Episode 182: Reclaiming Independence from Corporate Meat with Cole Mannix

Hi friends, this is John. Welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast, where we have all kinds of conversations related to improving soil health and improving plant health, improving livestock health, and ultimately, of course, improving people's health and improving and being good stewards of the landscape and the ecosystem that we're responsible for managing. I'm here today with Cole Mannix, who is someone I had the privilege of meeting a couple of years ago at, I think, perhaps your first or maybe your second festival that you hosted. And I've really admired the work that you've been doing with the meat processing and the— I don't particularly care for the phrase, the community organization, but the way that you've been bringing people together. So I want to say thank you for being here. Thanks for all the work that you're doing. And can you give us some perspective on the scope of the various enterprises and the various things that you're working on?

Yeah, thanks for having me, John. It's a pleasure to be here. So, Old Salt started in the conversations in 2020 and then we formed an entity in 2021. And today, the purpose of the business is to create a marketplace that regenerates land and community. And the way we're a membership of ranchers and workers in a parent company, that then owns these subsidiaries, a couple of restaurants now, a couple of small processing facilities. One is a slaughter and further processing facility, and the other is where we pack some e-com orders and we do some commissary kitchen work. And we have a curing chamber that we're trying to get under USDA inspection right now. That one is right here in Helena, where kind of our home base is and where I live. And then, we run e-commerce meat business wholesale to small independent grocers and restaurants and a little bit of food service. We do a little bit of processing for other farms and ranches. And yeah, I can't remember if I mentioned Old Salt Festival, but that's an event that we hold on my family's ranch every year. The last 3 years coming on year 4, just usually on the summer solstice. And that's— so it's coming up next week. So we're preparing for that. So Old Salt is a pretty young business that's not yet proven. You know, we're a startup. We're not in the black. We're trying to do something hard and that feels worthwhile. The founding ranches included my family's operation and two other relatively large Montana cattle ranches that are pretty unfamiliar with farming. You know, we're mostly mountain, mountain grazing, put up some hay to get through the winters. But we're, I would say, about 2 hours radius from Helena, Montana. So we're kind of central and western Montana. And those 3 ranches had all experienced how challenging the meat business is by trying to start up their own little brands, kind of 2004, 2005. And, and the next 10 to 15 years, we all had had experiences of mostly our operations, um, sell calves and yearlings to the commodity markets. We had all tried to kind of set up our own brand or participate in other brands and hadn't quite figured out how to get it to work. Um, so we met in, in the fall of 2020, and I think our story was a little bit unique in the, in the fact that the The ranches at the time, they were profitable. They had been profitable. They had been doing regenerative practices. It's a continuum, not a bright line, but they had been working for 30, 40 years to understand the right cadence of impact and rest on different types of ground that we manage. And, going to a whole bunch of meetings and conferences that are part of the Holistic Management or Allan Savory network and learning about soil health and plant health and riparian health and working on streams and how can we manage riparian areas to respect the fishery and how can we live with wolves and grizzly bears without just getting mad and, and, uh, just, you know, using a, using a gun or, or a violence to solve our problems. How can we manage our own operations to fit into the landscape rather than dominating it? And each ranch was also— so each ranch felt like it could say that we were on a better ecological— in a better ecological state at the time than we had been 20 years ago. And the economics were working. However, we were all concerned about looking out a generation beyond us. We saw producers continuing to lose, you know, power and resiliency in the marketplace. As things downstream of the ranch gate like processing and distribution and retail become kind of more tightly controlled. And so we decided to try to innovate and set up our own way of getting product to market and our own set of relationships with customers. So that's what Old Salt is.

You mentioned that the organizational structure, the business structure is a cooperative of employees in various enterprises. Tell us a little bit about what the structure looks like and the philosophy behind that. That doesn't sound like something that's particularly common. How did you arrive at that place?

We started life as a cooperative in Montana. It's called a Chapter 15 Cooperative Association, and we no longer have that structure. Today, we're actually an LLC that has cooperative principles sort of built into the operating agreement. And there's a couple reasons for that. One is that the cooperative structure does not really allow you to raise money outside of the producer base very effectively. The other challenge is that some of the tax benefits that come with cooperatives usually, um, didn't apply to us, uh, very well when we have this vertical integration because we have such different businesses. A festival is so different than a meat manufacturing, the facility, and that's so different than a restaurant. And so, for example, all of our workers can become members of the business where they can be elected to 49% of the board. We call it Class B ownership. Um, but most of the workers don't want that. You know, they might be going to college and flipping burgers at the outpost. Um, and so it became really administratively complex to track which labor counted as patronage and which labor did not count as patronage. And in the same way, we We have these two restaurants and we're working on several more. And at the restaurants, our meat is— could count as patronage because it comes from our members, but the lettuce and the other things on the menu don't come from our members. And so it became administratively burdensome. So we simply formed an LLC that has these four classes. Producers are Class A and they control 51% of the board. And we're built, if we grow demand, that we will add more producers over time. Workers are Class B, and that's 49% of our board. Investors are Class C. They don't have a board seat, but they get all the distributions if and when there are distributions until they get— realize a certain IRR, return on their money. And then the fourth class is essentially for employees. It's sort of an equity class for people that I can't afford to pay market to today, but who might be able to build a nest egg for tomorrow. So yeah, we knew we were going to have to raise a lot of money. We didn't have access to custom processing. And so, you know, the cold storage, all the things you need to get meat to market is capital intensive. We really didn't have that capital from the producer base. So we knew we were going to need to access a lot of that. That's why we changed from being a cooperative association to being an Old Salt Co-op LLC, is to be able to access capital. And then we, we also agreed at the beginning that none of the ranchers would be willing to use their land, their family lands, to guarantee loans. Um, they were very clear about that. They had all experienced failure in trying to innovate in the meat space, and they knew how risky it was. And so that meant we had to find debt that would not require personal guarantees. From the ranch members. And that was a huge component of Steward Lending, which was— is a crowdfunding lending platform that required a corporate guarantee from the business, but not— and it required assets to back up the loan, but it did not require guarantees from the ranch families of their land. And so we've just tried to put together something that would allow us to access the capital we would need, but still kept producers and workers being the primary beneficiaries of any success that the whole marketplace that we're trying to build has. And, from my perspective, one of the problems of business is that if you're a packer or a meat brand, you have an incentive to buy livestock at as low as you can. And, ultimately, the business's objective as designed is to return money to shareholders. And so that's also true on the distribution side, and it's also true on the retail side. And what that creates ultimately is kind of squeezing producers as low as they can go on a margin, and it results in concentration of power downstream. And I think, you know, from the perspective of the marketplace, I'm interested in sending value back upstream. Where it's created. Because I think good stewardship, good care of, of things requires, um, it requires time and talent applied over time and iteration through failure. And, um, you know, you need not just margin, but you need options. You need options for processing your animal and getting it to market, and you need to, to be able to build your own set of relationships with customers rather than that being mediated through what can be a very big anonymous supply chain. Yeah, I've heard you say before actually that regenerating soil is really about managing a series of relationships between root systems and micro critters. And I think also one of the biggest lessons of the environmental movement perhaps is that we don't really have environmental problems, we have people problems. And so the way that our human relationships work and our business relationships work, the rest of the food system downstream of the actual soil and plants and water is in my mind just as important, those relationships, restoring those relationships if we're going to also honor the natural world.

I want to touch on or dig deeper into this point because when you said that we have a people problem, Sometimes we have this human tendency of hearing what we want to hear or having preconceived ideas. What you're suggesting is not that we have a problem of people, that we have too many people or too few or whatever the case might be, but that we have a problem of relationships between people and relationships between the ecosystems that they are stewarding.

Yeah, I think unfortunately the environmental movement could kind of tend to go, especially when I was growing up and there was the range wars in the West over whether we could graze on public lands or whether cattle were a bad thing overall. If you, if you read things like the Monkey Wrench Gang, you know, sort of the idea can be like that people as a, are a plague and the only way to solve environmental problems are just get rid of us. And I'm not sure that's in our interest.

And, uh, we have, we have abundant evidence that in fact, uh, if you remove people from the landscape, those landscapes degrade.

Yeah, I think that it's one of the most hopeful things I know of that there is a way to be in right relationship with the land where we can actually enhance ecological function and enhance productivity. And that's a beautiful thing. It's the most hopeful thing I know of.

So when you— we had started talking about relationships and you described in the context of strengthening the relationships with your customers. And I have— yeah, I want to ask about the festival as well, but you've mentioned restaurants, you've mentioned processing and slaughter facility. Can you give us a bit of an outline of the scope of the various, the various activities that Old Salt is engaged in, in these various enterprises?

Yeah, we have about 100 employees today, and most of those employees, more than half, are at the restaurants. 22 employees at the slaughter facility and further processing facility in Butte, Montana, which is about an hour to the south of Helena where I live. 2 employees at a small processing plant in Helena, and then the rest is marketing and finance and corporate employees. We are, we have told ourselves that we have a goal of 9 more restaurants restaurant retail locations of the next 3 years, and all of those would be in Montana. And on one hand, they're a way to balance all the pieces of the carcass and find a home for those, especially in a time when it's hard to grow red meat on a wholesale basis with a decent margin because the price of livestock is just hugely inflated because of a low supply. And, and, uh, we think it might be a little bit easier to grow if we also control the menu. And, and the, you know, the menu concept. And if we do a really good job of operating restaurants in the right markets, then perhaps— restaurants aren't easy either, so we have to be good at managing people and systems. And, uh, however, the restaurant, if it works, it's a— it does create profit, and it's also a bit of an advertisement for the online brand. And it's also a place where our customers can pick up their order without the shipping and the dry ice and the insulation that you need when you send it in the mail. We don't particularly like— one of my dreams would be if we could just get rid of social media entirely. And so, but you still have to be able to, you know, for customers to know about you. And so we are still working to build the right sales process at the level of the restaurant so that people know, oh, this restaurant is a node that is connected to a broader marketplace. And if you, uh, are attracted or you had a, a good meal and you're interested in what else Old Salt does, go to the website and, and order meat for your family, and you can pick it up here for a significant discount on your order. So that's kind of the idea. So far we've had one restaurant that has worked quite well and the other one that does not yet work. And so, um, you know, we also know that that's not a simple path, but we are— Yeah. We, we don't— I would say another thing is that we just are— I think a lot of the claims about product attributes, it's— I think a lot of them miss the point. So it might be claims about nutrient density. It might be claim certifications. Sometimes those are third-party seals and sometimes they're just claims. I think that world can be very fraught and sometimes can miss the point. And so to be able to market outside of the digital realm where it's more experiential through a restaurant, through curating a space where you serve people, through a festival, by getting people in person, I'm just attracted a little bit more by that way of marketing than a purely digital existence. And so, the more we can be in person with people, I think the better chance we have of really building some authentic level of trust. At other times, I've talked with people about the movement of our industry to boxed beef where no longer did grocery stores tend to have their own butcher teams, but they sort of became just a repository to receive boxed meat and to put it out on the shelf. And I think there was a lot lost when you lose the butchers in the shop. You lose the communication between the butcher and the customer and some of the knowledge that, that comes with, you know, them knowing where these carcasses came from, having any connection to them at all, being able to talk to the person about how you might prepare it. And that is how I think for a long time human beings have communicated. Even if they're not an expert in meat, they can kind of gauge whether they trust the person they're talking to. And, uh, they could just— multiple points when you're, when you're a non-expert, multiple points of reference become really important. And you kind of decide whether you trust somebody based on whether they bring a lot of ego to the table, based on whether they seem to exaggerate a lot. You know, do you believe the story you're telling them? And do you see them show up in other ways in the community in which you trust or not? And all those kind of data points, I think, are often more important than things that can be measured and put in a spreadsheet.

Yeah. I love this call. I'm smiling really widely because this whole customer relationship aspect, the question that was on the tip of my tongue 90 seconds ago that you then went on this perfect little journey. I was going to ask you, following up on your social media comment, If you don't advertise, if you don't have marketing, digital marketing, or if you don't have social media marketing, then what does marketing look like exactly? And you've already partially answered that, but I'm going to ask you to go in again because I love your perspective on this topic.

Yeah. In addition to, you know, we're not particularly good at this yet. Like, we need to develop a sales process at the restaurant level that, you know, we've been learning to operate these restaurants. And so just figuring out how to operate a profitable restaurant is one, and just to market the restaurant itself is one thing. And then once the restaurant is nested within this other group of businesses, there's a whole nother layer of sales and pointing people to the website. The same with the festival. Just to organize that thing is a huge learning experience for us, like setting up on my family's ranch, no infrastructure, no internet signal, no cell signal. And 3,000 people. Like, how do you just do that, let alone get good at turning that into an experience where the— where people naturally realize, oh, these guys sell meat? And so, um, I still think that these, these spaces, these restaurant spaces and festivals, create an opportunity to market, but I'm not sure we're good at implementing that yet. The other thing I'd say is just You know, there is a camp called Camp Make-A-Dream down the road from Helena towards the ranch on a place called Gold Creek, and they take cancer kids and, uh, and adults who have had cancer, and, um, and they bring them out on the land, and they have, you know, anywhere from 50 or to 30 participants for a week at a time. And they've done this for decades, and they have a mailing list of 50,000 people, and they have a little lodge where they prepare food for folks, and they reached out to us about wholesaling our meat to them. And it's a low enough volume, and they're a price-sensitive organization that it doesn't make a lot of sense as a wholesale client. But we were like, yeah, I mean, this is great. How about we sell you our meat at cost, and then we get to share our product with your audience base?. And because they're health-oriented and they're thinking about how do I eat, I think that's an example of just gorilla ground, you know, just relationships. It's the same with, if I think about veterans who are coming back from overseas and very active, but when they get back home, you know, they could sort of, it's okay to maybe eat or at least your body doesn't show the consequences of eating sugary foods if you're really active. But, if you get back home, maybe you're struggling with diabetes or mental illness or you're feeling fragmented or not connected to a community of people. And so, here's a group of people who are serious and they have an idea of service and serving something more than themselves and they're starting and they're interested in health.. And so, here's a group of customers who's kind of— and there's all kinds of veterans organizations in Montana. And so, anyway, we're working to build relationships in that way. A lot of those folks are looking for places to have a retreat, to go to open landscape, to get out of the noise of urban areas and the noise of digital existence and just reconnect with each other and with land. So, anyway, All of these things I say as opportunities that we're thinking about but have not yet gotten good at using.

We've mentioned the festival a couple of times. What was the original vision for the festival and what has it morphed into? What has it become?

Well, I think the original vision was just breaking bread together. I think we connect with music and food and fire. I think that's this basic level of relationship building that human beings have, I think, done for a long time. And, we wanted to— it's hard with the idea of ranch tours to how many people am I going to reach bringing 20 and 40 people at a time? What if we could invite people for a few days, a significant period of time, and to just come be together at some greater scale than that? And ultimately, agriculture. I always used to think that the word culture within the word agriculture referred to culture, but it refers to cultivating. But I like to think about it as culture. I think human way of seeing the natural world and each other and the values that are set up around that way of seeing, that is what really what drives everything. And so a better agriculture, a regenerative agriculture, is it better culture? It's a rebuilding of relationships with each other in urban and rural. If I could have one hope for Old Salt, it would be that we could create this little economic system, this little example that sort of honored what Wendell Berry talks about in his writing. How could we build a marketplace that reflects that agrarianism, um, that's different than the marketplace that I think we basically exist in today, um, which— where we're losing a lot of farmers and ranchers and where I don't think their talent and skill and life passion applied to land and place is, is adequately respected. And so the festival is sort of about a new, a new way of seeing the land and each other and, and, uh, a new culture that can stick in a place and make a home, long-term home, rather than spoiling the nest and moving on, as is a bit of our history.

So what you're describing for the festival is not so much a— the intent is not to provide an educational platform, uh, of ranchers to ranchers, but it is really for the larger community as a whole.

That's right. Yeah, I would say we have maybe 5, like, let's say last year, maybe 500 or 600 people who work in agriculture or agriculture adjacent. Uh, you know, they might work on wildlife conservation or they might work for Trout Unlimited. And then there's the rest of the folks, uh, 2,500 people or so who are, uh, urban folks bringing their kids and and, uh, interested in connecting their kids with something real. And, uh, so one of the things that we didn't have the first year, but the festival has evolved to have, is all kinds of little talks and panels and poetry and pasture walks and demonstrations. Like we've got butchery demonstrations, we have working stock dog demonstrations, we have a couple of bird walks where Audubon talks about what they're learning as they survey birds on the property. How many species are there? What is the— how is the sage— not sage grouse, but sharptail grouse reintroduction in the valley going? And it's just so— it's all these little experiential touchpoints. And people may have come because they saw a band that they wanted to hear or a chef that they want to try their food, but they often end up connecting with their future business partner, or they might find their next project to fund or they might be running a business that finds their next funder. And so, that kind of networking is probably the most powerful part of the festival.

Across-domain networking. I love it.

So, what does—

you mentioned some of the challenges, no cell phone connection, no infrastructure. What does the execution of the festival look like? How has it evolved over the years? And I know there are a number of people who are interested in doing similar things, what advice would you have for them?

Boy, we are still— I'm not sure that we've found a rhythm where, okay, now it's easy and we just rinse and repeat. We— the festival has not covered all of its costs yet. Last year, for the first time, we covered all the direct costs. We didn't pay all the overhead that it took to, to hold it. It costs us in direct expenses with all the tents and porta-potties and stages and, and food cost. It costs us about $400,000 to put this festival on. And I think if we're honest with ourselves, it costs us probably $150,000 of labor from the operational organization of it to this, to the curation of the content that shows up there, to the marketing of the event itself, and all of the, you know, invoicing and receiving payments that it takes. And One of the things is we didn't want to turn the festival into a boutique market, high-priced tickets to wealthy people event. We have those in the state. We wanted it to be as accessible as possible. And in Helmville, Montana, we have a bar and a post office. And I was the only kid that graduated from 8th grade in this little town, only kid in that class. It's a very small place, and the only big event we have each year is the Helmville Rodeo on Labor Day, and it's $8 to get in. And so that creates a gravity of, okay, what can you charge for a festival like this that doesn't make locals feel like this is an abomination? And I think also part of the magic of it is that if locals do show up, which they do, and if people who are really working in agriculture and conservation show up, which they do, and then you also have folks from outside of that context, urban folks, there is a real magic, like an edge effect of those two ways of seeing the world where people feel, I think they just feel comfortable. They feel like there's already trust. In this place. And, um, so we could try to go after people who buy $500 and $600 tickets, but instead we've got, you know, $90 day tickets and $150 weekend passes. And so our ticket revenue is about half of the revenue right now. Um, and we have a 501 fiscal sponsor. There's probably about, uh, and between that and sponsorships, true sponsorships, um That's the mix of revenue. There's a little bit of ancillary stuff like the sale of merch and food truck fees and vendor fees. We have some— we have a whole thing called the General Store where artists are— some of it's art and some of it are brands that are making products. And so we get some fees from that, but— and some parking fees. But really the 3 main revenue streams are ticket sales, sponsorships, and grants. Foundations. And, yeah, I think without increasing ticket prices a lot, we're just going to have to let ticket prices gradually— let the numbers of tickets gradually grow and continue to be able to create an atmosphere where sponsors find value in providing money. And, the same with foundations.

Can you give us some perspective on, given that you have no infrastructure there, can you give us some perspective on what the requirements are to, in, for your setting to set up for an event like this?

We have about 4 whisper-quiet generators on site. We, you know, we bring in water stations that we get from Missoula, about an hour downriver to the west, so people can refill their water bottles and that kind of thing. We invite about, I think this year, 12 food trucks to provide the bulk of people's sustenance. And then, we have a big reefer trailer that we rent and we bring in, and that's what keeps our own food cold. And so, as part of your ticket, you can kind of graze from the live fire throughout the course of the weekend. So, we have a plancha station and a grill station and a cauldron. And so, We have, I would say, 4 or 5 fairly large tents that we rent for some shelter. Last year, for example, it was quite cold and windy, which was great in some ways because it really caused people to huddle in under the tents together and listen to the talks. And then we rent a stage and we rent the porta-potties and we have to have a grizzly bear management plan. To, to have electric fence to, you know, just protect the parking area. We've got a garbage plan to, you know, to make sure that things are captured at the end of the day. And then some of it is compost and brought to Helena and some of it is brought to the dump, the county dump. So and then the whole thing relies on about 200 volunteers who are just amazing. They're a huge part of this. What makes the festival possible. So they're doing everything from kitchen prep to helping put up stages to organizing parking and helping people get situated when they come out there. But yeah, once, once they're there, it's just quiet, you know, and every night the stars are out and we've got Starlink because the vendors need access to point-of-sale systems. But we try to protect those passwords so that people aren't generally on their phones. And yeah, it's just a time, um, it's a time to connect. Um, and I think a lot of times people leave with more energy than they came with. It's not like a lot of festivals are a big drink fest and it's a rave and, and people are ready to party in the headliner and then they leave tired. I think this is more like leaving recharged.

Yeah, well, one of the things I noticed when I was there was you spoke about the starry nights and the quiet. Like, you don't have quiet at a festival that could be a quasi— could be considered a quasi-music festival. Um, or shouldn't say a quasi-music festival, they have music there. How many of those are quiet at night?

Well, um, certainly there's bustle around the festival and there's, and there's noise, but there's places to escape. You know, you can take a walk up on the mountain, you can go out to the campground and it's pretty quiet there. And so there's kind of, there's ways to, I think quiet is a little bit relative. Quiet, there's no social media, right? There's not a lot of screen time. So it's, and because there's a lot of, I guess, content that you could describe as contemplative, I think there's just, um, there's not all of the bright lights and, and, and loud noises and distractions that you might think of when you think of a carnival or something.

How many people stay there at night?

Um, I would say probably at most 1,500. Um, a lot of other folks are day tripping in from Lincoln or Seeley Lake, those are about a half hour away, and Helena is about 50 minutes away, and Missoula is about an hour away. So, um, and then there's, there's also, um, kind of an extended RV area near the rodeo grounds where we run a bus, a shuttle back and forth. And so there's another group of people that stay there, maybe, maybe another couple hundred people stay there for extra RV space. But yeah, a lot of, a lot of the, you know, you asked about other people around the country thinking about holding similar things. And for me, probably the most important thing was to have some initial discussions with the fire department and EMS because they're both volunteer departments and it's a lot, that's where the real active community members are. And you really want to hear from them. And rather than saying, I'm doing this, It's like, hey, I'm thinking about this. I think it'd be a good thing. What do you think? What are your concerns? What problems do we need to solve? How do we deal with the county road closure? And, and, uh, how do we deal with the fact that there are grizzly bears in this valley this time of year? And then I— there's another nonprofit group called the Blackfoot Challenge in the valley that is sort of a collaborative, works on water and zoning and wildlife. And, and I brought the same question to them. And in that case, there's a broader spectrum of landowners from the place and agency people and nonprofit people, and I heard their concerns and their input, and you find ways to make the festival beneficial to other organizations in town. So I think that initial scoping and conversation having is important.

And just building on that, I would imagine that in, in some regards, some of those organizations perhaps even become partners in some way. What are the types of partners that you found to be particularly valuable?

Yeah, one partner, because we're not a C3, one partner is a 501 that can accept grants for the festival because they also see it as a way to share their own conservation work in the valley. And then they can help pay for the— those grants run through the nonprofit can help pay for tents and porta-potties and that kind of infrastructure that's necessary. So that would be a good example.

When you think about the festival, the community connections, the outreach, and ultimately also connecting through— connecting with the community through the restaurants and having those as distribution depots, what is your vision ultimately for moving the supply of your ranches and perhaps other ranches as well? Where are you now on the total consumption or total use by these various marketing efforts compared to your total production?

Oh, it's still pretty small. I would say about 15% of the 6,000 head of livestock that our member ranches sell each year go through Old Salt channels. And, yeah, we've got a long ways to go just to make a meaningful difference for our own members. We've, in some ways, Old Salt is, it launched itself at the worst time in history to start a meat company. And, it's a good time at least in the very narrow kind of short term. It's a good time to be a rancher because livestock are cattle, particularly are just very valuable. And it doesn't matter how you're raising them, frankly. Anything that can walk onto a truck and go to an auction or a live auction is— because they're so scarce, the packers are kind of paying out the nose to keep their facilities busy and keep the throughput up. But we weren't thinking short-term, you know, when we, when we established Old Salt. We were, we were looking a generation down the road and asking ourselves is the industry moving in a direction that empowers producers and local communities or the opposite? And we thought the opposite. And so the producers understand that the market cycles and there's reasons to— I think there's far more producers doing regenerative practices than people realize. I think what there is is getting those products to market in a way that rewards the producers for those practices. There's a reward in itself, right? Managing land regeneratively and decreasing your costs by decreasing inputs and finding ways to stack and layer enterprises that synergize with each other. Those are all rewards in themselves. But I don't think they're sufficient. And, you know, that's our own member ranches are a good example of that. They, their ecological trajectories were good when they founded Old Salt. Their profitability was good. And yet, um, they felt input costs in general, and I don't mean chemical inputs, I just mean tractors and fuel. Those things are escalating faster than prices. And that's why it sucks. Yeah. So we have to, um, we have to have the ability as producers to, to gain resiliency over time, uh, and to attract talent back. Um, because I really believe stewardship has so much to do with human beings, more eyes per acre, like eyeballs is, is kind of our goal. Uh, well, I remember one time and I used to work for a nonprofit called Western Landowners Alliance. And, um, it was a— I'm not— I don't know a lot about farming, but I was— I wrote a thought piece on crop insurance, and it's such a sticky thing. And I was wondering, okay, what if you could create a parallel incentive program that you could opt out of crop insurance, and if you did, you could participate in a different incentive program that essentially said for every $100 of additional labor I add to my operation, I can get $50 of that back. And because I remember the, the conservation—

the seek that idea—

the Civilian Conservation Corps, you know, during the New Deal was this— it just got young people engaged out on these big public works projects and trail building and all that. I think we need like a Civil Conservation Corps for agriculture. And I think more labor and more engaged kids can add a lot to the capacity to manage land regeneratively, not just kids, more engaged people on the land. And ultimately that influx of talent would just be a huge thing for agriculture.

And I think you are striking right at the heart of the challenge because one of the things that I've said repeatedly is that before we can have a conversation about regeneration at scale, the most fundamental piece that needs regenerated is the capacity for stewardship. And by capacity for stewardship, I mean exactly what you're describing— more hearts and hands on the landscape that care deeply and that are actively engaged. And if you want to accomplish that, if you want more hearts and hands in the landscape, then there has to be a way to compensate them and to reward them well. They should be able to be rewarded financially as well as if they put similar effort into other enterprises, into other endeavors. And we see that that is not the case today generally.

Amen to that. Yeah, amen to that. There's so many, um, there's so many opportunities to stack enterprises and, you know, especially on like where we're at, there's opportunities to innovate on the recreation side to a degree. We could certainly, um, do more on the sheep side of things on our own family's operation, which is mostly cattle. We could certainly do a pastured hog operation, and all those things take— all those things take, take time and talent and, uh, a lot of times what we've found— we participate in an internship program that the Kavira Coalition runs called the New Agrarian Program, and we've had a number of interns through that program, some who have stayed and are now a regular part of the ranching operation. And that— those outside perspectives are sometimes tremendously valuable because they don't come with the same preconceived notions that we have, you know, from being in this place a long time, there's some advantages to that and some blind spots that are created because you're in your paradigm and anything that can challenge that paradigm is generally healthy.

So let's dig more into— I want to hear more about this thought exercise of replacing insurance with, with people development. What does that look like? One of the things that I've found interesting, there are so many— when you really spend time thinking about it, there are so many perverse incentives around the crop insurance programs, many of which are not obvious on the surface. So just one even quasi-obvious example is the incentive for yields versus profitability. There's a good argument to be made that there are many growers, particularly with the elevated fertilizer prices this spring, there are many growers who would have been much better off from a profit-per-acre perspective putting on reduced nutrient applications, having slightly reduced yields but having had profitable yields. But insurance inverts that. You need to keep your APH levels up so that you have a higher insurance base for the future. Um, and so they're actually incentivized to pay more in expenses, grow a larger yielding crop that is going to lose them money, but to then rely on crop insurance to cover the gap. And on and on, there's layers and layers of this.

Yeah, I, I'm so— I didn't grow up with any farming context and I still don't have very much. So I had no business writing a paper on, on crop insurance, to be, to be honest. But I, you know, the benefit of perspective. So I have very limited knowledge about, um, you know, the challenges that farmers are navigating. I guess for me it's just, um, it seems to be the case that more and not less integration of livestock systems and cropping systems is a good thing. And oftentimes, at least farmers in my neck of the woods, let's say the Golden Triangle area of Montana or the lower Yellowstone, in some cases, the reason why it's hard to incorporate livestock back is simply because of how scarce water is. It's dryland farming. Fences are gone, and water is very few and far between. And so bison could make use of that migrating large distances, but it's a little bit hard to imagine how to integrate livestock back into that system today. But still, there are a lot of farming operations that tell me, oh, I would love to have livestock incorporated here, but my bandwidth is limited and I'm just not a cow guy. And so I think that kind of comes back to if we could somehow help, I think it would be hard to abuse a program that incentivized labor because you're not just getting free cash that you could spend on anything and perhaps not labor. You've got to demonstrate that your payroll is going up beyond some baseline. So you are investing in more than you're getting back, but you're getting part of that labor, that increased labor expenditure back to perhaps tip you over the edge to deciding that you might want to start working with the livestock person on your farm. Um, and conversely, perhaps there's some ranches that could incorporate a little bit of farming and, and feel like they don't have that skill set, and perhaps somebody else could come in. And so this is— it was a very— this is 15 years ago now, and it was— it's a very, um, loose thought experiment. But for me, the core is just when it— what is one of the things that would be helpful to operations that's hard to abuse? It's hard to sort of generally like more footsteps on the ground, more eyeballs is not going to have a bad ecological effect in the way that more inputs or more chemical or or more machines could have. And, you know, meantime, there's a lot of just the more people who are in this and the more kids who get involved, it's like that familiarity, um, can only help with our, you know, our cultural learning. And, and to get, you know, land is expensive and harder to access, harder to acquire to today, um, you know, than it was in my grandpa's time. It's harder to pay for it with the cash that an operation can produce, and in a lot of cases it's not possible. I'm not saying it's not possible anywhere, I'm just saying my neck of the woods, I— most places I cannot see how the profitability of an operation has a chance of, of actually buying that land. And so what are other ways to get more people on the land and, and create that access? It seems to me like it may be a function of government that is worth considering, especially since crop insurance is such a tangled thing with all these layers today that if you just wiped it away, you would have utter disaster is my guess. So there's got to be some kind of bridge, some kind of gradual letdown, gradual come down. From that system of perverse incentives.

Yeah, this reminds me of a comment that was made. I was asked to be a part of a think tank group to evaluate and to reconsider if we overhauled the crop insurance, or if we— not necessarily overhauled it, but if we just simply realigned it to produce goods that produce outcomes that would be better for society as a whole. And, you know, the, the one comment that seems kind of obvious— it was, it was made, um, early on in the conversation, uh, was what if we just stop incentivizing bad things that are producing poor public health outcomes, like more corn production for corn syrup, for example, more sugar production. And the sad thing about this whole conversation is that that seems like such an obvious place to begin, but it has no legs from a political perspective. And there does need to be a transition or a bridge, but there's, you know— sorry, you were going to say?

Well, I was just thinking of, uh, Glen Elzinga was on your podcast not too long ago with Alder Spring, and they've done partially by bringing in more help. They've really been able to utilize the massive amount of public ground surrounding them that they lease and to live up there with the cattle and to really just use human presence as a way of the right cadence of impact and rest on that ground. And it would be hard to justify that without either just a lot of volunteer labor that is a pure learning experience. Maybe they've figured out how to do it, and I really admire that. But I think an incentive like a labor incentive could just provide more of that. Like, clearly, more human beings are going to be having some really tremendous learning experiences and Helping to better utilize a resource in that context.

Yeah. One of the comments— there's a few dots in our conversation that I wanted to connect and get your perspective on. A bit ago, you spoke about how farmers have expressed an interest in integrating cattle, but they lack the the skill set and the infrastructure. And conversely, some ranchers might benefit from having some farming on their operations as well. And you spoke about how with Old Salt Co-op, you originally started as a cooperative structure and you have these 3 different ranchers. And I really appreciated your intentionality and your perspective on how you structured that. I've observed a number of, of instances where not many, but a few where farms started working together in active cooperation, um, in varying degrees, in varying structures. And it seems to me that there would be abundant opportunity for that to be much more common than it appears to be. Um, what, what inspired you to take that particular approach? What are the strengths that you see, and what are So, what are some of the opportunities and challenges that you see as well?

Oh, gosh. The challenges are just complexity, right? Just everybody has kind of the way that they've been able to make it work so far and everybody feels stretched. And so, to do new things, it's just complex. And Old Salt has— and it's paid a lot of money for its learning experiences. And we've experienced a ton of failure. And I think we are also experiencing some success and our complexity may eventually, if we can survive this valley of death, we may eventually be able to make complexity our friend and a real source of resilience. And the risk is that we got too complex too quickly. But I'm Railing a little bit here. We— the idea of cooperation, we did— we didn't think it was that new or interesting to just, um, build a brand around our family's name. Let's say Mannix Beef existed for about 20 years before Old Salt, and we were interested in fundamental change in the food system and we didn't want to just become a brand. Like, let's say we could— I'm not even sure if we could, right? I don't know if Mannix Beef could have built a brand that would get large enough to make it make economic sense for the family and to sell most of our stuff, you know, to our own customers instead of the commodity system. But we thought it would be— I'm not sure that the future of the food system is every single farm and ranch having to run their own brand. Like it just takes so many skill sets to get food to market, right? So we wanted to see, like, can we create something that is— that many producers someday could participate in as a real alternative to kind of the conventional marketplace? And we thought, okay, if we could, if we could base the stability off of that business on the main thing we raise right now, which is, which is meat and livestock. Well, eventually maybe our pooled acreage and our shared monitoring could justify ecosystem service markets that we wouldn't have access to alone, or that our scale starts to be attractive. You know, with the absence of some of regulated markets, perhaps the voluntary offset markets, perhaps we start to have a better argument as a whole together, or the idea of self-insurance. We all pay a certain amount of insurance on our operations each year, but when you really curate a group of people that trust each other and are careful operators, you may be able to get to a stage of saving a couple hundred thousand dollars per year by self-insuring. And there's all these, perhaps these folks over here have a little bit better winter grazing ground, and that would allow us over here in the Blackfoot Valley to put up less hay and to send them some extra cattle in the wintertime and that we could take, again, like just finding ways to use the ecological differences between these landscapes, even in our own region to synergize a little bit. There's, to me, that strength that can come in learning how to cooperate differently might just be the future. And I don't really know what it looks like. But I have a lot of faith in it. I think somehow it is how we need to build a more resilient agricultural system. And there cannot just be one thing. Like me, I don't want to sell boutique meat. We would like— we believe meat is nourishing. We want to provide it to our community. We want to provide it at the best price we can while still being profitable. And yet, And so I don't want to just create a brand that can sell meat to a tiny sliver of the population for a huge price. That's not how we become successful. We want to provide meat that, that is profitable but accessible. And ultimately, perhaps some other species at a little bit more scale than we do today, like sheep. Sheep are a great ecological solution, but the sheep industry has struggled. How can we bring back not just lamb, but also wool and wool processing in a way that adds some economic stability to the region. And then again, you start thinking about ecosystem services, maybe even shared recreation opportunities, self-insurance to save money on costs that right now feel like they're fixed, but they may not be as fixed if we work together. Yeah, I'm rambling a little bit there, but I just think that there are so many ways that we can benefit each other if we start thinking a little bit more about cooperation being our greatest strength rather than the rugged individualism image stereotype or archetype of the lonesome rancher on the plains.

Thank you, Cole. I think your framing around the ecological opportunity to the seasonal opportunities You know, you spoke a bit about— go about the bison being able to take advantage of grazing opportunities because of being migratory that are more challenging today. Like, how do you implement that? Well, it would take— it would take substantial cooperation on a substantial scale, which, as you pointed out, is— is— brings a lot of complexities, brings its own set of challenges.

But it also—

it is like we are capable of figuring this out. I read an article quite some time ago, and I'm, I'm completely forgotten the names of the individuals and the families that were involved, but there was this discussion of this, this group of 10 farm families that had, um, they kind of, they were cooperating very closely with their farming operations. They would plant together, harvest together, they owned equipment together.— and they were substantial scale. They didn't need to do any of these things to gain scales of efficiency. They were already very, very large operations. But by collaborating in that way— and they also had these different operations at different strengths. Some were livestock-oriented ranchers. Some were crop farming. And all of these beautiful synergies emerged where they were able to share labor, share resources. Uh, and they also had all of these inherent efficiencies that started accumulating where all of a sudden a couple of the families that were focused on livestock, um, they now found it relatively easy to take a month off every year because other people were there to fill in and there was this large integrated herd instead of a couple smaller herds. So there's so many opportunities like that, but to make those things work is going to require commitment. It's also going to require some sacrifice. Because that's part of what is involved in being a part of a community is that the self becomes subordinated to the whole.

Yeah. That's— and there, right there is maybe the difference between regenerative culture, regenerative agriculture, and what is bound to be extractive. Are we going to see ourselves as part of a community of land that we're part of, or are we going to see ourselves as everything's kind of serving my family's bottom line or net worth and try to leave my kids with enough money they don't have to work. That doesn't seem to work to me. I think of, and it's also just the way that nonprofits operate. Like in Montana, I don't want to go too far into a controversial subject, but two examples in Eastern Montana. One, the Nature Conservancy bought a 60,000-acre ranch called the Matador. And they were really interested in bird habitat outcomes. And what they did was they made that 60,000 acres available to the adjacent ranches for a decreased lease, uh, animal unit cost in exchange for bird habitat outcomes on those ranches. And so they expanded the impact of the 60,000 acres they owned a great deal, and meanwhile it did a good thing economically for those adjoining ranches that otherwise could not have afforded to buy that land or even chunks of that land. And I think I just love that example. There's another bison example in Montana called American Prairie. It's been going on for 20, 25 years where a nonprofit bought a lot of private land that was adjacent to public lands and they're trying to sort of build a Yellowstone of the Plains, this private nonprofit that would allow tourists to come and see the bison. It's been more of a combative relationship with ranchers, uh, where at least that's the perception, where these outside folks come and say, we're, we're kind of saving the plains from the rancher. They, I think, have some beautiful ideas, American Prairie, about restoring wildlife diversity and, and intactness to the plains, but they maybe didn't realize that the ranchers in that same region are their biggest partner. Their biggest— that's the biggest opportunity because those people would not live there unless they loved it, unless they cared about those same wild critters. They're under economic pressures that a big nonprofit is not. Um, but man, they really could benefit each other. So I really love the idea of that grass bank, the Matador Ranch, being used to sort of magnify the habitat impact across many more acres.

That's a beautiful story. Cole, I really enjoyed this conversation. Thanks for being here and sharing your wisdom. Are there any final thoughts or things that you would like to leave people with?

I, I don't think there's any huge words of wisdom for me. Just I'm grateful. I'm grateful for the chance to visit with you, John. And, and we're all in this together. The team at AEA and I are dedicated to bringing this show to you because we believe that knowledge and information is the foundation of successful regenerative systems. At AEA, we believe that growing better quality food and making more money from your crops is possible. And since 2006, we've worked with leading professional growers to help them do just that. At AEA, we don't guess.

We test. We analyze. And we provide recommendations based on scientific data, knowledge, and experience.

We've developed products that are uniquely positioned to help growers make more money with regenerative agriculture. If you are a professional grower who believes in testing instead of guessing, someone who believes in a better, more regenerative way to grow, visit advancingecoag.com and contact us to see if AEA is right for you.