From Farm to Fork The Art of Grass fed Meats – Grass Roots Farmers' Cooperative – #592

Foreign.

A state of high performance.

You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's school fact of the day Shed some light on farming practices and statistics in the US that you probably don't know are affecting what goes on your plate. Between 1982 and 2012, the average age of an American farmer rose from 50 and a half years to 58.3 years. Farmers older than 65 outnumber farmers younger than 35 by 6 to 1. And at 2013, the average age of starting farmers was 49. And by the way, that makes me ahead of the curve because I'm 46 and I've had a farm for a couple years now. Small farms have an exit rate of 9% to 10% per year, which is on par with all sorts of other small new businesses. And two thirds of farmland in the US Is set to transition to new owners in the next 20 years. So if you're like me, you want to be bulletproof, you care about where your food comes from. This is really, really important. This is a fundamental change in what you are going to be able to buy at any price. And if those numbers surprised you, that's good, because today's guest has said hell no to that stuff and is totally upending about what we think we know about small family farms in America. Today's interview is recorded in person. We're together at the Beverly Hilton at the 6th Annual Biohacking Conference. This is a conference that started six years ago with 100 people and it's more than a thousand people now and really become part of the movement that got biohacking in the dictionary and created something real and new and different than medicine or exercising or dieting and all that kind of stuff around having control of our own biology. And at the core of that, it's what you put into your body that really changes things the most. If you think back to that old story about Chicken Little saying the sky is falling, you might have felt that way when I'm talking about, oh my God, who's going to make your food not in the restaurant, but in the field? Well, Chicken Little wasn't talking about the Falling Sky Farm in north central Arkansas, which is what today's podcast is going to be about. Because today's guest is Cody Hopkins, a physicist turned farmer turned CEO and founder of Grassroots Farmers Cooperative. He spent more than a dozen years developing a vertically integrated sustainable livestock farm with a vision of creating a farming business that's to going good for animals, good for the environment, and good for customers 100,000%. That was very scientific of me, in alignment with what I've been talking about in the bulletproof diet, what I breathe, what I eat, what I live, and even what I'm doing with my family. So a guy who really, really gets it and grassroots is there to change how meat is produced and consumed across the country and making sure that the food we consume is authenticated with. With technology. So you know everything about what you're putting on your plate, because that is the duty of care that you owe yourself and you owe your kids. And he's actually done it, which is remarkably cool. Cody, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me.

Physicist turned farmer. What's up with that?

Well, so I grew up in rural Arkansas. I was the first person in my family to go to college. And when I went to college, it was, you know, my parents and my grandparents were encouraging me to move away from, you know, get out of the rural community, go find, you know, a job where you can actually make a decent living. Because, you know, in rural Arkansas, it's tough to. Tough to make ends meet. Not a lot of economic opportunities. And so went off to college, got, you know, was good in math, got a degree in physics.

You were a high school physics teacher?

Yeah. And then ended up from there, went on to teach physics and use my degree for a couple of years.

Wait a minute, Was Breaking Bad accurate?

No. Well, I was a physicist, not a chemist.

Okay, that's all right.

Yeah. And so, yeah, I went and I started teaching high school physics in the Northeast. And I love teaching, but I was sitting in the classroom one day. I taught at a private Catholic school, all boys school. And I had a group of 15 year olds that were, you know, they were full of testosterone. Pimply teenagers that were cooped up in a classroom. And I found myself thinking, like, this is just not the right environment for these kids. They need to be outside doing something. And I grew up outside as a kid. You know, we had a big garden. We spent a lot of time working out on our. A small family farm that wasn't really in production to, like, we weren't making our living off of that, but it was just part of our. My lifestyle growing up. And so after a couple of years of teaching, really started to miss rural Arkansas. Basically. I wanted to come back and try to find a way to make a living in the place where I grew up. And so that was, you know, it's kind of a weird turn of career, but in many ways, I went to a liberal Arts college. I think what I learned there was how to learn and how to be creative, how to be a good problem solver.

You've talked about how Michael Pollan and Joel Salatin were big influencers on you. I think most people who are listening have heard of Michael Pollan. He wrote really great books about what's going on in the food supply. And then Joel Salatin's actually been on bulletproof radio from Polyface Farms talking about this idea that grass fed matters. And I know about it from my anti aging stuff which I've been doing for 20 plus years. But the thing that really was astounding is when I came back from Tibet and I'd had yak butter tea and I tried to recreate it in the US with some butter and some tea and it tasted bad and it didn't work. And when I changed out the teas it didn't matter. And when I changed out the butters, only grass fed butter gave me that mental feeling. And I mean it'd be really convenient to say just buy some industrial butter and go to it. But it truly makes a giant difference. And when you look at all the science around toxins in grains, including the storage toxins, these mold toxins and antibiotics and all these things, I only eat grass fed beef. I have not had a piece of industrial meat. I don't care how good it's going to taste. I don't care if it's all that's on the menu. I'll fast or I'll eat the vegan menu or whatever. But that is the last thing I put in my body along with things like NutraSweet and high fructose corn syrup and all. It's just not worth it. When did you learn that grass fed meat was that important?

Well, so for me it was, I think it was two things. One is I. The first grass fed steak I ever had was a totally different eating experience. So you know, it was just a different flavors. But I also, about the time my wife and I launched our farm, so in 2006 I was diagnosed with hyperthyroidism. And you know, so I was really looking into how can I try to heal myself without having to take medication or have my thyroid removed. And so that was really influential in my journey early on trying to understand how through, you know, my diet I could help, help cure, you know, cure myself or try to help put my thyroid issue in remission, basically.

And you did that with food?

Yeah, yeah, through diet and I think lifestyle too. I mean going from, I mean there's just a different pace of life when you're living on a farm. And there's a. I'm a big believer in the idea of biophilia. You know, sort of getting nature nourishing you and being out. Like there's been studies that show that, you know, you spend 15 minutes out in the forest and it lowers your cortisol levels.

Yeah, like forest bathing. I wrote about that in Game Changers.

Absolutely. Yeah.

And your gut bacteria changes. Zach Bush talked about that. Just from walking around animals and trees and things like that.

Y. Yeah.

Okay, so you're getting some of that.

Yeah, I think that. So what really, I mean, farming as a lifestyle, but also the, the health benefits. It's not just, I mean, going back to. You mentioned Michael Pollan earlier and one of the things he said that I just love is it's not just what you eat, but what what you eat eats that matters. And so, you know, if you are feeding a cow a bunch of junk, bunch of corn, essentially just trying to fatten them as fast as possible, trying to produce as cheaply as possible.

That's a diabetic cow. That's fat fast.

That's right. Yeah. You really, I mean, you just don't get the nutritional density you get from. And the healthy fats from consuming really high quality well done grass fed beef or pastured meats.

I was in Austin a while ago talking with the meat manager at Central Markets there, you know, great organic food store. And they had some grass fed buffalo. And I said, is it grass finished? And he said, no. And I said, why would you ruin a perfectly good buffalo? And his answer was interesting. He said, you know, when it's grass fed, the fat is orange and that's because it's so full of nutrients. Right. But he said, customers, they don't even want to eat it because it's the wrong color. And so I couldn't sell it. And so he wanted the grass finished, but the demand wasn't there. And I'm to the point where if I look at a cut of whether it's just steak or anything else, if the fat is glowing white, that's an unhealthy animal and you don't want to eat that. It should be yellow. And the darker yellow it is, the more of a food high you're going to get when you eat it. And so this is about reeducating people's palates. How far along are we on just helping people understand that tastes like a steak instead of like neutral mush, which is a Corn fed thing?

Well, I think it's in. I think that really good grass fed beef becomes like wine.

Really.

It is, it has a terroir. Right. I mean like each last. Last summer, my wife and I, so we work grassroots, is a farmer co op. So we have several farms we work with. The farmers actually own the business. Right. And so we have different farmers. We have some farmers in North Carolina, some in Kansas. We're based in Arkansas and we had steaks from grass fed farmers in North Carolina. We had one from our farm and then we had one from a Kansas farmer. And each one had a totally different flavor profile. They were all delicious, but they all were very different in their flavors. And I think that's something that there's a lot of like, that's very exciting to me. I think customers would should as they learn more about that. Now, grass fed beef, there's a lot of bad grass fed beef out there too. You've got to do a really good job.

You're saying they feed it GMO grass in a feedlot and call it grass fed?

Yes. Yeah. They don't finish the all the way or they're, you know, maybe the animals, you know, too old or something like that. I mean, I think it's, it's a real art to doing really high quality grass fed.

I've had some tough, not very flavorful, not good to eat stuff, but on par. I've had some just amazing experiences there. But it is like wine, like the steak is different than the other. It's not a commoditized rubber stamp. Always tastes the same.

Yeah, it has flavor.

Now some of the other statistics I didn't cite today, but things that I've been paying attention to since the start of bulletproof is that 90% or something like that of small farmers in the US have a day job.

Yeah, it's like over 80. Yeah. Yes, that's right.

They can't make ends meet. So you go to the farmer's market and you buy some stuff and it's hopefully more expensive than at the grocery store because you're helping them to make their ends meet. But they're going to work all day, then they come home and I mean, we've got eight pigs this year and four sheep. And I tell you that is a huge amount of work. And you know, because you run a farm that's probably a lot bigger than that. And I have help on the farm because I'm fortunate. And plus I'm a CEO, that's kind of my day job. Right. And A podcaster and dad and all that stuff. But I can't imagine trying to do that just on that small scale without help. And so we have all these small farms we talked about at the beginning. What are they going to do? How do you make ends meet because people are attracted to being farmers? What's your solution?

Well, so I think, I mean, you brought up a very good point at the start of the podcast is there are very few, there are very few farmers today. And the ones that are here are, they're aging out, I mean, 20 years. Who's going to be growing our food for us? The average of a farmer might be close to 80 at that point. Right?

More stem cells.

Yeah, there you go. And you've got, I mean, we have more people in jail than we have on farms today. And it's a, I think that one of the, you know, we've been doing this for almost 15 years now. You know, we, we weren't farmers to start with. We're first generation farmers. So we're trying to figure this out and piece it together. And I think one of the key things that we found to be to help make farmers more successful is farmers working together, sort of strength in numbers. And that's one of the reasons why we decided to, to form a cooperative and market together, sort of work together to help get our products to the customer. Another thing that we really have focused on is trying to cut out the middlemen. And so when you buy a package of meat or a package of groceries, a package of chips or whatever at the grocery store, a very small fraction of the dollar you spend goes back to the farmer. On average, I think it's about 14 cents of every dollar goes back to the farmer. We're driving 70 to 75 cents per dollar spent back to a farmer or a farmer owned business. And so it's by cutting out that middleman and allowing customers and farmers to connect directly, that's another way that we're working to help farmers get a bigger piece of that pie.

I kind of feel like you might be a business masochist. I mean, you went from, you went from being a high school teacher, which is one of the most important underpaid positions in the world in terms of working your ass off and getting paid peanuts. And then like, I think I'll become a small farmer. I mean, obviously there was no business curriculum at your liberal arts college.

I obviously don't make decisions based on trying to get rich. For sure. You've heard the story of the fastest way to become a millionaire farming is to start off with 3 million. Right?

Right. Yeah, I.