Episode 149: Farming, Fashion, and Biodynamics with Cate Havstad-Casad

Hi, friends. Welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast. This is John and I have all kinds of fun here on the show, having conversations about soil health and plant health and human health and how we regenerate those and how we regenerate our supply chains, how we regenerate rural communities, how we regenerate the connections and the relationships between humans, people, the landscape, ecosystems. And today, I'm very honored to have a guest who I've had the privilege of meeting and sharing the stage with a couple of years ago at rfsi. Kate Havstad Kassad. Kate, thank you for being here and thank you for the work that you're doing on your operation.

Yeah, thank you, John. I'm really thrilled to be here, and I've really enjoyed your podcast over the years, and I've gleaned a lot of knowledge and camaraderie just virtually through your episodes. So very glad to be here.

That's quite a compliment. Gleaning camaraderie through a podcast episode is a remarkable achievement. I'll take that as a win.

Absolutely. Yeah.

So, Kate, I've learned that I can't possibly do justice in an introduction to people's story and the context of their operation. And so I'd love for you tell us a little bit about your farming operation, your personal context, and your journey. What is it that. What's the scope of the work that you're working on today and what brought you here?

So I would say my journey in farming and ranching I'll go way back to when I was in college and I worked for a biodynamic winery. I was going to UC Santa Cruz, and I'm a very proud slug, and I worked at a biodynamic winery. And that was when I was first introduced to that esoteric area of. Of biodynamics. And I started to understand this concept of terroir. And I started. Actually, what really hooked me was we went out to one of the vineyards that Bonnie Doon managed in the San Juan Batista area of Central California, and they had a small vegetable garden there, and they had a trial where they had done, you know, biodynamic practices on this one plot, adjacent to another plot that they used just basic organic practices, and they had us do a tomato testing. And, you know, a good tomato is like a different species from a bad tomato.

Yep, exactly.

And it's not that the organic tomato that had not seen in biodynamic practices was terrible, but there was something that could be tasted in that biodynamic tomato. That was enough for me to be like, you know what, I'm listening, I'm paying attention. I, I went on to then travel around the country with a touring farm to table organization called Outstanding in the Field. And that was a unique experience. I was in my early 20s and we considered ourselves liaisons between the farm and the diners. And I got to know a lot of these different farms and ranchers all around the western United States. And I got to see a lot of different models of how things were being done. Fast forward a few years after I completed that chapter of life. I ended up in Bend, Oregon, and I met who is now my husband, Chris Cassad. And I went to his farm to buy some honey. I was apprenticing to be a custom western hat maker. And we did a trade and I made him a custom hat and he offered me a season long CSA at his farm. And I started volunteering on the farm every Wednesday for harvest, wash pack for the farmers markets. And that is really when I immersed in agriculture. I fell in love with that farm. He was also practicing biodynamics. And this was back in 2013. I didn't know many people who even knew what that word was. And I mean, his farm was teeming with life and joy. That's the best way I can put it. And it was called Juniper Jungle Farm. And I have to admit, it was very jungle. Like it was untamed, there were weeds. And I just kind of loved everything about it. And I found that when I spent time there, I felt the most like myself. And so I made him my boyfriend and then I made him my husband. And here we are today. And that farm, you know, neither of us come from farming families, at least in recent generations, so we consider ourselves first generation. And he started on three acres there at Juniper Jungle Farm of leased land. And today we're managing about 1400 acres. So it's been, you know, 11 years of brick by brick expanding. And we've seen huge change in our business models. We've seen huge change in our water allotments. We've seen thus huge changes in our farming model because of water. So that, that is where we are today. We've transitioned from being largely, you know, vegetable, organic vegetable operation to today we do a very small amount of organic vegetable production and we do a lot of holistic planned grazing grain production, the raising of cattle and hogs for a direct to consumer meat program.

All right. There's a lot there to unpack. I know. I have a feeling there's an interesting story There around the water. Allotment. Allotment. And how that changed your. Your farming operation. But before that, how. Tell us a little bit of the story. How do you go from 3 acres to 1400 acres? And what were. What were some of the critical inflection points at which your business model changed?

So I would say, you know, in those early years, Chris was just learning how to do production farming, and it was, you know, a CSA model and it was farmers markets. And I would say that really held on as the model until about 2014. In 2015, he got his first wholesale potato contract with Deschutes Brewery, which has a few pub restaurants in the region. And that was when the farm started expanding its acreage. So it went from, say, maybe 5 acres at that time to like 25 acres. And so it really was parcel by parcel. And it was that wholesale opportunity in the. In the potato realm that started to expand management. At the time, the farm was located just outside of Bend, Oregon, and Bend, Oregon is our main market. But like many places similar, you know, the land is quite fractured. So by the time, by 2017, the Potato Contract kept growing, but we were spread across five or six different leases that were all very small, 10, 15 acre parcels. And that gets very difficult to make efficient just from moving equipment around to harvest and moving the potatoes. I think in the early days, we counted it, and we probably touched each potato 10 times from field to finished product. Right. Like, just terribly inefficient. And we just did it. So in 2017, kind of acknowledging the opportunity, we started looking elsewhere for farmland and we moved the farm to Madras, Oregon, which is 50 miles north of Bend. But it is the largest, second largest irrigation district in all of Oregon. It is really where the professional farming community lies. It's slightly lower in elevation, so we have a longer growing season, better for those crops. And we were able to acquire an 85 acre farm that was already certified organic up here. So, yeah, we. We moved the farm in 2017 to Madras. We had the 85 acre, which we call home farm. It was already certified organic, but it had been sort of neglected in a sense. And then so since 2017, it's been a really interesting part of our journey. I mean, this area, I think both what we're seeing everywhere, like, you know, aging population of farmers, but also a region like this that is losing its irrigation waters. It's not an area young people are flocking to for opportunity. So what that leaves is it leaves us and a lot of aging landowners and a lot of opportunity to take over leases. And, you know, I'll say, when we moved here, this is. There's a lot of, you know, just conventional agriculture that happens here. This district in Jefferson county used to produce over 60% of the world's carrot seeds.

Wow.

Huge carrot seed production area. A lot of grass seed production happening here. But again, as water has shifted here, those markets have dwindled.

But what has happened with water?

Yeah, this is a giant rabbit hole. You know, I'll say it's part driven by drought, but it is hugely driven by the water politics of the West. To sum up, like, you know, the dilemma of the western water law, these areas were founded based on kind of seniority. What district was founded first? And so Central Oregon Irrigation District, which is towards the Bend and Redmond area, highly populated, very developed, very fractured. It was one of the earliest irrigation districts founded in, like, 1901 north unit irrigation district, which is where we now live, which is very much. It's the second largest irrigation district in all of Oregon. Highly productive ag land. It was founded, say, I think it was like, around 1913. So that seniority system of western water law means that even areas that have become highly fractured and aren't really professional farming districts anymore, they are the first in line to get water. So in years where, you know, there's less snowpack, there's just less water to be allocated, we are the first to get cut. And so our cuts when we moved here in 2017, we just couldn't have imagined how bad it would get. The cuts started in maybe 2019, but at the height of our water allotment cuts, you know, we had lost 80% of our irrigation waters.

That is crippling.

It is crippling. You know, and we live in an arid, high desert region. You know, average precipitation is 10 to 11 inches. So, like, we rely on irrigation water. We're highly efficient with our irrigation waters. But again, this is like, this is big work that will, you know, take big policy change, I think, to adjust how we approach which water allocation in the West. So when faced with that, you understand crippling allotment, we had big, hard decisions to make. We had spent 10 years building the market, the infrastructure, acquiring the equipment, everything to do potatoes at scale. But we understood that if we were to try and bring the potato crop to fruition, we would be essentially following 70% of our acreage to do that. And that left us not only ecologically misaligned with our ethos, but from a business perspective, that's way too vulnerable to be relying on that Single crop. And so in 2021, I got to work to really build a new business model for us that would allow us to transition from reliance on those row crop veggies to more of a holistic grazing model where we believed we could use the very little water we have to keep all of our acreage covered in, you know, a growing canopy and convert that kind of solar power in different ways.

And so that brings you. So you started that in 21. How. What was the timeline like until you were. Well, let's flash forward to today. What's the scope of. How much meat are you processing and selling, and how much of that goes through your retail brand at this point?

Yeah, so, I mean, we're 100% reliant now on the meat sales to really drive the economics of the farm business. You know, we have four different markets, really, or ways that we sell our beef on our pork. We have a direct to consumer box program where we both ship to California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. We have a home delivery service we started in Bend, Oregon. We have a couple of kind of small boutique grocer outlets, and then we do have some wholesale restaurant accounts for the pork specifically. So it's been growing every year. And, you know, I. There's a couple ways to approach growing a meat business in 2021 and 2022. I thought nationwide box sales and shipping across the country was going to be the best, fastest way to scale. It is the fastest way to scale. But I honestly, I came home from a festival called the Old Salt Festival in Helmville, Montana.

Yeah, I was there a couple years.

Ago, you know, just magical. And what Cole and his team's mission is is to, you know, raise Montana beef to feed Montana families. And he wants 5,000 Montana families. And I came home from that festival, and I was like, you know What? We live 50 minutes from Bend, Oregon, which has an affluent population of 120,000 people. Can we just capture 500 families? Like, can. Can we just feed 500 families in our region? And that became my driving mission, is to funnel as much as I could of our shipping program to our home delivery program.

About a dozen questions that I would like to ask, but you know, what you've done. There are many growers, many farmers, who are often farmers because they enjoy being out in the field, not particularly because they enjoy selling or interacting with people. And so you've done a good job of marketing that and getting it out there. How have you. What has. What have you found to be most successful from a marketing perspective in building and establishing that business.

You know, I'll say we had a bit of an advantage because, you know, we had a presence at farmers markets and we had a presence in Bend, Oregon as vegetable growers previous to the meat business. So while the name of the farm changed, we've been around feeding people for 12 years. So but in growing, we still had to grow the audience significantly. You know, we played around with paid, paid advertising. And that does work. You know, creating content that makes, that opens the doors, kind of peels back the curtains and lets people actually see what we do here and, and why we do what we do. I think that works and connects with people. I'll be totally honest, which is that I had a bit of an existential crisis this January and really decided that I didn't want to pay Meta for advertising for the farm anymore. And so again, we're in another pivot, which is how do we build an advertising model based on our customer base in person farmers markets again, and just more word of mouth reliance in our community. Because I just morally am feeling quite conflicted about paying Meta.

Yeah, I completely understand that you might want to explore and have a conversation with what Jason Malk was doing when he was running his, his butcher and meat business, where they actually, they used meet as a school fundraiser protocol. So they rent all kinds of school fundraisers selling meat and they got the community involved and built a large audience and community engagement in an incredible way. He was extremely successful.

I love that. I love that. I would love to talk to him.

Be happy to connect you. So. So I have so many questions that I want to ask you, but you, you have a very, you have a much less common or quite uncommon perspective, being that both you and your husband are first generation and you started at a very small scale, have built this up over time, and I'm not even sure of the questions to ask, but I'd like to draw out. What are your insights or perspectives that people who don't have that context, who don't have that story, might not understand? What, what insights have you gleaned about what is different about your perspective than people who might have been embedded in the space for a long time?

I think about this often as far as the pros and cons that we face as first generation, because I have many friends and peers who are, say, fifth generation. And I used to sort of lament like, you know, certain growing challenges we wouldn't have had to face if we had had mothers or fathers or grandparents to guide us in other ways. We have very Open mindsets, because we have not been, you know, indoctrinated with any one way of thinking about how to do things.

I think the fact that you pivoted from vegetables to potatoes and now to livestock production, a matter of a decade, is testament to that alone. I mean, I know there's very few established operations that would have the mental fluidity to accomplish that.

I think I'm an entrepreneur in my. Like, I know I'm an entrepreneur at my core. And so I think both, I think entrepreneurs in any field and I think great producers, our profession is to pivot. Like, we're constantly pivoting, whether it's the growing plan or, you know, it's just different. The farm and the land is our canvas. But I think that fluidity has been our strength. And, you know, the. A little bit of, like, youthful ignorance is also helpful in not knowing just how hard it's going to be. That has been helpful, too. There's been no older generation to be like, do you understand how hard it's going to be to rebuild an entire new market? I didn't even think about it. I just saw that it's what we had to do, and so we got to work.

Well, there's a lot to be said for that. But I did derail, I think, your original thought process a little bit when I asked you the question. So in addition to just going back to that, in addition to this fresh perspective, what are some of the other observations or experiences that are original to you?

Because you are original, I think, in the context of, again, seeing how things are being done out here in this region, because we've had to be so bootstrapped and so scrappy every step of the way. We never relied on inputs, right. We always used the crop rotations and the grazing and the manure as our fertility program. So, you know, organics was just sort of a given for us. So that's one thing I think. You know, again, stepping into Chris's first farm and the diversity that he had and also, like, his ability to just, like, a little bit of that chaos that comes with, like, letting weeds happen. I understand there's certain farm contexts if you're growing seeds for the seed market, like, you can't have that. But in our context, it was okay. And the more I learned about weeds from, like, Nicole Masters, the more I realized, like, every single plant has its place in it. It's playing a role in the system. And if you pay attention and listen, it's either bringing essential nutrients from very deep ground in the soil up or it's telling you this is a highly compacted area and you need to deal with that compaction or you likely have a calcium deficiency here. So I think those are some ways where like we are just a little bit unconventional and, and that's actually served us, you know, for example, I'll give you a tangible example. We, we wanted to grow grain crop for the hogs. So we're, we've been working for years to become a closed loop farm system whereby all the feed that our animals are raised on, we produce. So we don't import fertility, we don't export or impact, we don't import feed, we grow our feed and that feed system becomes something that contributes to keeping the soil covered and is a beneficial part of the program. But you know, we'll plant a diverse grain crop in the fall and we will come in in the early spring with the cattle at the right time and let them do a very quick condensed graze of that grain crop at the right time. We have found that once we let that grow out and go to seed, we have a higher yield on that field than if we had not come in and grazed early in the season with the cattle. Most grain growers, you know, maybe aren't practicing something like that, but that's something that we experimented with.

More likely they would run.