Podcast Short #9: The Hope of Regenerative Agriculture with Kerry Hoffschneider

Hi friends. Welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast. It's in this conversation and this podcast is the place where I want to talk about all of the aspects of regeneration, regenerating soil and human health and plant health and all these important pieces. One of the things I've been talking about over the last year or more last several years is the fundamentals. What are the foundations of regeneration? And fundamentally, when you think about regeneration from a first principles perspective, it comes down almost singularly to regenerating relationships. Whether that's regenerating relationships between soil microbiome and plants, between livestock and the landscape, between people, between farmers and vendors, between farmers and their customers at all levels, it's about regenerating relationships. For today, I have a very special guest, Cary Hofschneider, who has spent a lot of time thinking about and writing about the nature of relationships in the farming community. So, Carrie, welcome. Thank you for being here. I'd love for you to tell us a bit about your personal story, your background, and what led you to have this interest in thinking about and connecting with farmer stories.

Thank you, John. It's such an honor to be here and debut my journey of feeling that started on a York county farm in York County, Nebraska. I was born October 18, 1977, and it was right before the 1980s hit. Our farm was small. It was. And a lot of farms were smaller then. And everyone has a different definition of that. But I'll just explain. My dad was a school teacher. He taught business at a high school. He drove about 20 minutes too. And then my mom happened to pass away when my sister and I were young. We were my, I was 4 and my sister was 8 years old. And mom would, mom worked some in town, but mostly, you know, she was a mom on the farm. And so life was going pretty good until then. As everyone who loves someone at any time in their life understands that whole. But I believe in grace and meaning in every pain we experience. So the grace in that was that I had an incredible grandmother. She was born in 1907. Her name was Ruth Heine and she was very progressive, thinker, open minded. And she was the biggest female influencer on my life. And she happened to be the first in her family of 13 to attend college. And so she was very much that, not a radical liberal feminist type. She was very much a. A woman is. Has a place to be learned, she needs to learn, she needs to go to school, she needs to be. And she would sit at the kitchen table and tell stories. And it wasn't Talking at us. She was listening to me too. It was back and forth, back and forth. She was awarded for being a great teacher. She got an award nationally. But you didn't know that about Grandma. Grandma was just awesome. And she was Grandma. So she stepped in when mom died and really was there. And part of the storytelling was I didn't know anything other than farming. Farming for us was her garden. She had the. One of the biggest gardens in the area. We still had fruit trees on the farm. Later they died of disease. Now they're coming back. That's. That's another story. But I was out there with her and so I thought we grew food, and we did. And so the stories, you know, I'd run away because I didn't want to do all that work all the time. But she was there. That was our farm. My dad was in the distance growing corn and sorghum, you know, or soybeans lately. And. But that was what farming meant. So that was the foundation. In the midst of that pain and heartache and disconnection from our mother, here was this woman who came.

You mentioned this being your debut of feeling, and I'm curious what your thoughts are around that, but it's a particularly intriguing way of kind of introducing yourself. Considering agriculture today is generally. Tends to be a very masculine pursuit, broadly speaking, I think that's the majority, though it's not universal. And it also tends to have a very masculine ethos, an ethos of domination and to a certain element, an ethos of. What's the word that I'm looking for? Not ignoring feelings, but actively suppressing feelings and suggesting that they are not a viable part of. Not a viable way of being in the world of agriculture, that we need to be macho and masculine, dominant.

You are absolutely right, especially for this country. So there the word manifests. Destiny has man at the beginning, you know, man. But it's not true the world over. Most of the world's farmers, I mean, I think it's even statistically recorded they're female. So there for me, there isn't this real need for it to be matriarchy or patriarchy. It's a human endeavor. And I believe the changes in agriculture have made us lose some of our humanness. And so when you asked how did I develop that? So when I was young, I mean, yeah, I was a feeler, but I was like a. I guess the word would be tomboy, but I really loved running around and racing outside. And I really didn't know until, you know, at the age where It's. You can notice the difference that I didn't. Wasn't supposed to wear a shirt. So I mean, I'm barefoot in shorts and with no shirt, running around playing in the trees, building forts. Really free brown as a biscuit. Living life with nature inside the farmhouse. It was stressful. My dad remarried quite soon to someone who wasn't from a farm and she didn't love it. You know, I think there was a different. It was a different time. So my sister and I really found refuge outdoors. But when it comes to that feeling journey, I was always trying to figure out what my dad was thinking because he wasn't talking right. You know, he was out working. He was the old staunch German Lutheran, Missouri student, Lutheran dad who wasn't going to evoke any sort of feeling about what was going on. He was going to go back to work and work was going to set him free. The stress was there and some heartache and some abuse even because we weren't addressing these core emotional problems that took a form. These feelings are an organ organism. They have a shape and they take a form in families. The miserable mom, stepmom, you know, she was working hard being a teacher. She had two kids with dad and, you know, it was a busy family. Dynamics change. I learned how to stay out of the way. I developed an emotional intelligence with the people around me. I could read their. Not read their mind, but in a way I could. I knew how to navigate that. And then my tomboyishness. I didn't want to be a boy. I wanted to always be a girl. I mean, I played prairie girl, I played with dolls. But I also had this nature part of me. Like, you know, I just want to feel the sun on all my body. You know, I want to be out with the cows. She always thought if I was a boy though, I could be a decision maker here and make things happen. I would be seen as somebody who could potentially take this farm over and do what I think that is right with it. And I would be listening to the adults around me. In addition to the family farm stress of just having a mom gone and this new deal, there were good, good things, but there were hard things. Everybody has that. I was also listening to them talk about what was brewing. And that was the 1980s farm crisis and what was going to happen to double down on the family during that time. And what happened is really another layer of removing life from the land. It really fueled my thoughts on how agriculture should be. And then all of a sudden what agriculture became. I feel Like I lost saw some of the last community oriented things turn into what we have today is an opportunity to remember that it's about a feeling too. It's not just about facts. And you can ask some more questions because I went on a tangent, but that's a really big no.

This is, this is an important story. But let's bring it flash forward to today where, where do you see the opportunity for farmers generally to re engage in perhaps healthier relationships with the landscape and with the ecosystems that they're stewarding and with their families and all the things that that entails?

I see the opportunity everywhere.

Give us a bit more detail. What does that look like exactly?

Yeah, my career. I decided when I left school or when I left to high school, I was going to be a writer like Willa Catherine. And I honestly wanted to go to New York City and ride about rural and get the hell out of there. Excuse my language. It had done enough. When I drove out the gravel road, I was like, I'm done, I'm good, I'm moving on. When I left, I didn't have support emotionally. I didn't go back a lot. We moved forward. Now that's come full circle. There's a lot of healing that's occurred. So what did I do? So when I my first professional career, instead of going to New York, what do I do? I take a job at the York News Times as a regional reporter. I was also the ag editor because it's a small newspaper. I think at that time it was the smallest daily in the country that was still pumping out information every day. And so in my role I went, I got in my vehicle and I started to stop at every farm and ranch I could do stories on them. And I started to collect information about how agriculture really worked. And then I'd see what was working even back then was diversification. And this is before regenerative ag and soil diversification. Family always at the table and had a say. They would have arguments, but they would circle back. They were paying attention to their water resources. They were not wasting water. They were doing conservation with or without government programs to help. These were basic principles that John Kemp talks about in every podcast, Right. They hadn't lost their connection to what really mattered because we can't eat or drink money, right? So it's that basic knowledge of I have to steward what's creating this crop, what's nurturing this family. I, it was just an understanding. Then I kept going through my career learning, learning, right. So I had this idea in My mind, I'm going to make agriculture better through these stories. I'm going to be a contributor to something more positive. I worked at a nonprofit for a while in my town is doing PR marketing. And at that nonprofit we serve disadvantaged kids. We serve children with behavioral and mental health problems. We just, we serve people that were going through things like I had gone through, except there was one difference. Economics. They didn't have the money to hide the problem, but it was a rural problem. It's a symptom of what's gone wrong in ag. So I keep learning and then I'll let you ask more questions. But my next step was like, that's awesome and I'm doing a lot of good there and I care so much about. We were serving like a thousand people a month. It was York county and surrounding areas. It was a lot of Nebraska. It was Mother's Jewels home. And its fruition started in 1889 with the orphan grain train. And then it evolved through the years as a Methodist mission. It was Epworth Village. But at that time I was there, we were like thousands of family members a month were being served and most of them were in rural. So everybody who is saying rural's great, I'm like saying, rural's not great. Rural has problems. Well, during that time, I got recruited to apply for a job at a huge seed company. It's a global seed company. It's one of the big three. And I was. It was a job that it took a month for me to hire me. It was the communications manager for the western half the United States. They were starting business units and I was to help communicate with the field sales and with the upper echelon. Well, then I really learned some things about agriculture I didn't like. And that was the out of touch nature of some aspects of global corporations. And that seed I so treasured that was growing on our small farm. And then the complexity and honestly the greed and just outright disconnect that some leadership have. And I'm like, I need to be an entrepreneur and I want to change. I got to have my voice back.

I've heard elements of your story briefly before, but when I think about the shift that you then made to becoming an entrepreneur. You use the phrase right just now of getting your voice back. There's an element, I would suggest, if I'm understanding you correctly, it's not just quote unquote, getting your voice back and the freedom to speak, but also the things to speak about that you felt very, very important. And so what are the pieces that you've been speaking about. And I'd love to bring it back to this whole relationship and connection aspect as well.

Absolutely. So to circle back when I was working at the large seed company, when I would do a news release, like, say a product Release, I had 11 lawyers in addition to other leadership reviewing my news releases. That was incredibly ridiculous. And so when you said I lost my voice, I did. I lost any ability to say any other way than what they were selling, which they're a company selling something. I realized I wanted to be a person giving something. And that was my reporting background, the freedom to share any new ideas imaginable that are better for agriculture. And so fast forward, what did we do? I met Del Fike of Fike Cattle Company and we shared the same mindset. His delivery was different, but our mindset about what we needed to change was the same. We had also had some rough go as growing in, in our formative years. So we knew what it took to, like, work through a lot of stuff. So we started the Graze Master Group. We co founded it off the premise of this is a business of people. This is a business of liberation. And I, even before we started the group, went back to my reporting spirit and started pounding the pavement of the countryside, stopping at farmers and ranches, meeting people and saying, can I write a hope story about you? And they would ask, well, why does it cost anything? Hope stories are my book. That became my book. Hope stories was my mission of my heart, of that feeling part of me that had been suppressed, that was expressing itself like good seed. And soil expresses itself when it's set free. I was the seed. My heart, my story, my talent, I guess, was hope stories. So I wouldn't charge anything. I don't charge anything to write hope stories. My mission is to get information out that's good for agriculture. Information like keep the soil covered. You know, let's plant. Let's try to plant things year round. Let's graze our animals differently. The things you talk about that I don't need to get into, but. But the farmers were actually doing it. So I'd meet farmers from all walks of life in that journey. We even worked with the Intertribal Ag Council. We developed relationships with the Pawnee. Our Pawnee family. Dell started growing corn for them. We could move on things fast because we didn't have a government bureaucracy, we didn't have a corporation telling us what to do. It was human to human, and we wanted to make things better. So I began collecting this information, sharing it on social media. Some ag media was picking it up. I had kept my seeds column for 20 years in the local newspaper. People were reading and seeing how I was changing. We came out swinging because we were upset. The industry had. We had a target on our back because when we started this no one hardly was talking about it.

What is the scope of the Grazemaster group? What's the nature of your work?

We are consulting all over the country. It's about 40 states that Dell has been in now consulting. He has a Gracemaster story to tell that you should talk to him. That's an awesome journey with his cattle genetics and I'm not going to even try to touch that. We work now with corporate partners that we believe are making a positive impact but they are not people that we are full time employees with where everything's a contract and everything can leave if it's not working. And we've. We cut it out of the group if it's not serving the farmer and rancher. It happens fast because we can do that. So we have a group that is the leaders and then we have community partners and we have a website, we do social media but our community partners are also nutritionists. We have a PhD scientist, we have Ward Laboratories, they're our lab partner. But their mindset is that one of we have to change, we have to save our soil and we have to promote practices like you do so amazingly well, John, that help our planet and renew it.

We started this conversation by speaking about relationships. The more feminine aspects of agriculture as compared to contrasted to some of the more masculine aspects of connection and intuition and so forth. How do you facilitate refreshing that or enlivening that within people?

It's my favorite thing to do and I don't know why I'm getting so emotional about it, but it really is. How do I do that? It's one on one. It's one thing. Person or one family, one farm, one ranch at a time. I believe and this is not an ego thing. I believe I have a presence that is loving. And I'm not saying I'm in love with everyone. That's not what I mean. I really believe my intellect and my heart, I believe they're one and the same in all of us. Our brain and heart and gut are all part of our nervous system and they aren't all alive. They're not all alive or working in the optimum state because our nutrition is not there. Our practices don't allow for that nutrition to be there on the farm. But for some Reason I've had.

And also we sometimes suppress them. Actively suppress them and choose to not release them. Yeah.

And men are raised. I mean, it's true. Men are raised to suppress them more than women. You know, they just are. Now, women are having to be a little bit more like that because we're in industry, and we have to be like, whatever. You know, that's B.S. men do have to, though. They are trained and all that stuff. Like, don't cry. Don't feel well, I can tell you. I mean, the great battles of the past were done by men that felt the passion of the battle. They got into it. The great lovers are feelers. They're men, but they're also great lovers. Right. You. It's a as much of a masculine need as a feminine need. And so I think I draw that out of people when I interview them. How do you feel about this? Because, honestly, everybody can get how to go. And no till or even Whaley ramp ahead. Let's grow perennials or let's add cattle. Right. Guys can get together and be like, yeah, let's do this. And I will have more. You know, I get that. But can they get together and be like, how are you feeling?

No, guys will not.

You look like you need to cry. You know, you look like you're. They don't do that as much. Women. Yeah. There's this disconnect with ourselves. So I want people to feel better. I looked at my parents. They didn't feel good. You know, I wanted them to feel better.

Yeah.

And, you know, so I used that desperate want that I couldn't achieve in that family unit. And I'm going out to the world, and I'm not, you know, I'm so imperfect. And I think that's another thing. I have made so many mistakes and been through so much. I can relate to just about anybody and what they've been through.

If you had to encapsulate our entire conversation or encapsulate your work, what is the key takeaway that you would like for farmers to come away from this conversation with?

The key takeaway is, and it's what Dell says a lot, too, your legacy is not your land and your livestock and your tractors and your stuff. Your legacy is how you showed you loved the people involved in your life. And we've all failed at that. I think I definitely have. You have a chance to change it. Don't be overwhelmed, because guess what? Everybody has had those suppressed feelings. Go ahead and cry in the tractor today or whatever. Go ahead and tell Your dad, you're done working for him. You are now 55, and you're gonna take charge of your life. Go ahead and tell your wife whatever you need to tell your, you know, your kids. It's the littlest things that we need to do that are the biggest things that will change the course of the future of this. You, John, are so focused on those little things. You get it, and I thank you for that contribution. I'm not going to be able to be you, but I can be all me. And that's what I bring to the table. And I'm learning to do it better every day. And I just want everyone else to have that potential. They're my seeds. That's what I see in people, your potential. And I look around at every single human being and I think, what's their story? And what could they be? What if they were in a different environment and what would manifest in them?

That's a beautiful note to end on. Thank you, Carrie. Thank you for sharing your story and for being here and for all of the listeners wanting to connect. Carrie's most recent book is Hope Stories for the Heartland. And you connect. Connect with her at the Grace Master Group and online. Thank you for being here.

Thank you, John. From the bottom of my heart. I so appreciate it.

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. Thank you for listening and we look forward to working with you.