Episode 110: Stock Cropping and Regenerative Innovation with Zack Smith

Hi friends, this is John. Welcome back to the Regenerative Agriculture podcast where we have lots of fun conversations about regenerative agriculture and all the fun stuff that's related to improving our ecosystem health and soil health and livestock health and ultimately of course, translates into human health. I'm really excited to be having a conversation with Zach Smith, really awesome individual that I met a year or so ago at a conference. I've been following his work on social media for some time on this cool concept that they call stock cropping. So Zach, thanks for being here and I'm really looking forward to this conversation. Tell us a little bit about your journey, your pathway, the stuff that you've been working on and what it is that you're working on today.

Yeah, so it's been a long journey. So I guess I'll start from the beginning. I was raised just outside of a small town called Buffalo Center, Iowa. Grew up on a corn soybean farm, family farm operation. We also had farrow to finish pork until I was about in middle school. So I did have some livestock experience up to that point. Did a lot of chores as a young man and learned all about that stuff as well. You know, I came, I graduated high school 98 and I really loved farming. I wanted to farm, but there wasn't room for me. My dad only farmed about 900 acres. So I went off to study agronomy at Iowa State and, and came out after four years and into a depressed ag market and ended up doing something I didn't think I would do, which was actually move back to my hometown. And I worked for the first two years in a seed production role at a small seed company. And then from there I went on for the next 11 years, moved on to a large independent chemical retail business where I became a certified crop advisor and sold a ton of pesticides essentially within 150 mile radius of northern Iowa and really became good at that craft and understanding active ingredients and really being a technical, you know, as what one would probably call big ag agronomist. And after doing that, I wanted to get off on my own and hang out my own shingles. So I took on a pioneer.

Zach, I didn't know that about your background. I'm starting to reconsider whether it was wise to have you on here. I'm just joking.

I bet you are. I know you are. Yeah. So I've sold a lot of glyphosate over, over, over the course of history. So if that gets me a skull and crossbone band, I I understand, but I think there's, there's more to the story worth hearing. So. So yeah, so then I became a. I became a pioneer seed rep and hung out my shingle and also had a crop protection business and a, a fertility business and a soil sampling business as well as a cover crop business. And it's really where I got this concept of enterprise stacking. Really figured out I wasn't just a seed guy. I wanted to utilize all of the tools I had in my agronomic intellectual war chest. And so I did. I wanted to pull onto a farm and be able to have a lot of different revenue streams that would hit so I could visit fewer farms and be more efficient with that use. And so I did that and built that business over the course of the next four or five years. And I farm still on the side. So my dad retired in 2013. I took over the part of the family farm and I farmed basically on the side. And that's kind of how I got into this soil health realm was I was really interested in switching the farm to different management tactics. So in 2011 we switched to strip till, which not wasn't because of a soil health thing, because soil health really wasn't in vogue back then. It was more of efficiency and saving passes and being a more efficient corn and soybean producer. And then we accidentally got introduced to cover crops in 2013 with a big flooding prevent plant year that introduced us to planting a six way mix of COVID crops in the end of July. And that was a transformative experience that then led me to integrate cover crops on all my acres since 2014. And then there's just been this kind of slow progression. I've always been interested in alternative agricultural production systems. It started probably back in 2010 with a friendship with a brilliant farmer and engineer that I started stock cropping with by the name of Sheldon Steven. We were playing around with strip intercropping back in 2010, 2012 is how it started. And we played around with some of these different row schematics to twin row 60 inch corn. We experimented first in 2012 or 2013 I think, and trying to find what I call biohacks, different ways to farm more intelligently with fewer inputs. And so I kind of had this side of me and then I had the big egg side of me was like find progress by just pumping more stuff onto the land. And the older I got, I figured out that that necessarily wasn't a path of progress, it was a path of reduction. You know, our soils were Worse off. Our communities were worse off, and there was fewer particip participants, you know, every year in the. In the food system. And I saw that, especially from an ag input supplier standpoint, you know, the vision of the future is this funnel where we get it down to just a very few number of farmers that are farming half the countryside. And that didn't look good to me. And so I kind of had this. It was kind of a perfect place in time. You know, it was right before the pandemic hit in 2020. We were looking at super low commodity prices. I was thinking of giving up the farm altogether because it wasn't worth my time to keep losing money because I couldn't compete with what the model is today for the big ag world with just a small operation. And so myself and two other farmers, I mentioned Sheldon already, Sheldon, Steven, and then Lance Peterson, we were trying to come up with an alternative production system within our context of what we knew, which was corn and soybeans. And so we were playing around with a strip intercrop idea. And for those who aren't familiar with strip intercropping, it's the concept of instead of just growing all corn or all soybeans, or it doesn't have to be just those two crops, but you essentially interlace a field. So every other 20ft or 30ft or 15ft, whatever your equipment size is, you put one crop like corn next to a shorter crop like soybeans. And in that case, the corn gets a bump in yield from having increased sunlight on the edges, and the shorter crop has a little bit of an inflection or a negative in the case of the soybeans. But the idea is, is that the increase in corn yield outweighs the penalty on soybeans, and you have a greater revenue across the acre if you're willing to screw around with it. And as small farmers, we were. But what we were really searching for in the winter of 2020 was and how this concept came to be that we call stock cropping was we wanted to find something to replace the soybeans so it wasn't a negative in the system. We wanted it to be just as competitive, if not more than corn and producing revenue. And so we were looking at the concepts that folks like, you know, Jason Mock, John Kutz, Lauren Steinlogge, just a couple of the names that have been working with this concept around relay cropping. And we were looking at using things like barley and soybeans, maybe relayed in between the strips of corn. But at our latitude, it's difficult to pull that off consistently versus folks that are further south. And so our friend Lance had an idea. Well, what if we put a pen of sheep in between the corn? That was the initial idea. And this all, like stock cropping, was generated over a Twitter DM session in about 20 minutes on a Saturday morning, February 9, 2020. And it was. That's everything that people see on the Internet now, like that I've done. It was literally concocted by three guys in a rapid tech session. And we still have the screenshots of it. It's actually pretty fun to look back on. But it was a concept of not just a pen of sheep, because the single enterprise in itself probably wouldn't pay for it. But it was like, what if this was a system that instead of just having a few species, we know that we need to introduce a lot more species of both plants and animals back onto the landscape. And so what if we invented a way to grow crops and livestock in this kind of three or four ring circus arrangement, and we invent this contraption that will move segregated, but yet together, multiple species of livestock through a cornfield in a strip intercrop arrangement? And the idea was it would be solar powered, it would collect its own rainwater, it would have GPS pucks on board with steering, just like our tractors did in our normal systems. And the idea of stock cropping was born that morning. And so over the course of the last four years has just been an evolution of trying to flesh out that idea and bring it. To bring it to reality.

Yeah, you know, I. I've had guests here on the podcast to talk about various aspects in different growing regions of intercropping. And of course, Jason Mauk has been here talking about growing plant species with the golden mean ratio. And some. Some really unusual conversations, but I think you're perhaps among the first. Usually when people, when people begin developing really innovative or radical ideas, then one of the things to go out the can is corn. And so you're actually looking at combining livestock with corn production, which I think is. Is an awesome idea. And I'm really intrigued by the pathway that this all went down. So there's many questions that come to mind. But actually, before I start digging into those questions, tell us a little bit about where you are today, how did this idea come to fully manifest, and where are you today with the tools and the robots that you've developed, if you will.

Sure. So essentially, in 2020, my partner in developing it, Sheldon Steven, was an engineer. So we designed together and Then built on Memorial Day weekend, the first mobile grazing barn. And so what we call our barns, aptly named for being kind of a four ring animal circus on wheel, we call our creations Cluster Clucks. And so we have different versions of Cluster Clucks that we've developed over the last four years. So the first one was we called the cluster cluck 5,000 and it was a barn that was 20ft wide. So when I say barn, for people that haven't seen this, there's a central barn that offers the ability for food and shelter and a raised floor to get the animals off the, the soil if needed and like inclement weather. And then on either side of the barn we have attached grazing pens. So out the front the ruminants go out the back of the barn. On the other side the, the pigs are able to, to go out. And then attached to the back of that we have, we started off with like Joel Saladin style tractors that had poultry and then they were all connected with a hitch and tether system with water systems and so that the barn had a central point to house feed and water and then that would be disseminated out across. So it was kind of, it was a design nightmare. It's really, really hard to incorporate. It's easy to make a single species contraption and there are others out there that are doing that. It's much, much harder to make, to incorporate three or four different species of livestock and all the unique things of trying to keep them housed and not have them destroy things building stuff heavy enough. So that was the cluster cluck 5,000. And then we demonstrated that in 2020, put it on the Internet. Folks like Jason Mock picked it up and with his following really boosted it to a kind of a whole nother level. That introduced in 2021. An introduction to Joe Bassett at Dawn Equipment. And Joe was interested in participating. He really thought this idea of kind of because he was in this Regen equipment space and he wanted to have something that was kind of the pinnacle of the top of the Regen AG and the livestock piece was that. And so he was interested in helping us. So he brought in the automation expertise and manufacturing expertise and we made what we called the Stock Cropper or the Cluster cluck nano. In 2021 that barn had full autonomous integration, solar panels, onboard computing capacity, electric drive motors. Trying to think what else. Oh, GPS steering with, with that system integrated. And then we had a Cluster Cluck app on the iPhone that would allow us to give programmable movement for whatever time of Day. So that was the advent in 2021 that we went to there 2022, we went back in and re optimized the cluster cluck nano, made it about half the weight because everything is about, you know, from a cost standpoint, you have to get the weight, you know, low enough and take out all the fat. And so we cut essentially £2,000 out of this barn to get it down to weigh about 1800 pounds and simplify a lot of the operations, make it simpler to potentially manufacture. That barn was a smaller version. So a 10 foot wide barn that was really only designed for ruminants and poultry together. So that was 20. And then in 2023, this last year, and we can get into this more. I really see two lanes of cluster clocks from a market standpoint. One which is perhaps a scaled regenerative production system that we would produce for farmers more with the diversity of all three or four species. And the other lane I see us going down is what I term protein sovereignty driven consumers, where we build devices specifically for say if you have an acreage and you don't want to build $100,000 structure, you can buy a cluster clock from us that you can put, you know, some pork or some chicken in and have something that is much cheaper than a big structure, but however has utility in managing, you know, land that you own with livestock, fertilizing them, moving them autonomously so you can still go to the lake on the weekend and enjoy, you know, life because having livestock has a lot of responsibility. And so, you know, that's kind of the, the arc of what we've developed over the last couple years. At the same time, we've been demonstrating this stock cropper system on my farm in Iowa and having field days and inviting people to come and see throughout the summertime what the scaled out regenerative system of growing crops and livestock with integrated with pasture and strips in between. And we've had some phenomenal achievements in production of both the animals and the corn side that have gotten a lot of people's attention as well. So that's kind of our arc of progress over the last couple years.

So you have the cluster clock nano of which the, the current version is 10ft wide. And then you do you also still have the larger version that is 20ft wide?

Yes. Yeah, and I forgot we actually we did make in 2021, we made one called the Cluster Clock Max 9, which was a rip off of John Deere's X9 Big Combine. And that one integrated cattle and hogs that was a 30 foot wide barn set up for 30 foot lanes, which would probably fit in easier with large scale ag production equipment. Widths, working widths. More commonality with a 30 foot working width. So in total we've made five different cluster clocks at this point.

What were the design parameters that you were keeping in mind? I'm really intrigued by the idea of including multiple different species because there are compounding benefits that occur in soil health profiles and microbial profiles once you combine different, different livestock species. So there I really see a lot of value there. But how did you think about the engineering from an animal impact perspective? Like you have these various width, how long is the equipment and what's the animal impact look like? How many thousands of pounds of animal weight do you have on an acre for these different types of livestock?

Yeah, so all good questions. So what, you know, when we sat down to design it, it was moving something and keeping a seal with the ground in any type of undulation. That was one of the primary. The first barn, we kept it in equal increments across the barn. So the leading pen was 11ft deep, the barn itself was 11ft deep, and then the trailing pen was 11ft. So everything was in the same increments. So when the barn moved, it would always move 11ft at a time. And we thought at that length that would be about as far as that we'd want to span so that we wouldn't have to worry about animals getting out or predators, you know, coming in. Because the wider that you go, any type of undulation makes creates an opening for issues. So number one thing is we wanted to make sure the animals stayed in because when the animals get out and you don't have perimeter fences, that's a bad day on the farm. So that was, that was one of the key things. The other thing we wanted to do is we wanted to make it incredibly stout so that it would last for a very long time. So if you see our construction, a lot of people describe it as major overkill and expensive. But the mindset was, is we wanted to build something that wouldn't last, you know, four or five years, like a salad and chicken tractor would, or something that could get blown away by a derecho, which we get in real life in Iowa. We wanted to make them stout and they would hold up to livestock. So we've tried to design everything so that these devices could last 20 years in the way that we put them together and then also make them very, very simple for people to be able to use the pain Points of having livestock, trying to put intelligent, intelligent design and to make it easy to chore and access the barn, where if you run into inclement weather, how do you deal with that? There's just a ton of different things within each species that we had to take kind of into consideration. And we really put a lot of thought in the first version especially, and then we've gotten better with some of the iterations as we've gone forth. But something as simple as, like, you know, if you're grazing into the pasture, how do you design a front leading pen that's going into vegetation that might be 4 to 6ft tall in a pasture and you have a flat bottom pen, you're just going to mow it all over. And well, then the sheep and goats aren't going to want to, you know, pluck that off of the ground. And so we came up with a tooth design front pen that would still keep the ruminants in, but allow the pasture to pass through in an upright way so that the browsing type animals, they want to browse their heads up. You know, we didn't think about that the first time. And so. So that those are some of the design iterations that we've had to kind of learn. And there's different things that we've had to include for each animal that we've just figured out with the passage of time. And that's, you know, one of the way I get the question all the time, when can I buy a barn? I want one of these things, you know, and we are still learning to make sure that we get these things hunkered out right, so that when people get the product, that it'll be a delightful experience and really make integrating livestock, whether it's in a backyard or in a cornfield, something that goes smoothly.

One of the pieces that I'm really intrigued by, I see, I see a lot of potential, is there is a significant need in high value crop environments as well. So if you have a vineyard or an orchard or caneberries and you want to incorporate livestock, if you want to incorporate livestock, first of all, there are food safety considerations. You have to keep the livestock separated from the food. There's manure considerations. There's all these different pieces that you have to be conscious of and aware of. But even with that, there are windows of time in a year that you can go through and graze livestock in these perennial systems, as long as you can keep the livestock from destroying the perennials. For some crops, this is more or less of a consideration. Than others. But one of the things that I've been interested in is as, as you've developed these devices, you designed them robustly to keep the livestock in and to keep the predators out. But an unintended consequence is that you also would have the effect of completely protecting plants alongside the pens from aggressive grazing action.

Yeah, that's 100% right. And so like that's one thing even within corn production that we've had to alter because the block paneling that we use for the side fences, even in corn, we've had to make it smaller so that, you know, the animals are passing within 12, 18 inches of the corn next to it in the system. And so we were getting too much grazing of those outside leaves, you know, through the fence. And so just like if we were going to design for an orchard or a vineyard, we would need to have pens that would almost be the leading grazing pens. I think almost are going to have to be a trapezoidal type shape to limit them from trying to climb up and get through that to still have a wide footprint to graze at the ground, but to keep the animals from jumping up and trying to get at the vegetation like in the type of setups that you're talking about.

One of the fundamental questions I've had, I've been really intrigued and fascinated by the work that you have been doing because I see so much opportunity, so much potential for it to in so many areas it could be implemented in. But one of the, one of the major benefits that the Salatin tractors have going for them is the capital costs where they are relatively inexpensive. And that's the one. As soon as you start talking about electric drives and GPS and solar panels and batteries and all the pieces that you've incorporated, the question becomes, well, what's the capital cost for that from a, from a production perspective? And does that, how does that really pencil out?

Yep, and that is the right question. And that's why, you know, if you're going to just try to do this with a singular species or a small singular barn, it does not cash flow from a business standpoint. And we knew that right off the bat. And that's why not only did we want from an ecological or a biological diversity, have increased enterprises with multiple species of animals, but definitely from an economical. It's same thing back to my seed days, you know, the enterprise stacking with the single cost of the chassis is what makes this thing go. And so I've built an economic model out using average USDA pasture raised pricing. You Know, for hanging weights, for what we've produced in this system that when you're doing it, you know, like in, in the case I'm familiar with is within, you know, in, within a cornfield that allows you to, to make money as a farmer doing this system using average USDA pasture raised pricing, assuming that's how it's going to, going to be marketed. So. But it is 100% contingent to pay for all of the expensive stuff and the price projections that we've made on when we actually get to a scaled potential production level where we think this thing will come out. The other thing I would say to your point is that I am trying to cut as much of the stuff that you listed off and the complexity that things like gps and so for example, one of the ideas that I have is just a, if you have relatively flat ground, just a central winch system that wouldn't need guidance for that, just have the, the barn be centered and pull it along in a straight line and you can actually have one motor that could pull multiple barns at the same time. You know, like similar to a gutter system in a hog barn from, you know, my old farrowing days. I remember that type of a setup. So the answer is yes, there's a way. It's contingent on the diversity and the multiple enterprises and then continuing to cut cost. But yeah, we built a model where it exists.

How many of these various units do you have out of the field and being used at this point?

So like I said, we built five of them and we've had all five all out on ground for at least one season for sure on all of them and then several of them, you know, every season since they've been built, they've been working on a cornfield. So right now we have, and not just on my own farm. So this Last year, in 2023, we got contacted last year by Precision Planting in Pontiac, Illinois and they wanted to have one because they were working on strip intercropping and seeing that was a way to in their minds boost production. And so we set them up with a cluster cluck nano that they've been demonstrating there on their farm. And then I also have another one in southeastern Illinois at a farm that is the set for a TV show that is utilizing kind of for the backyard homesteader. So we have, you know, we have barns that are outside the privy just of our demo farm in just outside of Buffalo Center, Iowa.

When you think about the pen size, the actual pen size that you have is relatively small. When you think about the way livestock are usually managed, and people talk about intensive animal impact and intensively managed rotational grazing where they might be moving them. It's very common to move once every 24 hours, but it's becoming increasingly common to move more often than that, to even move several times per day. And so the question that is coming to mind for me is if you have these smaller pen sizes, how are you thinking about the animal inclusion rate? How many pounds of live weight are you having for the different types of livestock and how does that correspond to your movement frequency?

So that was all taken into account when we first designed the first pen. So it was based off of minimum of square footage. Like so, for example, the cluster cluck 5000, we wanted to keep the same space requirements that are required, at least in a confinement barn. And we would be more than that because we would have, we wanted them to have enough room if we needed to lock them up that they would have that minimum of like. So with hogs, I believe that's 8 square foot per hog. But yet, you know, 98% of the time they have the ability to go out into this 11 foot by 18 foot pen outside.

So you're talking about the 8 square foot or the size constraints are they're the inside the barn, the middle section of the barn, correct?

Yeah. So in the case, you know, like with hogs, okay, so the reality is everybody loves having hogs outside. But you know what, when you have, when you get three inches of rain, you know, hogs make a mess in about five minutes. And so it's nice to have the ability. So what we will do, like if it's forecast to get a lot of rain overnight, we will lock the hogs up so that they don't do too much impact and then wait for things to dry off, then let them back out. And so the frequency of moves that we do is really, it's a function of the size of the animal, you know, so especially with the ruminants, because we don't want to just keep moving and not take full advantage of the pasture mix that is there. So we've kind of learned that, you know, when we start off, we start with, you know, feeder lambs or goat kids out front and then feeder pigs in the back. And so the smaller the animal, the fewer times that you have to move a day to not make the impact, the bigger they get, then we speed up. So we've designed actually a track system in our field where we have 750 foot runs and we have it down from a timing standpoint that we plant different mixes of pasture mix to align with the time that we project, the barn will be there. So we start off with a cool season lane, and then we transition to a warm season lane, and then we seed back on the cool season lane, another warm season mix, so that we can essentially go around this racetrack pattern with the animals twice within the same growing season over about 150 days, roughly. We start off, we usually move, depending on the size of the pasture, two to three times a day. And then as the animals get bigger, we move up to three to four. Like, you know, I listened to the, the Paul Greaves podcast that he talked about this because he's developing, you know, bigger versions of what I'm doing. But he talked, he hit the nail on the head. The labor costs and the amount of time, if you have a whole fleet of these, all you're going to do is move barns. And what we want the farmer in this system to do is not to be replaced by the autonomy, but be the artisan that goes around and be, is the caretaker for going around and looking rather than yanking things. Because we can come up with technology to do that and still require an artisanal farmer that understands because this is not just something you can control remotely. Things happen. You need to be out there, you need to be making observations the way that, in my opinion, farmers, all farmers used to be that way, rather than just having a field man manage things for you.

You can't manage this from a smartphone app. How disappointing or not?

Well, you know, you can, you can move it. But yeah, you have to be out there because there's all sorts of stuff that, you know, can go wrong. And we're, we're trying to design as much of that as possible to minimize farmers having to waste time on the simple things. But we want them to focus on animal health, managing, you know, making the observations of when they may, may need to make changes with the movement, you know, that type of stuff. That's what we want farmers focusing on in the system.

You mentioned that you, you are planting different crops to try to be at the right stage for when the, when the barns arrive for grazing. What, what does that translate to into, in terms of frequency of planting? How many times are you planting out in the field in the, in a season?

Yeah, so usually the cool season lane, we plant twice. The warm season lane will regenerate on its own. You know, so we use species that will come back after the first grazing pass. So two plantings, either one in the Fall or early in the spring, depending on, you know, how the weather is for us here in northern Iowa. Typically it's been an early. As soon as I can get across the field in the spring, I'll put the cool season lane in and that would get us cooking with gas. With having forage big enough usually, usually sometime in the first 10 days of June, I'd like to get that moved up so that we could do that probably closer to the middle of the May. That would be predicated on having good fall, an early, early fall seeding of something that would overwinter and then be ready to go the next spring.

So, so you, you described your journey. You started down this whole pathway as a result of desire for enterprise stacking and for proving the, the economic opportunity in your farming operation. Do you have any perspectives or insights? I know it's still early days for you, but you're investing energy in additional plantings and you then you have the capex costs of these various barns that you're moving around. Do you have any perspective or insights into the overall economic, the enterprise economic rewards as it compares to corn production, for example, how is this evolving for you on your operation overall?

Yeah. So, you know, the fun, I mean, everyone asks like, why, why do you use corn in this? Well, it's because what farmers in the Midwest understand and it's what I understand. It's my context. Right. And so one of the fun things in this system is, you know, is the fact that when you grow things in the stock cropping schematic, you can boost corn yields substantially and minimize the input into that. Because we've essentially minimized everything outside of just a little bit of extra nitrogen. Because what the animals put out don't quite get us to 100% need of what the corn crop itself would need. But we've reduced everything out and cut it out. So all we're essentially putting in from an input standpoint is just a little bit of additional nitrogen that we side dress on.

Yeah, I want to make sure I'm understanding correctly. So you're, you're kind of you, you haven't stated this previous in our conversation, but my perception from what you're describing is that you are then alternating strips and following years. So you have corn going into the COVID crop the following year.

Yes, I didn't explain that, so thank you for stopping me. Stock cropping is predicated on the plants feeding the animals and the animals feeding the plants. So after we have the annual pasture cycle complete, the animals have been on the next Year we simply flip flop and rotate. So where the animal nutrients were laid down, then we plant the crop in. And the idea is, is that we want to have a system that is self sustaining, so truly regenerative, where the corn that we are growing or whatever crop, it could be field peas or rye or anything to make a feed ration. We take that simply into the yard, we put it in the bin, we have a feed grinder like my forefathers had or my grandfather had, and the farmer becomes the mill again and retains that value, brings it back out to the monogastric animals the next year like the, you know, the pigs and the chickens that require that. And you really, truly have a super low carbon footprint value chain where you're walking the value off the farm in the form of the protein. That's really. I didn't explain that in totality, but yeah, it's a, it's. We're trying to create a perfect rotation where we're growing the feed stuff in concert with the livestock at the same time.

Well, you have a slightly improved rotation over corn and soybeans, but you're still going into corn every couple years, so there's still room for improvement.

I'm just poking you here 100%. 100, yeah. And, and, and believe you me, like I am, I am more than open to incorporating other, other crops and other types of rotations. Like to me, like, I don't know that we've really figured anything out. I think we have something more interesting than corn and soybeans, but I think we're just on the tip of the iceberg of what could be possible when we think outside the box and incorporate people much smarter than me into this space. So.

Well, it takes all types of innovators to collaborate. But I want to come back and we started, I had asked this question about economics and then we got sidetracked a little bit. But when you look at the, the economic picture of the whole ecosystem and what you're describing now is that you're actually getting economic benefits for the corn crop as well because you're obviously getting yield improvements from the edge effect. You also have less nutrient inputs. So I'm sure that is having an impact. So what does the whole ecosystem look like?

So the corn is really not the story, it's the livestock. Okay. So the corn gets people's attention because we can grow big yield corn. So this last year we grew 325 bushel corn. That's what, you know, what people identify with. But when you look at the Numbers, it's the livestock that's really the story because within, within hitting the same acre twice, where we're essentially growing 10 hogs per acre, I think it's six to eight small ruminants like goats or sheep. And then roughly, I think, I think my math is 250 to 300 chickens that are all in this wagon train that we go through. And the chickens, I should say those would be two turns of chickens, two different crops that would be in the back trailer. But it's essentially that density, that amount of numbers that only really take three quarters of an acre to operate on. And so that when you add those numbers up, we're creating somewhere on the livestock acre itself, we're creating somewhere between 12 to $15,000 of, depending on which pricing you use for average pasture raised pricing, that is the gross revenue, that's that we're starting with to then pay for the things like the, the infrastructure that it takes to house and move the animals across the space.

So, wow, that's 10x corn revenue.

Yeah, that's, that's why I say the corn is just the shiny thing to get people's attention. And then the real story is livestock. And a lot of people really struggle with that when they come and they're like, well, what, what are you getting for your corn? Well, 325 bushel. Well, that's only 160 bushel corn. Well, no, it's not. It's 325 where we planted the corn and we did it on hardly any inputs. And the reason we got it was because we changed the arrangement of what the field looks like. And then next to it, you think that's a zero. That's what consumers want to buy and pay a premium for is stuff raised outside in this stacked formation. And when you tell them what that number is, they kind of look at you like you got six heads because they're just a corn. Soybean farmer only thinks about things in the terms of corn and soybeans. And so I get that question a lot where people really get hung up on the fact that I'm using half of the land for livestock. And they kind of short circuit. But that's essentially the economics. And I've got a model built I'm happy to share with people, have them critique it, but it presumes, it presumes two things. And the challenges to scaling this out are the pasture raised price on the hook for the farmer to be able to receive. And then it assumes that you have access to processing in a market. And that is the biggest hang up that everyone runs into this space. And also why I'm attempting to pivot into things that are more accessible and then hopefully back build, keep developing the scalable solution. But in order to get to revenue with these devices, look at some of these alternative things that I talk or alternative paths to market that we talked about earlier.

Yeah, I think, well, that could be room for another very different conversation. So I'm going to come back to this economics question one more time because we've talked about the dramatic contrast in revenue from a top line perspective. And there's obviously the obvious questions of assuming access to processing, assuming access to markets, et cetera. There's a number of assumptions here, but when you include, if you look at whole enterprise, you look at the Capex costs, what does the bottom line comparison look like? Because lots of farmers have already have, they have a lot of capex invested in corn production and we're talking about an entirely new Capex investment here.

Yeah, I'm not dodging it. I just keep going off on tangents. So bottom line profitability in the model side built somewhere between 1500-2000 dollars an acre, broad acre. So across the, you know, when you look at the system as the whole, that's the type of profitability per acre we're looking at in the system.

I want to Clarify, you said 1500-2000 broad acre. Is that including the corn? Half acre? Yes, that's including silver. Okay, got.

It's an important distinction, a lot of assumptions in that. And so I want to be really transparent and clear. There's a lot of things to happen for that to be right. But that, I mean from a theoretical standpoint with what we produced, the acre, the amount of space it takes for what we're doing and the stocking rates we're using, those are the numbers.

Let's talk a little bit about the types of pasture mixes that you're using using both a cool season and a warm season mix. What is the, what are the various species and species diversities and what, what have you learned about the various pasture mixes that you've been using so far?

Yeah, so the cool species we start off with, it's primarily driven. You know, I'm not an expert in the, in the, the COVID crop mix range as far as I understand some stuff with my exposure, but it's been a learning curve with livestock and how everything reacts. So we started off a mix that was kind of heavy with oats and let's see, kale and forage rape and we had annual rye grass in the mix. But the rye and the rape usually is what ends up dominating those things. So I've played with rates on the early side, backed off on the oats to try to get some of the expression of the other species to really take off because the oats have really dominated them too much on the warm season species. I've tried a couple different things this last year I planted probably the most diverse mix but we've relied on things like we, and we've had four dry years. So I've been picking, you know, things like millet and Sudan grass, things that would do well in drought periods. But this last year we, we built it out. We had cow peas, we had sun hemp, we had sunflowers. Trying to think what else we had. There was, it was an eight way mix that we used on the, on the summer species and by far we had. The ratio of that was much better. The issue is height that I run into of as far as getting the barn pens to pass through. So especially with things like sorghum, Sudan grass that can, you know, if they get left unchecked they can really get some height on. That's one thing that I would amend. But you know I, I really like having the diversity. One of the things I claim is, you know, we've 10x the amount of plant and livestock diversity versus what we would have normally with a core cornfield. I don't have a, you know, it's completely honed in.

Like I think your number is too small if it's only 10x. I mean there are a lot of cornfields that have zero. So if you improve by anything it's infinity.

Right, right. 100. Right, yeah, I get what you're saying there. So, but, so yeah, I don't, I don't feel like I've got this thing prescribed right in. There's, like I said, there's people out there that understand this stuff way better than me that I'm trying to learn from. But I know that increasing the diversity has led to really good things. And just as a function of the corn production, like that's the thing I have the best gauge on. You know, we've increased the corn yield. Not that that's the only parameter we should care about, but I think it's a function of what is happening underground that is allowing that to happen without adding a bunch of other additional inputs. By increasing the benefits of, you know, both plant species of diversity and what their root exudates are doing along with you know, biomes of the guts of all these different animals that were putting out at the same time.

That was actually going to be the very next question that I have written down, I wanted to ask you, which is what? How have you observed the soil to shift and evolve as you've been using these devices out in the field? What soil improvements have you noticed?

Well, all the things that you would expect. Some of it comes down to, I want to say this, there can be detriments to doing this if you screw it up and you let something sit for too long or if you don't manage your hogs. Right, right. Livestock can actually impede, you know, and that's the reason that you need to keep them constantly, constantly moving. So there can, you can go backwards in some cases. But overall, like, I don't know, it's just incredible. You go out and you see, especially this last year, not only from a soil benefit stamp, so increased infiltration, you know, lessening the need for putting the additional nutrients on that I would normally in conventional, like the plants that come up, they just look incredible. Like they have their whole what they, what they're supposed to need underneath them at their feet. And you know, when the barn passes by, there's usually, until we get a rain, there's usually this period where it looks really tough and it looks like it's almost been over grazed. But once we get that, that flush of nutrients out of the manure back in the soil, the regeneration that we get and like the linear recovery that you can see going through the strip and you can actually see the nitrogen, like in the difference in the color of the pasture as it recovers, like taking it up, keeping it out of the tile line. Like the visuals and the things that you see in this system are really, they're really, really eye opening, especially to come somebody that comes from the conventional lane of agriculture. And it really makes me think about a lot of the problems that we face here in Iowa. What could be possible where we could still produce a lot of livestock on the land, the benefits that that could have to us. For a state with a lot of the challenges that we face with soil and water quality issues just by arrangement and doing things differently, if we added.

Livestock back to the landscape in a well managed way, it would solve so many of our problems. There would be new, there would be challenges. I'm not suggesting this challenge free, but oh my goodness, will that ever solve for so many of the ecosystem challenges that we have.

One of the things I would assert is a lot of People say that systems like this can't feed the world, you can't produce enough. And I would challenge that. I've had a couple politicians, senators, secretaries of ag have had on the farm and I've said, you know, for those of you that say that it's impossible to think differently about this stuff, the stocking rates that we are using just with our pork production, the stock cropper system, if I could get just 15 or 20 counties, flat counties in northwest Iowa to switch over to do this, we could produce all of the pigs that Iowa produces in just one summer turn.

Wow.

Yeah. And I need like 15 to 20 counties to switch to producing in the stock cropper method. And we could raise all the hogs outside in the summertime. Now, obviously logistically, you know, you can't get them all to market and have the throughput there. So. But the idea that we can't produce them in a fashion that is, in my opinion, more sustainable than what we do currently and require more people to be participating in agriculture and having the power concentrated with just a select few and democratizing that back out those things, in my opinion, I think we've proven that stuff is possible, at least from a production standpoint.

One of the fundamental challenges of our agricultural management, ecosystem and worldview from a macro perspective is that we tend to focus way too much on yield as measured in terms of pounds per acre or bins or bushels per acre. And I think if we started measuring in terms of, there's two parameters. A, we should measure calories. B, we should measure complete protein, protein that has complex and beneficial amino acid profiles. And we should measure those two parameters relative to acres and relative to water and water use. And if we started doing that, there's no question that well managed livestock on the landscape would beat what is happening with our current crop production ecosystems. And not by a small margin, it would blow them out of the water entirely. And that's that. This is of course where I believe the future is and where we're going to go in the long term future. It's just a question of how rapidly can we get there and how much environmental degradation has to occur before we collectively say enough is enough and we have to shift.

Yeah, I think you're 100% right. And you know, the thing I'm guilty of when I have conversations is I focus on the context of what I know or what the current status is or how people think of progress. And I think what you just stated is exactly the direction we go. And once you get enough people or you know, from the powers that be that understand that I think this thing will go like wildfire if you think about what the outcome is under the right, the right attributes, I should say. But you know, water quality, soil quality and human health outcomes. That's another thing. The older I get, I start thinking a lot more about, you know, not only myself within my family and observations of society as a whole. The older I get where there's definitely something that we're not doing correctly and agriculture is the start of all that.

So what do you see as the future for the cluster clocks? How do you see this evolving?

Yeah, so it's a great question. I wrestle with it every day because there's a lot of options and directions to go and you know, I'm just, I'm a single guy still with trying to get this off the ground. So we've gotten some venture capital money that we poured back into additional R and D and manufacturing. But the path that I see most likely right now is we're going to try to get to market sometime in the next year with a small backyard poultry version where it's cheap and easy to manufacture and like get the basic principle out there and then hopefully get to the point of revenue bringing back into the company and then start to back build into developing the cluster clucks for things like that you and I have talked about before, things that are easier markets to get to, like silvopastures or orchards or vineyards, those type of things. And then eventually if those things go well back build into developing the full scale field models. I feel like from an opportunity standpoint, from a business standpoint, at least, what's the most immediate and lowest hanging fruit, so to speak. That's kind of the vision that I see. So start off with the idea of protein sovereignty, feeding your family and then slowly backstep into, you know, using, using these, these devices to dare I say, maybe attempt to feed the world or a portion of the, the world.

I don't have enough familiarity with the, the numbers and the scope of the context, but I'm, and I'm sure you're probably are considering this already, but what if you went in a different direction and if, if the key constraint is access to processing, what if we focused on providing access to processing and mobile processing traders and so forth and provided the opportunity for more farmers to, to have a pathway to market there?

I'd be all for it. I just, I've seen enough over the last couple years of getting into this, of people that have done that and run into struggles. And maybe it's just been a lack of execution. But like, ideally. So what I see stock cropping as a system looking like would be finding somebody that would have a regional processing center outside of a major metropolitan area that we would cluster stock cropper producers similar to and they would market through a stock cropper, say meats brand similarly to like a Niman ranch is what I have in mind. And we cluster them outside of the metroplex so it's close to the processor and close to where the end user and then maybe that's replicated in my head, you know, a ways out. That's what I see potentially happening. It's just I haven't seen examples of that where that's super accessible to, to get excited about putting the limited funds I have right now into developing the big scale stuff. So maybe I'm wrong, John. So.

Oh, we're all wrong about something. It's just figuring out which of the things we're wrong about that's the problem 100% and getting there rapidly enough.

Yeah, yeah.

So what, what final thoughts do you have to share with us? What is, what's something that we've missed talking about?

About?

You know, one thing that, that we haven't talked about that I touch on a lot is and I, well, I hit a little bit on it. This, this idea around protein sovereignty and getting more people, more people involved with growing their own food. And that is one thing where over the last dozen years or so, and this has been just something I've kind of picked up along the way, but I'm incorporating it now back into kind of this future vision. For what we're going to do is creating devices that allow people that wouldn't normally to grow their own protein and not only do that, but help maybe help educate them or train them to become the processor themselves. And when you become the processor, it requires community because it requires people to come together and work together for. So maybe it might be a case where say, you know, somebody in a, outside of a metroplex has, you know, a couple acres that they don't want to mow. They want a cluster cluck. They want to actually produce protein. They live in a cul de sac and they really don't talk to their neighbors because they don't really have a good reason to come together. But what we've done is we've been butchering our own animals, our own hogs for the last dozen years. And we've been inviting people that have had no experience with processing and they live in the city and they really don't have any real experience other than getting in there, you know, Prius and making the commute and coming home and maybe mowing the lawn. And that's as far as they get as far as doing, you know, real things. And so like, what if we created this pathway to get more people involved and educate so that they start. Because I think that's the one thing, you know, consumers need to have more interest in this path, whether it's getting it from a scaled production stock cropping system or not. They need to have a better understanding of where their food comes from and how it is produced. And we need to be more transparent with that. And so I kind of see this protein sovereignty lane as something where we can really give people that are interested in a really unique opportunity. We can build devices that allow to bring them into closer to where they're at, but then also enable them to give them the skills or the support to, to figure out how to actually get it into their freezer. And it's hard for me. You know, I talk about a lot of things. I've got a lot of different ideas in this space, but I think to me that from what I've seen in my own personal inclusion of introducing people, that is a really, really powerful piece that solidifies community and friendships. And this, you know, kind of what we used to do all the time in agriculture was we depended on our community to come together and help us harvest. And we don't do that anymore. We view the neighbors as competition rather than allies. And so that's one of the things I see with Stockcropper that gets me excited. Rather than just selling widgets like actually helping people understand where their food comes and actually get them to participate in that for those that are interested, that's.

Very, that's very valuable. There is a type of connection that happens when people gather together around food and food supply. That just doesn't happen as easily for some reason in other ways. And I don't know how to exactly qualify that or describe that, but I've certainly experienced it and I know that you have and that many other people have as well. Let's talk a little bit more about the cluster clock nanos, or as you're describing them, the, the, the residential or the small acreage unit for people to just, to grow their own, to grow their own meat supply. The two questions that I have from personal experience, because I have poultry, or actually at the particular moment the correct verb is I had poultry, that the Raccoons wanted to enjoy more than me, I suppose, or more intensely. And so how, how predator proof are these? Are they able to offer complete predator protection? And what does the feed supply look like if I, if I need to travel and be going for a weekend or four or five days at a time? How viable are they from a poultry and livestock management perspective?

You identified the things that were the most important that we put into design of what we call the cluster cluck pico. So this is the smallest barn version that we've built yet, which is, it's seven and a half feet by seven and a half feet. And we built it with the idea of a family of four or five wanting to either grow, you know, say 25 broiler chickens inside of it or have perhaps like 12 laying hens. And so I actually have this barn outside of my house right now. Currently. It's been working since September. So that from a predator standpoint, we have, we don't have it included in this one. We have it partially included, but we, in the next iteration, we will actually see having a predator apron that will be. It may or may not move when the barn moves. We may be able to do some things mechanically rather than requiring electric movement, but essentially a predator apron that would keep, go around the outside to keep things from burrowing or diggering. That's the biggest issue with the, the saladin style and then making it heavy duty enough that things that are really strong, like raccoons, can't go through through. And the same thing with the fencing that we have on the bottom. So the barn essentially is designed. So the bottom two feet is a steel frame construction with chicken wire, half inch chicken wire to minimize the coons being able to reach in. I could see that even being gauged up for the backyard because if you have that happen, that's a really bad day. You're going to make this investment in something and then the predators come in and kill. And so we need. These things need to be designed really, really robustly. This is not. The residential version is not going to be designed for, with cost in mind. The cost per pound of the protein. It is the experience and making it easy to have livestock. And so from a water and a food standpoint, if you have a lake house, you want to go to the lake on the weekend. This thing is designed. So we designed this thing too. So if you're a working, you know, person, your kids forget to do the chores. We want it to be completely chorable from the outside so that you can literally get your eggs from the outside. You don't have to get in and get dirty. There's a feed chute. You open up, you pour your feed in, and gives you four to five days of feed. And then we have a water system that has enough water onboard water capacity to give you at least 2 to 3, depending on how many birds you have, and potentially up to five days of water on board. And so it's, it's really to make people that haven't had livestock, we try to design it in a way that makes it something that's tolerable and doesn't make it, you know, a chore. If they want to go away or do something, or if you live in a spot with lots of predators, we have to be able to account for all that stuff.

Well, I'm, I'm really impressed with the innovation that you've developed, the innovative thinking and the progress that you've made so far. So I am really hopeful that at some point in the near future, I get to see lots of cluster clocks migrating down through an orchard or a vineyard or, or whatever the appropriate context is. So thanks for all you've done and that you continue to do and bring. Zach, I really wish you lots of success with your enterprise.

Yeah, thanks for the conversation and I appreciate all that you do in this space. You're. I told you before we got on here live, you are, you're one of the guys I look up to the most in this space and keep on doing what you're doing. You do a fantastic job kind of leading the pack, in my opinion. So thank you, John.

Thanks, Zach.

The team at AEA and I are dedicated to bringing this show to you because we believe that knowledge and information is the foundation of successful regenerative systems. At aea, we believe that growing better quality food and making more money from your crops is possible. And since 2006, we've worked with leading professional growers to help them do just that. At aea, we don't guess.

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