How Grazing Animals and Soil Biology Work Together: The AlderSpring Ranch Story

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

0:16 You know, Glenn and Carol Elzinga were losing cattle to the wolves, and they were losing money, and they were ready to walk away from everything they'd built. And then one day, Glenn looked up at a painting of these cowboys sleeping beside their herds on the open range, and something clicked in his mind, much like it's clicked for every great regenerative producer.

0:38 And what if modern agriculture, everything it told us about efficiency and technology, maybe that's working against us instead of for us? And what if the answer wasn't new technology or better system, but going back to the way that God designed the animals and the land to work together in the first place? And so Glenn and Carol, they stopped fighting creation and started working with it. And they threw out the old conventional playbook and they took their family literally into the mountains of Idaho and began living with their cattle 24 hours a day, wolves and all.

1:11 And today they haven't lost a single animal to predation in over a decade, and their organic matter levels have tripled. Beavers have returned. They're regenerating their land. And what started with seven cows, 147 acres has grown into a very profitable operation that can ship you the finest organic grass-fed beef that you've ever had straight to your door.

1:33 So folks, if you believe that the land can do better today, better tomorrow than it is today, and that the creator built wisdom into this land so much more so than we give him credit for, you're going to love this conversation. My name is Keith Burns and this is the Green Cover podcast and my guest today, I'm very excited about our guest today, Glenn Elzinga of Alder Spring Ranch of Chalice, Idaho. Glenn, welcome to the Green Cover podcast.

1:59 So great to be here, Keith. Well, I have to say, this is actually the first time you and I are meeting, but I've read a lot about you. I've listened to some of your podcasts. So, before we get into kind of the what and the how of everything you're doing there at Alder Spring, which is very interesting, I like to start with the why. Why is it what drove you as a forester, your wife, as a plant ecologist? What led you guys to walk away from those, you know, good careers and buy seven cows and bet everything on a 147 acres of Idaho wilderness?

2:35 I think that's a really good question, Keith. I think what it really has to do with what was flowing in our DNA at the time. Carol, you know, had farming roots. She's from Indiana. She comes from a long legacy of crop and cattle. I come from a long legacy, probably a thousand years of grass-based dairy in the northern province of the Netherlands. That's where my folks immigrated from, you know. So, Carol and I were both really agriculturally rooted. We just didn't think there was any way to make money in it. And besides that, we didn't really like the way conventional agriculture was going.

3:17 We were both exposed to a lot of spray growing up. You know, I remember spraying Roundup by hand out of a tank sprayer. I'm wearing a pair of cut off shorts, Keith. You know, thank God I don't have non-Hodgkin's right now today, you know, or just putting on ear tags, organophosphate ear tags. I go to bed with headaches. I'm spreading teic on tropical foliage plants and stuff like that and feel completely sick, you know, and to the point of vomiting, you know. So all these things, you know, they just kind of pile up in your mind and they're bad experiences and we say they're bad experiences in agriculture. I don't want anything to do with that.

4:01 So she became a PhD plant ecologist and I became a forester. Both of those things were kind of pretty non-chemical based. You know, we're both ecologically minded in both of our professions. We're having a lot of fun. But here's the deal, you know, we wanted a place to raise our kids. And so we thought, you know, doing those kind of jobs and kids, they're not necessarily mutually exclusive, but they are in part exclusive. We wanted to be with our kids. And, you know, we just both felt like that's what God wanted us to do.

4:37 So, we ended up buying that those seven cows. We had a little bit of money from those jobs, about $30,000. And so we bought seven cows and we bought this little place. It was 60 acres irrigated in Idaho. Total of 147 acres. And you know for us we didn't know what it was. It could have been a homestead. Could be a hobby farm. It could also be maybe a stepping stone. The first one to build something much bigger that was a solely agricultural enterprise.

5:16 And so that was kind of the thing that got us going, you know, and obviously we're sick of the way we were brought up in agriculture and we wanted to find a different way. And we both came into it pretty, well, it was a little arrogant because we thought, well, anybody could make money in this thing, you know? Boy, these guys get a calf check, you know, $50,000 at the end of the year, $100,000, this is back, you know, in the 90s, and we thought that was a lot of money. But we had no idea that even, you know, just a hard scrabble ranch could have so many costs. So just so many costs. I just feel like we're bleeding money all the time.

5:57 And so it became very difficult to make money. So thank God we kept our other jobs. You know, that would be a piece of advice that I'd give to somebody starting out is keep your other job. Do not quit, you know, and subsidize your existence in agriculture while you get your feet under you.

6:14 Thank God, you know, he surrounded us with people who did know a lot, you know, old people that gave us a lot of advice, salt of the earth wisdom stuff. And meanwhile, we were successful, Keith, because we didn't have a paradigm. We had no idea what we were doing.

6:35 You're first generation. Yeah. So everything there was no preconceived notions. So we could just try anything. And the nice thing is I had these two old people. We gave a lifetime estate. They retired there, sold us the place and stayed on. And we love them. They became like adoptive, another set of parents to us. And I'd be walking past their big window that led into their kitchen. And they'd see me going by at 8:00 in the morning, leading a horse or whatever, going to work out on the ranch. And Ron or Francis would run out with a cup of coffee and say, 'Glenn, you need to come in here for a second.'

7:16 And I'd go in. I knew I was basically going to a woodshed with a cup of coffee in hand, you know. So I'd sit down at that table and Francis, she was very outspoken. She would just put it out there even before I sat down with that cup of coffee. She'd say, 'Glenn, you're going to kill all the cows.' I mean that would be that simple, Keith. She'd be like, 'Glenn, you're going to kill the cows.' And then they'd sit me down, tell me why. And so they saved me from so many pitfalls.

7:47 And so I credit that and that kind of ability to receive that information to how God enabled us to not only survive but also thrive over the long term.

8:04 And what a great story and I think that as you and I are at this stage in our life, you know, now it's our turn to start pouring back into others. And maybe we'll get into that a little later in the conversation because I know you're working with your children and your employees and we've got seven kids as well and lots of employees and so we're pouring back into those next generations which is such a blessing because you're right we have had so much help getting to where we're at.

8:37 No. And that is exactly the stage I and Carol are both mid-60s and that is what's laid on our heart now is because you know here's the crazy thing, Keith. We're still learning. I mean I just have these earthshattering learning moments like several times a week still. It's like, wait, I never knew about that. Or I'll read something and you know, so you turn that over in your head and it's like, wow, we got to try that with these cows or we got to try that with this grassland. So you know, we're learning all these things. So even that is still super valuable to pour those new things along with all the old stuff into this next gen, give them hope. And it's not only my kids, you know, like we have this internship program. Last year we had 19 of them.

9:25 And I think it would be safe to say about half of the people that come through our internship program pursue like at least in the short term they pursue a life in agriculture. And they're asking the right questions, Keith. So with that I'm like that's pretty exciting stuff because you and I got the typical stature of people in agriculture in America today. I think the number is around 57 and a half percent of American farmers or I think it's more like 95 percent of American farmers are 57 and a half years old at this point of time and what that means is we're looking at a huge transition of equity of ownership in the past in the next 10 to 15 years. And it's up to us to choose who those people are.

10:22 No, that's right. And you know, thank you for doing that. And I love what you said about these interns are coming in, they're asking the right questions because if you're asking the right questions, you don't necessarily have to have all the answers. And it's not your job to give them those answers, but if they're asking the right questions, you know, God will lead them to those answers. And it might be years down the road before they get those answers. But it's so much more important to ask the right questions than to get answers to the wrong questions.

10:51 You know, and in fact, my favorite piece of advice, and it's not mine, none of this is mine, Keith. I just learned this stuff along the way. Talking to people and looking at nature and stuff like that. You know, I heard this at a conference a while back. This guy actually got a little raised up there in the front and he said, 'You have got to stop being obsessed with hitting the bullseye.' He said, 'Just hit the dang target.' Okay? Just try to hit the target. And the target could be pretty big. Quit trying to hit the bullseye in this. And if you're just trying to hit that target, you know, your mind's going to be wide open all the time trying to learn new ways to hit that target and refine how you hit that target and how fast you're able to do that, how repeatedly you're able to do that.

11:42 So I think that's the biggest piece of advice that I really gather. And then we spread it to my young people, too. It's, you know, like before I left on this little trip, my wife and I are on a break from the ranch here. I said, 'Hey, just remember about the bullseye and the target. You don't want to hit that bullseye because you're wasting a lot of time to do that. Just hit the target. Just hit the target and those cattle will thrive. That land will.

12:07 Thrive without you hitting the bullseye all the time. Yeah. So, in other words, you're saying don't let perfection. That's exactly right. Yeah. I like that.

12:17 Well, so speaking of progress, you know, Glenn there at Alder Spring, you know, you guys have dramatically changed your soils. You've increased your organic matter from what, probably one and a half, 2% to, I think, a lot of your lands up to five, six, 7% now by applying these grazing management techniques. And, you know, at Green Cover, we try to help farmers and ranchers all over the country do similar things by integrating, you know, livestock back on the land, getting cover crops involved. So talk just a little bit about your take, your opinion on that, the combined power of grazing animals and living roots working together to restore the soils that God has given us to restore that soil function.

13:07 You know what's funny about this whole thing and you can probably relate to this. We stumble into these things, Keith. You know, I would like to say, oh, we intentionally change our soil profile and we intentionally change that soil organic matter. We just stumbled into that. And here's why. You know, we raised grass-fed beef. We've been trying to learn how to raise good grass-fed beef all the way since the mid 90s.

13:34 The first beef we actually started marketing, you know, I killed a lot of wild game. Because Carol and I when we started this ranch in the early 90s, well, all our money was going back onto the ground. So we just had no money. We couldn't even eat our own cattle. You know, we couldn't afford not to put them on a truck and send them out. And so, you know, I was killing a lot of elk and deer and that's that was our staple. And the thing about elk and deer, Keith, that I didn't like is they were generally lean. Sometimes you'd get some nice back fat, you know, on a backstrap or something like that. But sometimes because it was wild game and that fat would have an off flavor and I'd be like, 'Yeah, I do like wild game.' Okay. But boy, I would just die for a nicely marbled beef steak, you know.

14:26 So, so here we go. We go down, you know, and at that time we didn't really understand grass-fed. So the first cattle we raise, you know, we put them in our corral. It wasn't like a feed yard or feed lot to say, you know, I mean, there'd be like 40 head. We put them on grain and boy, they would get fat. And we learned all the nuance of grain feeding there. Not at a huge scale, but at a small scale. And boy, it was good. But you know then we started stumbling across stuff that you know in the literature that talked about how that omega 6 fatty acid composition wasn't necessarily good for you. It wasn't continual food. It was enjoyable food but it wasn't something that you wanted as a mainstay in your diet.

15:13 And so we latched on to that. And this was super early in the days of grass-fed. I remember I called Joel Salatin on the phone. I think it was 94 or something like that. I just called him and he picked up the phone and I think in those days he could pick up the phone because he was you know largely unknown and I was subscribing to Allen Nation's Stockman Grass Farmer at the time. My brother turned me on to it. He was a dairyman in Wisconsin and had met Allen Nation and had him come out to his place. He said you got to read this. He said because this is like probably the way things are going to go. So anyway, I found Joel's number and I said, 'Joel, I'm just wondering if it's possible to do this. I mean, are you finding success?' You know, I read he had a book called Salad Bar Beef and it was kind of the seminal publication of how to raise grass-fed beef in America today. And I said, 'Is this still working for you?' And he said, 'It's working.' So I asked him a bunch of pointed questions. So we went down that road, even, you know, trying to market this directly.

16:14 You know just a few cattle at a time and we started selling at farmers markets in Boise and the first question people would always ask is isn't all beef grass-fed? You know so I had to go through that whole thing with them. You know but anyway here's the deal going back to the grass. This is the rabbit trail I'm on right now. You know in my mind is why did we get there? Why did we get to that organic matter? Why did we get to the grazing quality we have now? And it's pretty much because I didn't like our steak, Keith. It reminded me too much of elk. It wasn't great tasting. And I'm like, yeah, this should be good for you, but yeah, I'd still rather have that marbled beef steak that we raised before. And so it wasn't marbled. It was very lean. And you know, we were selling it and we were selling it well. People said they felt better on it, but I was like, I need to try to figure out how to get this stuff to marble. So, I started taking apart everything. My wife and I did. And it was kind of a struggle because, you know, it's really hard to sell something you don't like.

17:34 You know, I'm sure we like cover crops. So, that's why we. Yeah. You know, I mean, the cover crops, you see results. You know, we've been through a whole bunch of cover cropping scenarios, and you see those results fairly instantaneously. And, you know, you could totally screw them up, but there's results instantaneously. But this beef steak thing is a long-term problem, you know, and you're like, 'Wow, I don't know how to get them here.' Because phenotypically and even genetically I knew we had beef that could marble because well we threw them in a in our corral before Keith and it was the same genetics we were working with. Now you know we were a lot more than seven cows. We're you know running.

18:14 About 150 head at that time. And I was like, these cattle have the ability to marble because I've seen them do it, but they're not doing it on my grass. So what is the deal? What is it?

18:29 So then we really kind of launched into reading Jim Garris's book 'Management Intensive Grazing.' I still have it. I still refer to it. And subsequent to that, Jim Garris has become a friend of mine. He lives fairly close to us. I see him at basketball games all the time. His grandkids and my kids are duking it out.

18:51 I love that. And I remember Jim telling me once, 'The best steak I've ever had and the worst steak I've ever had were both grass-fed.' When first of all, I had to ask him, 'How do you get the job of being a steak contest judge?' I mean, that sounds amazing.

19:11 But it goes to the point exactly what you're talking about, because it's all about management. It's really all about getting that brix in that grass. How do you get that brix in that grass? And I didn't even know what brix was in that day and age. So anyway, we started practicing this management intensive grazing thing. And you talk about hitting a bullseye versus a target. Wow. Either we had a really big target or we were losing a lot of arrows because we didn't know what we were doing. We had no idea until you start putting it together and say, 'Wow, I didn't give them near enough,' or 'Way down, you know, we're down to 2 inches here,' or 'I give them way too much, they hardly touch this stuff.' And you start realizing it becomes a lot of art.

20:02 You try to calculate it, but that's even a tough road. I try to teach my crew every year how to calculate grass and calculate dry matter on the fly. And I realize there's a lot about having a measured eye, just coming up with that dry matter per acre per inch, estimating that on cover density and stuff. There's a lot of art there. There's a lot of practice that goes into it. And I spent time with Jim Garris on pastures, and I swear that guy could get it down to like ten pounds. He'd say 1,250 pounds per acre per inch on this stuff, or per acre of grazable forage, and he'd kind of nail it. So anyway, that took a lot to learn, but after we started practicing it, those cattle actually started to gain weight much better and they started to really lay it on.

20:53 And now I was seeing cattle change in their appearance and start laying body fat down in places that I had seen them do it on corn. And it was just because I was growing quality pasture instead of just pasture.

21:12 Yeah. And as a result, your soil improved then too. And so I'm assuming that you didn't do all this to get your soil to 7% organic matter, but that was the result of properly grazing the animals. Because I like to say, you know, we love God's creation. We live in a fallen world and creation is broken, but it wants to be restored. And when you follow those principles that God has given us, it will be restored. And it does want to go back to those states.

21:50 And that's what I was seeing, and it was all a chicken and egg thing. I don't know if it was the egg or the chicken first. And you know, Keith, I didn't even know about organic matter. I did a little project with SCS where we fenced some riparian areas, and now it's NRCS.

22:12 I say you're dating yourself there if you say SCS there. Just chill out, will you, man? Let's try not to poke a finger in the interviewer's eye. All right. So, anyway, I mean, I do have hair color that's kind of similar to yours, Keith, but you might be farther along in that whitish color than I am.

22:35 I believe so. Yes. So, anyway, you know, NRCS did some tests, SCS, whatever it was, and we were in the low twos. And that was when we first got to the place. So what we actually had there was a baseline. And right about the mid-2010s, people started talking about soil carbon, and it was just beginning. The conversation was just beginning. And this is important, I would say, to new agricultural viewers or listeners on your podcast as well. It's like just absorb all the information you can from all these sources, and then you can kind of meter it out and see whether or not it's something that you can apply to your operation. So that's what we started doing. We started reading about soil carbon and the importance of soil organic matter. And I set out to try to find out where I was in that regard because I really had no idea. And at that time, people weren't even talking about the importance of it and the importance for productivity and even profitability.

23:45 And there was this whole greenhouse gas stuff that started to be talked about. People started talking about measuring carbon. So I had people emailing me saying, 'We're selling beef now that has some marbling, thank God, because you helped us figure it out. So our cattle are getting fat. We're sending them online. We're getting new customers. People are very, very happy with the flavor profile. And they're happy with tenderness, and they're happy with the marbling. And they're writing me back and saying, 'So, tell me about your carbon position.' I'm like, 'I don't even know what you're talking about.''

24:26 You know, I mean, what's crazy, Keith,

24:28 This is just 10 years ago. You know, it was largely something that people weren't talking about. People were talking about greenhouse gas in terms of fossil fuel emissions, you know, in automobiles and power plants and those sorts of things. But people were really making a connection to the potential for carbon sequestration in soil. So I set out to figure that out. After my forestry background I was a really good spreadsheet guy and so was my wife. So we started putting together these numbers. We started doing soil tests all over the place and we found out holy cow we're actually kind of rocking here. We had no idea, you know. So that first year I think we did about 55 soil tests down to 15 centimeters and we're at 6.45 on the entire ranch, on the entire irrigated portion of the ranch. We didn't even look at the range yet, but that was about 450 acres of all finished grass down in the bottom. So we're sitting around 6.45 and that was a lot of samples we had to do to get there. So I felt like, you know, we really did have a pretty good measure of where we're at.

25:50 From that, you know, I just learned how to do bulk density and learn how to do infiltration. Bulk density is the biggest thing to really come up with soil carbon. And so I was able to just backdate all that stuff to those first NRCS tests and we found out we were actually capturing a significant amount of carbon. And on that spreadsheet I found oh wow we're actually you know climate positive carbon negative here because we were, I think the ratio came, we we actually applied it to the pounds of beef and so we took all our fossil fuels we put everything in there even our like styrofoam and use of manufacturing to make dry ice all the stuff because we ship our beef all over the place we put all those things that are carbon calculation. Everything we could think of that was releasing carbon, we put it all in this giant spreadsheet and thankfully there was a lot of scientific research on all these elements of carbon release. So it took me several years to get it done, but we found out that for every I think it was every one pound of beef, we were putting four pounds of CO2 equivalent in the ground over the past 10 years.

27:10 And so that that was pretty exciting stuff because now I could say to people, hey, this is our position. If you want to see the metrics, you can. And I had I remember I sent the whole thing to Jason Roundtree, Montana State, several other people to just say, 'Am I thinking right here?' Because, you know, I'm just basically a dirt farmer who's trying to put this thing together, Keith. And so they said, 'No, you're on track. This is right. You're using the right numbers and the right calculations.' And he was like, 'I like what you're doing and you're on track and this is going to be close.' So you know, we started releasing that information to our customers.

27:56 And you know, I didn't really care about the carbon thing personally because I thought, you know, like you said, Keith, you know, I think this is the way we were doing it was in the will of what the creator had intended. So I felt like, you know, we're on track here just from a practices standpoint, but to find out that even from a scientific assay standpoint, those things that we believed were now coming out in the soil and we're actually seeing it. You know, subsequent soil tests were even higher. I think the last one showed that we're now 8.5. That was two years ago. We had high points. We had one area down by the river bottom in an ancient perched floodplane field, you know, that we actually had to reestablish, you know, into a grassland, but we took about 10 plots down there and that field was 17.75 and it just blew us away. And that was the average.

29:04 You know, I'm curious what the individuals were there. There had to be some in their 20s down here. And we graze that every year, you know, we graze it all the time. And that that was really really exciting to see those changes, you know, coming from that 2% and if you know, I think the testament with that to that soil biology was above ground diversity because back then when we first got the place, it was either alfalfa or quackgrass. There are two key species on my grazing ground when we bought the place in '05 and now there's 80 species out there and you know for the listener don't think you know I got a square meter plot and there's 80 species on there you know it varies by soil type so you know on a given square plot I'll count 15 to 20 meter square you know but over the whole place of that irrigated ground we have more like 80 species and but it's that biodiversity above ground that really adds to the biodiversity below ground and I've read study after study that showed that because all these you know mycorrhizal fungi for instance you know they all have individual pairings to plants and maybe there's several mycorrhizal fungi that connect with one type of grass you know so so you just leverage your biodiversity below ground when you leverage your biodiversity above ground and that's really that's really the story of what's happening here.

30:36 And you talk about the creator and his intent, and I think that's exactly what's happening here. We're just we're just getting out of the way and allowing that biodiversity to establish by grazing our cattle in a way that he made those grasses he designed those grasses to be grazed.

30:55 Yeah. That that's incredible. That's fantastic. And

31:00 And your marketing logo should be 'eat a steak, save the world.' You know, one pound of beef, four pounds of carbon in the soil. So I think you can really run with that. And I love how you are focusing on the diversity. You know, 80 plants in there, but I know that up in the mountains and stuff there, hundreds of different species. And really what we're trying to do at Green Cover here with our cover crop mixes is to emulate that. Now, we're not going to get to 80 or 100, but with annuals, we can get to 10 or 12 and have six different plant families in there. And that's so important. We can introduce a tremendous amount of diversity in 60, 80, 90 day period that really just jumpstarts the rest of.

31:55 Yeah. And I think your name 'Green Cover' actually nails the whole thing. It nails it because I can drive through southern Idaho right now and it's kind of a potato farming, barley, sugar beet culture all across the sweep of the Snake River plain and you've probably been there, and if I drive through there this time of year, I can't even tell you, it's probably 90% of the ground is uncovered right now, it's just dirt. You know, and potatoes can are legendary for extracting organic matter on steroids. You know, there's a few twisted vines laying underground. Other than that, there's nothing left. It's all been extracted. So when you say your green cover seed, to me that translates to soil covering. You're covering with green. You're covering that soil with green living plants. And you have a living root in the ground.

32:59 And you know, I know a lot of people see cover crops as a seasonal thing because you've got these warm season grasses and these warm season subtropical annuals that are coming in here. But the fact of the matter is if people are doing it right, they're also going to have their soil covered over the winter, you know, and it might be by a lot of that litter, but it might be a green and living root. And it should be, and I'm sure that's what you guys are trying to convey, through the winter to maintain the quality of that soil biology all the way through the year. And that's the leverage. That's the beginning of building soil like crazy.

33:43 And I think we're actually on the exact same page here as far as keeping that soil covered the way the maker had intended this stuff to be.

33:55 Absolutely. We appreciate it when you drive past a bare field and say that field needs green cover, right?

34:05 Yeah. No, that is exactly right. And those principles of soil health, whether you're in the mountains of Idaho or the plains of the high plains here where we're at or the corn belt, you know, they all apply. You know, keeping the ground covered and keeping that living root going and maximizing your diversity and minimizing those disturbances and of course integrating livestock. When you apply those things, the goal is not to have 8% organic matter, but that's the outcome of when you're doing these things. And again, you're working with those principles of creation that God is. So you know, and I get really excited about the potential here. You know, I pass those open fields in southern Idaho and I think, you know, I look at every one of them and say, 'What if? Just what if?' I mean, you can even keep your rowcrop agriculture there. You know, it's a matter of integration, you know, integrating green cover through the winter, integrating those living roots, integrating some livestock. And I feel like it's not a bridge too far for people to get there.

35:21 It is not. It's all about, I think, what's going on up here, you know, and how we think and how we see that could really leverage that. Carol and I bought another ranch a few years ago. And the whole thing was kind of a tortured potato farm. And I remember grabbing some of that volcanic ash soil and we made a little video about it and it was literally dust in the wind. Keith, there was nothing there alive. And we said we're going to hopefully be able to change this, and we did cover crops that do it. And now we just pulled our cattle off there, I think it was four weeks ago, brought all our mother cows home from there. And now I walked over those fields. There's about 250 acres of irrigated grazing over there. And we probably left a ton of dry matter on the ground, a ton of residue that our cattle kind of knocked down. And I was listening to a Jim Garish talk a while back, you know, and he said on irrigated or temperate rainfall ground, he said, 'If you can leave a ton to just feed your soil,' he said, you know, I think you're going to be meeting the objective of facilitating a continual trend of soil health increase. And so I walked through there and you know, at first in me was this, oh my gosh, we wasted all this forage. You know, and it's still there, Keith. It's still there. We still have to deal with that. We still got to deal with that paradigm of wasting forage.

37:09 Yeah. I like to say inside of every person, there's a farmer and there's a rancher, just graze it all. And the farmer goes, 'No, we need to leave some cover the ground.' And who's going to win that conversation inside?

37:21 Yeah. You know, it's a pretty difficult conversation to have sometime, but you got to think practically and realize that we're growing way more than pounds of beef or pounds of cattle.

37:32 You know, and we just got to put those soil microbes in a position in our mind that are actually pretty close to equivalent to those livestock that are walking underground. They're just another class of livestock. Now to me, that's where I'm trying to get my mind to saying we got these livestock over there and they're the worker livestock and we got these these over here. They're the output livestock. They're the ones we're actually getting money from. But I'm thinking, Keith, that maybe the real money is over in this type of livestock.

38:04 Well, if you've got, you know, seven, eight, 10, 20% soil organic matter. Yeah. I mean, the amount of dollars of nutrients that you've accumulated by doing that, it's incredible.

38:17 And now you have the system rolling, you know, that snowball is rolling down. And it truly is the good get better and the poor soils get worse. And so, yeah, you've really got things going the right direction. And I love that. And I love how you think about it. You know, that principle of integrating livestock. The rowcrop farmer goes, 'Well, I don't have livestock. I don't have to worry about that principle.' But you said it yourself. You know, all of those, you know, the bacteria, the fungi, the beneficial nematodes, that's all part of your herd, but we got to feed them. Got to feed them. And that's why you have to have that living root out there.

38:59 You know, and there's some resilience there, Keith. But I'll tell you what, I still really screw up. I got a couple kids married in one season a few years ago. One had a July wedding and the other one had an October wedding and those weddings happened to be on the ranch. Wow, that was a tough year because I didn't move my cattle, you know. I didn't really think of it, you know. I'm kind of, wow, we got to get this wedding set up. We got 350 people coming here. We got to take care of these things on the house. We got to get the yard squared away. Got to deal with the food setup, a wedding tent in case it rains, all these things. So it was a lot. My wife said, 'You're going to be here. You're going to be here and you're going to be getting this wedding setting up and you're going to be working with me full-time trying to get this thing squared away.' So, guess what? You know, I left cattle on paddocks way longer than I was supposed. They ate my residue and just pretty much grazed it down to, you know, what they would graze it with their tongue and it was not pretty. I was like, 'Wow, this is a struggle.' And the struggle's real. So you get these setbacks, you know, and thankfully, you have that soil biology which offers you resilience. And it didn't kick our butt too bad, but I definitely saw some falldown in grass productivity just because we ate the solar panel, Keith. We ate the solar panel. So, you know, I would pass that on to your viewers as well or your listeners and say, hey, you're going to make huge mistakes.

40:36 You know, but the thing that you've created with soil health and that biology and that biodiversity underground is you've created resilience with them because the thing we need to think about is that nature is also episodic. You know, you'll have these disasters. You know, it might be a wildfire or might be, you know, prehistorically a stampede of, you know, a million head of bison. I have a record that I've read from this trapper who witnessed at least 250 to 300,000 head of bison hit the valley right next to us.

41:14 And he would that have been like, well, he it was crazy, Keith, because he actually got treed. He had his pack stock. He had about two or three horses and mules. This is 1824. And he got put up in a Douglas fir tree in the narrows of this canyon because this stampede came and he felt the hot wind. He knew what it was. And sure enough, here they come. Here comes this tide. He tied off all his stock to this tree and he climbed the tree to get out of the way to not get trampled. And so these bison come by and he didn't give a number. Of course, there's no way he could have done it, but it took I can't remember the exact time he mentioned. It was like over a day he was stuck in that tree while these bison kind of trotted by and ran by. And so I just did some mental calculation, you know, I just said, 'Okay, I know I went to that spot in that canyon. It was about 150 ft wide between these rocks.' So, you know, all the bison had to fit through that little funnel, you know, and then calculate bison speed and the average size of them. So, that near as I could come up with it is 250 to 350,000 head of bison came back. So, anyway, he survives that, gets down off the tree, grabs his stock, and he realizes they've been tied up for a whole day. They're really hungry, but there's nothing to eat because these bison went through, right? So the valley that the bison went into is called the Little Lost Valley and we drive through it often and it's this big broad high desert valley. Nobody lives in the upper part of the valley where these bison crossers today even today nobody lives there. It's just a wide open desert semi-desert valley surrounded by snowcap mountains like 11,000 ft in height. Some of the highest mountains in Idaho ring this valley.

43:12 So he goes, he knows the country and he trots down into that valley thinking he's going to find some graze for these animals, you know, for these mules and horses. And Keith, there was nothing left. There was nothing left. This valley is 20 miles up and down and about 10 miles wide. There is nothing left. And you talk about episodic influence of nature. Those kind of things happen and we got to realize, oh, you know, it wasn't a steady state, you know, time by my watch.

50:07 It's purple, right? And so we go out there and we whack this stuff down and I kind of gave up on it. And the tipping point for me to think differently about thistle happened in December or late late Thanksgiving or yeah it's right around Thanksgiving and I go out there and a lot of times I'll pack a refractometer with me and I go down there and it is, it's been single digits for several weeks now at night it's cold and I go down there into this bottom where the thistle does. And two things I noticed right away, Keith. One, I couldn't find any thistle. None. None grew back. You know, it might grow back next year, but none grew back as of November. Okay. Second thing is the windrows.

51:03 Keith, I took a swather after the windrows were this deep. And Carol and I were like, a thistle. And Carol and I are like, what's going to happen to windrows? Anyway, they're gone. I mean, no evidence. There's no discoloration that you see normally by wind rowing. You know, we used to, you know, windrow graze cattle, you know, and try to do that and it would always leave patterning on the ground because, you know, photosynthetic deprivation of grasses underneath the windrow. Obviously, they're going to go chlorotic on you because they're dismissing sunlight. Nothing. No patterning at all. Just solid solid stands of orchard grass, Kentucky bluegrass and quack. And get this. This stuff is in stage three. It had three nodes. This stuff is all in stage three. So I whip out a refractometer. This is now in early December. We've had frost after we started with frost in, you know, the end of September. It's been freezing every night for months. Okay, this is all green. So, I take a refractometer out and this is the first time I took a refractometer out to that stand. And I do like 10 samples when I do this. First time I went out there, I had an 11.

52:27 And that was after three days of slate gray clouds. Keith, three days of slate gray clouds. I still had an 11 in there. I went out there after two days of sun on the end of a sunny day at like 3:00 in the afternoon. Took another one. I got an 18. This is in December. Okay, this isn't. So anyway, you know, long story short is that's resilience. That's resilience of soil biology.

52:59 And it took my wife, she really has geeked out lately on soil biology and the role of bacteria and fungi and breaking down fine roots after clipping or after grazing events. And she comes to find out that thistle is really really good at nitrogen accumulation in roots and really really good at phosphate accumulation in roots. And all a sudden I realized, oh wait, this is like creator stuff. This weed is now a tool. Okay. And so these two elements super available in these dead roots and with adequate bacteria and with adequate fungal networks that those things could be transferred into forms that are now, you know, highly absorbable to the plants and there's, you know, mycorrhizae relationship in all these grasses that I just listed all of them have huge mycorrhizal relationships, you know, and some of this stuff is probably arbuscular. So, it's just getting mainlined into these roots, you know, it's not only in rhizosphere, it's actually going into the roots.

54:22 It's a pipeline transfer once these conversions occur. And she's like, if we got the biodiversity, we got the different kinds of bacterial stages that can convert this into usable nitrogen, into usable phosphorus. Therefore, these plants just go crazy. And guess what? We need to create energy and photosynthesis and create glucose to then feed that goes down into root exudates that feed these exact same bacterial and fungal pathways with sugar. Guess what we need? We need those two elements. They're the core for energy transfer. Think of phosphorus for instance. You know, the phosphorus, we forget it. It's so important. You know if you know anything about plant physiology you know that this ADP to ATP staging in the light reaction of photosynthesis is key importance and then we go into the dark reactions. ATP gets converted to ADP. What is the P? It's phosphorus right? It is phosphorus that gets knocked off that creates the sugar that then feeds the whole cycle. These plants grow like crazy. We're facilitating the solar panel like crazy. So what I realized all this was designed and all we had to do to facilitate it was cut down a stupid thistle and it took only two three days to do it. So rather than stressing about the thistle I realized wait we just did the equivalent of, you know, double dosing nitrogen units on this ground by just manipulating the cover of these thistles. I'm not, don't get me wrong when I use the word cover, Keith. I don't want you to put that in cover crop mixes.

56:12 I would almost advocate it because if it comes up next year, I'm not going to be crying because we grazed that grass in January and it was still green and it was still reading at 12. And you know what that means out of 12 brix in January? It means I don't have to feed a blade of hay. We didn't stop grazing this year. Our finished cattle until the first week of February because I was still getting good brix. There's three tests that I take to know whether or not I have to feed hay to my cattle. First one is I do have brix and see do I still have sugar out there? Is sugar present? Because you got to have that sugar. You got to have convertible.

56:52 Energy to create fat in these cattle. Otherwise, you're not going to have intramuscular fat. Intramuscular fat is that fine fine marble fat that we like to see, you know, in the lean part of a ribeye. You like to see that spiral all through there. That's intramuscular fat. Intramuscular fat super super dependent on sugar on in energy in consumption. That's why when we feed corn, we get them to marble, right? And that's this thing we found out way back when we're trying to, you know, create a tender steak was we're getting that intramuscular fat because we're finally getting enough energy. Okay. So that grass, it's got to brick. I got to either taste it or it has to show up on refractometer and and that's the sugar. So second thing is the manure pads have to be spreaders.

57:41 So if that manure is coming out as a layer cake, you know, you know what I mean? It's got sides on it that are corrugated. It's kind of vertically stacked and arranged. There's no spreading at all. You know, this is even in the winter time. If I see that manure not spreading anymore, it's time to switch forage opportunity.

58:01 And then the other is is what we call the death triangle. And it's that triangle between the back of the ribs, the hooks of the cow, and so it's the back of the ribs, the backbone, and the hooks of the cow. So that triangle we call the death triangle. When that's emptying out continually, you're losing body condition. And the first thing you lose before body condition, even before cover fat, is intramuscular fat. The intramuscular fat goes next, which is the covers. Intra gets burned off first. It's the first energy reserve that cattle have. It's fat droplets right next to the mitochondria mitochondria and all these cells. It evaporates. It's gone. And it's the hardest thing to get back. So, if we have that sugar and we have that fill and we have manure showing that we're not eating more fiber than digestible nutrients, we're winning. So, they we passed all those tests until I think February 7. They started to fail the manure test. They were still getting fill. I was still bricing a little bit there and that manure test was starting to fail. So guess what? We bring in, you know, our green green hay that we harvest, you know, in the summer and now we're supplementing them and now we're on a full feed actually. So that's the metric for me. But I've never been able to do that before. And it was only because the resilience of soil biology offered it to me.

59:32 Yeah. And and I think I think you kind of answered your own question about God, why did you create these thistles? Because they're they're part of that system to build that resilience. And and and no, we're not going to put Canadian thistle seed in our mixes. But, you know, that thistle is in that asteracia family, that that that daisy family. And we can emulate that with sunflowers and safflower in in an annual mix. We can put chicory, you know, we can introduce chicory, which is again in that same family. Dandelions, you know, dandelions have a tremendous root system. They're all serving similar functions.

1:00:13 And so, again, that's, you know, what we try to do. What can we learn from nature and how can we emulate that, you know, in this short window of where we might be able to get an annual cover crop mixed in or, you know, and introduce pastures? How can we introduce some of these forbs back in because far too many of them are almost monoculture grass and and not nearly enough forbs and so how can we you know help bring that back in. So

1:00:40 Amen to that. Yeah. Forbs are such a huge component and we've gotten a little myopic on you know especially you know we use these words that say we are grass finished and I'm like no you better not be you better be grass and forbs finished you know because there there's so much there there's so many things they offer that just don't exist you talk to like a guy like Dr. Fred Provenza or Stefan Van Vleet. And you talk about phytochemical richness, it goes way beyond grasses. You know, it's the forbs. It's the forbs who are really telling that phytochemical story in a big way and delivering in spades. So, we we have to be thinking about it. But Keith, I do want to say that if you if I put in an order with Green Cover, I don't want you to think you can put Canada thistle in mine. Okay? You might not.

1:01:34 You guys yourself. You know, we're farmers are always welcome to add their own seed to our blends.

1:01:46 Yeah. You know, it's interesting because we've started we've started doing tissue testing of our cover crops when they when they kind of get to, you know, what we think is that late vegetative, early reproductive stage, you know, kind kind of when they're at their peak of value as a cover crop. And we've we and we're going to continue to do this, but we're we're just we're simply pulling a tissue test, send it into the lab, and getting a a full feed slash nutrient analysis of it.

1:02:17 Just just trying to, you know, see, okay, if if I want to cycle this in my ground, what cover crops do we need? But what's really interesting and just and and we just have a couple years of data, so we're going to continue to do this. The grasses are almost never the highest ones and the percentage of these nutrients and especially the minerals. It's always the broad leaves and it's not even the legumes mostly. It's you know the brassicas, it's the flax, it's the sunflowers, it's the sugar beets, it's the safflower and those are the four those are the four that are really doing that heavy lifting. Now the grasses produce the tonnage and so overall they may contribute more of these minerals because they have ten times the biomass.

1:03:03 But from an individual plant perspective, those forms, those broadleaf plants are so important, and that's where all that plant diversity comes from too, because all legumes are one plant family, all the grasses are one plant family. When I can do sunflower and buckwheat and flax, and now I'm adding up multiple plant families, that's where the real magic comes.

1:03:30 Yeah, and I see that on the range too, Keith. A lot of times I'll get off my horse and it's just fascinating seeing what these cattle eat. And I will say this, you know, and I think this relates even to the cover crop thing. I think a lot of our sugars, you know, that are important for fat development in these animals, are coming from the grasses, but I would say a lot of their nutrition, especially their maintenance, medicinal nutrition. You know, I was with Dr. Fred Prevenz up there on our range, and I'm looking at him and he's looking at these cattle grazing. We're just watching them graze and we're not saying anything, and I said, 'What? What are you looking at there, Fred?' He said, 'I'm watching that steer browse that bush, and it's a bush that I would have never thought would be in their grazing choice, you know. I mean, I got about 2,200 species up there. Probably of those 500 to 1,000 are ones we would consider grazable.'

1:04:48 And it was very atypical, you know, and I'm watching him eat this and he's kind of going after it with abandon. I said, 'What is the deal there, Fred?' And Fred says, 'Well, there's tannins in there that he's probably seeking.' And then he transfers to this steer, transfers to another plant. It's another forb. And I said, 'What's in that one?' He said, 'Well, there's medicinal compounds in that. They're self-medicating and they're doing it preventatively.' And he said their pallet is resonating with this, and that's why they're grazing these plants. So I think you're absolutely nailing it. I think a lot of the energy comes from those grasses indeed, you know, because they're the ones I could taste the sugar on, but when I go up there and watch them grazing all these forbs, I'm picking up all kinds of weird chemicals, you know. Some are very bitter, some have this kind of tannic feel to them. And some of them are almost objectionable to me. It's like, wow, that is so intense, very salty or whatever. I don't really want to swallow that. That's probably toxic to a human. But yet, I see them eating it.

1:05:52 And you know, with that, we get a great expression of plant flavor in our beef. You don't identify it as such, but when you eat a ribeye, you're like, 'Wow, that was really good.' And that really resonates with my pallet. That was a good ribeye. You know, I've eaten a lot of grain-fed steak, you know, especially lately. And I think it's because they switch into DDGS. You know, I'll travel and I eat a steak in a restaurant and it's like, wow, I don't feel really good after eating that steak. In fact, I'm going to stop eating it. I'm going to leave the fat on the plate because fat is a little objectionable. I'm not having fun anymore, but I don't have that with beef that's raised like ours. And it doesn't have to be just ours, you know. I have friends in the business as well. They're raising them just like we are. And there's a resonance there. And you're like, 'Wow, I want that whole steak.' But after that whole steak, I don't want another one because I'm totally satisfied. My pallet has been satisfied. And I think that's exactly how these animals are operating. They're just trying all these different plants. They become accustomed to certain choices, but they're regulating. They're self-regulating both medically, you know, in a preventative way, but also just in terms of what their pallet is telling me, because they're saying, 'This is satisfying for me to eat. I am satisfied by eating that.'

1:07:11 Yeah, I think that's so true. And this has been a great conversation and I'd really like to bring you back for another conversation because I want to dive a little bit into, because as we were visiting earlier, we have some similar stories on, you know, starting these businesses and having a lot of children involved and working on transition plans both for children and, you know, other employees. And so I'd love to have that conversation with you as well.

1:07:41 So I'm going to reserve the right to go to part two here at some point in time in the near future. But kind of as we bring this conversation to a close, if someone wants to test this out, test your theory, is this really the best beef ever? How do they order? Because you ship all across the country, like we ship seed, you know, all 50 states. Where do they go to get this product?

1:08:12 Alerspring.com, alerspring.com. And if they just want to follow us and see what we're doing, that's what a lot of people do. They'll follow our storytelling for like a year or two years and they're like, you know, I am interested and I want to become part of what they do as a partner. That's what we call our customers. We don't even call them customers. We call them partners because they're partnering with us on this ranch, right? So I wouldn't even ask that somebody goes and buys the beef. I just want them as a partner in terms of being part of our content. I get a lot of like I send a newsletter out twice a week, and they're both oriented toward marketing, but they both are prefaced by a story. So most people just open them.

1:09:01 To read the story. But there's an opportunity to go to the web store and buy some stuff and we'll mention sales and stuff like that but they're almost always story and a lot of them are like I told the thistle story on a newsletter probably a month ago or something like that, and I get a lot of response from those things, Keith, because people are very interactive about those kind of stories. Yesterday's story was about I talked to a guy named Dr. Tom Knoffs Singer in Nebraska. Have you ever met him?

1:09:34 Oh, you need to, you need to have him on. He's a veterinarian who's retired and he's come up with some stuff in stockmanship. And he actually ties it all into the creator as well. He's come up with some stuff in stockmanship that I've never heard of and it really transformed how we relate to these cattle. So that's what this week's newsletter was about. And I looked at my inbox yesterday morning and it had a whole bunch of people that it really resonated with.

1:10:09 So those are partners to me because they're very interactive and I'm learning from them again because they take me to a new place and say, 'Hey, have you ever thought about doing this with that what you just talked about?' So those are the places I really want people to get involved. You know, you can go to our website, alderpspring.com. There's a place to subscribe to our newsletter there. And like I said, it's none of my copy is salesy, but we have links to what's available on the web store this week. Most of it is just telling story.

1:10:41 And that's what all Alder Spring Ranch is on Instagram, Alder Spring Ranch on Facebook as well. You know, I'm not a big social media lover, but we do have a lot of connectivity there. There's, I think, 124,000 people following us on Instagram right now, and we get a ton of interaction. And a lot of people say, 'Oh, Instagram is so toxic and there's all these trolls.' And yeah, there's trolls, but there's so many fantastic interactions we've gotten from there. And a lot of them are young people who are seeking a path forward in agriculture for themselves. And I'm like, you know, let's put it out there for them.

1:11:24 Yeah, people may perceive Instagram as toxic or TikTok is toxic, but all be toxic. They're all tools for good.

1:11:39 They are. And it's so positive because you get this engagement. And the main thing for me, Keith, on those things is I want to offer hope. You know, because we're pessimists in agriculture. I've been in those coffee shop conversations all through the Midwest and even here. It's not good. And especially today, prices are not great in the commodity sector of the corn and beans market. And it's pretty tough. These guys are actually wondering if they can buy a cup of coffee and stay in business and do that all winter like they've done for decades. So there's a lot of disillusionment. There's a lot of just the thought of possibility is evaporating from agriculture right now. And you and I and others like us, we need to go out there and provide hope. It's like, yeah, it's not the same as it used to be, but there's a more hopeful possibility than I've ever seen before in agriculture. And it's today. It's right now. It's happening right now.

1:12:52 Yeah, that's great. And Glenn, I really appreciate what you and Carol and your daughters and the whole crew is doing to bring that hope to not only to people's plates but to people's minds and with your internship program even providing real world experiences and doing that. So I really appreciate you joining us and like I said, we will be reaching out to do a part two because there's so many more things I want to visit about, but I do need to kind of pull this together here. So thank you for joining us, folks. Go to alderspring.com. You can join their newsletter list. Order a ribeye and then let Glenn know if that's the best piece of steak you've ever had or not. So thank you, Glenn. Thank you everybody for joining this episode of the green.

1:13:44 It's been great, Keith, thanks so much for having me on and it was a great discussion. I feel like you and I could talk for hours. So we do need to end this. And I also want to thank you for what you're doing because we're selling beef, but you're actually spreading hope directly. You know, with every seed you send, you're spreading hope to those people. And that's such a cool thing. Every seed you spread is not only hope in itself as a plant, but you're actually providing hope to agriculture with every one of those seeds with green cover. And green cover is what it means. It's green cover and it's everything in agriculture today.

1:14:23 I appreciate that, Glenn. Thanks so much.

1:14:25 Take care.

1:14:26 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.