Food Plots for Wildlife: Building Soil Health While Growing Deer Nutrition

0:00 Hey everybody, welcome to the Green Cover podcast where we have really interesting conversations with some of the top farmers and experts in the regenerative world. Join us as we learn together how we can regenerate God's creation for future generations.

0:16 You know, one of the principles of soil health is to integrate livestock, properly integrate livestock, and it doesn't really say that has to be cattle. And so our guest today, we're going to be talking about integrating livestock, but actually using white-tailed deer as the livestock integration. My friend Grant Woods is joining us today. Grant has just been a great friend and a partner to Green Cover the past several years as we've worked together to help many clients, many people all across the country regenerate their food plots and really change the way that they're growing food for the deer. So Grant, welcome to the Green Cover podcast.

0:58 Good to see you as always. Thanks for having me on.

1:01 Absolutely. Yeah, it's been a real pleasure to get to know you and your team and it, you know, when we got together with you, it really opened up a whole new opportunity for Green Cover and getting our seed out to a different set of people, but really with similar goals of wanting to improve their soil so that they can improve their habitat. You know, and in this case it's for deer. In other cases, it might be for cattle or for growing crops. But it's kind of a cool story. I love the story of how we kind of form this business relationship and our personal relationship as well. So, go ahead and just share a little bit of that. Well, first of all, share a little bit of your background, your education, how you've got to the point where you're at now, because you've got well over a million followers on social media. So, I mean, you're one of the big names in the wildlife management business. So, tell us how you got here.

2:03 Well, I was raised on, as you know, Keith, a small farm in western Missouri, right where the Ozarks meets the plateau, a lot of rocks, and we're like, I'm 64, so young boys my age. Usually, we had a couple, you know, Jersey cows and a fairing house for a few pigs and, you know, stuff like that. And I was raised on that farm. And I've heard other people say recreational discing. I swear I'd come in for supper and my dad we'd eat supper and dad say, 'Hey, go disc that field again.' You know, so I was raised in that.

2:32 Went to college and was taught the same stuff and schooled there, small school, Missouri, then University of Georgia and finally Clemson. And I was always chasing working with deer. I just I believe in my heart now in hindsight, God built me to be a deer biologist. And I just followed that dream or that drive or that goal.

2:53 And but always had soils classes along the way in wildlife and forestry classes and very traditional NPK standard soil test all this stuff which you know when I was trying to help land owners understand that. And then I started reading and watching these guys doing something called regenerative agriculture. I even started before I think that word was popular. People were no tilling and then no tilling into that standing crop and I how does that even work? You know what's going on?

3:24 And then I guess the big impetus was my wife Trace and I bought some land in deep in the Ozarks deep rough rocky country just because it was inexpensive. We wanted land we could afford this old burnout cattle farm is what it was. No sense in discing because it was literally chunk rock everywhere.

3:44 I mean literally and I rented a no till drill from the county and figuring out how to calibrate and do stuff and absolutely true. I can remember drilling one day and I was just using whatever seed I could get of course and I'd look down and see the orange or green seed on top the rock. I was not penetrating and got a decent stand. You know, rain rained, right? God blessed it, whatever. But, you know, it's hard when you know where to drive your tractor by seeing your seed laying on top the ground and you can't even penetrate and continuing reading and learning.

4:22 And started planting blends two or three at a time, four at a time. And you know, a lot of us have the story the neighbors think, 'What are you doing?' And you know that's even the county extension agent I invited him over and he was like well this you know this is not going to work don't tear up our drill trying this it's not going to work you know so.

4:43 And through that process started building soil to my amazement because like many of us taught in college you can, you know, takes about thousand years to build an inch of soil and I think that's probably true if we lay a piece of rock on our back porch it take a thousand years for that to break down but if you have life organisms in there working, we know we can do better. And as we started, and this is over time, this is now 25 years ago, and over time making more progress. And in these horrible hills, I can remember we were, you know, people were starting to pay attention. And the United States Senate a tour was coming through the area. And by that time, when local extension agents figured out, hey, those were rocks and now you got this black stuff on top there.

5:28 Yeah. Right, and they come by and toured our place and that let me know that this is something that people don't understand. They don't know this. It's possible.

5:40 And then we got some universities involved and on that same rocky field actually I last time I planted a monoculture of corn which was silly for my purpose but again I thought that's what we're supposed to do counting you know rows and rings and all that. So it's this is not like a the new modern combines but the university's come up with 196 bushels per acre in the Ozarks. So I mean totally unheard of and that's back when 200 bushel corn was pretty good benchmark.

6:12 Yeah. So we, that term regen was floating around and boy I was studying Gabe Brown and David Brandt and others and Ray Archeletta and actually got to meet Ray. He actually moved a couple hours from me and just really diving into everything these guys put out. And then I heard about Green Cover and I decided I'm just going to hop in my truck. I was working in Kansas. We work all over and had a couple younger interns with me. We worked with universities and I called Keith Folks and said, 'Hey, I want to stop by and meet you.' Keith didn't know what he's getting in for that time. He probably wish he hadn't bought me that lunch, but anyway.

6:52 I remember that day. Yes.

6:54 Yeah. And I just told Keith, I really believe this is something the wildlife world could benefit from, and I love your approach, how you do business. I'd never met Keith before, folks. And it was overtly obvious he was a Christian man and got to do business that way. And we had lunch or broke bread together and we really talked it through. And I think we actually went another six months or so if I remember correctly and then actually formed a bit of a relationship and it's been great. And we call what we do the release process, releasing the creation's potential.

7:30 And I'll share one other thing Keith on this line here. I'm an avid reader and I really enjoy reading the early explorers. Everyone thinks of Lewis and Clark, but there were many in every little area. And in my area, there was a guy when there's just a couple trappers in the Ozarks, and he was looking for lead deposits. And he was talking about the abundant wildlife and grass as tall as a horse's bridle and all this stuff, and it's all timbered now. And and and that's where I started thinking how productive that land was. And we could we could recover or release that potential. That potential's there. All the base parts are there. It may be limited to microbes, whatnot, but they're there and we could release that and get that potential back. And then a great guy, he was the first known white, not Native American buffalo hunter in Kansas and he wrote a brilliant book of his observations and he was, you know, he was out there with Native Americans chasing buffalo and seeing stuff and there was no development, no sod huts, no nothing. His observations of the diversity of plant species and how productive it was and I'm like gosh we're adding all these.

8:41 Inputs now and no one was doing that. And then another thing I'll share: I don't think a lot resonates with a lot of people if you read, if you actually read the Lewis and Clark journals and not just watch the movie or something. You think about how far they walked, and in one, two sentences in the whole journals that talk about ticks they're back to back. So one stop along the river, probably where fire hadn't gotten to, and there was too much undergrowth, they talked about tick. So when you read Daniel Boone's writings all the way across Kentucky, he never mentions tick.

9:13 You can't walk out most people's backyards now and not talk about tick. So let me know that what we see now is not how God created it. And there's a better, more productive way. And so that's where we started the release process. And then when I met you and started diving into all the great information you have from all the people you work with in your own practices, that allowed us to even elevate the game more.

9:42 Yeah. And I remember, you know, when we were working at trying to come up with a name for this process, we kicked around lots and lots of different names. And you know, when you brought that one forward, it's like that totally makes sense because all this potential is there. You know, when we do a soil test, you know, if we do that total nutrient digestion test, we see the vast amount of minerals that are in our soils, if we have the biology there to release it. So it has a huge amount of potential that God has built into these systems. You know, diversity brings all this resilience. And so we just have to, you know, kind of release it and get out of the way.

10:21 And one of the things that I have found just fascinating in working with you and with all of the great customers, food plot customers, landowner customers, has been that these principles, you know, the soil health principles as applied through, you know, integrating diversity primarily through cover crops and biology, how they just work everywhere. You know, they'll work here on, you know, good ground in Nebraska and they'll work in arid ground in western Kansas and they're working in the Rocky Ozark Mountains of Missouri and Arkansas. And so it's just really encouraging to see that these principles work regardless of where you're at.

11:05 Yeah, Keith. And I was just sharing off camera before we started, we just had a great email from a gentleman we helped in Northern Alabama. If you're not familiar with the area, it's rolling hills, hard pack place, highly eroded area. And he bought 100 acres or so that had been heavily timbered. It was like me but much younger, starting out, only land they could really afford, great guy, and you know, big dreams, some hand tools, small tractor. And I remember touring this place and the only openings that just didn't have treetops and stumps everywhere because this place had just been harvested. You know, the previous landlord said, 'Hey, if it's worth any money, take it because I'm just going to sell it.' So pretty rough place. And the openings were logging decks where they brought in big heavy equipment and picked the logs up, put them on truck, take them out, cut the ends off, cut the butt logs off, whatever. And there's just trash heaps all over. And I remember walking up there going, 'Well, this is going to be a test.' Because I looked down and there just big old puddles of hydraulic fluid that leaked out of heavy equipment on the ground. When oil won't penetrate, folks, you know, that's pretty bad, pretty compacted.

12:09 And so we got him set up, got a plan going, and it did not rain. So the first fall, by the time he got any moisture at all in the forecast, just planted a monoculture of cereal rye. Cereal rye is always my go-to right in the fall. And got a crop, you know, this was not going to make the cover farmer today, but it was more than I thought was going to grow. And then this spring, of course, he's got a diverse blend in there this summer, and it's looking good and deer in there, and the guy's happy. And I can already start to see the changes. The soil's still red and hard, but those roots are starting to go a little deeper than even the fall crop. And that's where we're just releasing that potential. It's never too.

12:50 Late, folks. You can recover. I'm amazed at and even in some of the other countries in the Sahara and places like that some of the recovery stories that are out there that people take you go well there's no hope in this and then people put the right processes in place and introduce life microbes usually and what recovers is so amazing.

13:14 Yeah. And you know, another kind of play on that word release is, you know, so you've got you got a green growing plant, which is, you know, one of God's amazing creations. It's taking just the energy of the sun, which really powers everything. It's taking this carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which, you know, some people say is a pollutant, but it's it's not really. It's food for plants and it's turning that CO2 into, you know, this liquid carbon and then that plant releases it out the root system and that's really what's driving the system because as it releases that carbon through the root system, that's what's feeding the biology and then really the biology is doing the heavy lifting from there. It's breaking down, you know, the mineral portion of these rocks and it's gluing together the soil aggregates and you know, giving you that infiltration and, you know, it it's just a wonderful way that God created the plants and the biology to work together. And you have to have both in order to make it work. And I think that's what, you know, we're seeing, you know, both, you know, at your place, which, you know, you call the proving grounds, which I want to I want to get to that because I love that phrase. But we're seeing that, you know, everywhere where people are employing these principles, these soil health principles. We're seeing these types of things happen.

14:39 It's such an amazing simple, extremely complex but simple process that sometimes those of us that have been practicing and seen the results, benefited from the results go, how come every farmer, every gardener is not doing this? And I've kind of whittled it down for me that because it's microdriven and we take plants for granted. You know, we don't you know, the plant is such an amazing, it's incredibly complex and everything going on there and the world's best solar panel ever. I mean, Elon will never create a solar panel as efficient as a plant leaf, right?

15:22 So, I think we just take it for granted. We can't see the microbes. I always refer I talk a lot about earthworms because people can see them and hold them. Um it's and fertilizer companies have these big massive banner ads everywhere. And I'm not anti-fertilizer. Let's just don't use any more than we need to. But the microbes unless you're watching a PowerPoint where someone's got the slides or some way you don't even know they're there. And we take plants for granted. And I think once we put those two things together, as you mentioned, the plants got to capture the sun's energy, convert it to a form that microbes use if they're underground and they're working, you know, basically 24/7, 365 for the most part and doing and get out of the way and my practices now are almost every year less and less intrusive because I realize the value of what's going on.

16:17 Yeah. And all these things we're talking about, you know, they're really they're they're free. They're given to us by God by grace. And you know, one of my one of the talks I really enjoy giving, I actually did it for the first time, you know, there in Branson at your field day. You know, that concept of biograce and how God has given us sunlight and carbon and these nutrients and you know, the atmosphere is 78% nitrogen. So there's 30,000 tons of nitrogen above every acre of crop ground and you know there's all these microbes and so all of this is given to us by grace. You know we we can't really buy it. We don't really deserve it. We're not going to run out of it. I mean that's that's what true grace is. And it's just really interesting to think of it in those terms. And like I say, I have fond memories of that first time doing that there for your folks in Branson.

17:16 Brilliant presentation and easy to understand like all your presentations. And I reflect on when I'm driving in the Midwest, like where you live, and you can see fence rows. You can't really see them where I live, and they're, you know, depending on where you are, two, three feet taller than the rest of the field.

17:35 And typically, unless it's been sprayed, those plants are a little greener and they look good. You pull them up. And Keith, we've done this and showed this. I remember working in Kansas on a project. You and I were on there a little bit. And a guy had bought some land and there was an old little corner of CRP that just pretty much been left alone. And the length of a shovel—I don't know, standard shovels, what, five, six feet, something like that—so two and a half feet out into the field, it was just dead. No wormholes, no beetle holes. It was just clunky, couldn't really break it apart. And I did this on purpose. And I saw the other end of the shovel. So two and a half feet or so into this old CRP that was just been left alone. A lot of people thought it's a wasteland. And we don't even have to dig. We can pull up these plants and the roots are breaking off because they go so deep and there's earthworms and everything there. And you can tell it's just running on all eight cylinders.

18:29 Well, that's it, folks. It's never too late. We can recover those even little sections and spread them across the land by just employing the very simple principles of soil health.

18:40 And that reminds me that we never give up on people either, right? God never gives up on us. We never give up on people. It is never too late. And it's never too late on your soil. And I'll say one last thing. I remember doing some work for a large golf course called Callaway Gardens, a series of four golf courses just west of Atlanta, years ago. And if you're not familiar with golf courses, they're sprayed with fungicide, insecticide—I mean, every side there is, they're treated all the time to keep them looking like that in a monoculture grass because that's not natural. And they were going to redo one of the golf courses. And so midsummer they just let this one golf course go. No playing on it, just let it go. And I'm like, boy, nothing's ever going to grow there. And by that fall there was goldenrod and ragweed and stuff had taken over the fairways and everyone's thinking this is despicable. I'm even back then I've got, this is amazing. All those seeds, because golf courses have been reshaped, you know, moved by big yellow equipment, everything treated with—they're toxic waste sites, some of them.

19:47 And we just backed off and the miracle of God's creation come through that and it was amazing. And we see that again in old farms and stuff that if we use the right principles and encourage it, it really blossoms.

20:05 Yeah, and that's a great example of how God's creation can heal itself. And you know, when there's diversity out there, it makes it so resilient. So I want to go back to, you know, you call your land that you have there just outside of Branson, you call it the proving grounds, which I love that term. You know, it's a term used in military contexts and other contexts, but tell us why you call it the proving grounds and what are you trying to prove there?

20:39 Well, Tracy and I again, we bought this. It was literally a burnout cattle ranch. I didn't tell many people this at first. It's kind of fun to share now, but in my career as a wildlife biologist, literally working from New Zealand to Canada, I've never walked a property and found as many cattle skeletons per unit area as my own place, because they literally starved to death. The rancher didn't care and he just let the cattle starve to death. That's how bad it was, folks, literally. So obviously, they grazed anything before they died that was somewhat digestible to a cow. And we started with that. And people were like, 'What is this guy doing?' And I'm from the area, but I've been off to school and worked other places, moved back, and they're like, 'Oh, that he got polluted by colleges. That boy, you know, he don't know what he's doing.' And then I'm no tilling, which almost no one no tilled. Back in the day, there was no problem getting a county rental no-till drill because no one believed in it.

21:33 Yeah, you can just call up now. Yeah, it's always available.

21:38 So we started doing these practices and they were so strange, out of context for everyone around there. And I don't know, me and some buddies were talking. I was like, well, I just want to show people we can do this. I've done it enough years now I think it's going to work. And just kind of out of general conversation, it came up to Proven Grounds and that name stuck.

22:00 And I like it. And Keith and I have talked about this before, but it's hard to imagine for most farmers how rocky it is. Literally, most people I think you'd agree, Keith, would never drive their farm equipment across my property. They wouldn't even think about it.

22:18 Yeah, I tell people this all the time. I've been to your place multiple times when we came for that field day and we were doing some soil testing and infiltration tests. And you can't stick a probe in the ground without hitting 12 rocks. You got to kind of wiggle between the rocks. There's wonderful soil there, and I mean, you've got five, six percent organic matter now between the rocks and on top of the rocks. I would not want to be a disc opener blade on your drill because it's hitting a lot of rocks and it's just a tough environment. But you have proven that no matter what the environment, these principles of biology, these principles of creation work to create soil.

23:08 And so we think about deer and food plots. Deer, adult deer salivates about two gallons a day. Ruminates all salivate, they're regurgitating and stuff. Cattle, actually a lot of people don't know this, a large cow will salivate about thirty gallons a day. Well, that saliva is just full of microbes, right, coming out of their rumen. Some of them are very beneficial to the soil. And so there's this replenishing act. And then if you're in the Ozarks and all of a sudden you've got a food plot that's the best food around, you're going to spend more time there. They're going to probably salivate more per unit area there than throughout most of the range. And you can really start multiplying these microbes and they keep replenishing them. So I think that's one of the ways we were able to make such rapid progress because there was a concentration of micro deposits going on there, unlike in Nebraska where there's food everywhere, right? There's, unless you're doing mob grazing. And that's kind of one of the principles of mob grazing. There are many, but a lot of people just think it's the trampoline or whatever. They don't think about all the microbes being deposited there.

24:18 The dung, the urine, the saliva. Yeah.

24:23 So let's talk a little bit about what the release process looks like. You know, from a practical standpoint, what are you doing as far as timings and plantings on both the proving grounds there in Missouri as well as what you recommend to other clients as you go out and help them on their properties? What does that look like?

24:44 Yeah, so it's a system again to just use the potential of the area. And we tend to plant annuals. We plant annuals in the spring. We're usually planting into a fall crop. So we're going to plant a little later because that soil stays a little cooler and we're waiting on that fall crop to be in the dough stage or have seeds that can be terminated by crimping. I'm not anti-herbicide. I just don't want to use any more than I have to for several reasons. And then in the fall, which is a key crop for most deer people out there, they're planting fall crops to attract deer to see them. Summer crops actually help deer grow, right? In the fall, deer are slowing down that metabolism. So we're starting in the fall. We're going to plant a blend. It's always got some cereal rye in it like you and I've taught Keith, but usually six, seven, eight different species. And Keith and I work on this every year and tweak based on what we've learned or doing. Gonna try to have at least some grasses, oats and rye, and some brassicas, turnips, rape, radishes, a couple legumes in there, usually annual clovers, and of course some forbs in there. And that diversity is a secret to the whole.

26:00 The whole thing. And we're going to let that grow through the winter. It'll be kind of short. They're browsing on it. And of course, in the spring, spring green up, it'll bolt and get big. Again, hopefully we get several tons per acre of organic matter out of that on top. Now, the roots are really doing the work, but people are seeing the top. And then we promote what's called planting green drilling or broadcasting right into that. I have a lot of small plots, eighth acre or so that we broadcast right into it and either foot crimp with a tuba 6 and some angle iron or weed eat it down if it's mature enough that weed eating will terminate that crop and let the new crop grow up through it.

26:42 So our process is applying seeds at the right time of year. And for us, that's defined in the spring when we can terminate the standing crop by crimping. And in the fall, 45 to 60 days before the average first frost date. And I've learned to use the last five years. Don't use the last 80 years of data because the climate has changed. Things seem to have changed a little bit. And there's a rain in the forecast. If you're broadcasting, that rain is so critical. If you're no tilling, you have more leeway. And it's not critical just so the raindrops help get the seed to good contact with the soil, but in food plots, you're always bordered by cover or something. So there's a gazillion turkeys and quail and rodents and squirrels. And the squirrels be leaving like this with your seed in their cheeks all day long, and they can remove a lot of seed in a couple days. So we like to plant, especially in small plots, just as close to a rain as we can to help make sure that seed stays on site.

27:45 That's like the 30,000 foot overview, Keith. But we've learned of course a few changes or tweaks through the years. We want to work really hard to get seed to soil contact, but we found as our soil gets better and better, we can plant shallower because that soil quality is so good. And because we're always planting blends, we may have really small seeds in there like balancia clover or something like that. We don't want that getting too deep. And the large seeds, if you have decent soil, we found they get a root down. So we air on the more shallow side, a quarter inch, a quarter inch, those are averages in food plots. This is not like a precision leveled egg field. I mean, our drill bounces, literally bounces. So just you know, you're taking average.

28:35 Yeah. So the planting twice a year. Fertilizers and herbicides are used only when needed. I mean they're tools.

28:47 They're tools to use. Yeah. If you've bought some land that's been under, you know, you bought some land in Iowa is great hunting and the guy's been adding fertilizer and everything for years and you wean it off all at once, it might be ugly. So we do take some soil test although I'm less and less dependent on soil test and I used to be and more for using that on something like the haney test or something that's measuring some life out there in the soil.

29:15 And we have found that what we've seen north to south two years of that rotation we're pretty much out of testing because we're getting enough life out there that we know we can carry on and as Keith said there's 30,000 tons of nitrogen and air. There's plenty of phosphorus and potassium in the soil. We just have to release it with these microbes. So we do work with microbes and we have drones apply them at times. We find we can really expedite the process by adding beneficial microbes. It's not necessary. They will come. I've they're there and those populations will expand. It's not like they're moving in. They won't expand.

30:00 Yeah. And so you're doing the microbes really we're doing it in two ways. You know using a drone to apply them as a foliar, but we're also putting three different types of inoculant on all the seed that we send out the food plots. You know, we're using our rhizobac, which is it's got multiple families of rhizobia, which will colonize the roots of legume plants, but it also has other free-living nitrogen fixers.

34:39 I think that's part of the reason that we see some pretty rapid changes in a very short period of time. You know, like the North Alabama, you know, red concrete. He's not there yet, but it's coming along. And I know there's been, you know, lots of other, you know, the great customers and clients we've worked with. You know, they'll send pictures, you know, they'll tell stories. And it's just encouraging to see, you know, how these, you know, creative processes are working to change their soils.

35:08 So Corey now in North Alabama is where Chris Barry was, who's a friend of both of ours, just doing an awesome job and Chris is in South Carolina, about an hour out of Charlotte, if you know that geography over there, folks. And Chris bought a farm that had production crop land on it and the previous owner just abused it. I mean that red clay just couldn't dig a post hole if he wanted to. Pack hard as it could be. Chris is a few years into it now. Several good rotations and every year it just, I like Chris. Boy, you've made it, man. This is good. And this year his crops and they've had good rain this year, but looks so good. And his deer are not South Carolina deer. I mean, these deer look like the Midwest deer, you know, he's really doing great. And Chris was a guy, he's extremely intelligent, very successful that just played by the rules. Chris is a guy. Okay, I don't know that. I know this. I don't know that. So I'm going to do as close as I can depend on the weather and equipment breakdowns, whatnot, what I'm supposed to do. And he has built inches of black organic matter on top of red clay. His crops are extremely productive. They're like a calendar cover now.

36:27 And the wildlife has responded. Turkey's everywhere. And some people may not know in this audience, wild turkey populations are plummeting throughout the turkey's range. Chris has a gad of turkeys. It's amazing how many turkeys he has. And once again, we can go through this process to restoring creation. And again, being the reader I am, Daniel Boone talks about thou when he was literally walking through Kentucky, thousands upon thousands of wild turkeys. He actually has a quote. He doesn't think he ever spent a day in Kentucky. Even in the winter, year round, 365 days a year, he did not hear a turkey gobble.

37:09 And we think about the diversity of the habitat that was there and the forest canopies were open. Buffalo were grazing through, elk were grazing through. Well, you can restore that on your land. You're not going to have buffalo and elk going through most likely depending on where you are. But even smaller properties can really make huge gains in the soil and the wildlife populations respond accordingly.

37:32 Yeah, Chris is a great great example. I love talking to him. He's just always so excited and passionate about it and you know the pictures that he sends. It's just really fun and there's a lot of Chris's out there as well, you know, having stories like that and again, it's a testimony to, you know, the power of biology and just releasing all of this potential that God has built into these systems. So really fun to do. Now, you know, obviously you have the Growing Deer TV show. You're putting out videos every week. If people aren't familiar with that, I would encourage you to subscribe on YouTube or Facebook or wherever you watch a lot of your media. You're on almost all those channels. So in addition to putting out, you know, weekly videos, sometimes more than one a week, you and your team do, you also consult with a lot of land owners across the country. Maybe talk just a little bit about, you know, how have you seen people's appetite for outdoors, for acquiring land, using land, you know, trying to procure some of their own food. How have you seen that shift last five years? You know, there's kind of a before and after now, but how have you seen things change and shift?

38:51 That's a great question. Certainly see people more interested in understanding what they're consuming and of course wildlife free ranging wildlife has proven time and time again in most situations be extremely nutritious and then they go back well guys these critters are eating.

39:11 What's on the land, what am I putting in my land that they might be consuming? And that really helps open up the whole big picture where before I think there's deer out there, it was just deer. There wasn't a distinction like it was cow. It wasn't grass-fed, regenerative raised cows, mob grazed cows. It was just cow, right? And we're seeing that now in deer.

39:31 And people are more cautious. Some people are more cautious on what they're applying to their land realizing that goes into water. It goes into the critter. The critter may go into you or your family.

39:43 So really seeing that and a great example, we work all over and I got a call. We don't screen, right? Customers will want to pay, we're going to help. And so a lady called me from Pennsylvania. She had 40 acres, very successful software engineer, and she wanted to procure her own protein. She wanted to source her own wholesome protein. And this was not about growing big antlers or record books. This was a lady who wanted to harvest with a bow. She's kind of, you know, a lot of houses around the area, a lot of 20, 30, 40 acre house places, and she wanted to do it as natural as she could.

40:19 And we laid out a plan to help restore in that area the native habitat and some food plots. And I found that so rewarding because I believe as hunters, our highest calling should be as a provider. If we go back in time, hunters were providers. Nimrod was a tremendous hunter in the Old Testament. And so she wanted simply, didn't matter if it was male or female, she wanted to provide high quality habitat on her 40 acres, harvest enough deer for her to consume. She was a single lady and that was really rewarding.

40:55 And I like when people want to grow great big antlers too. I think everyone sees big antlers. I've never seen a cave painting of little spike buck. When we look at the petroglyph and all these things, I've worked in Nevada and I've actually found some in some canyons. I'm not sure they were recorded before. Maybe someone had seen them but the government didn't know about them type thing. They're usually bigger structures on if it's an antler animal they're drawing.

41:27 And I think that's a crowning glory and it symbolizes health and a lot of good things. But in reality as a hunter and I've really come full circle, for me it's about the meat. So we've worked with a mutual friend again Dr. Stefan Vanderbleet and sent some samples from Chris Barry's place in South Carolina and our place there in Missouri. And I was shocked and I think actually Dr. Vanderbleet was pretty pleasantly surprised how super high quality those proteins were, not just protein but the whole meat.

42:01 And others talked a lot about this, the phytonutrients, nutrients that only plants can make when they're interacting with the sun. But then ruminants like deer can consume those. And if you think about it, they're actually the perfect media to take it from a plant which we shouldn't consume like mature pokeweed, considered a weed, a lot of people. Deer browse on that well, if we eat it, we're going to have really upset tummy. It doesn't digest well enough. But a deer can take the nutrients out of that and put it in a form that we can really digest well.

42:33 So a lot of people know I'm a kidney transplant patient. I've had a transplant 32 years. I'm super blessed. And I was a really poor graduate student and so venison was a huge part of my diet. I'm a deerologist, it's readily available to me and to the day. So when I go to the male clinic every year for my checkups, usually the nutritionist asks, hey Grant, what are you eating? It's a different one. Usually every year it seems like well you never know if it's an anti-hunter when I'm a wild ecologist. I consume a lot of venison and they just get so excited.

43:04 And this goes back, I think there's a lot of parallels here. We want a diversity of plants on the landscape, close proximity. There's a lot of interaction going on there. And then if you have a really picky ungulate, deer have a really narrow mouth. They're very selective eaters. If you watch a deer versus a cow, cow walks a new pasture, they're happy, it's head down. They're just eating. A deer takes a bite here and a

43:32 Bite here, they're called scientifically a concentrate selector. They eat the best and leave the rest. And it makes sense then that their meat may be a little higher quality. And that's why I got with Dr. Van Bleet and did this testing.

43:46 And in fact, that proven true. It's some of the best meat he's tested, which is really saying something. And someday, Keith, we ought to share those results on here and have you actually go through that. You probably understand all that better than I do.

43:57 Yeah. Well, you shared that with me. And it was it was better than just about any of the grass-fed beef profiles that he had ever tested. And he's probably the leading tester of that in the world. So he has a huge database of things to compare it to and yeah the omega profiles and the fat concentrate you know the healthy fat concentrations it it was just almost off the charts. So yeah, great job in in doing that. And and you know, down the road, it would be really interesting to compare that to, you know, deer in the wild, but you know, not eating nearly as healthy of a diet from nearly as good of, you know, soil because it it's starting from that soil. You know, the soil is releasing the nutrients, the plants are taking it up, and then, you know, the deer are concentrating it. So, it's kind of the way the system was built to work, wasn't it?

44:50 It was. And I reflect on that a lot. And it does all start in the soil and the sun's energy. Like our lives come from the sun, a different sun. So you want to take care of your land. I think this is so important for wildlife biologists or recreational land owners or people that make a living cropping or running cattle. It all starts with the land, folks. And if you're abusing the land by putting unnecessary additives on there or not treating it right, you can't expect the best product off there. And I get great joy in seeing healthy fawns running around this time of year. A lot of turkey pokes. I flushed a bunch of turkey pokes the other day. You if you're in turkey country, quail country, you know how it is. You're doing I was marking some timber and you're doing a job and all a sudden they start flying up, you know, behind you and in front of you and all around you. They know what's going on, you know. And then you realize, oh man, that's a product of this land and that's a product of the habitat improvements we've made.

45:48 And or if you're serving your family a nice venison loin and everyone's smiling, the conversation's good. You've got some guests over and you can kind of sit back and say, I was the provider, you know, man, I I I worked on that land or me and my friends worked on this land and someone harvested this deer and then we processed the meat and, you know, we prepared it. That's a really good feeling. It's a feeling probably comparable to a farmer that has a really good crop harvest or a beef harvest or whatever and providing for the family in the local community. And again, I want to reflect on that. I think farmers and hunters go back in the old days, you know, we were gather hunters. Farmers and hunters are true providers. And I think there's a lot of should be a lot of pride in that. Instead of being downcast, there ought to be a lot of pride in that.

46:37 Yeah, for sure. For sure. Because we all we all need to eat. Well, as we kind of wrap up here, I want to kind of take it back to the beginning. We talked, you know, about kind of our story of how, you know, God brought us together and, you know, we just share a lot of common values, a lot of common beliefs. You know, here at Green Cover, our mission statement is to help people regenerate, steward, and share God's creation for future generations. And you know, your motto, your little tagline that you kind of end all of your video episodes with is is really quite similar. So, why don't you share that and then share why you always close your segments with that?

47:18 Yeah. So, we say enjoy creation is our I think our tagline and we talk about releasing creation's potential. And so for me, I I believe in my heart, I know that God created this and put man here. And we want to encourage people to have that contextual relationship that we're not just here kind of floating through the universe. There's a creator, there's a creation,

47:49 And he created us for company with him. That's our sole purpose is to interact with God. And that gets so distorted so many times. It's really simple like a lot of principles we were talking about. And so I want to use whatever skills God has given me to point people back to the creator and his will for their life. And certainly one of his wills is to take care of his creation. That's really one of our purposes here. And another purpose is to share our relationship with the creator with others so they can have all those benefits and blessings of that. So I want to end every episode we do. In fact, Daniel and I, both my co-host, Daniel and I end every episode with that message.

48:32 And to me, getting your fingers in the dirt, the best illustration of Christ's life, death, and resurrection has always been a seed for me, right? You've got a living plant. It's flourishing. It's harvested. You know, Christ was crucified, looks dead, it's buried for a couple days, it springs to life. It is to me the perfect illustration of Christ's gift to us. And just little kids at vacation Bible school, whatever. You know, you start on week one, day one, and you give them some seeds, and you're really hoping it grows by the last day of the week. You know, you've got everything watered right, doing right, and use that as illustration. Or if I can get someone in a garden, there's a really good chance that they're going to have a better understanding of creation if they're a non-believer by when we talk about what really is going on and how God provided everything we need in the soil. Healthy soil has everything it needs. We don't have to have any additives in really healthy soil. And that's true in our lives, too.

49:43 So to me, no doubt in my mind, God built me to be a deer biologist. I did not understand that when I was a young man, but I do now. And but as a young man, that's all I want to do. I was different, right? I kids my age want to be a fireman, which is very great, and policeman and in the army. I'm 64. Those are all tremendous gifts and professions to our society. I just wanted to work with deer. There was no term deer biologist back then. And so when I got in that groove and started doing what I was built to do, things certainly went a lot smoother and better in my life. And then to take that and use those principles of biology and the release process, regenerative ag, and use that to share about Christ. That's my path. That's what I'm built to do.

50:31 Well, and you do it very well. And thank you so much for taking time to share with us, folks. If you aren't familiar with the Growing Deer, all the content that's out there, again, you can get on YouTube, search for that, Facebook, you can follow Grant. There's just a treasure trove, hundreds and hundreds of videos about all facets of wildlife management, including a lot of food plot stuff. You can go back, watch all those online. If you are interested in any of these seed mixes that we kind of talked about, you can just go to the Green Cover website, greencover.com. Lots of information on there. We'd love to help you regenerate your creation for future generations as well. Thank you everybody for listening. Thank you Grant so much for sharing not only your time here but your passion with all of us. So thank you.

51:25 My brother and I started Green Cover in 2009 because we understand what it's like to be a farmer starting out on the journey to improve soil health. We saw the power of plant and biological diversity on our own farm here in Nebraska. But we found that it was difficult to get the right cover crop seed mix. We also learned that there was a big learning curve in successfully implementing cover crops. That's why we built Green Cover so that farmers like you can access the highest quality cover crop seed put into the right diverse mixes along with the technical advice and the educational resources to help you successfully implement cover crops on your own operation. So contact us today and we'll help you with the right cover crop mix for your farm or ranch so you can regenerate your portion of God's creation for future generations. Patience.