Episode 142: Harnessing Technology for Regenerative Grazing with Jason Rowntree

Hi, friends. Welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast, where we have all kinds of fun conversations related to regenerating soil health, regenerating public health, and everything that's in between those two things. Nutrition management, nutrient density, improving plant health, better agronomy management, better soil health, and you can imagine the spectrum. So today I'm here with Jason Roundtree from Michigan. Jason's someone I've wanted to have here for quite some time and taken some time to put together to make it happen. Jason, you've been doing some work that I'm very intrigued in, in the, in the nutrient density space and producing with a particular focus and emphasis on producing healthier, higher quality food. You know, for the last. This is a topic I've been passionate about for almost 20 years. And I've seen lots of people talking and doing some things, particularly in the fruit and vegetable space, that clearly produce better quality fruit, better flavor, better aroma. But one of the things that hasn't happened a lot, we haven't had a lot of people doing a lot of measuring and actually measuring what the improvements are, what's actually happening, what's really going on. And it's my understanding that this has been. There's been a recent resurgence where there's quite a number of new people coming into the space who are actually measuring, who are doing things. But it's my understanding you've been doing this for quite some time. Tell us a little bit about your story, your history, your background, the journey you've been on, and the scope of the work that you're working on.

You bet. Thanks for having me, John. It's good. I think we met in Chicago and we were like kindred spirits. And it's just taken a while to get back together. Almost a year, honestly. Yeah, man. I, I was trained traditionally, got a PhD in animal science, nutrition, and did it at Michigan State in the late 90s, early 2000s. And then I, my, the job closest to home in Texas was at lsu. So my wife and son and I at the time, we went down to Baton Rouge, be closer to family. And I worked down there doing beef cattle work for, for several years. And during that time frame, we got hit by Katrina and I didn't realize that I was going to be doing relief and recovery efforts after massive hurricanes. We had Rita hit that same year in 05. And, you know, it wasn't this ooh, ah moment. And, you know, I had, you know, light bulbs going off everywhere, but I saw a completely devastated landscape and it got me to thinking about resilience and you know, I was thinking at the time, low input, ag. I don't, you know, at that time regenerative wasn't really a key term and sustainable was pretty popular. But I kind of thought about low input. What does it look like to take fossil fuel out of beef, cow out of our grazing systems? And so a few years later I had the opportunity to come back to MSU. And so I've been up here for 16 years where I oversee a research center, Lake City, which is up around Traverse City. I also do work up in the Upper Peninsula. And so we have, have like a two pronged approach to our work where I'm very interested in how grazing management influences ecosystem, ecosystem function. And then I also have been very interested in how we manage cattle and how we feed cattle and what implications that has on beef nutrient density. And hopefully over time we still haven't gotten there, but to look at the side of human health as well. And so we've been looking at different ways of grass finishing supplements, grain finishing, etc. And what that does to the meat. And so we've been doing that piece as well. And so it's all under that, that kind of. Sir Albert Howard, you know, kind of a premise of, you know, healthy soil, healthy plants, healthy animals, healthy people.

Yeah, all of those things integrate. And I think anyone who's paying attention doesn't have any questions about that concept anymore. But where the questions evolve is how do we implement it? What actually matters? What actually makes a difference. So let's get into maybe a little bit of the, the animal nutrition and the nutrient density pieces. What are the factors that actually contribute to producing higher quality, healthier beef?

And first of all, I'm going to not play the, the neutral academic on your show here or anything, right? But I've always kind of thought about this in different levels of nutrient density, right? Where you know, I go to my, my local grocery store and I see way too many people shopping way too much in the middle aisles. And you know, if I've got a box of cereal or a three ounce portion of a regular product of beef bought at the grocery store, I would much rather see that nutrient density, you know, from beef and meat period, as compared to a box of Rice Krispies. No offense to my rice farmer friends in Louisiana, but do you see the context, right, like there's different levels of nutrient density, right? Like don't eat crap, eat real food is one level. But then we can, we can evolve and say, oh well, and there are millions of phytochemicals out there that we know nothing about, but we do know they have anti inflammatory principles and, and we can see differences in those based on how we finish cattle. And so we have set up trials for over 10 years now that test different finishing strategies. What I can tell you is probably what goes into the animal in the last 30 to 60 days is the most important.

That's interesting.

Yeah, it, you know, it's, it can really alter nutrient densities based on that last period of finishing. And so, you know, how we finish cattle in those last 30 to 60 days seem to have the greatest impact. Same in rodent trials as well, when you look at that.

So hang on, I just want to make sure we're understanding this clearly. So you're suggesting that.

If we feed.

Cattle in such a way, let's say that produces low phytonutrient content and, and has a broad omega 3 to omega 6 ratio.

Yep.

We can change the diet in the last 60 days and, and significantly change those fatty acid ratios and change the phytonutrient content in the last 60 days.

Yes, yes. And it's, it's really the, the turnover of nutrients. Right. Like there's all these things going on. It's probably too complex but, but we can really like improve nutrient density by what goes into them in that last period of time that is the most important time period as we finish animals. And often, if you think about it like let's say in a grass finishing system in the upper Midwest. Well, if we're on a 18 to 20 month period of time, you know, a fast, often we're going into stored forages in the wintertime. Right.

Like, yeah.

Or you know, we can go into a two to two and a half year cycle and we can be finishing off fresh forages.

Yeah.

And stored forages and fresh forages have different nutrient content and therefore can impart different nutrient profiles on the beef during that time period. I could be cynical. Right. I love grass finishing. Okay. We know the, the challenges we have in commodity beef beef production. It is highly efficient, however. But, but you know, I, I could probably put a lot of good foo foo dust in a feed, feed yard diet the last 30, 60 days and, and mimic, you know, different omega 3s or other things like that as well, if I wanted to.

Well, that's the one, the one example of that that I'm familiar with is the work that Pierre Vale and his colleagues and collaborators have been doing in Europe with Blue Blanc Core, where they're doing exactly that. They're feeding Flax in particular, I think the last. Well, I don't know if that's limited to just 60 days. I think that might be the entire duration of the, of the cattle life cycle where they are deliberately and intentionally producing a particular omega 3 to 6 essential fatty acid ratio.

Yeah, absolutely. So I'm gonna step back and kind of tell you the beginning of this story, please. So I've had a really good working relationship with Green Acres Foundation. They're, they're, they're outside of Cincinnati. And they reached out to me at a grass fed exchange down in Georgia. So I'm guessing that was like 14, maybe somewhere 15 when will Harris hosted down there. And they said, hey, we want to do a survey of all the grass finished beef in the United States. And Allen Williams would have been a part of this project, who does a lot of work in this area. And so we set up a blind sample, meaning we didn't know who the packer or who the farmer was. They were farmer A, B, C, D packer ABCD. And so we collected about 800, 900 samples across the year. So spring, fall. And we had beef coming from small local producers or small regional producers all the way up to big commercial brands that, that marketed grass fed. And so we ran nutrient density on those primarily fatty acids were our big, our big look. But we also looked at vitamins and fat, fat solubles, you know, specifically. And what we found, John, was massive variation that grass finished beef isn't just grass finished beef. You're sitting down. Which is good because we actually found what was being marketed as grass finished. We found ratios that were 20 to 1, N6 to N3 or greater.

Makes you question the integrity of the label of grass fed.

It really makes you wonder because it could be, you know, what sources are all these? N6 is coming from highly linoleic, which we know is, you know, soybean. Right. We saw ratios that were spot on. Right. Like one to one, really, really good. Right. High content of, you know, dpa. Aha. Stuff like that. Right. And interestingly, all of the beef that had very high in sixes had almost no fat soluble vitamins. Like in terms of picking up vitamin E, for example, we couldn't find it in a lot of those samples.

What do you think was, was this coming from stored forages? Why, why the discrepancy when you have some beef that.

Well, that's a great question because we've been trying to chase that answer for the last 10 years. And so we have set up trials feeding distillers feeding soil pellets, we fed grapeseed oils, we fed all these different types of supplements with grass. Never been able to replicate that high of a N6 ratio. I would think honestly it would have to be coming from some kind of a soy bean bage or you know, something of that nature. But we've never been able to actually replicate it. We fed a lot of soy holes with and some brands allow, you know, a certain percentage of these things to go in and still call them grass fed. And we can alter it a little bit, maybe you know, four to six to one, like, like a, a better end of a grain fed, but never been able to 100% replicate it. And it's interesting to me but what we've also started doing is we started also working with Stefan Van Vliet out that worked with Fred. You know, Fred Provenz has been a huge influence on both Stefan and myself over the years. Right. And Fred is the master on this. I mean I give umbrage to him and a lot of this is his influence on me. But we've also started to do a lot of metabolic genomics work on this meat where we're looking at the metabolites, we're looking at the gene expressions and we actually just published a paper in Nature Nature Food which for redneck from Texas to be in nature food is quite the accomplishment. But what Lucas found, Lucas was the PhD postdoc working on this is that looking at the metabolo genomics we could tell with 100% accuracy that an animal was grass fed. We could look at the metabolites and be able to predict it every time that it was grass fed. If we fed that also true of stored forages it we with supplements. It's true. We found that if you fed like a soybean distillers or you know, some kind of a combination, we could 100 predict it based on metabolites, more so than just fatty acids. Okay. And whenever the question you come into is stored forges or those types of things, we could hit it about 50% of the time. And so we've been searching for these markers that can 100% with authenticity label grass fed beef. And and we, we can do that. Typically the, the metabolites that increase are like citric acid, succinic acid, kind of some of these steps and anti inflammatories, things like that. I, I could kind of go on, I nerd out on it a bit. But that's why we're having this conversation.

To nerd out on a Bit So don't hold back by all means.

Yeah, yeah. So, so let's, let's establish a bit.

Of a baseline if we can for, for people who are just catching up to this conversation. What is the, I'm going back to fatty acids because that's what lots of people are familiar with. But what is the ranges? What's the spectrum of fatty acid profiles that is reasonable. And what's the spectrum of metabolic expression that you are observing? Are we talking 5x variation, 10x variation in different compounds?

Much less. Yeah, great questions. So fatty acid ratios typically. I work with Dr. Jen Fenton here. I, I, she's our go to nutritionist that does a lot of this work. She's my neighbor. And you know generally our grass fed, the probably the greatest N6 to N3 ratios we see are about 3 to 1 on average. Grass grain fed will be probably 6 to 8 to 1. Very often we see beef, grass fed beef that is one to one. And, and so as I've just commented, we've seen quote unquote grass fed beef range all the way up to 20 to 1. And so it isn't a bad marker. What's really interesting to me is which fatty acids are, are pronounced. Yep.

There's recently the next question I was.

Going to ask from the University of Chicago that doing cell culture work showed that transvestinic acid, which would be a 18 carbon fatty acid I believe with one unsaturated bond but it's got a bend to it and, and so it's kind of like a conjugated right at the 11th carbon, it's highly anti inflammatory and shown to be anti carcinogenic. Right. This transocentic acid and I went back and looked at the expression or the content of that in our grass fed samples and looking at probably a six to seven fold increase of TVA in our grass fed versus our grain fed which means it's coming from forages and very interesting and very potentially impactful. Now if I could be cynical for a minute or kind of, it was really funny to me in this big University of Chicago paper that while they showed this, this fatty acid that's highly profound and meat and milk has all these anti carcinogenic factors, they wanted you to be really aware that they don't think you should be eating more red meat however. And you know, so they went into this whole, you know, cover your rear end deal. Right. In terms of, we don't want to say that but the point is, is that you know we do see that, we see without question considerably greater conjugated linoleic acid cla, which as well is a very highly anti carcinogenic fatty acid. Interestingly, TVA is the precursor for cla. And so we see these really nice anti inflammatory factors. Typically in grain fed you're going to see greater like 160 and 180 which would be like palmitic acid and stearic acid. And I always laugh because when you look at the sensory trials in beef generally people think the best tasting beef, they link it back to what the content of it is and it's always got a lot of saturated fat in it. So we've been genetically programmed to seek out saturated fat. We like it, it tastes good. Often we do see our grain fed have greater saturated fats and, and you know, we've, we've picked up variation with grass fed where sometimes they are higher. But it's all part of really what happens in the rumen. We. Go ahead brother.

Yeah, you mentioned a, a word that made me laugh because it was literally the next word that I've written down that I wanted to ask you about and that is inflammation. Anti inflammatory fats. So the work that Bleu Blanc Core did a couple of decades ago was they actually did human health studies and clinical trials where they documented that animal products grown with narrow omega 3 to 6 fatty acid ratios. And again it's my understanding they were producing this using flax, but they documented significant anti inflammatory benefits as compared to pro inflammatory benefits from just run of the mill grocery store meat that was being produced in Europe, this was in France in particular, I think these studies were being done. As you're looking at these different fats, you're describing some of these fatty acids as having anti inflammatory effects. Are you, would such an observation make sense to you? Are you able to see that in the metabolic profile?

Yes, yes. And it's often picked up in phytochemicals. Right. And one thing that, that my lab partner Dr. Fenton has done is, has really worked to create an understanding of how to measure these phytochemicals and meat. It's often done in plants but not in meat. And it's been a heavy lift to get that to work in the lab. Also working on eggs, you know, pasture based versus you know, more conventionally grown eggs. And so there will without question be 5, 6, 7, 8 phytochemicals that do tend to pop up in greater concentrations. I also want to be clear John, like in our work we stop at the meat, right? Like I, I, we, we've never fed it to humans. We've never followed anti or pro inflammatory metabolites.

Right.

Postprandially after a human eats a meal.

But we do understand the effects these compounds have to some degree.

Correct? Yeah. And, and so yes, it, it, we can pick it up. And then the other part of the equation is that you know, vitamin E is, is an anti inflammatory. Right. And others, you know, and, and so there's just a, A, a combination of nutrients that we do see in our grass finished meat that appears to be superior. Does that mean for me, like again, I, I look at the state of human health in this country. Right. Like it's, it's almost, I, I don't want to say we're having an elitist discussion on these nuances. Right. But, but again I think I go back to the real challenges we have with obesity in this country and these other issues. And you know, and so I always want to put context around that. Right. Because I'd much rather see people eating, eating nutrient dense meat versus all the stuff in the boxes from the grocery store or you know, in the bottles. And, and so, but, but it is, it is awesome to see that there are ways that we can go back to really eating how we were programmed to eat and see why these animals have these different compounds. And it really at the end of the day comes from forages. Right. And we can follow forages and typically find that these compounds are greater in peak photosynthesis. And you would expect that.

So when you say peak photosynthesis, do you mean peak vegetative growth?

Yes, when we are seeing an, you know, that the plants around the summer solstice, you know, those time periods, cool season grasses, mind you, you know, we pick up these cool season, our big cool season flush. That's when we see them, they tend to decrease in the latter summer as we hit our summer slumps and then we pick them back up in the fall when we get that second rush of grass when it cools off in the fall time. But those are the peak areas that we typically see greater concentrations of these in the plants and is.

Okay, and is this, what's the context of the observations that you just made? Is this relative to your local environment there in Michigan? What if someone is grazing beef in Florida and a warm season grasses, for example.

Yeah, it would be completely different and it could arguably be peaked, peaked again when the soil temperatures are, you know, getting up into the 70s and 80s. Right. And so when that happens here, it's like our grasses say adios, you know, or not we're not going to go.

Yeah. So what is the, what is the, what are the factors that can be contributed from, I'll just broadly call them medicinal plants rather than just grasses and forbs. So I've been fascinated by this study of looking at how plants influence each other. And I've come to the conclusion that many of these plant species that we might consider as being medicinal or having medicinal value, nutraceutical value for people, such as artemisia wormwood, for example, is one of the plants that has been documented as, as inhibiting or reducing mildew pressure when it's present in orchards. So these plants are having medicinal value not just for people, but I would contend also for other plants that are in there that are in close proximity. And we don't know exactly what close proximity means. It might mean a couple yards or a couple hundred yards or maybe longer. We're still figuring that out. But you've been defining this conversation largely in terms of the, the metabolomics that show up from forages, from grass in particular, what is the degree of influence of Forbes and of having a diverse, a diversity of plants that the livestock are grazing.

Yeah, absolutely. Right, Great question. And you know, we know from, from Dr. Provenza especially, right. That the interactions of these plants and how they communicate rhizobili is amazing. Right? And so, yeah, so in our context, you may have a plantain or chicory that can work well in our, in our mixes, deep tap rooted plants like chicory, all are going to generally photosynthesize at different wavelengths of light. Right? Like that's the beauty of this, right? That and it, it's, it's this, the author, you know, they're the creation. Right. Because it is so elegant that you know, we know that all these different plants tend to photosynthesize it a little bit different wavelengths of light. Okay, so based on the, the time of day, based on the amount of light that they're getting, they will act a bit differently. There are some that are shallow taprooted, some that are deeper tap rooted. And as we know, the changes in soil types with microbial activity and all the things that you've talked about on your show with others are all going on at the same time. And all of those things combined lead to different plants having different nutrient profiles. We know that if an animal is provided as much diversity as possible, they will forage to it. They especially in more western range environments where you might have a hundred or one hundred fifty different types of plants, including forbs, shrubs, other plants, very different and an Animal can graze to meet their nutrient requirements based on that, you know, humans think in a 100% trace mineral mix and we throw that out there and they're going to be great because we're not real complex thinkers, right? As compared to say like a cafeteria style mineral where we've got all these different minerals out and a cow eat different ones during the different types of year. And the point being then is that what you're, what you're asking is absolutely correct. That that a chicory plant is going to have considerably different nutrient profile than maybe white clover. And, and we can therefore, you know, see influences on the animal health and the concentrations based on that. You have just a monoculture. Well, that monoculture by itself is photosynthesizing at a certain wavelength. It's got a certain depth to its roots and it's only going to be doing one thing. And we obviously know the benefits of biodiversity and your listeners as well and how the greater amounts, the more productivity. I did a trial one time where we put, we just, we took like one specie cover and then we took. It's been so long, dude, I'm getting old, man. But it was like, we did, it was like oats and then we did like oats and a Brassica and then we did like 10 or 12 different species.

And.

The real cool thing is, is that the animals always gained the best on that most diverse cover. The most aptly graded choice, grass fed, mind you, on that most diverse cover. Yep, we got the greatest yields off the most diverse cover. Yeah, blah, blah. I mean, it all lined up, right? And my other feeling is when you get into the COVID game, you know a lot more about than I do, is that, is that much greater an opportunity for a seed to germinate. You know, when I put more diversity out there, something's going to grow, right? Where if I'm only putting one thing out there, I've got one window. And so I really have enjoyed some of that. Never like one of the biggest berated times in my career was by Gabe Brown. Gabe. Gabe was visiting the farm and I had this cool mix and here I am the academic trying to be cool and I didn't have a warm season in it. I should have had like a sorghum Sudan in there and, and man, Gabe let me know, he let me know that I needed to do a better job, right? And that's. And I will say I'm so thankful that all these cool farmers have taken me under their wing because I'm an academic, right? I I have worked closely with people like Gabe and Will Harris and others. And, and I mentioned Alan earlier. Right. And, and, but they've mentored me. They've helped me try to apply the things they see out in the field that I can apply in a research setting and provide that quantitative data you're talking about.

Yep. So I want to go back to the conversation around timing of the primal importance of the last 30 to 60 days relative to these forage metabolomics. If I recall correctly, we started this conversation a little bit focused on the fatty acids and how those profiles shift. But maybe the way to ask the question I want to be getting to is if livestock, if beef are fed a grain centric diet, grain oriented diet and then switched in the last, let's call it the last 60 days. Can you see in the metabolic profile, can you see the legacy of grain consumption?

That is a trial we haven't done and it's on the list. Can I hypothesize?

Of course.

I think I can. Grain finish an animal for four months, kick them out on fresh, high quality forages. I think I can flip it. I think I could. You may not want to hear that, but I do think.

Oh, I don't, I don't, I don't have a contention here strongly. I think there's a lot of people that would have interesting reactions to that speculation. Well, because I mean there's a lot of people who would be inspired by the opportunity there because that gives them the opportunity to produce a healthier, higher quality food with some system adaptations. And then of course there are also people who would be, who might be threatened by that. But the reality is, as I perceive it, the market and the consumption for a quality grass fed product is much bigger than our domestic supply currently.

It's, it's. I, I had an opportunity to work with a high, a burger chain on the west coast. I don't, I don't think I can say their name. You can probably intuit. And they were wanting to use domestic grass fed.

There's not enough out there through a.

Few of their restaurants. And I flew out there, met the president, the CEO, the company, etc, and I think we did the math and there was enough domestic grass fed grind in the United States to maybe keep like three, four or five of their restaurants going the entire year. Yeah, and, and, and so ultimately we, we, you said a lot right there by the way. But, but that the, the problem is. Yeah, I mean there, we, we need greater domestic supply. There's no doubt. Number two is that you know, I wouldn't, the, the product would not be grass fed. It wouldn't be a grass fed product at that point. Right. Like if you, you grain finished all the way up to a certain point or use supplements or byproducts and then kicked them out for that last 60 days. But I think it would be interesting to see what the nutrient profiles do read right where if you're not a purist, if you don't care about that label, you just care about your health, there could be opportunities. I, I think in, in some of those things there that, that can. I, I'm not a purist, I'm a pragmatist. And, and whatever works for people, works for people. Right. And if I can grow some high quality grain in my context and I want to feed it to a ruminant, I'm not opposed to that by any means. But the point being is that we can take within our own context and make things work.

I'm some interesting blend of idealist and pragmatist. And the practical aspect is that as you've pointed out to some extent, we're having a bit of an elitist conversation and we recognize that meat quality exists on a spectrum. If we can take 30%, I'm making up numbers here. But if we could take 30% of the existing meat supply chain and dramatically improve that quality by having it be on grass and on pasture instead of in feedlots for the last 60 days of its life and shift large segments of the supply chain to produce a higher quality product, product for people, for the consuming public, broadly. Why would we choose not to do that right now? Yeah, you said. I, I said a lot of different things on my statement earlier and that one of the things that I, the words that are deliberately included is our domestic supply chain. The reality is that our grass fed producers who are trying to market as grass fed here in North America at the moment, particularly if they're looking for even a small premium, are at a disadvantage because grass fed beef is being imported from Argentina and Australia and around the world at prices that make it difficult to compete with or impossible.

Impossible.

Yeah.

And I work with, you know, I make a trip out to Australia, you know, and I've got colleagues out there and it is the land, the land that they have in Australia for grazing is so immense that their break evens John, just dwarf, dwarf ours. And I've always thought it was nuts because I, you know, I live in central Michigan. Our, our main grocery store is Meijer. It's out of Grand Rapids, it's our Walmart and we had the largest lamb kill plant, wolverine down in Detroit, Michigan in the United States. But all the lamb at Meyers from Australia and it's because of price point and cost and, and, and so it often what we see happen in the US is that we bring in lean grind from Australia or lean meat from Australia and we'll blend it with domestic fat from the United States. And that's a lot of times what you see in grass fed burger where it's kind of a combination of, of US and Australian products that go into to making a blend that makes me.

Shake my head for a wide range of reasons. But I'll just, I'll just, I think I'll keep my commentary to myself on that one.

And, and I think that's like I tell you that the biggest proponent of domestic grass fed that I know is, is Will Harris. And yeah, I've done LCA work, I've done a lot of work. I've gone to Africa with Will and survived. I could tell stories, but it, it, and there's a reason behind that. Right. Because he wants, and we should all collectively want to see our domestic producers thrive. And we live in an international world and our supply chains think internationally, they don't think just domestically. Right. And, and so it adds a lot of, of of complication. You know, and I, I've always thought that I won't be anti import, but if it helps a System provide beef 365 days a year. But I always hope it would be in a way that could purchase greater amounts of domestic product over time. But that might be too purist and naive of a premise.

I've always been fascinated by macroeconomics and I've spent quite some time studying raw materials economics. And I think as I understand it, and as I've understood it for a while, if you want an economy to do well, then you need to compensate the raw materials producers. Well those are farmers, fishermen, lumber, mining, et cetera, those foundational raw materials producers. And if we want to protect our economy, then we have to protect the pricing that our raw materials producers receive. And so I think there's, yeah, there's a whole conversation we could be having around that.

We could all agree then that 10 to 11 cents out of the dollar at the farm gate is not near enough.

No, it's not.

And that's what's happening today.

Yeah. And if you also look at thriving economies that have thrived for the long term, that were not debt based economies, people were spending Significantly more than 10 or 12% or 15% of their take home income on food. It was more in the 25 to 30% range.

Absolutely. And we may be headed back there.

Well, if we're headed back there for the right reasons, farmers could thrive. But it's debatable whether we're headed there for the right reasons.

I came across some studies thinking about multiplier effects and University of Kentucky's did a lot of great work in that space. But they, they basically showed for every dollar spent on like for every dollar spent in a, in a local beef economy, it, it can add three to $4 of a multiplier effect to that local economy.

Yep.

And I think that you know, you know, we, we tend to, to think about like the four corners of rural America. Right. It's a Dollar General tractor supply, a John Deere dealer and a McDonald's. Yikes. And that's kind of what's happened. Right. And, and I, I worked some with McDonald's. I'll be completely transparent. If I can help McDonald's make a difference, I will.

Absolutely.

But what I want to say is that it also shows that, you know, much of rural America has been extracted.

Yeah.

And, and the fact is, is that I don't blame the people at McDonald's. Okay. John, it's just a function of how things have evolved. Right.

It's generally don't have bad intent.

No, it, it's just the fact that our economy is, is evolved into this extractive low cost system that doesn't account for unintended consequences. And those unintended consequences in rural America are human health, soil health and overall well being.

Yeah. And overall wealth and well being. You know, if you go back, I'll just make one more comment on raw materials economics. Your comment about a dollar in a rural community turning over three to four times per year. Charles Walters was a champion of raw materials economics when he founded and he had, he had a degree in economics as I understand it, and was part of the reason for his selecting the phrase of eco agriculture to be the tagline for Acres usa. He said that in order for agriculture to be ecological, it first must be economical. And so he studied this in depth and has a fascinating book titled Unforgiven. And the book is a bit dated. It was before the technology era. I suspect technology might change some of the math a little bit. But there was a period of decades, I want to say from the 1920s, 30s somewhere in there was when his data first started. He compiled data for up through the 70s or 80s somewhere in there, for that entire time period, the overall economy of the US was precisely 7x annually of what they paid their raw materials producers collectively. So a different way of saying that is for every dollar you pay your farmers, your miners, lumber, forestry and fisheries, every dollar turns over seven times in the economy in a year. And so if you want to have a thriving economy, you simply pay your raw materials producers very well. And the more poorly you pay them, the less well your economy is going to do generally.

Absolutely. And then it concentrates wealth. Yeah, And I think that's what. And look, I'm not a communist or anything, dude. Okay. I mean, I, I, you know, I are socialists or whatnot. But it, what I am saying, though, is that, you know, it is. And I think maybe this is a good bridge into ecosystem opportunities as well. Right. That farmers cannot only produce quality food over time, but they can also, you know, produce healthy and clean soil and land and water and biodiversity and all these other things that have been diminished markedly since the green Revolution because they were externalized costs opportunity, a huge opportunity that our farmers and ranchers are standing on in their land that, that should beckon greater financial opportunity as well.

Yeah, these have all been externalized costs historically, from a macroeconomic context. I do want to go there with you, Jason, how we can monitor and measure these things and possibly monetize them in the future. But before I go there, a couple of pieces that I want to wrap up on the nutrient density piece. One is I'd like to ask you about. I don't know to what degree you're familiar with this, but years ago I had a conversation with Chris Nichols where she described some work that she participated in, I think out of Pennsylvania somewhere, where they were documenting ergothioneine movement through the food system, where you have soil fungal populations that produce ergothioneine. It's absorbed by the forages and then transferred into meat and milk. Are you, have you looked at that at all familiar with that at all?

No, that's not, no, that's a kind of a riveting comment there. But I, I, you know, I haven't, and I haven't done that. No.

All right, well, we're going to have more conversations about that later.

That's cool, man.

All right, so the ecosystem services, regenerating landscapes, carbon capture, deep. By the way, I think I get approached regularly by people who ask me what's my opinion or what's my perspective on climate change? As if though they're incapable of forming their own opinion by themselves or having their own opinion. There's a lot of debate around cause. Is mankind causing it? Is it caused by higher levels of carbon dioxide? Is it caused by solar cycles and solar particle flux? And there's lots of contention. Is it caused by shifted water cycles? But regardless of the one thing, you know, the one thing that we all agree on, we all agree on the solution doesn't matter what you believe the cause is. We generally collectively agree that the solution is sequestering carbon, maybe for different reasons. Maybe the reason to sequester carbon is so that we can stabilize a small water cycle so that we can regreen the earth and have more vegetation. Whatever the drivers are, we all understand and agree that regenerative agriculture or landscape management, to regreen it and to sequester carbon in the system is the driver or is kind of the, it's the nexus point that we can all agree on. So how do we, as similar to what you've been, how you've been evaluating nutrient density, I've heard from others that you've also been evaluating the relative impact of different types of forage and grazing management and so forth. So how do we, how do we manage our livestock ecosystems for maximum ecosystem impact?

Oh, great question. So I, I, I go back to, to what I've learned from Alan Savory and we, for many years our farm was a savory hub. We've, we are no longer now. But the point I would like to make is that it all goes back to management.