Getting Salty with Michael Sileck of Baja Gold Sea Salt

Okay here we go michael it's such a pleasure to have you as the organuary part of the organuary twenty twenty four i'm really excited to just in general have a discussion about salt i i think in general it's a misunderstood category it's a growing category i think if you look back even twenty years ago that you didn't at all have the options of salt you do now so there's clearly a lot of awareness around there so i'm really excited to share who you are your company with everyone so that we can better understand what we should be looking for and why quality and salt matters but let's start off just sharing a little bit about you how did you get into this crazy world of salt yeah thanks.

So much for having me james really appreciate it excited to be here excited to share more about our company so my name is michael silic i jokingly call myself our chief mineral officer of sea agri solutions i handle our marketing and sales and innovation efforts for the organization and really my background is in product development and marketing of truly health and wellness products i've worked in the culinary space i've worked in sleep health and sleep quality and now i'm working in you know with salt and also with our sea agri brand with nutrient density in our food supply and supporting regenerative agriculture missions as well so really love to work with products and services that can help improve people's lives through nutrition and through other wellness practices excellent.

I have to i always love like how people's names sometimes can mirror what they're doing when you say your your last name selak it makes me a salt lick i i don't know why but it just i find that's kind of fun and and amusing but well so tell me so did you actually help find are you one of the co founders of the of of baja gold and and c ninety so i.

I am not no and our family actually has been helping with the sea agri mission we acquired sea agri about four years ago from the founder of the organization and so the story of sea agri is one that is many decades in the making actually up to seventy decades in the making sea agri was the commercialization of research and innovation done by a gentleman named doctor maynard murray in the forties fifties and sixties and doctor murray actually pioneered the idea of using ocean water as a fertilizer and of using the minerals and trace elements that are in the ocean to remineralize our depleted soils so that our food food supply and the nutrient density in that food supply could be restored and so robert kane and we can definitely go into a lot of exciting and really interesting stories about all of these different decades but robert kane started c ninety in two thousand three and followed that up with baja gold in about twenty thirteen and did a wonderful job of building the organization and then my family has been involved for about four years now kind of a wide range of different professional expertise to really bring c ninety and baja gold to more people and make our products more readily available really globally with ultra high quality and consistency so that we can bring these health and wellness benefits to more people across the world so let's.

Since we're talking about the actual products let's let's distinguish them because it sounds so it sounds like almost the founder really was focusing on c ninety right that that it was really they were really focusing on the agricultural piece not necessarily the residential kind of culinary side.

Yeah culinary side yeah absolutely so robert kane started with the c ninety brand and just to take things back to doctor murray if that's okay so doctor murray was a medical doctor and during the forties and fifties he was really dismayed with the health quality of his patients and he found that you know it's a world of innovational leap at that time a lot of technological advances but he saw we were going to the moon and doing all of these wonderful things but the quality of the health of his patients was declining and he said that doesn't make sense everything else in the world is advancing why is it that human health is not following suit and he found through a lot of different research that the nutrient density and the overall quality of our food supply chain was declining and if you looked at the perhaps amount of magnesium amount of calcium that might be in milk or the quality of our grain supply in the forties and fifties relative to studies done in the early nineteen hundreds that nutrient density that mineral density was significantly lower than it was forty or fifty years prior and so armed with that information he kind of sought to better understand how the food supply chain works how agriculture works how farming practices can play a role in the eventual output of what you are raising and what you are farming and then concurrent to that he actually studied the marine life and the ocean life alongside of land life and he made this interesting discovery that while land life seems to suffer from cellular degeneration and various different diseases like cancer marine life does not suffer from those challenges and the key difference is that marine life is living within this salt water and really mineral water ecosystem whereas land life if you go back to those farming practices has seen soil health has seen mineral density in our food supply chain decrease over time so you have one group of animals group of life that is living in a mineral rich environment that is thriving and you have a group of life that is living in a mineral deficient ecosystem and their health is declining and he said well that's really interesting is there a way to bring the vitality and the power of the ocean the minerality of the ocean into our food supply kind of restore the minerals that were once there so that we can raise a healthier population and ultimately the health of his his family his relatives would be higher and so he pioneered this idea of using ocean water in agriculture first he started by using just pure ocean water using it as a fertilizer truly integrating it into soil fertilization using it within hydroponics and then over time he found this is this works very well but as anyone who works in logistics knows shipping water is extremely expensive it's extremely challenging we do of course a lot of our farming in the great plains and in the midwest of our great country here not a not an ocean nearby unfortunately and so he said how can i bring the power of the oceans to our farming lands and the answer was a dehydrated sea solid or an ocean mineral or another term for an unrefined sea salt he found a location in mexico that has the highest mineral density he figured out a way to dehydrate that ocean water and leave an ultra concentrated mineral crystal essentially that was known as sea solids at the time it would come to be known as c ninety and that product was used throughout the sixties seventies and eighties in various different researches research studies in the great plains and in the midwest to remineralize soils foliar spray on pastures and row crops and increase their nutrient density and then ultimately feed to livestock as well and animals that we are raising so that they have a more nutrient source of food so all of this research robert kane was actually a part of in the seventies and eighties and several decades passed you know there was a couple of different life changes and events that occurred but in the early two thousands robert resurrected this technology resurrected this idea of ocean mineralization and brought c ninety to market using the same source of ocean water and sea solids that he had worked on with doctor murray so long way of kind of explaining that yes our roots at sea agri are in agriculture they are in regenerative and organic based agriculture that is meant to restore and regenerate the minerality and the nutrient density of our food supply not only nationwide but worldwide and that is where a large majority of my time is still spent on the day to day we are challenging the status quo challenging paradigms within agriculture encouraging people to think outside of the you know we call it the npk box and consider different ways of soil land management of crop growing and of animal management livestock husbandry and things of that.

Nature you know it's interesting to me that the sea salt would be pro agriculture because i i now just moved to the east coast but i remember when i was living in portland oregon they would not let people salt the sidewalks now i know that's not a sea salt but that rock salt because they they were very cognizant or aware of the damage that that can do to the environment can you talk a little bit about that because that it's like is it is it purely just the sourcing of the salt that makes the difference like why is this rock salt not good for our environment but yet this sea salt is good for.

Our topsoil absolutely that's a great question and that really is the genesis of what makes sea agri products different different from anything else on the marketplace today so salt itself when people think of salt they typically think of maybe rock salt like you're thinking of you know for roadway use or they're thinking of table salt at their local diner kind of that white flowable maybe comes in a blue canister there's you know several different table salt brands out there but you guys all know what i'm talking about salt itself is going to be in its purest form ninety nine sodium chloride which is nacl and that is going to be something that has very limited nutrient quality and if used in an agricultural way will not have benefits in the same way that an unrefined sea salt or an ocean mineral will and the difference is that sodium chloride in its pure form is is really not something that occurs in nature and what i mean by that is most people think of okay where do you get salt from and you get it from the ocean and so if you dehydrate ocean water what's left is not table salt what's left is sodium chloride yes but also all of nature's minerals and trace elements in relative proportion to one another and so in order to actually obtain pure salt you have to undergo additional processing to actually strip out those minerals and trace elements so that all you are left with is the sodium chloride and that does have applications it has applications in the food world perhaps it has applications in roadway use and whatnot but that itself is not something that occurs in nature on its own sodium chloride and therefore does not have true benefits in the agricultural world so that may be why in your example there they don't want to spread pure sodium chloride on their land on their soils the difference with c ninety and what we're doing with regenerative agriculture is that we use a very limited processing technique that is limited to solar dehydration that maintains the mineral balance within c ninety so you have all ninety plus minerals and trace elements you have a reduced sodium chloride level relative to table salt so typically c ninety or baja gold will have a sodium chloride level of about seventy five percent versus that ninety nine ninety eight ninety nine percent sodium chloride of table salt and the balance is going to be made up of magnesium potassium sulfur calcium and then also all of those beneficial trace minerals or micro minerals such as zinc boron selenium what have you and so that type of a product a ocean mineral with all of nature's minerals and trace elements can provide benefit to soils it can provide benefit to plant tissue and then also to animals as well and really that type of a product is only available when you use these unrefined sea salt techniques if you're watching on video here there's a a picture behind me of our retention ponds in baja mexico so what we do to create this product is we simply allow the lunar hide to flood these retention ponds we let the sun dehydrate the ocean water from the sea of cortez for a period of four to eight weeks and then we capture the ocean minerals and that's it there's no anti caking agents there's no artificial heat there's nothing else done to that resulting product it's a pure natural product and having all of those minerals and trace elements linked with that sodium chloride is what allows the product to support soil health improve soil fertility and then provide those benefits to plants and animals as well so that's a long winded answer a little bit but that is the key difference between a rock salt or a know an earth salt or a a a table salt that's been processed and stripped of those mineral benefits so this.

Is fascinating so those beds behind you in the video i mean they look like huge plots of it's kind of square but they're huge so that's where the salt is drying but you you shared that you wait for the tide to fill those so it how so is the tide not happening within twenty four hours every twenty four hours or is this once a month that the tide does that like how how do you prevent the tide from coming back and washing away what you already started.

To dry sure it's actually a very unique location we are actually about six to eight miles out of the coast and there's this very low elevation alluvial topsoil is what they call it it's almost like a marshy kind of topsoil that the tide travels over and for whatever reason it only actually reaches the retention ponds about four to six times per year it's kind of getting pulled in and then it sometimes gets pulled out and then it gets pulled back in and so we are not we don't see the water every day we actually only see it about four to six times per year and then we have dug down these retention ponds even further below below the land level there and so there's some some drainage and kind of irrigation to help keep the water in or if it's already been flooded to kind of shut off the water flow so that we can then process and create the ocean minerals so it is a highly natural process we do use the lunar patterns to bring the water in so that we aren't exerting any energy or anything of that nature by pumping or anything of that nature it flows in naturally from the sea of cortez and then is dried.

By the sun wow that's fascinating i hope people can see the image because it's really powerful and so we've you've you've already mentioned it but so the baja gold mineral sea salt is the culinary side of your business obviously you're you're you're refined not refining but you're processing the salt a little bit finer so that people can add it to.

Their food correct yes and so the the baja gold is a is a kind of a funny story so robert kane created c ninety in two thousand three and it was around twenty ten twenty eleven he started getting phone calls from farmers and they said robert i love your product it's an incredible product i feed it to my animals and i'm out on the farm and you know what they were alluding to was a little bit of dehydration and electrolyte needs they told him i'm out on the farm and i take a pinch of c ninety and i put it in my mouth and if i'm working a long day in the summer in the heat i i feel so much better when i have that that c ninety in my mouth there and they said i've tried bringing this fifty pound kind of dirty bag of livestock salt into the kitchen and it doesn't go over so well could you but you have a great product could you kind of kind of make this a little bit more kitchen friendly for me and so robert said yeah we could definitely do that and he created the baja gold brand and started putting it in smaller packages of course you don't want to lug a fifty pound bag into your kitchen every day so we have smaller packages nowadays we have like a nice little tabletop grinder we have one pound bags five pound bags but what we have done over the years since then is actually separated the production facilities so that our c ninety product is is bagged if you will in a agriculture grade facility but the baja gold product it actually is hand screened we keep we we put an extra set of hands on it and eyes on it to make sure it's as clean and pristine as possible and then it's handbagged in a facility that meets fda cleanliness and sterility standards so the products are all sourced from the same location but we have some extra care with the baja gold so that is the highest quality for you and your family.

Members i i can speak directly to the baja gold i've been using using it i got some i think i got some at the wise traditions conference and i am using it currently and it's it's really there's some larger chunks which is always fun when you're doing anything culinary you know you can actually like see like little rocks you know rock salt kind of style put on it so it's sort of a mix of smaller grain and and just kind of rustic feel to it which i i like and then the flavor is is really nice it's it's not too salty like it's got this beautiful balance to it which is not common with with chunkier pieces of salt sometimes they're overly strong in terms of or salty so i have to say i've been really impressed with it i wish that we could use i mentioned this to you when we first met i wish we could use it in pluck the only problem is that it's too wet for our product because sea salt is you know when it's natural sea salt it tends to just be a little bit more wet now there's something though that is definitely a concern for a lot of people and it's kind of the buzz buzzwords right now one of them is is mercury or is it mercury sorry no is it what was it oh lead sorry lead being found in in a lot of rock salt and then the other is microplastics and sea salt can you speak to either.

Of those or both of those absolutely and we take quality and contamination very seriously at sea agri on both the c ninety and the baja gold side we do robust third party testing to ensure that our products test very well for heavy metals and test by very well i mean very low and test negatively for all other contaminants microplastics glyphosate what have you so just to go through them in order to we do a robust pesticide and other contaminant test on both c ninety and baja gold for over four hundred different pesticides we do this in partnership with midwest labs which is a third party independent lab it includes glyphosate and various other branded and unbranded pesticides that are out there kind of chemical compounds if you will baja gold and c ninety routinely test negative for the presence of all of those substances we also test for microplastics we test negative for microplastics and we do robust heavy metal testing and our results are very very low in many cases they are undetectable at extremely low detection levels what i will say on heavy metals in particular ocean water contains all of nature's minerals and trace elements in a perfect proportion as doctor murray would say that includes some of those heavy metals if you test ocean water at the right levels you will find lead you will find very very ultra trace levels of mercury and of of all of nature's minerals and trace elements and that's how if you will god created the ocean and so that is present in all natural unrefined sea salts what's important is that you monitor those levels and ensure that they are extremely extremely low and in the ultra ultra trace quantities because that ensures that they are safe for consumption and so if you look at our reports you will see that our values are extremely low or in many cases like i mentioned undetectable i believe cadmium arsenic and mercury are actually undetectable in our tests at parts per billion levels that is the level that we are testing at they are not we're not trying to you know artificially raise the the bar here so that you clear it no they're very very strict testing guidelines parts per billion levels of detection and the summation of all this is that we source our products from a very clean body of water the sea of cortez there is not industry in the sea of cortez the way that there is in the gulf of mexico this is not the gulf of mexico where people are familiar with oil spills and things of that nature the government of mexico is extremely proud and extremely protective of the sea of cortez and we feel very confident about the quality of the water that we use to start with and the end to end production process if you will and the types of tools that we use to bag to ultimately bag c ninety and baja gold and not only are those practices in place with our team but we also check and verify them with this third party testing so hopefully that gives your listeners a sense of confidence and i encourage on both the concerning side if you will heavy metals contaminants what have you but then also the positive side with all the minerals visit our website and look at all of the third party testing we do and we post very transparently for you to compare so we are we believe in transparency at sea agri we provide routine annualized testing we we post the actual test from midwest labs or from eurofins or from advanced labs and so you're not going to see something on our letterhead for example you're going to see the actual test results for you to kind of do your own research and make your own.

Conclusions and i'll ask you again at the end of our talk but what is that website in case someone wants to go right there from hearing you.

Talk sure so c ninety is going to be sea ninety dot com and baja gold is going to be b a j a g o l d s t co dot com and that's baja gold saltco dot com and within both of those if you look for something called technical analysis or on baja gold it's called the mineral lab these are in the header of the website it's very easy to find again we're very proud of our testing and we want you to find it we want you to look at it and compare.

It and each website leads to the other so as long as you go to one you'll find the other right yes yes yeah what you know i'm just curious from your from your experience running the company from your involvement is the concern of microplastics in sea salt is that a is that a myth or is that a true concern or do you even know.

What i would say so professionally i would say that you certainly should do testing and see what is in your your preferred sea salt brand we we believe that actually the alluvial topsoil that our water travels over does also act as a bit of a filtration device the fact that we are in the upper northwest part of the sea of cortez very far away from the pacific ocean helps with the water purity and the quality of our product so overall should you be testing your product yes i would say microplastics in general are becoming more and more prevalent in our everyday environment and so i don't believe that just because you are maybe not from a living ocean does not mean that you could be subject to contaminants and so it's important to test all salt products all food products because as you consider production techniques as you consider airborne microplastics and various other things these the unfortunate reality is just that these contaminants are all around us and so it's important to look at everything and not just say well if it's ocean based it's a real problem if it's not ocean based it's not a problem if that makes.

Sense yeah no it does now what it sounds like this is probably not an issue with the sierra cf cortez but i have heard this regarding other you know bodies of ocean is pharmaceuticals is that something that's come up in you know your your time with the company or has it ever come up in general um because i i remember a few gosh this was a while ago but i just remember that because so many humans are taking pharmaceuticals that when they pee and if you know if those that water is going into the ocean which it does in some areas after it's been you know cleaned or whatever that the pharmaceuticals were not getting filtered out and so there were a lot of fish that were you know had high levels of proac you know or whatever it might be have been when they did the study originally do you can you speak to that or or have have you kind of had to cross paths with that topic.

At all we honestly we have not had to cross paths with that subject and that that is interesting and i'm definitely kind of following the logic there i would say we you know we definitely will speak with our contacts at our laboratory partners and see if that's something we should be screening for the the areas that we look for are those that have the highest level of potential runoff or concentration within the water and so agricultural pesticides and things of that nature which are in such abundance in some parts of the world that is why we specifically screen for those i don't know given the use case you kind of just described there i don't know if the concentrations would be enough to pose a challenge i think what's interesting i've learned about this business is just how vast the ocean is and how much the ocean can and really this goes for soil as well our land and our earth is designed to heal itself it is and if you give it enough time it will heal itself and something like you had just described there that might be so minor relative to the overall volume of ocean water that the ocean is able to take care of that over a relatively short period of time when i.

Imagine i imagine that a lot of the discussion of toxicity is concentrated around you know big cities and whatnot you know populated areas i mean you know because you you start out the talk mentioning how the underwater life seemed healthier than the the land life but the reality is is that it's not as healthy near populated areas you know where where you have big cities and runoff and whatever pollution you know anything like that so i think the the human effect takes its toll on nature no matter whether it's underwater or above water.

But to your point you're right and and even i mean you see some of the fish farming and you start unnaturally concentrating marine life even though it is still surrounded by the the health of benefits of the of the minerals if fish aren't meant to be that enclosed and that confined with one another they have health challenges and so that's you know the human impact like you.

Said and the ecosystem around them starts to have health suffers exactly yes so to your point i think choosing the environment that you're pulling the resource from is really really key and clearly you guys have chosen wisely thank you so much for joining us today you mentioned the website already but but why don't you go ahead and mention that again and where people can find you on.

Socials as well sure so for baja gold baja gold i i please check us out if you are interested in kind of a culinary sea salt i would recommend looking into the benefits of sea salt for your overall health and wellness for your hydration purposes salt is having a real renaissance at the moment and salt is so important not only just to salt your eggs in the morning it's it's for your overall health and vitality and having a mineral rich sea salt is so critical for your health and wellness baja gold dot baja gold saltco dot com b a j a g o l d saltco dot com please take a look at our baja gold difference page which compares all of the leading brands of sea salt compares their sodium content with their magnesium potassium calcium sulfur and other trace mineral content and you may be surprised to kind of see how some of the salts that popular culture may make you think are extremely healthy how the numbers may actually kind of stack up relative to other salts including baja gold so please take a look at that at that website we have a whole line of products beyond our mineral sea salt for table use we have a liquid ocean mineral product for health and wellness we also just launched a bath and soak product that's incredibly powerful you'll sleep better than you ever have before really and then if yeah absolutely yes sir.

I'Ll have to get some of that and then is the is the liquid the liquid ocean minerals are those a good replacement for the electrolytes that a lot of people are taking it's a.

Great alternative yes it's a natural yeah it's an alternative it's a natural approach we concentrate our mineral sea salts back into kind of distilled empty water if you will so it's not a lab created you know perfect values if you will trace mineral supplement it's going to be giving you the minerals and trace elements back from the ocean in a liquid form so it's it's an incredible product in that fashion and yeah so baja gold saltco dot com and then if you are a homesteader or even if you just have some houseplants or you're an aspiring gardener c dash ninety dot com is going to give you more information on our regenerative agriculture mission we have products that are again they're fit for a small home all the way through we work with commercial farms that bring in c ninety by the dozens of full truckloads which is a lot of salt so we we have products for anyone who is working with nature and we'll help bring the minerals and trace elements back into whatever it.

Is you're working with and is there any concern you know i think the industry when we started pushing sea salt more you know within the culinary world particularly the industry fought back saying well there's no iodine in sea salt right so they were trying to you know kind of scare people what do you guys usually say to that kind of.

Mentality or that sure so baja gold does contain iodine in the natural proportions that are available in the ocean so we typically test at around five parts per million which is a bit of a trace quantity there was a lot of regulatory work done around iodine many many decades ago due to some challenges with food quality and iodine deficiencies in your overall diet and so on virtually all salts that don't have iodine added as an ingredient which is a processing technique it's an additive it's not a natural thing you're going to see the phrase this salt does not supply iodine and that is a government regulatory requirement from the fda that dates back i believe to the sixties or seventies so don't let that scare you kind of look at what your source of nutrition is your food that you're eating it's it's incredibly likely that you're getting plenty of iodine from your food and you'll also get a little bit of it from baja gold as well or any of the other major sea salts that are out there they just don't cross this specific threshold that was set many decades ago so that's the backstory there.

I think i think it was actually before the sixties i think i think it actually was a came out when the blue blue bottled salt that we're not mentioning the name of when that when that was basically meant you know produced and sold to the to the us that's i think when it happened which i think was maybe even earlier than the sixties i want to say even the forties maybe but yeah okay yeah yeah but to your point like it's it's a manufactured concept it's not natural to salt as it is correct yeah so important for people to know that that you're getting iodine and other foods and probably enough that you don't need to have table salt right so.

Supplemented with iodine correct yeah i think.

It'S very important for us to remember that some of these things we've grown up with are are propaganda they're not necessarily actually accurate nor are they necessary for our survival but thank you so much for sharing your wisdom sharing your passion those watching the video are listening during the month of january all the way up to february seventh can save fifteen percent on either seagull or actually on both seagull c ninety and baja gold by using the code organuary it will be in the notes but that's organuary to save fifteen off all of their products highly recommend i can't speak to c ninety i don't have a garden but or a farm maybe one day but the baja gold is fantastic everyone i highly recommend it i've really enjoyed it and it's such a pleasure getting to talk to you and i wish you guys all the best thanks.

So much james appreciate it same to.

You thank you thanks for thanks for participating in our january of course happy to do so.