Perennial Grasses for Grass-Fed Cattle: What Mark Thomas Learned in 30 Years

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

0:19 You know, everybody's familiar with the principles of soil health: keep the soil covered, maximize your diversity, minimize your disturbance, keep a living root in the ground at all time, and integrate livestock. And we all understand those, but those are sometimes difficult to implement on our operations.

0:36 But there's one system that implements all of those and it keeps it going all year round, and that's when we convert some of our ground to a perennial system. My guest today is an expert in perennials, not only in the seed, but also in utilizing them as well as how you integrate them with annuals to have a really smart system. So my guest is Mr. Mark Thomas with Mountain View Seed and he's also a rancher just south of Enid, Oklahoma. Mark and his wife Annette run some cattle down there. Mark, welcome to the podcast.

1:13 All right, Keith, thanks for having me on and looking forward to visiting with you today.

1:18 Yeah, it's always fun to have a conversation with you and I do want to cover kind of those topics. We want to talk about perennials because you know as much about perennials as anyone. But we also want to talk about how they can work with annuals and how the two of them together can really set you up for success when grazing your cattle. So I want to jump into that, but before we do, give people a little bit of your background. Tell us your context of how what is your career looked like to get you where you're at there in the Enid, Oklahoma area.

1:56 Okay. Sure. So for the last 30 plus years, I've worked in the seed industry, in the grass seed industry. Started working for in distribution in the south and then about 25 years ago I went to work for an Oregon based company cool season forges grasses grown out there in the Walla Walla Valley which is the seed capital of the world they call it.

2:32 It is. And so it's been a very interesting journey. I grew up in East Texas and going to work for an Oregon-based company was a great challenge. We worked with everything from turf grasses, forge grasses. I spent some time working with ranchers down in South Texas on wildlife products. We were bringing in a lot of stuff like Lab Lab and working with a lot of those annuals and just a combination of all different types of perennials, annuals, tropicals, temperate grasses and legumes.

3:18 So today I work for Mountain View Seeds and I'm developing their forge business portfolio. We began recently, the last couple of years, working more with alfalfa and identifying alfalfas that would have some different traits and characteristics. We were looking for not necessarily GMO type alfalfas but things that would be more grazing tolerant, things that would be more adapted to different weather extremes and conditions, salt tolerance a big deal. And as we know, water is a huge resource concern for a lot of places in the west and the west seems to be moving east. So it's growing and a growing market for us. But we're working with some pretty unique genetics and with a management system of being able to actually force early termination of the irrigation, which would force those plants into a drought-induced dormancy and reduce the amount of water that's required to produce a crop.

4:39 And so when you do the economics of that and you say well if you're reducing maybe a harvest or two, that's reducing part of your cost and you're doing it at a time when those plants are most stressful, your evapotranspiration rates are at the highest.

4:59 The research has shown that you could reduce water usage by 50% and maintain 75% of the yields. That work was done by Dan Putman out in California.

5:15 So it's all pretty exciting stuff to get to where we are today.

5:19 That's very exciting. And here at Green Cover, we probably sell more Mountain View perennial products than from any other company because we've experimented with seed from a lot of companies, but we've just had really good luck, good consistency with the Mountain View products, and we're also very excited about this alpha. So let's jump right into that and talk maybe just a little bit more about that because it is something that is so different and unique that at first hearing people may not quite get where this would fit.

5:59 These are called NUMEX, which is kind of the trade name on these. And you have a fall dormancy 5 that we got a little bit of, and we've got a customer in southwest Kansas that got a circle of that planted. And for those of you not familiar with that area, the southwest Kansas area, a lot of western Texas, their irrigation is shrinking. The aquifer is shrinking. They're going to be more and more limited on how much water they can pump. So this is a perfect fit for that because you can shut that water off early, save the water, save the cost, and not hurt the alpha stand. How much of a survival rating does this self-alpha have even though it goes into a drought-induced dormancy?

6:48 It's very high. The plants in New Mexico State, it's called New Mex because it comes from New Mexico State. They're the ones who did the breeding work on it. This project has been going on for 20 plus years. They were specifically selecting for this drought resiliency. They did all the work and then they did all the testing, and then they were able to identify the traits that would trigger that. But the other thing was that these varieties, if you have full irrigation, they yield at the top of the trials. So they're better genetics, but that ability to reduce irrigation if you're short of water.

7:49 The Ogalala aquifer is all over the news these days about the reduction of water. It is a real issue, and it seems like all parts of the west are having issues with not enough water. What are we going to do about it?

8:15 So it's a good fit for a limited irrigation area. How well does it fit for a dryland area where mother nature is just simply shutting the water supply off and you never know when that's going to happen? Is that a good kind of insurance policy against that?

8:32 Yes, that ability just to go into that drought and do dormancy and then recover from it. It's that recovery period that is very beneficial for a dryland producer when you have those marginal years. The first round of selections on these things, they were actually just trying to reduce the amount of water they were putting on, you know, going full season, just reduce the amount of water. And they got it down to where they could reduce their water by say 20% and still maintain their yields. But when you're able to put that plant into that drought-induced dormancy, there's a lot of things that happen. You're saving significantly more water, but you're also reducing some cost of production. So the economics work out. But yes, for dryland production, it'd be a really good insurance policy, safety net, to have those type genetics. And we just released, well, we haven't released it yet, but we've got a new one in production. We started out with the fall dormancy 5 and 8 that came out of New Mexico State, but we have a fall dormancy 4 that's called resilient, and we've got that seed in production.

10:07 Being increased right now and that'll be available in the next two years and be a fall dormancy for so it would work in, you know Nebraska, northern Colorado, Wyoming, you know South Dakota all the way to the Canadian border.

10:27 That is really exciting. And just to be clear so people understand, this is a naturally occurring gene that they have developed and expressed. So it's not a GMO product. It's just done through traditional plant breeding methods.

10:48 Yeah. So Mark, let's talk about a couple other unique products that I think that you guys have and then I want to have a little bit of a discussion of how do we take these unique products or some other perennials too and how have you seen and I'll talk a little bit about how we've seen producers utilize those within their system to get some perennials established and you know long-term, short-term, medium-term. So before we go into kind of the system part, let's talk about a couple other ingredients and I want you to kind of share a little bit about how the endophyte that you guys are breeding into both fescue and I believe you have a ryegrass coming out if it's not out already with an endophyte. Tell us a little bit about what the endophyte is and what it does and why that makes these particular varieties of perennial grasses superior.

11:46 You know and endophytes and the discussion about novel endophytes or beneficial endophytes you know really started that's been about 25, 26 years I guess since those things kind of really became known here in the US. Most of that work was done in New Zealand. They did it originally in New Zealand they were using perennial ryegrass. And what they were looking for was an endophyte that would contain a certain compound that was toxic to insects. And so it's kind of a basic, it's a natural insecticide. Now they knew those things were in those endophytes but they needed to identify specific endophytes and these endophytes are fungal and so they need to identify those that were not toxic to mammals because naturally occurring and a lot of perennial ryegrasses and these are naturally occurring endophytes, I mean they, you don't create a fungus but they identified different plants that were non-toxic and within for cattle. So that's where it all began and so we're learning more about the benefits of those endophytes that fungal endophyte and what it does for the plant.

13:26 The along with insects, disease, you know it increases the health of the plant, makes it resistant to diseases but it also through the exudates it's releasing part of that fungus into the soil that's around it. And so it helps to build that rhizosphere and a healthier root system. So healthier plants, you know, making healthier soils and you know how that whole relationship works. And so the more and that work is just being done by USDA now and it's going to be ongoing and so we're going to learn more about it. There's already some papers out there that have been released about the benefits of these endophytes and what they're actually doing to the soil. So a lot of that we just knew that it made them more drought tolerant and maybe was it more drought tolerant or was it because the soils are healthier, the plants healthier, it's just more resistant to abiotic stresses.

14:38 Now, when a lot of people hear the term endophyte, they immediately think of K31 fescue because it has an endophyte in it, it's an extremely hardy plant. People know and understand that, but it's not the most friendly plant for grazing livestock on and that's partially because of the endophyte. To talk about the difference between the endophyte that occurs in K31 and the endophyte that occurs in the estantia fescue from Mountain View which we sell, we sell both but we sell a whole lot more estantia because it's what you would call a friendly endophyte, novel, correct.

15:21 There's a great book that if you haven't read it, I mean it's got the history of Kentucky 31 and fescue all together. But for everything video, it's called The Wondergrass. The Wondergrass story of Tall Fescue.

15:39 And so it's a great book in reference to understanding fescue and what fescue has meant in the transition zone. I was just out in Missouri a couple of weeks ago. I was over there looking at some farms and right in the middle of the fescue belt and was talking to this old farmer about how he recalled when they started planting Kentucky 31 back in the 50s and what was there before Kentucky 31. And if you go back and you look at the history, well, they were native grasses and the challenge with the native grasses were is that the farmers were you know, more European type farming systems versus, you know, bison, you know, ranging large areas. They had smaller fields and so they were set stocked. They weren't rotational grazing, they were just set stock and so their native grasses really struggled under those kind of conditions.

16:49 And so when a European grass which fescue is native to Europe was found to persist, they thought wow this is the answer and so that's why they called it the wondergrass and they, you know, the government had a lot of money programs for farmers and they really saved the soil. I mean because they were having some serious erosion problems and obviously I mean they had farmed a lot of that country and found out it wasn't, you know, was pretty marginal farm ground and so they were needing to put it back in the grass just to save the soil and it really built a cattle industry.

17:30 But then you know when they realized that there were some issues with the endophyte and what it caused the animals, you know, it's the main thing it does is ergoalkaloid is a vasoconstrictor and so it reduces that blood flow and so they don't get circulation, they don't get the oxygen and so their body temperatures go up, you know, they're going to have a harder time cycling, reproducing, producing milk, shedding that their coat, you know, that winter coat, they just don't slick off. Matter of fact, in severe cases, they're going to lose extremities. You know, whether that's ears, tails, hooves, those kind of things. So it's a serious problem on a lot of acres.

18:18 And so I worked with the Alliance for Grassland Renewal to basically help you know producers to renovate those toxic fescue acres and with these novel fescues. And so basically the novels maintain all those positive characteristics that you get from the endophyte that you know building that healthier plant, the healthier soil around the plant, and then but they're what they would call non-mammalian toxic and so they're not toxic to you know cattle or any type of mammals. But they do have that compound that would be toxic to like insects, you know, to help protect the plants from different pests.

19:09 Yeah, so we still we just want the right kind. That's correct. That's correct. And it seems like there's you know we've there's endophyte free fescues. We market into endophyte free fescue and you know I would say there is a place for that but if you're dealing with the stresses and it seems like you know more and more parts of the country are having more stressful growing conditions with droughts and heat and all that. So, you know, the opportunity or the need for those novel endophyte fescues has grown significantly. And I know that y'all's business has grown significantly over the last couple of years and talking to Zach and you know, you guys are doing a great job with that product and helping a lot of people.

20:08 Yeah, well, it's a good product and with that novel endophyte being in the fescue as well as ryegrass, let's talk about you know how have you seen people utilize these products and of course you know we're all about mixes and especially when it comes to perennials because every natural system is just loaded with diversity and so that's what we want. So we want the alfalfas and the clovers.

20:36 And the lepadees and the birdsoot tree foil, the grasses, the forbs like chicory and plantain—how have you seen people successfully utilize these? And these are mostly cool season. The warm season perennials, you know, more native types, that's a whole different conversation. I think I want to focus this on putting a cool season perennial mix together and how that works within a rotation and actually seeding farm ground back to this. How have you seen people utilizing that system?

21:13 You're absolutely right. The principles of cover crops and diverse perennial pastures are the same. If you can put more species into that pasture, you're going to have a more satisfied animal. The cattle and livestock are going to do better on a diverse mix than they are on a monoculture. They did this work in New Zealand where they took sheep because they have twins, so they took 25 sets of twins and separated them at birth and then raised those on perennial ryegrass, which is what their normal pastures were—just monoculture perennial ryegrass. And anybody that knows that, the forage quality of perennial ryegrass is through the roof. It's high sugars, very digestible. It's just excellent quality. And then they had a mixture where they had perennial ryegrass, white clover, red clover, alfalfa, plantain, chicory, and the difference in animal performance was almost 2x what they were on monoculture with perennial ryegrass.

22:50 That's one of the things I've noticed out here where we run a lot of cattle on stockers on wheat, so they'll gain on wheat but it takes them a while to adjust to that kind of diet and those cattle are always craving something else. They're going to eat the bark off the tree if they don't have something else to eat. Those are just observations that you see. But I think that's where we're progressing. Even there at the alliance, they were talking about tall fescue, tall fescue, tall fescue. But I think a lot of the grazing and having a lot of animal science people more involved in that, they're looking at it now and saying there is a lot of benefits to having those mixes.

23:56 There's a USDA ARS researcher, Britney Davis, working out of Lexington who has done a lot of work with red clover and now working with alfalfa. What they're finding is that a lot of these added components to a grass mixture have special compounds, beneficial compounds that aren't present in your grass. These flavonoids present in red clover have phytoestrogenic compounds that improve feed efficiency, which would explain what was going on with those sheep because of the red clover that was in there. They were having these phytoestrogenic compounds that would improve weight gain. They've also found that they have vasodilators which improve their overall health and circulation. So if there is some toxics, like if you had toxic fescue, these would offset that. You think about how many other weeds and forbs and things that are naturally occurring have some of those anti qualities that your livestock may be coming in combat with. Red clover, white clover, alfalfa, chicory, plantain—these things are actually their medicine chest to create health.

25:44 Now we didn't know all that was going on. Maybe you did. Maybe you planted that mixture because it's better for the soil, or Green Cover convinced you that you needed more diversity out there in your pasture. But it is true. But it's also doing things for that ruminant that we're just now finding out about.

26:06 Know and the latest thing is that you know alfalfa, same thing has these beneficial compounds. It's almost like in a superfood. You know, we just usually think about them as, you know, well, there's protein and whatever the nutritional values are of those plants, but there's more to it.

26:25 Yeah. In the old-timers, you know, before everybody had access to a vet, they'd have a sick pasture, you know, that would have all these forbs growing in, at the legumes and forbs, and if the animal got sick, they'd turn them out into there and kind of let them self-medicate, would they?

26:43 That's right. That's right. And you know, and that's what's great about establishing those perennial pastures and you know, and getting that diversity into one of those mixes. So if you're grazing, you know, you're implementing little soil health principles and you're bringing cattle onto your farm, you know, you're going to need some perennial acres set aside to go between crops, you know. So if you're like if you're going to graze some of your summer annuals where you're going to need something for those cattle to be on in between, you know, when you're growing those crops or your cash crop. I mean, like in this country, you know, we graze a lot of wheat, then pull them off and so those cattle need a place to go. If not, you just have a fluid herd where buying and selling and shipping. But it's always good to have some perennial grass acres to be able to move those animals onto and having that diversity.

27:54 So let's talk about that a little bit because some people may be thinking, well, I'm not sure I want to tie up my crop ground for the next 30 years in a perennial, but maybe I have some ground that's pretty low productivity. It's been abused. It's not very profitable growing grain or row crops.

28:18 Maybe that's something they can put to perennials for three, four, five years, really improve that soil, you know, benefit the livestock, benefit the soil, and then come back out of that into crop production again if they choose to. Although the economics right now would say you know, leave it in grazing because that's money. But that all cycles too. But do you see people doing that? You know, what I would consider kind of a short-term perennial rotation.

28:49 And you can do that with these cool season perennials because they're significantly less expensive than doing native warm seasons.

28:59 That's right. So yeah, we see that in what we would call, and I hate to use the term like marginal farm ground, but I mean when you have ground that's getting less productive, has been farmed the same way for 75 years or whatever the number is, you know, to be able to take that ground and put it into a diverse perennial mix for five years can do a lot of good for that soil and you know in five years from now the economics could look a lot different.

29:39 One of the things I've seen is in talking to a rancher there in the Flint Hills and, you know, of course, the Flint Hills are primarily grazing, well, they're grazing the Flint Hills, or you know, native grasses and big pastures of native grass and there's some places there where they had some lowland or that, you know, some sub irrigation to it or whatever, you know, that they've been farming. And being able to take that and put it into cool season grasses and graze, you know, and utilizing the new fencing systems which I think are fantastic technology, especially for grazing cool season grasses and rotating and being able to move those animals intensely grazing and moving those animals. So it really takes a lot of the work out of it. I'm still running turbo wire and pigtail post, the old way. And I could see where it would make it a lot easier for somebody to get into.

30:53 That business of running cattle, grazing cattle, with these new systems. And so in that trend that we see, I mean because there's some programs out there with the USDA NRCS to put ground out of farming production and put it into grass and not necessarily CRP but there's money out there to put it into grass and it doesn't have to be native grass, you put it into improved grasses or tamed grasses.

31:29 I've got some that's actually into bermuda grass and the first thing I did when I planted the bermuda grass was start trying to get more diversity into it and so there's a lot of different species that you can work with to do that and green cover you got them all.

31:49 We try to certainly want to be able to help people fill that niche and yeah, you're exactly right. The virtual collars, virtual fences are going to be a game changer for people being able to do this because I think there's always been people that would be willing to do it that can see the economics of doing it, but the fences are all gone and you know this now you still have to deal with water. Water is still going to be an issue that you got to figure out, but the collars can certainly help with the fencing issue and especially if it's a piece of ground that you need to improve, but it's not going to be pasture forever. So you don't want to invest a lot of money in expensive perimeter fence infrastructure. You can put up a moderate perimeter fence and then with the virtual collars, you can really manage the grazing on that.

32:44 We just had our Nexus in the field event here at the farm in Bladen and a lot of talk about the collars and it's exciting to see how people are using them, how people are considering them. And I found out there's some new companies coming onto the market. So there's going to be even more options for people to choose from. You know, as we move through and this technology develops. And like any technology, it's going to get less expensive and it's going to have better features as it matures a little bit.

33:17 Yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean, it was kind of like the first time I saw a calculator. My dad was a surveyor and I don't remember how many functions it had but it was pretty big and it cost a lot of money and so my dad being a surveyor engineer, he was one of those guys that had a calculator. I thought that was pretty impressive. And you know, today we have phones that have so many functions that are cheap and so yeah, we'll see that technology with the virtual fencing and collars continue to improve and help and monitoring animals as well as moving them.

34:03 That's the big thing is being able to monitor, you know, monitor animals and check them. That it's not going to replace getting out there and visually taking a look at them because you still need to, just like I've always been encouraged to get out there with my spade and dig around in the soil and know what's going on. You want to do the same thing with cattle. We want to get out there with them and take a look at them and see what's happening and are they, you know, they tell me when they're ready to move. When I come out there to observe them, they start lining up and ready to move to the next paddock. I know they're ready to move. You know, if they're just out there busily grazing, then they're still pretty happy where they're at.

34:58 Yeah, I was encouraged at our event that we had here. I heard several people who are using collars. What they said was they actually spend more time with their cattle now, even though they're not building fence every day, they actually spend more time and it's better time because now instead of focusing on the fence, they can focus on the cattle and they can be more observant and they can be better managers because they're managing cattle and not fence now.

40:33 Cattle are going to gain more than they would off straight sorghum or bermuda grass or crab grass. I observed that because I used to have a lot of crab grass before we were really planting a lot of these mixes, summer annual mixes. Crab grass quality would be great for a couple of months out of the summer.

41:01 But I could go out there with some alfalfa, and those cattle would go eat that alfalfa. And then after they would eat a certain amount of alfalfa, they'd go back to grazing the crab grass again. I was like, 'Well, you know what, they really want is they're really getting something out of that alfalfa.' And they truly were. But they want that diversity.

41:22 They don't want to just stand there and eat alfalfa all day long. Well, they would, but they really want something else even though the alfalfa is good. So no matter how good your grass is or how good your monoculture crop you got, it's not going to be as good as those diverse mixes. We were in that winter annual, summer annual rotation of forages. And we began to notice we had some issues with cheat became a problem and there's different weeds and things that we were combating because of that. Just doing the same thing, even though we were doing diversity, we were keeping something growing. We were planting at the same time every year.

42:12 When we started shifting some of those acres into, say, instead of grazing a summer annual mix during the growing season, we just stockpiled it. So you'd go full season and that created a tremendous amount of biomass. All my neighbors thought, what are you going to do with that? And it's like, well, I want to graze it. You can't even see your cows in there. I mean, it was 8 foot tall. But pushing those cattle in there, and this was after it had a frost.

42:50 So you're planting this when and then when do you start grazing it? Tell us what that time frame is.

43:02 Yeah, this would be planted mid to late summer. Some of those acres I would graze when I was terminating one summer annual. I would have some acres that I could go into in the fall and then but then I would maintain some of those acres all the way up until frost and then give it 10 days for the propionic acid issues to take care of themselves and then go in and grazing in the winter on that cover crop. When you go in there it smells like silage. You can smell the sugar in those sorghum plants. They may look like brown paper, but there is energy in there. Those animals are phenomenal with transitions in their diet, changing their diets really. They just continued to gain on that stockpiled.

44:15 And the benefits to the soil and then just being able to control a lot of weeds because I had this fantastic armor and just breaking that cycle of when I'm planting. I'd come back and follow that up with late February, early March oats, peas, and collards or turnips into that. And then I'm able to graze that, come back and start grazing that in May and June. That's what I'm on. I got cattle on right now.

44:55 There's been a lot of things that we've learned is how to shuffle acres around. It's not like we don't really necessarily go in and plant a whole quarter to one thing. You know, we may take a quarter and divide it up into 40 acre pieces and plant this one and then stagger the planting and plant something else on this other one. So we can just kind of rotate that around instead of having to.

45:21 Move all the cattle off of that farm and onto another one. You know, because you're planting or waiting on it to get established, you're able to just move, keep those cattle moving. And one of the things it does is that by keeping those animals on there is it keeps your dung beetles active because you're not taking away their food source and so they're able to continue contributing.

45:50 Well, it sure sounds like it's cheaper and easier than making and hauling hay through the winter.

45:58 Yes. Yeah. Now to be honest we did supplement with alfalfa in that system but the amount of alfalfa that we were feeding we were feeding like twice a week was just enough to basically get enough protein to feed those bugs in the rumen and so they're able to better, more efficiently digest that sorghums and you know get that energy out of them. So now you ask about how you know how we market our beef or cattle and we basically were 100% grass-fed. And so there's no cubes or grains or anything else. And the reason we went to grass-fed was we were looking for something that would we could gain a premium and some way that we could differentiate ourselves from you know the beef that was being sold at the local grocery and we started that back in oh I guess it was 2016.

47:05 So we've been doing this now for ten years. But when we first got into it, we were wholesale and so we were just looking for somebody that could buy all of our cattle. And we did that for one year and ended up making the decision that, you know, the best thing for us to do to really capture money is direct market. And so we started selling our beef directly to the end users, consumers.

47:35 And today that business looks like we're probably 80% of pretty close to 80%, 75 to 80% would be people buying wholes, halves, and quarters of beef. And so it's been a good program for us. We feel like there's some health benefits to the customers that we're selling it to and really it's all established business and these people that are buying all this beef were not people we knew ten years ago. So it really you'll find customers that are our best salespeople because they talk about our beef and we share our story about how we raise these animals and how we're trying to be good stewards of the soil. But in being a good steward of the soil, we take care of our livestock the same way we do our soil. We say one and the same. Those are, and it's interesting when you see the parallels between the microbiome of the soil and the microbiome of the rumen and how those things work together so closely.

48:59 Yeah, and in the microbiome of our gut as well is all influenced by that.

49:05 That is absolutely correct. And I tell this story and it's true. I was diagnosed about ten years ago with rheumatoid arthritis and so that slowed me down significantly and the doctors worked with me and I began to realize that the doctors didn't really understand those autoimmune diseases because they were just prescribing medicine and cocktails of different drugs and stacking chemistry on top of chemistry and I ended up on a product that was immune suppressant. So basically my immune system was overreacting and so they suppressed my immune system. But then in 2000 you know they gave us that warning that if you had a compromised immune system then COVID could be a serious matter for you. So I went off of all medication and really I was social distancing, staying at the ranch and I was eating my own beef. And I figured out how to mitigate, I guess that's the term, mitigate the arthritis.

50:41 And so today, I take zero medication. I don't take medication for anything.

50:52 That's been quite a journey. When you're taking care of the soil and producing this healthier product and cooking for yourself and eating foods that aren't highly processed, your body works better. And there's no better tasting medicine than a nice big ribeye, right?

51:21 That's right. And that's one of the things I tell people about. Everybody's looking at the cattle business going, 'When are those prices going to come down?' I said, well, for the last 50 years, beef has been villainized as being bad for you and unhealthy. And so you need to eat lean chicken or whatever other processed food they wanted to sell you. There was a whole industry built on that. A lot of money made by processors. And today, you know, it's no longer villainized. It's at the top of the food pyramid. And that is a game changer because long-term demand for beef will change. We were on a steady decline from the 70s on the amount of beef that we were actually eating because we thought it was bad for us.

52:33 Have you had any of your beef tested to look at the nutritional profile, the phytonutrient profile of your beef versus regular beef?

52:46 What we did is we did a fat profile, measuring the omega-3s versus omega-6s. And it's yes, significantly different. That's where a lot of the inflammation would come from, from those different fat profiles. We did that a few years ago, and I don't have those numbers right off the top of my head, but I could get those for you.

53:25 Yeah, well, anybody I've talked to that's doing their own grass-fed beef, doing it in a regenerative way with proper grazing and utilizing all of the benefits out of the soil, that's a common story. You know, just healthier, better omega ratios, fat ratios. So keep it up. Are your customers relatively local? Are you shipping meat? What does that look like from your customer base standpoint?

53:59 Somewhat local, Keith. I mean, it's local in that it's Oklahoma City, Edmond, Stillwater, Tulsa, mostly within the state of Oklahoma. But where we are, the county has 8,000 people in the whole county. If we were just going to try to run that business out of here, we'd struggle. There's a lot of cattle out here and there's not necessarily people that are willing to spend the money for that grass-fed product. When you get into some of the other markets, you find there's a big demand for that product. And to be honest with you, COVID changed everything. Back in 2016, it was hard to find somebody that had a deep freeze big enough to put a beef in. Since then, from food security and those kind of things, people have deep freezes now.

55:15 Yeah. They have a deep freeze. And so I think that the opportunity is just going to continue to grow. When you look at it, I think there's going to be more funding to get more processing, more local processing. Processing was a big limiter back 10 years ago when we first started. So I think the opportunity for developing that type of business and for a farmer, rancher right now that's maybe looking at it, and I know I've got some neighbors.

55:51 I've gotten into both grass and grain finished beef bulls, but you know, maybe they turn that piece of it over to a son or a daughter or somebody that wants to stay on the farm and you know, while you continue doing you know, farming and you provide that opportunity and that income opportunity, you know, to that person. And so that's been a great way. I mean, if you got a daughter that wants to be out, you know, stay on the farm and because a lot of times they do a really good job of they can do a really good job of marketing that beef.

56:31 And raising it, too. So, you know they — yeah. Oh, absolutely. So, it's great opportunity to get that next generation as well. For sure. So, well, thank you, Mark, for sharing all of that. And if if somebody's just wanting to get started, you know, maybe they're farming, maybe they have a few cattle, they're thinking about maybe putting in some perennials, expanding their cattle herd, any of these things. What would be one piece of advice you would give someone who wants to kind of start down this path, the regenerative, particularly grazing path?

57:08 Find a mentor. Find somebody that's doing this. And they may not be, you know, your next door neighbor. Maybe they're, you know, 100 miles away, but you know, going to some of your programs, Keith, or going to something like Noil on the Plains, you know, is a great place to find somebody that's doing what you want to do and then learning from it. And sometimes you'll find out that, you know, maybe they're not doing you know, everything that you want to do. And so, you know, you take what you can learn from them and go find somebody else and kind of put together that system. But, you know, it's hard to find a program that's really going to fit everybody. And you got to know what your strengths are. You know, what are your core competencies? You know, what are you good at? I mean for Annette and I — and Annette you know prior to doing the beef business she worked in corporate America worked for a major pharmaceutical animal health pharmaceutical company and so it was a big change to go from that to raising and marketing grass-fed beef. But, you know, she used the things that she learned and those business skills and marketing skills and things that she learned from the pharmaceutical industry to go out there and sell grass-fed beef.

58:54 And the other thing I would say is enjoy it. I mean, you really need to have that mentality that you know, you enjoy cattle and enjoy being around them. Go out and learn how to enjoy being with them. Don't, you know, they're not just work and they're not dumb animals, but you know, being with the cows, learn how to enjoy it.

59:19 I like that. That's great advice. And folks, if you're wanting to go down this path and you're not sure where to start, just give us a call here at Green Cover. We could put you in contact with people that can really help you. We've got all kinds of resources on our website, you know, podcasts like this, webinars where we help walk you through some of these steps that it takes to get started. So we're here to help. And within the regenerative ag movement, there's so many generous people that want to help as well. So, thank you everybody for watching this episode of the Green Cover podcast. We hope you enjoyed it and will join us again. 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.