EPISODE #970 How Regenerative Systems Save the Soil, Animals & You - Robby Sansom

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today's guest is Robbie Sansom, who started a regeneratively sourced meat company based in Austin and it's called Force of Nature, which is a really, really powerful thing. And his background, he was at Epic for quite a while as coo. This is a guy who's been working with grass fed animals for a very long time. And because he's an Austin, that makes him extra cool. So welcome to the show, Robbie.

You know, thanks a lot for having me.

You're a Texan, you were born and raised in Austin and at some point though you became a land steward at Rome Ranch and you do regenerative raised bison. So is this a product of breeding or did you have an awakening along the way where like this matters? Because a typical Texan really like, give me my corn fed barbecue and I'm good to go. Why are you different?

Yeah, I think people might, might point out Austin as being a little bit different than typical Texas. It's got its own, it's got its slogans to bo but that's probably not the answer for me as it relates to your question. You know, I, I grew up, you know, traveling, you know, Texas is huge, has tons to offer. I grew up driving a few hours down to the coast and you know, living in the, in the bays and fishing and just enjoying all the natural wonder that had to offer and then, you know, heading out west and being in the hill country and hunting and, and being around family that had been part of farming communities for generations and. Yeah, and then jumping in the car and making the 10 or 12 hour drive out to the mountains and having access to those and bugging people like you. But always that fondness for outdoors and natural places and in particularly as I kind of laid out, just connecting with those environments and part of that being forming relationships with your food and being able to source and procure and prepare food and do it as a family and a community. And so that just developed a set of values inside of me that were always fundamental to who I was. And then I went down a professional path and did consulting and big business stuff and like many people felt unfulfilled and figured out, you know what, I can connect these dots and that journey with Epic and now Force of Nature is sort of the manifestation of that.

Well, I like that. So a little bit of the Austin hippie side and just caring about stuff that you can see matters. When I made plans to move about, oh geez, 13, 14 years ago, I Said I want a place where I can grow my own food because food sovereignty matters. And it turns out what your food ate is what is going to impact the quality of the food. So my plants eat dirt, they eat soil. And so I needed good soil. And my animals eat plants that either did eat good soil or didn't. So it all starts in the soil. But I do that because I wanted to feed my family and I wanted to have control of my own supply chain. I'm on 32 acres, I feed my local community 25 sheep, 25 pigs. This year, three cows. We're not selling those, we're just eating those. And it's been a labor of love and it loses money all the time because having a small farm, 90% of small farmers have day jobs, even though a farm is a full time job. And we gotta change that. And you've managed 600 acres, which is a bit of a not small farm. What's your advice for people who want food sovereignty? Like, what do we do?

I think so. First, I think what you're doing is remarkable. I think there's a renaissance of people looking to get back to that. You know, over the last hundred years or so, you look about, about 1900, 30% of the US population was involved in food production. And now that, you know, here, a little over 100 years later, it's down to 2 or 3%, a tiny fraction as our system has failed those people and communities and early families. And that's been in large part to what we were talking about a few moments ago at the onset of the call, right? We've delegated that procurement and processing and preparation of our food to large corporations. We've entrusted them to represent our values and what they offer us. And what they have done is in some ways misled, misdirected or deceived us and made compromises in the name of profit, right? How can we drive down costs? How can we cheapen food? And then, and you know, and then sort of helped, helped condition us to think and see food the way they want to see it, such that we are complicit in the process, right? We are, we are good little cogs and they're big machine doing what they what purchasing, how they want us to purchase, what they want us to purchase, when and where they want us to purchase it, without asking the questions that we should be asking if we were really trying to find the value in our food and represent what it is that we are looking for. So I think sovereignty starts with becoming an independent thinker and taking some responsibility and autonomy back to paying attention to what you are consuming, regardless of what it is, and signaling to the industry through how you vote and purchase, really where you place value and what you want. That's probably the biggest driver and the most powerful thing that we can do as consumers.

Okay. So understanding that it's important is one part of sovereignty and paying attention to it. But you still have to go to the store and buy your food if you're lucky enough to eat at somewhere besides a dollar store. Right. So is this about, you know, getting a goat? And people may say, what are you talking about, Dave? During the Great Depression in New York City, there are photos out there of people with goats on their balcony in skyscrapers. Not one or two, you know, none of their skyscrapers, but large buildings with 10 plus floors where people saying, well, I needed to feed my scraps to something that would make me some milk. So people did it even in that environment. But almost everywhere you could have chickens and a goat or a sheep somewhere or one pig, which is one of the easiest ways of converting most food into protein and fat, which is what animals do for us. Pigs are incredible for that. You have one of those in your backyard, you're going to eat pretty well and it'll eat anything and everything. They make gross sounds when they're pissed off. But your neighbors might not like it. But you can feed your neighbors to a pig in a pinch as well, especially if they're attorneys. Right.

And I think you could point to victory gardens in World war. World War II as well. Oh, I, I did. I got a lot of. I got a lot of attorneys. So it's extra entertaining for me.

I'm just kidding, my friends.

No, that. I was actually thinking of Silence of the Lambs, I think, anyway, the. But you could, you could point to victory gardens too, in World War II and, you know, recognize that that wasn't just an initiative. That was, you know, actually turning back to how things once were. Yeah, we should, we should all, to the extent that we're able, figure out how we can, we can actually produce our own food. There's value in that, there's resilience in that. There's stability and security in it. I love this idea. I love what you were talking about. Upcycle, you know, using monogastrics to upcycle food waste, whether that be, you know, pigs or chicken. I love people that have laying chickens in their yards, which is really common around here. And sure, you could work in some ruminants, goats and things like that. Everybody should do that, right? And I think to the extent that we can make ourselves independent of a broader complex or food system, there is some protection in that. But there is still the reality that the overwhelming majority of what is being supplied into the food system is coming from that larger system. And so we have an opportunity to influence and change that for the better at real scale, and we shouldn't ignore that either. But I do think you're right. I think, I think to the extent it's within our means, we should be doing that. In fact, from a pure protein perspective, I think the number one avenue that you can take to procure your own food is either to produce it regeneratively in your own context, on your own land, or get a backpack and a rifle or a bow and spend a week in the mountains and see if you can overcome adversity and struggle and actually produce some food for yourself and bring it back. You'll have a story and a relationship and experience that's invaluable along with food that is more nourishing than anything that you could purchase. Next to that would be, you know, again, having a, an incredible multi species farm, regenerative farm nearby, practicing the highest standards of agriculture and then being a neighbor within your local community. I think if that's the case, go right to them. You know, I think there's a lot of people that those aren't options for every day or all the time or at the scale they need to feed their families. And so then we got to look at, you know, what we're trying to do, which is build a massive network of those family farms. Build a massive network that are practicing the right practices on a large national geographic scale. Same thing with processing to make sure those farmers have access to a market and then work with consumers to create awareness about these real issues in food. And I'm sure we'll get into those and then to make sure that they have access and that we're generating more and more demand so that we can create incentives that pass back to processors and pass back to farmers that justify them raising the bar and that signal to the industry, we're not going to buy whatever you serve up in front of us. We're not going to keep feeding into your lies. Right? We're going to, we're going to take a stand. And you know, there's, there's not a big, you know, quote unquote evil corporation out there that's going to produce a product a consumer won't buy. And if they see consumer behavior Going in a different direction. That's what they're going to start to try to produce. And we can drive that influence in really large scale.

And you had some pretty good success doing that at Epic, right? I mean you started saying grass fed stuff and you got it out there and Epic got acquired, right?

Yeah, Epic, we sold Epic to General mills back in 2016. And yeah, we were pretty early on, you know, not alone, but early and talking about grass fed proteins and you know, the funny thing about Epic is it started as a vegan energy bar company and the original founders, and now my co founder, Katie and Taylor, now my co founders in Force of Nature, you know, had these values of I want to do what's better for humans, I want to do what's better for the environment and for the welfare of animals. I want to do what's better for, for communities and health. And much like many of us tried a diet and lifestyle that did not work out. And honest.

And when looking the vegan diet will trash you. I'm sorry, I did it too. It's a scam and it's going to cost you a lot of money in grass fed fat and protein to recover from what the vegan diet will do to you.

Well, and it's misleading, right? It is not better for the environment, it is not better, as you said for you, it's not better for animals or welfare and so on and so forth. So it's really those foundational principles though that translated into Epic, which was not just about grass fed. It was highest quality protein convenient, still trying to be mindful of ecosystem health and welfare. And that's what led us down the journey of understanding regenerative agriculture. And to your point, the success of that and the influence that we were able to have in selling that to General Mills. I remember taking the chief sustainability officer of General Mills out to a regenerative farm because the deal was going to fall apart over the idea of regenerative cause it felt too good to be true. How could it solve all of these problems? How could it truly be so virtuous across such a wide range of stakeholders? And they came back and not only did the deal go through, but within, I think two and a half, within two years, General Mills became the first Fortune 500 company to make a commitment to convert a million acres of its supply chain to regenerative. And then Danone followed and then PepsiCo followed, you know, that, that, that kind of again, that's that sort of influence and intention at scale. A lot needs to be done to hold them accountable to those claims. And that's, you know, words are cheap and actions matter more, but that's pretty powerful when you look at the ripple effect. And then the, you know, another thing I think is great is, and I'm sure you've heard of this is the life cycle assessment that was performed out at White Oak Pastures and in Bluffton, Georgia. Empirically validating and a cradle to grave analysis using Qantas labs, the same lab that Impossible Foods used to show that, you know, to offset the carbon impact of eating an impossible or beyond burger, you need to eat a regenerative beef burger. And that's been, and that's been held up across the industry. Right. That, that then became, you know, it works. Everybody's leveraged that and been able to, to use that to validate, you know, what we are doing broadly. And that's a, that was funded by General Mills. So what a gift to this movement.

Well, you, you're highlighting something that, that a lot of people who, who, you know, eat food out there, we're all paying attention and generally they say, how dare you sell this grass fed company to insert name a big food company. Guys, that is the goal. That was one of the things that when I decided to take funding at Bulletproof, same thing, Grass fed collagen, grass fed butter, grass fed or go home kind of thing. And look, you have to create change at these large companies. And what happens is they say, oh, someone figured out how to do this, so we want to bring that knowledge and that team in. So now you have a company with incredible distribution and marketing power who just gained consciousness when they did that with Epic. They're like, oh, now we get it. And you just told the story perfectly of how that works. And I've had a chance to meet the CEOs of pretty much everyone you'd expect for those companies. When I was involved with Bulletproof and you know, I, I had the conversation with the then CEO of Pepsi about sustainability and they're interested. The problem is twofold and I want to get your take on this and see if I'm right or if there's more to it. Part of the problem is that they realize if they do something that's a half a cent more expensive, that their competitors are gonna do the cheap one and they'll lose market share and they're terrified of that. So they're literally saying, how do we continue to maintain this level of profitability and this price and make it healthier? Because we actually want to make it healthier. So there's a sincere desire, but a fear. And then the other big problem is they are just misinformed. The Pepsi team was like, well, you know, we've seen Dr. Ornish's work, who we pay millions of dollars a year to to allow us to say that a calorie is a calorie and it doesn't matter what kind of calorie. And so using that flawed basic knowledge, we can go out there and have an entirely plant based offering and tell ourselves it's healthy so we can sleep at night. And I'm paraphrasing quite heavily there, but truly, you know, at the time, this is a pharmaceo, she's a vegan and a really powerful, amazing, incredible woman. But the flawed assumption there meant that they were just not looking at meat. And people say clean meat and clean meat is a cow that ate grass, but they think clean meat is like a laboratory creation. So is it bad assumptions or is it the economics of I have to have the cheapest food on the planet? Which of those or both are driving this corporate behavior?

Oh, I think it's, I think it's those and, and, and then some. I think the other premise that I would have to, that you would probably agree with and I'd have to say we need, we need them to reject is this idea that any compromise, almost any compromise is appropriate to feed a growing global population. And I think that's sort of a, well, this is in the best interest of consumers. But we have to make this compromise because we have to be able to feed this growing population or whatever else it is. And I think that's quite reductionist in addition to being false in many ways. The other thing I think is kind of, we were talking about it with institutions. These are large complexes, right? You change the President, you don't necessarily change everything about the United States. You know what I mean? It's meant to be resilient regardless of who's at the helm. And what I think I found in similar conversations with many of the large food companies is they are large organizations of tens of thousands of people who are generally well meaning and generally intelligent. And I think for us, what was so wild to recognize, and finally, I mean, because we were protective, right? I mean we said no, we were like no pound sand, not interested, you'll screw up the product. Our team, the people who have literally bet the farm on us and they came back and said, no, you don't understand, we won't screw up any of those things. We want to learn from you, you know, all of those things. And I think there's this general desire and hope at the top to influence change and on the front lines to drive change. And everything gets kind of mucked up in the middle when you get to conventional thinking and what's safe and how do you keep your head down and not be disruptive and stuff just, you know, fizzles and drags on and dies. And so, you know, I think some of that conventional thinking is it has to be the only thing that consumers value is cheapness. The truth is consumers have an array of values. A shelf price is one of them. We can really dig into shelf price because yeah, it's a fun one for me. And what's the true cost of food? And is regenerative protein really expensive or is it actually incredibly valuable? But yeah, I think as far as those big, big companies go, I really do think with the right incentives and pressures coming from consumers, there aren't blockers in the building that are going to stop the right thing from flowing up. You just have to overcome decades of bureaucracy intent to make sure that these things don't swing and turn on a dime and end up taking it off a cliff or whatever analogy you want to use.

Well, let's talk a little bit about grass fed and regenerative proteins. And to be really clear, it's possible to make non regenerative grass fed proteins, but in general, a grass fed animal is going to be better for you and probably better for the environment, but not always. So regenerative means something a bit different. Walk me through what regenerative means, the way you're using it with force of nature.

Yeah, I think, you know, for us regenerative is a more comprehensive look at the what happens pre and post life and death for an animal. Right. What contribution did it make to an ecosystem? What ecosystem services did it bring and diversity did it help create? And you know, I think animals living in regenerative systems, as you said, lift up the system, create a better food product or protein product for a consumer. They've because they've lived and fulfilled their potential in nature. And that legacy then lives on the land and then as you consume it, it lives into you and the people that you share that bounty with. Right. And so that can mean managing land and practicing management techniques of animals that are designed to emulate and honor the blueprint that mother Nature gave us. Right. Simply saying, oh hey, the mineral cycle, the carbon cycle, the water cycle, the nutrient cycle, you know, all of these things are widely celebrated in nature. And it is through the millennia and large herds of megafauna since the last ice age, that incredible potential and fertility was generated on our lands. And we've been mining that with conventional industrial agriculture. Very extractive to the point where we've extracted so much they've had to rely on inputs, they call them amendments or applications of fertilizers and pesticides and herbicides and so on and so forth to make up for the loss of function in those systems. And a regenerative system actually regenerates and rebuilds that resiliency and maintains it in a way where it can actually continue to produce food again. Our current system being this extractive industrial model, it has a shelf life, right? I mean, it is so extractive to the point of it will not be able to work for us in producing food in the future.

We've got about 50 years of topsoil left on the planet at the rate that we're consuming it, unless we start regenerating it. And what we do is we say, this is a problem that matters. Let's go solve it in a small way or a big way. So you're doing something about the problem. That's why I really appreciate it. Like just having you on the show, because we need to do it. You put values in a company to make the company have culture. What are the things that you did with force of nature?

We have a set of core values that aren't just art. We don the walls with right? We talk about them as a team on a daily basis. They're meaningful and disruptive and we recruit accordingly. We bring people in that want to be here and live the values that we have as a company and in doing so, cherish and defend them. And we of course have processes in place to drive accountability internally and externally and to make sure that we're living the ideal that we expect of others, which is there isn't a destination here, there's a journey and we need to be raising the bar. And that's the standard. There's a minimum threshold, no doubt, but too many companies out there are racing and cutting down to that and digging their heels in. And the reality is we need to be improving, right? And so those are the sort of concepts and efforts that we have that will continue and must in order to continue to maintain those ideals indefinitely.

What do you say to people who say, well, look, I have this plant based amino acid blend, it's the same as protein. What, what's your net reply to that?

You're talking about the sludge that comes from those processing plants that plant based.

Meat, you know, it could, could be anything, but they're just saying, hey, you know this, this stuff, wherever, wherever it comes from has the same amino acids as a grass fed steak. It's the same thing.

Yeah, I did, I had a conversation with one of the executives at Impossible and his whole shtick was about how much more efficient what they were doing was than animal agriculture.

It's insane, but okay.

And I just couldn't get my head around it right, because to your point, the macro, the micro profile, you really start to get into phytonutrients and actual science. And what they're offering is toxic and at best an incredibly poor, almost embarrassing representation of what evolution has given us in the form of ruminant proteins. But to make the claim that it's more efficient, it's absurd to the point of not even really being addressed. Right. Animals have lived in these systems. The largest herd of megafaun the last ice age was the American bison. It co evolved to be a keystone in our ecosystem. Keystone meaning it has a disproportionate and positive effect on the ecosystem. It is necessary to perform its function and part of that function is to ensure everything around it thrives and in doing so upcycle protein. We talked about soil. Why is soil important? Because all life on the planet, that is terrestrial, relies on soil. And soil is this thin few inches that, that cover some of the globe. And the most prime soils are on about 30% of the landscape of the earth. And Those have been 70% desertified or degraded through agriculture. And so you know, these animals that were put there to efficiently ensure that those systems are resilient and thriving and not desertifying are also upcycling protein for the omnivores, the carnivores and everything else who will then die and guess what? Decay. And that life will feed new life, including plant life and the soil and so on and so forth. Right. And so yeah, this, this is why that argument is so frustrating. Because the most efficient thing is, is, is already there. We can't be turning our backs on it.

How do you go about measuring what happens when someone eats say an impossible burger, but there's all sorts of other fake meat stuff out there. Do you look at human health as an output or are looking at the inputs and saying this is less efficient per calorie? What's the math look like for you?

And I guess I'm just not following that the specific questions, what's the math look like? In my choice as A consumer to whether or not to eat that.

Or you're sitting here saying grass fed meat and regenerative agriculture is provably better for the planet. And so that means you have to have a provably better metric and you have to have a cost metric. So when you're doing that math, you know, in a spreadsheet somewhere, what does it look like? Like, are you measuring health in humans? Are you measuring health in soil? Are you measuring number of animal deaths? Like how do we break down into this?

Well, I think it's, I think it's, I think, I think there's the human outcome and we can dive into that. Health, nutrition. I think there's the ecosystem, ecological outcomes. I think there's social issues like in communities, farming communities, rural areas, there's those animals, the welfare, their ability to exhibit. And there's, and there's measurable and anecdotal and empirical and financial measures across those. I think to start though, I'd say these plant based systems and alternative systems, you're the expert on nutrition. I think the food is garbage. I think we have a perfect design for an item that we should be incorporating in much greater amounts into our diet to be part of a healthy lifestyle in the form of meat that is consistent with the definition of meat that occurs in nature. And I think I have to reject the premise that the alternative of plant based or cell based meats which are reliant on the conventional agriculture system are an option. I would say anything reliant on the conventional agriculture system is truly not an option. There's only an illusion of choice. We are racing towards a cliff in our ability to produce food. We can sustain that pace and we're still heading towards a cliff. We can slow that pace and we're still heading towards a cliff. Or we can redirect our course and start to rebuild the resiliency and fertility into our lands and ecosystems and address not just human nutrition and the fact that things like glyphosate are showing up in urine and breast milk, dead zones in oceans, droughts and floods, pollinator die off, loss of topsoil, as you alluded to these other incredible weather events, nutritional density in our diet that is lacking. Right on and on and on and on down the list. So I would say the cost and value of replacing a vicious system with a virtuous one is almost too profound for me to even quantify. I will say this just for scale because it all sounds very nebulous and theoretical. I don't know the average person appreciates how profoundly impactful agriculture is. You begin to appreciate that when we get in a plane and we look down and we see the checkerboard beneath us, right? We like to think there's a few farms out there, there's a few cities and there's a bunch in nature. But when you fly, you recognize there's a lot of farms out there. In fact, the US is about 2 billion acres. And we practice some form of agriculture on about 1 billion of those acres. Half of the land mass of the United States is under some form of management for food. And you expand that globally. It's about 30 billion acres of land and about 11 billion of those acres are being impacted. So if we're tilling that land, about 40% of the legacy load of carbon in the atmosphere is a result of just tilling land. That destroys soil, disrupts ecosystems, causes erosion, screws up water infiltration in the water cycle, makes.

I'm going to pause you for a second there. I love, I love what you're explaining for, for everyone, the vegan movement will argue that because some of those plants are fed to animals, you should not eat animals.

Right?

It is a logical fallacy to say that, but it is something I think we have to acknowledge. Yes. Right now in industrial farms are taking corn and soy and other grain and they're, they're growing it, extracting from the soil, putting it in cows to make unhealthy cows to put in people to make unhealthy people. That's what we have to break that.

And taking inputs from Ukraine and Russia because our system is so depleted of the nutrients needed to create food that we have to import it from elsewhere to be able to even do that on the lands that you're talking about.

That is totally true because they're depleted already. Right. And so what do we, you know, what, what, what do we do then? I mean, I'm in a position and you are too, right? I either can grow my own animals or I can go to the restaurant, say if it's not grass fed, give me the wild caught fish, which probably has some mercury and plastic, but I'll deal with that as best I can. That's what I do. Otherwise, you know, give me some veggies and maybe some rice and I'll, I'll put some butter on it and I'll take some cow based protein powder. I'm just not doing it. But I'm just going to say most people, yes, you could actually save a lot of money by just cooking at home. And it's cheaper than restaurants. But if you're traveling, you have life that gets in the way. It's really hard to do this. So what are you doing to make it so that people like me and maybe a little bigger than me who have a few extra animals can, can get them to market? It's, it's. Getting food to market as a small farmer is incredibly difficult. There's, there's butchering and slaughtering where people screwed up all the time, the regulators are in the way, and then there's distribution. For me, I guess I have a big enough name, I can put Asprey farms on it and I can put it in a local market, it'll sell. But for most people, you don't even know how to sell your meat right now. If you can produce it. And then some other person's gonna come in and say, you had to ship your cows 500 miles to stress them out to be killed heartlessly in a cruel, you know, Chinese owned slaughtering plant. And you have to do that by law or you can't sell it. So how are you fixing that?

Well, again, I think it starts with demand generation and the consumer, right? And so for us, being a brand and being a, you know, aiming to be a lifestyle brand and active in the digital space, being a thought leader in this category and intentionally trying to reach consumers that are falling into different groups to help create awareness and inspire them and hopefully help to create more demand, we've proven that we can scale regenerative systems, right, that we were able to accomplish. We recognized that accelerating demand would be a key driver in all of this. And so we call it creating awareness and then creating access, right? Because to your point, it's difficult to gain access for a producer and a processor, therefore it's difficult to get access for a consumer. So if we can make the call to action and the access for consumers much easier by offering it in variety of retail stores across the country, available direct to consumer online and food service and so on, all of a sudden demand starts going up and so we can start paying more prices, higher prices, back through to processors, back through to farmers, and we can start aggregating in different regions at different scales and start to actually build a significant enough supply that justifies creating that supply network that you're talking about and further even achieving a level of efficiency that helps to make it as affordable as is reasonably possible for consumers who now actually have access to it.

You ever think about putting a ring of homes around your 600 acre ranch?

Well, so you said that the Rome Ranch is owned by Katie and Taylor, my co founders. I have bison in the herd. I get to go out there a bunch.

So it's owned by, by, by some of the other founders of Epic. And you're working as range manager.

Yeah. And it's, and it's like, and it's like our home farm, so to speak. It is separate from force of nature, but we work with dozens to hundreds of, you know, family owned operations like Rome Ranch all across the country. As far as like making a super community out of it, I can't speak for that. I haven't had conversations with them about it. But I think there's merit in that, you know, and I think that, I think those ideas and instances of that actually happening are popping up all over the place.

I like living around a farm and I recognize how much work it is to do that. And I also recognize that I'm pretty lucky and I've worked really hard so I could do that. But I want a world where other people who desire connection to the land and to animals so you can nourish the animal that actually is going to end up nourishing you and your family. Why would we not want to have 100 homes ringing 100 acres that have animals and plants and an active farm manager and standards about no pesticide, no poison, no light pollution? So I would pay to live in a place like that where I get a share of the food and it's basically like having your own co op where you get a vote on what you grow and how it works. That I think is a sustainable map for the future.

We have a massive.