Running a REGENERATIVE Cow, Hog and Chicken FARM — Ep. 198

I'm really worried that I don't see him wow where are they I called them right like no usually they come running when they hear us we're on the lookout for the pigs [Music] Ike and his brother Dave are third generation farmers who left farming behind to pursue let's say greener pastures only to return to their grandparents Farm seven years ago after realizing that they wanted to carry on their family's Legacy by implementing a regenerative farming model on their 200 acre Family Farm by rotating pastured raised cows pigs and chickens we took some time on the weekend to tour their Farm discuss their business model and the challenges and benefits of running a small-scale regenerative Farm [Music] foreign [Music] we're here at red house ranch right yes was it always known as red house ranch no it was a dairy farm a beef Farm a row crop Farm back when my dad ran the farm and it did not have a name back then really yep so it was so a farm it was the classic agricultural model at the time every Hillside around here had a farm like this up to 500 Acres a hundred dairy cows a few pigs and that slowly disappeared over time as dairy farms aggregated into much much larger operations and as you drive around rural Upstate New York you'll see all of the artifacts of all of these old Farms the r the biggest artifact from this Farm was a barn that stood here there was a massive barn and in the early 80s there was a line wind it's essentially a instant tornado and it blew it away what it is completely gone it's buried out there in the field and actually that was a blessing for us because having these old ancient buildings is a is a massive economic burden yeah so with that being gone my father had stopped farming by then and what he did is I'll show you the machine he used up here is he mowed and we all thought oh what a waste of time and diesel fuel why is he always doing that Acres was he mowing he was mowing about 250 Acres but if he hadn't mowed it would look like that yeah and we wouldn't be standing here right now because it would all be this scrubby Forest that's absolutely unusable um you know it was a day when we were little kids it was a dairy barn we would he would milk cows did all that kind of classic stuff everything that every other farmer did and was this also for yourself or was it also for you know selling too oh no it was selling there was there used to be a railroad pickup at the bottom of the hill and the more inner even more interesting that is this Farm was started by my grandparents and they raised chickens here and and they had cows but they raised eggs that went to New York City because there was a man in New York City and it's kind of ironic that one of the things that we started to do but we were stopping now is we produced eggs that went to Boston wow so um it's called a brush hog and this is what my dad used and we use now for you know since the 80s to keep the pastures as pastures instead of uh forest and what are you pasturing now so we've been doing the classic in the what's the field the Joel Salton model of pastured pork and grass-fed grass-finished beef and we do have chickens pasture chickens on the ground as well and so that's a kind of a rotational it's funny regenerative agriculture has become such a mainstream term now but yeah it is a lot of people call It farming the microbes we use a model that simulates the coming and going of the Buffalo moving north to south or the wilderbeast in Africa going across the plains right they're there for a very short amount of time and they don't come back for a year which gives the soil an incredible amount of time to to regenerate and regrow and that's what we do with our cows we use some interesting it's called poly wire you can see it there on the side of the building we move our cows every day to New Pasture and they eat the top of the grass which nutritionally has the most carbohydrates in it which is what makes us fat and it's also what makes cows fat so we try and do that rotation and it makes I'll show you some of our steaks they're as highly marbled as any grain fed steak and but it is all about the management and the speed that you move and you be sure to give them that top bit of grass if you look at other traditional methods that people raise cows on and in fact over on that Hillside there's 20 cows in one probably 20 acre pasture and they never move and the grass is only this tall right and that makes a tremendous difference underground as well as nutritionally there's no there's no resilience there for moisture absorbent absorbing um and it just doesn't regrow fast well they probably also trample the ground pretty heavily yeah the ground and it's selected the plants that they like are eaten down to the ground the weeds grow so it makes a tremendous difference using this kind of uh managed managed grazing so I guess like you could maybe tell a lot by the marbling of the meat so when I mean obviously if if anyone is a meat eater they look for that type of marbling as well you know maybe a connoisseur well we've been trying to look for Prime Cuts our highly intramuscularly marbled and it has been a real it's been a long time to get the techniques down for this kind of managed grazing to produce that kind of meat you've got to have a very very good pasture and the other thing about our pastures is the diversity and you can see a little of it right here when we first came out here I wanted to know you know how diverse is this field and we we actually took a measured out a square meter and we took a whatever the transact almost we took a Transit we cut it all down and we segregated it by plants and we had up to some spots had 20 different varieties of plants right and now this is year seven we'll walk out into some of the other areas the density of plants is so much higher because as the cows are walking they've got their two Hooves and it it pushes the soil apart a little bit and it is it exposes a little bit of bare soil to the Sun and that is one of the things that it triggers seeds to grow because there's a massive amount of latent seed bed we haven't planted any of this this has not been plowed in at least 50 years yeah I think you know I was just on a call in regards to kind of managing landscapes as it relates to kind of pollinators and insects and things along those lines and it's really the Savannahs it's really after kind of in that type of grazing where you get the most diversity for pollinators and sex absolutely you know again is is interesting because you're managing the land in that way maybe not intentionally for pollinators or insects but if you said I want to manage this for pollinators and insects maybe it would be like raising animals in the way that you are raising them absolutely that is so key and you imagine you know you get that little bit of space a little bit of poop a little bit of urine a little bit of rain and some new seed is going to sprout and seeds have an incredible lifespan under the soil um there's a gastropod episode that I was going to send you I don't know if my daughter sent it to you no if she didn't but they've uh they've put there's a couple of universities that did this they put jars two feet under the ground with a known number of different plants plant seeds and then every 10 years they'll go out and dig up a jar and see which seeds uh will Sprout yeah and there's some of them are 50 years old that are still sprouting so it's very interesting yeah how long seeds can last in the soil is this to notify where the chickens are it's where the campsite is okay over the campsite so you turn you turn right at the rooster turn first at that one down there and then this one and uh it's a hip camp site and people come here from all over the country how many Camp oh I guess we have two two campsites and that's the unique thing there's only two on 200 Acres yeah you know a conventional camping is you're here someone else is next to you and somebody else's kids are next to you so it's a very isolated experience well this is incred I mean if you look at the landscape around you're just like nestled in this Valley of just like all these amazing Hills you could see kind of where the streams would flow and everything this is so yeah beautiful like your grandparents I guess picked a really beautiful space and now I'm just curious because I want to go I want to go into this ecological stuff because I think it's really interesting I think a lot of the viewers would find it interesting but I just want to get a bit more of your history because you did you you stepped away and so your brother stepped away as well tell me about that story we left as soon as we could you do not want to be we were not going to be Farmers a lot of kids growing up on farms always said I you know you know find me the next ticket out of here I I it's so funny I at that time there wasn't a lot my parents didn't know a whole lot about where to go to college so I was in the library in high school and there was a College catalog that was a weird format it stuck out on the Shelf and it was Arizona State University that's where I'm going that's how it the marketing at Arizona State University made a lot of sense when they just like minor those Library cells so I I left I've I have had a very checkered career I've traveled all over the world I was a electrical engineer I became a program manager for a telecommunications equipment manufacturing company and um yeah I've done a lot of different things the last 20 years I worked for a company called Sienna and during that time I was in Kansas City and we we went to a agricultural conference in Columbia Missouri uh this is 20 years ago and I I had it was just strictly recreational I had no idea that this that it would plant the seed of what would would have brought me back here and there was a guy there speaking named Joel saliton and anybody who's listening to this who is into Agriculture and alternative resilient agriculture knows about Joel saliton right and I stood there out because I didn't want to pay the extra five bucks to actually go in and see him so I just stood outside the curtain and listened and and that that started that started this whole path to thinking about well how could I how could I do that and then later in March of 2010 I remember this pretty clearly I was having health and nutrition problems I was overweight I had high blood pressure and I stumbled onto the Paleo Solution by Rob Wolfe and decided wow I need to change my diet and I eliminated all gluten and dairy and started becoming highly aware of how what you eat profoundly affects your health and well-being and I I'm still obsessed with that and follow a lot of people in that field um so between Joel salton's sphere of influence and the Paleo sphere and thinking about how can I be involved in this and then realizing oh my parents are here they're aging and we've got 200 Acres we're going to inherit it it all sort of started to come together that maybe we can build something here with all these different overlapping interests and we started to develop the plan for for Red House Rancher probably 10 years ago when we actually started laying it out and thinking about you know would we want to come back and I and when you say we who so I I reached out to my brother and I at that time he's a heating and air conditioning technician spending so I spent a lot of computer screen time he spent a lot of vehicle screen time because he was spending most of his time driving to and from jobs and we both realized it might be time to to do something different and are you around the same age or we're we're two years apart okay and then you both had this like coming together and was he also experiencing this kind of like I mean I guess you guys were close and you talked a lot and you said hey I'm not feeling as well and I'm on this paleo diet it's really cool I mean I guess that's what happens right yeah I mean like like all diets everybody has their own unique takes and settles on different things but he he also realized that there was some advantage to eating a little differently and having a more physical life so that aspect of it too has been very helpful for both of us because yeah you know we're still very physical it's very many annual yeah and it's helped maintain both of our both of our I think Health and Longevity but it's really interesting and then so in 2010 you started to plant a plant of red house right when did you really get back here we came back seven years ago okay actually seven years ago um came back spent some money on infrastructure fencing and uh bought our egg mobiles built some egg mobiles can we go see the chickens yeah let's take a look at the chickens so um you had mentioned in the past that you might be winding down some eggs are on the meat chicken or how does this work we are going to abandon the egg business we've had up to 2500 layers here it's very labor intensive it's difficult to charge enough for that volume of eggs to actually pay ourselves right my whole idea has been to make this an Enterprise where we can actually pay ourselves a a living wage unlike most farmers who are just happy to be able to turn the tractor on and pay their pay their basic bills not necessarily make an income so this is a very classic you know these are truly pastured cage-free they're fed organic but we are not certified organic and this this vehicle will move back and forth across the field you can see it started here yep you've got these they look like dead spots yeah but but by Fall they will start growing and next year the grass in there will be it'll it'll be dark dark green it'll be a foot taller than everything around it so it is an amazing system of pumping these the extra microbes from the chickens the phosphorus the nitrogen it is it's done a lot to a lot of our passions so we've had chickens on the field different fields so over the last seven years and you can see right where they've been because the grass just pops up in bright green and then that of course is where we will graze the cattle on that yeah so you really move them just around this particular field right here and you can see they're open grazing yeah do you how do you you just probably have to deal with the hawk once in a while right or so we don't we we're very lucky usually this is electrified this year we have an electrified any of our fences for the chickens because we don't have we have lots of coyotes they're all over the place foxes are everything but we don't have any ground Predators it's been mainly owls interesting at night they will walk right in grab a chicken rip its head and neck off and fly away I mean do you have cameras at night because that'd be crazy well I would we haven't caught it on camera but we can tell by the modus operandi that's classic owl we don't have you know there's Eagles around here there's tons of hawks there's a guy coming today to buy some chickens who's lost all of his chickens from Hawks and it's like wow we've been really lucky that we haven't had that problem I think it maybe helps that you have some hip campers around you know this is the smell of human nearby do these fields get grazed at all are they are you just kind of maintaining themselves they have been grazed every year except this year yeah and you can see your golden rods coming back up you have your clovers you have yeah it's Timothy yeah butter and eggs fleabane you got quite a bit okay so then you oh and our favorite oh multi-floor Rose we talked about how oh it's checking out all of this stuff which you have to we have resorted to spraying it I regretfully and shamefully say but there's so much of it and this it's a permanent one-time solution I mean this was actually marketed oh it's marketed your grandparents yeah as like as a living if we went over on the other side of the hill where it was too steep to mow you'll find these things that are literally 15 feet in diameter this giant impenetrable ball of thorns yeah and you can't walk on the hillside anymore because it is completely covered by that it was it was good intentions yeah initially so uh if we walk like this way we'll hit a little road so just out of a curiosity you have um you know your your beef and your pork how do you or how have you kind of navigated managing you know these actually three animals because you have your your chickens but I kind of feel like they're a little bit more easy to manage you know you have your pork and your beef and how are you kind of splitting your time in your Fields with that well what is so interesting that the pork and the beef have the least amount of Labor is that right um and the pork is the lowest by far and you'll see that when we look at their setup um and in terms of the labor for the cows it's a half hour every day you go out you move the fence and you're done yeah and that's the beauty of beef to me is you need a cow you need grass and you need salt and water and then a little bit of management and you get is that once once it's on your plate or before it's on your plate that that's that's a good point before it's on your plate but that's all it takes to make the one of the most nutrient dense foods that you can have chickens pork they take external inputs right you've got to have if you want to do it in an economically viable way you've got to have soybeans you've got to have corn you've got to have feed for them because they will not grow to marketable size in a reasonable amount of time without those external inputs whereas beef you're looking at what they live on I mean it is amazing the other thing that we do for our beef in terms of management is we at we have a mineral tub right you've got to have the salt but we also put in their seaweed oh interesting ground seaweed and that provides a whole Suite of micronutrients iodine being the first and then selenium and then all the other things that come with seaweed and it's kind of like um you know people use that for plant fertilizer as well absolutely and you get those micronutrients and what's so interesting is usually when we first get the cows we'll have the tub of seaweed there and they'll just it'll just disappear like they've been starving for something in there because animals have a unique ability to tell what they need and what foods will provide they will selectively graze for the optimum nutrient input and then we'll fill the tub back up and they'll start grazing and it'll just sit there yeah and they won't they won't eat any and sometimes they'll get in a different section of pasture and all of a sudden it starts to start eating it and it it we feel it's a really important component not just for them but for us because that those nutrients are going to transfer right to us when we eat that beef yeah and there's some very interesting research going on at the University of Utah I believe on not just micronutrients but phytonutrients secondary plant metabolites as they actually move through the animal and then on to humans yeah the guy's name is Dr Van liete it's an amazing New Field of research on you know you are what you eat yeah fascinating and now let's also talk about from the kind of the co-opting of terms so you know in many ways people understand who are in the environmental field like how sustainability has been co-opted What What In The Farm world I mean from grass-fed to U.S raised to regenerative how are these words kind of being co-opted to a certain degree and what's your view on them yeah it's so there's a lot of aspects to that the first one that comes to mind is called cool country of origin labeling um you see some meat this is particularly for meat meat had a special carve out to the cool legislation when you buy uh you know a steak in the grocery store it says Made in the USA well it was only packaged in the USA it is from Argentina or anywhere else except the USA so that that is one of the grossest abuses of I don't know what you call a greenwashy mislabeling deception of the consumer right people are trying to change that but it's the foreign countries threatened to sue us in the World Trade court because it would it would buy us consumers towards U.S meat versus versus imported meat I see so that's one thing regenerative is another one um has that been co-opted quite yet or is it starting to regenerative yeah yeah so Cargill right which is one of the largest Meat Packers and Industrial agricultural entities in the country they are spending lots of money on regenerative and figuring out how to use that word on their products the other one is organic organic has been taken over by uh we're not organic certified it's not worth the time it's doesn't really have the value that had 30 years ago when it first came out right um it's been very diluted in in my opinion so I think it goes back to like knowing your farmer if you can know one you know what I mean like yeah that's one of the benefits like of being here because that I see and I think that it you know one of the things that people had always said is that you know the best way that you could like support your local community or you could support your food system is by supporting your Farmers obviously most of us these days especially if you lived in the city and you lived in cities for a while it's hard to know your farmer because there's not a farmer around right right well and we're lucky now we have things like this where you can actually see it you can look at our YouTube Channel where I'm out there talking about the you know I gave that seaweed Spiel in one of my YouTubes yeah so that is one way but even that there are a lot of giant corporations now that have very sophisticated websites they have lots of pictures a butcher box I mean you look at that and you think oh getting real food you really don't know what you're getting with any of those right I was even looking at um you know Whole Foods and they had like these uh stages or steps that you could go one through five or whatever and uh where five is like the premium meats that you know are locally sourced and but you go there and you don't have fives it's really hard to get five well it is really hard and it's and it's it's it's packaged in like pasture Rays or grass-fed and this kind of stuff which is actually meaningless to a certain degree now unless you could actually come out and actually see it with your own yeah and you know our whole the whole industrial food system the supply chain is set up you've got to be big you've got to be massive to get into Whole Foods you've got to have thousands of cows that you're processing and we are operating on a very different scale than that what's your scale like tell me a little bit so we've had up to 25 cows on here okay on our property we would like to develop a big enough customer base where we could get back to that level we now ship all over the Northeast we've got our shipping systems in place and we've got that all figured out so you go on like if you go online what's your website www.redhouseranch.net and then where do you ship to what's your delivery area I'll have to give you the the graphic for that but it's it's essentially the northeast Pennsylvania and then everything Northeast of that right so you can get one day shipping essentially you if it's one to two days when it arrives we ship with dry ice we ship in a completely recyclable box no styrofoam um yeah and it's it arrives Frozen or ice cold yeah yeah well that's fantastic because it worked in local food and glass mile like Farm to uh to people's homes and that Logistics is a lot to kind of think about and it's interesting to see that you said okay we could with the Advent of modern day shipping we could get it to this extended area and there's a lot of people within that area yeah there's over 70 million people in that area yeah and it's a matter of finding the ones that really want to know their farmer and to know their food and connecting with those people we have a lot of loyal customers like that now and it's it's wonderful they they love shopping online and we even have a store here which we'll take a look at where you can walk in and actually look at the products and we have a point of sale terminal there that's great and I guess I guess take a cooler back of stuff and I think there's other issues like with meat and like directly related to People's Health and along those things I mean I know that you know sometimes there's a discussion of like putting what you put into your calves not just the grass but like a ton of antibiotics or whatever you know you often see antibiotic free or this or that and I imagine it's important to actually keep your animals healthy and but you know that is something that people like consider also when they're putting into their body as well yeah and that that is our whole thing with all of our animals antibiotic free but I I do have to say there's a place for antibiotics like if you have a cow that's wounded and has an infection just like you or me like I avoid antibiotics at all costs but I had bronchitis two months ago and I still have a little of a resonating in me and I got antibiotics rightly or wrongly Sandra tick he had to get doxycycline as much as he didn't want to take it but generally I mean in the last couple years we haven't used any yeah we've had a pig a few years ago that needed needed a shot of something but normally and that's part of the advantage of this method of Agriculture the animals are not confined they eat an incredible diversity of plants so they get all those different plant metabolites to maintain their immune system they're in the sun especially with the Hogs Hogs raised indoors in a confined building it's it's just mind-boggling to me that that's the standard but that is the standard and they have to get all their all their nutrition from a fixed feed and that certainly doesn't include the kind of plants that you'll see that that the pigs eat I mean this is kind of it's it's a it's a crazy analog but it's it's almost like the same where you're just like you know we're crowded in this environment in the city we have this fixed speed down the road you could only go to the McDonald's yeah exactly it is exactly analogous to that and you're not exercising you're sitting on the couch and you're eating lots of Cheetos yeah and what happens to you you get fat you get into the whole and it's a global epidemic yeah and you'll see these pigs out here running around and the sun is shining on their skin their bodies are making natural vitamin D not vitamin D from a feed mix right um and yeah yeah this is great look at this like little forestry setting it's very a very unusual stand of trees we call it the Pine Woods we used to play up here and we were kids and then I found out that my dad and his sister used to play up there when they were kids do you have um plans for the farm like have you thought about like kind of the future of the farm and you know was your dad thinking about the future of the farm as he was starting to get older like he he probably wasn't expecting you and your brother to come back absolutely they they were ABS completely flabbergasted when I came back I actually you know PowerPoints were my part of my world and spreadsheets and I came back and I said I said I want to swim PowerPoint they looked at me like whoa what what is this they probably fell asleep at the dinner table yeah it was it was not Death by PowerPoint um but no they they had no idea what they were going to do with it they had no idea that this this would happen yeah and we've you know uh succession planning is a big thing I mean if it is to be a successful business it has to transfer to somebody otherwise it will just vaporize yeah and you know we're looking at all of our grandkids trying to figure out who might who is interested and yeah we don't know yet yeah you never know how people like just like us I mean who would have thought we came back yeah I mean do you ever look back and you're like you're like been so different or you you see you you have no regrets like this is where you wanted to be oh yeah I I don't I don't regret this at all I mean it's had many benefits you know hey just being here helping my parents it would have been very difficult for them to stay here and maintain the property without us around so now this so let's talk about what we're seeing here a little bit this is an electrified fence it's called poly wire okay this is the same technology that we use to manage our cows with and this is what is confining the pigs into this area um it's it's quite amazing it's really high voltage it's very another one over there it's a very very short pulse it's on the order of microseconds okay um so it will it will hurt it will make you see a bright light but um sorry I didn't see it and there's another one right there yeah so we sometimes we have our hogs in the forest which is called Silver pasture right so they're eating acorns and whatever they can find yeah whatever they can find and um we've we wanted to explore this method of purely pasture and this field has had some cover crops planted on it we had our chickens here last year so there was a massive amount of nitrogen and phosphorus here so we in the spring we did we disked and we put down some cover crop and we'll go out and look at that it didn't work out quite the way I wanted to but we're going to next year we're going to disc this whole field and plant it in a hog specific uh seed set with things like pumpkins sunflower sorghum sedan grass collards things that beans yeah things that Hogs will specifically eat and thrive on and get a lot of calories from and that's our plan for this next year you know it looks bombed out it's looked like oh man what kind of farmers are these people you don't know how to keep their fields flat we we really don't care if our fields are flat a lot of farmers are obsessed with making them look like a pool table but right it's for the animals and they don't care really and we had the water here we just moved this yesterday we moved them all down a little bit um you know next year this this will be completely green the grass will be a lot taller there's a lot of manure that's been spread out here and you can tell it doesn't smell yeah that's the beauty of this right we we could easily scale this to have over a hundred pigs on this property with multiple multiple different cohorts rotating around through the pastures in the woods yeah well it's it's very interesting because you mentioned the flat fields and what's fascinating about it is that you know you have quite a bit of topography here I mean your your Topography is hilly and it's naturally you're kind of leaning into the natural Topography of the land so that's our hog feeder and that's where we put our we have a very interesting and unique feed mix that we should talk about so normally it's corn and beans is the prior the primary components okay not quite 50 50. and then there's a mineral mix of a whole bunch of other micronutrients we in my obsession with health and nutrition as well as what we want to have for our end product which is charcuterie we've learned that it's better to have less omega-6 fatty acids in the end product and where does that all come from well it comes from corn corn yeah corn is the sort is in the feed mix not for the fatty acids but for the carbohydrates right that's what helps the pigs put on put on fat and so is it you want that balance also in your body of like the omega-3 and omega-6 yeah I'll get to that so so we don't use corn okay in our hog feed we use wheat barley there may be another grain but there's no corn so they don't get that extra load of omega-6 so that you do get closer in our bodies of the ideal ratio is like two to one or one ideally one to one of omega-6 to omega-3 and it makes for a for a denser fat and that may go against everything everybody believes oh it's going to clog my arteries I'm going to die that's simply not true yeah but if you're making charcuterie like like the pepperon we're going to look at yeah that's what you want is a harder fat so you know we're just starting up that operation to explore those kind of products and now that we've got this feed mixed down they thrive on it we've got a a feed mill that makes it for us it's also the other important element to all of our feed is that it's non-GMO certified and it's not organic but having it non-GMO certified means that they're not using Roundup on their fields yeah or any anything else usually either it's usually a different kind of farmer that cares about not using GMO modified products right and all of our food is non-GMO verified and then obviously like you said you know the organic label has kind of lost it's a lot of rigmarole it's um it's it's expensive for very little value in return so exactly yeah exactly that's and that's why we don't go and get organic yeah to get the non-GMO because we can get the non-GMO just from the non-GMO verified program exactly so over here this mud pile uh this is this is where we had a cover crop planted oh yeah I see and in the cover crop it's like turnips or turnips yeah and beets and we thought oh the pigs will eat it but I mean we just had this left over this is a typical cover crop that we would use for grazing cattle there was a lot of sorghum sedan grass we planted it too early and all the grasses got frozen during that brutal Frost yeah that may that Frost what whoever else was in here really attracted them to this area and they have turned it up and you can see this is this is a very you know they they Hogs want to root yeah we'll look at this area over here but they turn all this grass over this they do this with their nose and they eat the roots and shoots that are under the ground yeah and that gets into this you know what are the micronutrients in there what are the macronutrients in there that they're absorbing that we subsequently will be absorbing right and they're they're getting some of that dirt and everything they're getting the dirt they're getting the microbiome and then they're pooping and peeing and doing and doing the same thing giving that back which is why you know I think like as as kids you said you you know you and your brother are up there playing you're you know getting your hands dirty you're probably like licking your fingers you get you get dirt and and grime in there too so you kind of get somebody said I don't know who but it you got to eat a pound of dirt before you die to stay healthy but this I mean it looks like this has almost been mechanically done yeah this is from 10 pigs and we just let's see where are we here we just opened this up two days ago right they they do this really quickly you know but for some people they would say this is uh pretty intense but the land kind of regenerates and heals itself really quickly yeah I'm really worried that I don't see him you have no they busted through the Electrical Fence well we actually left it off for a while oh my gosh see you I think they're uh see them they're sleeping it's too early Hogs are the last animals to get up on a farm yeah sneak up on them there and you'll see them all laying together like hot dogs oh my God this is where they call them pigs in the blanket oh my goodness that's so adorable oh what did somebody wake me up are they petable sort of they will jump up in Bolt as we get close to them look at that oh man I want to get a picture I feel like I want to put a little blanket over them well isn't that funny they have that nice shelter that they could be in and they sleep out here in the night right hip camp for pigs yeah poop oh man look at them he's like that's enough where's my coffee in the middle of a dream and I woke him up it's still too early oh my goodness that's hilarious so that's our 10 pigs all accounted for whoo really made me worry there I was worried to call my brother and ask him what if he knew what happened but you know they're right next to the poly Wire yeah they get trained to that when they're little we get them they're about this big and we put them in a in a poly mesh fence like you saw with the chickens and then we have a little we have that poly wire on the ground so that they get used to it and once they're trained to it um if you were to take that down they'd be very hesitant to cross the space where the wire was interesting yeah they get very very habituated to it and here's some you see some fresh fertilizer oh yes yeah yeah so that's that's our pork operation we envisioned scaling this um with our perimeter fence which is just down there which that's where we tap off the power for the for the poly wire we can run these kind of paddocks anywhere on the 200 acres and with these kind of portable Sun shelters you could have 25 or 30 pigs in the middle of a pasture in July and they would be perfectly fine in the heat yeah yeah I'm so amazed that they just that they don't even get up it's good sleep we moved them was it was yesterday this is all all digging that they've done in the last like say 48 Hours well they've been working hard that's where they're doing it and they you know they turn this over and you'll see them chewing on that stuff yeah and that is a whole lot different than a hog that's been raised in a kfo and fed a fixed mixture of corn beans and a bunch of other other stuff yep um the diversity of that and then it would be nice to get them running around because when you see that's the other big part of it it changes the composition of the muscle when you can actually be out there sprinting like the analogy you talked about right when you sit on a couch you're you're musculature is not the same as if you're out you know running a few miles every day and these things run like crazy yeah and it's scary they're so powerful and that's their hams are you know massive because they actually get to work them out I think people who live in areas where pigs have become wild you know because they've returned to the wild like very quickly and they they become quite disastrous because you could imagine like yeah just in your front yard yeah yeah this is pretty crazy this was an eggmobile as we're winding down we have two of these and there used to be nest boxes on the side but they make an ideal hog shelter and it's movable that goes along with our concept of constantly moving our animals and we've pulled it several times here and you know is it on like wheels or how does it move it's a skids okay little skis there and we hook the tractor up to this and just tug It Forward how do you how do you work in the winter like when things are under cover of snow yes so Hogs are incredibly resilient we we are getting new Hogs tomorrow and we will they will not be processed until the end of January so we have a spot on the other side of the property where we have underground water that comes up because that's the key thing you've got to be able to get them water okay we've got several different shelters if a hog can be dry and out of the wind they can withstand like the wild hogs right they can withstand the most brutal weather and we've done this twice before so that's what we do with our Hogs we don't have we don't overwinter cows because we're old guys and we don't want to work that hard so we buy our cows in the spring and we finish them you know as late as December so we don't have that burden of having to feed them and water them over the winter so it's basically for you it's a seasonal it's seasonal uh well yeah it is seasonal yeah definitely but by the end of January we're we're pretty much taking it easy and in chapter two of Red House Ranch now when we're starting to do this charcuterie stuff that'll be the time when we'll go to the commercial kitchen you know once or twice a week start a new batch of pepperon or or salumi or whatever it is we're making now you mentioned going to a commercial kitchen but you also mentioned to me that you're building a commercial kitchen yes as well we hope to have it built by finished well it is the structure is physically there the sinks are there the stove the gas we're just doing the uh water system now I ordered the UV purification system two weeks ago so we'll have a commercial kitchen to work in here very shortly and literally it's right see that cell tower it's 200 yards to the right of that okay so do you own all no that's our neighbors the Smith Brothers who do maple syrup oh no they may they they use some of our trees to make maple syrup so we're collaborating on the kitchen with them that's fantastic it's really nice to be able to have like this network of folks that are still here that are working on things I'd imagine even like a little maple syrup on some pork well we we talk about making uh maple flavored breakfast sausage yeah absolutely I mean those are all the kind of options that become available when you have something like that together and people to collaborate with absolutely and you're mentioning that some of your pepperoni pepperoni goes actually to another mutual friend that we have Terry yes he is my inspiration for that uh hey he's a very inspirational person and he told me a product that he needed and I thought well that's a great challenge yeah you're looking for something like that to to work on so he's using that to source for his pizzas well we we've only had a few beta batches test batches but once we scale up uh he should be he as well as you know there's a whole massive set of restaurants along the wine trail that have a charcuterie plate yes and what's on it nothing from around here so that's that is that is a market that we're looking to try and develop some products so one thing I want to talk about here this pipe looks like pipe plain old pipe but it's look at irrigation it's a special pipe that we use it comes in 500 foot lengths and we can move it wherever we want like it wasn't here earlier in the year but we brought the hogs out and we reconfigured it we've got about two and a half miles of it yeah and we can set it up wherever we want if we want to graze cattle over there we'll just sling a hunk of this pipe around so it will serve where we're going to be for a while and then in the winter we pick it up and we move it back to us we're going to store it here in the pine trees and that's a whole part of this kind of the infrastructure for this kind of Agriculture can be very low cost right because it's not buried it's not permanent and it gets back to that seasonal part that you were talking about right that's one of the advantages of not having to overwinter a whole lot of cows and how how are you like especially when you're talking about like the charcuterie and everything how are you going out and like talking to these restaurants like what is your strategy to go out and like build a customer base I think like anything you show up with a business card an elevator pitch and a sample yeah a free sample and Terry also uh I think he's going to be one of our uh what do you call it like a rep a wrap not a rep but uh somebody who can say yeah this stuff is good yeah um so that's you know it's marketing yeah I'm not the greatest at it my sister is much more in that field so who we met earlier a little bit earlier but I mean it's so it's all about it's all about meeting the people everybody wants this kind of food that's the thing if you show up with something that is truly high quality and delicious um a lot of these places will will naturally go for it so I just wanted to show you this so this there's a fire hose this is very configurable if the power of pressure wasn't on I'd take it off but you can just unscrew this in 10 seconds and all of a sudden the hose is free or you can put something else on it's much different than the conventional type of fittings that farmers historically use they are more expensive but the the ease of changing and being flexible is we love it yeah that's fantastic and it's just a is it considered more of an irrigation house or no like what um PVC pipe is that it's called outside diameter outside diameter controlled pipe it could be for irrigation some people bury it it has all kinds of applications we want to just head right down this road and not bother our hip campers so when did you start the hip camp I think four years ago okay so kind of halfway through your farming day yeah well like a lot of things you know I get we get ideas from other people my daughter Maya who you met the other day yeah she said dad have you ever heard of hipkin of course not you need to start one and I looked at it and thought wow this this would be a good thing because it would do that AG education piece as well as a little bit of extra Revenue yeah absolutely I think you know you have this piece of land and you diversify as much as possible have those places where he you know you might have lost a couple customers or whatever you can make it up in another in another uh business or even when you want to take the time to do research and development which quite tank frankly takes resources and time then it allows you to you know do that a little bit more by diversifying your business so yeah brilliant idea it works great this is just so gorgeous this Outlook of this landscape it's very beautiful and I think some people who probably Farm are like wow this is too many Rolling Hills so in the 40s the U.S government went around and characterized all the Farmland yeah and they called this I I don't forget remember the exact term but it was something like pitifully pathetic useless farmland and there are all these pictures of these dirt farmers that were up here literally there were pictures of farms on Rumsey Hill Road yeah something like unacceptable farmland and in terms of corn and beans and row crops it really is it's Rocky but for grass this is the best yeah I mean when we have our grass growing it is absolutely amazing the amount of beef and protein that you can get off a land like this when you look at it that way a very different way than saying oh I got to plow it and plant something but making it a pasture perennial pasture turns it into a whole different proposition yeah I think that's so wonderful that you say that because if you go over towards like Trumansburg for instance yes it's flat land you know you could do corn for days there you know and it and it's perfect for that everything's in a grid and you just really lean into what the landscape is calling for especially if you're going to like produce a certain uh type of crop with it you know why force it into this like Square Peg and say okay I'm going to put like a ton of rice oil right here and that's what everybody at the time in the early I don't know 50s you know they all had they're all driven by agricultural policy yeah to to do that they were funded by Banks to do that and and to come to do something different is really painful and difficult because everybody tells you you're crazy and you know as La jollathan likes to say when somebody tells you you're crazy and you're doing the wrong thing keep doing it and I'm not sure that's always right but in some cases I think he might have a point I think the the challenge is though you know in many ways you want sometimes you want a little bit of that support from the government like you know I think people are intentioned to go a certain way because it's easier money they have subsidies that type of thing yeah go ahead you could have you could go sorry doggie sorry oh so this is a lot of pickerel weed right here yes and I'm not sure it's part of the video but I wanted to talk about uh I don't know about this whole thing I don't think you would see this if it was like you know one of those kfos where you have all the this is not a sewage Lagoon it's not like a big sewage yeah no um so many years ago probably 30 years ago I was living overseas and I wanted to build a pond and I had my uncle build this for me it's 18 feet deep wow and all of these plants I I planted like 20 of those like I picked for all week 30 years ago yeah there's there's snails in here if we went to the other side I put 20 snails there's probably 50 000 in here now you can get escar snails yeah yeah had the idea of creating this ecosystem and and I did and these lotuses we just planted this year they're in a tub right now yeah and I want them to invade this pond because I want to see Lotus all around and I think we are finally we finally have a tuber that's growing well enough that we'll be able to do that um I'm surprised your water lilies haven't taken over well they oh so when I had the pond designed there was a specific intent I didn't want to have a lot of growth on on all the edges so that wall over there slopes down very steeply and very fast I see okay it gets deep right away I intentionally made a shelf here that is four feet deep I see and then it drops off yeah so those water lilies are competing with these guys and they they can't quite in that shallow water but my my idea was to create habitat for fish in here and this definitely is fish spawning habitat and and it's a camping you know we grew up here swimming every summer all the cousins would come here and hang out and now we have hip campers so I don't know where they're from but they all everybody comes down here and swims and enjoys the pond yeah fantastic uh you think are some of the most challenging aspects of the business especially for somebody who's considering getting into this what kind of words of advice would you have I mean obviously some people are still looking for land you were fortunate enough to have this already in your family but beyond that what what kind of words of advice would you give folks it all depends on what you want to try and do right my my goal was to create an Enterprise that that could make pay us assist a living wage if you just want to do this in a hobby level that's a whole different question but if you really want to do it from a business point of view you've got to start out doing some spreadsheet calculations you know how many cows do I need to have at what percentage of income am I going to retain from those cows what are going to be my processing costs processing is a huge issue we have to schedule our processing 18 months in advance wow okay so and this is somebody who will come and process your beef or your we send it to them USDA processors um and now I would say anybody who wants to do this are they local are there local processors you'd probably have to find what processors are in your area some people have to travel that's all part of the homework right yeah you have to figure out where that's all going to work where's your feed going to come from the most important thing I think is going to school I have spent a lot of time and money going to conferences the grass-fed exchange there's a whole bunch of them there's soil conferences and you have to go out and meet people see what they're doing visit Farms visit other people look at other follow a dozen websites of people that you want to be like buy from them see how they do order fulfillment if you're really going to do it at a business level you have to be very tech savvy you have to understand web marketing you have to use you know how many views per day am I getting how much am I getting you know what's my cost per click I mean all these things what's my retention what's my retention you know what customers are buying again what am I going to do to make them come back yeah it's an extremely complex thing and you know one of the things when I give I've given a couple lectures to conferences about this one things I say is before before you start your tractor engine you better have your marketing engine running well in advance you you will not succeed you'll go to farmers markets you make a couple hundred bucks you'll spend 12 hours to do that and it's unless you unless you're doing that for fun it's not worth it yeah so you really have to understand you know how do I want to live how do I want to spend my precious hours that I have here on Earth right do I want to be groveling and not make a penny meet a lot of cool people but it you it's very easy to get enchanted with the Joel salatin view of the world and and want to be part of that and a lot of people get into it I think maybe really lose their shirts in the long run I think it's great advice and I think of you like you said you can you and your brother both came from this uh that way maybe that meticulous way of thinking that's a really good point it really it takes a team right you one person isn't going to do it a husband and wife isn't going to do it either you know I do a lot of the financial piece I do all the order fulfillment shipping that kind of stuff my sister is excellent with all of the marketing Instagram I mean you have to be out there in front if you want people to find you it's so funny because your your parents probably like had the kids thinking that they would grow up working on the farm to a certain degree and then that started to that dream started to slip away and then here you say like my sister's doing this my brother does this well and my mom cooks for us that man was like my mom is definitely part of the team I mean she patches our pants she has lunch ready for us she packs eggs with us I mean she's like check you out of the house and here you are she tells us when something doesn't taste good and like there's something wrong with this sausage okay well look at it yeah that's great uh whether whether it is a family team or where you're prepared to buy a team right there's nothing wrong with hiring an accountant hiring a internet marketing expert to help you get your presence out there because you have to realize that if you try and do it all you're going to be disappointed with yourself because you will never have enough done and at some point you've got to be able to to breathe and live and yeah you you got to face that reality of we may have intimated it already in in our discussion but what has been the result of having a farm here because we are in like this little interesting area in the Finger Lakes where there are quite a lot of other Farms that you could interact and partner with you had mentioned you know your The Smiths across the way who do Maple uh collecting as well and then you provide some of the sugar Maples on your land we talked about Terry with like you know with his Stone Bend farm and the pizzas and he's using your pepperon what's the what's the experience has been for you here with all that interaction well I I really like it I mean I'm I'm a sort of an introvert but I do like getting out and meeting all these people I mean to me when we have a customer show up for the first time you know I always ask well how did you find us and because I'm such a health and nutrition nerd I'll invariably slip out a little question like that what's your favorite podcast oh I listen to Peter or Tio I do too and um you know that kind of interaction is really good we had one customer who showed up the other day my sister took care of her um you know she's well of all the people that are out there why did you pick up she said well because you have a good website yeah and I can order and I can just come and get it yeah there's many other people out there um yeah it's something that we've toyed with trying to help other people like be a food aggregator but that hasn't really panned out for us finding other products to sell and that is one of our downfalls that's one of our shortcomings when you look at some of our competitors like white oak pastures or seven sons yeah they have massive amounts of product right because because they have a hundred employees yeah and they have a procurement manager and they have a website the one down in uh towards Atlanta yeah Georgia Bluffton Georgia yeah um and those are my Inspirations so when did you paint the house red oh it was red when we were born okay it was repainted a couple years ago started starting this I did so I sent a note to all my kids and you know hey we're going to start this business what should we call it and within 20 seconds my son replied red house ranch okay it really stuck yeah that's great so any could people just come at any point and see do they have to make an appointment to like open Saturdays okay it is Saturday right right it's opened then people are ordering just we'll have it all ready and they come and pick up great that's my that's nice that you have like a online store on your website which is very easy to use and very intuitive and really good photography of like the products that you would get that are representative of the products that you would get and then here locally people could come and pick it up right this is our display freezer nice oh yeah okay look at wings T-bone steak pork tenderloin breakfast sausage rib steak New York strip steak okay you got the full one cut yeah we got a pretty good selection yeah and dog treats too yeah yep some dried pig ears some big bones yeah and then we have our storage freezer our walk-in Sub-Zero freezer oh wow okay can we keep all of the bulk products great we we're friends with um uh Justin Peterson he was the chef at uh hazelnut in Trumansburg and I know he's a he's needing to eat there I don't think we've ever he is a charcuterie expert he he doesn't run hazelnut any longer but um you know I went to him and I said hey you know I want to make here's all the other pepperonis I want to make something that's above and beyond so he researched ancient pepperoni recipes and came up with a very unique set of ingredients as well as the process which is secret and this is our third test batch that we that we made and Terry has tried some we've had a lot of people try it and they've all exclaimed how good it is I gave I gave up a whole one pound stick to my uncle and um thank you you know he called me back about 12 hours later you got any more of that I ate it all um it's it is this one is a little cold but I mean because it just came out of the freezer but wow it has a lingering flavor you can taste more fennel than you would in a typical it's like like spiced but like overly spiced and just one flavor of spice you can this is what's made more nuanced yeah really good and it's like um the textures is also very good yeah because and the other thing about this is this is a classic fermented sausage right you add a little bit of dextrose to it and a starter culture and it creates lactic acid to lower the ph so the meat doesn't so the meat is safe and then it literally hangs and dries in a drying chamber for up to six weeks to lose to lose it loses up to 40 percent of its moisture so there's more pork in there than and then per square inch then if you're eating a pork chop right and because it's marbled like sometimes when you eat like a typical pepperoni and people will know anybody who's at a pet like a one slice pepperoni pizza or whatever you're kind of tearing into this this kind of like falls apart in your mouth this is something because of the marbling yeah this is something that you would you wouldn't mind eating on a charcuterie board yeah those I would not I mean that's so so that's the end product out of all of that chattering about plants and planting metabolites going through the animals and the exercise that produces the best ingredient besides our spice mix our spices are all organic they're all very clean nothing in there nothing else in there besides spices and salt that's great and bacteria right I mean to have salami it's true salami is is created with lactobacillus bacteria so you said this is kind of your third iteration on this do you think this is going to be your third and final and when can people start getting your uh pepperoni we have batch four is is curing right now how long does it take to cure it takes the total process takes I would say seven weeks totally okay start to finish I I hope that we're cranking this out in January great like you said the seasonality of our business will have more time to do development and it all has to be certified you have you have to have the recipe certified by a safety group that says yes your process will produce something that is safe people aren't going to get sick from eating it which is really important right we want to comply with all the rules and regulations of how you make food that we're going to sell to the public so we have to go through that process and um hopefully in January we'll be I plan to make 20 pound batches once a week as we get our systems running we have automated Chambers for the curing and for the drying Chambers we have to get all that automation down and make sure our record-keeping systems are in place and um yeah that's the plan a lot of logistics well thank you so much for taking us through this I think this is going to be really enlightening for folks who have been thinking about doing this or may be interesting in kind of transitioning into something that was maybe a little more you know traditional into something that's a bit more like you know this idea of regenerative and at least people may know a little bit more of what they're going to get into as well no matter what your personal dietary preferences most of us can agree that supporting one's local farmers who contribute directly to the local food system is a sensible if not honorable Act it not only keeps money within the community but also builds a level of resiliency in the region as a whole food is fresher and traceable people have more of a trust in connection with where their food comes from and having many local farmers throughout one's area builds a more healthful and accessible food system as a whole which is especially apparent during times of need and many local farmers like our friends over at Red House Ranch will prioritize farming methods that are not only ecologically sound but also regenerative to the land we encourage you to seek out local farmers in your area to support and if you're living in the region or even visiting the Finger Lakes be sure to check out Red House Ranch 10 of our Google AdSense revenue is reinvested back into Community projects here in the Finger Lakes so be sure to like subscribe hit the notifications button and even tip your support makes a difference we'll see you in the next episode [Music]

Channel: Flock Finger Lakes

Views: 151,937

Keywords: Flock, Flock Finger Lakes, Finger Lakes New York, homestead, homesteading, how to homestead, permaculture, permaculture farm, upstate New York, agroforestry, summer rayne oakes, how to start a farm, farm life, Joel Salatin, regenerative farm, regenerative animal farm, silvopasture, pasure raised beef, pasture raised animals, regenerative agriculture, raising pigs, raising chickens, pasturing animals, pastured raised chickens, pastured hogs, pastured cows, rotational grazing

Id: esf_oMp4y54

Length: 69min 16sec (4156 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 02 2023