Episode 144: The Regenerative Blood Business with Gavin Heywood

Hi, friends. Welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast. I really enjoy the conversations I have here exploring all the topics related to human health and soil health and what regenerative agriculture should be, what we should aspire to, what we can learn from each other, and the opportunity that we have to be good stewards of the landscape of ecosystems, of this planet and improve its overall function and performance for the pieces and parts that we interact with. I've really been looking forward to having a conversation with Gavin Heywood from Australia ever since I heard about his operation, the work that he's doing, a couple of years ago, a couple of months ago, when I met a friend and a colleague at rfsi. Gavin, I don't want to spoil the surprise by pretending I know very much about your operation. I know you're doing some things that are several things that are quite unusual, out of the ordinary. So can you tell us a little bit about your operation, your history, your journey, what's the scope of the work that you're working on today and how did you arrive here?

Thank you, John, for having me today. It's a great honor to be here and to tell our story. So we're in Australia, in New South Wales. We have a family farm which we've been on for 120 years. And we run a, a business that sells animal blood. And so this is the point where my kids all start rolling their eyes because they've heard people ask this question so many times and they all switch off and we run up to 250 horses in one mob in a time controlled grazing fashion. We also have a large mob of sheep and a handful of cattle. And we sell blood into the medical diagnostic market to make blood agar plates for hospital microbiology labs. We sell blood and serum and plasma to university labs for teaching and for research and to commercial labs for all sorts of weird and wonderful testing and research as well. And we've been making a little bit of snake antibodies in horses. And yeah, that's, it's, it's. We've been at it for 20, 20 years. And the idea came from someone I used to work in a laboratory at New South Wales Uni. And after, after I'd completed Unique, as I was leaving, someone said, oh, well, you should, you should sell goat serum to us. And so I thought, oh, that sounds like a great way of making lots of money. So I came home and my gross margins on, on my theoretical goat serum business looked really good. And I caught a heap of feral goats, got permission to do it from the Animal ethics committee and started to try and sell goats serum and failed. We didn't, we didn't really sell more than 10 liters even to this day. But it started in process. I, I, I got a grant from the government to market the goat serum. And through that grant, put a website up. We found another business that was going out of fashion, out of, not out of fashion, out of, out of business, another blood business. And bought their tools and put their name as a keyword in the search engine for our website. And away we went. People started finding us and we started making little products and it was like a little hobby for about seven years. And finally the big users of horse blood found us and tested us out with small products and finally became a regular buyer every week, which took. So we started that in 2004. By the end of 2010, we actually could build a business, could build a shed for the business, employ four people and start regularly putting blood out. So it was a long, long process. And up until that time, I was working for my dad on the farm for not a lot of money. And we've gradually built that business up and up and up so that it's become the biggest supplier of horse and sheep blood in Australia. And we also sell overseas to company, to other government institutions and businesses in the Pacific and Southeast Asia as well.

You mentioned providing blood and providing serum for all kinds of weird and wonderful projects. But I imagine to many people generally and to many farmers in particular, your operation sounds pretty weird and wonderful in and of itself.

Yeah, it is, it is. To start off with John, we, we're trying to do our grazing and farming holistically for a start. So that's already marks us out as weirdos to everyone around a boundary because we're. Our farm looks bushier and, you know, it's got so much more diversity. We let weeds grow that other people would, would not want. We let, if trees or limbs fall down, we leave them there because they become great habitat for the next lot of trees to come up. Like, there's a lot. There's so many things about our place that are already weird and then so.

I haven't even seen it yet. But you're saying it looks messy to people who want everything cleaned up?

Oh, yes. Yeah. People like to bulldoze things into a pile and burn it so that it looks like a park. And that just takes habitat away from so many things, from microbes up to lizards and snakes and things. So I, I love the messiness because it creates little micro climates everywhere and well, for example, I saw a tree that had fallen down recently and it had 60 new trees growing all around it, 60 saplings, and of about 12 different species that it was feeding them all. So why would you get rid of them? So that's weird because people would normally burn that log and none of those trees would have grown. Yeah, yeah.

One of the pieces that I'm really fascinated or intrigued about your story is doing something that is so out of the ordinary and so remarkably different there. I very frequently have conversations with farmers who, who feel stuck, who feel trapped, as if though they can't do something different. They, they, they are stuck because of infrastructure investments or because of what they are comfortable or familiar with. What are the things that you've observed or what have you experienced that has given you comfort? Trying to do different things, something that's very different out of the ordinary and being perceived as farming weird by all the people around you?

Well, in terms of the regenerative and the holistic way of doing it, I was very blessed in that I went away to university and didn't study agriculture. And when I came back I was. My dad had already started his holistic journey a few years earlier by doing holistic management training and then grazing for profit or similar to your ranching for profit. And as soon as I got home he and I went and did another grazing for profit course. So that was my foundation and I didn't have any conventional ideas in my head. And that was very, that was very useful because even though my dad was trying to change, he still had all the old ways in his head that he knew worked. And stepping out into a new way was restrictive because he didn't, he was running the farm for the family and that the risk of failure in his mind was always weighing on him. So maybe, maybe at the start I didn't have, I didn't have any money invested in land. I could try things and that was helpful. In terms of the blood business, we nearly gave up many times. It took seven or eight years to actually get to the point where we could pay ourselves a salary. And it was just a hobby up until that point. And I think I was just pig headed about it because there was obviously a market and we just had to prove ourselves to be worthy of getting a foot in the door in the market. I think I was convinced that if we had healthy land we would have a healthy blood product and we could do it. I don't know if it was naive because there was a lot of hard work involved and sometimes staying up all night filtering serum or dealing with blood products that needed to be done because it's a perishable thing. So we put a lot of hard work in and maybe there were times when it would have been prudent to stop, but I don't know. I just had a dream that I was just going to keep pushing until it worked. In terms of regenerative stuff, if you read Charlie Massey's Call of the Reed Warbler, some of the stories in that where farmers, graziers, have really hit a wall in their own land, but walk over the fence and see what's growing on the verge beside their road and seeing how it's not suffering at all under the same rainfall, things like that really encourage me that if we take our foot off nature's neck and let it do what it can do, then there are so many things possible. And so, you know, I, I think if people in the Chihuahuan Desert can grow good grass, we have more rain, more rain than them. Yeah. Well, we could do it as well.

Yeah. Can you? Well, there's several questions that I want to ask you, but can you give us some context on the rainfall in your environment?

So we have 625mils of rain on average. What's that, 25 inches?

23. 25 inches? Something like that? Yeah.

And it's, it's sort of fairly. It's maybe a tiny bit more summer dominant, but we still get, we can get good rain in the winter as well, and we can, we can grow good legume content during the winter and rye grass and oats and that sort of stuff, and getting more winter active native grasses coming back in as well. Yeah, yeah.

Now, you mentioned a phrase a bit ago that I'd love to get into and see if there's something there. And you, you mentioned producing a healthy blood product. And what, what defines a healthy blood product? And are there, are there any opportunities for improvement there? You know, there's a few thoughts that come to mind. One is William Albrecht here, who was one of the pioneering soil scientists who really innovated a lot of the soil science and the soil chemistry work that has been the foundations of eco agriculture for quite some time after the Second World War, or. Yeah, I think it was shortly after the Second World War. He, he obtained all of the fitness. He overlaid the, the fitness for military service from all the draftees and overlaid them with soil geological profiles. And he was able to show very distinctly and very clearly that there were certain soil types that had higher calcium content, that had better mineral Nutrition, better mineral balance, that had a much smaller percentage of young men being rejected for physical reasons, for physical fitness reasons than other soils that were more minerally depleted. And when I think about producing blood, I mean it's, I don't know how much blood you were harvesting from an animal in a given time period, but that is constantly generating new blood cells is, is a process that can take some energy or that I, I could perceive as possibly being energy or nutrient depleting. And that's an assumption on my part that might not be correct but just love to. What defines a healthy blood product versus a less healthy blood product and how are you managing that?

It's pretty simple. We're not doing biochemical or even mineral analysis of the blood but our main marker is the percentage of red blood cells that a horse has. So if it's sort of 30% red blood cells or less then it's regarded as anemic. And we are strictly guided by an animal care and ethics committee who we report to and, but it seems, and it was really stark for us back in 2019 when it was really, really dry here, we got down to nearly only a third of our rainfall for a 12 month period. And we full fed those 250 horses for 11 months with all their food, just brought them into 10 hectares and gave them everything. And I've got a graph that shows their weight and their red blood cell percentage for the months leading up to that. And it was, it was diving down, down, down towards 30% red, red blood cell percentage. But, and, and I started trying to feed them cheaply because I knew it was going to cost a lot of money. And I ended up getting a horse nutritionist in and she said no, you can't do that. You can't, you can't roll barley and feed it to them. You shouldn't be giving them that hay. You need to be giving them loose and hay and they need to be get getting this much, this many kilos per, per kilo of body weight etc and as soon as we fixed it was mostly the protein content I think of the, the feed up their, their weights. The graph shows it so starkly. Their weights and their red blood cells just took off to a new level and instead of being down around 30% the average was, was up over 40% which is, that's pretty hard to keep an average up there even you'd have to have a really good grass season to do that. But it really seems to be dependent on the quality of the protein in the grass and so obviously that can be driven by the minerals in the soil. But it is interesting. Even on the farm that we're running these horses on, it's really impoverished from lots and lots of disc ploughing over 50 or 60 years to grow wheat. And it's still able to keep, when there's enough moisture and enough grass, if we give the grass a good recovery time, it's, it's still able to keep red blood cell percentage up in the high 30s, low 40s. So I wondered, John, whether that's because when I buy the animals, they're already 5 to 10 years old and they've done all their growing. Maybe if we had to grow them on this land, they'd end up like those soldiers that got rejected. I think from memory that his research showed that they had, you know, their teeth were poor and things like that. They, they weren't grown or they were flat footed.

They didn't have, they were, they were really looking part, amongst other things, particularly at, at leg ar. Leg and foot architecture to be able to march for long distances and be resilient in stressful environments in that regard.

So I'm wondering whether the horses, because they, because they're, they're mostly ex harness racing horses. So they've been bred to race and they would be fed to the eyeballs for their first four or five years of their life and maybe that's the thing that then enables them to exist on my poorer land. That's, that's possibly true, yeah.

One of the things that you're describing, the very challenging land conditions that you have, and I think it possibly might have been before we had the microphone turned on, but you're also relatively small scale for the region that you're in. If I remember correctly.

The whole.

I guess the question that I'm really asking is, or trying to understand is it seems to me with a blood business you have the opportunity to actually make a livelihood and a good livelihood on a scale that might be smaller than some might consider.

Definitely, yeah. If I was running cattle on this land, I'd have to have a job somewhere else. Even if I was running a wool grow, I couldn't grow, I couldn't do a fat lamb operation on this land and I couldn't really. I could breed cattle on here. I could maybe run 150 to 200 cows. But you wouldn't be able to grow their calves out on this land. You'd have to take them somewhere else and it, it wouldn't support a family. So we, we at least 1800 acres. And we also own another four and a half thousand acres which adjoins that land. And it's also had a similar history in terms of over overstocking and cropping and the type of plowing and stuff. But it seems softer down there. I think it's been, it's been managed more kindly for a lot of that time and it's regenerating really fast. We've changed the management down there in the last five years and, and it's got trees popping up, it's got different good pastures starting to appear and it, it'll, it will actually do a better job when we, we are going to move our operation down there too.

One of the things that I wanted to ask you about is how you manage grazing horses and how you manage them to have a holistic and a kind impact on the landscape. You know, I'm a part of a community that still farms with horses and we still drive horses. They're our primary means of transportation locally. And all horses, a lot of people have small lots or small homesteads and they might have one or two horses on a homestead of half a dozen acres. And those horses impact their pastures very negatively because they're there constantly, all the time. And so these pastures are often continuously grazed. And when you have high rainfall environments during the winter months, they just get pounded and they get hammered. And so we are, we're starting to have these conversations about, as a community, about, okay, how do we need to begin managing our horses and our horse pasture differently, particularly during the winter months, but just to avoid the continuous grazing. Because unlike, unlike a grazing cow, perhaps a bit more like a sheep, they will, they can bite a grass or a plant off all the way down right to the soil. So how, what have you learned with, and how are you grazing your horses and what are you observing? What have you been learning?

So really you're still trying to graze them the same way as a mob of cattle, except the amount of time you might leave them in a paddock might end up being less because certainly they have bottom and top teeth so they can like you say, bite things off it. It still comes down to time. So if you're only trying to take the top 40 or 50% of the plant so that its roots don't stop growing and keep oozing out that sugar, which we really need, you, you can still get. And, and they're still trampling things. They, they have hooves that really can cut and chip. And I think they're, they're a really good animal for breaking new ground, but also smashing down moribund grass and weeds. But if you, you just have to manage the time. So if, if you leave them in there for less time and move them on and let that plant recover, you're still going to get a good result on a small holding. That's really difficult. And I mean, you can be fencing small paddocks if for two horses, you, you wouldn't need much. You would only need.

The challenge is if you. Yeah, the challenge is if you constrict them that much from a feeding perspective, then they don't really get enough exercise.

That's, it's, that's difficult. And I don't know, I don't know how you would do that.

You pull pastures with your neighbors?

Well, I guess so, yeah. Or exercise them, take them for a walk like you would your dog. But yeah, yeah, if you can control the time, you can control what the outcome. And that's, that's always the way in with any grazing animal, I think. But I view them as a massive chisel plow mulcher. You know that they can do a lot of good in a paddock, really open it up for new growth to come, but they can also really bite everything down to the, the, you know, if you leave them in there for half a day, too much, you know it. They take too much.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you've been on this holistic ranching, ranching for profit journey for quite some time. What, what have been, as you've observed, you described that the soil was very degraded historically. What have been some of the, what's been the improvement? What's been the progression in the ecosystem that you've observed? What have been some of the memorable moments for you?

I think one of the early things was seeing water not lie on the ground, but actually soak in. And there are a whole heap of monitoring tools you can use to, to get numbers on this. And I do have those tools and I seem to never, never make the time to use them. But water soaking in more plant basal density, so plants being closer together, less, less bare soil. We've seen scalded patches of soil that'll have a ring of thistles around them. And that ring of thistles will slowly come, creep in until that patch of bare soil disappears. We've had that happening over the, over the time. We've had lots of trees pop up, especially with horses. Horses don't seem to eat all the little trees like sheep and cattle. Interesting because, because they're, they're only in there for a day. Normally they don't seem to eat those trees, but when they get to about a foot width in the, in the trunk, they might strip the bark off it. So it's, it's a strange difference to cows. Cows would rub on them and smash them down and, and eat the leaves. Horses don't seem to do that as much. So I have a really beautiful little tree called a karajong which grows on our land. And it's the sort of tree that was left by the settlers as a tree that would be a good shade tree and for cutting the leaves down in dry times for fodder because they've got good protein. They generally struggle to regenerate with sheep and cattle, but with the horses they've been on the land I'm running my horses on, there's barely an adult Kharrajong tree. But in the last 14 years the amount of Kharrajong seedlings that have sprouted up and gotten away has been really gobsmacking. So I'm going to now take my horses down onto another piece of land and swap cows up to here. And I'm just hoping that they, they're big enough to, to survive them. We've also had different grasses come in. So instead of woody hard grasses we've had softer grasses coming in and that's obviously been really good. And we also had more diversity in terms of Forbes and sort of tap rooted weeds. Every now and again we get a wave of thistles come through. And as much as I hate them because I get them in my legs and the horses get them in their eyes, they're doing amazing jobs opening soil up. But I would rather have a plant like a chicory or a milk thistle or a prickly lettuce or something do that. And we seem to be getting more of those sort of plants coming in. And the stock love them because they've got secondary metabolites that they like. And so diversity is another big change.

I think one of the pieces that I find intriguing. Thinking about your story of the tree development. I don't know how densely your trees are returning, but it seems like you have the. You were creating the conditions for the redevelopment of a savannah where you have a treed, a combination of a tree and a grassy landscape. And some time ago, I think it was shortly after it was printed, I read this fascinating book titled the Greatest Estate on Earth, describing how the Aborigines managed Australia with fire and largely with fire as a tool, I think. And one of the, one of the highlights that really stood out in my mind was the description of how soft the soil was in certain regions that horses actually couldn't run across it because it was so soft. And the fact that Australia had no hoofed animals before the Europeans arrived. And so it's, it's fascinating that you have. You're able to use horses and their grazing habits as a tool to regenerate some of those landscapes.

It is. And actually just thinking about the softness of the soil where I run them, I still think it's an incredibly hard piece of land. It's like a light clay, a light brown sort of clay sort of soil with shale, really not that far under in some places. But we've never really had to trim the hooves on the horses, except in the last five years we've had to start doing that because I think it's just been softer and they're not chipping off and breaking off themselves. It's the only thing I can think of. And maybe it is softening up a little bit, just the surface. I mean, it would only take the top inch to soften up a little bit, I guess, and they wouldn't chip off. But it, it seems to me that's. That's been something that's probably changed in the, since the, the dry period from 2014 to, to the start of 2020. We've had some. We've had three wet summers. And it's. I think, because we took the animals off the land for 2019, it, it's, it's just, it's responded in an amazing fashion. Yeah. And we're not. Yeah, we're having to trim the horse's hooves now. And it's, it's, it's interesting.

Yeah. Well, if you're trimming. If you're trimming several hundred horses hooves every couple of months, that's, that's a chore. That's a job.

Wow. No, we're not doing that many, but we do sort of 30 to 40, you know, every three months maybe. But we never used to do any before that. We did. We didn't do them at all. But in terms of the savannah and the return of those trees, I think we use our animals a little bit like the cool burns are used in Gammage's book. So it's not quite the same because I have, I have in some areas, I have trouble with a native pine tree that just can grow up as thick as hair on, On a cat's back. And it's. Yeah, it's a real problem because doesn't let Anything grow underneath it. And I do. We, we have talked about doing, trying some cool burns in our, in our hill country to try and. Yeah to try and manage to manage.

Those trees and reduce their density a.

Little bit because you can't do it with the horses. Won't do it. If you left sheep or goats in there for long enough they would eat them but then everything else would be degraded around it as well. So yeah, there are some, still some questions to be explored around that though.

As, as you've been on this journey and working with the livestock and the landscape. What, what has surprised you? What was unexpected?

It's unexpected that we can actually run that many horses in a mob. We started with 20 and when we got bleeding properly we put them into 60. And that was a big deal because we run them behind single wire electric fences. And they all came from places where they'd been in a stable all their life. So be becoming a herd and being herded was new to them. And so they formed all these little groups and just ran in every direction and they ran through my single wire electric fences. And over time we formed them into a herd that moved as a herd. It had leaders and middle and tail and then getting them into a bigger mob. So 120. That was the next step. And then at some point we decided that we actually needed all our animals together in one mob. So we ended up with 250. There might have even been more than that at some point. That was a really big paradigm shift that we could run them that big and then draft them each week and we only take a third out each week. It's been really surprising to me that they don't eat the trees as they come up, but they will eat bark coming into the spring. Doesn't matter what other feed is around. They'll, they'll eat the bark off a certain tree. That's a nasty surprise because they can, they can kill a hundred year old eucalypt overnight by stripping all the bark up to three meters around. So we have to do a bit of protection of some of those trees.

When we have cattle in larger groups. There's this known phenomena that beyond a certain threshold they no longer begin, they no longer behave as individuals. They start behaving as a group, they start behaving as a mob. Are you observing a similar phenomena with the, with the horses as well?

My, my observation is that they, they actually don't like each other but they can't not be where each other is. And so, so within my group and this was probably another surprise. There. There are. And. And if you actually got to know your cows and sheep, you'd see this as well. But some of the horses have no friends, and they just are on their own all the time, and they're at the back of the mob. Some have one friend. There might be three or up to seven in a group, and they're all split into social groups like this. And so they ferociously look after that group. They will bite and kick and whatever it takes, barge to protect their little group from anyone else coming near them at the trough or going through a gate or whatever it is. But as soon as. As soon as a few of them go through a gate, all the rest have to charge through after them. Just because they're scared of missing out on something, they. They cannot not be in the mob.

Are we still talking about horses?

Yeah. This is what happens. It's crazy. And if I run them up a laneway and try to cross a gully, the ones at the front, they will go to the edge, and then they'll turn around and face the rest of the mob. And I have to keep pushing the tail enders up. So they're the ones getting my Roth. And as I start getting more and more cranky to try and move them that. And compress the mob enough to push the leaders through, it's. The leaders will then start fighting and kicking each other because they're getting more pressure on them. And then eventually one of them will look around and go, okay, we'll go across. And it's. It's just crazy that I. I don't think they're much more intelligent than a kindergarten kid. You know, like a. I think they're really simple. I know they can do lots of amazing things. You can teach them a lot of stuff, but I just observe really dumb behavior every day. And it's usually to do with trying to get to where your friend is or getting away from someone who's protecting their friend. It's really frustrates the heck out of me because they just can't slow down and think it through or do it slowly like a cow would. They will just barge through a fence to get to where they need to go, because I've just got to get there and they don't. So they. They're a frustrating animal to. To work with at times, but they're also amazing to watch when they're all galloping along in a. In a massive group. And. And when they're really feeling fit and healthy, they are full of energy. And cavorting and kicking their back end up and neighing. And that's. That's amazing to watch as well. I. I feel like when I see them doing that, it makes me glad that I'm running horses. I. I don't think I'll miss them when they're gone because it'll be much easier.

So with the larger mob, are you still running a single wire?

Yes. So fairly early on, I learned that painting the wire with white paint was pretty helpful. And I also paint the top of each post. My posts are probably 25 to 30 meters apart and quite some distance. The wire is about a meter off the ground and. And we paint the wire white. And that made a massive difference to them seeing it, because sometimes the grass is. Sometimes the grass is that high and sometimes there is. There are other woody weeds that have grown that high. And at times I've had to slash with the tractor each side just so they can see the wire. Yeah. So it's the. It's the cheapest way to fence a place up. So I've probably got 110 paddocks for them, sort of averaging six, six to seven hectares. And yeah, when I run out of grass in that area for the rain we've had, I just. I take them to another part of the property until it recovers. And. But I've also found that I've started using horse cider wire, which is like a poly wire that's white, which, it stays bright white, even like a paint will gradually wear off, but this will stay white and I can just pull it out through the post off a reel and make it really obvious where the fence is as well. So, yeah, that. That makes a massive difference.

Gavin, a bit ago you made some comment about thinking about when the horses are gone, so I don't know if this is something that you're considering or thinking about or not, but what. How do you. How do you envision your operation growing or evolving or shifting over time?

I. I think we'll still be doing this for quite a while, at least a decade, I would say. But I think eventually we would. We would go to cattle with. Probably with sheep. Our land's been used to grow wheat and other crops for a long time, but I don't think it's the best place to be doing that. So we will continue to grow cover crops and the. The main reason for doing that is to continue to get all different types of plants pulling up, different minerals, different root systems in there with their attendant microbial communities to keep breaking the soil up. So I mentioned we have a carbon soil carbon project. Everything will be driving towards getting my roots and microbes and carbon down to a meter 20 or more to store it, but also for all the other benefits that come with it. So using cattle to do that, using sheep to do that. We did used to grow a lot of merino wool, like garment quality wool. Um, I don't think I would go back to that. That was my dad's passion. But who, who knows, maybe you could do that in a smaller way at some point. But at the moment we're just building a new facility for the, the blood business and we're about to expand especially our sheep bleeding production. We'll hopefully have to go from 200 to 800 or a thousand sheep to provide the blood that we're going to need to do. So that's going to be.

I've been wanting to not just have a conversation about the blood business because I'm really interested in understanding the rest of the operation as well. But I know my listeners are not going to be happy if I don't ask a little bit more about the blood. So tell us a little bit about what does the process look like of drawing blood from an animal and how, how, how much, how much do you take? Can you take, how, how much can the amount that you take change based on the health of the animal? What, what does the process look like?

Uh, so we, we're, we run to guidelines set by the animal ethics committee and they allow us to take 1% of the body weight of a horse. So a 500 kilo horse, you can take 5 liters. We take that every, every three weeks. We would have that horse available and that would, you know, if we don't have an order that is big enough that week to bleed all of the animals for that week. We don't bleed them all, but so we would, we would run them in, up, up a race, get them all prepared, put them in a special horse crush and they eat, they're eating, so it's pretty good for them. So I guess it's like having a milkshake when you give blood yourself. They, they just stand there and we, we put a very big needle which is attached to a long tube into a 10 liter bag and collect, collect the blood. We weigh the blood so we know how much is in there. And we have to defibrinate the blood, which means clot it, but without it becoming a big blob of jelly. We actually have to agitate it so that the Fibrin, which forms the clot, forms a spongy clump, really about as big as your fist. And then in, in our little lab, we can pour that blood out and it's just red blood cells in serum. And that will stay liquid forever because the fibrin's gone now. And we pull that together in bags, which we then pour into bottles or bags for our customers. So, and it's the same process for a sheep, but, you know, 50 kilo sheep you could take 500 meals out of. So it's the same sort of, same sort of thing. And, or if we have to make plasma, then we would collect it into an anticoagulant that's already in the bag and that would stop it from clotting. And you might sell it as whole blood that's not clotted, or you might get rid of the red blood cells and sell the plasma. Or if you let it clot and then get rid of the clot and the red blood cells, you'll have serum. So that's another product. So just depends what people ask for. So we might send out, you know, 15 little boxes of blood all around to universities and, and companies, as well as all the big 40 liter eskys that we send each week out to all over the place for our bigger customers. But yeah, and it all has to be that. The really cool thing, John, is that we are really trying to have a microbially healthy soil so that we can have healthy plants, healthy animals. The blood's good. And then when we collect the blood, it has to be perfectly sterile. And not even one bacteria or fungal spore or mold spore or anything can come from the, when you put the needle in the animal to when it goes out to the customer. It has to be perfectly sterile. But the reason most of our blood is, is made is to make it into blood agar plates, which then grow microbes that are unhealthy ones. So that's, that's the really cool overarching progression of our, of our product. We're going from healthy microbes to, to diagnose unhealthy ones in, in humans. So if you, if you have, if you're coughing up sputum or if you have an infected bladder and you give your doctor a sample, they can spread it out on our little blood agar plate and incubate it. And the bacteria that are causing the issue, it can grow in their little colonies and they can look at it and they might be different color or they might, they might make the Blood go clear or green tinge around the little colony. And they can, they can get those bacteria and grow them in a broth so they can get enough to get DNA to test it or whatever. Um, but it's disease diagnosis at, at the far end of the, the healthy soil microbes. I, I think that's pretty cool.

And you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation that you are also beginning to produce antibodies. And this is, I think, an area that everyone should be interested in, or at least it's an area that I'm very interested in because, you know, there's, there's some fascinating research. It was, I want to say it was published back in the early 1900s, 20s, 30s, maybe 40s. I couldn't say exactly when on this idea of producing immunotherapy quality milk, or, or rather, I think it might have been called superimmune milk, where the idea was that if, if an individual, if a human is diseased, they can pull a blood sample with that microorganism and inject it into a cow and then harvest a dry cow that's six to eight weeks away from giving birth, then collect that colostrum and collect the milk, and the cow will produce antibodies that we can then consume. And I know Jerry Burnetti treated his, his first case of cancer successfully with this as a therapy. And so I've always been intrigued by how our bodies produce antibodies, how mammals in general produce antibiotics, and how we might think about that as the foundations of our immune system and supporting that a bit better. So, yeah, I'd love to get your perspective on what is involved in producing antibodies.

Well, really all you're doing is immunizing them with a protein of interest. So it might be. We have made antibodies for a company that checks whether a meat being sold into a supermarket is what it says it is. So that they would, they got us to make, they would send us the protein that they were looking for and we injected into our horses over a period until they built up enough antibodies to be worth collecting. When we would send that back to them, they could use those antibodies to cross check. So if someone was selling what they said was beefsteak, but they could check whether it was actually beefsteak or whether it was actually camel or something else. So they really. Or if we inject snake venom.