Episode 175: Wild-Range Metabolomics and Nutrient Density with Glenn Elzinga

Hi friends, this is John. Welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast where we have all kinds of fun conversations related to regenerating soil health and plant health and public health. It's quite an honor to have Glenn Elzinga join me here on the podcast. Many times you're familiar with, I do an introduction, allow people to kind of introduce themselves. This time Glenn and I were connected, started having a conversation, and the conversation immediately went from basic introductions and how are yous into this awesome conversation about cattle psychology, some of the things that Glen is working on, things that he's thinking about. And I realized that I need to get the record button pressed and we need to start recording this awesome conversation. So we just simply jumped directly into a conversation. We didn't give a great deal of introduction to Glen's operation. Glen, of course, is very widely known in the livestock grazing space, but for those of you not familiar with his operation, Glenn and his family operate Elder Spring Ranch, and you can find a lot more information available about them online than I can tell you very briefly. But the important part, Glenn is working on some very interesting things related to livestock handling and management that I think you'll find very fascinating. Without any further ado, here's Glenn.

I've been at this 34 years, and the stuff I'm still picking up is, uh, you know, stuff that is life-changing revelations. And a lot of it is just from looking at the land and looking at the cattle. But, you know, I've been bumping into some of these stockmanship things. You know, we could talk about some of these things like this cortisol thing and cattle. And oh gosh, it just— it has taken me to brand new places. And I don't have answers, I just got questions, John. So I should be actually interviewing you.

Well, for some of the questions you might have, I may not be the person that has the answers.

Well, I'm sure, and that is the interesting thing about the regenerative space. I was brought up working on very conventional farms of every shape and size, all the way from corn and soybeans to produce to orchards. Using chemicals all the time. That was my childhood growing up. And, you know, the thing about the regenerative space that's different from that is like everybody in commodity agriculture, not everybody, but most people in commodity agriculture follow this formulaic way of doing business. I don't care if you're an orchard, I don't care if you're growing sod or corn or soybeans. And then, you get into the regenerative space and it's the Wild West.

There is no formula, that's for sure.

Yeah, everybody's doing something different, you know. And so you can go to somebody's place like the Alexander's place, and I know I'm gonna learn stuff. Hey, I never thought about that before. And it's because for them, it's just like me, you're opening a new box every day, and it's like, wait, I didn't even know that was in there. And it's because we can, and it's because by definition that's what we do. And, um, And that's why it's fun. And that's why, you know, we're seeing burnout in conventional ag and, you know, people getting disillusioned and hopelessness. So anyway, and you're bringing a lot of hope to people and asking the questions that actually create more questions for them. And that's just what we want. That's the beautiful thing.

That is one of the things that I've learned. I think one of the most, I don't know if I would call it the most underrated skill, but perhaps the underappreciated skill, or one that I've learned to appreciate, is the ability to ask the right questions. And it's actually one of my biggest frustrations at times has been when I have been here as a podcast host and, or not even, or even just in conversation. And I recognize that I'm having a conversation with someone who is not necessarily genius, but who is very wise, who is rich in experience and rich in knowledge, who is a walking encyclopedia, and I'm not smart enough to know the right question to ask. That can be very, that can be very frustrating when I recognize— and I've had conversations with a few individuals like this who I mean, they're the classic example of a walking encyclopedia, but they also didn't volunteer information. You had to be smart enough to know the question to ask in order to find the answer. And yeah, that's, that's a frustrating experience when you recognize that here are people who are on the edge of being geniuses and you can't draw out what they have within them because you don't know the subject that they know.

You know, and I think a lot of it, John, and correct me if I'm wrong, I think it's paradigm. You know, I think when you're in a paradigm and you don't see, you know, say it's this dish on the table, the fruit bowl is now empty. You're in that fruit bowl and you can't see out, you can't see over the sides. And so all of your thoughts revolve around your life in the fruit bowl and you really can't see out of it. You think the fruit bowl is life. So until somebody like knocks over the fruit bowl or, you know, shoots a fire hose of water in there to get you to wanna climb out, drowning. I mean, that's what happened to a lot of us in conventional ag. You know, I was pretty conventional on our cattle business and there were certain times where somebody came along and started clubbing me over the head and I was not gonna survive the clubbing. Unless if I pulled away and said, wait, we need to think about this differently. You know what I mean? So I see this in crop agriculture all the time. I got many relatives in the Midwest, you know, they're fantastic farmers, you know? And for them, the tweak because of the paradigm is, you know what, I'm gonna switch to anhydrous. I'm gonna switch to anhydrous. I'm gonna do the switch. And I know it's dangerous and I know people get hurt, but I'm gonna go to anhydrous, or I'm not gonna take my corn to the elevator anymore. I'm gonna build a bin. And for them, those are the shifts that their brilliance gets attention to. You know what I mean? These hacks within that system, but they can't see outside the bowl. And until something abruptly, you know, say we pulled the entire subsidy off the business of commodity crops, cotton, corn, you know, soybeans, you say we pulled the subsidies off that, that would be a fire hose in a bowl for people. It would just blow them right out of there. And either they just quit or they, the genius would kick in, John. It would kick in for a lot of them.

And then you're—

Glenn, you want me to—

You are so spot on. The genius would kick in because necessity is the mother of invention. And you know, there's this question, uh, as I've been at a number of conferences this winter, people ask me to talk about agricultural economics and the history of agricultural economics and how we got to this place. We recognize we were in a very different place 70 or 80 years ago. How do we get— first of all, reminding us what that used to look like. And bringing it flash forward to today, you know, my grandfather served as a conscientious objector during the Second World War, and he came home at the end of the war. He was 28 years old. He married, got married, bought a farm, paid for it in 4 years.

Wow.

And you go back and look at the history, and there was this entire era, late '40s, '50s, '60s, many farms were paid for in a 5 to 7 year time period depending on where you were in the country and what crops you were growing and so forth. And the challenge that I've— I really like the framing of a question that Peter Thiel often asks investee companies. You have a 10-year goal. If you had to achieve the 10-year goal in 6 months, how would you do it? And it's a fascinating question because you can't achieve a 10-year goal in 6 months by going faster or by going harder. You have to do something different.

Exactly.

And so the challenging question I've been asking people, and when I'm asked to talk about this topic, is if you had to pay for your farm in 5 to 7 years, how would you do it? Because I personally believe— well, I don't believe, I've got lots of evidence that it is still possible. I know many people who are producing revenue and profitability to that extent, but they're not doing it on commodity crops, obviously.

Yeah, those are good questions. I'm going to think about the Thiel question. Yeah. You know, for us, it wasn't Peter Thiel asking us, it was the club over the head. You know, it was survive or die. And if you're going to survive, you had to be innovators. You had to be, you had to make the right choices and innovate. And, you know, and you had to be willing to make mistakes because there is far more mistakes than positive features, which created profitability ultimately. So it is a tough place. And, you know, I was talking about a good friend of mine. He worked on our ranch for 10 years, and, uh, you know, he was always listening to stuff like Peter Thiel. He was always listening to, um, you know, David Ramsey, small business, um, creation and, um, creating passive income streams. So you can go over here and create a new business, and, you know, he's possibly selling that business, creating a new business over here. He's really into small business, and, um, And I'm just wondering about it because I was talking to him the other day and he's really struggling. He bought a small processing plant here in Idaho and he processes chickens. He's doing a great job, but I could tell just by talking to him, you know, he's been at this now for 10 or 12 years. He's struggling for cash. And I'm wondering what, you know, with all that knowledge he had, and I know he still invests in a lot of time, you know, he listens to a lot of podcasts, he reads a lot of books. You know, he's got the business hacks, John, you know, he's, and, and I thought, I said to my wife Carol, I said, so I think he's got all the right ideas. He's thinking right. But is it that he still is in the business of cheap food and trying to add value to an already cheap product that people aren't used to paying more for? I mean, think of chicken. You can go to Costco and you can get a whole chicken for like $2. You know, that's already cooked. You know, when they're on sale, you can walk out of Costco or a lot of grocery stores and get a broasted chicken that they've prepared for you. They've seasoned it, they've done everything. You can haul it out of there for a few dollars. And when we were selling chicken, we used to have a broiler program on our ranch, a pastured poultry operation, kind of à la Joel Salatin, you know. And, uh, we were raising not that many, you know, it was like 600 birds a year. And, um, John, I couldn't make a pencil for less than, you know, like $25 a whole broiler. I could not make it work for less than $25 to put that in a box and ship it all across the country, maintain a web store, keep the dry ice flowing, have the employees stuff it in a box, get the insulation, maintain a freezer, maintain all those infrastructures. I couldn't make it. Work for less than $25. And we sold out, we sold out. But yet right across the street, you know, figuratively, you have this ability for somebody to buy a chicken for $3.

This story is the perfect encapsulation of the last 80 years of our cheap food policy. And actually, you know what makes it an even better contrast, Clinton, is the story of cheap chicken versus your grass-fed steak. It's a complete inversion of the reality that used to exist prior to about 1950s or thereabout.

Yes.

Um, I think I may have first heard this from Joel, but, um, he spoke about how— and I've read the history as well— Franklin Roosevelt's second presidential campaign slogan was 'a chicken in every pot.' It was Because at the time, chicken was the expensive meat. Beef was cheap because beef could be pre-grown on grass and on rangeland. Chicken required grain, right? And so that was the beginning of the federal level of a cheap food policy, and it was the beginning of significant incentivization of grain production and this entire system which is now developed all of these tremendous societal externalities, the public health costs, the subsidies. I mean, you know, what is intriguing to me is looking at— I've now been in agriculture, um, I'm half your age. I've been around and paying attention for about 20 years, and I don't know how many farmers are really paying attention and are really aware But the public perception of farmers used to be, if you looked at Consumer Trust Index, it was farmers were trusted at the top levels, right along with the clergy. And they are sliding fast because they are being perceived as welfare recipients. They are dependent on welfare. Now you could make the argument that a large degree of that has been deliberately created, policy created, that people have been, farmers and producers have been guided down this pathway by federal policy. That I think you could make an argument for that, but it doesn't change the reality of what currently exists.

It doesn't. I think the other part of it too though, John, is that, um, for us, one of the standing principles on the whole direct market paradigm for us is we, we need to establish customers that know, love, and trust us, and we need to know, love, and trust them as well. It's, it's a mutual, it's, it goes both ways. And I think that because of the commodification of the food system, there is no knowledge, there's no loving, and there's no trusting. There's no association, you know, and we have the stereotypes of, you know, we think milk comes from the grocery store, we think meat comes from the grocery store. Those, you know, and those things, you know, may or may not be true. But the fact of the matter is they do have no knowledge of the land from which that came or the family from which that came. So, it isn't only, you know, I think not everybody is aware of the subsidization of the thing, but they are totally aware that they have no idea. Have no idea whether this steak came from Brazil or Argentina or Paraguay, Australia, or maybe a United States feedlot. And then the perception of feedlots itself is a toxic thing for a lot of people. They, they've seen them, you know, you can't hide a feedlot, you know, nicely.

Most of 'em are in Kansas and you only need to experience them once to develop an opinion.

One time, one time. It, it like, and that's actually what got off a, us off the commodity train. It was that one day in Kansas, we're traveling west on I-70 and it's pouring down rain and we're driving an old Chevy Suburban where we just came from our, um, Carol's in— Carol's folks, my in-laws in Indiana. We helped them with corn harvest every year. And before that, we just loaded our calves on a truck, our calf crop, you know, it was about 200 calves, 2 semi-loads. We sent them off and my kids helped me and it was all wonderful. And, you know, we raised those calves through the season and put 'em on the range and put 'em on some of the best grass on earth and raise these super healthy cows. And we're going through Kansas on I-70 and it's pouring. And my daughter says to me, Dad? Yeah, honey, what is that smell? What is that smell? It's horrible. And I said, well, don't open your window, but we're passing a big feedlot right now. And she said, you mean where they feed calves? I said, yeah, yeah. And she said, can I just roll down my window for a second? I said, well, it's just gonna make the smell worse. And she said, I'm not trying to deal with the smell. I just wanna look and see because, you know, the windows are rain streaked. And I said, sure, go for it. She rolls down the window and she just stares out there. And this is one of these deals. They must be feeding like 70,000 head or 100,000 head or something. John, it was unforgettable because it'd been pouring down rain there apparently for a couple of days. And there's these calves out there and they're literally belly deep in mud, just belly deep in fecal mud. And my daughter is smart enough to know that it's fecal mud. You know, obviously we can smell it. And, and she just stares out the window for a while, and then I hear her roll up the window. We drive for a while, another few miles, and she says, Dad, are our calves in there? And I said, no, they're not. And she said, you told me they went to Kansas. I said, yeah, but there's many of these things in Kansas. And she said, so our calves could be in a situation just like those calves. I said, yeah, they could be. I can't lie to you. And I just turned to my wife and her eyes were already there. I'm looking at her and her eyes are already there waiting. And I said to her, never again. Never again. So, people have that kind of imagery in a lot of their minds. Maybe they haven't seen it as bad as we have, but just from this visceral animal husbandry feeling that some of us have when we see cattle like that in a situation of confinement, especially those of us who've been around cattle, I mean, it pulls the trigger. So, it's pretty complicated, but I do believe that people don't trust people in agriculture anymore. And this, this is why this thing's happening right now. I think, you know, um, Trump, Trump says these things that, you know, hey, we're gonna lower beef prices. And you know what? My neighbors hate that. They hate that because they feel like for once in their lives, their cow-calf operations are finally in the black, finally in the black, you know, after years and years of waiting. I think Jim Garris told me once that 1972 was the last time this happened. And cattle prices weren't, you know, they weren't around $4, but everything else was super low. You could buy a pickup for what, $2,000 or something like that. Labor was, you know, in the single digits, like around $1 to $2. So all things pretty equal, Jim was like, no, this happened before. It was in 1972. So meanwhile, you know, we waited, what is that, 50 years, 53 years since that time for it to happen again. Here we are. And my neighbors are going crazy when Trump says we're gonna lower beef prices because they feel like for once in their lifetime, after 50 years, they're finally finding a little bit in the black. They're a little bit in the black. They're not harvesting their equity anymore. You know, and they're not increasing their size or credit line based on equity increase because all agricultural land in the country is increasing in equity value. So these bankers, they love it and say, hey, we could give you a higher operating because your equity's improved. You're doing a great job. Your equity's improved. Even though they have nothing to do with it, John, you know what I mean? Yeah. I mean, it's because farmland appreciation for us, it's recreational value appreciation. We live in a beautiful country of just big mountains and snowy crested mountain vistas with green grass underneath and people love it and they're willing to spend a ton of money for it. And so as a result, land appreciation is just exponential. And these bankers say, "Hey, we love your equity position.

Do you want more money?" That was what precipitated the 1980s farm crisis. Getting farmers comfortable with increased credit.

No, and I remember it, John, you know, neighbors, Carol's neighbors had airplanes. These guys grew corn and beans. They had airplanes. They bought airplanes because they could. They could just borrow the money and, you know, corn was okay and they could buy airplanes. It was an exciting time. In just a little bit.

There's another contributing factor to a rapid erosion of trust of agriculture, and this is a very controversial topic, but since we are embracing controversial topics, I'll just rip the can off— rip the lid off the can of worms. And that is the recent issue around glyphosate. Now, in Trump's executive order around glyphosate supplies, now you can have lots of conversations about the incentives around that and how that all came to be. But the reality is, Maha, the people who care about public health, the people who are awake and are paying attention, and there are tens of millions of them more today than there were 5 years ago, yes, are ticked. Heck yeah, they are ticked. And they go on social media and say that they see farmers universally defending the use of glyphosate. And not defending the use of glyphosate, that's not quite the right framing, but in complete denial that glyphosate has any human health impacts. And so there isn't— the polarities are so opposed and so far apart from each other that it's difficult to have even a reasoned conversation to say, yes, we understand that agriculture today is in a spot of dependency and that there is a need for transition. But also, we shouldn't deny the fact that there are human health implications because— and anyway, it's that whole conversation You know, reminds me— this reminds me of a quote from Charlie Munger. Charlie said something to the effect of, you have no right to have an opinion unless you can articulate the opposing point of view better than the opposition. And yeah, and I think if consumers were able— and they don't have the experience, the context, many of them— but if they were able to walk a mile in the footsteps of a farmer, they would have more sympathy for the dependency on glyphosate that many growers have. And vice versa, if farmers were willing to authentically, without bias, actually look at the real data that is published in the peer-reviewed literature. I mean, there's a simple reality. Why does Bayer keep losing lawsuits?

It's pretty clear.

Yeah. If there were clearly no evidence for glyphosate causing harm, then Bayer would never lose.

Yeah. Or why do those same companies try to set up legislative protection? You know, we've had a bill in our state in Idaho that failed, thankfully, for legislative protection. You can't sue these companies, um, for glyphosate claims, you know, as regarding human health. So, I mean, that to me is very clear that they must see an issue here.

Well, that is an aspect. That's another consideration of farmers destroying public trust is because they're not even willing— they have this inherent bias because they feel that it's dependency. And so they're not even willing to consider the opposing point of view and actually look at the raw source information and develop their own unbiased opinion.

Right. And the consumers are seeing this. They're seeing farmers trying to get these bills sponsored. They're the ones who are doing it. You know, they're, you know, actually lackeys.

You know why they are out there by the chemical companies? You know why? Because the chemical companies are not stupid. And they know that farmers historically have rated extremely high on the Consumer Trust Index.

Yes.

Rated right up there with clergy. So if you're a pharmaceutical company or if you're an agribusiness company, who better to get to represent your interests than farmers and persuade them that it is in their best interest to represent you?

Yeah, Idaho is still a pretty rural, um, state. In fact, a lot of the legislators who are trying to promote that legislation were farmers. I mean, the people in the Senate, you know, state congressionals, they are farmers. I know these guys personally. They're the ones pushing for this bill of legislative protection of immunity for these companies. And you got non, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma over here. And it's like, yes, this is really happening. It's been tried and true and tested in courtroom over and over again. And there's a whole bunch of settlements that have already occurred. And it's like, what are we even doing here? Why can't we even ask the question? That, that's what I want to ask is why can't we even ask the question about why can't we wait and see what science says about this?

Well, why can't we—

has already said, why do, why do we even wanna gamble human health here? Yeah. You know, why, why would we just say, oh wait, we trust these companies. The non-Hodgkin's lymphoma suits are invalid. We're gonna disregard them. But why not say, hey, wait, this might be a human health issue. Let's check it out first. And instead we've gone the, we've gone the opposite direction. And, uh, No, that, that, you know, I'm actually involved with some of the Maha stuff and right now I can't even sort out, um, what side people are on because, you know, on one hand, you know, from the farmer's side, like I said, I, you know, I have relatives in the corn and bean, corn and bean business, um, who depend on glyphosate. They got Roundup Ready corn, they got Roundup Ready beans, you know, when they're doing it off prop like alfalfa, they got Roundup Ready alfalfa. And their whole infrastructure has been built around this one chemical. And so now do we just pull the rug out from under them and say it's over? Hey, the party's over. And meanwhile, I don't even know what their alternative is. Is it going back to atrazine? For some people it is. Some people are night spraying dicamba. Some states are legislating dicamba. So, I mean, what are we going to do, John? You know, I mean, if you jerk the rug out from under him, do John Kempf get a whole bunch of phone calls about how to set this up? You know, I mean, what, you know, there's no easy answers here.

No, there are no easy answers and there needs to be a transition there. It isn't appropriate to do a rug pull, as it were. And also it doesn't work to ignore the conversation, stick our heads in the sand and hope it goes away and gets better on its own.

It's not our fault that bear bought Monsanto. Might have been a bad investment. I think they're thinking it over. So, oh, it would— it truly—

when I looked at that deal going through, like, who did the due diligence on that?

Who didn't do the due diligence on that? It's like, who have you been talking to? What kind of bubble have you been working? Anyway, I sprayed my share of Roundup when I was a kid with— As did I. Cut-offs on and just pair of work boots, hot humid weather, East Coast cornfields. We just Roundup the crap out of everything that was emergent. I drank a fair share of it. Thank God I'm not looking at non-Hodgkin's, but I do worry about it.

This is not a worthwhile brag, but I think I can one-up your story that I sprayed Roundup with a backpack sprayer barefoot.

Oh, barefoot. See, I was half naked. You had a shirt. No, no, I didn't have a shirt on. It was just a pair of cutoff jeans and I did have work boots on, but I didn't, I haven't read anything that absorbance at the foot level is any, you get your bare feet in soil, I'm hoping. Well, at least dirt and, And, you know, meanwhile I'm just sweating bullets. You know, this is 99% humidity and I got fertilizer burn from the morning. We're hand spreading fertilizer in sweet corn fields and wow, it was a little bit of burn and sizzle. So certainly you and I have both been exposed to it. Thank God we don't have any symptoms yet that I know of, but we might. And the reality is that it was ubiquitous. We were all using it.

And still is. So, Glen, we've been, at some point in our conversation, I just hit the recording button because we've just, we were in this fun conversation and it was, it was too good to go to waste. But, you know, I, I didn't come from the ranching side of the world. I came from fruit and vegetable production, started working with a lot of farmers, and then I started hearing about this interesting character in Idaho named Glen Elzinga. Ray Archuleta told me I need to reach out and connect with you. Then I heard about the nutrient density analysis results that you got coming out of Utah State. And so I thought to myself, you know, I got to try these steaks. I want to know exactly what this looks like, what this tastes like, and what this is like. Do you know I couldn't get any?

I do know that. It's buying weekly, John. There is a time. And when you can get it, and it's every, every other week, and my customers all know when to push click. Um, and, uh, let's see, where are we at in the schedule? It'll be next month, Wednesday. Wednesday they'll be available again.

So they all set their alarms. I already know how this works.

No, they do, they do. And also I sent a tickler. I, I got an email news subscription, a list of about 12,000 people, and we send that out twice a week, and it coincides with the release of new product. So, and it's not like we're stockpiling. I mean, we literally sell out every 2 weeks, John. And, and these people know nothing about soil biology. Okay. They know about flavor, but they know about flavor, but they also know about health. And, you know, if, I don't know how much you pride out of Stefan van Vliet. You had him on the podcast, didn't you?

I had him here on the podcast a year, well, a couple years ago maybe at this point. And yeah, he's become a friend.

I mean, it was, It was a really landmark study. He took 18 of our steers directly off the range. My daughter and I went up there and sorted them out horseback, brought them down to some remote corrals. They went directly to the processor, and he got a piece of pectoralis profundus, which is the upper part of the chuck, off these— actually lower if you're an animal, um, and, uh, and did the same thing with 18 feedlot animals, all Angus beef, all basically the same age, you know, physiologically. They were different ages actually because the grass-fed, our grass-fed takes longer. I mean, feedlot cattle can die in 16 months, right, John? And these were probably 25. So for equal physiological maturity, just because of the lower average daily gain. That's where we arrived. So basically, same sort of cattle, and, you know, not specifically the exact same genetics, but genetic Angus. So phenotypically, they look the same, they're all black. And he compared those two types of cattle, um, in his metabolomics lab in Utah State University using spectrographic analysis. So what's crazy, I had no idea but he picked up 1,500 different compounds. Like, what he did is he made these things into patties, put 'em through a meat grinder, and, um, put these patties in an oven and took the interior temperature of these individual patties to 170 degrees or 160 degrees. It was 71 Celsius. And so, you know, what's crazy about it, John, is these things were cooked Yep. And normally we associate cooking with volatilization, caramelization, compound change, if not full loss due to volatilization and denaturing. So anyway, I'm sure he lost some of the complexity there, but he wanted to emulate something that we would ingest. So anyway, did, did, did a cooking way beyond what I'd want. I don't know if you're a medium rare guy or if you you're a well-done guy, but you know, 160 degrees, too hot for me. I like to go 138, 139, somewhere in there, you know, have a nice caramelized exterior, nice, you know, pink interior. But he went way beyond pink. He's going into well-done country now. So anyway, takes these things and applies his analyses to it and comes up with 1,500 compounds in each of these samples. 18 and 18, 18 from feedlot-fed DDGs in South Dakota and 18 directly from our wild ranges. And I gotta tell you something about the wild ranges, John, just so the, the listeners know. I mean, there's 2,200 plant species up there. My wife is a PhD botanist. She's the plant girl. I'm the cow guy. And she's evaluated this and checked it. There's 2,200 different plants up on this rangeland. We run on a, 70-square-mile pasture, um, that's 47,000 acres, and it's basically wilderness. Um, it's extremely wild country, a lot of elevation gradient from one end to another. Starts at 4,700 feet elevation, goes all the way almost up to 10,000. Alpine tundra at the bottom, low desert, effective precipitation at 2 to 3 inches at the bottom of that range in a canyon bottom. So what that means is with that elevation gradient, you have a huge, huge vegetative ecological gradient as well because you have all these different plant communities and ecosystems based on elevation, rainfall, aspect, the direction which the hill faces, soil types, all these things where you get huge biological diversity. So these cattle don't eat it all. Some are pine trees, some are cactus down in the low country. Um, you know, there's just things that you wouldn't picture a cow eating, and you're right in some of those. But on the other hand, I see these cattle eating up there and I'm surprised at what they're eating a lot of times. And it's all because, John, they've been given a choice. So we're on horseback up there 24/7. We live with our cattle because wolf predation, I don't know when you press that button, John Kempf, but wolf predation was one of the clubs that smacked us across the side of the head. We were losing our cattle to wolves and it was because we were not up there with them. And now with human presence on the ground, we coexist with these wolves and we haven't lost anything to wolves now for 12 years. So that's what necessitated our on-the-ground presence. So now we see ourselves as, You know, I'm a long, long-term proponent of Jim Gerrish and read his book when it first came out. I think that was the late '80s, and, um, Management Intensive Grazing was the book. And I kind of absorbed it, started practicing at home with hot wire, and I thought, you know, that really can't be something that's emulated on our rangelands because it's vast. You know, it's just an incredible amount of country, that 49,000 acres. But then I realized when the wolves got after us that because we're living with these cattle and managing them on horseback, that now we could be the grazing cell on horseback. So what's crazy, John, is I never really made this correlation, but I found out the principles are the same. The principles of growing grass and rest periods and grazing efficiency and stock density, all those things are the same principles that our irrigated ground has. You know, we irrigate pivots and wheel line irrigation on about 2,000 acres at home. There we've been practicing management-intensive grazing and active multi-paddock grazing, whatever you want to call it, for, oh gosh, it's been ever since like '93. I've been doing it. And, uh, so that's, you know, that's quite a while. That's over 30 years that we've been practicing that, those grazing principles and learning them still. We're learning them still. I just wanted to say that we never say, oh, we've arrived. But anyway, on horseback, that management-intensive grazing, that adaptive multi-paddock grazing thing is a moving amoeba going across the landscape. And because we know the country so well, you can ask my daughter, Melanie. She's my oldest. She's 32. She's been horseback up there since she was like 7. And John, you could say, Melanie, do you remember the big Douglas fir tree that's growing right next to that big boulder that's been split? And it's got the lightning streak on the black lightning streak on the right-hand side if you're looking at the rock. Do you remember that tree? And she'll say, yes, it's at the head of Park Creek. There's 55 miles of creek up there, John. And she'll remember this tree. I mean, that's, that's how much this stuff gets under your skin when you're on horseback up there with these cattle all the time. So we know the country, and as a result, then we can run this thing. We've done this with GPS and Google Earth as well. So we've, you know, absorbed a technological factor to it to kind of mirror what's in our mind. But in our minds are a map. And as a result, we've been able to manage it so that our average grazing return interval is about 3 years on any given acre, given acre of ground. And our average duration of grazing with the entire herd of 400 to 500 head is 3 minutes.

Wow. I thought you were going to say a few hours or half a day.

No, moving all the time. They're moving all the time, you know. So like, I got this one favorite slide I show often, you know, at a conference or something like that, and it's Annie, my middle-aged— my middler daughter. She's like, oh, 23 right now. She's on horseback and she brings a herd of about 400 head of cattle into this Douglas fir stand. And it's really a beautiful stand because the grass is just beautiful. It's, you know, I got a before picture. I'm just sitting on my horse. I take a, you know, these phones are amazing for these pictures. And I take a picture of this. And so you're looking at like 10 inches of available forage on the before picture. And, um, then the next picture has Annie in it and she's bringing his 400 head into that picture, into the frame. And they all get their heads down. And, uh, you can see they're walking because they're all oriented in the same direction. And, you know, if you were to take pounds of beef per acre there, I'd say you're easily a quarter million. You're probably a quarter million pounds of beef per acre. So anyway, these cattle are evidently moving because you can see their legs are stretched or, or are all oriented in the same direction. So anyway, the next picture shows nothing. There's no cattle, there's just trees and grass, and there's a residue there, probably, probably about 6-inch residual there, still all green. And I'll ask the audience, how much time? And John, I get stuff like 2 months. I'm like, how's that possible? How does it— I can't even make that work in my head, you know? And that's okay because some people come, come a little closer and they'll say an hour. 2 hours, you know, and then I say 3 minutes or 2 and a half minutes, it actually was in that picture. Um, and they're, they're, they're dumbfounded. And then I, I hit them with the rest period and it's 3 years. It's 3 years. So anyway, the reason why the long rest period is because it's rainfall. You know, if we're in a high rainfall area like where you live or our artificial rainfall areas like on our center pivots, you know, we've got 30 or 40 inches equivalent rainfall under a center pivot, we can return sometimes in 25 days. It just depends whether that grass has reached stage 3 or not, and we'll come back, you know. So anyway, you know, it's the same principles, but rainfall and brittle environments just changes the timing. So anyway, that's what we're practicing up there. So I just wanted to make that clear that they're grazing 500 to 1,000 plants in that unique environment. At home on our irrigated pastures, they're probably averaging pretty much across the board now, they're over 8% organic matter. They're all certified organic as well. They're 8% organic matter. But they're, those cattle, you know, they'll be on that piece and that's got about 80 species, which is pretty good for a temperate—

That's exceptional. Yeah.

You know, and, and, you know, I don't want people to get hung up on that, John, because it's not like I'm going to take a square meter plot and say, see, there's all 80 right here. They're right. No, that's not true because you have small profile changes. So this is like on a 200-acre pasture next to our house that my wife and I did a plant list. But it doesn't matter if they're on the same square meter. What matters is over the grazing interval, animal over that grazing rotation, you're going to pick up all that species diversity and all that plant compound richness. And so it's the plant compound richness that Stefan, coming back to Utah State, found interesting. 1,500 different plant compounds identified in both of these types of animals, the DDG animals and our wild grassland animals. And he found, I think it was, I think it was 1,525, and then 907 of those compounds were unique in terms of the differences in concentration. They were marked, marked differences. And so the best thing about it, the most exciting thing about it was that the chemicals that he discovered that were quite a bit higher in, our beef were the ones we like to hear about. They're the ones that are anti-inflammatory. They're the ones that are antimicrobial. They're the ones that are antioxidant. Like some of these antioxidants were 3 times higher. Like, there's some really esoteric names here. There's like eicosapentaenoic acid, okay? Or docosapentaenoic acid. They're, that's DPA and EPA. Okay. And we think of conjugated linoleic acid, you know, that's CLA. We think of those in, in terms of acronyms, mostly in terms of 3-letter abbreviations, but they're key antioxidants. And they averaged, I think it was 4 to 6 times higher in our beef than the feedlot beef.

This is perhaps an oversimplification. People smarter than I might say that it is, but as I've looked at what does it mean to have nutrient density, or as I've started calling it, nutritional integrity, what does it mean to, for us to consume a healthy diet? What really is a healthy diet? And very broadly, there's this whole conversation around seed oils and on and on the list goes, but I think as a general broad brushstroke, you could put things in a pro-inflammatory versus anti-inflammatory category and be pretty much spot on. And I was intrigued by the research work that was done by Bleu Blanc Court in France, Pierre Vail and his group of colleagues, where they were deliberately feeding flax to livestock to produce a narrow omega-3 to omega-6 ratio. And well, that raises all kinds of— they were obviously doing some very good things, but I also have some reservations about the phytoestrogen content and some of the implications of that. But of course it's being processed by ruminants and that, that makes a significant difference. But they are one of the few groups that did human consumption trials of, of people who were eating animal products. This was eggs and dairy and beef and chicken, and I think perhaps pork as well, um, that was fed with flax to have a narrow omega-3 to 6 ratio. And they found that just that simple change of the omega-3 to 6 ratio produced an anti-inflammatory effect in the human body versus a pro-inflammatory effect from mainstream grocery store animal products. And you then layer on all these other anti-inflammatory compounds that you're describing And the human health implications become very consequential and very far-reaching, I think more so than most people realize. The reality is we are a very inflamed society generally because of our abysmal choices of the things that we call food that aren't actually food.

Yeah. And, and our environment too, John. I mean, you're out there spraying Roundup, as was I, you know, and so we have all these atmospheric pollutants we're doing, you know, a lot of people are drinking water that's fairly undrinkable, you know, by drinking water standards. So we're creating, um, a perfect atmosphere for free radical formation. Yep. You know, so with all these free radicals running around, we have to, we absolutely have to have antioxidants in our life to maintain life. Because otherwise, you know, I mean, this, this is, you know, this is carcinogenic.

And we have historically.

Yeah. So, you know, the fact, you know, when Stefan called me, he called me one day, he said, I gotta tell you something. This is like the first beef I've ever seen that had almost a 1-to-1 ratio. Actually, I think the sample he tested was a 0.9. So that's omega-6 over omega-3. The fraction is omega-6 over omega-3. That means there are more omega-3s than omega-6s in this particular sample that he discovered. He said, I've never seen this before. And that was super exciting, you know, because, you know, the omega-3s are only one part of it. You know, we're talking these phytochemicals as well. They're also these really amazing things that, you know, cause these same 3 things: anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, antimicrobial, you know, the things we need for immune system, immune system maintenance and defense. And we've given up on a lot of those things because, you know, with, you know, I'm hoping your listeners already know that when we give up flavor, we give up those attributes because flavor, understand, you can create flavor with sugar and salt and fats. Right. And that's the perception, you know, I mean, it's, you know, you ever read Mark Schatzier's book, The Dorito Effect?

Yes. He's on my list. It's been on my list of people I wanna interview for years.

He's actually been on the ranch several times. He and I have become really good friends because he started buying our beef and he actually featured it in one of his books. And it was because it won his taste test at that time. And the reason You know, he didn't just dismiss the fact that yes, this was good tasting beef. He then made the association after conversations with Dr. Fred Provenza, another guy from Utah State. He's also been on the ranch, but all these people have come to the ranch to look at this range because they wanna see where these, these plant compounds are coming from. And when you get out there and see that biological Biodiversity. It's really, really clear where these compounds can originate from because, you know, I'm standing there with Dr. Fred Provenza and I, I said, Fred, what are you looking at here? And he said, I'm observing what your cattle are eating. And I said, what does that mean? And he said, there's tannins in that plant and it's enough tannins that he won't eat much of it. You know, it's a steer, he's grazing, browsing this, this shrub, but he's looking for something there. And so Fred in his work has basically, um, documented nutritional wisdom first in animals and then in us. And it's associated with palates, you know, how we taste things. That's our palate. So animals, how they taste things, it's based on a feedback loop called nutritional wisdom that their body is basically telling them. It's messaging their palate to say, I need that biochemical in there. I need that chemical. I need that phytochemical. I need that flavonoid, or I need that CLA. And I need it not because I'm sick. John Kempf. That's the amazing things about animals versus us and where we've gotten to. I think the human genome used to be here.

Well, actually, I actually think we still have that capacity.

It's just, I do too. I do too.

It's been masked by addiction to sugars and salts and other stuff.

No, I think we have it too, but we have to relearn it. But these animals already have it, so they're going around And you know, when we have a headache, we take bare aspirin. There you go. How about that for, for comparison? The same company, right? Or we take, you know, ibuprofen. Or if we're getting sick, you know, a lot of friends of mine will douse the Vicks Formula 44. You know, they'll go to the drugstore and maybe get some codeine elixir with it or something like that to mitigate. So we're always mitigating illness in our human experience, especially in Western culture. But meanwhile, I'm watching these cows. I'm up there with them on horseback every day. I'm up there with Fred Provenza talking about this and Stefan Van Vliet, and they're saying, no, no, no, they're, they're medicating, but they're medicating preemptively. They're preventative minded in how They absorb these chemicals and as a result, they're the picture of health and they don't get sick. And they're right. They're right. I mean, like our doctoring rates are now, you know, probably a 10th of what they used to be. They're already low. But right now, I mean, I, you know, we run about an average of 600 head of cattle and we had one pinkeye last year and we didn't even doctor it because it just self-healed. Uh, we had two foot rots. And if I talk to my neighbors, and we have good cattle in our country, we have good solid Angus genotypes, their doctoring rates are way, way, way, way, way higher, John. And I think it's just because we've offered these animals a choice and they have the nutritional wisdom to do it.

It was the, the conversation about disease, illness versus health. I heard framed once as we, we tend to think of, of health as being binary. Either you're well or you're sick.

Yes.

When in fact wellness exists on a spectrum and you have a state of— on one of the spectrum you have vibrant health, on the other end of the spectrum you have disease, and then you have this in-between spectrum that you could appropriately label. It's, again, it is a spectrum, but you could label this spectrum pre-disease, like you are moving to a pre-disease state or moving in the direction of a disease state. And I think that, that instinct, that self-medication that you're describing is, um, the moment there is any perception— or perhaps not even moving outside the optimal health state, they are maintaining optimal health.

Yeah, and it could be a very small percentage. Perhaps they're feeling something that's 2% off optimum. And they have signaling built in that says, I now have a taste for that flavor. I now have a taste for that scent being emitted by those flavonoids in that plant. You know, so I, I don't even think they, I think they know their plants, you know, obviously they don't have names for 'em, But I watch him being very, very careful about selecting plants. So, you know, people might call this selective grazing, but I think we've left something on the table by saying we don't want any selection in grazing. Because if you don't allow selection in grazing to some degree, yes, you gotta balance this out on the plant side. But now if you allow no selection, you're in a place where you have to figure out how to balance it out on the animal side. This is why we get into, you know, medication in feedlots and engineering of feedlot rations to try to maintain wellness because the animals no longer have a choice. They just can eat what's in the feed bunk. And to me, it's a travesty because you have this elegant fermentation machine/mechanism in a cow. And it's this thing of just beauty. It's this perfect alien picture of matching diverse plant ecosystems into health that then provides food for us through meat and milk. And we just put, put all that aside. We cast it all aside, cast all those good gifts aside and put these animals in a feedlot in a concrete bunk with a TMR ration that often is comprised of DDGs. It's a waste product. DDGs are a waste product. And DDGs also happen to have a lot of times antibiotic residue in them because in ethanol culture, you have to apply antibiotics to keep it a pure yeast culture to get the desired result out of ethanol. So, and that, that was interesting in Van Vliet's study too. He also picked up antibiotics in, it was all through the, I think it's—

That doesn't happen.

It tested in 97% of his samples. I think it was 97. There was one segment, it was 80, and I think the other one was 97%. I think it was a quinone, hydrofluoroquinone, I believe, showed up. And they haven't been able to trace it because the ranchers who were growing those products had no recall. They said, we didn't apply antibiotics. So it had to come from the DDG supply chain. Carol, my wife, found an article that tested 36 ethanol plants and found that, oh, it was a significant amount had use of antibiotics to maintain the purity of their yeast strains to create ethanol. But it was measurable in about 12%. 12% had measurable antibiotics in the final byproduct DDG. So anyway, we're feeding these things to these cattle. And for me that, you know, I'm not a huge science person, you know, I love this research. That's not where I'm at. I'm on the cow side, John. So I'm their horseback, okay? I'm watching this group of cattle. There's about 5 mama cows and they're older and wiser, I'm assuming. And they got their babies with them. They got their calves with them and they're on the far, let's see, it'd be the northwest corner of the ranch. It's a barbed wire fence piece. It's off irrigated ground. It's about 2 miles from my house. And I trot out there and say, what are they do? What are they doing out there? And I trot out there, and John, they're just standing in this little godforsaken pair of sagebrush dirt that's been kind of beat to death because they've been standing there for a while. They've eaten every blade of grass off them. And I get them out of there and bring them back to irrigated pasture, to the 80 species, right? The 80 species diversity. It's like, girls, Here's food. But they keep going back. One night I'm laying in bed, I just have a light bulb moment, and maybe it's God. It says, no, they know what's about to happen. They know what's about to happen. And it's because that northwest corner is kind of the closest point of beginning off our home ranch. To get to those rangelands 8 miles away. They know that's where the journey begins, to walk to the range. So sure enough, that following week, we now have about 250 mama cows. They're included in that. We walk right past that very spot, right past that very spot, all 250 pairs. These are mama and babies, so a total of 500 head. We're on horseback. We hit the main road We go down the paved road to get to the range. It's across the Salmon River, and that's where the wild country starts and the open grazing starts just in about 8.5 miles. And I watch those old mamas. They're in front, they're in front, and they start trotting. They start trotting and then they start running. We gotta keep going in front of 'em to slow 'em down.

Hey, you know what's coming?

Slow down, girls. And they know what's coming, John. No, you nailed it. A lot of people are like, 'What is wrong with them?' They would say, 'No, instead I'm watching and say, what is right with them? There's something right about those cattle.' And the reason they're running, I realize, as soon as we cross the Salmon River Bridge and get onto that range, they put their heads down, they go right to business. And I'm watching them, and they're eating all these different— this esoteric variety of plants, and they're just eating the species diversity that is in that low country on a range. They're eating wildflowers like wild geranium or Indian paintbrush, and they're taking even a bite out of sagebrush or greasewood. These are like plants that we consider, oh man, they're not cow food, but they're, they're trying them all and they're just going through it. Like, you know, remember when you were kids, you'd go to like a smorgasbord or a nice buffet? You know, we'd, we'd go to, you know, a wedding or something like that. And man, as a kid, I just loved it because there was all these things to try and I'd fill my plate with all this diversity. That's what these cows are doing. They're doing exactly the same thing. And it's because they are designed for diversity. And it isn't only because they like it. I mean, their palates are saying, oh, try that, oh, try that, try that. I think it's because they have to have it. I think it's because they're missing nutrition. In fact, this is an interesting thing. Whenever we put them on the low area of the range, if we try to supplement minerals or supplement even salt. Those two things untouched. Untouched. They just left home. They're eating some mineral. We usually feed kelp and they're eating Redmond salt. You know, we're certified organic across the entire operation and intake is pretty maintained. You know, they're pretty steady on that. They don't overkill on either one of them, but it's, it's a pretty steady intake. Everybody's taking in some. Second we get to that range and they put their heads down and start to experience diversity I'll say it again, all, all minerals and all salt is off. It's off the table for them.

Does that last for the entire season?

No, it changes. And I think it's because the most diversity that we're going to pick up for any one day in their grazing journey is down in the Lowcountry, because there you have these incredible aspect shifts. So aspect is again, what, you know, what direction you are in reference to the sun. So south aspects, you're going to have these very, very just brittle environment plants, these desert plants. There's even cactus there, there's scorpions, there's rattlesnakes. It is desert, and it's because it's got an effective precipitation of probably 2 to 3 inches a year. And it gets a little bit of snow, like right now it has some snow on it. But what's crazy, John, is When the warm winds of spring come in April, snow gets scoured off, and guess who gets it? The wind. It sublimates. It goes through a phase change. It goes right from solid, doesn't even bother with liquefaction, and goes into the atmosphere. And you can dig a hole under a snowbank on those low country ranges, and a lot of times the soil is powder dry.

Wow.

Even though it's 85 degrees out, you know, you got snow that's melting and you're like, oh, it's going into— no, a lot of it does not. So you need a rain on snow event. So that's where the 2 inches of rain comes from, from rain on snow events. So sometimes as much as 5 or 6, you know, but a lot of years it's 2 to 3. So those south aspects are there and then we'll tilt them over into a north aspect in the afternoon. Because the south aspect plants, their stomata all close. And guess what? Photosynthesis pretty much shuts down. You're not gonna end up with any sugar in the leaf material. The solar panel has got no sugar in it. So your bricks has fallen off. And guess what? We're trying to make money by picking up bricks, right? Because bricks is pounds, bricks is 80 Gs. So anyway, so we switch over to our north aspect. I talked to the crew and, my daughters are finally getting it because I'll come up there sometimes when I'm not up there and I'll say, what are these cattle still doing on the south aspect? It's 2 o'clock in the afternoon. You gotta get off this thing because we're here to make money. And the cattle are already telling you they're not interested because they're just wandering around or laying down. They're not eating, they're done with it. But as soon as you tilt over into north-facing slope, everything changes because now your effective precipitation is up 50, 60% more. Your plant diversity has changed. You have new species over here. So this, I think, John, is why, because there's the phytochemical, the biological plant diversity has just dramatically increased because of these aspect changes and because of desert variances, and then comparing them with, like for instance, in the low country on steep north slopes, I'll have Idaho fescue dominated stands that almost cover the ground. If I flip that over and go right over that ridge to south aspect, I got cactus, greasewood, sagebrush, and bluebunch wheatgrass and same with wild rye. So species difference is completely different. Soil covering is a lot higher, so there's a lot more green grass on the north slope. So, you know, we gotta just basically have that in mind all the time. And it's the complete spectral opposite from a feedlot environment where you're feeding the same thing all the time. Here we're trying to provide for them a diverse palate choice every hour of the day. You know, we're trying to craft that in our heads where they're grazing plan. Where are we going today? You know, so we'll be in cow camp, we put it, put the cattle all down at the end of the day after 10 o'clock at night, sun's gone down, they're ready to lay down, they're done. They're gonna ruminate all night until 5 o'clock in the next morning and we'll pick 'em up and move 'em again. And, every night, you know, while we're sitting around camp, cooking dinner or whatever, we'll decide, hey, where we're gonna go next and where can we maximize their grazing choices and maximize their, their nutritional needs and matching what their palate is looking for. I remember one time I was up there and, uh, I saw this whole bunch of steers kind of heading sideways out of the herd and they all got their heads down. And I can't even see anything over there, John. It's like they're grazing air. There, there's sagebrush, there's bluebunch wheatgrass, but they're not eating the bluebunch wheatgrass, which is a really good grass. I've bricks bluebunch wheatgrass at 22, you know, at the right time of year, early in spring when it's really coming, pre-boot stage, you know, 22 bricks. And I'm like, that grass, that bluebunch wheatgrass is running at 22 bricks, but they're grazing air. What? Is going on. So I go over there, see what they're doing, and I see that they're grazing this plant. It's almost invisible. It's just this wispy little plant about, you know, 10 centimeters high. It's got these tiny, tiny little white flowers on top of it, and I know what it is. It's called Aranaria It really likes these low desert environments. And they're sweeping it up. They just hold their tongue out and sweep it up. It's easily broken and they sweep it up and they just, they're just lawnmowers going across this Aranaria plant. I told Fred Provenza about this and he just started laughing at me. And I said, do you know what the plant was, Fred? And he said, yeah, I bet it was Aranaria. He knew, he knew, he knew. Anyway, um, so I had to try it. So I tried the same thing. I just swept a bunch of it up with my hand and stuck it in my mouth. And guess what? I mean, it tasted like maple syrup, John. Wow. I mean, those little flowers, they were maple syrup. I bet they would brix. I should— I'm going to try brixing them this spring. I bet they would brix at like 24. They are that sweet. They are that sweet. And these animals knew it, you know? And, but they're picking up all this other stuff with it. That's what's amazing, you know? Yes, it's sugar, it's maple syrup, but it's got a side of all this plant compound diversity that we can't even begin to get our mind around. You know, Stefan van Vliet, when he was out there, he's stuffing plant samples in test tubes. I said, what are you doing? He said, I'm throwing these all on dry ice. I said, no, what are you doing? And he said, I wanna find out what's in these plants and try to trace it to what's in beef. 'Cause I wanna see if it changes from plant compound into beef. And he did indeed find out some of these plant compounds he felt like disappeared. They, they already had been turned into something different after they metabolized.

Yep.

Yeah. They were metabolized into something now the animal can use very specifically. Yep.

Yeah.

So, um, so anyway, you know, that this whole, this whole business has really underscored to me the importance of letting the cow be the cow and letting them make the vegetative choices. You know, even in grazing, even in regenerative grazing, I see this. We can't be not— we can't be selective. We have to practice non-selective grazing. And there, there are truisms in there, you know, but I would submit to you that almost all grazing has some aspect of selectivity to it. And I think we've lost that. I mean, to me, the test of selective grazing versus non-selective is what if we didn't graze it? What would we see happen? What plants would manifest? What plants would dominate after 10 years of not grazing it? And it's obviously different than what the sward would look like if we weren't grazing. So eventually there's selection going on. You know, so I think what we need to do is think about what our objectives are. And our objective is plant diversity. So how can we create that and how can we hack their palates to help us do—

because exactly, because plant diversity is going to contribute. Plant diversity will contribute to all the medicinal compounds.

Yes.

Beef, anti-inflammatory, anti-inflammatory compounds, antimicrobial, all the medicine The medicine is in the diversity.

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

Glenn, this has already been such a rich conversation. I haven't— we haven't— you're very well known, so, and people can find your backstory. I'm not going to ask for a history and backstory of the ranch, but let's go to what are—

what are—

what comes next? What are the new things that you're looking forward to emerging?

So I think that the biggest place that's really, really gotten rich for me just in the past few months, John, is this aspect of stockmanship. And, you know, we've always practiced stockmanship, so I didn't really think of it in the context that I'm thinking of it now. This is one of those, um, clobber over the head moments, maybe. Um, and I was talking to a guy named, um, Dr. Tom Noffsinger. He's a veterinarian from Nebraska. Have you heard of him?

Yes, I have.

Stockmanship expert. But, uh, I was actually first listening to a podcast with him in it. So this is the value of podcasts sometimes because they'll make you think about something brand new. And I hope we can do that today. And anyway, Dr. Tom started talking about this stockmanship thing and Then he said this thing about how your left eye, how an animal's left eye is connected to their right hemisphere and vice versa for the right eye. And I've been practicing Bud Williams stuff for most of my livestock career, but I never knew this about the eye. And it just so happens that that right hemisphere is where animals process fear and flight. And so they gotta evaluate with their left eye first whether there's a fear or flight concern to respond to. That's, that's their test area. So that's why an animal will turn her head to you and look at you directly. If you approach them on the right side, they will always turn their head and you'll be able to make them do that just by getting into their space. As soon as they perceive that there's a chance for stressful interaction here, they wanna now evaluate you with their left eye. So they will turn toward you. So I didn't know any of this. So I started trying it with my daughter Melanie, and she thought, of course, this was one of dad's crazy ideas, you know? And so we started handling these cattle, trying to be consistently in a counterclockwise direction. And it began to change everything. And, you know, let, let me give you an example. We were loading cattle in gooseneck trailers, and I'm holding the gooseneck trailer door in the right hand and trying to get these cattle to go past me while they're looking at me with the right eye. And I'm trying to do some movement to try to get those cattle to go. They won't go in the trailer because my trailer is already fairly full. I like to make it all the way full, not stuffed. I mean, I like cattle to be able to move around, shift weight, but I like them pretty well stuffed, you know, filled in there. Because if we hit the brakes or something like that, or hit a curve bad, you don't want cattle falling over and then other cattle landing on them. You want them to be able to use each body to steady themselves. So anyway, um, I then said to Melanie, I couldn't get those last 4 head loaded, and I said, could you just hold the gate here and I go over on the other side and work the left side? And anyway, John, it was 3 seconds. I mean, I just moved back and forth a little bit on that left side, interacted with that left, left eye And they just looked at me and just loaded in the trailer. And Melanie brings the trailer gate over and clicks. So anyway, I called Tom Nofsinger about that. I said, Doc, I got to talk to you about this thing. And he starts laughing about— laughing at me. And I said, what are you laughing at? He said, I, I think I know what you're going to talk about. And I told him about the trailer. And I said— and then they really started laughing. And I said, what are you laughing at? He said, go on, I think I know what you're going to say. And I said, Okay, here's the deal. I think every trailer door in America has been hung on the wrong side. Yeah. And he said, I think you're right. And then he laughed some more and we talked a little bit more and laughed some more and hung up the phone. But anyway, those kind of things, John, you know, this is only a few months ago that I just picked up this nuance, but it's opened a door for me who how to respectfully handle these cattle, even on the range, if I'm on horseback, you know, I, I realized I went in my mind's eye and just thought about how we were actioning ourselves upon this, these cattle with pressure and release and how much more effective we could be if we considered those sorts of things, those nuances that would just make 'em perform that much better. And when we do that, we afford them better stress-free environments to make nutritional choice. Like, let me give you this. I found this weird esoteric paper that talked about how animals that you involve yourself in the right-hand side of their head, by entering their space, by entering that flight zone, if they got their head down grazing and they don't raise their head up when you do that, because you've built a relationship of trust with that animal already, those animals are generally one body condition score heavier than ones that would have to raise their head and turn toward you. So John, what that means is one, one body condition score is about 85 pounds.

Wow, that's— that's— they have no fight or flight response.

They don't. They don't because they're used to you. You know, you still can move them and action on them to create movement and direct them to new grass. Those are important features. I don't want docile cattle. I just want cattle that know that we respect them. Like, you know, this whole business of creating cattle disposition that you can basically pet and handle their calves. We don't agree with any of those things. We work with wolves, John Kempf.

Yep.

These cattle have to be alert. They have to be paying attention. And plus we're moving them across rangelands for miles a day. You know, we, we put, um, GPSs in our saddlebags and found out that we're traveling 600 miles a year with these animals on their grazing journey. So that means they have to be actionable. They have to be alert. They have to be ready to take energy from us and respond to release. And pressure and release is, is what we do all day on horseback. So we don't want dull cattle. So as a result, we don't even tag our calves anymore because they, they— these cows will kill you, you know. They take no prisoners. They will just— I've been rolled by cows and it, it's painful. My brother ended up in a hospital for a while, broken ribs, getting rolled So, you know, this whole generation of cattle raisers has said, we want calm dispositions. And I'm over here saying, no, we want cattle that are responsive and we're going to respect them for who they are. So anyway, we don't like those kind of cattle. But what I do want is somebody who has a determination in their head that they can trust me because I respect them. So that when I move into their flight zone just a little bit with my horse, they're still grazing. They're watching me. They see me. They see it's me. And they don't respond by stopping grazing. And as a result, I'm a body condition score far— I mean, how much on, on a $4 market? What are we, 85 pounds? You know, we're, we're 300, we're $340 right there, right?

That's a big deal.

It's a huge deal. So this stuff actually makes so much, so much sense, you know, in terms of not only production but profitability. These are freebies. These are things that are so easy to achieve once we've built that trust with these cattle. Now what if we work with them by encouraging them to go left side counterclockwise? You know, when we're, you know, I see so many handling facilities now that are built backwards. I mean, they got Temple Grandin elements. You know, they got the curves and— but they've laid out the key chute that fills the alley backwards. It makes those cattle go counterclockwise instead of counterclockwise. And as a result, we're creating— we're just inciting stress before they even get to the chute where they're gonna receive all kinds of stress. So I actually talked to my— you can see I get crazy on this stuff. I talked to my crew and I said, get the backhoe in the barn there. And rip down that whole portion of our chute. We're gonna make these cattle flow counterclockwise. You know, when I started learning all this stuff months ago. And, uh, so we did. And they thought, this guy's, you know, Glen's got a screw loose. You know, got gray hair. John, you don't have any of that. So your, your kids don't— Oh, I do. I just hide it. Oh, you just got nothing. Those are distinguished looks. Those, I mean, you're very distinguished looking. But anyway, I'm all white now and my kids like this, this dude. Yeah, he's getting old. He's getting old. See what he's got. So anyway, anyway, I had him turn over this whole thing. We put a Bud box in here, Bud Williams box, and we made sure that these cattle were always gonna flow counterclockwise. Anyway, they came in a chute. We had to preg check 250 cows a few weeks ago, and I have never seen this before in my life, John Kempf. God, never seen it before. 250 range cows, and these are not docile animals. They're not. I mean, if you're alone in a crowd with them and you incite them, they will take you. They will, even without a calf, they will take, they'll come after you. They'll send you over the fence, you know. So you gotta respect them and you gotta, you gotta run them in a way that they wanna be run. And this left side counterclockwise thing, is a way to respect them. I got 'em coming into the chute there, and the vet's on one side, he's pregging, his wife's running the chute on the other. I'm just, uh, running body position to get 'em to come into the chute. And they're flowing really nicely. We're pregging these cows, and I've never done this before. It's 45 seconds to 50 seconds per cow. They're flying through there. For full arm pregnant preg check. This isn't, you know, ultrasound. This is a full arm palpation preg check. 45 seconds, 50 seconds per cow. And what was crazy is I've never seen this before, but after we set up a left flow, a counterclockwise motion in that chute with these cattle, they started walking out of the head catch in the chute. We've never seen that before. They always like And they fly out there. You just open this thing, they step out. In fact, 4 of these cows turned around 15 feet away and watched us to see what we're— never seen it before. These are wild range cows. These are not docile, you know, Holsteins. These are animals you cannot touch. There's no way you're going to touch them. If you touch your baby, they will touch you. But they will touch you to make you part of the soil. So anyway, I never saw this before and it's just because we've created this respect. And I'm just thinking now lately how much that can influence every aspect of our operation. It's, it's how these cattle will finish. It's how they'll perceive nutritional choice and be able to self-medicate. It's a whole plethora of things that come in because we've enabled them to be what they were created to be. It's just like when we get out of the way with soils. I see this as a huge parallel. When we create biodiversity above ground, we're not creating biodiversity intentionally below ground. We're not saying, oh, we're going to create microorganisms down there. We're going to get more arbuscular mycorrhizae. You know, we're going to get a soil biology that kicks butt, and we're going to Haney at 50, and we're going to get 12% organic matter. You know, we don't go in there saying that, but instead we say, no, we need biodiversity. That's the first thing we need above ground. We need biodiversity. So we're going to work for that. So there's no way we're engineering what's happening in the soil below. Instead, we almost get out of the way and say, we're going to provide that soil everything it needs to win, and we're going to get out of the way and see what happens. I think in regenerative agriculture, we tend to say that with things like soil, things like plant diversity. But what if we got out of the way and said, hey, cow, do what you were designed to do, and we're going to provide you all the means in our power to make that happen?

Oh, that's beautiful.

You know what I mean? Yeah. It's, you know, I even see people, their cattle are drinking out of mud holes. And, um, and just this one little thing, there's just one little hack of saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, we're going to ensure crystal clean water. And because crystal clean water, when you're running a fermentation, say you're a brewer, right? No. And you're running a brewery. And you bring a truckload of mud water over to the brewery and say, hey, I got your water for you, they're gonna think you're nuts. They're gonna think, dump that stuff. We need the crystal clear stuff. We need the Rocky Mountain spring water. We need— we don't want to go to Lake Erie for our brewery water. We're not going to do that. There's sludge residue in the bottom of Lake Erie and the wind's been blowing. No, absolutely not. That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life.

Just for the record, since I live 20 miles from the lake, Lake Erie is no longer the news headlines of the 1980s. Lake Erie is clean, it's clear, it's clear as a crystal. You know what made it so?

A—

I'm using air quotes here for all the people listening— an invasive species called a zebra mussel.

Oh, no way. It filtered it all.

Zebra mussel filtered it all, and Lake Erie is clear as can be.

You know what's crazy about that, John? My dad used to, he quit dairy farming and we used to live on the East Coast and he hauled, he picked up a semi and he hauled semi over the road. He'd usually be back every night. So it wasn't like long-term trucking, you know, sometimes he'd have to be gone. But he, told me about hauling semi-loads of goods over the Cuyahoga River. It was on fire. Yep. The Cuyahoga was literally on fire and that was flowing directly into Lake Erie. Well, thank you. What's amazing, that's different.

Yeah.

That's an amazing thing. Yeah.

The EPA gets some of the credit and the zebra mussel gets more credit.

But anyway, you know, John Kempf, don't you agree? We just gotta get outta the way on some of these things and provide those opportunities, you know, for, for biodiversity to occur and for these cows to actually manifest in what they're created to be. Because I think, you know, some of it is epigenetics. You know, we could be getting in the way of our cattle. We could be creating environmental pressures on them that present, you know, no opportunity for genes to express. I think there's genes, there's so many genes. That we leave on the table that we're not allowing to express because we're unknowingly placing environmental pressure on these animals or even the plants that we work with?

Well, as I'm listening to you describe, your analogy of not deliberately engineering this, attempting to engineer the soil microbiome, was a beautiful and a very apt and appropriate analogy. And there's an aspect of what you're describing, it occurs to me that perhaps the appropriate word to use is control or attempted control. Yeah, we attempt to control what plants we're planting, what crops we're planting in row crop environments, what cover crop combinations and so forth. And to what degree are we restricting ourselves and restricting the development of the whole ecosystem by our attempts to control? There's a, there's a difference between controlling. And what's the, what's the other word that I'm looking for? Um, not even guiding necessarily, but allowing to express. You know, there's this phrase, um, this phrase from— I've been really intrigued by the body of work that has been popularized by Otto Scharmer, uh, Theory U. The tag phrase, the, the tagline from Theory U is leading from the emerging future, allowing allowing the future to emerge and facilitating that, being a facilitator rather than to control. You are a facilitator and allowing the optimal solutions to emerge.

Yes, yes. No, you're exactly right. And when we do that, we start finding out all these other things start happening. Like one thing we noticed several years ago on our cattle is we no longer had flies. John, I come from this, like we put it on those cattle, we put Warbecks on, you know, we put ivermectin on Dectomax. We, you know, used insecticide, pyrethroid ear tags, and then we'd rotate them with organophosphates. And man, Warbecks, it's illegal to throw the container away. It says do not throw this container away. So what are you supposed to do? You know, I mean, everybody threw 'em away at the time of Warbecks. So, you know, so we did all these things and now of course, you know, when we became organic, those things ended. So these cattle, especially in a range, and I had Fred Provenza with me on one of these questions. I said, Fred, what do you think of the flies? And he said, well, you don't have any. And I said, well, why? I wanna know why. And he said, it goes back to the phytochemical diversity that your cows are eating. It just goes back. He said that they're licking themselves. It's in their saliva. And they're also putting out oil droplets on their hairs. You can see it out there. They're glistening, they're shiny, and no flies. And he said, it's because you've presented them this opportunity to self-regulate that too, you know. So it's not only medicinal, it's fly repellent. And it's just because We've offered them the opportunity to maintain themselves by their own palates and their own biofeedback loop within them that allows them to make the nutritional choices that are going to take care of them in this regard.

This is so beautiful, Glenn. You know, there are— I get the idea from our conversation that I'd like to spend about a week in the evening sitting beside the campfire with you with a microphone on.

Well, come on out, John. We'll put you on a horse.

Yeah, yeah, there is, there is an aspect of wisdom and experience of having been, having been in doing the work that you have been for so long of just Observing, paying attention, observing. Um, you know, I get many, I get many solicitations from people who want to be on the podcast, so many that I eventually drafted a form letter to be a kind letdown.

And you should have sent one to me, John. Well, I would have handled it.

There are, um, well, you know, I've been trying to get you on for a couple years. It's just been, uh, it's been playing tag here. But, um, in one sentence of the letter, I, I went back, I realized, you know, I'm just writing this thing, streaming of consciousness, and afterwards I read back, I read it again, and I realized how brilliant it was. The one sentence I wrote said, decades of experience don't count for everything, but they sure count for an awful lot.

Dang right.

And, um, and it was one of the common patterns. I'm getting lots of people who want to be on the podcast who, oh, they've made this amazing new breakthrough, they've come up with this new technology, they have this new product and it's going to solve all these problems. And it's like, yeah, try it for 10 years and then let's have a conversation.

Yeah, you're right. You know what I realized is I, I hire a lot of kids our internship just, flyer went out last year, we had 450 applicants. Year before we had 700. Last year we hired, I shouldn't say hired, we had 19 interns over the course of the summer. And between the interns and the employees, I think our number was sitting right at 29. No, it was 39, 39 last year. So there was a lot of people working on a ranch, you know, associated with And that would be one thing that, you know, talk about in the future. You know, I, I often see my neighbors, they're saying, hey, you know, we need to be able to buy another ranch for you kids to be able to run on. So we think always horizontally, you know, in terms of expansion for the family business and creating niches for our kids and siblings and other family members, or even just good ranch hands that have stayed with us for, you know, several years, and now they're ready to take off on their own and complement our current operation. So we always think horizontally and say, we need to put you over on that ranch, let's lease it, you know, and there's value there. But, you know, land costs, you know, when you look at just the scale of land and look at potential return associated with it, it becomes very difficult. First of all, purchase is usually a very low return investment, you know, because you're trying to make principal, you're trying to pay interest all the time. So instead, I, what I encourage people to think about is what if we just go vertical instead and build businesses on top of the one we currently have, you know, and put more diversity into the system.

So much opportunity for that in agriculture. So much.

Unbelievable. It's unbelievable.

So that's what farmers complain all the time about everyone else making all the money.

Yes. Yes. And instead we could stack it, we could stack it and make that money. Exactly. We can make that money with a stack. So, you know, that's what I tell these, these young people that come out. But one thing, their biggest attribute, John, is agility. And it's just like those people who are saying, hey, put me on a podcast. I've thought about this thing and it's a really cool thing. And it's because they're very agile-minded. You know, at this point in my life when I'm 63, my wife read a book on it and she said, "You and I are entering the time of crystalline intelligence. People like you, John, have fluid intelligence." And that means agility, agility in thought, you know, because a lot of times we're really difficult and stubborn, you know, and hard to change ideas. But the thing about crystalline crystal and intelligence, it implies a lattice, a framework.

Yep.

And that framework is called wisdom, right? And that's what we see. That's what we see in agriculture. And for some reason we've lost sight of the value of that. And, you know, we've put a lot of our older people out to pasture and to say, instead of a young person saying, dad, what if I, Tried this on 10 acres here, and you helped me do it, and I could use the lattice of your wisdom to help me make it happen. You know what I mean?

I know exactly what you mean, and I would suggest that part of the reason agriculture has stagnated and has become worn in its groove, if you will, is because it's become dominated by the elderly generation, where the younger generation hasn't had capital and wherewithal to get in. Yeah.

Yes. Yeah. And the whole thing's stacked that way. I mean, you look at the process of subsidies, it's stacked that way where older farmers, you know, they got their histories, they got an ability to, you know, apply for those subsidies. So we've— governance has set up and facilitated that even further, especially in the Midwest, you know, in commodity states. So it, it's, it's a, it's a difficult premise, but, you know, you and I have talked earlier in this conversation about how scalable these opportunities are and how we can layer these opportunities on a given acreage of ground. And that's where the young people really can come in and shine because they're agile enough to think about possibility. And when they interact with the older generation and say, hey, what about this? What about— I have this idea. What about this? Let's try it on a small scale and maybe we could stack that enterprise on the rest of what we do here. You know, I think those are the valuable conversations that are gonna move us forward because John, we're, we're facing crisis right now demographically cuz everybody's my age. Yeah. That's practicing agriculture, right? I mean, I think, I think right now it's around 87% of the people are my age in agriculture in the United States. That means we're facing crisis in 10 to 15 years. I mean, either I'm gonna dead, I'm gonna be dead or I'm gonna turn over the ranch to somebody else or, whatever, you know, those are the characteristics. My hope is I never stop working. I just stop signing in front of checks and I stop signing the back of checks because I don't want the financial burden of saying, oh, where am I going to come up with the money to pay these people? And I don't want the financial burden of worrying about where money for me is coming from. I just want to work for them. And so that's where Carol and I are right now. And that's actually why we're on a little vacation right now because it gives the younger generation opportunity to do it without us. So we're hoping all the cattle are alive when we come back. I'm guessing they might be, but anyway, you know, we got to find— we got to ask those hard questions, and then we got to come up with a way that we can move forward together. Because the old people have all the equity, right? The equity is in my hands on this ranch right now. And for me to sell it, you know, and have a real estate transaction, give the kids the money. That means nobody's in agriculture, right? Because really, most sales in my country go to some investment banker from California or New York. Um, there are people who can afford that, and they're buying recreational value. They're not even looking, looking for agricultural value. They're looking for a place where they can go out on their back deck with a drink and say, this is all mine. And that's the only thing they're looking for. And is that where we want agriculture to go? But what if we look at it different and say, no, no, no, no, no, no, I do want to fish a little more and maybe I want to play one round of golf a year, but I also want to keep working with my, with my family, keep working with that next gen. Those are exciting possibilities and that's an exciting hope for agriculture.

Those are necessary possibilities as well.

Yeah.

Glenn, this has been an incredible conversation. I've immensely enjoyed myself. Thank you very much for all that you do and for sharing your wisdom and experience. And I look forward to more conversations.

Well, me too. This has been fantastic, John. You asked really good questions, some of which I couldn't answer well, but it's been fantastic. And I always learn a lot in this exchange of ideas. So thank you very much.

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