Why Eliminating Meat From Our Diet Isn’t The Solution To Climate Change

Animal wellness is a crucial part of human wellness, right? Not just when what goes in our mouths, but when we have unwell animal systems, the impact on the environment.

Welcome to Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and that's Farmacy, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. And today's conversation is gonna really matter, 'cause it's about a conversation between farmers and doctors, between what we need to be talking about right now, which is how to regenerate human health and planetary health. And that is the conversation today. And it's with an extraordinary woman, Anya Fernald, who is the co-founder and CEO of Belcampo, which is a regenerative ranch up in Northern California at the base of Mount Shasta. They have 27,000 acres of organic foreign land and they process also the livestock for sale in its own butcher shops and restaurants, which is very unusual. So they've got the whole supply chain. Belcampo in Italy means beautiful field, and it is definitely beautiful up there at the base of Mount Shasta. She's for two decades been leading this field of regenerative organic agriculture focused on meat and leadership within the meat industry. She's been profiled in New York and the New York Times. She's been a judge on Iron Chef and the Food Network since 2009 and recognized as one of Inc. Magazine's 100 Female Founders and 40 Under 40 by Food and Wine was named a Nifty 50 by the New York Times. So she's one of the pioneers in this field of regenerative agriculture, which is often a male-dominated field, agriculture in general, and you are breaking all norms in many ways. And I'm just so happy to have.

You on the podcast.

So welcome, welcome Anya. Thank you for having me. Okay, so let's get into it. You know, I think we were just chatting a little bit before the podcast about the importance of having dialogue between farmers and doctors, ranchers and healthcare, and between agriculture and healthcare. Why? Because it's all about food. And as we know, food is really driving so much of our global crises today. Obviously, chronic disease is making COVID worse. And just a little fact, which I think is staggering to me, to sort of explain why America is leading the pack. We don't want to be number one in COVID, and we are number one in deaths, number one in cases, number one in the growth, spread. And, you know, there are many reasons for that. But one of the key reasons, I believe, is our poor metabolic health, which has to do with our crappy diet. And in China, there's three deaths per million population. In America, there's 500 deaths per million population.

Oh, my goodness.

Right. And in China, the obesity rate is 2.6%. In America, it's 42%. So it's related. And your whole work and your effort has really been to link both flavor, deliciousness, nutritional quality with the health of the animals, the health of the planet and the health of humans. And it sort of reminds me of a quote from Sir Albert Howard who wrote Soil and Health, which I read 40 plus years ago, where he said, the health of soil, plant, animals, and he said, Man, but I would change it to humans is one great subject. And I think you have nailed it with your work at Belcampo and understand those linkages and have created an extraordinary thing. And I just like to dive into your background a little bit because you grew up in doing all kinds of interesting things and went to work on a dairy farm in Bavaria. You lived in Greece and parts of Europe and you saw a different way of raising animals, a different way of cooking. And in getting in there, you really had a different view of really what we need to be doing in terms of agriculture and particularly in terms of how we raise animals. Because now you actually are running one of the largest meat production companies in the whole regenerative agriculture space. And I refer people to all the time to I've eaten in your restaurant in Santa Monica. It's fantastic. And tell us about your story. How did you get started? Because you were like a vegetarian and all of a sudden you're running a regenerative ranch raising animals.

I think I was driven by a curiosity around food that was fundamentally motivated by feeling well. So we all have kind of like an origin story for our passions in life. And for me, being a good cook was a way that I helped my family early on. My mother really struggled with anxiety and would get overwhelmed easily. So I remember diving in as a young girl and it was a way that I could just, I sort of had this ability to hustle and to think on a lot of different levels and plan out and get a lot of different things done. So the initial kind of genesis for me around cooking was absolutely the role that you play in your family unit. And I then, as I grew older, I loved the manuality of it. I loved the history of it. So I pursued a real passion for baking, took a year off during school and during college and was a baker, and that's when I went to Greece. And then as soon as I graduated from college, my biggest instinct was just to go somewhere and do something with food that wasn't being a chef. I worked for a hot minute and New York at the time, a very fashionable food magazine called Savour. And it was like, you know, like champagne and caviar. And I was like, this isn't my world, you know, that's just, I'm not into, and I still to this day really don't like chef culture. And chef culture was fundamentally, if I think back on it, you know, you have such a great lens on your choices, right, when you look back, it's 2020. But it was also that there was no concept of wellness. And I think that in general, the whole kind of chef culture in America is like this egregiously flaunting wellness and health. And if you look at Europe, the chef culture is much more about that. Now in France, there's who famously like super obese gourmands and stuff. So it's not totally true, but there's a bit more of a balance in the culinary world around wellness. And there's less of this drive towards overindulgence. But in general, I was sort of turned off by fancy chef culture, loved farming, and I moved to Europe. I got a fellowship at the time. It's kind of a funny story, but I'd read about this fellowship in the Smithsonian magazine. I'm obviously a big nerd and I loved reading Smithsonian in high school. And so this fellowship was like, they'll give you like 15 grand to go do whatever you want that's not academic for a year. And I told my parents, I was like, I'm gonna get this fellowship and this is my plan for after college. And they're like, well, knock yourself out, but it's like very competitive. And I didn't have any other plan and I fortunately I landed that fellowship because thank God I don't know what I would have done otherwise. But it got me, so I moved.

To Europe with that like 15, 18 grand.

From this fellowship and I went there with a carry-on bag and I came back like eight years later.

Eight years later.

And during that time, I started out as a cheesemaker. I mean, I can visit my parents and stuff back and forth. But you know, when I went there, I worked initially, I used that money to support myself. I had a folding bicycle. I had a huge amount of chutzpah that I'm like, let me draw that energy forward to myself today. But I kind of, you know, I charged out there. I traveled around by train. I visited over a hundred dairies. I worked for longer periods of time in three different dairies. And it was a, it was an incredibly challenging time. I mean, I remember being, you know, desperately lonely and stressed out. And it was in foreign countries and different languages. This is a time I didn't have a cell phone. I didn't have, I mean, that was before cell phones. I was traveling on travelers checks. There's no ATMs, right?

Different sort of world.

I remember that. I remember that.

You're reliving the past in a map.

Exactly. And I, am I folding bicycle tires? Yeah, there were no ATMs. Right. So it was a really different, it was just learning on so many levels. And it's actually now when I get young people approaching me saying like, what do I do? And I'm like, put yourself in a tough situation and figure it out. 'Cause it'll guide you well in life. So so much of what I learned about thinking on my feet and just kind of hustling and finding the path forward was in that time. And it was about facing struggle. Now I call that out just on the personal development side, but what happened to me in terms of my learning was really tied to my health. okay, so I grew up in the low fat 90s. I graduated from college in 98, and I was a competitive athlete. And, you know, it was like snack wells and Entamans fat free brownies is what the girls would, like, pound before meats and stuff. And we'd have, like, spaghetti feeds with, like, no fat spaghetti. So I moved from that environment, and I'd been a vegetarian on and off to. I actually had stopped being a vegetarian because when I was a competitive rower, it was difficult for my body to. to get the energy that I needed with a vegan diet. So I started eating eggs and some meat. But I moved to Europe and in dairies initially, and I started eating like not just a little meat, but like a lot of meat and a lot of, you know, this is a place where I would get up at two in the morning, typically for my dairy jobs and have some espresso or coffee and then milk animals until, you know, about five and they make cheese till about 11 and then eat probably like 2000 calories of animal products. You know, so it was a mix of like introducing intermittent fasting, introducing, you know, all sorts of different patterns and then a very, very kind of proto-keto diet. And when I was eating bread, it was like locally made and small source. And I had this really, really powerful kind of transformation in my mood, my attitude, my overall health, lots of different things. And in that time also, you know, it's like when you look back, it was that my desire to stay there was as much about learning as it was about continuing to feel good.

Mm.

Okay.

So you connected to food and your health in a way that you hadn't?

Absolutely. And I wanted to continue to feel that way. I didn't want to go back to America. I felt like I had more to learn, but I also was like, from a health perspective, it was like, this is amazing. And I got a job then. I got a visa. This is very funny. And in 2000, I got a visa from Italy for an independent work permit that was based on me being a cheese expert. So I had to go to the consulate. in New York City and explain to them that it's like 22 year old American was a cheese expert. That was like, because you have to show that you have a job that Italy is very protectionist, obviously, and, yeah, and you have to show that you have a skill that nobody in Italy has. So I had to go there and do it like a, an interview claiming that I was like a cheese. I mean, I knew a lot about cheese. Do still know a lot about cheese. But that was, that was definitely a lucky chance that I got this Visa, and I was hired then to work in a rural development project in Southern Italy that was basically doing economic redevelopment via helping small scale cheese producers scale up, get exported, build their whole like marketing and packaging. And then from there, I moved to Northern Italy and did a sort of similar set of works, but on a little bit of a larger scale with a larger group of producers via a foundation funded by the region of Tuscany. So I ended up having a very kind of professional progression after that year of cheese making, starting from that base knowledge and the how-to of actually working in dairies.

But you also learned there are things that I think were probably subliminal because my guess is the animals that were on those farms were heirloom animals, that they were not consuming industrial food products from commodity farms like in America. That the quality of their milk and the nature of what you made from that was quite different. I mean, we've lost 50% of our livestock species. The homogenization of animals and breeds for human consumption is just staggering. And through that process, we've lost a lot of equality, right? So what did you learn there about the type of animals and the way to raise animals that resulted in better food and better nutrition?

So all of that really was the substance of my life in Sicily. So I lived in Sicily for two years and the group that I worked.

With made- so jealous.

Well, they made a cheese that was from this called the Modicana, you can Google it, that produces less milk than sheep does. So, I mean, it varies, like, like you're talking like a liter and a half or two liters of milk a day, which is infinitesimal. You know, a Friesian will produce 18 to 30 gallons in a commercial operation.

Depending on its cycle of life.

It's like you're only enough to feed a baby. Okay, so tiny amounts. You might ask, well, like, why on earth would anybody keep a commercial dairy cow around with that low, low level of production? And the answer is that the milk is extremely high in protein. But more importantly, these cows can live off of like thorns and bark. Okay? So they're extremely robust. In Sicily, it's over 100 degrees two or three months of the year and there's no irrigation where I was living. So it was adaptive to the environment in a way that really made it very, very suitable. It's kind of like an all-terrain vehicle, right? So it could handle periods of drought and famine effectively and just keep on, keep on keeping on. And you put a friesian there. And I think I've seen the same thing with the introduction of these friesian operations into like tropical countries where the US will pump in millions upon millions of dollars in aid to establish large scale industrial dairies and the animals will just wither in months due to just they can't handle the parasitic load right in a tropical environment. And so actually the low yield brahma cross varieties are actually a much better fit for that. So you see this again and again where it's like these large kind of luxury high production and high volume animals aren't suited for all environments is one key piece of things. And then, you know, additionally, there there's a different there's a different quality to the actual product they produce. Everything's slow growing in my experience in the animal world tends to be of I won't say, you know, don't have the science to say it's better, but it's of a different caliber. And you see this in in density, the way that's been documented is protein density. in free range, slower growing animals. There's a really solid data point that's pretty well documented, which is that animals that grow slower have higher protein and have in general higher micronutrient density. So in all of these kind of low and slow, I think of the animals, it's the Tyson chicken that's coming to full weight of close to 3 pounds in two and a half weeks from being a chick to a chicken on our farm taking 8 to 10 weeks to achieve that same market weight. So that trade off in speed is what I saw again and again is that these products made from local breeds that produced at sort of like shamefully inefficient levels, producing great taste quality, and then offering farmers much more resilience and flexibility on a small scale.

So you basically took all these insights from being in Sicily and Italy and all these different farms and practices you saw and the different animals and Something inspired you to create this 27,000 acre regenerative ranch in Northern California. How did you get to there from being this young woman with a folding bike and a backpack?

Right. Well, so keep in mind that in the eight years I worked in Italy, the final chunk of it was doing a, I ran a microfinance fund for small scale food businesses. So I basically assisted, this is around the time of the European Union. I assisted in small scale food businesses coming up to speed, helping them get in line with the European Union regulations, et cetera. So all of that was really crucial to my kind of understanding of business development, market compliance, you know, all the different aspects of like food safety, et cetera. Now, in the time that when I returned to the US- you- learn the.

Art, you learn the art of farming and the business of farming.

Yeah, and my inclination is more into the business side of it, right? I'm intrigued by the potential to not just do something beautiful, but do something powerful. Right. So it's one thing I've seen frequently in the, in the kind of regenerative and small scale ag world, I desire to create a small perfect microcosm that's available to very few. And I think that's why the elitism kind of claims have stopped and been a perennial issue in, in the space, right? Because they are like, they're like beautiful gilded small microcosms that actually are not very accessible, even though the, the, the majority of The products that we're talking about fundamentally are the food of the poor. These are the foods that we developed in subsistence economies to eke by because we couldn't afford the mainstream products. So it's an interesting lens to look at things now. I think that it's all been now viewed as this really high end. So for me, the idea of creating something small and beautiful and perfect is less interesting than creating something larger and transformative with some nicks and tumbles along the way.

I get the scale idea. We're going to get back to that because it's a very important question. this is great. It's wonderful. You can have an heirloom cow. Okay. It'll feed, like, six, you know, Tech billionaires in Silicon Valley. And, like, who cares? We're going to get to why it's important and. And how to scale it. But before we do, I want to sort of address the elephant in the room, which is the conversation about meat itself. Is it good for you? Is it bad for you? Is it bad for the planet? Is it good for the planet? Is it bad for the animals? Is it okay to eat animals? Because. the conversation that's really emerging in many, many circles is that we should all become vegan in order to save our health and save the planet. And you put up a very different conversation about this. How, how do we become to understand that beef is the enemy? And, and why, why is, why is it not?

Absolutely. I mean, there's a Series of cultural conversations that happened after the industrialization of beef production that shifted the optic and the lens we viewed beef. You know the narrative well, I'll repeat it, the broad brush strokes of the story. After the Second World War, we had a major consolidation of agriculture. Many of the ammunition factories were converted to fertilizer factories, which made, we had basically a vast infrastructure of fertilizer factories that were ready to go. We started to make fertilizer much, much cheaper. We had a bigger industrialization of agriculture. At the same time, we had a different approach towards food security is what we call it today. But the government after the Second World War and around that time was very concerned about America's autonomy, understandably, and invested in systems that ensured that we had enough corn, wheat, rice, soy, those key crops and a few others, cotton, sorghum, tobacco, that we had those produced in volume sufficient to feed the American public in the US. The confluence of those two things is an overabundance of food crops starting in the 50s that we began to understandably re-divert to beef feed. And we developed the world's- We started.

Producing too much food and so we had to feed it to something else, right?

And the thing is too, Marc, it's a bunch of rational things that we did, right? We were like, okay, we don't wanna have another, you know, Victory Gardens and terrifying end of the world scenario, understandable, right? We, we have all these huge factories that we need to do something else with understandable. Like these were all kind of rational economic.

It was, it was good, it was good intentions with bad consequences.

And longer term consequences. You know, these were sort of short term pivots and responses to things. I think sometimes, and I do agree with some of the broader kind of conspiracies at times around big ag, but the way that it's been built up, I think was a normal react into a bunch of, you know, social and economic forces. And so what we ended up with though is by the fifties, we were, realizing we could get fatter beef faster, feeding it human food. Right? And then about 10 years later, you know, Diet for a Small Planet was one of the first books that hit around this. But then about 10 years later, people started to say, but wait a second, this is devastating for the environment, right? Because we're basically producing resource intensive crops that are maladaptive for beef diet, right? And are also bad for the planet being produced at the scale, for this usage. And, and effectively we created a very unsustainable beef supply system. So the way that it happened is that we, we pivoted how we produce beef from a natural regenerative traditional system to the modern industrial factory farm.

Yeah.

And then we started to understand, I'd say the, the, the response to that was for many people, well, we're going to be vegan. Now, why wasn't the response, like, oh.

My God, look what's happening in these factory farms? And then of course all the literature came out that meat is bad for you, it's got saturated fat, we shouldn't be eating it, it causes heart disease, right?

Yes, yes. And I think a lot of the, you know, the conversation around beef and how bad it is, a lot of it I agree with directionally in that confinement beef is really bad.

Yeah, so just to clarify, what happens is this conflating of traditional, let's say heirloom, regeneratively raised animals and their impact on health and the planet versus feedlot beef and their impact on health and the planet and in fact on the animals in terms of the horrific conditions they're raised in. And yet the conversation about meat doesn't often distinguish those two things. And just like, and even the health effects is fascinating. We've talked about this before on the podcast, but you know, there are studies that need to be done more on this and we're working on how to do those. But in, in Australia, they looked at wild kangaroo meat versus feedlot beef, gram per gram of protein when consumed have profoundly different effects on human biology. So the feedlot beef raised all the inflammatory markers, the kangaroo meat. lowered inflammation in the body. Same amount of protein, both meat, but profoundly different effects on human health, not to mention the effects on planetary health.

So, it's a dangerous through line to draw at times, but you look at the confinement system and feedlot beef, it is an inflammatory system. The way that these animals are fattened up is by giving them a fundamentally inflammatory maladaptive diet. Right, which triggers a lot of different reactions in their bodies. And it also is putting them in confinement, which creates, you know, competition for mates and foods and resources, unsanitary conditions, highly stressful. So it's cortisol. So, you know, there, there are sort of two factors, maladaptive diet, inflam, that's inflammatory, and then a highly inflammatory, stressful context that they're, they're living in. So those two together, now you're the doctor here, so I'm going to leave it to you to understand, like what's, you know, eating meat from an animal that, you know, effectively is highly inflamed, inflammatory for us. that that would make sense to me. And I, I'm always troubled when I see, you know, people in the culinary Community, in particular, posting pictures of, like, Kobe and Wagyu and this highly fatty meat. And I just think, you know, you wouldn't put a picture up on Instagram of a 350 pound four-year-old and be like, look at how cool this is, right? You say, like, this is an Abomination, right? Like, help us help this child. And when you're putting that kind of picture up of those steaks, it's effectively what you're doing is saying, like, here's a , deeply diseased and troubled organism. Um, and we're, we celebrate and fetishize it as opposed to looking at it like what it is, which is inflamed.

And it has inflamed tissue. Well, it's interesting that the, the diet we're feeding the animals that's inflammatory is a high carb diet, corn. That's the same diet that Americans are eating is a high refined carbohydrate diet that makes us inflamed and sick and more likely to get COVID and, and many chronic diseases. So it's, it's actually an interesting parallel that you draw. And Russ Condr says it's not the.

Cow, it's the how. Hi everyone. Hope you're enjoying the episode. Before we continue, we have a quick message from Dr. Mark Hyman about his.

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That'S getpharmacy with an F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y.com Now back to this week's episode.

How does the how that you're doing at Del Campo change the quality of the meat? How is it different for us from a health point of view and how does it impact climate and the environment in a different way than traditional feedlot? And how ethically is it different? I mean there's a lot of questions in there because it's ethical issues, environmental issues and health issues. and they all get conflated and it's important to break them out because they're quite different.

So around the ethical issue, I do need to state the kind of, for me, the elephant in the room is that an animal dies to make meat. Okay? So that's a fundamental choice that we have to be comfortable with as humans. What I've tried to do is to answer all the questions apart from that one, which I can't have an answer for, right? But what I've tried to build in our systems is the same as I think the thinking of many people in the regenerative movement, which is to create an evolutionary system for the animals to grow up in. Now, to put the question around the high carbs, too, I need to talk about that. There is a little bit of a difference in terms of our inflammatory response and the beef's inflammatory response. I agree that we're both inflamed, but keep in mind that beef are ruminants, and so their evolution is for eating large volumes of extremely low calorie, high fiber, nutrient poor food, which is forage. So there are amazing kind of like, they're like the compost pile of the animal.

They're upcyclers of nutrients that we couldn't eat.

We're the predators. We won out in the evolutionary battle, right? We got to eat kind of everything. We're a monogastric. Other animals that we eat that are monogastrics are pigs and chickens, right? Monogastric means we have one stomach and we are able to because of that we need and we seek out nutrient dense foods. So if you or I were to eat only grass, we would be in the hospital in a week, right? It would be extremely difficult for us to extract enough nutrition from something that high fiber. Cows, on the other hand, are suffering when they eat nutrient dense food because they have these five stomachs which become gassy and inflamed when they're pounded with a lot of grain. The question too is like, well, all, you know, natural grasses would have seed pods on them, but I can say from being in the farming industry that it's like one half of one percent when you have a, you know, a large field of grass and how much these animals are not scraping the seeds off like bears pick blackberries. They're eating volumes of grass and there's a little bit of seed at different phases of the life cycle in there. Okay. So that's a very different system. So an evolutionary system means that we're trying to create key aspects of how an animal exists in the wild. And in the case of there's no wild cow, but there are bison and there is oxen, right? And the plant step oxen from Russia are the original cows. And what we do that is to focus on diet, breeding, and mothering. Those are the kind of the key life points for animal wellness. So, in the diet is what we talk about the most.

I just want to stop you for a minute there. You just said something that I don't think anybody talks about. Animal wellness. Animal wellness. That's a very new idea that brings into the conversation a different way of thinking about how do you raise animals for their health, and for our health and how they're connected. So it's very important. Thank you for pointing that out.

Well, I think animal wellness is a crucial part of human wellness, right? Not just when what goes in our mouths, but when we have unwell animal systems, the impact on the environment. And that's not even just the like big picture, your grandchildren, polar bear stuff. That's literally, if you live two miles from a confinement agriculture farm, you have something like double the chance of having a a miscarriage or a low birth weight baby. Okay? So it's not just like, it's also quite near term here and now and wellness issues. Okay? So in our systems, and I want to clarify, point out that there's dozens of farms across the US, maybe in the hundreds, I don't really know, but like of that I know of, there's dozens that practice this. We're not unique in this and there's a lot of options now to buy regenerative products. But our system, the word regenerative is like looking to the long term. So thinking, many generations out in terms of the health of the soil. And that means that we're trying to actively sequester carbon. That doesn't exactly relate to the, there's not like a regenerative practice specifically around beef, but beef are part of a regenerative system. In environments like where I am right now in the Belcampo farm, we are, it's a brittle grassland environment. That's where we farm, that's where most regenerative farmers.

You couldn't grow crops or vegetables there essentially.

There's not enough water. Correct. Yeah, so this is an area that 150 years ago was heavily grazed by elk and deer, right? There are massive herds of them around here. And this is an environment that evolved in concert. So in concert with ruminants, right, with these big, heavy hoofed foot animals with lots of stomachs that could take all of these massive volume of grasses, a little bit of seeds, basically mulch them and poop them out, for lack of a better word, in a, so the seeds are actually passed entire through the digestive tract of these animals and then they're deposited on the prairie on the ground packed in its own great fertilizer. And while the animals is dropping these mature seed pods packed in fertilizer, they're also lightly aerating the soil by walking across it with their heavy heavy bodies and sharp pointed hooves, kind of creating a light tilling effect as well that allows that the next time the rains fall, there's indentations where the rain pools, creating greater saturation of the water. So that whole process, so the beef, I'd say, are in support of a regenerative prairie management system. That's the way that beef are part of the system.

Well, that's a very important point you make because what people don't understand is that if we wanted to say, let's just eliminate animals from the planet, eliminate agricultural animals, because they're the enemy. And there are many people who are saying this. We should just get rid of animal agriculture. What you're saying is that it doesn't actually make sense because 40% of our global agricultural lands are not suitable for growing crops. They're suitable for grazing animals. And if we do it right, and there are many ways to do it wrong through overgrazing, which destroy the environment lead to desertification, which has happened all over the world. But doing it right, like you're doing it, you're actually restoring the ecosystem. You're increasing biodiversity. You're building soil carbon. You're drawing down carbon out of the environment. You're conserving water in the soil. You're actually creating healthier animals, which then creates healthier humans. You're creating this virtuous cycle, which require.

Animals, is what you're saying. Yes. And the challenge here is that there's a really broadspread assumption now that widespread assumption that animal agriculture in and of itself is the problem, not the current manifestation of animal agriculture. But we've got plenty of examples in history and some good research being done right now that shows that when you remove, as you mentioned, ruminants from a traditional prairie system, that system collapses. And the great example in American history is the Dust Bowl. And so there's many, many stories about this and documentation of it, but I'll give the short version, which is that we took, we removed the bison from our prairies through massive kill offs. We then fenced in those prairies and for the first couple years of farming, it remains today unbeaten levels of wheat production. That land was so fertile, right? So fertile. within two years, it cratered. It cratered. And then the Dust Bowl happened. And what happened is the topsoil, which had been built up slowly through generations of animals walking, dropping manure and seeds, et cetera, aerating, et cetera, all of that evaporated and turned into, it's literally called the Dust Bowl. And there was, you wouldn't see the sun for days because of the amount.

Of dust that had come up through erosion. It went all the way to Washington, D.C., which is why the government actually.

Started to create the Soil Conservation. Carbon in soil, the reason we want carbon in the soil is that it supports microbial growth in the soil. Microbial growth then supports the growth of micro rhizomes and root systems. That's a virtuous cycle. Then it further sequesters carbon.

Right?

So carbon is like, it's kind of like think about it in, in your own body too. It's like having a healthy microbiome is the first step to making sure you don't get the flu and then getting the vaccine is like sort of the on the outer levels of what you want to do, right? So there's a lot of similarities to how we look at the human body and whole body wellness and how we approach agriculture. Like we have a very consistent systemic approach in America to those two kind of problems or opportunities. But here at Belcampo, you know, we've been surveying the soil since 2013 and we are carbon positive. So we've actually been actively sequestering soil. We've got that monitored by a third party. So just to your question of like, is beef bad? I'd say, hey, based, I mean, there's many, many people that are surveying this and measuring this right now. I think we're probably a decade away from the tide really turning on this issue by farms like ours showing concerted long-term shifts. But in our farm, in seven years, we turned the tide. We changed the direction.

That's a very important point that, you know, we actually can sequester or store carbon that's in the atmosphere into the soil and draw down carbon in a way that can help stop or even reverse climate change. And it's a conversation that's starting to happen in many circles, certainly happening in Europe, it's in certain conversations that are happening in the government. It's not certainly far enough, in my opinion. But what people don't realize is that we have the biggest carbon capture technology ever discovered. It's available everywhere on the planet. It's free. It's something that is available everywhere and is called photosynthesis.

Well, so it's interesting. to me too, too, because people think like carbon sequential is important because we want carbon out of the environment. And this way we put it into the ground where it's stored. But then that's just the beginning. Cause what happens when the carbon's in the ground is that there's better microbial action, there's better micro rhizome growth, and then you limit erosion, right? So it's like, it's a totally virtuous cycle. And then you build more micros and then you're able to sequester even more carbon. So it's not just about putting things in the bank. It's actually that there's interest on that in the bank. You know, there's actually like a really healthy cycle. that carbon creates. And we do a very good job with industrial ag at killing the microbiome of the soil. So, you know, something that's really painful about, for me particularly around glyphosate and Roundup, right? A very, very common chemical is that it kills the microbiome of the soil. So, as you know, it's a broad-.

It's on 70% of crops.

It's everywhere and it kills like inches and inches of topsoil. So, When you see these flash floods in the Midwest on farming communities and whole towns are underwater and mudslides and stuff like that, that's because we've completely killed the microbiome of the soil through the use of the most commonly used agricultural chemical. It doesn't just kill what's above, it kills what's below. So that's another double whammy in terms of carbon sequestration, because then you're killing.

The ability of those plants to sequester carbon. Yeah, as a doctor, it's also important to me because when you put carbon in the soil, you build the microbiome of the soil, and the microbiome of the soil is what allows the nutrients to be extracted from the soil to go into the plant that will enter us and make us healthier. So when you look at industrial farming, whether it's growing vegetables or animals, one, the nutrient density is lower in factory farm animals, but the nutrient density is far lower in industrial produced crops. So you've got 50% less nutrients and minerals in some crops over the last 50 years just because of the destruction of the soil. So it's such an incredibly virtuous cycle. It's hard to argue with regenerative agriculture. And yet, you know, many people still do. I mean, we talk about, you know, the sort of fake meats out there that are being promoted like Impossible Burger. And, you know, I went into Starbucks the other day and I bought a coffee and I saw in the cabinet the Impossible Burger cheese sandwich, you know? I mean, what? It was like, and I was like, what? And then I was like, what? You know, the, the people don't realize one, it's a, it's a highly industrial food product. It's made from 47 novel proteins. It's got more glyphosate than you require to kill your own microbiome because it's GMO glyphosate sprayed soybeans. And three, it is better than feedlot beef for, climate environment in terms of greenhouse gases, but regeneratively raised beef actually draws down carbon while the Impossible Burger will add three and a half kilos of carbon. So you literally have to eat one regeneratively raised burger from Belcampo Farm to.

Offset an Impossible Burger's carbon emissions.

That would be a good marketing play. It's actually validated science through Qantas, which is a life cycle analysis company from Australia that looked at both both approaches. And it was kind of shocking to me. I thought, wow, that's pretty impressive. So I think, you know, the whole, it's not the cow, it's the how message is really important to get out there.

It's a message that's so radical in terms of the modern thinking about protein, that animal protein, that it's a difficult one. You say it, people are like, but can I really believe this? This is so different. But, you know, Mark, in the past, What, five years? We've seen a radical shift in people's understanding of the role of fat in their diets. There's still plenty of holdouts with margarine in their fridge out there, but the tide is turning. So I'm optimistic that good data and good advocacy can make that shift. I know, and I do what I do with integrity because it's the right choice for the planet. I also know, though, that the levels of meat consumption, the way we consume meat, are not sustainable. So I'm not saying this is just sort of a carte blanche to continue what we're doing, but change The input, right? And, you know, we throw away almost, I hear somewhere between 35 and 45% of the meat that's produced in America goes into the trash. So I think there's a lot of waste.

Why is that?

Well, when you have a really cheap product, you're not very conscious. I'll trust, you know, trust me that the numbers on like caviar usage in American restaurants are not nearly as egregious. People don't throw away stuff that's expensive. Meat's very, very cheap. And so it's a, you know, we feature it heavily in buffets. We feature it in, you know, it's a giveaway effectively. We make it, we do abundant portions that people don't finish. So food waste in meats, egregious. And so we raise animals in torture. They die in torture. It's bad for the environment the way that's produced and then it ends up in the trash can. So tell me that, you know, we feeding them human grade food the whole way, right? There's just elements of that that are so broken and wrong. So I think that there's, you know, the kind of the big piece that we need to talk about is that raising beef the way that I raise it is three to five times more expensive than the conventional method. And one of the great privileges of being American is cheap meat, you know?

And so we've, we've talked about it. Is it, is it real? Is it really cheap, though? Is it really cheap? Because when you look at who's paying the cost of a factory farm animal, who's paying the cost of the destruction of the soil, the pollution of our waterways through the production of food that goes into rivers, lakes and streams and kills our fish supplies like 212,000 metric tons in the Gulf of Mexico, the loss of pollinators, which have dropped 75%, half of all birds have gone from America because of our agricultural industrial system. The incredible damage is happening to the climate as a result of destroying the soil and the way we grow food. Who's paying those costs? I don't think we're actually paying the real cost of the food. What about the antibiotic resistance and the 700,000 deaths a year from antibiotic resistant organisms, much of which is coming from farms that cost trillions of dollars. Who's paying that cost? It's not the price you pay at the checkout counter. It's what I call socializing the cost, meaning we as citizens, as countries pay the cost while the corporations who produce those meats actually privatize the profits.

Yeah, and if you look at the way that the locations of the factory farms are increasingly in disenfranchised areas with high density of people of color. You know, California passed the proposition which, which basically made the worst actors just leave the state and go to places that were less regulated. Right. And where the citizenship was less active and dis, and yeah, right. So, I mean, it's a pretty, it's a pretty disproportionate impact on the poor as well in terms of the actual immediate bad effects of, I mean, if you look at, for example, chicken farming, it's primarily new Southeast Asian immigrants and Latino immigrants that are in that industry, right? So it's disproportionately health impacts in terms of who's actually working there.

Well, the farm workers and the food workers, but also the people who live nearby, as you mentioned, the amount of pollution is driving asthma and the chronic illnesses that are really well documented in terms of their impact.

Well, here in California, you know, back to the COVID thing, when you started to see the death rates in the Central Valley, spiking, you noticed that how just the death rates per thousand were so much higher in near the agricultural communities because the General, you call it like metabolic health indicators are so much worse there. I mean, there's three times the incidence of asthma in Fresno is in Oakland, right? I mean, an equally polluted California city, but it's the ag, right, that's driving that asthma level. So, I mean, that you're, this is the point though, the question for me is I often get the dollars and cents rationale of like, I'm a working single mom and I can't, you know, afford this and I understand that. directionally, there's a, there is going to need to be, I think, to implement regenerative agriculture, a broader understanding of that, of those bigger picture externalized costs. But I don't think in the US we have a great track record of understanding the sort of like nuanced bigger picture impact of, of good short-term economic decisions for individuals.

Right.

So I don't have a ton of confidence in people grappling with that bigger picture. negativity, it seems like what the decision is, is like, well, let's just pivot to this highly processed soy based or grain based industrial ag off put and just buy into that if I'm going to be activated around this. So the pathway to getting consumers to stay with meat but demand better meat is going to be a more laborious build, I think. But that's really, that's what I've been leaning into is like trying to find a demographic that's ready to convert or is open to the message and has maybe not massive resources, but enough to have a little bit of optionality.

Yeah. There are ways of buying in bulk, there are ways of buying at scale. You can buy half a cow, you can buy with your neighbors. I just bought half a lamb from the local farmer here. I put in my freezer. It'll last me a long time and wasn't that expensive compared to, it's all local. How do we scale this? Because as you're talking, it's really clear to me and I think it's clear to many people in high levels of policy around the world that regenerative agriculture is a key solution to so many of our problems, right? Water problems, climate problems, food problems. And the UN said that if we took 2 million of the 5 million hectares of degraded land around the world and convert to regenerative agriculture, we could stop climate change for 20 years and would cost $300 billion, which is less than we spend on diabetes in this country. The government spends and it's, is basically 60 days worth of, of military spending around the world. And compared to the 4 trillion, whatever of dollars we spent on COVID relief, it's just a drop in the bucket. And yet nobody's really talking about how do we build and scale this? Because a lot of the conversation, well, this is great, it's elitist. If you have money, you can buy it, it's not really scalable. But there's a lot of challenges to that theory. And guys like Alan Williams have talked about if we took all the degraded land, if we took all the land that's being used to grow corn and soy for animal feed, or some of it, if we took the conservation lands that the government has, we could actually scale this up and that would bring the cost down. It would improve our entire ecosystems, increase biodiversity, conserve water, help deal with the droughts and the floods and the fires and the weather instability and climate. I mean, it's sort of an interesting concept, but how real do you think it is that we could actually move this at scale? Because it's only 1% now of our agricultural system. How do we get it to 10, 20, 50%?

I'll tell you from an Organizational capacity management. So we built this operation here. I started the business with my co-founder in 2012 with 6,000 acres and we've scaled it to close to 30 through the acquisition of three other large ranches and also acquired and built a land for and built a slaughterhouse. So in that time, what I've learned is that regenerative agriculture is much more reliant on human know-how and intelligent engagement with data in a series of decision-making points. So unlike in a feed lot, you can have kind of anybody show up with the bag of feed or a computer and put the feed in the bucket and you buy the feed from one of three consolidated companies and you buy that based on price and proximity. in. So that's sort of your decision tree is like, where's the bucket go?

Right.

In, in regenerative ag, you know, I'm looking at our pastors right now, and, and I can tell a story about every single one of these. Like, did we decide to irrigate ever? If so, what's the system that we use? That's most efficient when we're planting. We do no till planting. What and how are we planting and where to optimize sunlight and natural water flow? how are we handling hedgerows and biodiversity? How are we handling biodiversity management? And then how are we rotating the animals over the years? How are we handling fencing or any type of containment? So these I could just like rattle off, but there's like hundreds of these decisions and they're made by highly skilled ranchers, right? Whereas agriculture on the whole has been de-skilled and put into, they're sort of like a autocratic class and then there's endless workers who don't even need to speak The language of like, of their bosses, right? Literally don't need to even speak the language, right? There's so little need for any real knowledge transfer and there's no skill gain through the work.

Yeah.

My jobs here at our firm are careers. People are learning really sophisticated information about how land is managed, how we increase fertility using a lot of subtle kind of EQ type skills around animal management. It's really hard. You understand every day why people don't do this anymore. So scaling this, the challenge here, Marcus, and this is our scale. So Belcampo now we are, you know, by the grace of God, growing in COVID. Our restaurants have actually grown year on year in COVID, I believe due to the wellness message and the wellness experience that many of our customers have of just real significant physical and wellness goals being met through our product. I'll just hypothesize here, but we are actually growing in our restaurants, which is very, very unusual. My category is down 70% year on year due to closures. We're up 15% at this point. We close of two of our restaurants that are in enclosed malls, but the remainder, the remaining five, those statistics are true on. And then the rest of it, with our e-commerce growing and our other channels are growing, we've been in a really fortunate position. But as we look at scale, We're scaling through partner firms and partner is capital. I mean, and if I think about the real challenges, you know, I've had a significant single investor for eight years. We're now raising capital for the company in the upcoming months to fund really our e-commerce expansion, our direct to consumer mail business. But we are, you know, the privilege of having an individual committed investor and the long-term approach to returns is enormously important. And then also just the, you know, as I scale, I'm not, I've never been an advocate of let's just buy 250,000 acres. I mean, a, where the money come from, that's this kind of patient capital, but also from a management and logistical perspective, it becomes untenable, right? These are systems that are better built for medium and small scale operations. I consider Bo Campo medium scale. We have a, we have a herd of 3000 beef currently. So we'll be expanding next year. About 25% of our production will be coming from partner firms that we then certify. to meet not just certified humane and organic, which are our base criteria for Belcampo, but then also our own regenerative practices. So the scale, and I bring up my story is relevant to the degree that it reflects an experience of scaling a regenerative agriculture and failing more than I've succeeded in many, many ways, right? And saying, okay, I don't really want to do this four times as big. I'd rather be a You know, a coach on the regenerative practices, a certifier and a marketing arm. And so that maybe in 10 years our own where I'm sitting, this farm right here is maybe 10 or 15% of our production. And the remainder of it's coming from many partners. I want to call out something too, Mark, that I think, I don't know if consumers are aware of the amount of frustration in the farming community about industrial ag as well.

You probably are aware of that.

Traditional farmers. Exactly. So, I mean, the challenges are I mean, if you were to start a farming business right now in industrial systems, you're basically, you sign up to, you're buying all your baby animals from somewhere. You have to fatten them in a certain season in the livestock industry. So you're buying them at market set prices. You're buying what you feed them at market set prices, and then you sell them at market set prices, the commodity prices, all three of those commodities. None of that's differentiated. Whatever you do doesn't matter. You just need to come in under those commodity prices. It's terrible. It's not entrepreneurship. It's, it's, there's no, there's no, like, there's no ability to differentiate. It's bad for the farmers. If those commodities don't line up great, you're just out and you're just in the red that year. Yeah. And there's, and you have nowhere to go. You have nowhere to go. I mean, we saw this in COVID, right? Where those farms were just like up a creek all of a sudden and killing, you know, aborting baby pigs and. throwing away eggs and stuff. So when, when you're sque, you are squeezed in conventional farming. And then also what we're seeing in the, you know, in the case of the crop industry with, with glyphosate, they're actually, you know, they are mandated to buy the chemical from the farm. They're mandated to buy the seeds from that, that same company, Monsanto. And then they also, then they can only sell out the commodity. Again, if those three things on a pricing basis don't align one year, who's paying the price? The farmers are. and they're taking it out. And that's something that the, that the USDA does a ton of. It's just basically bridge financing for farmers that are sustaining losses on behalf of agribusiness. You know, like the small farmers have become this giant bank that's funding misalignment.

In the commodity pricing structure. That's right.

Yeah.

I mean, just to break that down for people, the farmers are not the bad guys. They're caught in a squeeze between the banks who give them money to run their farms. which then goes to the seed chemical companies, and they're stuck in this vicious cycle and have to buy crop insurance for the downside on their farms, and they can't get loans unless they have crop insurance. And so they're stuck in this vicious cycle, which is a trap, and they often make very little or no money. And what you're saying is that farmers are getting sick of this and they're looking for new ways. And I've seen, you know, had Alan Williams and Gay Brown on the podcast, and They really talked about how as they go around the country, more and more traditional farmers are sick and tired of the way things are happening and are looking for a new way and are coming out in droves to really learn about regenerative agriculture and understand how to implement these. And they're profitable in the first year, which is interesting because, you know, when you think, you know, the people who are making all the money in the system are not the farmers, it's the seed and the chemical companies and the banks and, and, and not the farmers. But this turns all that upside down. And I imagine on your farm, you had a private investor maybe for the land, but basically you're not having to buy chemicals, you're not having to buy seeds, you're not having to buy antibiotics, you're not having to buy hormones, you're not having to sell your products in a commodity fixed price system that lowers the price so you can actually have a profit. So it seems like this is a model that's going to regenerate rural communities, that's going to reinvigorate farmers, that's going to actually increase profits for them and, and have all these side benefits, just as our traditional farming system has all these negative benefits. It's the opposite, right? Better food, better for the animals, better for humans, better for Farmers, better for climate, better for biodiversity, better for water resources and the soil.

It's all a win-win-win-win-win. And the key thing we've done is to build a direct relationship to the consumer. Right. And that's another thing where, although with small Farms, there are farmers markets, those often require a lot of driving, getting up early on the weekend, if it's raining, you don't sell anything. So the problem is there's really no consolidated market where if you have a differentiated product, you can sell it into. So there's not really the channel to support any scale on regenerative. And I'll be clear too that our firm has cost us significant investment. So although we don't spend on antibiotics and glyphosate and things, we've had to scale up the herd. We've bought thousands upon thousands of animals and breeding stock. we have seven species that we raise here commercially, all the infrastructure around that. So it's a significant lift to get an operation like this up and running. But I think the longer term challenge for regenerative as well is that there's very little left in the way of rural small-scale infrastructure to support. So if you do get a farm up and running, it's difficult to find slaughter and further processing. So making things like beef jerky on a small scale or just getting your animals killed, that's what we have done, you know, we built our own slaughterhouse down the road about 20 minutes from the farm that's certified humane and certified by CCOF as organic. So having those pieces has made all the difference for us to be able to build actually a brand. But the scale issue for regenerative, it's a different model than how the agriculture is scaled currently. And that's a question that I kind of muse on a little bit, right? Which is that truly regenerative I see it as a patchwork of medium scale operations that scale up in concert. But it's difficult to, there's not really like an easy acquisition pathway for a large, you know, well resourced kind of agribusiness to come and inquire a bunch of these. So I do think there is an opportunity around investment to look at, you know, longer term. This is a field that- well, there are billions of dollars.

There are billions of dollars flowing into regenerative ag from private investments and funds. Okay, so Anya, we have a new administration. You're called by President Biden to lead an initiative to transform agriculture in this country. Maybe you're the Secretary of Agriculture, maybe just advising him. What are your top three recommendations or five, whatever you want to share that would really move the needle and make us move forward faster to solve these big problems of human health, animal health, planetary health, and really move things forward.

Flattening the subsidy system, flattening it. So making it- I mean killing it or- Making it equitably distributed among all types of farmers. So instead of having a huge subsidy go to eight crops, have a small subsidy go to every crop. If we're going to subsidize farming, let's subsidize all farming in the US. And if we're going to subsidize any type of farming, let's, you know, I don't think it's fair to say we're going to massively like eliminate subsidies to large scale farms or corn or wheat or those different things. But we need to have a flattened subsidy. So a subsidy system that isn't differentially favoring crops that are large scale.

So incentives for regenerative agriculture?

Well, in other countries, they're simply tax breaks for farmers as a category. Okay. So that's something to consider instead of saying we're going to give an operational subsidy to producers of this one specific crop, we could say we're just going to give an operational subsidy in the form of tax relief to all farmers.

That's a big idea.

That's a big idea. I mean, that to me would say we're going to incentivize food production and interest to food security, which I agree is a national priority, but we're not going to specify that it has to be these specific eight crops that also happen to be pretty unhealthy.

Yeah, I mean, if I were king for a day and had autocratic power. I would essentially put in one rule, which is that any food produced in this country must have as its requirement that it's high quality. And we can define high quality nutrient density, promotes health, promotes a healthy environment. It's all the things we would say in terms of food and food production, but quality has to be king. And I think if we did that, it would make a huge difference. I don't see that happening. But for example, we give school lunches. we have quality standards. We could improve those obviously, but for SNAP, there's no quality standards for procurement for food and purchasing in the government, there's no standards for what we grow. There's no standards that has to produce quality food. I mean, to produce corn and soy and the way we're doing it that gets put into industrial food products that make us sick and fat and cost the government huge amounts of money in Medicare, Medicaid. And, I mean, it's just, it all falls apart when you focus on quality. And that's really what Belcampo is about. It's about producing quality for the earth, for humans, for the animals in all levels of the system.

Yeah, I agree with that. It's difficult with the word quality because it's qualitative, right? But I think broadly, if I was to look at what could lead to better quality, it's, you know, right now we actively subsidize the worst quality foods, right?

That'S right.

And, and we don't have any incentivization or any kind of structure or rigor around assessing that point that you brought up earlier, which is the bigger picture impact of our choices in agriculture. So those are the kind of the two areas that I think are the most, most interesting to explore from a policy perspective is like, how do we change subsidies to equally not disincentivize the other stuff, but maybe equally incentivize all the stuff.

I would just incentivize the best stuff.

Yeah.

I would actually I would actually, you know, have the costs not be so externalized.

Yeah, yeah, that's it. I mean, looking at ways to bake in those costs is a very interesting idea. I mean, it's a, the system where right now in America, it's cheaper, significantly cheaper to chemically grow corn, harvest it mechanically, store it, usually in a modified environment. Truck it then to a cow and then feed it to it that it is to just let a cow out on a pasture and let it eat till it's full.

Yeah.

That's nuts.

It is.

It is. That's the major sticky point for me is like, let's make that, it should be easier to just let a cow out onto grass. Granted, if that's organic grass and it's like all the groovy species, whatever, but like, even if it's just regular old grass, it's Still cheaper to chemically grow corn, mechanically harvest it, truck it, store it, truck it again, store it again, and feed it to a cow than it is to just let the cow out into your backyard.

It's crazy.

It really doesn't make sense. And that's the fundamental like dis-economy that we've got. And it's doing us a disservice on so many different levels. Like that's the fundamental issue is that cost basis, you know? And so it's interesting when I hear all of this, kind of like this vigorous resentment of the beef industry. I'm like, you realize this is just all in the service of agribusiness. You know, it's a pretty fundamentally like pro agribusiness angle, like to just embrace veganism. Because that's actually, I think you're just supporting the same aggregating corn based. I mean, they see it right in the wall too. They're like, people are eating less granola bars, they're eating less, you know, highly processed cereals. There's this vast infrastructure built to make all that garbage. So now they're just getting ready to pivot to something that feels better. And it's vegan protein. You know, like that's the thing. It's like the next highly processed plant-based garbage that they're going to convince you to eat. So I think it's fundamentally an agribusiness.

Backed message to effectively kind of- I think you're right.

It's like we're killing one of our- I think you're right. That's a very important insight. To like push us too, because what are we going to do with that? you know, we stopped eating as much, you know, as much Cheerios and we stopped feeling good about giving, you know, like Twizzlers or snacks to our kids. So there's been some shifts recently. So how are they going to get us back, you know, from this whole foods kind of migration? And, and that's got to be, that's a lot of people are thinking about that right now. And to me, they kind of, yeah, the composition of those products is too similar to the garbage. It is.

You know, it's too similar to the garbage to make me think that it's not, you know, it's a bait and switch. Yeah. Yeah. So if people want to get more involved in learning about regenerative agriculture or eating those products, where should they start? So regenerates an unregulated word, right?

Just like grass fed and finishes. But starting with a farm that at least claims to be regenerative and doing some research into it is a great place to start. Now, if you're looking for a regenerative from a local farm, it's probably going to be at your farmer's market. It's unlikely that any of your grocery stores are going to be stocking it unless it's a really small kind of alternative shop for people that ship nationally. Belcampo, of course, is available nationwide. There's a few other regenerative operations like White Pastures is one of them. Porter Road down in the southeast does an amazing job with sourcing. So you can look for those words. Another words you want to see or you could see in place of regenerative is climate positive. And if you're not seeing the word regenerative climate positive, the three things that would suggest that that's the kind of operation is grass-fed and finished, right, is one claim. Organic certified and then some type of certified humane or animal welfare association approved. so those three together are pretty much a proxy for the regenerative approach. That's great.

And people are, you know, interested in going to belcampo.com, they can learn about what you're doing. Can they order, can they order Belcampo meat there?

They can do everything there. They can find out on restaurants in California and then we ship nationwide now a free delivery over a hundred bucks. So it's very accessible. It's usually two-day shipping and we're filling out of the East Coast now as well. So it's speedy and delivered frozen. That's something that's really blossomed for us in, during COVID and it's been amazing for the business. It's just a huge, huge way for us to grow, to control margin, to manage the customer experience. So it's a great way. I mean, supporting Belcampo that way or any firm with direct purchasing is huge. Many people don't realize that when you go into a grocery store and buy, there's a couple layers of people taking a percentage. So it ends up usually being about 60% of what's on top of their farmer costs. So if you're buying direct, you're basically giving 60% more to the supplier, which is really crucial for operations like ours.

Incredible. Yeah, direct, you know, just cutting out the middleman is a great idea. And, you know, that's sort of what you're talking about in regenerative agriculture, cutting out the middleman, which is all the farming and the corn production and soy production that has to go into feeding the animals. You're just like, let them eat grass, right? And for people who want to learn more about regenerative agriculture, there's also an incredible report by the Rodale Institute. It's called Regenerative Agriculture in the Soil Carbon Solution. And you can just Google it Roedell Institute. It's really a wonderful detailed understanding of how to actually use regenerative agriculture to solve so many of our problems in terms of human and planetary health and actually in ways that are good for animals. Anya, you are incredible inspiration to me and so many people, I think, by what you're doing. You've really gone and created something unique, remarkable, and I encourage everybody to check out Belcampo. Just go to the website. It's beautiful. You'll learn all about it. You can learn more about regenerative agriculture. Watch Kiss the Ground, which hopefully you've seen. I'm in it, but I'm just a small bit part, but it's an incredible movie that talks about regenerative agriculture and I encourage everybody to watch that. And Anya, thanks so much for being on the Doctors Pharmacy podcast and helping us learn more about the nuances of regenerative agriculture and grass-fed meat and why.

It'S so important to our health and planetary health.

Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, of course. And if you love this podcast, please share with your friends and family, share it on social media. Leave a comment, we'd love to hear from you and subscribe wherever you get your podcast and we'll see you next time on the Doctor's Pharmacy.