Regenerating Landscapes With Livestock and Diverse Forages| Fred Provenza

Hi, friends. This is John, and this is the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast. Welcome and thank you for being here and for listening at this place, this time. Here on the podcast, we talk about the agronomic science and the cultural management practices that have the capacity to regenerate plant health, soil health, and public health. And I also want to give a shout out to the amazing team that we have at advancing eco agriculture that supports this podcast and really allows this to be. I find my life so enriched by being able to work with them, you know, here on the podcast. And my own journey has really been informed by not just reading and theory, although I certainly enjoy that, but able to actually implement it on scale and see what works and see what doesn't work. And that's something that all of us as individuals need to constantly evolve and become better at. So for this podcast today, for this episode, I have looked forward to this conversation for a long time. And I have a lot of joy in inviting Fred Provenza, who has done a lot of amazing work on animal nutrition, ruminant interactions with ecology and human health and human nutrition, and how we should be grazing on our food. And so there is so much richness. You know, one of the joys of having Fred here and one of the challenges is when you have someone who has such depth and such breadth of their life work, the question is really, where do you begin, where do you start, and where might you end up? So I look forward to that. Fred, thank you very much for being here. And I can't possibly do justice to your story of what you have experienced in your life, what you've worked on, and where you are today. So I'd love it if you could just share that with us. What has your pathway been?

Well, John, it's wonderful to be here with you. I too have really looked forward to this conversation. And the first thing that pops into my mind as you ask that question is, for me, it's been about relationships with other people. You know, it's easy to focus on the individual and, and what, quote, that individual has done throughout their lifetime. But I never see my life in that sense. I see it as relationships with other folks and give total credit to the roles that they've played as I've gone along in my life. From my parents beginning back as a pup growing up in the mountains of Colorado, I can relate very much when people talk about the importance of place in our life, of the place that we come from, my heart has never left the place that I was born and raised. Those mountains Even though I've traveled all over the globe, I've always had such deep linkages to those places. And as a young pup growing up, I was just fascinated by the natural world. If it moved, breathed, I want to say, or whatever insects and everything else do, I was fascinated in it. I just absolutely loved it. As I went along a bit in my schooling and started learning about plants, they just, I just got enthralled, absolutely enthralled with plants initially, just identifying them. This whole world, this whole universe I had never really seen until I took the first plant class in plant taxonomy. And it was just, you know, it makes you think how many worlds within worlds within worlds are right there in front of us and we don't see them. But that certainly happened with me with plants. And, you know, I heard you talking about plant intelligence here recently and amen to everything you were saying. It's just, you know, the. What little I've learned about them and none of it was deliberate. We're working with these goats down in southern Utah to prune this shrub, black brush during the winter, stimulate this new growth that we knew was more nutritious, higher in energy, protein, minerals, all those things. Come to find out, most of the goats didn't even want to eat it. And that started a huge adventure about how these so called secondary compounds mediate interactions with the environment and how plants are actively participating in everything that's going on. So when you were talking, talking a little bit about plant intelligence and consciousness of plants, very interesting topic.

I find it so interesting that we have this popular narrative, or perception, if you will, that plants are somehow inanimate objects that just happen to have life. And as you dig into the research, you realize that in fact plants are self aware. They are aware of their environment and they make informed decisions and informed choices. They have a neural network that is identical to our own, except that in some cases it might be significantly larger. And they communicate with each other. And one of my favorite comics I've discussed it several times, is there was this drawing sketch that I saw of two trees and a human is walking by and one tree says to the other, do you suppose humans can communicate? And the other tree says, no, how can they possibly. They don't have roots. And, you know, while that is funny. Yeah. There's also the realization that plants don't just communicate through their roots. We're starting to understand that better. But they're communicating in the electromagnetic spectrum and literally talking with electromagnetic signals to each other constantly through the atmosphere and through the soil. So anyway, it's a marvelous world that we live in that we're mostly blind to.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. The case that. Yes, yeah. The communication, all the senses that plants have 20 or more different senses that you're alluding to in one way or another. And I often think, you know, many a quote, dumb plant has out foxed all the agronomists and people that trying to kill them one way or another. Right. They're always a step ahead of, ahead of us. And then one thinks, as you're saying, self aware, conscious, sentient and they're the givers of life. Really. I think that so much, you know, and so this whole debate that we often get into of sentience and we shouldn't be killing animals because they are sentient. I think the broader issue to me is that all life is sacred. It's all sacred and we're a part of that. And then, you know, to, to think out of that, that as you were saying the other day, and I chuckled when you're talking about that the, the rhizophagy, the plants are actually carnivores, which is happy munching on bacteria as they can. No, but you know, life lives on life acknowledging that. And you know, I think of the years when I was on the ranch. I worked on a ranch for seven years in Colorado and you know, we were just so, so I don't know what, what it feels like to be an ant, but that's what I used to think when I was there on the ranch. All the things in the different seasons that we would do, from irrigating crops to harvesting crops to caring for, for animals and, and those, those rhy. From the spring, the early spring through the summer, through the fall and then into the winter, it just felt so, so deeply connected. And then there were things, you know, growing of, of our gardens and our food and then butchering, butchering hogs in the fall or whatever it was. And just that intimate relationship with the natural environment made you feel linked in ways that the whole debate that we get into over what to eat and not eat was kind of not relevant at that point. It was that we're a part of. I don't know if I'm expressing that very well, but we're a part of all of that. And it's all sacred in a sense.

It is all sacred in a sense. And as we're learning, it's all sentient, it's all self aware plants as well as animals. And so there are many people who have approached their dietary choices from a desire of doing no harm. They chose not to be carnivores because of their perception that they are doing harm. And as the realization grows of that plants have similar levels of consciousness and cognition. That brings an interesting element to that conversation. And so I think from my perspective, I would say it this way. Plants and animals desire to contribute, we desire to contribute, and as similarly, they desire to contribute, and we should accept their contribution with gratitude, whether that is, whether we're consuming plants, whether we're consuming animals. When we accept that into our bodies and that nourishment with love and gratitude, it completely changes the. Our relationship with that food, our relationship with where it came from, and the way that it influences our bodies and our health as well.

Oh, absolutely. Well said. Well said, John. You know, I often think too, you know, there's a small percentage of the population who are farmers and ranchers who are actually growing produce or animals or so forth, but we can all be, quote, farmers and ranchers. If we own even a little plot of ground, we can think about what we grow on that plot of ground. I'm really a proponent of thinking about what were the native species that grew in the place that you live. Encouraging them to grow as a really important part of where you are. It reduces use of fossil fuels, pesticides, herbicides, when you allow that diversity, and it encourages life below and above ground. And what's amazing, and I'm not trying to be a big proponent for what sue and I do, that's what we've done here in Ennis. And it's amazing the number of people that stop and say how big, beautiful your. Your yard is. And so, well, this is just the native plants that grow here. And seasonally, the what's flowering changes from early spring to late spring to summer to fall. You have this beautiful bouquets of, of wildflowers and grasses when you get into the grasses, and then the diversity of different insect life. For, for instance, I'm thinking about now bees, your honeybees that love to come and visit our place because there's a whole, a whole variety of different plants. We do have a little bit of lawn that's planted around the house that was here when we came. We didn't get rid of it, but we've really encouraged, encouraged clover throughout the yard. We didn't have to do anything. It was there, we just didn't kill it. And it spread throughout the lawn. Well, that's fixing nitrogen. And boy, do the honeybees love to come and hit the clovers throughout the yard. Too. So, you know, we're not sound old now, but I'm going to say it. When. When I was growing up in this little town of Salida in central Colorado, the grandparents and older generation all did that. They all had beautiful gardens, herbal vegetable gardens. They raised chickens, some of them even had a hog. They were still really intimately linked with plants and animals in the, in their lives in the sense that, that we're trying to articulate here. But I. That really disappear during my parents generation and then from that generation on it seemed like that, that. And if you drive around that little town of Salida, you don't see so much of that anymore.

Yeah, it's certainly something that has been, seems to have been lost with the last several generations as we've moved primarily to the cities. And we have a very tiny proportion of our overall population that has a close connection to the rural landscape and to the countryside and to food production. And I like your point that we can and we should actually experience that in our homes, even if we have small lawns. And you know, one thing that I find interesting is how many farmers, and even particularly farmers across the Midwest who are growing lots of, let's say corn and soybeans and wheat and commodity crops may not even have their own gardens and may not even be growing their own food. I think that's such an opportunity for us to develop a close connection.

Absolutely the case. And when I think, when you mention that, I think back to those years on the ranch and they hadn't lost that. Those people still were so, you know, they had chickens for their eggs. It wasn't a commercial thing. And beautiful, beautiful, beautiful gardens, beautiful gardens nursed with the manure that came from the animals. I'm reading a book right now. I agreed to write a foreword to a book and it's on pastoralism. And it's just a beautiful, beautiful book about nearly 1 billion people on this planet and their way of life, the pastoral way of life. And there's a part in there where the author is talking about where pastoralism often gets in, integrated in with farming systems. And in this particular case that she's, she's illustrating the. The farmers actually pay the pastorals to put their animals on their fields after the harvest because the manure from those animals is such a rich source of nutrients and they draw very, very sharp distinction between manure from animals foraging on diverse landscapes that then come in and deposit that manure on their fields versus commercial fertilizer and how it just trashes the land that they're on, it's, you know, they're not studying all of these things. They're, they're, they're students of life, right? Of watching what's happening. And, and then a point that, that get brought out too is that the flavor, the flavor of those foods is so fantastic that they grow on those, those plots compared with the commercial fertilizer. So hitting on, she, she just touches as she's going along on many, many points related to, to the relationship between domestic animals and crops and health of landscapes.

This connects so well with your work on an understanding of the gut microbiome for livestock and for people and how that changes and evolves with diet. And so when you think about ruminants or animals coming to graze on land that previously had a very diverse diet with lots of diverse forages, their microbiome is invariably going to be much more complex, more sophisticated, more nuanced, more diverse than if they're just consuming a handful of crops from a TMR mixer. And so I think that's something that's perhaps not often contemplated in our agricultural system, is that manure is not manure. We're really not talking about, we should not be thinking about manure from a nutrient application perspective, but from a microbial perspective. And what is the microbiome contribution that it's adding?

Oh, such a good point, such a good point. And it takes me back probably 50 years now when I was a younger pup reading a paper by some ecologists that were making the point that you just made that the more diverse the diet of the, of the ruminant animals, the richer the microbiome of those animals. And they were thinking in terms of these secondary compounds as diverse or these tens of thousands of compounds that plants produce, and simply pointing out that when animals are eating those, they're creating niches, niches for all these different species of bacteria, protozoa, and on and on and on in the gut. And I remember how that hit me 50 years ago when I read that paper. It's like, yeah, that's really, that's amazing. And ruminant nutritionists had been focusing on the gut microbiome for years and years and years. In fact, when I first entered into some of that, I, I got a little bit bored with that because, like, you know, surely there's more than just the microbiome here. There is, there are these other organs and there's a brain on this creature and it's. But you know that they, they appreciate it. They very much appreciate it. And, and when animals were moved from rangelands and they talked a lot about cellulo lytic bacteria digestion, bacteria that break down cellulose. And when they move into feedlots and get on, on high grain diets, why the microbiome shifts in big ways toward starch digesting bacteria. So at a broad scale, we're talking about some of what we're talking about, but that at a much more nuanced level it certainly the more diverse the diet, the more diverse the gut microbiome. And it makes me think of the Hadzas in Africa, the people that anthropologists have studied so much and nutritionists, and how incredibly diverse their gut microbiome is. And it's linked directly to what we're talking about. They eat this tremendously diverse diet of plant and animal foods.

You know, when I was looking forward to our conversation, I was rereading your most recent book titled Nourishment. And for all of our listeners, there is no possible way in a podcast interview to record all the wisdom that Fred has shared in his book. So I highly recommend looking up his book Nourishment. We'll link it in the show notes. But one of the I read very widely and with enough depth and background in thinking about these possible connections. I'm, I'm seldom surprised anymore. But I was delighted and overjoyed to read about Clara's kids and the story that you shared. Can you tell us about how these children self selected their diet?

Yes, it's a delightful story and I'm going to give you a little bit of background about that. I had not heard about the work that Clara Davis did roughly 100 years ago now until an author in Canada, Mark Shacker, contacted me. He read some research that we were doing. We were looking at animals, cattle in feedlots. And we were very interested in the ability of animals to self select their own diet. And so we said, well, what would happen if we had two groups of cattle, one that was allowed to self select the individual ingredients that were in a total mixed ration and the other that were fed the total mixed ration. And that was such an amazingly interesting eye opening study to me. And we, we found in that study I'm working my way to Clara, but I want to make this background first. We found that when animals were given a choice, no two individuals ever selected the same combination of foods and no animal ever selected the same foods from day to day. But every one of those animals offered a choice grew just, just fine during the two months that we were doing this finishing trial. But what was even more amazing was, you know, what would you think if you offer animals a total mixed ration versus a choice, which group's going to eat the most food? I'll be honest with you, I thought, you know, given a choice and they have these different things, that group's probably going to eat more food. I was wrong. And that just. And the more I thought about that, I thought, you know, it makes perfect, perfect sense. But it's something we don't stop to think about. Well, why would they, the animals on the total mixed ration, eat more. One hypothesis, and it's supported actually by people who study humans, is that in order to meet needs for certain nutrients that are in that total mixed ration, let's just take protein as an example. Some individuals are going to have to over ingest, they're going to have to eat more energy in order to meet their needs for protein. And so what we found was that it cost less to finish those animals on that ration because they were actually eating less food. So let's create to Clara now, not that she was trying to finish these children, but she had 15 children given up for adoption in this nursery. And can you imagine following those children for six years, recording everything they ate each day for six years, and they were offered 34 foods available seasonally in the marketplace. So they didn't get all 34 foods each day, but throughout the seasons they would be offered choices of these foods. And the people working on the study were instructed, don't give those children a hint of anything that they should eat. You just lay it out and you let them eat it each day. And so what Clara concluded was no two children ever selected the same combination of foods. No child ever selected the same food from day to day, but every one of them selected a diet that met their needs. There was pediatrician who was following the children, writing papers. I read the papers that they produced, said they'd never seen a healthier set of children. So it speaks then to what we were studying in those years and what Clara was interested in. This whole idea that there's a wisdom of the body that knows what the body needs if it's provided suitable alternatives. The, you know, the children in this case or the cattle in our case will select what they need to be to meet their needs. It also points out, and Claire made a point of this and over the years it was so striking to me how no two individuals are alike. You know, if you think about that, no two individuals have ever been or will ever be alike on this planet. It's amazing. And you think how that comes about. You have genes being expressed in ever changing environments, and then nature adds a pinch of chance just to keep things interesting at the molecular level during development. And so you have this marvelous kind of way that everything is absolutely unique in the plant world, in the animal world, and all uniquely interacting and co evolving one with another. So Claire was making a point of that related to her children.

When you think about the biochemical individuality that all of us have and our capacity, what I found really interesting about her study and other related work, similar to the work that you did on livestock, is that almost invariably when there is the opportunity for people or for animals to follow this inherent body's wisdom, they end up not only healthier, but more intelligent, in the case of people, more coherent or cognizant, if you will. I'm not quite sure what the right words are here, but there are additional levels of discernment and perhaps you could say intellectual intensity and awareness that emerge. And this also speaks back to Mark Schatzker's work that you mentioned in his awesome book, the Dorito Effect, where all of us have this sense, if we allowed ourselves to express and if we don't pollute it with sugar and fats and salt and msg.

Yes, absolutely the case, I think that's if we're hitting on the key here is having available to you wholesome foods, wholesome plant and animal foods, and then simply allowing the body to do what it. What it's done for our species and for all the different species on this planet for over the eons. And it's that wisdom. But it's so easy to have that hijacked, as Mark points out in the Dorito Effect, how the food industry has been able to hijack that. And I can relate so much to what you're saying, John, from a physical standpoint, from a spiritual standpoint, you know, each one is unique and tapping into that uniqueness in ways that don't harm others in a sense, but being who you are, not trying to be someone else, something else, just simply. I've often thought that. And when I was at the university, I thought that so much. There's a big difference between what I would call teachers and preachers. Preachers tell you telling you, huh? And I may be too negative here. I'm not trying to get after preachers. I'm just a teacher. Leads you to your wisdom, to your inner wisdom. It doesn't try to tell you what you are or how to be. It's it's, it leads you to that and you figure that out. You know, it's the challenge. You figure, you figure that out. And from diet standpoint, and nobody can tell you just, I love that in the diet studies, you know, any study of particular diet, some people lose weight, some people gain a bunch of weight on what should be a diet. Well, that's the body being, the uniqueness. So nobody can tell you those things. And I think that very much from a spiritual standpoint too. It's the journey on and you know, do the work, do the. And it's. In a way, it's work in a way, it's not work. But I think it's so easy to maybe not be who you are in the sense that we're talking, to have that hijacked in one way or another without even realizing it. That starts in utero, as our work was showing in utero. Early in life, you're being of necessity brought into a particular culture at a particular time and place, and you're learning that. But as you go along then trying to come to grips with who really are you. And that can be a bit of a challenge, actually, because it's at such deep levels that we become acculturated. Right?

Yeah. So, Fred, you just made mention of your work and your studies and the in utero training that happens of food awareness and food sensitivities and so forth. We never quite arrived to you telling us about your research or some of your work with observing animals in the landscape and how they interact. And I'd love for you to tell us a little bit about that and how that offer some more context. I mean, there's, there's many different places you could take this conversation. I'm sure one of the questions that emerges for me is when I drive across the Midwest and then the Great Plains and the high plains, you introduced me to this wonderful book, the Art and Science of Shepherding. Thank you very much, by the way. I've really been enjoying it. And when we consider the wisdom that shepherds can bring to a landscape and managing that landscape, there's the question that emerges. What are the possibilities for regenerating these ecosystems that have very low rainfall with shepherding, as contrasted to the management intensive grazing, electric fencing model that is widely promoted in Stockman Grass Farmer and other similar publications and so forth. So I'd love to get your perspective. It's a broad field. You can take it any place you want to go.

Okay, that's a great question. And it could go a lot of places. Right. And so to say a word at first for I've worked with many people who have been involved and have great respect for those people involved with management intensive grazing. And you know, the notion and Jim Gerrish coined the term management intensive and the reason was that it the focus is on management of being involved with the animals and you know, fences was what electric fences was one way to do that certainly. And but the emphasis was on management and paying attention to those animals and working with those animals. So I want to, you know, before that Alan Savory and I known and worked closely with these people over the years and very much appreciate that the shepherd, I think as is as just the most nuanced, amazing way. And I mentioned that I'm reading a book on that now on pastoralism and shepherding, agreed to write a forward for it. And it's just bringing back all of the beauty and the nuance that's involved in this intimate relationship that you become family with the animals. Basically you're all part of a family. And in working with Michel Mireille in France and who's really the person who was key in that book on shepherding that you just mentioned, you know, the shepherds. It's really a co evolution. I think the shepherds are learning from the animals. The animals then in turn are learning from the shepherds and the whole system is co evolving and being so very locally adapted to the environments that they're inhabiting. And so when you talk about lowering costs and you know, I think about some of the environments I worked over the years and reading this book is making me think of that too. Some of the very harsh arid environments and seeing the animals and how so many suites of characteristics were coming together from the frame size of the animals. You know, on these very arid environments you can't have an enormous animal given its needs. But as you move toward sheep and goats, but also cattle of smaller frame sizes and then the kind of things that we were studying about how these experiences in utero and early in life are really enabling organ systems of the body to better utilize the foods that are in those environments seasonally. I remember working with the goats in southern Utah, as we mentioned very briefly early on and the last year of that study we were working with cattle on those different pastures. And I remember the ranchers I was working with saying, you're not going to believe it when you see how these animals, how these cattle mow black brush, how they put their heads down and they are brush mowing beasts. And it was it was mind boggling because what we think of and we tend to categorize, you know, goats, goats eat brows, sheep eat forbs, cows eat grass. Right. But I would say throughout most of my career I've always pushed back against that because that's so general. And you can find many, many examples where all of them do different things. And this was an example down there where these cattle, it was just stunning to see. I used to each year when we'd go down, we'd spend four months with those goats down there living with them. I used to think how on earth can they eat this stuff? How can they live on this diet of black brush? Hardly anything else to choose from. And then when I watched those cattle, it was just, it was amazing to see them put their heads down and just mow the brush. So, you know, but all these things then as we were showing with different organ systems of the body, they're all responding in ways and adapting in ways that are enhancing the opportunity and the ability of those animals to utilize the forages that are in the environment. So you have that. As you know, it was, I'm thinking of studies we did with straw where we were feeding cattle during pregnancy, the last trimester, ammoniated straw. And then comparing the response of their offspring with, with offspring that had been, whose mothers had been on a much more nutritious diet. And those young animals who were exposed in the womb to straw, not only did they eat more straw, they digested that straw better, they grew faster. So I think then, okay, now let's put that to, to a way a rancher might look at it out here in the, in the arid west. If you want to cut the costs of ranch operation, the best way to do that is to get out of the fossil fuel loops, get out of the, hang out of the machinery, get all of that out of your operation, have your animals wintering on forages and then you think well, forages are poor quality during the winter. But if your mother has exposed you to poor quality forages in utero, you're already in an advantage. Your body is being prepared. And this book on not at liberty quite yet to mention they don't have a title for it. It's all. It's written on everything they're trying to decide the title but it is a beautifully written about all the nuance that goes into to that with examples from around the world, whether it's reindeer herders up north to pastorless in India or Africa or wherever. And it's very much about your question and what I would say in my mind it means to be really locally co evolving with those arid kind of landscapes. And I can't help but think as I read that that knowledge could become so absolutely invaluable as we transition out of an era where fossil fuels have really enabled us to do things that historically our ancestors were unable to do in terms of all that energy that's in a barrel of oil helping us to grow food. Moving back to this lifestyle that very intimately involves pastoralism and close relationship with animals and then their close linkages with the farming systems beautiful way of life.

So what you're describing is as. What I'm coming away with is that in fact animals have an inherent capacity, the right animals to adapt to their environment and what we would consider to be extraordinarily difficult environments to, to a degree that may be much greater than we might appreciate or expect.

Absolutely the case. Absolutely the case. If I just hope that our conversation can make that come alive to the point and I'm throwing the cattle in there to, to try to illustrate, I don't know how to paint a mental picture of how harsh black brush landscapes are. This monoculture of this shrub that's. That looks like not even a goat could survive on it. And yet here are these cattle that are wintering in these landscapes. They weren't expecting them to, you know, they would, they moved seasonally, as pastoralists have done historically. They moved seasonally out of those, but in the winter that's where they were. And then they would move, move up to higher elevations as, as green forage became available. Surfing the green web, the green wave it's called. Now people in ecology concert old days people call follow the green, follow the green up the. Anyway, it's this idea of moving, moving with the. As the vegetation greens up, moving up the hillsides and into the mountains and so forth and then wintering on the poor quality foods.

So I want to come back to the question that I had asked earlier and ask it in a slightly different way. From your perspective with the observations, the experiences that you've had, what is the possibility and what is the pathway forward for regenerating these millions of acres in the arid west?

I think the possibility is great. I think in a way those landscapes, you know, many of them are composed still of native plant species that are incredibly adapted to the locations where they're growing and through the management of grazing, simply managing the grazing, going back to what we were saying is really all that it takes. We did a lot of work over the years too, looking at landscapes that had been degraded in one way or another. And then thinking about how through time and timing of grazing and encouraging species that we wanted to encourage. You know, it was amazing to me to learn over the 40, 50 years we were involved with that of how through time and timing and animal species of grazing, you could encourage different species of plants to grow on those landscapes. You could really co create on those landscapes and you could. We were a very much involved over the years in enhancing biodiversity of landscapes, of moving away from annual plants toward perennial plant species, enhancing diversity. You know, when I went to Utah State University back 50 years ago, I did it for a couple of reasons. One, it was the only university that would take me as a graduate student. Two, it was a program that was made for me. I was very interested in, in wildlife and wildlife biology. And my idea was to study mountain goats foraging in the, in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. So I end up studying domestic goats on this shrub, black brush. Nothing could be more boring. Well, it turned out to be totally the best thing could ever have happened to me, I'm thinking. But the program I got associated with at Utah State University had for many years been using domestic animals to improve habitat for wildlife species. And I thought that's beautiful thing. When I was at undergrad and wildlife biology, there was this animosity between range people who were interested in livestock, livestock grazing and wildlife, people who were interested in wildlife species and diversity. And it was like, you know, always butting heads and these two quote, people thought were mutually exclusive worlds. And here were people that were saying, no, we can use domestic animals to enhance landscape for wildlife species. I thought this is something I want to be associated with. And so, you know, you just come to, I mean, certainly the west is arid. It can seem, I think, depending on which part of the globe a person's coming from, to be formidable and hostile kind of landscapes. But when you look at the diversity of different plant species are there and what you can do to maintain or enhance that diversity, well, at the same time working with domestic animals and using them as to manage landscapes for the greater good. It's impressive, but it goes back to where we started. It's about the management, it's about being involved. And that's where I think, you know, we really came to rely. And in the years I was on the ranch, I said the same thing. We came to rely on fences as babysitters. They were good babysitters, right? Well, we did the farming down in the, on the ranch in Colorado. We put the animals up on Landscapes administered by the Forest Service. And they were using what was called rest rotation grazing back in those days where you would, you know, it was designed to try to maintain the health of plant communities by moving animals to different pastures in different ways across different seasons and different years. But basically we put the animals up there and we go out, run up and check on them what we could on horseback and so forth. But, but that's a totally different deal from if we were up there shepherding those animals and herding those animals and moving those animals in ways that get talked about in that book on shepherding. And I'll put in a plug for my friend Glenn Elzinga, who is, is doing fabulous things with shepherding practices with cattle in Idaho up in the Salmon, Idaho region. And just the nuance and the understanding of behavior of animals that, that people come to have when they're living with those animals, it's, it's phenomenal. And you think, and for the listeners that may not be familiar with some of this, when a shepherd in France is looking at a landscape, they're looking at how to utilize that entire landscape, not just the best. What we would consider, oh, that's the best grazing there. And this is horrible. So we won't even utilize it. They're thinking about how to utilize the entire landscape and they're thinking about appetizer phases, main courses, booster stages, dessert stages, and so forth to these meals, to these day long meals. And that's what's, you know, that's where our work intersected with, with Michel Mide and the work that he was doing in France and that the, the book that came out of all that, because we were thinking about how plant diversity enables individuality of animals and enables animals to compose their own diets. And then we were thinking about complementarities, how, you know, if an animal meets certain mixes of plants that can enable them to utilize plants that they might not ordinarily be able to touch due to complementarities. And then we got into sequences. Well, if you eat an appetizer of this, it can help you. So let me get specific here, give a couple of examples. I'll start with some shrub species that we worked with. There's a shrub called sagebrush that is the primary, one of the primary plants growing in the Great Basin, this huge five state region that goes from Utah and up through the northwest into Washington and so forth. Sagebrush has come to dominate many of those landscapes through grazing practices where people grazed in the spring of the year when sagebrush is very high in Terpene concentrations spring and summer. And so animals don't want to utilize sagebrush at all, then that means they utilize the understory grasses and forage. So that encourages domination by sagebrush. So you end up with monocultures of sagebrush. And then you start to think about, well, how can we move away from those monocultures and so forth. And there are various ways that you can do that, but one has to do with diversity and one has to do with the species called bitter brush. Bitterbrush happens to be high in tannins, and as it turns out, tannins in bitterbrush will form complexes with terpenes in sagebrush. And so what would. Ordinarily, either one of those plant species alone may be strongly limiting of how much an animal can eat when you have them in combination, that complementarity enables the animals to eat much more of the combination of species.

If I can. If I can just conclude that what you're saying is that if you then shift grazing management to the fall, you now have the presence of both of those plants that you can combine. Is that right?

Yes, yes. Yep, that's right. You can utilize that. You can, you can utilize both those species in the fall. I'm thinking, too, about fall and winter kind of grazing, fall and winter grazing in particular, in that sense. John. That's right. So that, that complementarity, that complementarity can, can also lead to the demise of sagebrush. Actually, you can reduce them. I'm thinking of where, where we were living in, in Logan, Utah, there's a game fence that they built many Years ago, about 8ft high game fence to prevent mule deer from coming down into the valley bottom in the winter. If you look at the, at the. If you walk along that game fence and you look at the plant species and the mix of species that's growing there nowadays, and then you look below the game fence. Above the game fence, there's real strong domination by bitterbrush and not much sagebrush that's left below the game fence. There's a pretty good mix now of bitter brush and sagebrush. So why does that happen during the wintertime? The bitter brush is enabling the mule deer to utilize the sagebrush to a greater degree. And sagebrush doesn't tolerate browsing nearly as well as bitterbrush does. So we're getting into maybe more details of plant dynamics than a person wants. But that's how those things play out on landscapes, right?

Yeah. It's important for us to understand to the degree that we can influence and as you said to co create on our landscapes that in fact we can change entire plant populations and the dominance or the presence of different plant populations based on grazing management and, or on grazing mismanagement.

That's absolutely that we say nuance but it's the big picture. It's the thing. And that's what we worked with for years and years and years. That's what range science, this whole discipline of range science was kind of gone extinct over the years. But you know, that's what it was about, was about understanding plant behavior really and animal behavior on the relationships between plants and animals and then the ways that through grazing management you can have such big impacts. We throw in another thing here too related to plants like bitter brush that are high in tannins. Those tannins help to reduce methane emissions. So that gets another part of this story related to interactions amongst gut microbiome, the combination of species in the diet and so forth. So no, there's so much that that can be done and then thinking about that's what we say, well in a way you do become a co creator and it's thinking about well what, what is it that you, you would like to encourage on this landscape from the standpoint of, of your grazing management? I may mentioned earlier that the program I came onto was interested in enhancing the abundance of wildlife species by creating forages that would really benefit them during seasonally. And so we're using the grazing management to do that with cattle. One other comment on complementarities from a pasture standpoint. Plants like endophyte infected tall fescue that are common on many, many millions of acres of landscape and by all rights that's a toxic plant. When you look at the alkaloids in fescue and what they can do and so forth. And you know, for years and years when I was interacting with people from the Natural Resource Conservation Service, they said, you know, you need to get diversity in there. It helps the animals to dilute the diet. To dilute the diet. If you have for instance alfalfa as a part of the mix, the animals can, can do a little better. Where our research led us was to look at again and I'm not a silver bullet type of person, but tannins showed up again in this case here that when livestock and we showed this with sheep and with cattle both when they had access to tannin containing plants, they could utilize much more endophyte infected tall fescue with much less negative kind of effects from, from the fescue. And again it was the fact that the tannins were binding the alkaloids that were in the fescue, rendering that negative effect inert, basically. So these complementarities and sequences is what we were really getting interested in. And that's what, you know, I knew Michel Miret and knew of his work, but we really bonded when we started down that path of looking at complementarities and sequences. And the shepherds were totally about that in the work that they were doing. Complementarities and sequences and mixtures of plants and so forth.

So when you consider all these, you're essentially creating a daily food plan for a herd. As a shepherd, while looking at the entire landscape, I am curious about your personal experiences in living with the goats. Essentially, you were a shepherd. You're living with the goats for four months out of the year and observing them in your undergrad studies. What came out of that for you? What was unexpected? What surprised you?

I think there were two things that really made me stop in my tracks and think. One, we mentioned already where we're using the goats as mobile pruning machines to stimulate this new growth on black brush, which we knew was more nutritious. And yet when it was obvious from the first year we were down there that the goats, I say the goats, 80 to 90% of the goats didn't want anything to do with the new twigs. 10 to 20%, they hadn't heard about that. They loved them. They. But most of the goats, they turned their nose up on it and it's like, wow, what's going on with that? And that opened up so much, you know, that this whole field of chemical ecology was just starting to taking off in those days. And here I linked up with chemical ecologists that I would have never linked up, it would have never happened had those goats not want to eat the new growth. And I started reading in this literature that was talking about plant defenses and that plants protect. Protect plant parts. And, you know, it's a big investment to make new, new growth twigs on black brush. So black brush produces tannins. The bark is like 70% tannin. And so the. The plant is. Is protecting that investment. And that just opened up. I started reading in that literature and it was just the most fascinating thing imaginable to me. The going back to what we had talked about earlier on plant intelligence and plants participating and being so involved in what's going on. And that can happen in real time where within a matter of hours, plants have created compounds that say, leave me alone. Don't fool with me anymore. I've had Enough foraging and so forth, that was one thing. The other thing was that we had, we'd set up, my wife and I had built about 2 miles of fence in 110 degree temperatures down there, I'll say, during the summer. And we set up these six pastures for the goats. And so we had 15 goats on each of those pastures. And in one of the pastures, the goats started to eat wood rat houses. And so the goats there, at the base of these juniper trees, they build these huge, these huge houses. And on the outside of the houses is, is bark, bark from the juniper. So I'm trying to paint a picture, I don't know, these big houses at the base of the trees. And, and, and if you start to look inside those houses, and I didn't tear the houses apart to do this, but the goats in this one pasture literally were annihilating these houses. And you realize there's different rooms in these houses. And one of the rooms is the bathroom. And the houses are densely packed vegetation, needles from the trees and so forth. It's just this, this monument. And the bathroom's in one of those, and it's soaked in urine. Well, that urine soaked vegetation became a protein supplement for those goats. And the goats that were on that, that pasture that were eating the woodrat houses fared far better during that, that three month browsing period than the goats in the other five pastures. But that was, it was amazing to me that they did that one and two, that the goats in the other pastures didn't do that. And it just made me think about this whole idea of innovation, innovation in animal populations. And then how once an innovation like that takes place, they're so social, they, every goat was doing it. You know, I often tease people when I'm presenting about this. The Einstein of the goat world figured it out and everybody laughs. You know, however that happened, once it did, they were all, and maybe they were encouraging one another, but they all were doing it. And so then you have, then you think generation to generation, that becomes a part of the culture of those animals and this whole notion of animal culture. And the livestock producers often talk about the genetics of their herds, and I appreciate that very much. And when I was on the ranch in Colorado, the old rancher raised Herefords, absolutely loved them and took great pride in them. But I think what we miss is this whole culture, the culture of these animals and what they've learned and this gene expression in utero and early in life that we were talking about, that becomes every bit as important as the genes that the animals bring to the situation. And then these innovations just got me thinking about how important innovation is and how once that happens, how it can be maintained within groups of animals simply by culture and this, this notion of culture. And then that takes one into this whole. And then. I'll be quiet for a minute. This whole area of extended families, you know, if you let livestock go feral, they end up in extended families just like bison and many, many other creatures. And you start to think about families and extended families and the roles of different individuals in those families. The grandmothers, the great grandmothers, the aunts, the so forth, the young males and then. And so forth. And you think of the value of that. And I often think nowadays of what we've lost as a human society, as we've broken down families, as we no longer have that unit and extended families as a part of, of that. You know, really, when you think about it, you take young people that have kids, they're too young to know how to parent. They really don't know what the hell they're doing. I have to say. That's why you want grandparents and you want extended families. And I think of that growing up in that little town of, of Salida, that was still a part of that. We, you know, the parents were there, but the grandparents were there, the great aunts were there. And I think back now to how, how comforting that was in many ways and how much. What role models those people were and how calming because they'd been through, they'd been through it. They knew, you know, the parents are busy trying to make a living and deal with all the kids. That, that whole business of extended families as a core unit and then extended families, it's not a trivial deal. And then, so is it any surprise to see that in these cattle, sheep and goats, let them go feral, they end up in extended families. So many wildlife species of the ungulates anyway, that the large herbivores like we were studying, they live in extended families. And you come to, you come to very much appreciate, appreciate the functional significance of that and what that means then as you go across generations and then, you know, in this book on shepherding and herding that I'm alluding to here.

And.

That gets brought up time and time again of the value of those transgenerational linkages to, to landscapes and how, what, how that makes us locally become we and other creatures locally adapted to and co evolving with the landscapes we're inhabiting.

Yeah, thank you, Fred. That was really wonderfully expressed. I had the privilege of growing up in a community where that family culture was valued and continues to be valued and prioritized. And I can so clearly see the value that that brings in a couple of different ways. One is that, as you mentioned, Joel Salatin has this phrase where he describes that we should be leveraging elderly wisdom with youthful energy. And that multi generational aspect really allows that to happen. Where you have the elderly wisdom, but the elderly generation has less energy, the youthful generation has the energy. And when they can really collaborate, then amazing things can happen from a productivity perspective. But the other piece that I've come to really appreciate about this strong family culture is the sense of place and identity that it gives to youth, young children, young people. They have a sense, a very clear sense of who they are in their environment. There is nothing, the lack of anchoring that sometimes shows up in culture at large that I've observed and I found that to be really intriguing.

Oh, amen to everything that you're saying. And to give a current day example, I think that grounding and centering, that, it's so critical, you just can't get away from it. But we have, we've broken that, I think to a great extent. And I was listening to a commentator who I very much appreciate actually, but he was talking about these mass, mass shootings and the young men that are doing, you know, getting like Uvalde that it just happened. And he was talking about facets of that. But he was saying, in some ways I can't understand, you know, it's, it's not just mental illness that, that's a cop out on that. And I was saying it's hard to understand while this is happening, but it's not hard to understand. It's related very much to exactly what we're talking about right now of that being grounded and centered in place and in community and being linked with physical and spiritual values, whatever that that is in a particular. But that grounding and centering is absolutely critical for, for, for mental, mental and physical and spiritual health, all three of those. It's. When you break those linkages, then you're, you know, the, the societies break down. It's just fundamental and it may sound old school or whatever it sounds, but it's just, it's, it's a fundamental part. And you know, what have we lost then in our, the animals in our care when we, if we don't even have it in our own societies, why would we ever think about that in, in the animals in our care? But what do you lose? There's a lady in Tasmania, Nan Bray is her name. You know, I used to teach a two week short course, very much hands on at Utah State University during the summer. And as it went along, NRCS sponsored it. But we'd have people from all over the world over. It was taught over like 30 year period. We'd have people from all over and we'd be doing hands on. So we're talking about food selection and habitat selection, not so much, but these things. And we would be having those people hands on, involved, doing things young, learning from mother. It was amazing when they would do, you know, you train the young animals, the mother to eat one thing, avoid another thing. Then you'd, you'd show them these. The, the hands on involvement makes things come alive. Right. It makes, it's not just words anymore. You're hands on, involved and participating and you know, all that then gets linked in with what we're talking about on these transgenerational linkages to the, the landscapes that we inhabit.

Yeah. You know, when you speak about culture, the culture of a society, of a group of people, of a community, the culture of a group of animals, there are almost an infinite number of variations that can exist in culture. You can have strong culture that is widely, widely variable. But when you lose the connection or what I called the anchoring. So when you have a strong culture, you could almost call that a coherent culture. When you lose that anchoring, then in the absence of a coherent culture, you get no culture, which is chaos. And so when you think about the livestock patterns or even in our society, as you were describing, we have all this chaotic intermingling and a lack of sense of identity, lack of sense of place. And it's really intriguing for me to think about that from a livestock management perspective. I have not considered that in the past. And it's the one experience that I've had that has really stood out to me. I've had the privilege of traveling widely and meeting with groups of people in many different places. And without question, when there are multiple generations living in the same place for extended periods of time, when farmers talk about being the fourth generation, the fifth generation of the farm, there is a degree there of becoming indigenous. How do you become indigenous to the landscape? And when that happens, it becomes very clear how people adapt or adopt the personality of the landscape to some degree. If you have harsh, rugged landscapes, you develop harsh, rugged cultures with harsh, rugged individuals. It's really intriguing. I had an interesting meeting at one geographic location once and I returned home and I told my wife I think that this entire culture has developed calcified thinking because they're in a very calcareous environment. And there was a lot of, just a pronounced inability, even though there was the expressed desire, there was an inability to grasp new concepts and new ideas that was quite profound. It was quite disconcerting to watch people express the desire to learn something new but not be able to wrap their minds around it. And not just one or two individuals, but as a group. And so anyway, I feel like I'm just rambling on here, but I'd love to get your, your response.

No, you're not. It is fascinating though, and it brings to mind an example. You know, when we were last 10 years, I was at Utah State University, we had a program called Behave, which was really taking principles and processes that we'd been studying, working with and working with livestock producers around the country and around the world as it turned out, to try to think about how to implement those. But one of the groups we ended up working very closely with was Ted Turner's Ted Turner. And I don't know if the listeners know or not, but Ted became very interested in bison as a native animal species and trying to move back to native kind of ecosystem. So he purchased tremendous amount of land over the years. And I think now they have like 50,000 bison that are, that are under their, their management on these landscapes that out in the Midwest and, and throughout the West. Amazing ranches, amazing management that takes place. But you know, most bison have cattle genetics, have, they're not pure bison. They have cattle genetics. It's very rare to find a herd that doesn't. Well, one of their ranches is down in New Mexico and there was a herd of bison on there that they were ready to get rid of. Actually it was kind of scrawny, not the best looking kind of bison at all. And they were, they were having their bison tested, DNA analyzed by some researchers at Texas A and M University. They were working with different herds and it was just literally as they tell the story anyway, the day before they were ready to ship them, get slaughter, get rid of them all. And the geneticist said, no, no, no, no, don't do that. These are pure bison. They have no cattle genetics, no cattle integration. Why did they look scrawny and, and not like some of the bison up here? They're down there in those harsh landscapes in the arid Southwest and they're reflecting kind of the quote, calcified users that's, you know, they're like those cattle that were down there in Southern Utah. They're not huge frame size. They're, they're, their body size is adapted to the landscapes where they're, where they're inhabiting. Right. They're, they're co. Evolved with that. So long winded. But a story that goes along. And that's. It's true what you say. You have this infinite kind of variations on cultural themes and what comes about in those different cultures and subcultures. And the more you look into that, the more I'm thinking of wildlife examples too of the innovation that happens and then becomes a part of that culture, makes that culture absolutely unique and amazing in its own ways. Even if it is calcified or whatever. It's all, all part of the manifestation. Right.

So Fred, you've had the opportunity of working with many leaders and innovators from around the world and we have many listeners here to the podcast from, from all over the world and from particularly here in North America and Australia and so forth. What is something that you wish all farmers knew? What, what is. Where can people follow up from our conversation to learn more? That's one question. And the second question is what is a valuable piece of information that you think it would benefit everyone to know?

Good, Good question. You're going to put links out there to some of the materials like the book and so forth. I also mentioned that there'll be an audiobook of nourishment coming out right away and it doesn't have the detail. I cut the, you know, it's roughly 155,000 words in nourishment. I cut it to 75,000 words to get rid of the details. I think for some folks there's too much detail in that, that book. Too much. The audiobook is going to be more, more big picture, big picture related to that. So that's going to be another source of information if people want to just listen and not have to read and so forth. So that's materials we. For people who really want to go into things. We published like 300 papers over the years and many, many popular kinds of things that, that help people get, get their, their heads around this and done. Many, many, even in the last year, many, many extended workshops and master classes for different groups that are accessible. So then the question, what, what would you, what, what would you want people to. That's a hard question, I think for me, John, I think I would say follow your hearts. Follow your heart. Find what it is in you that you're. That's your passion and follow that and don't let Anybody interfere with that, and you'll have a wonderful, wonderful life. If you're young or if you're old or whatever, follow what's. Every one of us is unique. Just find that and follow that physically, spiritually. There's something in you that knows it's at that deep, at that deep level, and it's not involving thought. You know, I'm going to read you a short thing that's in that audio book that just relates to that, because I think about it a lot, and I think you probably think about it a lot, too. But what I want to say is thinking plays a subordinate role in the creativity of eminent scientists. And that was disclosed in a national survey that. To discover their working methods, their creative breakthroughs come during mental quietude, when we become quiet, when we. When we shut down all the noise. Ironically, the reason many scientists aren't creative isn't because they don't know how to think. It's because they don't know how to stop thinking and reside in the intuitive stillness within. And I'm saying scientists, let's say, for everyone, right? It's for. For all of us. Albert Einstein called the inner stillness of our intuitive self a sacred gift. The rational mind, a faithful servant. I'd say now to our great detriment, we worship the servant and defile the gift. It's that intuitive, that part that's deep within us that just. It knows. I don't know how it knows. It's linked with. It's linked with whatever one wants to be. Call that the absolute being, God, whatever. That's where we. I very much believe with one, with that, and so follow that, you know, and follow.

There's a key phrase there. Thank you, Fred. That was wonderfully expressed. Follow that. See, following is doing. You have to actually. We need to listen to this inner awareness, follow your passion, and then actually engage. And I want to share this with all of our listeners. We have many listeners to the podcast and to the webinars that we produce that we're very grateful for all of you and for the change that you're bringing about in the world. And it is necessary and valuable and powerful for all of us to inspire each other to share information, to share what we have learned. But we also need to recognize that we only begin to change the world when we manifest that, when we put it into actual action, when we begin applying and implementing what it is that we know. And I've had several conversations recently with people who have expressed that they've listened to lots of the podcasts but they're not really familiar with the work that we do. And so I would ask all of you to reach out to us, to our team at Advancing Eco Agriculture, or reach out to whoever is in your field who can be advisors and mentors and actually begin the process or constantly improve on the process of implementing and doing, because that is how we create the future that all of us want to see. So, Fred, thank you with all my heart for being here, for sharing your knowledge and wisdom, and I very much look forward to having more discussions with you in the future.

Yes, and thanks to you, John. It's been absolutely a true pleasure to spend some time with you. I've wanted to do this for a long time and we finally got it done.

Yeah, it's been a pleasure.

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