https://www.listennotes.com/e/aaffaca5ae1c4da8a44ef4880b9b4d90

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

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

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

Absolutely.

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

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

Yeah, exactly.

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

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

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

Wow.

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

But what has happened with water?

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

That is crippling.

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

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

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

Yeah, I was there a couple years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More likely they would run you off if you suggested it.

Yeah, yeah. You know, so those are a couple of examples.

I think for many farmers, we're really attracted to farming. We find deep meaning in our work. We're not doing it just exclusively for the economics alone, because quite frankly, if that were our motivation, we would probably be doing something else. What is it that you've found particularly meaningful that has really drawn you and connected you to agriculture?

Like I said early on, when I first started spending consistent time on Chris's first farm, I felt the most like myself in that context. I love the seasonal rhythm. I love when spring comes around and we start seeds. I love working in the greenhouse early in the spring. I love the harvest. I love sharing the bounty of our harvest. We grow way more food, just even in our little home garden than we would ever need. And we feel share all of that with our neighbors and friends. I love the community of people that ends up gathering around, especially a food based farm. And I love observing and getting to know this landscape. You know, we just took over a new lease, it's primarily dryland and I just took a really long walk over there. The Other day, and as I walked through this canyon, I thought about how, you know, there's evidence of humans inhabiting this area for 8,000 years. That's 400 generations of people who have been in this landscape before us. And so agriculture connects me to a really long lineage of human beings on land in a way that makes me feel deeply human.

I think you just touched on the most important piece that we can so readily be forgotten in agriculture, is that it is through connection to the landscape, connection to an ecosystem. Ultimately, what it connects us to is to other people and to other stewards and recognition that we're a part of a much greater whole. I think within, as you think about journey that you've been on, what you find meaningful. What are some of the memorable moments that really stand out in your memory, good and bad?

You know, I remember I was for other business purposes, I was away from the farm, in a hotel. I opened up our email and I read the irrigation district's announcement of our allotment in 2022, and I cried. I realized really what that meant for us, right? That was the year when we had 20% of our water being delivered. And I. I'll never forget that feeling in that moment, because there was pure fear of what are we going to do and are we going to survive? But I do have the sort of makeup where that feeling lasts fairly short, and then I get quite determined to solve the challenge. So I got to work very quick. I applied for a value added producer, you know, through the usda. And that's a huge reason why we were able to develop our meat program. I'll plug that for anybody who needs to make a big pivot. The VAP grant was catalytic for us. I also remember in 2020, you know, Covid, I didn't even touch on this, but, you know, we had built 75% of our market for the potatoes at that time was restaurants. And so come the pandemic, right? Our. Even before the water loss, you know, our main market for potatoes, poof, shut down. And so I had to very quickly pivot the crap to go to grocery stores, which is, like, not simple. And that same year, we had an unseasonal. We had a tornado event that happened here, which is not normal. And it rocked our farm. So it was kind of like boom, boom in May. It was just like crazy things happened. But after that tornado event, all of our friends, all of our farming friends, and even some of our customers and community, the day after that happened, and it rocked our farm. People showed up and A whole crew of people got to work picking up broken glass, picking up the pieces of our wheel lines. And those are the moments, right, like when really disastrous things happen. There's something about the farming community that is we will be there for each other. And so those moments really stand out.

And again, those are moments of community and connections to other people.

Yeah.

You know, one of the things that I. The first time I met you, we shared a stage at rfsi and you said something that in that moment that the people didn't have the full context of your farming operation. But you described how, I think a couple of years previously you had shifted the farm where you had doubled the yield while reducing water use by 80%.

Yeah.

Tell us a little bit about that. How did that all come about?

So that was in the context mostly speaking to like our, our hay fields. And so before we were expanding our cattle herd to where now we're using most of the hay. We produce produce. We were selling hay. And so I go off of really like, what's our bail count coming off of those fields? So I started holistic management training in 2020. And that was when we started doing ecological outcome verification monitoring. And so that's really like when that world of like Alan Savory esque, you know, holistic prescriptive raising became a part of my education. And we started playing with, you know, shorter duration, higher intensity grazes on our hay fields or on the grain fields like I mentioned. And so really it only took a couple of seasons of implementing that on our hay fields. And this was happening while we were, you know, our water was being cut back where the yield on those hay fields and had doubled. And that goes off of just the bail count coming out of those fields. We were never applying, you know, any synthetic fertilizers or anything. It was really just the correct timing and the correct application of grazing that helped us increase those yields in the face of the water loss.

Double the yields with 80% less water is pretty remarkable accomplishment on any crop.

You know, and the other thing that happened that year, John, was I think that this is right. It was either 21 or 22. There was a really bad cricket infestation that happened in this region and it really affected a lot of the farms around us. And we did not experience the hit of the crickets. And I can't tell you from a technical, I don't know why, except for that. Like, we do believe that soil has a microbiome and we do believe that the way that we have managed things has created A pretty resilient microbiome here. And we just didn't have that cricket infestation that we saw elsewhere. The other thing that I've been keeping track of is the heat buffering capacity of soils. And so, you know, from year to year we have seen, you know, other parcels that we have taken over because again, we've been able to take over more parcels year after year. So we've got, you know, Home Farm has seen our management for the longest. But say the property just to the west of us, it's been on its journey of, of healing. But on years where we've had like say 116 degree heat wave in June, which is just terrible, we have significant difference in the temperature of the soils on our home farm versus those parcels that are kind of in their process of healing. So all these things that.

Even with the same soil cover.

Yes, with the same crops growing, but very different, you know, current nutrient makeup and health status, but same crops growing.

This is intriguing. You'd almost expect, you know, generally we tend to associate higher organic matter content soils as being darker soils, and we tend to associate darker soils as absorbing more sunlight and therefore conducting more heat. But you're actually describing the opposite.

No, I think that what we have seen has been a greater heat buffering capacity in the face of those extremes in the soils that have seen this management for the longest.

So let me just clarify. When you're saying heat buffering, I thought you said a bit ago that you're seeing the soil temperatures remaining cooler. Are you seeing that the plants themselves, the crop itself is also a lot more resilient?

I mean, on Home Farm, Absolutely. Like I said, that cricket infestation just did not come from for the crops here. We're getting higher yields at Home Farm than we are on the other parcels that we've taken over and are transitioning. But no, mainly it comes down to that when we put a, you know, soil temperature probe into those soils, they are consistently lower on the Home Farm than they are on those more dysfunctional parcels that are like in process.

That's fascinating.

I think that's. I think that's a huge area of investigation for the future because I think wherever anyone is, we are seeing greater extremes when it comes to heat.

Absolutely. We're seeing more climate volatility with heat and with water and needing to balance that. So, Kate, there are, I think it's safe to say there are tens of thousands of people in younger generation who aspire to the journey that you have been on, who want to get into farming, but who are faced with what they perceive to be insurmountable hurdles of very expensive land prices that are kept at elevated levels because of existing landowners. People from older generations who have built up a lot of equity, who are arguably making actually facilitating difficulty for land access for the younger generation. And there's obviously lots of other factors at play as well. But my question for you is what. What advice would you have for people from a younger generation who want to get into farming and who don't have the benefit of connections and contacts. Contacts and experience as you have?

Yeah, well, there's a resource in Oregon that I can give for Pacific Northwest people and I hope models like this exist elsewhere. I'm just not sure. There's a group called the Friends of Family Farmers and they have an online portal called Farm Link and it is for landowners to list their properties where they're willing to lease land and for farm seekers to get access and you know, look through potential listings. That's one place. And I, you know, I hope again that there's resources like this in other states. You know, opportunity has grown for us because we plopped ourselves in an area that I think again from like a more conventional mindset, somebody might see this as a farming area that is losing opportunity because water is leaving. We see it differently. Like if we were stuck in the we are potato growers mindset, sure, opportunity is leaving, but because we stopped thinking of ourselves as one thing and we started asking the question like what are these times asking of us and what is this place asking of us? It was asking us to change our model. Like I think if you go into it open minded, you can find areas where say there is an exiting farm population and there are aging landowners who are seeking young people to manage their lands. I think, you know, there's lots of work to be done to support people in creating long term lease agreements so that the work you put into property and the infrastructure and the soil that you build is not like a season to season tenure. I think that's important for leasers. That would be my advice. And you know, we still operate with really old equipment. Like you know, we year by year acquired or traded our time and our sweat equity for a baler or you know, a combine. It's been relationship building which has allowed us new lease opportunities and the opportunity to say trade for quite equipment.

We can't conclude our conversation without talking about hats. You met your husband by making a hat for him. Are you still making hats?

I am, yes. Yeah, this I'm in my office, which is in the back of my hat workshop, which I got to build on our farm in 2021. I. Yes, I, I'm still building custom western hats. I've been doing it since I was 23 and I love it. It's like my meditation, it's my craft, it's my trade. It's given me incredible opportunities in this life. It got me a husband.

You can't offer any higher endorsement than that now, can you?

And hey, John, I want to say this because again, for a younger generation of farmers, you know, I think for a lot of agricultural, cultural families, it often takes multiple revenue streams to make it work. And the hat business, in those years of transition, it held us up financially in ways that we really needed. So maybe that's another piece of advice for any aspiring ag entrepreneur is like, I do think you need multiple income streams, however that comes. So hats have played an important role creatively and financially.

If I remember correctly, you are expanding beyond hats as well, right? You're doing other leather work also.

Yeah. The leather goods company is called Range Revolution, whereas my hat company is called Havstad Hat Company. Range began in 2021 because as our meat business was growing and our raising of cattle was expanding and I was really digging into the business and the unit economics of the beef business, I realized that, you know, every time we send a steer to slaughter, only 65% of the carcass is getting utilized. And that's because for most small to mid sized producers and butchers, there's no aggregation systems in place for the hides, the awful and the bones. And from a business perspective, I'm constantly thinking about how we make mid sized regenerative agriculture more economically resilient. And seeing a 35% quote waste on every steer or cow sent to slaughter was just like a huge wake up call. So I decided to get to work. I felt like I could solve the hide waste dilemma through design. And again, that youthful ignorance was very useful. I had no idea how complicated and hard this would be. But Range Revolution, the leather business has been on a awesome trajectory. I actually won the pitch competition at RFSI last year and, and we've been expanding. We've got wholesale accounts, we have a direct to consumer business, we've got some exciting celebrity collaborations happening this year. But you know, if you know me at all, like, I'm not just trying to create handbags and wallets, you know what Range Revolution's mission is, is to increase the economic returns to regenerative ranchers and to use my Creativity, my design and my ability to do marketing and branding, to reconnect a huge section of the population that lives very disconnected from agriculture, which is the fashion consumer. I mean, no one really thinks anymore about where the fibers on our bodies come from. But once upon a time, the industry was cotton and it was linen and it was wool and leather. And it's really just since the 1950s that petroleum based synthetics have dominated. Today, 70% of the fibers in our fashion industry are petroleum based. So while we address, you know, all other areas of unsustainability, bringing an agriculture lens to the fashion industry is, is something I'm passionate about working on.

You know, I imagine you might enjoy having some time to twiddle your thumbs, but for some reason I think you'll never do that. You'll always enjoy making hats. And so since making hats is your meditation and you'll express your entrepreneurial drive in other ways, I'll have to ask the question, what comes next?

What comes next after this chapter of work or like this year, you can.

Answer that question in any way you like.

Oh, you know, this year, you know, I want to see the meat business just continue the path it's on. I'm very happy with where things are going. You know, I just want to have a cut flower garden for joy this year. I've been too busy and kind of chaotic and raising babies the past two years to have just like my joy garden. So I think this is a year of kind of reclaiming some of those things on the farm that, you know, just the kind of do or die nature of the past four years is not allowed for. So my cut flower garden and just doing some things for joy, that's, that's what I hope for this year. I do hope for a little bit of spare time just to ride my horses. And I also want to do more almost like vlogging via YouTube and sharing what we are learning on this farm. Because on a day to day basis, I think most of us agriculturalists take for granted the things that we are witness to, the things that we are dealing with. And there's a giant population of the world that I think would like to see behind the curtain more. And I think it gives the world and those people who live in the city or they're curious about this stuff, I think opening up our worlds to them is a really important mission for agriculture. So I want to find more ways to share the story through my writing and through video vlogging.

That first piece that you said, creating, deliberately creating space and creating time to pursue joy or to experience joy. I think it's a question for all of us. Ask a question for all of our listeners. What are you doing to deliberately experience joy and to experience that it's, it's easy for us to get caught up in the race of the next thing that needs done. So, Kate, in with the with your vlogging work and just your marketing in general, where can people find you?

Thanks for asking. I have, you know, Instagram is where we share a lot of our farm story and so the farm you can find us at Cassad Family Farms. C A S A D Family Farms. You can find my hat making work and kind of various musings at Havstad Hatco. That's H A V S T A D. And you can find the Leather Project at Range Revolution. And all those businesses have websites and whatnot. And I've been doing more writing via substack and so you can find me also, I think if you just search my name, Kate Habstad Cassad, you could probably find my substack presence.

Thank you. And we will include for all of our listeners, we'll include all of those links in our show notes that you can find on YouTube or if you're on a typical podcast channel or the podcast website, we'll have those show notes available. Well, Kate, thank you very much for being here. Thank you for all the work that you're doing, for the wisdom that you're bringing to the world, for the knowledge that you're sharing. Thank you. Look forward to having more conversations again in the future.

Likewise, John, 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.