Episode 138: Regenerative Grazing and Cattle Breeding with Del Ficke

Hi friends. Welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture podcast. Here's where we have all kinds of fun conversations related to soil health, animal health, human health, and the many ways that they connect with each other. I'm here today with Del Fike who has been a prominent voice in the space of cattle breeding and soil regeneration for several decades. And I'm sure it will be a very entertaining conversation. You know, there are, there's so much work that has been done and that still needs to be done. When we think about genetics, genetic development, genetic improvement, I'm really inspired by this concept of epigenetics, that environment determines genetic expression. But also we, particularly in the livestock case, it becomes very clear that genetic adaptability or genetic adaptation to an environment. Actually the words that I'm looking for, genetic adaptation to performance, are so important and so overlooked that what cattle that really perform well in a grazing system, that are adapted to be outdoors, to thrive in a natural environment, are very different. It's a very different direction from the way cattle breeding has gone for the last 70 or 80 years. And Del, you have, you have a front row perspective on that. So thank you for being here. Thank you for all the work that you've done. Can you tell us a bit about your history and story in the context, the scope of the work that you're working on today and how you got here?

Sure. Well, thanks for having me on, John. And we'll try not to cause too many problems and make too many people angry. I love where you were going with, you know, the accountability side and I'll get to my story. But the accountability side of the cattle industry is nearly non existent or very rare. Most breeds of cattle, most operations are still very much on crutches. You know, they may talk the talk. These cattle do all this and they, you know, they're, they're making all this money and you know, there's just a lot of artificial things that have propped that up and continue to prop that up. So my Start Fight cattle company is in Pleasant Ale, Nebraska. We're also part of the Grazemaster group. The Grazemaster is the breed of cattle that we trademarked in 2015 after years and years of trying to develop what I always called the perfect beast. And people will say, oh, it's not the perfect beast, or you know, mine's better, this is better. Well, hey, it's the perfect beast for my forages, for my operation, and it's the perfect beast to really hang your hat on that. We've done something really with God's hand in aligning, you know, our soil health practices. And then we wrap this breed of cattle around it. But it wasn't always that way. We weren't always in sync with nature. We didn't always have good forages. We were were fertilizing and spraying and all this. And then chopping silage and feeding cattle in mud or dusty pens and hauling copious amounts of manure out. And we definitely like, I equate a lot of what farmers ranchers go through or they suffer from the Stockholm syndrome where they become friends with their captors. And we certainly were friends with our captors, with our suppliers and our breed associations and a lot of things like that. So our operation started out as a basically a livestock trading deal in the 18, late 1860s by Johan Fyke and then one of his sons, H F. My great grandfather, carried on the livestock side more than than anyone else did in the family. You know, livestock has always been a big part of our program. So we're to put some context around this. So we're in the rolling hills of southeastern Seward County, Nebraska. So most people equate Seward county to flat land, tons of water, you know, manicured lawns, new equipment, which it's still that way in western Seward County. That too will go away too, in the water and all that goes away. And I won't get on that tangent right away, but while I'm talking about water, one component of this grazemaster breed is less water consumption. Because our location, we're four miles from the aquifer. We're not flat, we're heavy clay soil. A few rocks, not on our place, but a lot of the neighbors have rocks. There's good grass. Yeah, the heavy clay, generally we get all the rain we need. We haven't for the last four years. My father Kenneth always said, you know, if they wouldn't have tore up eastern Nebraska and tried to farm it, we would have had the best grass on earth. Well, my dad's been gone almost 13 years and you know, dad, we got some of the best grass on earth and at least some places we're bringing it back. So yeah, long history in the, in the livestock industry. Had registered Hereford cattle for about 70 years in the family generational deal. So the red hide our grazemasters, they're red and they do have some Hereford still in them.

What was the inspiration for developing the grazemaster? How did that come about?

Well, if we would have stuck with straight bred cattle, we'd have been broke. Any straight bred Breed cannot compete against a composite. Just like, you know, we talk about corn, you know, hybrid corn, anything like that. We've got to have that hybrid vigor. We have to have that pop. We just always wanted. My dad always wanted his own breed of cattle. My dad was amazing because he got me knowing my cattle interest and in ag interest, got me in front of the most influential people of the times to help kind of condition my, my thinking in a really good way. And so one of them was, I remember as a little kid, eastern Colorado, Tom Lassiter that built the beefmaster breed. Our principles are a lot the same with the Grazemaster deal. Except the biggest part of what we're doing different than the beefmaster with our Grazemaster is I like them pretty, I like them, you know, form follows function. I like beautiful animals. I couldn't go out and look at crappy animals every day. It may be my only, only artistic flair is building this breed of cattle and maybe manicuring some wildflowers out in the grass. But we would have been broke staying with straight bred cattle. And we had straight bred Herefords and we had Red Angus and we had all this. And we tried so many different combinations. We can tell you everything that doesn't work together, which is probably more important than, you know, what does in a lot of ways. And so through a lot of trials and everything, you know, we've, we took a theory. Really, you know, the genesis of that was my dad getting me to these places. My dad sold pioneer seed for 25 years and gar seed for 25 years. But when he was at Pioneer and a lot of young people don't know this, Pioneer had probably the best beef cattle herd for a very limited time any place in the US they bought every good breed, every good animal and every breed that they were targeting. So when I was little, you know, five or six, we'd go to Coon Rapids, Iowa, over to the Gars farm where they had a lot of these bulls of Pioneer were doing and stuff. And what always fascinated me was the crossbred side of it. So they, they did a composite way back in the day. I think they called them RX3s and really cool red deals, you know. And I never understood leaving, even though it was harder for my dad, even though he was in all that to let the straight breads go. I never understood straight bred cattle. You know, my, my idea about straight breads, it's. They're just here to make really cool crossbreds, you know, and we're doing that and we could do that any place, you know, if somebody wanted to build their breed suited to their area. But we'll go through a little history here. So we try to get away from the Queen of England, so we bring cattle from breed societies over to the US and we still fight with making these cattle fit. So you're feeding them and you're vaccinating them and you're maybe, you know, you're creep feeding the calves and the cows are too big and they're taking, you know, all the stuff that. And people can call me and they're. I can take them to thousands of cows and show them that there's, you know, this is the way it is. But so as Americans, we were so independent, we left that country, but yet we brought all the nasty habits with us.

So breed association, that's called being human.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. You're 100% right. So we continue to listen to our breed associations, like the breed societies back in the old countries, on how we should raise cattle or what, what breeds we should have. Well, you know, England's going to be different than New Mexico, where somebody's trying to make a living, you know, running. Running one pair on 40 acres or something like that. So we basically took a shot at our independence. Didn't do anything with it. So there's nothing I like doing more than when people tell me I can't do something and we just go and do it. So my dad always said, you know, there's going to be times these cattle are going to have to take care of themselves. We're not going to chop silage. I said, okay, let's stop chopping silage. Done. And there's going to be times that we're not going to be there to, to help them have a calf. I said, good, let's hide the calf puller. And we got back into where my grandfather was actually always calving in May 1st part of June. And we got in sync with that and we took away nearly all the need for vaccinations. We don't pour or worm. We don't do anything like that. You know, we cherish the dung beetle in our pastures like the Egyptians did, you know, on the walls of their pyramids. It's still, you know, it's still etched or painted there. We lost track of our freedoms and what we can do. And so when we took all those crutches away, we were set up with this breed that when we took all those crutches away, we had very little fallout. Now back to your segue into this John, talking about how cattle aren't acclimated to the environment. These cattle are acclimated. We let nature do a hundred percent of the selection out there. Now are we saying we're going to let something, if it's not doing well on grass, starve or anything like that? No, we're not, we're not doing that. But we're not in their cat, you know, watching them calve, we go through occasionally, they calve on their own. They graze nearly 100% of the year. If we get some snow, that's when we get our opportunity to, to biocarpet and unroll a few bales and translocate seed and get some soil building stuff going there. Everything's an opportunity when you're working with nature and these cattle work with nature and they work for us 100% of the time. We feed nearly zero commercial protein, mineral. They get a little salt, it's always available. They don't go after it because they are built for the forages we have. So anybody can do that. You know, I'm not some genius in this. I just said enough was enough and you know, let's take some of our independence back. And it's, it's pretty cool, you know, American thinking, hey, you know, what you guys got out there isn't good enough. I'm going to do my own deal. So that entrepreneurial attitude and you know, the cattle people have, especially on the registered side, have always been a little eclectic or a little out there too. And you know, I'm certainly remnants of that, of that eclectic artistic flair with a very blue collar, pragmatic attitude and set of goals for these animals. And like I say, it can be done any place.

When you look at the group of people who historically, who are some of the, the godfathers if you will, of developing livestock for natural ecosystems, I'm thinking of Jan Bonsma from Bond with the Bons Mara breed of Gerald Fry and probably other people. This is not a place that I'm intimately familiar with, although I've studied it a little bit. Did you have any inspiration from any of the work that they had done? What were the parameters that you used? What were some of the things that you were selecting for and that you were looking for?

Well, sure, I mean we wanted hands off cattle. We wanted problem free. We wanted them to calve on their own. We still wanted a big, big calf that did everything on grass, you know, or the forages we gave them. A lot of people ask me on the grazing side of things what's your favorite thing to graze? And it's like anything I can get a fence around what we provide them, they will either excel or they're going to fall out of it. And they don't fall out of it now. They excel, you know, and that's, that's really one of those cattle and a lot of people think you can't do it, but you really can. And ironically, on the composite theory side, and I'll get back to the nature based side, the composite theory side, a good friend of mine that I was introduced to in 1984, Frank Padilla, actually worked for Schroeder Cattle Company in Palisade, Nebraska. They were doing a composite. And that's where, you know, we went out there. He was still doing some Hereford stuff. He had just started that job with them. And you know, the bug of the composite deal, Frank really ignited that and we've had such beautiful conversations and he's a big part of.

Just for clarification, when you use the terminology of a composite, what are you referring to?

So like multiple breeds in one breed. You know, like our Grazemaster is a four way composite Hereford, Red Angus, Scimital in either Obrac or South Pole, depending on what we're shooting for there. But so the composite deal, it is taking the best of each of those breeds that complement each other, yet do things specific that you want to add to it. So the composite theory is always just, you know, I'm a composite guy and Frank was a big part of that. And you know, when we were really starting to run heavy on the soil health side and really rolling with this breed, we went to a soil health deal. Carrie Hofstneider and I went up to Billings to a deal with, with Johan Zeitzman from Zimbabwe. And Johan and I hit it off. Like we both say exactly what we're thinking, we both are. No nonsense, you know, blah, blah, blah. And, and we hit it off. And I've given more of his books to people. I think it's man animal belts on, I can't remember. Yep. But ironically he got his breed, the Veldmaster, kind of trademarked or rolling the same time we did Grazemaster. Of course, Veld is African prairie and ours is great. I mean, we want to graze everything. We're not going to just, you know, just keep it to that. But it was a really good shot in my arm and I really started to follow him in tighter selection. And of course, and he was talking a lot more on, you know, ultra high density Grazing and things, everything that we were doing. But you're, you never stop learning. And so, you know, when the guy comes, you know, halfway across the world and, and he's like, down, he's like, what you're doing is what I'm doing. He's like. And I don't, I don't get to talk to people every day that are doing that. And, and I have no excuses, you know, I make no excuses on, you know, that this was the right, right way to go. You know, did we have a lot of things we need to get work through? Of course. But it all goes back to economics. And if people really would figure what they have in feeding these large animals, these new tractors to put up, you know, a bunch of feed and all this stuff, I mean, they're still not making money or much money with this calf price, which everyone thinks is astronomical. And it's still only probably a third as high as it should be. I think my dad sold, in December 1973, he sold 10 fat steers and the net, the money he made off those, he bought a brand new Chevy Cheyenne pickup in cash. Yeah, I don't know that you can do that with 10 fat steers now because when I was in pickups the other day, it was a little bit higher than that and I think the margins were a little lower than that on those fat steers. So we can't manage what we don't measure. Agriculture loves to not measure. And I want to measure everything. I need accountability, I need longevity, I need problem free. You know, I need, I want it all. I mean, that's just, you know, I jokingly tell people, they said, what was your two goals in agriculture? I said, well, you know, building the most accountable breed of cattle on earth and having the healthiest soil on earth. And you know, I say that half joking, but if you don't have lofty goals like that, you'll, you'll never push yourself to doing any better.

Yep. My home forte is not necessarily as a livestock person, although I have some passing familiarity with the space. But what would you say differentiates the Grazemaster breed that you've developed from work that other people are doing in the space? And I'm asking this because I, I don't really, I don't know, and I'm imagining that other people are curious as well. But the work that Kit Farrow is doing, for example, or the work that, I don't know who the folks are that are innovating at with Seven Sons farm in Indiana, I'm Sure. You probably know Shorty Hostel and some of the folks there. I don't know who the leaders and what the names are there, but how would you say your development work is distinctive from the efforts that other people in the space are pursuing?

You know, probably going back to that artistic flairs. You know, I'm probably doing a lot of things or all these operations that have become low input, you know, high profitability type deals. We're probably all doing many things alike. My cattle are not going to be as small as a lot of those cattle. I can't have fragile cattle. I hate. I absolutely despise fine boned. I need cattle that if. If it gets muddy in the spring in eastern Nebraska like it used to. You know, I like a cow size that's a little. Probably a little bit bigger than some of those guys. I want to have my cake and eat it too, with. I want small calves and I want pop. I want performance. Because if somebody's going to buy a bull for me, most likely that program, they're still trying to sell heavy feeder calves. They're maybe not looking at it as a, you know, they're not going to spend as much on feed on those females out of that bull and stuff. They want that pop. And so I think a lot of these people, we're all under the same mindset and we're trying to jam everything. One size fits all, no matter what breed it is to every operation. And it doesn't work. We have to get really particular and we have to, you know, build on those different places. And it's not hard, you know, to build what really works and get rid of the stuff that doesn't because it costs you money.

Well, if you look at the natural patterns of how wild animals express themselves in different latitudes, I mean, just simply looking at white tailed deer, the further north you go, the heavier and the sturdier they become. Thicker hair coats, their hide is thicker. It's just they express themselves very differently the further north they go. And the same is true of moose and other wildlife as well.

Absolutely.

Yeah. You mentioned you started working on beef and then also got into the soil health considerations. What was the attraction? How did you find those to overlap? And I suppose the qu. There's several questions here, but how has your work with soil health influenced the development of the grazemaster breed?

Well, I mean, the soil health part was. Was eliminating the crutch of extra feed, extra minerals, protein. Because even though we're still heavy on brome grass, which a lot of people cuss and you know, there's times I cuss it too. You learn to manage that and you learn to graze that differently, to start bringing back those warm season grasses that are still in the soil. I mean, God did not make a mistake on that. He did not. That's not all gone. When we do what we call our intensive grazing, our prairie rehab, you know, we're grazing different at a different time of the year and a really high levels of animals going across there and we're thinning up those cool seasons, bringing the warm seasons back and, and it's, it's just a beautiful way to, you know, to have that come together. So there again, people do soil health basically kind of for three reasons, but mostly to so your back's against the wall or you want to be so progressive that you want to try every new thing or it's your heart's into it. My back was against the wall. I damn sure wanted to be progressive. But my heart was the difference. My heart and my connection. My grandfather, Adolf Fike, was a naturalist, barefoot naturalist. And one of my good friends is a Missouri Saint Lutheran pastor. And I always tell him I'm a recovering Missouri Senate Lutheran. And my grandfather, sometimes on Sunday mornings we would go for pasture walks.

And.

He would be blown away that we've brought so much of that back that was farmed to look like the native prairie that he would have saw as a boy. And it's just cool to think about, you know, what we can do when we get that balance. You know, it's cattle, it's soil, it's, you know, these, these plants. It's a symphony that people don't quite understand. But, you know, I get pretty, pretty loud on, you know, my passion for this and things like that. But I really had a calling from my grandfather in a spot in a pasture one Sunday morning that I could feel him there. And he's like, you're not the first, you're not the best. Which would have been totally. My dad and grandfather, they always kept you humble. You're not the first, you're not the best, but you're probably going to be the most vocal and people are going to listen to you because you've done it all. I've had a lot of failures. We farmed large scale. Now we, you know, way, way smaller, which allowed us to do a lot of cool things and help other people. So the community component of all that too fits in with the nature and the soil and the plants and the, the economics. And so I'm really Like I don't look like I would drive it like a flowered van or something. But you know, I, I talk like, you know, it's, it is beautiful. And God did not make a mistake in any of this. We made the mistakes, we continue to make mistakes. And the best thing I did was hearing my grandfather say, take a step back, boy, nature be fine. And when we stopped fighting it, fighting it with the wrong breed of cattle, fighting it with the stuff that was costing us so much money, that was actually going to bankrupt us when we, you know, it's amazing. I've got four grandchildren and they can be any place on that farm and out with those cows and picking flowers and doing all this stuff because it's a healthy environment and that's a beautiful deal because this has nothing to do with me. My generation, I'm 57. My generation is not going to be here that much longer. Everything I do is for my kids and my grandkids because we will run out of water if we don't change this. We will, you know, contaminate everything in the environment. Will. It will retaliate and as it always has in the past. But we just gotta. History, read history. Constant.

You know, I thought more about rangeland management and beef and agronomy and the intersection of those different domains over the last year than I probably have in a long time. And part of that came out of the realization of just the tremendous strides, the tremendous progress that we have made in learning and figuring out. I don't like to apply the word regenerative to every, as an adjective label, to every conversation that comes along, but these different models of managing plant nutrition for how do we manage plant nutrition to get high performing yields and robust immune systems? We've made so much progress with the higher value crops and almost none of that information has been transferred to rangeland management, to forage management for a variety of reasons. One of the reasons being that the economics aren't there. The economics are very challenging. And we had a really interesting conversation this summer. I visited Polyphase Farm, had a conversation with Joel Salatin and Kit Farrow and a number of others. And we were discussing the rate of change, the rate of adoption of known improvements, things that have been well established for which there is not a shadow of a doubt. And in this particular case, the discussion they were having, they have the voice of experience. I don't have this level of experience or insight. But their assessment was that once something is well proven, like rotational grazing and more intensive grazing management, once something is well Proven it takes roughly between 25 and 30 years to get a thorough adoption by the majority of rangeland and cattle managers. And they cited several, several examples. I don't recall what they were off the top of my head. But my question for you, I'd love to get your perspective and your take on that and just the question of what are the contributing factors? Why is innovation so much slower in the beef and rangeland management space than it is in higher value crops?

So higher value crops, it is faster. I've been told by a lot of people, the average, it takes the average farmer 70 years to change. So the cow guy, I'm always going to be on the cow guy side, he's doing it in half that time. He's still not doing it fast enough. But when we think about the no till planter that Alice came out in, Alice Chalmers that, you know, the young kids don't even know anything about, Alice Chalmers came out with a no till planter for cotton in the 50s. All right, west of us, it's still full on no till until. You get out to the sandy part. So Seward York, Hull, those counties, they're still tilling everything. It's, it's beyond recreational tillage. It's a crazy sickness. But when we think about that planner come out in the 50s. Well, we're in the, you know, almost 25. Well, that's, you know, that's 70 years roughly. And people still haven't adopted no tail. Okay. So, you know, not to ride that deal too much, but you know, the chemical companies and the universities and the people that were pushing for to continue, you know, a way of farming pretty much just bankrupted the whole planter deal.

Okay, okay, hang on. I don't want to lose sight of the original question, but this is a new story to me and I want to dig into it because we had the introduction of a no till planter in the 50s and today we have this dogmatic debate that doesn't really serve anyone about needing to choose between no till and Roundup. And that you can't have no till unless you also have Roundup or also have the use of herbicides. And yet they didn't have roundup in the 1950s. So I'm very curious if you have any insights into what did the management practices look like at that point that they were able to adopt the use of a no till planner at that time.

So what I was always told down south in the delta, those guys are going to go into rice stubble and things like that, you know, or wheat stubble. And I'm sure there's some old timer in some place on some bench in the delta going, yeah, I saw that. You know, and he's got two days left to tell his story. But, you know, we have to think about everything that was done in the past. You know, the frost, seeding of legumes into the wheat and all that stuff. My family stopped plowing way before people stopped playing just because it was in the clay. You tore it up wet, it was clumps, you couldn't hardly raise a crop, blah, blah, blah. So they were doing a lot of different planting just with stuff that wasn't even. My grandfather hated machinery, so whatever he had, he had. But when we think about, you know, the. The level of change, how long it takes. And then getting back to the original question, John, is, is so people are scared. So people. They don't like to change. Change is hard, extremely hard for a lot of people. So unless you really have to, you're not going to. You know, generations are not there in. In the cattle deal anymore. When I was a kid, my dad bought feeder cattle for some feedlots in eastern Nebraska. Plus we had our registered Hereford herd. So we traveled the state and sandhills, everything, extensively. Believe it or not, I. I wasn't in school much. It kind of shows, but I know every ranch gate and cut off. You can go through the sand hills or whatever. So a lot of my education came from my mom and dad would stay in the ranch with the ranch owners, and I would get to stay out with the cowboys in the bunkhouse. So that's where I learned a lot of things about characters. Those dudes were some characters, and everyone is characters back then, you know, and they all more colorful than others. Yes. And. And people say, well, Del, why do you talk the way you do? And I said, man, I grew up as a tail end of a really cool time when everyone was a character. Everyone had great stories. They were all ornery, but they all work together. But I remember as a kid, even up until I was in high school, the 80s stopped it, but there would be three generations on those ranches. The 80s changed the dichotomy of that because all of a sudden the young one went to town if they could or went to do something else. Grandpa and grandma were too old. The middle generation, the dad, they were trying to keep the ranch together. They couldn't afford help. Things like that, you know, where people would say, okay, but they don't understand the value of if you do all this and you can hire more help, you can make more money. There might not be the equity or the capital to do some of that stuff. It's almost like a corn system. They're looking at a system of feeder calves going through a sale barn or going directly to a feedlot. And where we differentiate ourselves with starting a meat business, which is a total pain in the butt, too. But we had a great following. Still do. But now we're going back more towards the genetic side, because, you know, as I get into my retirement years coming up, you know, I want to have fun and make those cattle really cool. And, you know, hopefully someday somebody will say, hey, those graze masters were pretty cool. And then they just, you know, don't say anything else, walk down the street, whatever. But, you know, I just. I'm not going to make history, but people are going to darn sure know I was there. And cattle people will adapt faster. Everyone we've consulted with that had cows jumped on cover crops immediately, because what does a cow guy call cover crops? That's cow feed forage.

Absolutely.

So, yeah, it's just like, it's easier for those guys to see that, the value. And then all of a sudden, these guys got really good soil. They might have been doing some of those fields for 50 years, and they're like, gosh, that always raises. If I put it to corn, it's always my best corn field. What am I doing? Well, run more cows and have more, you know, maybe put it in the rotation, cover crops every three or four years and just run cows on it, you know, and. But it's. It really is a labor deal, and it's a. It's a mindset deal. And. And a lot of these blenders are scared to death to let people try anything different.

Yeah, that's a significant challenge. Where do you see the significant opportunity for people in the beef space where at this particular moment in time, we're at a time of record high prices. As you pointed out, they're not as high enough as what they should be from a parity pricing perspective. And we know that when we look at the historical cattle cycle, it's reasonable to expect that that price is going to come back down again. It's not a question of if. It's just really a question of when. Does the peak of the cycle this time last another couple of years? Does it last another four years? At some point, it'll come back down again. When you look at this macroeconomic context, where do you see the opportunity. The areas of opportunity for beef producers and grazers in general.

The opportunity is. If you want to work, there's going to be a ton of opportunity. There's grassland that they just can't tear up to put corn, even though they will try the craziest places on earth and tear up the sand and blah, blah, blah. And if the opportunity is, if you want to work and you can find that grass, don't. Maybe these young guys, you know, there's no young guys out there. Young guys, gals, you know, don't go in debt buying a bunch of cows. Get that guy that's in love with that coward, he wants to retire, Lease those cows from him. He's got a vested deal in there, you know, he's. He's got the cows. You're going to put in the sweat equity. You're going to start with a herd that's acclimated to that area. You can tweak it however you want, but it takes work. I've got family members. Years ago, when we were intensive grazing along the highway west of my place, we were moving cows two and three times a day in cover crops and was like, oh, did they have a preventive planning deal? Geez, that kind of, you know, we don't know what he's got out there. And we called it the rumble bar effect with what we were doing because we would be fencing and moving cows and there was rumble bars on each side of that highway. And we knew when people were watching us because they'd veer off and we'd hit, we'd hear the rumble bars. We called the rumble bar effect what we were doing. And, and, but I'd have family members, what are you getting an acre out of that? You know, custom grazing. And then we put no input corn behind it, just plant, right. Chase the cows off with the tractor and planter. And I said, I don't know, you know, you can. That year I think we were 8 or $900 net profit per acre. And we worked our asses off and we built that soil, we recycled those nutrients, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. And they're like, do you have to move the cows that many times and do all that? I'm like, yep. And they're like, oh, that's way too much work.

Oh, wow.

You know, and so, you know, the whole ag. The whole government deal, I can, you know, blow that wide open too. Like, you guys, you guys know that. I mean that. They've got these guys exactly where they want them. So everybody in, in politics goes to D.C. with, you know, on a $90,000 a year job and living expenses in Georgetown or 95,000, they're there for four years and they come home a multi millionaire. So that's pretty good math. You know, they're making money off of this system. And when you tell the big corn guy that he's scared to death that that system is going to go away.

Right on the reality, from a macro perspective, we should all be delighted if that system were at least shifted quite dramatically, perhaps sooner than we might think. The story that you're sharing or the example that you're giving of being willing to work and being willing to be innovative and do different things reminds me of the story of Alvin Picchey. Alvin Picche is a young Amish dairy farmer in central Pennsylvania that I interviewed here on the podcast a couple of years ago.

I remember that. Yeah.

And Alvin is now, he's about my age. At the time, he was in his lower 30s and he had just bought his third farm and paid for it. And Alvin was extremely sharp with a pencil. Some of that came through in our conversation, but not nearly enough of it. He had figured out that he couldn't afford to grow corn. He was grass fed, 100% grass fed on dairy. And the reason for that was his cost of production. He had, his cost of Production was between 5 and $6,1 00 weight for milk, where the mainstream at the time was 17 to $18. A hundred weight. And so Alvin was making. He wasn't getting a grass fed premium. He was being paid an organic premium at the time, but not a grass fed premium, which he is now. And can you imagine? I don't know the exact numbers, but I'm speculating. At this moment in time, Alvin's being paid somewhere around $45, 100 weight for his milk, and it's costing him, let's just say, less than $10 to produce that milk. How many farmers would desire to have that level of margin? But to do that, Alvin had to buck every trend in his family, in his community. He got really sharp with the calculator and he said, I can't afford to grow corn. I can't afford to fill that corn silo because it costs me too much money and time and energy. Stop growing corn, starts grazing, does 100% grazing. And he made this transition fairly rapidly as a matter of a couple years. He went from, in fact, I think a single year he dropped corn, went 100%. Grazing did a lot of fairly radical stuff. And I'm sure that was uncomfortable, but look at what was the other side, at the other side of that discomfort was all that opportunity.

So the power of perception in agriculture, people are worried about the perception of a neighbor that they don't hardly talk to anymore. A neighbor that might drive by every so often and say, gosh, I'm worried about Ed. He didn't get a new tractor last year. The perception, it's so damaging. Ironically, my grandfather Adolf said the day the, the horses left and the tractor came was the day we replaced community with competition. No longer did you need a group of people to have a threshing crew or to, you know, do whatever. All of a sudden, you know, Henry across the fence he used to work with, he was eyeing that ground that you were renting from that little old lady down the road because his Ford Ferguson or Farmall was just a little bit bigger than yours. He could do a better job and.

He needed more land to cover the cost of that tractor.

Absolutely. So, you know, Earl Butts did more damage to agriculture than anyone ever. I mean, you know, his get bigger, get out farm fence row to fence row, take on debt. We have to feed the world. While the man sat on I don't know how many corporate ag boards to make money off of this. We're still fighting that off in the 80s deal. So in the 80s, I was a teenager. My dad didn't co sign any notes for me. I co signed his notes. I had a group of cows were paid for. I went into the bank one day, I said my dad doesn't have much debt but he's worried to death. I said how can I help? And his best friend, the banker said, and they were really good friends. He said, well you can co sign your dad's notes. And my mom still has two notes that when she passes away they'll come out for the family to see that. I only asked my dad to co sign a note one time and he's like, yep. He said I'm going to give you some advice. He said, never co sign notes for your son. He saw all his friends do that. And at that point my cousin and I had that was LDP corn. It was buck 44. We had bushels of corn in every elevator, every bend site, all this. I'm like, boy, the bank is pressuring me. And I went in to talk to my dad who's retired and my mom, she just shook her head, she knew what he was going to tell me. And you know, I went out the door and we started to change our operation, I mean radically, you know, and, and I Don't care about perception. It makes me no difference what anyone thinks about what we're doing. But, you know, when you can do something that, you know, even if it's not your family for the next human being, that you're gonna make it better or you're gonna make it still be there. You know, the religion is in, what the resources do, what nature is, and then how it, you know, wraps around. So we gotta stop listening to people that do not have our best interests at heart. And your friend did that. He said, the heck with it.

There's this quote that circulates around a lot. And I went through a very challenging life experience. I don't know, half a dozen or more years ago, probably 10 years ago now. And I came out of the other side of that realizing that I need to be very deliberate about whose opinion I care about. And that has been an incredibly valuable lesson for me. And the quote that gets, I see getting circulated online all the time is, why do you care about people's opinion who you would not ask for advice?

Yep.

Like, if you don't value their opinion highly enough to go to them for advice, why would you care about their opinion? And that includes people at church, at the coffee shop, in the community, your neighbors, maybe even your family.

Yep. I always figured they're not paying my notes back at the bank. If they were writing a check and helping me out, they would have all kinds of say. But all they're doing is criticizing. And so, you know, and they're criticizing behind your back and things like that. There's great people out in the country yet. And that's why this is no longer movement regenerative, ag. It's just going to be agriculture. We're going to stop talking about all those words. You know, it's just going to be agriculture and community. But we have to open up our minds to other things and learn, learn, learn about everything, really, but agriculture in a lot of ways. And I just talked to somebody this morning. They're like, del, you. What book you reading? Well, I don't read one book. I read three or four. And so my attention deficit disorder mind or whatever, it's just like, okay, one is Hunting Geronimo, one is Germania, you know, that whole power grab and war after war after war. And one is Plato's Final Days. And the fourth one I'm reading is the total BS Warren Commission Report on the Kennedy assassination. And they're like, wait a minute, you're not reading anything about agriculture. I'm like, no, I'm Living Agriculture. Man, this stuff is telling me. This stuff is telling me cool stuff. You know, every book is a. Is a chance to get away and stuff, but every book you read, you'll pick something out. No matter what what the topic is, you'll pick something out to make your operation at home better because it can cross a lot of different lines.

One of the topics I've. I've been so intrigued about, and there are many, but one of them is really understanding the fundamentals of how macroeconomics truly works. How does our banking system really work? Not how do people say it works, but how does it really work and how do macroeconomics really work? And there's part of what got me inspired and interested in this direction was Charles Walters work from back in the 40s and 50s on raw materials economics. And I look back at that foundational research that goes back to. He was advocating with at the time it was the National Organization for Raw Materials for Parity Pricing, which you alluded to a little bit earlier on. What would par pricing be today for food and grain production as compared to what it was when we had a balanced budget and balanced economic performance in our economy? When you really understand how raw materials works very well, you get a very different perception of how you price your products as a farmer. And a very personal example is a week ago, a couple weeks ago, there's an ad in the local paper for Thanksgiving turkeys. Pasture raised Thanksgiving turkeys. I know most of the people here in the local region are in the space. I didn't recognize the phone number, so I picked up, called them. Our historical source of turkeys isn't available. So I didn't reach anyone. I left a moist message. I said, hey, I want two turkeys for Thanksgiving. And got a call back a couple days later. They put down my order and they gave me the price. I didn't even ask about the price. I didn't care about the price. I wanted good Pasture raised turkeys. Oh, and the price is $2.75 a pound. And I cringed because I know that was in when I was in my teens. This is now 20 years ago. We were growing turkeys, selling them for $3 a pound. And we eventually stopped because we couldn't make money doing it anymore.

Nope.

And so for all of our listeners who, if you're not familiar with raw materials economics, the foundational idea is that you have raw materials coming into an economy and essentially it's agriculture, fisheries and forestry and mining and everything else is value. Add to that. And that before this was. The data, of course, is all from before the era of technology and rapid technology development. But for many decades, there was this precise multiplier where every dollar that you paid the raw materials producers multiplied seven times in the economy in a year. In other words, that dollar changed hands seven times in a year. And you think about that, that means if you want a vibrantly healthy economy, then you need to pay your farmers. And agriculture, fisheries, forestry, you pay them really well, pay your raw materials producers very well. Those dollars rotate seven times in the economy in a year. And so when the farmer is charging $2.75 for his turkeys or a barely break even rate, whatever, if you're pricing yourself low, you are not just hurting yourself, you are hurting yourself first and most, but you are also hurting all of your neighbors. From a macroeconomic perspective. Did you ever stop to think about that?

Nope. Everything down the line, you're affecting.

Yes.

You know, and, and you know, people on the commodity side, they're like, you know, when I say, you know, I don't want to be in a business where I can't price my product the way I want to, even if I need to be smaller, you know, I want to make more money off of each animal or each acre. And they're like, well, there's a lot of opportunity in the grain markets. You just have to watch the board. Well, a lot of that's manipulated. Guys, come on, they're right. They're gonna make their money and you're going to take what they're going to give you on all that stuff. And now we're, I mean, we're seeing a potential bubble bursting deal like I got to see in the early 80s as a teenager. Everything was inflated, including the optimism. And, you know, land's never going to go down and all this stuff they're not making anymore and blah, blah, blah. And everything's cyclical. Everything is cyclical and everything corrects itself.

Yeah. You know, I have the privilege of working with lots of farmers in many different settings and ecosystems. And I know not one, but many farmers who are making well into a six figure income, 120, $150,000 farming less than three acres. In fact, based on the success rate, I'd say most farmers who are really serious about making a living and being successful financially and professionally are more financially successful farming smaller scale than they are bigger. It seems the bigger scale you become, the more difficult it is to do.

That because they are intimate with those acres. Those acres. They are just like, if you're A larger scale and you're trying to change stuff to a regenerative way. You're always going to start closer to the place to try your stuff. You're not going to go seven miles away and try something because it's not convenient. Okay, A smaller deal. And a lot of people say, you know, Dell, if you had a perfect size operation, what would it be? I said anything over 15 acres is a pain in the butt. And they're like, what did you say? 15 or 1500? I said, no, 15. Because some of the most profitable ones, just like you're saying, John, are these people that are really doing a good job with what they've got. I never need to buy one more acre of land because I have not even come close to optimizing, maximizing whatever you want to say on what I have. My kids and grandkids won't.

When you think about the intimacy factor that you just described, I've described this as the hearts to acres ratio. Like how much can you be in close communion with and be a good steward of to the highest level and also manage? The other factor is that these smaller scale producers who are managing more intensely, who are being very good stewards also then have the bandwidth and the time because they're not spread so thin from a management perspective that they have the opportunity to build relationships with their customers and they decommoditize themselves. Whether that means value adding or producing non commodities, whatever that might be. They build relationships and relationships builds community. And that is what we are all desperately missing.

Yes, absolutely, absolutely. Technology has, you know, back to the livestock side of it. With livestock you need a crew. No matter how hands off you are, there's times you need a crew and you get together and you got cow manure on your hands and you're eating a glazed donut, talking, you know, to your neighbor. And you know that. Yeah, no, like I like to get it right so you guys can think about it. But so when you're a big grain farmer, not bashing these guys constantly. Most of the time I do, but not on this. I'm not trying to bash it. So setting in a tractor seat and being competitive with your neighbor does not build, does not build anything really good because you know, they might take on 2,000 acres. Well, they're not, they're not going to have five more people helping them to add, you know, a bit more technology and a part time guy. And then we wonder, you know, my dad was always against consolidation of school, churches, banks, all that. He goes, once they start there's no stopping it. And he goes, that's not a good thing. Everybody's like, no, that's progress, Kenneth. That's progress. He's like, the hell that's progress. That's going the wrong way. And he fought it and fought it, you know, co ops consolidating and all that. And now we wonder, you know, these, you know, in a typical area that's big farm farmers, you know, there's 10 or 12 of them around and there's no Main Street. They don't need Main Street. You know, everything's getting shipped in. You know, they're buying everything bulk someplace or whatever, and they'll be the same ones. It's like, boy, I sure remember when I was a kid how, how good it was. Well, guys, you were part of the problem. You were part of why this blew apart. And not necessarily they didn't do it intentionally or on purpose. They got caught up in it. And most of them are so, you know, far into all this stuff. It's hard to unravel it and get out of it, you know.

Over the last several months, I've had several conversations where this term of an NPC or a non player character came up. And the moniker derives from video games, where you have these characters in video games that are just present there all the time. They're not players, they're just present, they're playing a part in the game. And the point that people are making is that increasingly large segments of society behave like non player characters. They fill a role, they're playing a role, and they play the role that society expects of them or that they perceive that society expects of them. They don't particularly step outside of that. And I suppose another way of saying that, perhaps a kinder way of saying that is that we go through life subconsciously. We go through life half asleep. Pay enough attention to the implications of our decisions and how they affect the communities and the people around us. And so to your point, many of us as farmers, we have contributed to the demise of our communities. Not intentionally, perhaps unknowingly, perhaps unwittingly, but we weren't paying attention. Now that we are aware, now that we've seen the downfall, now we can shift from the subconscious to the conscious and say, you know what? I want to do my part in going a different direction. And now you start playing a different role than just the role that society expects of you.

You no longer sleepwalk through life or lack of expectations. I mean, I mean, there's no expectation. These people have no Expectation, you know, like the people you're talking about and all this, you know, it's. We really are asleep, we're numb, we're not conscious with what's going on. We become yes men.

Yeah.

You know, we don't want to go against that, you know, that whole perception, that whole system, because it is a system. It's not a good system, but, you know, they don't want to. Don't want to go against that. And we are not living. And I am a firm believer when you touch healthy soil, and I've had more pictures on the. Of me smelling soil, taking that hit of soil than probably a lot of people, because I truly believe it. It's all connected. I just, I love the. I love the smell of it. But that's what's making us healthy. And, you know, you walk bare feet across the soil, that's. That's healthy. We've lost all that connection. We are not connected to nature. And if there's one that. My dad always said, if you could ever unite agriculture, everyone's fighting in their own little pockets. Part of them drove to D.C. with their new tractors when everybody else was going broke. And then blah, blah, blah, you know, if you could unite them, and I would unite. If I had one crazy dream, I would want to be my own pastor out in the pasture. I'm the worst sinner and beggar on earth. But bring these people, unite them, open up the Bible, read just whatever it was, and let's talk about it, you know, but out in nature. Out in nature because we're missing that.

And when we missed that, you spoke about, I think it was your father being the barefoot naturalist grandfather.

Yeah.

And, you know, I grew up like that, and I don't spend nearly as enough time, as much time as I would desire barefoot anymore. But there is something about you connect with the life and the living systems around you in a different way. You are more present, you pay more attention. And then you start asking when you are more present and you pay more attention, you start asking odd questions. Yesterday we've had. We're having Indian summer right now. We've had two days of the most beautiful weather that you could possibly imagine. And yesterday morning I stepped outside visiting with a friend, and it feels like spring the day before. The temperature on the thermometer read exactly the same, but the wind cut through you like a knife. We were having this conversation, like what? The temperature is the same, the sunlight is the same. There's no apparent differences. But the air today feels balmy. What Is the difference in air that feels balmy versus air that is sharp. I don't know the answer to that question. I have some wild guesses, but you start asking questions like that, and far too many people today don't ask questions anymore.

Question everything. I told my kids that. My dad told me that. His dad told him that. When I told my kids, you can be anything you want, but question everything. And they took it a little too far because they're, like, in everyone's face questioning it. But, you know, hey, we need some people like that to. In this revival When Men Were Men, you know, we need to get back to that. But we can't do it by consistently or constantly. You know, the demise of the environment, you know, it's all going against us. And like I said earlier, will retaliate. And I think it's starting in a lot of ways. But all we can do is each of us, even if you just have a little patch of land or somebody's like, years ago, they said, dell, what's the. What's the best person you work with with soil health? I said, oh, that's easy. The little old lady in New York City that's got one. One tomato plant in a pot of beautiful soil. She touches it every day. She is one with that plant. And we just got to get to be one with all this again because, you know, we can kind of harness this in a little bit, but we all got to be in it together.

Yeah. That is the key piece that this connection heart to acres ratio, intimacy, as you called it. When we cultivate that, then the answers come to us. We may not know the answers. We don't even know the right questions to ask. But when we cultivate intimacy, everything is revealed.

You got to feel it. It's not the answers coming to us mentally. It's the feel. It's the touching the healthy soil, it's seeing the healthy livestock. It's waving at that neighbor. That's not fighting cancer. It's all this stuff, and it's really in our own control to do that. But, you know, God's hand is in it all. And the. Our Creator did not mess anything up. We've messed it all up. Let's get back to, you know, how it started. And, you know, we can have our modern flair and little technology, whatever, but we got to get back to the basics. If I can do this, it is so simple, because I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed. Anyone can do what we've done. I guarantee it. And they could probably do it way better.

Well, thank you Del. Thank you for this conversation. I had no idea which curves and earthworm trails we would go down, but this has been enjoyable. So thank you for all that you bring to the world, for all your contributions, and I look forward to connecting with you more in the future.

Thank you so much. John.

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, we test, we analyze and we provide recommendations based on scientific data, knowledge and experience. We've developed products that are uniquely positioned to help growers make more money with regenerative agriculture. If you are a professional grower who believes in testing instead of guessing, someone who believes in a better, more regenerative way to grow, visit advancingecoag.com and contact us to see if AEA is right for you. Thank you for listening and we look.

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