Cook Your Way to an Economy of Peace with Cate Havstad-Casad

Kate: 00:00:17

Howdy.

Kate: 00:00:18

I'm Kate Kavanaugh, and you're listening to the Mind, body and Soil Podcast where

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we're laying the groundwork for our land, ourselves, and for generations

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to come By looking at the way every threat of life is connected to one

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another, communities above ground mirror the communities below the soil, which

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mirror the vast community of the cosmos.

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As the saying goes, as above so below, join me as we take a curious journey

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into agriculture, biology, history, spirituality, health, and so much more.

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I can't wait to unearth all of these incredible topics alongside you.

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Hello everyone and welcome to the Mind, body and Soil Podcast where we

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explore the threads of what it means to be humans woven into this earth.

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I am your host, Kate Kavanaugh, and I am so excited about this week's

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podcast because it has been a long time.

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Coming this week I host my friend, somebody who I consider

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to be a mentor and a role model.

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Kate Haad.

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Kate is, Kate is a force.

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She is a complete force of nature and watching the integrity, the grit, the

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honesty and the functionality paired with the incredible beauty with which she runs

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her businesses never ceases to amaze me.

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I met Kate very briefly one summer when her and I had both met through Ed

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Roberson of the Mountain and Prairie Podcast and she was just passing through

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Denver and made time to come and meet me.

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And it was just instant.

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And we recently were able to get together for a country mice do the

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city girls outing in New York City.

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And we have been talking more and more, and I really.

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Since the beginning of the podcast, wanted to bring Kate on, but I'm really glad that

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the timing worked out the way that it did.

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As with most things, because by the time Kate came on, I feel like I had a

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better understanding of how to highlight the incredible work that she's doing.

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I've been thinking a lot about cycles lately and all the different psyched

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cycles that dovetail in and out of one another here on earth and what

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it means to be a part of a cycle.

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What Kate is doing with a completely closed loop farm in mattress organ

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Oregon, is incredibly unique and I think what her and her husband Chris

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Kasad are building is something.

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Other people could learn from in the future, especially people in brittle

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climates that are struggling with with water, and that's a big part of

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what we talk about in this episode.

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But Kate isn't just a farmer.

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She is also an incredible hatter.

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My husband and I both own a hat from Kate that are just so precious to us.

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She is also an incredible, she has just built this company with regenerative

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leather as part of an effort to again, close the loop in our food systems

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where we have quote unquote waste.

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She is passionate and fiery and so articulate.

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So it was just such a joy.

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I honestly feel like we just got to scratch the surface and that there is

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a lot more here to explore with Kate.

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So don't be surprised when you see her name come up again on the

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podcast roster and just please go explore what Kate is doing.

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She articulates it so beautifully on her various social media channels.

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Wow, what an honor.

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It's, it's one of those things, honestly, where sometimes I get the

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most nervous when I'm interviewing people that I am lucky enough to

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consider my friends , because I just want to give them a platform to really

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share their unique experience of life.

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And Kate's is certainly.

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Before we dive into our conversation with Kate, I have

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just a tiny bit of housekeeping.

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I have been absolutely loving reading some of your reviews of

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We are really trying to grow this little platform right now.

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The podcast is just over a year old, and let me tell you,

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Awesome review from Infrared Escape Artist Essential Nourishment in podcast form.

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This is an overdue review because I have been listening to this

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Wherever you are, whoever is listening, this is for you.

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And I just know that you're going to love this week's episode with Kate Haad Kasad.

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Without further ado, here she is.

Cate: 00:07:10

Yeah.

Cate: 00:07:12

Um, so anyways, anywhere you wanna like start

Cate: 00:07:18

. Kate: I thought a lot about this.

Cate: 00:07:19

I thought a lot about where to start with you.

Cate: 00:07:21

This podcast is so important and dear to me.

Cate: 00:07:25

And I have, I have all these quotes and I have all of these

Cate: 00:07:29

places that we could start.

Cate: 00:07:30

But I kept coming back to, as I prepared this interview, the

Cate: 00:07:35

idea of loops and circles and cycles and systems and rotations.

Cate: 00:07:41

And there was this roundness to everything that I wanted to talk to you about.

Cate: 00:07:47

And I, I mentioned it to you and you wrote back and, and I was

Cate: 00:07:52

embarrassed that I didn't pick this up.

Cate: 00:07:55

You wrote back about a revolut.

Cate: 00:07:58

About range revolution.

Cate: 00:07:59

And I suddenly saw that there were even more circles and ways

Cate: 00:08:05

of identifying those circles.

Cate: 00:08:07

And so, and I think you know this, I love to define something.

Cate: 00:08:11

Mm-hmm.

Cate: 00:08:11

. And so I went back to de define revolution for myself.

Cate: 00:08:15

And I pulled these two particular definitions, one a sudden radical or

Cate: 00:08:21

complete change, and two, a progressive motion of a body around an axis so

Cate: 00:08:27

that any line of the body parallel to the axis, returns to its initial

Cate: 00:08:31

position while remaining parallel to the axis and transit, and usually

Cate: 00:08:35

at a constant distance from it.

Cate: 00:08:38

And I thought a lot about your work and all of the loops and closing

Cate: 00:08:45

of loops that you're creating.

Cate: 00:08:47

And I wondered if you had an access that you know, that you pivot around.

Cate: 00:08:53

Like what is your access, your anchor point, your pillar.

Cate: 00:09:00

I, when you posed this to me before we started, like, do you know what

Cate: 00:09:03

your access is or can you define that?

Cate: 00:09:06

Like my brain ping ponged a few different directions, but what it

Cate: 00:09:12

actually came back to that access for me is finding and feeling and embodying

Cate: 00:09:23

like my place in the natural world.

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, and then also helping inspire that thought process and helping other people feel that

Cate: 00:09:34

same sense of belonging and placeness.

Cate: 00:09:39

Hmm.

Kate: 00:09:39

I love that so much because I think that you are creating a space,

Kate: 00:09:44

and I think with that, because I wasn't quite sure where I would go.

Kate: 00:09:47

I actually do wanna read this quote at the outset for

Cate: 00:09:50

you, if that's

Kate: 00:09:50

all right.

Cate: 00:09:51

Yeah.

Cate: 00:09:52

So

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this is from Fri Joe Capra, who's a physicist and ecologist that

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I really love, and this is actually

Cate: 00:09:59

from a textbook called Systems View of Life.

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There are solutions to the major problems of our time, some

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of them even simple, but they require a radical shift in our

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perceptions are thinking are values.

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And indeed we are now at the beginning of such a fundamental change of worldview in

Kate: 00:10:17

science and society, a change of paradigms as radical as the Copernican Revolution.

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Unfortunately, this realization has not yet dawned on most of our political

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leaders who are unable to quote unquote connect the dots to use a popular phrase.

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They fail to see how the major problems of our time are all interrelated.

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Moreover, they refuse to recognize how their so-called solutions

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affect future generations.

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From the systemic point of view, the only viable solutions are

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those that are sustainable.

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A sustainable society must be designed in such a way that it's ways of life,

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businesses, economy, physical structures and technologies do not interfere with

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nature's inherent ability to sustain life.

Cate: 00:11:04

Mm-hmm.

Cate: 00:11:05

, that's fantastic.

Cate: 00:11:07

It's so much of what we learn as land managers is how to get out

Cate: 00:11:15

of the way and just be a steward of natural systems and processes.

Cate: 00:11:22

And the one thing that I like wanted to pick up and revisit before this

Cate: 00:11:27

conversation with you, um, is this little pamphlet that I got from the

Cate: 00:11:33

Shoemaker Center cuz they put out all these great little publications.

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So this was the one thing that I wanted to look at this morning before

Cate: 00:11:41

I hopped off on with you, is this pamphlet in Economics of Peace.

Cate: 00:11:46

And it starts with Schumacher talking about Buddhist economics and then it

Cate: 00:11:50

gets into Wendell Berry talking about the economics of peace in this day and age.

Cate: 00:11:56

And I just think that that that is tied up in everything that we are

Cate: 00:12:02

doing and all of the work that I find myself like revolving around.

Kate: 00:12:08

Hmm.

Kate: 00:12:10

I love that.

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An economics of peace and I think you're building that in a very diverse

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array of businesses and I love that being in place and economics of peace.

Kate: 00:12:26

You know, to kind of go back to that AC access that you were talking about are.

Kate: 00:12:33

Are where you are, because I think that so many of the ventures that I've

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watched you grow over the years are coming out of this space of how can

Kate: 00:12:44

I be in service to a place mm-hmm.

Kate: 00:12:47

And whether that's Halstead Hat or Range Revolutions or Ca Family Farms,

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there is just an honoring of the place that you are in and, and what it would

Kate: 00:13:00

mean to create economies of scale that are in service to that region

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and to that place and to that peace.

Kate: 00:13:14

I think, and I was, I, I wasn't quite sure where to start, but I think I wanna

Kate: 00:13:19

start with closed loop farming Yeah.

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At Kasad Family Farms.

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Because it is that place that I think for you right now, that everything, that, that

Kate: 00:13:31

is home, that, that is your home base.

Kate: 00:13:33

Mm-hmm.

Kate: 00:13:34

, and I might be wrong in that and correct me if I am.

Cate: 00:13:38

You're very right.

Cate: 00:13:39

Yeah.

Cate: 00:13:40

Absolutely.

Cate: 00:13:40

And it's, it's, it's the, it's actually one of the most wonderful

Cate: 00:13:45

ways to start when we talk about an economics of peace or Yeah.

Cate: 00:13:51

How to define place and purpose and place and the concept of closed loop farming.

Cate: 00:13:57

I'll just jump in and explain what that is.

Cate: 00:14:01

Um, Closely farming is this concept that in our model, we are producing

Cate: 00:14:10

all of the inputs that this land our animals and the community that

Cate: 00:14:17

exists on this land need for health.

Cate: 00:14:21

And, and everything that is produced on this land goes back into the

Cate: 00:14:29

systems to support that health.

Cate: 00:14:33

So that's a broad way of saying we, so for example, how to bring this into

Cate: 00:14:38

the practical, um, we're seed savers.

Cate: 00:14:42

So every season, uh, at the end of the season, uh, we collect the

Cate: 00:14:47

seeds from the crops we are growing.

Cate: 00:14:50

Uh, they're cleaned in a very, very old, like a hundred year old seed

Cate: 00:14:54

cleaner if they're not just like hand winnowed, you know, on a tarp with

Cate: 00:14:58

a fan . Um, and those are saved and then they're replanted the next year.

Cate: 00:15:03

And all of the feed that we feed our animals, we grow here on the farm.

Cate: 00:15:09

So we are not importing, um, feed for the pigs or the cattle.

Cate: 00:15:15

We do not import fertility.

Cate: 00:15:17

So we're not bringing, you know, um, fertilizers and whatnot.

Cate: 00:15:22

Um, onto this property.

Cate: 00:15:24

It is the animals and the crops and the systems and the rotations that provide

Cate: 00:15:28

that fertility that the land needs to grow abundantly and have homeostasis.

Cate: 00:15:34

Um, and then, yeah, all the, the products that, whether it's, it's a byproduct of

Cate: 00:15:40

a growing of a crop, say like the straw left behind after we harvest the grain,

Cate: 00:15:45

that also becomes either the mulch for the garden or the bedding for the animals.

Cate: 00:15:52

Um, and ideally, you know, the food products that are coming off of this

Cate: 00:15:56

land, obviously Chris and I sustain ourselves and Heston, um, off of

Cate: 00:16:02

everything that comes from this farm.

Cate: 00:16:05

And so everything that we produce here on this farm, I mean then is like

Cate: 00:16:11

actively making us, I mean, , we are just made up of everything that we consume.

Cate: 00:16:17

So we are made up of the land that we steward.

Cate: 00:16:20

So that is the whole like, closed loop of this system that we have been working

Cate: 00:16:26

for, um, a long time to get here.

Kate: 00:16:33

I'd love to tease out because as I, as I thought about all the, as I

Kate: 00:16:38

thought about your closed loop system, I realized that it's actually concentric

Kate: 00:16:42

circles, that it's loops in loops and loops and loops, and you just described

Kate: 00:16:46

some of those, that there's this feedback loop between you and the land.

Kate: 00:16:50

There are these loops of seasons where the seed from the end of one

Kate: 00:16:56

season is what begins the next season.

Kate: 00:17:00

There are loops in rotational grazing animals where they are going

Kate: 00:17:08

in, in maybe not a precise circle, but that they are rotating through

Kate: 00:17:12

these pastures and creating these loops, interacting with one another.

Kate: 00:17:17

And so they're kind of these stacked functions of mm-hmm.

Kate: 00:17:21

concentric circles and closed loops that make up this space.

Kate: 00:17:26

And when we were together in New York a couple of weeks ago, we talked a lot

Kate: 00:17:32

about creating a template that there are not many farms that are working

Kate: 00:17:39

to create these closed loop systems.

Kate: 00:17:42

And I think that so much, so much importing and outsourcing happens, right?

Kate: 00:17:48

We, we outsource our extraction when we bring in feeds.

Kate: 00:17:52

Sometimes we import fertility when we bring in fertilizer.

Kate: 00:17:57

And so I wondered if you.

Kate: 00:18:00

Share with me a couple of loops that happen on the farm, whether

Kate: 00:18:04

that's with animals and all of the different crops that you grow

Kate: 00:18:10

and the seeds that you plant.

Kate: 00:18:13

Whatever feels most, most present for you.

Cate: 00:18:17

Well, I'll tell you about what has been the development, um, of our feed

Cate: 00:18:23

program, which is actually our cover cropping program, which is actually

Cate: 00:18:28

our like climactic resilience program.

Cate: 00:18:33

So, perfect.

Cate: 00:18:35

Yeah.

Cate: 00:18:36

So, okay.

Cate: 00:18:37

So to set the backdrop for how this has evolved, I'll say that cuz I

Cate: 00:18:42

just introduced something that we'll probably get into, which is water

Cate: 00:18:46

and climate change and adapting.

Cate: 00:18:48

So this is a direct result of our farm having lost 80% of our

Cate: 00:18:56

irrigation waters in five years.

Cate: 00:18:58

So to, yeah.

Cate: 00:19:00

To put that to somebody who's not a farmer, like that doesn't hit if, if

Cate: 00:19:05

you aren't an irrigator or you don't understand what it means to farm in an

Cate: 00:19:08

arid region, our average precipitation here would be between eight and 11 inches.

Cate: 00:19:14

I would say the past couple years it's been like five.

Cate: 00:19:17

Like we're very brittle.

Cate: 00:19:18

Wow.

Cate: 00:19:19

So irrigation waters are how we farm.

Cate: 00:19:22

And to lose 80% of your irrigation waters is like to have any other business

Cate: 00:19:27

lose 80% of its operating capital.

Cate: 00:19:30

It's a drastic change.

Cate: 00:19:33

So we've responded very quickly because that's, I guess, what

Cate: 00:19:38

our profession is, is to adapt.

Cate: 00:19:40

And so let me get into this, this feed program.

Cate: 00:19:45

So what we started trialing was, um, drought resilient cover crop

Cate: 00:19:53

mixes that were going to do well with very little irrigation waters.

Cate: 00:19:58

Um, this is not like a no irrigation water system.

Cate: 00:20:02

This is like, yeah, it wouldn't be full on dryland.

Cate: 00:20:06

This is like very minimal irrigation.

Cate: 00:20:09

And through the trials, what we were finding is working really well.

Cate: 00:20:15

Here is a mix of barley tri, sometimes wheat, rye peas, vetch will throw

Cate: 00:20:26

in, um, clovers, radish turnup.

Cate: 00:20:31

Depending on what time of the year we're planting this or what the goal is, we

Cate: 00:20:36

might throw in sunflowers and flax and it's, it kind of, we have things that

Cate: 00:20:43

we'll throw into it, but that basis is the grains with the peas, um, sometimes oats.

Cate: 00:20:51

And so that will get planted usually in the fall.

Cate: 00:20:56

And we let it over winter, depending on the year peas.

Cate: 00:21:02

If, if the winter's not too bad, the peas will make it through the winter.

Cate: 00:21:05

But it depends if you're planting like a, a win, like a winter pea or a spring pea.

Cate: 00:21:09

So it over winters, it like absorbs all that moisture that

Cate: 00:21:14

comes in through the winter.

Cate: 00:21:15

And then in the spring, things start to really like pop and go

Cate: 00:21:19

off and we'll let it grow to a certain stage in the plant's growth.

Cate: 00:21:23

And then we come in and we graze it with the cattle.

Cate: 00:21:26

And the timing of that graze with the cattle is, uh, really important because

Cate: 00:21:31

what we want is we want the, the right timing of disturbance so that that graze

Cate: 00:21:37

by the cattle actually creates this response in which it sends a single signal

Cate: 00:21:43

down through the roots to like really bolster and like create more fortitude.

Cate: 00:21:48

And then, but also it creates this tilling effect so that the plant sends out more

Cate: 00:21:54

shoots, which once that grows out, the expansion of those chutes becomes more

Cate: 00:21:59

grain or seedheads, thus increasing yield.

Cate: 00:22:03

And then in the process you've got the cattle, you know, pooping and

Cate: 00:22:07

peeing all over the place, which is just like the most wonderful

Cate: 00:22:10

dressing of, you know, nutrients.

Cate: 00:22:13

And they move their way along and it's a really quick light graze.

Cate: 00:22:17

We don't want 'em to come back and chomp multiple times.

Cate: 00:22:19

It's a chomp and a.

Cate: 00:22:21

And then after that graze in the spring, we let that field just

Cate: 00:22:27

recover all season long and grow.

Cate: 00:22:29

It might see one or two irrigation sets.

Cate: 00:22:33

It's a very little amount of water.

Cate: 00:22:35

And then we come in, in late July, sometimes early August when things have

Cate: 00:22:41

really fully developed, and we harvest that, uh, grain or the seed, and that

Cate: 00:22:47

becomes the basis of what we will plant again next year as our cover crop mix.

Cate: 00:22:52

And it will also become the basis of our pig feed.

Cate: 00:22:57

And then, you know, so after we've come in and we harvest all that, and

Cate: 00:23:01

I, you brought this up actually in the correspondence, but what we've,

Cate: 00:23:05

well, let me finish the cycle.

Cate: 00:23:06

So we've harvested the grain, we bring all that grain back, we store

Cate: 00:23:11

it here on the farm in our grain bins.

Cate: 00:23:13

And then what is left is the standing field of straw.

Cate: 00:23:17

And so we come in then with our swather and we harvest that straw and

Cate: 00:23:21

um, we bail it and it becomes straw bales and it's organically grown,

Cate: 00:23:26

and we sell some of them to other gardeners who want an organic straw.

Cate: 00:23:30

It's really hard to find organic straw.

Cate: 00:23:32

Yes, it is.

Cate: 00:23:33

It really

Kate: 00:23:34

is.

Kate: 00:23:34

We've tried.

Kate: 00:23:34

Yeah,

Cate: 00:23:35

we've tried.

Cate: 00:23:36

And it's like, if you're a gardener or anything that's trying to do

Cate: 00:23:39

something organic, like to take a pesticide ridden or herbicide ridden

Cate: 00:23:43

straw and throw that in your garden is just like shitting on your intention.

Cate: 00:23:46

So yeah, it's really hard to find.

Cate: 00:23:48

So we're really stoked to provide that to people.

Cate: 00:23:50

And then we use a lot of it here on our farm for our own garden mulch,

Cate: 00:23:54

and then all of our animal bedding.

Cate: 00:23:56

So the pigs, you know, are just in all the cattle.

Cate: 00:23:59

You know, we have, uh, a barnyard that, uh, we feed in, um, sometimes during

Cate: 00:24:05

the winter, depending on the rotation.

Cate: 00:24:07

And like, what ends up happening in that barnyard is you've just got layers

Cate: 00:24:11

and layers of that straw bedding, the poop and the pee, and all of

Cate: 00:24:15

that just amassing all winter long.

Cate: 00:24:17

And it just becomes this like black gold, which we put into the compost pile.

Cate: 00:24:22

So that is one of those.

Cate: 00:24:24

So then, right then the compost of that straw bedding then becomes,

Cate: 00:24:30

you know, again, the amendment that we will put onto the garden and

Cate: 00:24:33

the seeds that we will sow again.

Cate: 00:24:35

And then the whole cycle begins again.

Cate: 00:24:39

It's

Kate: 00:24:40

beautiful and it's incredible to capture and recapture that

Kate: 00:24:44

fertility where you are also building fertility within the soil.

Kate: 00:24:50

And I wanna capture that too, that this seed mix Yeah.

Kate: 00:24:54

Is also acting really well in this brittle environment to help open the soil, help

Kate: 00:25:03

capture whatever precipitation you do get.

Kate: 00:25:06

Yes.

Kate: 00:25:07

And help build soil organic matter that is going to create

Kate: 00:25:12

more resiliency for your farm.

Kate: 00:25:14

And, and correct me if I'm

Cate: 00:25:16

wrong in any of that.

Cate: 00:25:17

No, you're so right.

Cate: 00:25:18

And it's just worth highlighting that like the seeds that are harvested and

Cate: 00:25:24

saved and replanted , much like us humans, if you've made it like it's because

Cate: 00:25:30

you were like adapted to make it right.

Cate: 00:25:33

So that which we are saving and replanting is the thing

Cate: 00:25:37

that like made it last season.

Cate: 00:25:39

And it makes it, it, it fits into this system, it fits into this climate.

Cate: 00:25:44

It has the ingrained intelligence and resilience that we're going to need

Cate: 00:25:49

for it to survive in this climate.

Cate: 00:25:51

So that, that aspect of seed saving, I think is something

Cate: 00:25:55

people don't think too much about.

Cate: 00:25:56

Like, it's not a simple task for a farm to, you know, and we aren't

Cate: 00:26:01

purists like we order in seeds sometimes from Johnny's, or preferably

Cate: 00:26:06

from like seed savers exchange.

Cate: 00:26:08

Because they focus on heirlooms, but that regional adaptation mm-hmm.

Cate: 00:26:14

in the seed, in the cover crop mixes, I think is a really critical thing

Cate: 00:26:19

for us to develop and move forward if we're all going to make it.

Cate: 00:26:23

Because things are changing in our environment so

Kate: 00:26:26

rapidly.

Kate: 00:26:27

It's almost like, and I don't know enough about seeds, it's almost like

Kate: 00:26:31

epigenetics in humans that we are, we are turning on things that are needed

Kate: 00:26:38

in the basis of that feedback loop.

Kate: 00:26:40

Here's another feedback loop between the seed and its environment in

Kate: 00:26:44

order for it to be best adapted.

Kate: 00:26:46

And something I think that you do so beautifully is this idea of thinking

Kate: 00:26:52

about the ecology of a region and how to support that through time.

Kate: 00:26:57

And I think that, that that act of seed saving is honoring the evolution

Kate: 00:27:04

of those seeds unique to that region.

Kate: 00:27:06

Mm-hmm.

Kate: 00:27:08

so that they can do their best work together.

Kate: 00:27:13

And I wonder if you might talk about that too, because one of the pieces

Kate: 00:27:16

that we haven't fully brought in here is this biodiversity standpoint of you

Kate: 00:27:21

have the, this diverse seed mixture that is both becoming adapted to

Kate: 00:27:26

that environment, but they are also.

Kate: 00:27:29

Helping each other.

Kate: 00:27:31

And there is an interdependence within that space, not just between

Kate: 00:27:35

the animals and the seeds, but between the seeds themselves.

Cate: 00:27:39

Yeah.

Cate: 00:27:40

Thank you for opening up that portal because this has been one of the most

Cate: 00:27:44

beautiful, just unintended positive consequences of trialing these things

Cate: 00:27:50

is seeing what happens when you foster increased biodiversity even in a cropping

Cate: 00:27:58

system, which is not a typical mindset.

Cate: 00:28:02

Like we, we sit here surrounded by conventional agriculture

Cate: 00:28:06

here in Madras, Oregon.

Cate: 00:28:07

We are in farming central.

Cate: 00:28:10

And it's, it's biodiversity can be looked at as a a, a nuisance in a sense where

Cate: 00:28:17

if you're a certain sort of farmer and you've got a certain thing presenting

Cate: 00:28:22

in your field that is out of step with the contract that you've been given, it

Cate: 00:28:26

could jeopardize your entire contract.

Cate: 00:28:28

Right?

Cate: 00:28:29

And so our model of abundance of biodiversity is

Cate: 00:28:35

counterculture to industrial ag.

Cate: 00:28:38

But the results of this, so I'll dive into like observations.

Cate: 00:28:42

So for example, we, last season we did most of our fields this way

Cate: 00:28:48

where it was that mix altogether, but we did several fields where it

Cate: 00:28:53

was just critic, uh, just critical.

Cate: 00:28:56

We did a field that was just peas.

Cate: 00:28:58

We did a field that was just oats and we did a field that was just bartley.

Cate: 00:29:03

And here's something that happens.

Cate: 00:29:05

So first of all, with the peas, you know, peas will grow all season long

Cate: 00:29:10

and they'll get, you know, uh, when planted alone, they will get, say

Cate: 00:29:15

two or three feet tall maybe, and then they will sort of flop over.

Cate: 00:29:20

And so from a logistical standpoint, when you come in to harvest the seed

Cate: 00:29:24

or the grain, the peas and you're combining it, uh, all that stuff is

Cate: 00:29:30

laying flat on the ground and it becomes sort of like pain in the butt process.

Cate: 00:29:33

You end up scooping up a lot of like dirt and rocks and it just makes

Cate: 00:29:37

sure process of harvest a nuisance.

Cate: 00:29:39

When we grow the peas as a part of this mix, the peas and the vets, they

Cate: 00:29:45

climb the, the stalk of the grains.

Cate: 00:29:48

So the rye or the trio stalk that get very tall.

Cate: 00:29:51

So as a result, we had peas that were like five feet tall, five and a half

Cate: 00:29:56

feet tall, and it was incredible to walk through this cover crop field.

Cate: 00:30:00

I've got some incredible photos of it that are, you know, PEs up to here on me

Cate: 00:30:05

and I'm pointing to my ears, . Uh, and it was just like this, like, oh my God.

Cate: 00:30:11

It was like a, like, it was, we were giddy to see this happening.

Cate: 00:30:15

So we've created all this additional biomass above ground, which means

Cate: 00:30:19

we've also, you know, increased all the biodiversity and all

Cate: 00:30:23

of the biomass below ground.

Cate: 00:30:26

We've increased the yield as well.

Cate: 00:30:29

So the fields that were planted as a monoculture, say the tri, I think

Cate: 00:30:35

that we got about 2000 pounds per acre on average off of those fields.

Cate: 00:30:40

And coming off of the very diverse cover crop mix fields, we got an

Cate: 00:30:46

average of about 6,000 pounds an acre.

Cate: 00:30:49

So we nearly tripled, whoa, the yield on what came off of that land when things

Cate: 00:30:56

were planted in that cover crop mix.

Cate: 00:30:59

So we can't fully articulate.

Cate: 00:31:05

A lot of the, the why this happens and, and, but like from an observational

Cate: 00:31:11

standpoint, the more you foster that biodiversity, the more you are rewarded.

Cate: 00:31:18

Hmm.

Kate: 00:31:19

Yeah.

Kate: 00:31:20

I was picking up this morning, I woke up really early.

Kate: 00:31:22

I was nervous about this, this podcast, and, uh, I'm reading

Kate: 00:31:28

Andreas Webber who wrote The Biology of Wonder and Matter and Desire.

Kate: 00:31:34

He has this idea that all things that are living right, whether

Kate: 00:31:40

it's a plant or a cell or a human organism or an ecosystem wants more

Kate: 00:31:45

aliveness that we trend towards.

Kate: 00:31:49

This idea of aliveness and biodiversity in that space is part

Kate: 00:31:55

of integrating more aliveness.

Kate: 00:31:59

It's more individuals that are working in concert to create that aliveness.

Kate: 00:32:04

And through that, that one of the biggest risks as we face this six

Kate: 00:32:09

mass extinction event and this massive loss of biodiversity is in

Kate: 00:32:14

many ways the loss of the ability to know ourselves in the web of things.

Kate: 00:32:21

Mm-hmm.

Kate: 00:32:24

. And I was so struck when you were sharing this story about the way that these, this

Kate: 00:32:31

inter planting works in concert and how much it has to teach us about ourselves

Kate: 00:32:39

and about what it means to work in concert with one another within the context of a

Kate: 00:32:46

piece of land or a community or a region.

Kate: 00:32:50

And I think that's something that when I look at the work that you're

Kate: 00:32:55

doing in this space, and I don't know of anybody that is, is doing quite

Kate: 00:33:01

the work that you and Chris are.

Kate: 00:33:02

Mm-hmm.

Kate: 00:33:03

, I see this biodiversity in the way that you are building that interconnected

Kate: 00:33:09

community and regional ecosystem as a reflection of the incredible

Kate: 00:33:15

biodiversity and interconnectedness and working togetherness that

Kate: 00:33:20

you've built on your farm.

Cate: 00:33:22

I have to thank Chris and this farm for this just like education that

Cate: 00:33:30

I have gotten because when I first started working at Chris's first farm,

Cate: 00:33:34

which was called Juniper Jungle Farm, back in the day, , it was Juniper Jungle

Cate: 00:33:39

because it was in this landscape of like many old Junipers, but also like his

Cate: 00:33:44

farming style has always been a bit.

Cate: 00:33:48

I don't wanna say undone, but like the jungle aspect is sort of, it's him like

Cate: 00:33:53

you would walk into his greenhouse and it was just sort of wild in a sense.

Cate: 00:33:58

And that makes sense cuz he actually comes from like having studied permaculture

Cate: 00:34:01

and being like kind of that guy.

Cate: 00:34:04

And I, you know, early in the farming journey I may have looked

Cate: 00:34:07

at other people's models of farms and seen the pristine rose and the

Cate: 00:34:12

perfection and the single crop and no, you know, weed out of place.

Cate: 00:34:18

And I would look sometimes at our farm and be like, oh my God, like

Cate: 00:34:21

I'm like embarrassed to post this picture cuz look at all of our weeds.

Cate: 00:34:24

And like, that was just, these days I have a totally different perception of the

Cate: 00:34:30

purpose of a weed and the beauty of God.

Cate: 00:34:35

What, what I may have thought was like messy or undone.

Cate: 00:34:38

And now I am like, this is the symphony that we should strive for.

Cate: 00:34:42

Hmm.

Cate: 00:34:42

Um, and I wanna touch back on like the purpose of a weed because this can be so

Cate: 00:34:47

applied to like us and our lives, right?

Cate: 00:34:50

Like, like please mechanically we could look at a weed as, uh, a failure of

Cate: 00:34:57

ourselves to control this out of placeness of this thing, you know, a nuisance

Cate: 00:35:03

we need to eradicate and just this thing that is, you know, uh, pointless.

Cate: 00:35:10

But what I've learned more recently, and like Nicole Masters has actually,

Cate: 00:35:15

and her work in soil has really helped me start to really get a grip on this.

Cate: 00:35:21

When weeds talk, they are telling us something on the landscape.

Cate: 00:35:26

So for example, if you've got a thistle problem, and thistles are

Cate: 00:35:31

the worst, everyone hates thistles.

Cate: 00:35:33

But like thistles have a purpose and a point and they're communicating

Cate: 00:35:37

something and they are bringing something from the depths of the

Cate: 00:35:41

mineral bank up to what the soil needs.

Cate: 00:35:43

So typically when thistles present, it's because you have a calcium deficiency

Cate: 00:35:47

and if you test, if you actually do tissue tests of those weeds, they

Cate: 00:35:52

will be very high in that mineral that you are lacking on that land.

Cate: 00:35:56

So, you know, you could walk around, uh, your farm and you could do tissue

Cate: 00:36:01

samples of these weeds and they will tell you exactly what is it that your land is

Cate: 00:36:06

deficient in, and then how to address it.

Cate: 00:36:09

And you know, in biodynamics there's, you know, you can create these compounds, you

Cate: 00:36:15

can harvest that weed, you can create this kind of fermented mixture and you could go

Cate: 00:36:22

out and actually spray that compound onto the weed itself and then thus actually

Cate: 00:36:28

help to eradicate that weed issue.

Cate: 00:36:30

So like, I don't know where I wanna like take this, but in essence, like how we

Cate: 00:36:36

see the farm landscape, Either we look at it at the service level of this thing I

Cate: 00:36:44

must eradicate and deal with, but we miss out on this opportunity to actually like

Cate: 00:36:50

hear what the land is trying to tell us.

Cate: 00:36:52

And that is, yeah, something that Chris has really helped me see.

Kate: 00:36:59

I think it's so beautiful too, to be connected to a space where you can

Kate: 00:37:03

learn what it means to listen to what land is telling you and to respond.

Kate: 00:37:11

To respond in kind.

Cate: 00:37:13

That's like, you know, nothing has amplified that more than the past several

Cate: 00:37:19

years of record high temperatures and record drought and record fired season

Cate: 00:37:29

like nothing has amplified the need for that to be a skillset to survive.

Cate: 00:37:38

Like really from a farm perspective, but from like a society perspective.

Cate: 00:37:44

We've shifted our mindset hugely from one of this is what we

Cate: 00:37:50

want to do on our farm, right?

Cate: 00:37:52

We want to be potato growers, we want to expand our potato production to

Cate: 00:37:58

what is the land asking of us and what are these times asking of us?

Cate: 00:38:05

And.

Cate: 00:38:06

Since we have adopted that way of like that lens to look at things,

Cate: 00:38:12

things have radically shifted and we've had these incredible learnings.

Cate: 00:38:16

We've had, you know, in, in times that could be looked at as dismal, you know,

Cate: 00:38:23

extremely challenging, climatically, extremely challenging to, to be a

Cate: 00:38:29

farmer in the shifting landscape.

Cate: 00:38:31

We've had some like incredibly high highs and joys because we are listening

Cate: 00:38:38

and then applying that listening.

Kate: 00:38:42

It feels like a co-creation.

Kate: 00:38:44

And I think that this is so beautiful that out of a massive struggle, and

Kate: 00:38:49

I wanna come back to this idea of 80% of your irrigation waters being cut.

Kate: 00:38:54

Because I think, and, and to compare that to working capital, I think really

Kate: 00:39:00

puts it into perspective for people that might not be familiar with water

Kate: 00:39:05

issues in the West and just, just the profundity of that and the grief of that.

Kate: 00:39:13

To have your farm and your mission to be built around an idea that is

Kate: 00:39:20

suddenly not not possible with the resources that are available to

Kate: 00:39:26

you and to have to pivot and to.

Kate: 00:39:30

Number one, to be able to pivot at all and to be able to see that and to listen to

Kate: 00:39:34

the land and say, okay, how can we, how can we work within this context, within

Kate: 00:39:40

this framework that we're being given?

Kate: 00:39:42

Yeah.

Kate: 00:39:43

To work in a way that is creating resiliency in one of

Kate: 00:39:50

the most brittle environments.

Kate: 00:39:53

And I want to talk about water.

Kate: 00:39:55

I want you to talk about water, because this has been such a big

Kate: 00:39:59

part of your journey in Madres and you speak about it so beautifully.

Kate: 00:40:05

And I'll, I'll let listeners know, you know, we did a very

Kate: 00:40:08

early episode with Heather Hansman who wrote the book Down River.

Kate: 00:40:11

But this is something that I wanted to hear from your perspective and how the

Kate: 00:40:18

different players in it, whether that is the agricultural setting and more

Kate: 00:40:23

urban environments, the just the, the legislation around it and everything.

Kate: 00:40:32

I just wanna hear it all.

Cate: 00:40:34

I wanna open this by actually like, anchoring it in an experience that I had

Cate: 00:40:39

before, um, before I think I embodied the experience of water as sacred through

Cate: 00:40:49

the most recent years, five years.

Cate: 00:40:51

And I, so I'm trying to remember, I think it was 2016.

Cate: 00:40:57

Was, um, when the Dakota Access Pipeline protests were happening in North Dakota,

Cate: 00:41:03

and Chris and I were still at our old farm in East of Bend, Juniper Jungle.

Cate: 00:41:09

And when those protests started, I can't even explain exactly why I felt so called

Cate: 00:41:18

to go be a part of that, but I did.

Cate: 00:41:20

I went with, uh, a handful of people from Central Oregon and, um, went and joined

Cate: 00:41:27

the, those protests in North Dakota.

Cate: 00:41:30

And whatever you think about , that whole event, um, it was an extremely,

Cate: 00:41:37

it was an extremely important thing for me to go do and see with my own

Cate: 00:41:41

eyes and sit and listen to be in an environment with native elders.

Cate: 00:41:48

Um, talking about like mi washo, which means water is life like

Cate: 00:41:53

to sit in that environment.

Cate: 00:41:56

Um, coming from my background and to learn from those people, I was so fortunate to

Cate: 00:42:04

learn from, I just wanna like anchor my, my start of, of reverence for water in

Cate: 00:42:11

that experience because culture is much wiser than our, like, current culture.

Cate: 00:42:18

Understand the sacredness of water and the sacredness of, um, man's relation to water

Cate: 00:42:26

and landscape and protecting of that.

Cate: 00:42:29

And that had a deep, deep impact on me, not just in that learning, but also in

Cate: 00:42:34

learning to like what extent power and, uh, bigger authority will, uh, seek to

Cate: 00:42:42

control those resources and, and what it means for people to protect them.

Cate: 00:42:47

When we moved to mattress, which is where our farm is now, in 2017, we had

Cate: 00:42:54

a full, uh, allotment of our water.

Cate: 00:42:57

And for this district, we are a junior irrigation district.

Cate: 00:43:02

What that means is the whole Western United States has been founded on

Cate: 00:43:06

this doctrine of prior appropriation.

Cate: 00:43:08

Mm-hmm.

Cate: 00:43:09

, and it's just this sort of seniority system.

Cate: 00:43:11

So first irrigation district established in the District River

Cate: 00:43:15

basin is the most senior, and then we are just one of the younger ones.

Cate: 00:43:20

And what that means is that when resources get more constrained, the

Cate: 00:43:25

junior irrigation districts will be the first to have allotment cuts.

Cate: 00:43:28

And so those cuts came in 20.

Cate: 00:43:32

Our first cut came in 2018, so it was our second season, uh, here on the new farm.

Cate: 00:43:39

And, um, a full allotment of water, uh, in this district at a hundred.

Cate: 00:43:45

Would be two and a half acre feet of water.

Cate: 00:43:49

And, uh, to compare this to one of the other irrigation districts

Cate: 00:43:54

that's more senior, they're a hundred percent allotment would

Cate: 00:43:57

be five acre feet of water.

Cate: 00:43:59

So just a starting base.

Cate: 00:44:01

We've got half the water that like a more senior district has on a normal

Cate: 00:44:06

hundred percent allotment year.

Cate: 00:44:08

And then to frame the dramatic shift, so starting with two and a half acre feet

Cate: 00:44:13

of water in 2017, last season, 2022, we were given 0.5 acre feet of water to farm.

Cate: 00:44:21

So that is the, the scale of change.

Cate: 00:44:27

And what's wild to think about as well.

Cate: 00:44:32

Um, when we farmed east of Bend and we were in a more senior district,

Cate: 00:44:36

water was very free flowing.

Cate: 00:44:38

We actually didn't understand very much at all about how irrigation waters worked

Cate: 00:44:42

in this region because there was no scarcity or we never felt the scarcity.

Cate: 00:44:48

We just, we didn't have to care.

Cate: 00:44:49

We didn't have to understand.

Cate: 00:44:50

I think that's how most people operate with water, because you

Cate: 00:44:53

turn on a faucet and it's there, you just don't underst you don't have to

Cate: 00:44:58

understand because it's not scarcity.

Cate: 00:44:59

Mm-hmm.

Cate: 00:45:00

. Yeah.

Cate: 00:45:01

So it, it's been the scarcity which has caused us to be students of

Cate: 00:45:06

western water law and advocates for, um, more equitable water rights,

Cate: 00:45:13

you know, in a basin like our.

Cate: 00:45:15

And what's crazy too is that, you know, in 2017 when we had two and a half acre-feet

Cate: 00:45:21

of water, we could grow everything we could dream of growing in this region.

Cate: 00:45:26

We could have grown every vegetable crop we ever wanted to, and we had

Cate: 00:45:31

to be careful in conservation minded.

Cate: 00:45:34

But yeah.

Cate: 00:45:36

Uh, and so when I think about now the fact that there are irrigation districts

Cate: 00:45:41

in this region that have an allotment of five acre feet of water, it's a

Cate: 00:45:44

very gluttonous thing to think about.

Cate: 00:45:46

Like, it, it, mm-hmm.

Cate: 00:45:47

, it's not necessary.

Cate: 00:45:48

You don't need that to be a professional farmer.

Cate: 00:45:50

And in fact, those districts that are, you know, senior districts, um,

Cate: 00:45:55

they're no longer agricultural regions.

Cate: 00:45:58

So like a lot of other places in the United States, you know,

Cate: 00:46:02

may have been an agricultural region in the early 19 hundreds.

Cate: 00:46:06

But a Bend Oregon has, uh, it is fractured.

Cate: 00:46:10

It is urbanized.

Cate: 00:46:12

So it is now, um, a non-ag re region that is getting a majority

Cate: 00:46:17

of the irrigation waters.

Cate: 00:46:18

So that's

Kate: 00:46:19

the landscape.

Kate: 00:46:21

Two questions.

Kate: 00:46:22

What, what is a space like Bend Oregon that's a little bit more urban?

Kate: 00:46:27

How are they utilizing their water allotment?

Kate: 00:46:30

Because it's not to grow food.

Cate: 00:46:33

No, no.

Cate: 00:46:34

I mean, irrigation waters will go to golf courses.

Cate: 00:46:36

There is a private water ski community that currently hoards, uh, a certain

Cate: 00:46:42

portion of tullo irrigation, district water . Um, and then you have, or we

Cate: 00:46:48

have these insane user or LoseIt laws.

Cate: 00:46:51

Um, so yeah,

Kate: 00:46:52

wealthy landowners will say, uh, 10

Cate: 00:46:55

acre ranchette in order to keep their E F U, uh,

Cate: 00:46:59

exclusive farm use designation.

Cate: 00:47:01

Thus, the tax break that comes with owning E F U land, they have

Cate: 00:47:05

to apply the irrigation water.

Cate: 00:47:07

So, uh, or else they will lose that irrigation.

Cate: 00:47:10

Right.

Cate: 00:47:10

And then their E F U designation, you know, it's so, it, uh, it's

Cate: 00:47:15

being applied in a very wasteful way.

Cate: 00:47:18

And, um, you know, uh, any system that allows for it, in fact, perpetuates

Cate: 00:47:27

waste is inherently violent.

Cate: 00:47:29

So, uh, water allocation in this basin is, um, it's a violence against land.

Cate: 00:47:35

It's a violence against the communities that, uh, rely

Cate: 00:47:40

on, uh, a local food system.

Kate: 00:47:43

That is an incredible way of putting that.

Kate: 00:47:45

Will you say that one more time?

Kate: 00:47:47

I just, I want to, I wanna internalize that.

Cate: 00:47:50

Yeah.

Cate: 00:47:50

Um, any system that perpetuates waste is inherently violent.

Cate: 00:47:56

Yeah.

Cate: 00:47:57

And we'll get into this, I'm sure in other ways.

Cate: 00:47:59

I mean, this drives my, my mission with range revolution and all

Cate: 00:48:03

that comes in the world of fashion and full carcass utilization.

Cate: 00:48:07

But that's, that's something that Wendell Barry talks about in his

Cate: 00:48:11

peace and economics, uh, of peace.

Cate: 00:48:14

And until our society thinks about that statement, our own participation

Cate: 00:48:26

in systems that perpetuate waste, any government system like the

Cate: 00:48:31

beneficial use laws in Oregon that perpetuates the application of water

Cate: 00:48:37

for no purpose, until we really think about that, uh, we will have, uh,

Cate: 00:48:43

an economy of violence, you know?

Cate: 00:48:46

So, yeah,

Kate: 00:48:48

I wanna get into teasing out some of those, those other waste systems.

Kate: 00:48:52

But before we do that, I, I am not done with water, if that's all right.

Kate: 00:48:57

We're never done with water.

Kate: 00:48:58

You're never done with water, you're never done with water.

Kate: 00:49:01

And I really want to understand a little bit more about the drought pressures

Kate: 00:49:06

that are happening in that region.

Kate: 00:49:07

And I think.

Kate: 00:49:09

I think for those, right?

Kate: 00:49:10

Like I ca I came from the west and I came from Colorado where the Colorado

Kate: 00:49:16

River Compact turned 100 last year.

Kate: 00:49:19

And there are a lot of pressures and Oregon and Washington are

Kate: 00:49:23

kind of in a different space with water outside of, of my knowledge.

Kate: 00:49:27

But you mentioned

Cate: 00:49:28

right behind Colorado, we're right behind it.

Cate: 00:49:31

What?

Cate: 00:49:32

You're

Kate: 00:49:32

right behind it.

Kate: 00:49:33

Yeah.

Kate: 00:49:34

You mentioned something on a podcast that really struck me because I wanna

Kate: 00:49:39

better understand the pressures that are reducing water in your region.

Kate: 00:49:43

And you talked about the difference between bureaucratic

Kate: 00:49:46

and ch climatic drought.

Kate: 00:49:47

Hmm.

Cate: 00:49:49

Yeah.

Cate: 00:49:50

So I think, can you tease that

Kate: 00:49:52

apart?

Kate: 00:49:52

Yeah.

Cate: 00:49:53

Sorry, go ahead.

Cate: 00:49:53

Yeah, yeah.

Cate: 00:49:54

That's, that's something that I've really, um, started to talk about recently to

Cate: 00:49:59

help people understand, because I think really people will just be like, gosh,

Cate: 00:50:03

it's too bad for the farmers because, you know, it's, we've got drought.

Cate: 00:50:08

Like it's this thing that we have zero control over, when in fact a

Cate: 00:50:12

lot of the drought pressure that agriculturalists face in the west

Cate: 00:50:16

is bureaucratically imposed drought.

Cate: 00:50:19

And this comes back to, yeah, the way that, I'll just speak to Oregon

Cate: 00:50:23

because that's the system I've been such a student of, um, uh, Oregon Law.

Cate: 00:50:30

Actually, uh, that, that system of prior appropriation, the fact that we

Cate: 00:50:35

have really no thorough definition of beneficial use of water, um, it just

Cate: 00:50:41

means that water has been applied.

Cate: 00:50:42

Those sorts of, uh, legislative frameworks are the reason we don't have equitable

Cate: 00:50:50

water distribution in a basin like ours is the reason that we operated with

Cate: 00:50:54

0.5 acre feet of water last year as a professional farm growing food in Morgan.

Cate: 00:50:59

Um, whereas a, a golf course in Bend would've been given their

Cate: 00:51:02

full allotment between four to five acre feet of water last season.

Cate: 00:51:06

So I just want the conversation to be very honestly framed for

Cate: 00:51:12

what it is, which it is partially driven by, um, the, the climate's

Cate: 00:51:18

presentation of water for the year.

Cate: 00:51:20

But it is hugely driven by legislative frameworks.

Kate: 00:51:26

Yes.

Kate: 00:51:26

And the private water ski communities allotment of water in opposition

Kate: 00:51:33

to people who are growing food.

Cate: 00:51:35

Yeah.

Cate: 00:51:36

Like here's, here's an example too, like this should be a duh thing.

Cate: 00:51:40

So, so if you've got a patron in an irrigation district, central Oregon

Cate: 00:51:44

Irrigation District, which is the district in Bend, who wants to transfer

Cate: 00:51:48

water to, they say, I wanna give my water allotment to a farmer in North.

Cate: 00:51:55

From the state law perspective, that wouldn't satisfy a beneficial use

Cate: 00:52:01

clause so that landowner would be at risk of losing that irrigation.

Cate: 00:52:07

Right.

Cate: 00:52:08

So it actually right, it, it, it, it incentivizes not transferring

Cate: 00:52:14

water to where it's most needed.

Cate: 00:52:16

Even if patrons want to do that with what they own is their water.

Cate: 00:52:20

Right?

Cate: 00:52:21

So one of the proposed updates, legislative bills that is probably gonna

Cate: 00:52:27

come in the next couple of years would be an update to beneficial use so that

Cate: 00:52:31

the transfer from one irrigation district to another irrigation district would

Cate: 00:52:34

satisfy that beneficial use clause.

Cate: 00:52:37

I would love to get more radical and really define beneficial use

Cate: 00:52:42

in, say, application of irrigation waters to a golf course in the desert.

Cate: 00:52:46

In fact, the like 32nd golf course in our desert is not beneficial.

Cate: 00:52:51

Thus it should not be granted irrigation water or groundwater rights to pump.

Cate: 00:52:57

And this is a very, very big, very complicated topic.

Cate: 00:53:04

It brings up a lot of fear and old wounds that peg agriculturalists

Cate: 00:53:11

against environmentalists.

Cate: 00:53:13

That's a huge dynamic that plays out in central Oregon through, we have.

Cate: 00:53:19

An organ spotted frog issue, which compounds all of this,

Cate: 00:53:22

and that's a whole rabbit hole.

Cate: 00:53:24

But yeah, it's, um, it's deeply complicated and it's gonna take really

Cate: 00:53:30

patient, really compassionate, really collaborative work to shift what is a 100

Cate: 00:53:37

year old system that has not been updated.

Cate: 00:53:40

And I love this analogy, like water in the West is, is, is a technology

Cate: 00:53:47

akin to if we were all still driving around in Model T cars mm-hmm.

Cate: 00:53:51

like we are driving around a model t system of water allocation in the West.

Cate: 00:53:56

That's, that's what we're struggling against

Kate: 00:54:00

with, with massive in, with a desire to change and to strengthen

Kate: 00:54:08

a resilient system to bring water into brittleness, to provide food

Kate: 00:54:14

for people to, I just don't know.

Kate: 00:54:19

I, I, I don't know how to underscore how important this is because I think the

Kate: 00:54:23

conversation that we have going forward around food, especially in the United

Kate: 00:54:29

States, because I think the Western United States grows the majority of our food.

Kate: 00:54:33

Like we cannot talk about food without talking about water.

Cate: 00:54:36

Yes.

Cate: 00:54:37

Yeah.

Cate: 00:54:38

We can't talk about food without talking about water.

Cate: 00:54:40

We can't talk about land use without talking about water.

Cate: 00:54:44

We can't talk about, you know.

Cate: 00:54:47

Yeah.

Cate: 00:54:49

Anything fashion, we can't talk about fashion without

Cate: 00:54:52

talking about water consumption.

Cate: 00:54:53

Yeah.

Cate: 00:54:54

And again, it's like I, I wanted to ground the conversation and water with

Cate: 00:54:59

that experience that I had in North Dakota during the Dakota Access pipeline

Cate: 00:55:04

protests, because again, we are, we are just a, a young culture that has not been

Cate: 00:55:12

raised in a way to have reverence for these natural resources that are finite.

Cate: 00:55:17

And again, it's, it's easy.

Cate: 00:55:19

And I understand how we got here because you just turn on a faucet

Cate: 00:55:23

and you just flip on a switch.

Cate: 00:55:24

You don't think about how the water got to you, how the energy got to you.

Cate: 00:55:30

How does our existence play on systems of convenience that, you know, uh, yeah.

Cate: 00:55:37

Either we're building an economy of peace, or we're building an economy of violence

Cate: 00:55:41

and we've been in a stage of an economies of violence and I have nothing but hope

Cate: 00:55:46

and optimism that things will shift.

Cate: 00:55:48

But it comes down to really nuanced conversations like this one we're

Cate: 00:55:51

having about really complicated issues.

Cate: 00:55:53

Like I could talk about the, like the, the mechanics of water in the

Cate: 00:55:57

west, and I often do that, but I, what is underneath that is culture.

Cate: 00:56:04

It is reverence.

Cate: 00:56:06

It is, it is understanding your place in the natural world.

Cate: 00:56:15

Hmm.

Kate: 00:56:17

Yes.

Kate: 00:56:17

And I think.

Kate: 00:56:19

One of the reasons that I wanted to, to deep dive on water with you is

Kate: 00:56:24

because I think that gaining that reverence requires some education.

Kate: 00:56:31

Like we can't, we can't have reverence for what we might not know or understand.

Kate: 00:56:37

And like you said, when we turn on that tap, there isn't the knowledge of where

Kate: 00:56:44

that is coming from and the issues and the, all the threads that that pulls on.

Kate: 00:56:52

And so it, we have to illuminate these spaces before we can begin to change

Kate: 00:56:59

them, if that makes sense, before we can create a, an economy of peace.

Cate: 00:57:04

And I wanna, I wanna add this in there because I think I wrote something

Cate: 00:57:09

to you recently and I can't remember it, but what brought I, I was just thinking

Cate: 00:57:13

that , if you are a person who lives in Bend, Oregon, you might be listening

Cate: 00:57:18

to this or whatever city, you might be listening to this and be like, You know,

Cate: 00:57:21

the, the response that I think has been the enculturation that has happened has

Cate: 00:57:25

been like, well, you know, turn off the faucet between each time you do a dish

Cate: 00:57:30

and don't take too long of a shower.

Cate: 00:57:32

Like, like, how can we conserve our water consumption is been this

Cate: 00:57:37

placement of responsibility on the individual in these ways that are

Cate: 00:57:42

honestly not gonna move the needle.

Cate: 00:57:44

It's been a campaign to make us feel like, well, shit, I'm not doing good enough.

Cate: 00:57:50

I need to take shorter showers.

Cate: 00:57:52

Meanwhile, the real culprit of this injustice is the fucking golf course

Cate: 00:57:58

developer who's gonna pump the same amount of water out of the ground that the

Cate: 00:58:03

entire city of Pineville uses in a year.

Cate: 00:58:06

Wow.

Cate: 00:58:07

Like that, that's what we should be focusing on.

Cate: 00:58:11

Um,

Kate: 00:58:12

the 32nd golf course.

Kate: 00:58:14

Yeah.

Kate: 00:58:14

Is what you said too.

Kate: 00:58:15

The 32nd golf course, I'm

Cate: 00:58:17

speaking about this, this golf course, the Thornberg

Cate: 00:58:19

Resort, which is this, it's a 17 year battle of Central Oregon.

Cate: 00:58:23

It's been the most epic thing to follow.

Cate: 00:58:25

It has been how I have learned about land use policy and how you

Cate: 00:58:32

battle these things, how you might win in these battles, which comes

Cate: 00:58:36

down to bureaucratic process.

Cate: 00:58:37

But I just wanna frame this because whether it's water,

Cate: 00:58:42

In that dynamic, right?

Cate: 00:58:44

That where they're shining the light over here when it's like, don't

Cate: 00:58:48

pay attention to this over here.

Cate: 00:58:49

Mm-hmm.

Cate: 00:58:50

. And it's the same when it comes to, you know, the oil industry telling

Cate: 00:58:55

you to recycle that yogurt carton.

Cate: 00:58:58

And if you don't, you feel like a fucking failure of a advocate for

Cate: 00:59:03

earth when really it's like they have been funneling all of their

Cate: 00:59:08

sort of efforts into rebranding oil to be the clothes that we wear.

Cate: 00:59:13

And we've totally like missed that because we've been so focused on

Cate: 00:59:17

how we're not recycling well enough.

Cate: 00:59:18

These are the dynamics that, um, I spend time thinking about.

Kate: 00:59:27

I mean, you know that I do too.

Kate: 00:59:29

That when we put the onus on the individual, then we have, we

Kate: 00:59:33

have commuted the conversation from the real issue at hand.

Kate: 00:59:39

And we've also created, uh, what I think is a, a very negative feedback loop

Kate: 00:59:46

between ourselves and our environments.

Kate: 00:59:50

That, that we feel like a blight.

Kate: 00:59:54

And so we further and further move away from our environments

Kate: 01:00:00

instead of recognizing that we are a part of the environment.

Cate: 01:00:04

Yes, Kate?

Cate: 01:00:06

Yes.

Cate: 01:00:06

And that.

Cate: 01:00:09

That feeling like we are a blight, that that separation, that we should remove

Cate: 01:00:17

ourselves from land and let it revert to this bucolic version of wilderness.

Cate: 01:00:22

That separation, that guilt, it lends to what I see and I've seen even be written

Cate: 01:00:30

about as this sort of like, people can be paralyzed by this like doomsday projection

Cate: 01:00:38

that they feel like Earth is on.

Cate: 01:00:40

If you just read the headlines of the news, you could be

Cate: 01:00:44

paralyzed and never take actions.

Cate: 01:00:47

Yes.

Cate: 01:00:47

Because it feels so huge and impossible and we are just fucking up so bad.

Cate: 01:00:53

And that narrative is, I think, whether intentional or not, it is disempowering

Cate: 01:01:01

us to participate in the solutions.

Cate: 01:01:04

And that is yes.

Cate: 01:01:05

What I see so directly and what I really wanna help that access that,

Cate: 01:01:14

that I revolve around helping people find their place in the natural world

Cate: 01:01:20

because I exist here on this farm.

Cate: 01:01:24

That has seen arguably some of the greatest climactic challenges

Cate: 01:01:29

over the past five years.

Cate: 01:01:31

But last year I nearly fr through a field looking at like the bounty

Cate: 01:01:37

and resilience that is possible against the hardest of conditions.

Cate: 01:01:42

And I want people to understand that possibility and that place in the world.

Cate: 01:01:51

Mm-hmm.

Cate: 01:01:52

, I can get

Kate: 01:01:53

emotional talk and the possibility of Me too.

Kate: 01:01:58

Me too.

Kate: 01:01:58

Because I think I asked my friend Molly on an, uh, in her episode of the Mind,

Kate: 01:02:04

body and Soil Podcast, I asked her, what does the soil say about what is possible?

Kate: 01:02:10

And I think the gift that maybe we are given as people that get to interact

Kate: 01:02:18

with land in such an intimate way that have an opportunity to listen is

Kate: 01:02:24

that it feels like so much is possible in a space where that 24 hour news

Kate: 01:02:31

cycle is telling us that we should give up hope that it's not possible,

Kate: 01:02:37

that, that everything is, is on fire.

Kate: 01:02:40

Hmm.

Kate: 01:02:40

And.

Kate: 01:02:42

And I think it does.

Kate: 01:02:43

It separates us, and I think it moves us away from solutions that

Kate: 01:02:48

are based in the earth and towards these more mechanized solutions.

Kate: 01:02:53

It moves us away from regenerative meat and to an impossible burger.

Kate: 01:02:59

It moves us away from leather and into some oil-based leather product.

Kate: 01:03:07

It moves us away from everything that is real and steeped in the incredible

Kate: 01:03:16

reality that is possible when we co-create with nature, which I think

Kate: 01:03:20

is something that when I look at your work, you co-create with nature in

Kate: 01:03:27

all of these different beautiful ways.

Kate: 01:03:29

And I think that maybe this is a good space to bring in Range Revolution.

Kate: 01:03:33

Yeah.

Kate: 01:03:34

And to talk about its role in building an economy of peace and

Kate: 01:03:38

addressing an incredible source of waste within the system.

Kate: 01:03:45

Yeah.

Cate: 01:03:46

Yeah.

Cate: 01:03:47

Range revolution, it's, I wasn't intending to start a new company.

Cate: 01:03:52

I wasn't intending to like take this on.

Cate: 01:03:57

And it's one of those things in life that.

Cate: 01:04:01

My anchor is like, I've just visually always had, I actually have a compass

Cate: 01:04:05

tattooed on my arm because when I was just very young, um, and got this tattoo,

Cate: 01:04:11

the concept was like, it's very easy to kind of get pulled here and there by the,

Cate: 01:04:17

like, the sparkle promise of this and the, you know, sparkle opportunity of that.

Cate: 01:04:23

But to like remember to trust the compass and come back to

Cate: 01:04:29

that center point purpose.

Cate: 01:04:31

So range revolution began because I wanted to create a luggage

Cate: 01:04:36

piece for have stead Hatco.

Cate: 01:04:38

And I was like, I wanna create this awesome luggage piece for hat people.

Cate: 01:04:44

And, um, I want it to be in leathers sourced in a way that I, uh, source

Cate: 01:04:51

everything else in my life, the ethos I lived the rest of my life by.

Cate: 01:04:54

I wanted to find regional hides that were coming from, you know, sustainable

Cate: 01:04:58

or regenerative ranchers that I know.

Cate: 01:05:01

And that was so naive at the time.

Cate: 01:05:04

And what that opened the door to was seeing that all of the hides

Cate: 01:05:11

from all of our cattle, all of our friends cattle, all the mid-size

Cate: 01:05:15

processors that I know of here in Oregon are being thrown into the trash.

Cate: 01:05:20

And it just, it blew my mind.

Cate: 01:05:23

I just couldn't even believe that.

Cate: 01:05:25

I just never thought of that, that system of waste.

Kate: 01:05:28

Yes.

Kate: 01:05:29

And sometimes I, I know processors that pay to have them hauled away most, right?

Kate: 01:05:34

Like, not only are they trash, but they are, they are paying to have them taken

Cate: 01:05:41

away.

Cate: 01:05:41

Yep.

Cate: 01:05:42

They are liabilities to the processors.

Cate: 01:05:44

It is ridiculous.

Cate: 01:05:46

And it's where we're at.

Cate: 01:05:48

Yeah.

Cate: 01:05:49

And I mean, to compound that, you know, in the United States alone it's 5 million

Cate: 01:05:54

hides a year are thrown into the trash.

Kate: 01:05:58

Wow.

Kate: 01:05:59

Into the trash.

Kate: 01:06:00

And this is going into

Cate: 01:06:01

landfills.

Cate: 01:06:01

Yeah.

Cate: 01:06:02

Some might incinerate.

Cate: 01:06:04

So I mean, the options are, uh, landfill it or um Sure.

Cate: 01:06:08

Burn it.

Cate: 01:06:11

Yeah.

Cate: 01:06:12

So that, you know, and then I was like, okay, so, so, This bag, I

Cate: 01:06:18

have, you know, this, this leather product I have, what is this?

Cate: 01:06:21

Where is this coming from?

Cate: 01:06:22

Right?

Cate: 01:06:22

So then I open the door to what are the, you know, commodity leathers

Cate: 01:06:26

and what are those supply chains?

Cate: 01:06:28

And I immediately, you know, was met through with the realization

Cate: 01:06:31

that it's extremely opaque and it's extremely opaque for a reason.

Cate: 01:06:35

Uh, a majority of the commodity leather supply chain can be traced back

Cate: 01:06:41

to, um, I mean it's, it's primarily foreign, so it's going to be importing

Cate: 01:06:46

from New Zealand, China, or Brazil, particularly the Brazilian hides.

Cate: 01:06:50

There's a lot of focus on those right now because they are

Cate: 01:06:53

often products of deforestation.

Cate: 01:06:55

So, you know, we've got the kind of worst, um, systems of aggregation

Cate: 01:07:01

are, uh, kind of rewarded by commodity fashion supply chains.

Cate: 01:07:05

So when I see those two things and I'm like, here we have, uh,

Cate: 01:07:10

hides going into the trash lost realization of asset opportunities

Cate: 01:07:15

for ranchers and processors alike.

Cate: 01:07:18

And then you see systems which are perpetuating deforestation and a

Cate: 01:07:24

globalized violent supply chain.

Cate: 01:07:26

That seems like a solvable problem.

Cate: 01:07:28

How about I solve it

Cate: 01:07:31

? Kate: I heard you say recently

Cate: 01:07:35

of communicating cultural ethos.

Cate: 01:07:38

. I think that that's a double-edged sword right now.

Cate: 01:07:41

That we have what we refer to as art and design in the fashion world, in the fast

Cate: 01:07:46

fashion world, and what ethos that's communicating, which I think through

Cate: 01:07:51

the lens of this conversation, starts to look like an economy of violence.

Cate: 01:07:55

Yeah.

Cate: 01:07:56

Then we have something else that you're building with range revolution.

Cate: 01:08:00

I wonder what that ethos is, and I also wonder a little bit about the numbers

Cate: 01:08:07

on that waste and carcass utilization.

Cate: 01:08:10

Yeah.

Cate: 01:08:11

And what we're looking at and how that can really impact the

Cate: 01:08:16

mar the very tight margins Yeah.

Cate: 01:08:18

Of

Cate: 01:08:18

farming and ranching.

Cate: 01:08:19

Yeah.

Cate: 01:08:20

I mean, you understand this well as a butcher and somebody who works, you know,

Cate: 01:08:24

through Western daughters and all of your own work that, um, you know, in, in your

Cate: 01:08:30

standard processing facility, only about 65% of a cattle carcass is being utilized.

Cate: 01:08:36

And so because we don't utilize hide awful and fat for the most,

Cate: 01:08:43

those are considered waste products.

Cate: 01:08:45

And, um, really the rancher is only getting a return on, um, you

Cate: 01:08:51

know, those primal cuts of meat.

Cate: 01:08:52

And that is when you work in such a small margin business, such as ranching

Cate: 01:08:58

or farming or processing or whole food distribution, all tiny margin businesses.

Kate: 01:09:06

Yeah.

Kate: 01:09:06

One to 3% is what I

Cate: 01:09:08

would put it at.

Cate: 01:09:09

Yes.

Cate: 01:09:09

I don't know what you would put it at.

Cate: 01:09:10

Yes.

Cate: 01:09:10

Through our food.

Cate: 01:09:11

I mean yeah.

Cate: 01:09:12

Even food distributors, like ag connections, like yeah.

Cate: 01:09:15

One to 3% that, uh, lost opportunity of, uh, hide and awful and fat utilization.

Cate: 01:09:23

If we could take a 65% car utilization and raise it to 75 or 80%, that

Cate: 01:09:31

would mean a world of difference in the economic realities of ranchers.

Cate: 01:09:35

Yes.

Cate: 01:09:35

So that's how I started looking at it, was I was like, you know, I've

Cate: 01:09:39

got the, the design mindset that is like, we can solve this supply chain.

Cate: 01:09:44

And then I'm thinking about it like really from like a producer first mindset

Cate: 01:09:49

that if we build this system right, not only can we increase, um, the return to

Cate: 01:09:57

the rancher, a return to the process.

Cate: 01:10:00

If we can build market opportunities that incentivize best practices

Cate: 01:10:07

on land, however that looks to the rancher, but the world is talking about

Cate: 01:10:11

regenerative, you know, principles.

Cate: 01:10:14

If we can build a value added marketplace for those goods that

Cate: 01:10:18

incentivize those practices, then we can increase the return to the rancher

Cate: 01:10:24

and we can increase their ability to implement best practices on land and

Cate: 01:10:30

pollinate through their impact on land.

Cate: 01:10:34

So I see this as this like interconnected opportunity to solve a waste issue, to

Cate: 01:10:42

solve also, what is a consumer issue?

Cate: 01:10:45

Consumers right now are demanding transparency and options that make them

Cate: 01:10:50

feel good about where their dollars go and, and it's solving the economic, well,

Cate: 01:10:56

it's not solving, but it might improve the economic realities for ranchers.

Cate: 01:11:01

And I like to highlight this in the siloed conversation.

Cate: 01:11:07

From a fashion brand's perspective, what I see them focusing on is the

Cate: 01:11:13

materials we want, the materials we wanna talk about, the materials.

Cate: 01:11:18

Um, regenerative, regenerative, regenerative.

Cate: 01:11:21

We don't have regenerative outcomes on land unless producers.

Cate: 01:11:28

Have even the brain space to operate, um, in a way that they can be creative and

Cate: 01:11:36

think about new approaches so that they can imply more regenerative outcomes.

Cate: 01:11:41

When a rancher is just like operating in this fierce space of scarcity,

Cate: 01:11:47

which so many are, it's really hard to, um, learn new things,

Cate: 01:11:54

implement and trial new approaches invest into monitoring their land.

Cate: 01:12:01

So if we want regenerative, we better see these producers get more profitable,

Cate: 01:12:07

and however we source in whatever supply chain we build must further

Cate: 01:12:13

increasing their profits because the profits are in the track right now.

Cate: 01:12:18

Yeah.

Kate: 01:12:20

I think to distill a little bit what you said and to reflect it back

Kate: 01:12:24

to you and see what you think of this, right now we have this negative feedback

Kate: 01:12:28

loop where the very, you know, these yields that, that aren't enough off

Kate: 01:12:34

of whole animal utilization that are sitting, you know, somewhere between

Kate: 01:12:38

60 and 67%, I think at best, honestly.

Kate: 01:12:42

Yeah.

Kate: 01:12:44

Are giving the rancher, you know, maybe one to 3% to work with.

Kate: 01:12:48

But in all honesty, I think many farmers and ranchers are working in

Kate: 01:12:52

the red, which is very frightening.

Kate: 01:12:55

And so then they have no, no, just like you said, no brain space, no

Kate: 01:13:01

working capital to become creative about how to build different systems,

Kate: 01:13:06

have no incentive to work in a more holistic context within their practices.

Kate: 01:13:14

But there is an opportunity here to change that into a positive feedback loop where

Kate: 01:13:20

you have this, this structure that is supporting the farmer and rancher at a

Kate: 01:13:29

financial, financially sustainable space.

Kate: 01:13:33

And I think that, that, that has always been critical to me.

Kate: 01:13:36

We can't have a conversation about sustainability without

Kate: 01:13:39

talking about financial sustainability or even viability.

Kate: 01:13:42

Yeah.

Kate: 01:13:43

And.

Kate: 01:13:44

You then have what is creating a better feedback loop?

Kate: 01:13:47

You have better yields, and you have a space for, for all parts of the

Kate: 01:13:53

animal to go, you are decreasing waste.

Kate: 01:13:57

And you are modeling this sort of idea of economic peace out of nature, which

Kate: 01:14:05

there is no waste in nature, right?

Kate: 01:14:07

Like there, there nature does not waste like even what we

Kate: 01:14:11

call waste, human waste, right?

Kate: 01:14:13

Like fecal matter or urine.

Kate: 01:14:16

That is not waste.

Kate: 01:14:17

It is part of a beautiful cycle and loop.

Kate: 01:14:21

And we can make that here too.

Kate: 01:14:25

Yeah.

Kate: 01:14:26

And

Cate: 01:14:26

you're doing that.

Cate: 01:14:28

We are building it.

Cate: 01:14:29

And what that looks like from a tangible like supply chain perspective is, so

Cate: 01:14:35

right now through the systems I have, um, available to aggregate these hides,

Cate: 01:14:42

the ranchers are getting $10 per hide.

Cate: 01:14:46

That is, and this is a, you know, a a just a, a raw salted hide.

Cate: 01:14:50

This is not a finished leather.

Cate: 01:14:53

I am building the economic model of range revolution so that we can get that

Cate: 01:14:58

number at least to $25 returned to the rancher, plus a return to the processor.

Cate: 01:15:03

So in order to do that, like we have to reverse engineer, like we have

Cate: 01:15:07

to build this company with like that regenerative, ecological and social

Cate: 01:15:12

outcomes as a center pillar around which we build the rest of the company

Cate: 01:15:17

and the rest of the organization.

Cate: 01:15:19

And so we have to reverse engineer from, okay, finish product.

Cate: 01:15:24

So I'm focusing on primarily like handbags and luggage, some smaller items

Cate: 01:15:30

like journals and other little things.

Cate: 01:15:33

But I'm focusing on this sector of the fashion industry being handbags

Cate: 01:15:38

because they have a built in profit margin that will allow this to happen.

Cate: 01:15:43

So I'm strategic in what area of the industry I focus on, and then

Cate: 01:15:48

setting those prices so that we can work backwards through manufacturing

Cate: 01:15:54

to the processing and tannery, to the kill floor, to the rancher to

Cate: 01:16:01

get that dollar amount back to them.

Cate: 01:16:04

What I see happening like in the fashion, Sector, like in general,

Cate: 01:16:09

like in the big, big like companies that are established who are trying

Cate: 01:16:13

to like source regenerative materials.

Cate: 01:16:15

Like they're still looking for those commodity leather prices because

Cate: 01:16:19

they don't think holistically.

Cate: 01:16:20

They don't think producer first.

Cate: 01:16:22

They just want the raw material to put a stamp on something and the consumer

Cate: 01:16:26

will be like, yay, regenerative.

Cate: 01:16:28

But like, how are we actually building the whole system that improves the

Cate: 01:16:33

economic reality starting there.

Cate: 01:16:35

And that's so much easier said than done.

Cate: 01:16:38

Like , it's like these are all good ideas, but you're working against the stream.

Cate: 01:16:45

You're working counterculture, you're working against models in which

Cate: 01:16:51

they have shareholders that hold CEOs of companies responsible to

Cate: 01:16:56

hit this profit number for the year.

Cate: 01:16:59

And you're also working against how we've built businesses for

Cate: 01:17:04

the past however many decades.

Cate: 01:17:06

And what we've got is we've got these giant organizations that

Cate: 01:17:11

have added sustainability like an appendage to this large organization.

Cate: 01:17:17

Mm-hmm.

Cate: 01:17:18

. And it's not working like the past 20 years of companies talking about

Cate: 01:17:23

sustainability has moved the needle very slowly and barely at all.

Cate: 01:17:28

Like it's not working that model of business.

Cate: 01:17:32

Range Revolution is addressing the waste issue, and it's also addressing

Cate: 01:17:39

like how we build businesses into the future to be holistic in just

Cate: 01:17:45

how you structure an organization.

Kate: 01:17:49

As you were talking, I had this picture of range revolution in, in

Kate: 01:17:56

the center of a revolution acting as an axis around which two changes

Kate: 01:18:04

are happening in parallel ways.

Kate: 01:18:06

One sort of like a top down and one from the bottom up.

Kate: 01:18:10

Mm-hmm.

Kate: 01:18:10

, and I haven't fully decided which is which, but in one space you're

Kate: 01:18:15

building a, a feedback loop.

Kate: 01:18:18

You're building another feedback loop between soil, rancher,

Kate: 01:18:23

processor and this consumer good.

Kate: 01:18:26

That is then flowing more money back to the farmer and rancher and soil.

Kate: 01:18:31

Right.

Kate: 01:18:31

And so like here is this little revolution that is happening right here.

Kate: 01:18:36

Yeah.

Kate: 01:18:37

But then tangentially to that is this revolution where this bag,

Kate: 01:18:43

this, this bag that is traceable is asking much bigger industries.

Kate: 01:18:50

To question their own business practices and the way that they form business.

Kate: 01:18:55

And I know that that is an incredibly tall and difficult order.

Kate: 01:18:59

Yeah.

Kate: 01:18:59

But I also know it's one you're capable of doing and that that revolution,

Kate: 01:19:08

that process that happens within that industry where you're saying, I need

Kate: 01:19:13

you c e o of this company to look at the soil and understand that that is

Kate: 01:19:20

at the heart of what is important.

Kate: 01:19:23

Yeah.

Kate: 01:19:24

And to recreate economic flow around that access instead of the profit

Kate: 01:19:33

margin that has become the axis of all of all corporate enterprise.

Kate: 01:19:40

Does that, does

Cate: 01:19:41

that make sense?

Cate: 01:19:41

Absolutely.

Cate: 01:19:42

And this is, you know, uh, somebody who's been very supportive in my journey of

Cate: 01:19:47

this business said to me, or actually said in a conversation or a speech he

Cate: 01:19:52

gave, which I hold onto, is in this next chapter of building an Economy of Peace.

Cate: 01:19:59

Um, he didn't reference that, but I will, we b we need both.

Cate: 01:20:03

We need the bigger to get better, and we need the better to get bigger.

Cate: 01:20:09

Yes.

Cate: 01:20:09

We have, you know, and, and Kasad Family Farms and Range Revolution

Cate: 01:20:14

are awesome little examples of this bottom up approach.

Cate: 01:20:19

Meanwhile it had to have meaningful impact.

Cate: 01:20:23

We will need those giant organizations to improve.

Cate: 01:20:28

Uh, I don't have super high hopes as to like exactly how good they're gonna

Cate: 01:20:33

get, but if we can shift their sourcing, if they can funnel the resources

Cate: 01:20:39

that they have, the capital impact that they could make, even just a few

Cate: 01:20:45

percentages into regenerative producers, that would make literally, uh, a life

Cate: 01:20:52

a life difference for that rancher.

Cate: 01:20:54

And it's really a tiny percentage of their sourcing supply chain.

Cate: 01:20:59

So it's a yes and model.

Kate: 01:21:03

Yes.

Kate: 01:21:04

Yes.

Kate: 01:21:05

And I, I wanna bring this back to a quote that I pulled from you and you

Kate: 01:21:09

said, we do not anymore or do not yet live in a time which acknowledges the

Kate: 01:21:14

extensive ecological services that agriculturalists provide to our species.

Kate: 01:21:19

Planetary

Cate: 01:21:20

survival.

Cate: 01:21:22

Mm-hmm.

Cate: 01:21:24

. Yep.

Cate: 01:21:24

That was inspired, I think I wrote that thinking about, uh, how the

Cate: 01:21:32

agriculturalists of Central Oregon are carrying the burden and weight of

Cate: 01:21:36

saving the organ spotted frog species.

Cate: 01:21:40

Which is a species that used to exist from, you know, British Columbia all

Cate: 01:21:46

the way down through California on the west coast, and now it's last stand

Cate: 01:21:50

of survival is here in central Oregon.

Cate: 01:21:52

And so we're responsible to save this species after all others

Cate: 01:21:56

operated in a way in which this species started to go extinct.

Cate: 01:22:00

And no one else has any accountability.

Cate: 01:22:03

No one else takes any responsibility.

Cate: 01:22:05

Nobody else pays any sort of ecological reparations for the damages done, but the

Cate: 01:22:10

agriculturalists will carry that burden.

Cate: 01:22:13

And that's,

Kate: 01:22:16

I think that's true of many, many things.

Kate: 01:22:18

Oh yeah.

Kate: 01:22:22

Well beyond, well beyond the spotted frog, not to downplay

Cate: 01:22:26

that importance.

Cate: 01:22:27

Yeah.

Cate: 01:22:28

And I mean, when I, if I bring this back to leathers and

Cate: 01:22:31

supply chain sourcing mm-hmm.

Cate: 01:22:33

, we're gonna create the same dynamic if we don't think holistically about

Cate: 01:22:38

building supply chains with holism.

Cate: 01:22:40

Because if all we have now is x, y, Z corporations saying gimme, gimme

Cate: 01:22:45

regenerative raw materials, and they don't take any active investment into

Cate: 01:22:53

bolstering the producers who manage the land, which may provide the growing

Cate: 01:22:57

supply chain, they are now demanding.

Cate: 01:22:59

Then all we're gonna have is this like extractive, um,

Cate: 01:23:04

hoarding of resources again.

Cate: 01:23:07

So that is what I am hoping to help frame is that while we talk about,

Cate: 01:23:16

or, or food, I mean, you know, it it, you have to become an active

Cate: 01:23:21

participant in supporting these systems that we all now want to have.

Cate: 01:23:28

And just because all of a sudden, um, we say we want a, a regenerative piece of

Cate: 01:23:35

meat and we want a regenerative hide, um, does not mean that supply chain exists.

Cate: 01:23:40

And this will be a process of building and it's gonna take

Cate: 01:23:42

really people to support it.

Cate: 01:23:46

I'm

Kate: 01:23:47

really appreciative that you are able to look at

Kate: 01:23:50

economies of scale in this space.

Kate: 01:23:52

I think that it is, it is not easy to build an alternative to this system

Kate: 01:24:01

without considering how we, how, how people that are working in a holistic

Kate: 01:24:08

model are scaling, are aggregating, are pooling community resources into

Kate: 01:24:15

whether that's the processor or the distributor, that we have to have

Kate: 01:24:20

economies of scale in order to work as counterculture to the industrial complex.

Cate: 01:24:28

Yeah.

Cate: 01:24:30

Yeah, I mean, um, I've been a part of, you know, small local food systems and

Cate: 01:24:38

we've been a very small farm in the past, and I see, you know, and I see the, the

Cate: 01:24:44

smaller systems of, of craft and Artis, you know, artisans creating of products.

Cate: 01:24:50

But in order to make this stuff like truly work from an economic standpoint,

Cate: 01:24:57

there is an economies of scale we've got to reach to make that work.

Cate: 01:25:01

And building to that and then honoring what the limits of that

Cate: 01:25:07

growth are, what we've not been very good at yet as a culture.

Cate: 01:25:12

Mm-hmm.

Cate: 01:25:12

. Mm-hmm.

Cate: 01:25:13

. So both taking this, this mindset of say, you know, uh, uh, where places like

Cate: 01:25:20

you and I come from, from a small farm mentality, from a regional mentality

Cate: 01:25:24

and, and learning what it takes to build to an economies of scale that

Cate: 01:25:29

then also honors the limits to growth.

Cate: 01:25:32

Like that is something I'm extremely interested in.

Cate: 01:25:35

And that is, that is everything that I am doing with range.

Cate: 01:25:38

It is building a model.

Cate: 01:25:42

To exemplify that.

Cate: 01:25:43

And you know, we're also doing that in food systems here in Central Oregon.

Cate: 01:25:47

You know, Uhhuh, , we could just, I was about to say, yeah, we could just,

Cate: 01:25:51

you know, we could just sling our veggies, you know, direct to consumer

Cate: 01:25:54

and our meats direct to consumer like we've done for the past decade.

Cate: 01:25:59

Um, but what we kept hitting is, you know, um, in a need to scale up

Cate: 01:26:04

some, we need to have these models of distribution that support farmers

Cate: 01:26:08

reaching those economies of scale.

Cate: 01:26:10

And so, you know, one of the ways that we've taken action to do this is we

Cate: 01:26:15

actually a small group of us in our region of Central Oregon, we took over a

Cate: 01:26:21

local food distribution business, which was called Agricultural Connections.

Cate: 01:26:25

And we've worked with them for the past nine years and we've grown up together

Cate: 01:26:30

and we, we acquired that business and we had placed it into cooperative ownership,

Cate: 01:26:34

really identifying that the key to growing more young farmers, the key to bolstering,

Cate: 01:26:43

uh, a resilient and decentralized local food system here in central Oregon

Cate: 01:26:48

came down to having a distribution mechanism which would support these

Cate: 01:26:55

farmers in these ethos in perpetuity.

Cate: 01:26:58

And so what was previously a privately held L L C was that owner was ready to be

Cate: 01:27:05

done and we just, we knew that mechanism couldn't land in the wrong hands.

Cate: 01:27:10

So, Long-winded way of saying like, in order to secure our ability to scale

Cate: 01:27:17

the growing of food and the distribution of food and the accessibility of, of

Cate: 01:27:22

organically grown or regeneratively grown foods in this region, we

Cate: 01:27:26

had to also grow distribution.

Kate: 01:27:29

I think you are incredible, and I don't know if you see it through

Kate: 01:27:33

this lens, and so I want, I wanna share how I see it, but you are identifying

Kate: 01:27:42

problems and pinch points within the system and creating models and templates

Kate: 01:27:49

that are both honoring that there must be an economy of scale while also having

Kate: 01:27:55

reverence for the fact that in nature there is no growth in perpetuity and

Kate: 01:28:01

that there has to be a cap and to work to find that sweet spot is what we need.

Kate: 01:28:08

And, and you're doing that and you're templating it across, across several

Kate: 01:28:13

different sectors, which is incredible.

Kate: 01:28:18

Um, I just think you're, I just think you're amazing and I just

Kate: 01:28:22

wanna pause and tell you that

Cate: 01:28:24

Well, you know how I feel about you too, and I just thank you

Cate: 01:28:27

for seeing, you know, the work I do.

Cate: 01:28:30

Sometimes it can feel so like, well if I talk to the wrong person about

Cate: 01:28:34

it, they might be like, oh my God.

Cate: 01:28:36

Like, you know, like it's, it could seem disjointed, but there is the, the

Cate: 01:28:40

access that runs through it all, that is the, the, the congruence That is the

Cate: 01:28:47

continuity that I need for all this work.

Cate: 01:28:50

Not to feel too, like all over the place.

Cate: 01:28:52

Yeah.

Cate: 01:28:53

Cause I, I do operate around this access so I can context switch from this work.

Cate: 01:28:59

Can't have started this work on range and this work on agricultural

Cate: 01:29:04

connections all with the through line.

Cate: 01:29:07

And to touch on this kind of brings us back to what we were talking about

Cate: 01:29:13

earlier with like, people feeling so overwhelmed by the big picture.

Cate: 01:29:18

It's liberating, it's empowering to think within limits.

Cate: 01:29:24

So it, it really is because if I were to think about solving all of

Cate: 01:29:30

the world's food insecurity issues, I may as well not get up tomorrow.

Cate: 01:29:36

. You know, it's like how do I even, you know, but what I can do is I

Cate: 01:29:41

can focus here on Central Oregon.

Cate: 01:29:44

And even just Central Oregon is a complicated, big enough system for

Cate: 01:29:48

me to even think about how do we deal with, uh, a, a future of, of food supply

Cate: 01:29:55

here, but, but those limits, um, it is, it, it's a liberating place to operate

Cate: 01:30:01

because you can have real impact.

Cate: 01:30:03

I wanna tell a little story about somebody who I admire greatly.

Cate: 01:30:06

This is one of my please here in Central Oregon, and her name is

Cate: 01:30:10

Megan French and she has a farm in Bend called Boundless Farmstead.

Cate: 01:30:15

Megan has always been a local food advocate and she worked at some

Cate: 01:30:21

nonprofits and she worked at the, uh, local Vore, which is a, uh, a local food.

Cate: 01:30:28

It's not quite a cooperative, it's a not-for-profit grocery store in

Cate: 01:30:32

Bend that sources all local food.

Cate: 01:30:35

And, and then she started farming and now they have a farm.

Cate: 01:30:40

And, um, Megan, I think it was seven years ago, she started, uh, an

Cate: 01:30:46

event here called Fill Your Pantry.

Cate: 01:30:49

And she had seen models of this done in the Valley of Oregon.

Cate: 01:30:53

And fill Your Pantry is this book by Farmer's Market that happens in the fall.

Cate: 01:30:58

And so people who come.

Cate: 01:31:01

Are just, you know, consumers who want access to local food.

Cate: 01:31:05

And you come and you buy, uh, food and bulk direct from

Cate: 01:31:09

your farmers and ranchers.

Cate: 01:31:10

And the idea is fill your pantry for the winter ahead.

Cate: 01:31:13

So it's your staples, it's your onions and your potatoes and your winter

Cate: 01:31:17

squash, your meats and your bone broths and your garlic and all the things

Cate: 01:31:21

that are gonna store all winter long.

Cate: 01:31:23

And if you're lucky, there'll be a little bit of the last of the season's,

Cate: 01:31:26

greens, you know, your ferments, your soap, your honey, like it's all

Cate: 01:31:31

the things amazing from this area.

Cate: 01:31:33

And you know, the first year it was at this grain hall, you know, it was a tiny

Cate: 01:31:37

little thing that we all did and we all had our like little tables and it was

Cate: 01:31:41

just small and folky and it was great.

Cate: 01:31:44

And this last year, so here, seven of fill your pantry in central

Cate: 01:31:48

Oregon took up this entire giant parking lot at the fairgrounds.

Cate: 01:31:53

There were thousands of people that came to buy local food to eat all winter long.

Cate: 01:31:58

I'm even willing to share numbers.

Cate: 01:32:00

I mean, on that single day, our farm does, you know, between 10 to $15,000 of sales.

Cate: 01:32:08

And that's just our farm.

Cate: 01:32:09

So think about that multiplied between all the other vendors who are there.

Cate: 01:32:14

Um, wow.

Cate: 01:32:15

And it's, and people now c and it was snowing.

Cate: 01:32:18

The weather was shitty, but everyone came and they were bundled up.

Cate: 01:32:21

People come literally with their like, um, garden.

Cate: 01:32:26

Like people get serious about preparation.

Cate: 01:32:28

Mm-hmm.

Cate: 01:32:29

people pre-order.

Cate: 01:32:31

And so in seven years this, because Megan French was like, you know what?

Cate: 01:32:35

Local food matters and I wanna do this here.

Cate: 01:32:38

She started with this tiny event in the Grange, which now has this huge,

Cate: 01:32:44

not only like environmental impact in that you've got all these people who

Cate: 01:32:49

are gonna be eating local food winter long, now you've got a, like a totally

Cate: 01:32:54

different cultural connection and mindset.

Cate: 01:32:57

We not thousands of people who think about how they're gonna prepare to eat for the

Cate: 01:33:02

winter ahead by buying local, you've got a huge economic impact both in the lives

Cate: 01:33:09

of the farmers who walk away from that event with more money for the winter.

Cate: 01:33:13

Mm-hmm.

Cate: 01:33:14

. And then you've also got all the people who might like local food or organic food

Cate: 01:33:20

can come with this sort of like nose up, like, like it's for rich people attitude.

Cate: 01:33:25

But when you buy in bulk at these events, you're buying food for

Cate: 01:33:29

far cheaper than you could ever get it at the grocery store.

Cate: 01:33:32

Yes.

Cate: 01:33:32

Um, so you've got low income people who can access the most nutrient

Cate: 01:33:37

dense food possible through both buying and it's just incredible.

Cate: 01:33:41

That's one individual who just decided to do something and the

Cate: 01:33:46

ripples of that decision are changing.

Cate: 01:33:50

Like the attitudes and, and the relationships between consumers

Cate: 01:33:54

and growers and local food systems in central Oregon.

Cate: 01:33:57

And so that right to come back to like the liberation of operating within limits.

Cate: 01:34:03

Megan can't solve all of our food distribution issues, but this one decision

Cate: 01:34:10

in central Oregon has made massive impact.

Cate: 01:34:15

Yeah, absolutely.

Kate: 01:34:16

And every time you post about this, every year that you post

Kate: 01:34:19

about this, I feel such a deep desire for this to be something

Kate: 01:34:24

that is happening in my community.

Kate: 01:34:26

And I see what a feedback loop it creates.

Kate: 01:34:28

That it's good for every shareholder in that system and is honoring, you know,

Kate: 01:34:34

the farmer, consumer education ecosystem.

Kate: 01:34:39

Every piece of that is being nourished in this one space and it's bringing people

Cate: 01:34:45

together.

Cate: 01:34:46

And I didn't say this and it's so worth saying, the emotional, um,

Cate: 01:34:53

fulfillment both ways for our farmer and a rancher to see that sort of

Cate: 01:34:58

show up on a snowy day in November.

Cate: 01:35:02

Like that makes you feel appreciated and like you matter and your

Cate: 01:35:07

services to the world are valued.

Cate: 01:35:10

And when times are hard and agriculturalists can feel like shit,

Cate: 01:35:15

every possible thing is against us.

Cate: 01:35:17

Like just that interaction at the end of the season can be the thing

Cate: 01:35:21

to fill the cup to keep going.

Cate: 01:35:24

And yeah, in the reverse, the consumer feels their sense of

Cate: 01:35:29

place they are and then they are consuming their sense of place.

Cate: 01:35:33

The food becomes a part of who they are.

Cate: 01:35:35

That feedback loop for the consumer and what that might do for them.

Cate: 01:35:41

Like don't be overwhelmed by the weight of the world and what the media will tell

Cate: 01:35:47

you about the burning of it all because here's your place in it and it's showing

Cate: 01:35:52

up at fill your pantry and your place is also to then go home and cook that food.

Cate: 01:35:58

And every time you grab a potato in an onion from your burlap in the garage

Cate: 01:36:03

and you start cooking, like it will bring a smile to your face because

Cate: 01:36:08

you'll think about the fill your pantry day, you'll think about the

Cate: 01:36:11

conversations you had with your growers.

Cate: 01:36:13

You'll feel this sense of connection to all of it.

Cate: 01:36:18

And it's just the most beautiful for the words economics of peace

Cate: 01:36:23

to jump off the page and embody and experience fill your pantry.

Cate: 01:36:28

And what Megan created is an economics of peace.

Cate: 01:36:34

Thank you for sharing that,

Cate: 01:36:37

. Kate: I think that's a really,

Cate: 01:36:42

change can look like just within a community, just at that scale.

Cate: 01:36:47

Yep.

Cate: 01:36:47

It's, and yeah.

Cate: 01:36:51

I wanna take a little bit of a turn if that's okay with you.

Cate: 01:36:54

Yeah.

Cate: 01:36:55

And

Cate: 01:36:55

I'm having so much fun, . Good, good.

Cate: 01:36:59

Um,

Kate: 01:37:01

sometimes I want to build a reverse interview.

Kate: 01:37:05

I think that oftentimes sometimes we get, we get a peek inside somebody's

Kate: 01:37:11

mind, and then we hear about what they're building in the world.

Kate: 01:37:15

Mm-hmm.

Kate: 01:37:16

. But sometimes I think the reverse can be even more powerful, that you get a chance

Kate: 01:37:22

to see what someone is building in the world, to see the revolutions that, that

Kate: 01:37:29

that outer edge of their self is making.

Kate: 01:37:33

Yeah.

Kate: 01:37:33

And it gives you this curiosity to really get at that access point.

Kate: 01:37:41

And I thought a lot about what could possibly lay at

Kate: 01:37:48

the center of your incredible.

Kate: 01:37:54

Resilience, your incredible

Cate: 01:37:57

ingenuity, your

Kate: 01:37:59

desire to, to problem solve, your desire to connect.

Kate: 01:38:04

And I kept coming back to this idea of where beauty and

Kate: 01:38:13

function and nature intersect.

Kate: 01:38:17

When I look at what you've built, whether it's with Kasad Family Farms, or it's with

Kate: 01:38:23

Range, or it's with Halstead Hat Company like you are looking at like, what, what

Kate: 01:38:29

function can I, can I bring, like how can I bring functionality to this world?

Kate: 01:38:36

How can I bring a sense of fulfilling something that is really needed, whether

Kate: 01:38:43

it's just a hat on our head or a full integration of a community, or an entire

Kate: 01:38:52

different way of looking at a supply chain that changes both the, the entry

Kate: 01:38:58

point for farmers and soil and marrying it with just the most incredible beauty.

Kate: 01:39:05

I think I see that in your bags, and I see that in your hats, but

Kate: 01:39:10

I also see that in the way that you approach community, right?

Kate: 01:39:14

Like this, a beautiful economy of peace with which you pro approach

Kate: 01:39:20

your life and your community.

Kate: 01:39:24

You marry it all with nature, whether it's dying in the hats, in the hues

Kate: 01:39:28

of the high desert or the nature of the hides from your cattle, or just an

Kate: 01:39:36

incredible field of biodiverse plants that are propping one another up.

Cate: 01:39:42

Mm-hmm.

Cate: 01:39:44

, how did

Kate: 01:39:45

you get there?

Kate: 01:39:45

What, what is at the heart of that, that that like drives Kate to create those

Cate: 01:39:51

systems?

Cate: 01:39:52

Hmm.

Cate: 01:39:55

That is the forever journey.

Cate: 01:39:57

finding out , you know, what is, what is what is in the marrow

Cate: 01:40:02

that like produces this kind of insatiable desire to do these things.

Cate: 01:40:08

Mm-hmm.

Cate: 01:40:08

, I used to just mm-hmm.

Cate: 01:40:10

think that it could be my upbringing.

Cate: 01:40:12

I was thinking about this because actually, right, we talked earlier

Cate: 01:40:16

about epigenetics and seeds and we talk about in resilience on land and

Cate: 01:40:24

that adaptation and let's bring that into like, observation of like self.

Cate: 01:40:29

So if I were to think about what I come from, what's my seed stock?

Cate: 01:40:34

I come from my mother and father obviously.

Cate: 01:40:38

Um, and what do they come from?

Cate: 01:40:41

My mom's side of the family comes from the Ukraine and Poland.

Cate: 01:40:47

Uh, so Eastern European Jewish heritage and my dad's side of the family is an

Cate: 01:40:54

Irish kind of Norwegian background.

Cate: 01:40:57

And so, I mean, why am I the way that I am, I would say is a makeup of all

Cate: 01:41:07

of the ancestors that came before me, their resilience, what they came from.

Cate: 01:41:13

I actually learned, so a little family history.

Cate: 01:41:16

So Halstead is a town in Norway, that's my last name.

Cate: 01:41:20

And um, oftentimes, you know, when people immigrated, it may not have been our

Cate: 01:41:25

family name when they lived there, but when they immigrated, they often took

Cate: 01:41:27

the name of the town that they left.

Cate: 01:41:30

And so coming from that region, HAAD is actually this like genre of functional

Cate: 01:41:36

and beautiful Tin VAEs out of Norway.

Cate: 01:41:41

So you can like look up like Haad tin.

Cate: 01:41:45

So I don't know exactly, I want to go and actually explore that, but there's

Cate: 01:41:50

literally like a genre of like beautiful functional tin artwork out of Norway.

Cate: 01:41:57

And then if I think about my mother's side of the family, when her ancestors

Cate: 01:42:04

left the Ukraine and Poland great in time, like right before World

Cate: 01:42:09

War ii, like really took hold.

Cate: 01:42:12

Um, and then the antisemitism was already so strong.

Cate: 01:42:15

And that's what.

Cate: 01:42:17

Led them to leave.

Cate: 01:42:18

Which actually, to take the story a step further, it was, I think

Cate: 01:42:22

my great, great, great grandmother who, her family sent her to America.

Cate: 01:42:30

And one of the reasons they sent her was because she was, well, she

Cate: 01:42:35

was sort of a danger to herself.

Cate: 01:42:37

She was a very outspoken, um, and strong young woman.

Cate: 01:42:41

And so thus she was the target.

Cate: 01:42:43

She would be a target of, uh, an antisemitic campaign.

Cate: 01:42:48

So, I mean, why am I the way I am?

Cate: 01:42:51

I come from very strong Jewish women,

Cate: 01:42:57

and, and I feel this too, like when I know no lack of challenges

Cate: 01:43:07

in everything that we're doing.

Cate: 01:43:08

Like really we have hard, hard days and, and I can speak optimistically and

Cate: 01:43:14

with fortitude, but um, I have low days.

Cate: 01:43:18

But on those low days, like what I really think about is like, , this ain't hard.

Cate: 01:43:27

You know, like, this ain't hard.

Cate: 01:43:29

Think about what my family endured to allow me to be here to have this chance

Cate: 01:43:35

to suffer and work through my own suffering like that, that family, that

Cate: 01:43:43

ancestral perspective of resilience.

Cate: 01:43:46

In the honoring of all that had to come before to allow me this chance to suffer

Cate: 01:43:53

through my own, like stupid problems of like, why am I addicted to social media?

Cate: 01:43:58

Like, gimme

Kate: 01:43:59

a fucking, you

Cate: 01:44:03

don't, what was, you know, enslavement and persecution and daunting

Cate: 01:44:10

trials to get to where we are today.

Cate: 01:44:12

I know you have this in you too, and that's a part of your

Cate: 01:44:15

story of Western daughters.

Cate: 01:44:17

So like, that is why I am the way I am.

Cate: 01:44:20

And then my mother's side of the family for context too.

Cate: 01:44:23

So, um, when they ended up in Missouri, her family had a small,

Cate: 01:44:30

they were actually Ukrainian ranchers.

Cate: 01:44:33

Um, and so when they landed in Missouri, uh, they had a, a small

Cate: 01:44:38

processing facility in a butcher shop.

Cate: 01:44:41

And then I think it was my grandpa, guy, guy, they then spun out

Cate: 01:44:47

and had a, a dress, like a dress company, pattern makers and, and

Cate: 01:44:52

the fabrication of women's dresses.

Cate: 01:44:54

So like, Who knows how all of this stuff, like, I didn't know this history.

Cate: 01:45:00

Like I, I don't consciously think of this history, but like, look

Cate: 01:45:04

at what I'm doing in the world.

Cate: 01:45:05

, like I'm designing and raising meat and, you know, utilizing hides, like there's

Cate: 01:45:12

something coming through and I would love to believe that it is a product of the.

Cate: 01:45:19

Yeah,

Kate: 01:45:20

I was thinking the other day that we talked so much about

Kate: 01:45:23

intergenerational trauma, but we don't talk about intergenerational

Kate: 01:45:27

joy or intergenerational strength.

Kate: 01:45:31

Yes.

Kate: 01:45:32

I, I, I'm not sure what that, what that word is.

Kate: 01:45:36

Yeah.

Kate: 01:45:36

But as you

Cate: 01:45:37

traversed

Kate: 01:45:38

that story, like we don't, we don't talk about the good that

Kate: 01:45:42

is being passed down and how that is absolutely transformative to us,

Kate: 01:45:48

even without knowing that history.

Kate: 01:45:51

And I think that that's so incredible that you ended up doing what you're

Kate: 01:45:55

doing given, given that history.

Kate: 01:45:57

Isn't that crazy?

Kate: 01:45:58

Um, it's wild.

Kate: 01:46:00

And so I think, I think we have to remember that epigenetics, right?

Kate: 01:46:06

They can, they can shift us in a negative direction.

Kate: 01:46:09

Yeah.

Kate: 01:46:10

But they can also shift us in a wildly positive direction that there

Kate: 01:46:14

is this intergenerationally built

Cate: 01:46:17

strength.

Cate: 01:46:17

Yeah.

Cate: 01:46:18

And I would argue like no doubt, I mean, we're all gonna be handled,

Cate: 01:46:21

handed some not so positive aspects of our family history.

Cate: 01:46:27

Yes.

Cate: 01:46:27

But I would love every neat person to feel this way on your hardest of hard days.

Cate: 01:46:32

In your moments of doubt.

Cate: 01:46:34

If you can tap into this understanding that the only.

Cate: 01:46:40

Reason you are here today is because of the resilience and the fortitude

Cate: 01:46:46

of your ancestors to get you here.

Cate: 01:46:48

Like that.

Cate: 01:46:51

That is something that can make you feel a fortitude that comes from a well,

Cate: 01:46:57

that is so much deeper than like, oh, today I have the strength to X, y, or Z.

Cate: 01:47:03

This is like, this is, this is very deep ancestral fortitude that provides you the

Cate: 01:47:08

opportunity to be here today and struggle through all of our modern day struggles.

Cate: 01:47:14

How's it end of perspective?

Cate: 01:47:15

You know, like it does the x, y a chance to suffer.

Cate: 01:47:19

Oh yeah.

Cate: 01:47:19

Like,

Kate: 01:47:20

I love this.

Kate: 01:47:20

A chance to suffer.

Kate: 01:47:21

That put me, that put a lot into perspective.

Kate: 01:47:24

To me, it is an opportunity

Cate: 01:47:26

to suffer.

Cate: 01:47:26

I have this, um, little thing on my wall right now in my hat workshop, which is

Cate: 01:47:32

the effort is the reward, and mm-hmm.

Cate: 01:47:35

whether you think about the chance to suffer, like, I'm so grateful I get to

Cate: 01:47:39

get up today and take on this challenge.

Cate: 01:47:43

It might feel so big if you have this myopic lens, but that, that big with

Cate: 01:47:47

the myopic lens gets very small when you zoom out from a generational perspective.

Cate: 01:47:51

So that can help when things feel overwhelming and big, but

Cate: 01:47:55

also like it, it could be easy to get lost in the day to day.

Cate: 01:48:00

Like say, I'll just use that, that, uh, that in my hat workshop, if I were

Cate: 01:48:04

to just focus on myself as like, I've got X amount of orders, I've got these

Cate: 01:48:09

materials that are delayed, I've got this customer that's waiting on me.

Cate: 01:48:13

Like that could feel like, um, I don't know, annoying right?

Cate: 01:48:21

. But if I shift the mentality when I'm in my heart workshop with that phrase

Cate: 01:48:26

of the effort is the reward, like all of this process, I, it is a gift to get

Cate: 01:48:33

to be here dealing with this challenge.

Cate: 01:48:35

And I truly find that shifts my mentality if I ever get into one

Cate: 01:48:41

of those little ruts of, of the day-to-day menial tasks with such a

Kate: 01:48:48

powerful heritage and with such beautiful gifts being passed

Kate: 01:48:54

down your line, how has Heston's entrance into the world changed the

Kate: 01:48:59

way that you, that you view sharing

Cate: 01:49:03

that with him?

Cate: 01:49:05

Oh,

Cate: 01:49:08

Heston is the most incredible thing to happen to me,

Cate: 01:49:16

There's nothing more that I want for Heston to see exemplified for him then.

Cate: 01:49:29

Parents driven by a sense of purpose.

Cate: 01:49:33

Like, uh, how do I distill that?

Kate: 01:49:40

Well, let me add this piece into it.

Kate: 01:49:42

Let me, let me find it in my notes.

Kate: 01:49:44

Yeah.

Kate: 01:49:46

Let me find it here.

Kate: 01:49:47

Because you texted me earlier and you texted me a song by the Beach

Kate: 01:49:51

Boys, , and you told me to imagine you air punching your shackles on

Kate: 01:49:57

the long promised road of letting my soul's purpose manifest on earth.

Cate: 01:50:04

I may have spoken a little bit of weed when I texted that to you, , I

Kate: 01:50:10

loved it so much because it communicated little bit of suffering,

Kate: 01:50:16

lot of purpose, long journey, . And we don't know if we have kids.

Kate: 01:50:23

Like I want them to see that.

Kate: 01:50:25

Like I want them to see purpose.

Kate: 01:50:26

I want them to see that it isn't immediate.

Kate: 01:50:28

Yeah.

Kate: 01:50:29

And that

Cate: 01:50:30

it's hard.

Cate: 01:50:33

Yeah.

Cate: 01:50:35

. So anyone who's listening should go immediately.

Cate: 01:50:37

Pause, go listen to Long Promise Road by the Beach Boys, and imagine airing

Cate: 01:50:44

your way through throwing off the shackles on your path to purpose.

Cate: 01:50:51

Um, we'll link it so

Kate: 01:50:52

it's easy.

Cate: 01:50:56

Yeah, man, that is, well, like, okay, let me like, let me reverse.

Cate: 01:51:02

So like, what has been the example that I saw?

Cate: 01:51:05

So I observed my parents in raising of three daughters, which now that I

Cate: 01:51:11

have one child, I'm like, holy shit, how did they do it With three, both

Cate: 01:51:17

self-employed people, middle class people who had lots of challenges, they had

Cate: 01:51:24

financial challenges, they had legal challenges, they had, you know, probably

Cate: 01:51:29

their own interpersonal challenges.

Cate: 01:51:31

They had family challenges and I saw them struggle.

Cate: 01:51:37

And I also had a sort of relationship with them where they were so open

Cate: 01:51:42

and honest with me and us about talking about those challenges.

Cate: 01:51:49

Um, very open about admitting or talking about their own failures and, and

Cate: 01:51:55

that's how parenting was modeled to me.

Cate: 01:51:58

I mean, yeah, I, I mean things that my father has said to me over the years,

Cate: 01:52:03

like so much of what he said to me, like lives in me on a day-to-day basis.

Cate: 01:52:12

One thing that I'll point out, like this is a silly little story, right?

Cate: 01:52:17

But my dad one time had to fill in as a, a, a substitute coach for my

Cate: 01:52:22

like, you know, U nine, like, like I'm eight years old or something, right.

Cate: 01:52:26

Playing soccer.

Cate: 01:52:27

And he's our substitute coach.

Cate: 01:52:29

And in that particular game with my dad as my coach, I scored

Cate: 01:52:34

like eight goals in a game.

Cate: 01:52:35

Like, it was absurd.

Cate: 01:52:37

, like, like I had, I had that sort of a figure in my life who made

Cate: 01:52:43

me feel like I could do anything.

Cate: 01:52:47

And at the same time, like when I was in college and I was just

Cate: 01:52:52

like, what am I doing here?

Cate: 01:52:54

Like, what's the point?

Cate: 01:52:55

You know, like I felt like I was really wasting time and he would

Cate: 01:53:00

just be super real and be like, you're learning how to learn.

Cate: 01:53:03

You're also learning how to check bureaucratic boxes, which is a

Cate: 01:53:06

very real part of life to it.

Cate: 01:53:08

Get your degree, don't complain.

Cate: 01:53:10

You know, it was like, don't drop out, just do the thing.

Cate: 01:53:14

It's suffering.

Cate: 01:53:15

It's fine.

Cate: 01:53:16

She also, like, he was a long distance runner, so like long distance runners

Cate: 01:53:20

all have to love suffering to a certain extent, you know, and, and like, yeah.

Cate: 01:53:26

And my mother, like my mother is just sort of this, um, she's a psychologist

Cate: 01:53:31

and she is a very cerebral person.

Cate: 01:53:34

And if I were to give my mom a mission statement, which like she

Cate: 01:53:38

has sort of voiced in her own.

Cate: 01:53:40

Her study of psychology and family systems, her goal in

Cate: 01:53:46

being a clinical psychologist has always been to help people do

Cate: 01:53:50

better in difference with others.

Cate: 01:53:53

So no matter what, we're gonna have these moments of conflict in difference,

Cate: 01:53:58

whether it's in the family system or it's in our communities at large.

Cate: 01:54:03

And she's operated from a place of just wanting to help people do better

Cate: 01:54:08

when they're indifference with others.

Cate: 01:54:12

My father was Fi, he was an activist.

Cate: 01:54:15

He was full of like passion and fire and like that lives in me.

Cate: 01:54:19

He's a count.

Cate: 01:54:20

I mean he dropped out of college.

Cate: 01:54:24

He likes to say he went to college to find a wife cuz that's where he met my mom.

Cate: 01:54:29

. . He went on to be the academic.

Cate: 01:54:32

He dropped out and he went, there was when the Vietnam War and the recruitment

Cate: 01:54:37

for that war was really hot and heavy and he was a conscientious objector and

Cate: 01:54:42

he dropped out of college to go study at Joan BA's Institute for nonviolence.

Cate: 01:54:48

So like that activism, that fire paired with this like cerebral,

Cate: 01:54:58

thoughtful systems thinker of my mom.

Cate: 01:55:02

Like that was what was modeled to me.

Cate: 01:55:04

And, and the honesty and the transparency and the willingness to talk with

Cate: 01:55:08

humility about their shortcomings, that is why I am the way I am.

Cate: 01:55:15

So when I think about the marrying of what Heston is, the combination

Cate: 01:55:19

of me and Chris, Chris brings this groundedness in this, um, this connection

Cate: 01:55:31

to spirit that I think Heston will have.

Cate: 01:55:37

And I think he will have the kind of drive and mischievousness

Cate: 01:55:44

that, um, both Chris and I share.

Cate: 01:55:47

And so I guess I'm rambling to say that I want Heston to have so much of what

Cate: 01:55:56

I feel so fortunate to have been given.

Cate: 01:55:58

And, and that is the opportunity to see parents work with purpose

Cate: 01:56:03

and find his own place in that work and be driven by purpose and,

Cate: 01:56:08

and humility and reverence and.

Kate: 01:56:16

I, I just think you, you are a gift to him as much as he is a gift to you.

Kate: 01:56:21

And it was beautiful to hear that, and it's been, it's been a gift for me to

Kate: 01:56:25

watch your transition into motherhood and to navigate that as you also navigate

Kate: 01:56:33

owning a farm and these businesses.

Kate: 01:56:36

And you have a really beautiful way of, of balancing it in all of its imperfection.

Kate: 01:56:44

Mm-hmm.

Kate: 01:56:45

and I, I don't wanna, I don't wanna over glorify it, but I think that's what makes

Kate: 01:56:51

it so beautiful to me, is that I just see you navigating it with such a plumb.

Cate: 01:56:58

I worried about motherhood.

Cate: 01:57:00

I, I'll be totally honest, and we've had our own private conversations about

Cate: 01:57:03

this, because I never felt particularly maternal, I think, in a, in a way that

Cate: 01:57:07

maybe motherhood is presented, you know?

Cate: 01:57:11

And I worried about a loss of independence and I, I, you know, I had, you know,

Cate: 01:57:16

I worried about not being fully ready, like we're not fully financially ready or

Cate: 01:57:21

I, in my career, am not fully ready yet to give this time to this little being.

Cate: 01:57:26

And the best advice anyone ever gave me was my friend was like, you'll

Cate: 01:57:30

never be ready, but you figure it out.

Cate: 01:57:31

You know, like it, um, And again, , like we have all the conveniences

Cate: 01:57:39

of modern day life at our disposal.

Cate: 01:57:41

Like what did my ancestors do to figure it out back in the day?

Cate: 01:57:45

And you know, there, there's plenty of books about this.

Cate: 01:57:49

I hardly read any books about pregnancy or motherhood, but there was one that

Cate: 01:57:54

I read called The Continuum Concept.

Cate: 01:57:56

And I just think if you study other cultures, uh, and how they

Cate: 01:58:00

rear children, you can just strap.

Cate: 01:58:03

And honestly, I look to ranch women.

Cate: 01:58:05

The only women I wanted to talk to about being pregnant and having children were

Cate: 01:58:11

like my rancher friends who were mothers.

Cate: 01:58:12

Because those women will just tell you that you strap that baby

Cate: 01:58:17

on and you get to it, you know?

Cate: 01:58:19

Yeah.

Cate: 01:58:20

What's not over glorify it.

Cate: 01:58:21

It's hard.

Cate: 01:58:22

And there are days where you feel like you're failing or like, you know,

Cate: 01:58:29

ah, shit, I didn't get enough done.

Cate: 01:58:32

Or man, he really saw me be frazzled and short with Chris, or,

Cate: 01:58:38

you know, but like he's also just along for the right of it all.

Cate: 01:58:45

And he has been a catalyst for me in a way that I don't think anything

Cate: 01:58:53

else could have been like when it comes to self-care, when it comes

Cate: 01:58:58

to zeroing in my focus on purpose.

Cate: 01:59:02

When it comes to working on my relationship with my husband, nothing

Cate: 01:59:07

has been more of a catalyst than to bring a Heston into the world.

Cate: 01:59:13

, you know, and it took me a long time.

Cate: 01:59:17

It, it took me a long time to just find my equilibrium and I'm still

Cate: 01:59:22

finding my footing as a mother.

Cate: 01:59:24

He's constantly changing and evolving and so what he needs from us is

Cate: 01:59:29

constantly like changing and evolving.

Cate: 01:59:31

But I've grown more in this past year and a half than I have in

Cate: 01:59:36

the past 10 years, you know?

Kate: 01:59:41

Do you think mm-hmm.

Kate: 01:59:44

Think something that's interesting about what you said is that

Kate: 01:59:48

being farmers teaches us how to change and evolve, right?

Kate: 01:59:51

And I think what you and Chris have experienced is an unintentional evolution

Kate: 01:59:57

of farming from what you thought it was going to be with these pressures

Kate: 02:00:01

around water into something else.

Kate: 02:00:04

And I wonder if parenthood does that too.

Cate: 02:00:08

Oh yeah.

Cate: 02:00:09

Oh yeah.

Cate: 02:00:10

My entry into motherhood was the most, uh, tangible lesson of, take your

Cate: 02:00:18

ideas of control over what will be, and throw that shit out the window.

Cate: 02:00:23

You know, like, um, I had a whole vision and plan for my birth.

Cate: 02:00:31

It did not go at all according to the plan.

Cate: 02:00:36

I had a vision, the plan for what that first 90 days of motherhood would be like.

Cate: 02:00:41

And I read the book and I was ready with all that auric recipes, and I was not

Cate: 02:00:46

gonna leave the house for this many days.

Cate: 02:00:49

And guess what?

Cate: 02:00:49

Like wife presented situations that required me to travel with

Cate: 02:00:54

Heston when he was very little and that wasn't a part of the plan.

Cate: 02:00:59

So motherhood in and of itself is absolutely, like you said, just

Cate: 02:01:05

this process of letting go of your preconceived notions of what will be

Cate: 02:01:11

and listening to what you will become.

Kate: 02:01:19

I love that.

Kate: 02:01:20

I don't think, I think that's just such a great message and I'm, I'm

Kate: 02:01:23

grateful to you for, for showing me what might be possible in motherhood

Kate: 02:01:27

as I navigate that, that whether or not that is in the cards for me, because

Kate: 02:01:32

I think that you've done it in a way that has opened up possibility for me.

Kate: 02:01:38

Hmm.

Kate: 02:01:39

Just, yeah, I'm really appreciative.

Cate: 02:01:42

I'm so glad.

Cate: 02:01:43

I think more, more women, you know, probably need alternative just

Cate: 02:01:48

views of, of, of what it can be.

Cate: 02:01:51

And to also talk openly about what's hard, what we.

Cate: 02:01:56

How we might be selfish, right?

Cate: 02:01:58

Like, those are taboo subjects when you're supposed to be this

Cate: 02:02:02

all giving maternal force, right?

Cate: 02:02:07

But it's the women in my life who got real with me and were like,

Cate: 02:02:12

Hey, , you might look out that window on week three of being inside the

Cate: 02:02:18

house and really resent your husband.

Cate: 02:02:21

You know, like you don't mean to, you don't want to,

Cate: 02:02:25

and just know that's normal.

Cate: 02:02:28

, you know, like , like that's not in the books, right?

Cate: 02:02:32

Um, those conversations to shine a light on the shadowy

Cate: 02:02:37

sides, I think are necessary.

Cate: 02:02:44

Okay.

Cate: 02:02:44

We're back together.

Cate: 02:02:45

We were talking about motherhood.

Cate: 02:02:47

We were talking about motherhood.

Cate: 02:02:48

And one of the, um, the concepts that I most appreciate in helping

Cate: 02:02:55

me think about, um, being a mother who you know is, is striving and

Cate: 02:03:02

achieving and driven by purpose, and Heston is a part of this world.

Cate: 02:03:06

Chris and I have created, I don't know if this came from

Cate: 02:03:10

which book this came from, but.

Cate: 02:03:15

I think it's actually quite damaging when we raise children in a way that

Cate: 02:03:20

we make them feel like they're the center of the universe and we actually

Cate: 02:03:23

build our entire lives around them.

Cate: 02:03:27

And I think there's like, there's pressure to do that sort of, and yes.

Cate: 02:03:32

Um, and in fact, like I want Heston to feel a part of the bigger thing that he is

Cate: 02:03:41

a part of here with us and in this family.

Cate: 02:03:43

Like he has a, he has a role and he has a purpose here with us, and he has

Cate: 02:03:49

folded into that life and into that purpose and into that work every day.

Cate: 02:03:55

That really helped me because I think the fear I operated from about

Cate: 02:03:59

motherhood was that I would have to stop or neglect or push to the side these

Cate: 02:04:06

things that are so important to me in order to build my world around him.

Cate: 02:04:10

And that was incorrect thinking.

Cate: 02:04:12

It, it, it is, uh, in, uh, a service to them to raise them in

Cate: 02:04:19

a way where they understand they are not the center of the universe.

Cate: 02:04:23

They are a part and they have a role in this bigger system.

Cate: 02:04:27

We all work to create.

Cate: 02:04:29

That's what I love about ranch and farm kids, is they are raised with

Cate: 02:04:33

chores and purpose and like, get your coat on and get in the trucks.

Cate: 02:04:38

We gotta go get that cow.

Cate: 02:04:40

Like, you know, So that's liberating too.

Kate: 02:04:46

I think I needed to hear that on a couple of different levels

Kate: 02:04:48

because I think there is this sort of Instagram idea of children being the

Kate: 02:04:54

center and this loss of independence, which is a fear that I share.

Kate: 02:04:58

And I also think that from the outside, looking in, not as a parent, which

Kate: 02:05:04

gives me massive blinders, but all the same, that children need a purpose.

Kate: 02:05:10

They need jobs within their family system to be, uh, a member of that family.

Kate: 02:05:17

And I think we talked about this when we were together.

Kate: 02:05:19

I think so often with kids there is this, their help isn't helpful,

Kate: 02:05:24

it makes more, it makes more mess.

Kate: 02:05:28

And so we discourage them from helping when that natural state is that they

Kate: 02:05:33

want to integrate into life and to have purpose, to have chores, to have

Kate: 02:05:39

a job, to have to have place within the ecosystem of the family unit.

Kate: 02:05:45

Yeah.

Kate: 02:05:46

And I know that Nicolette Naiman and I touched on some of the intangible

Kate: 02:05:51

benefits of ranching being, giving children that space and that purpose

Kate: 02:05:57

and that agency and ownership.

Cate: 02:05:59

Yeah.

Cate: 02:06:00

And I have to bring this back to the fact that my partner, I have

Cate: 02:06:05

a Chris in this, like, oh my God, what an incredible father he.

Cate: 02:06:10

And Chris's background before he went fully into farming, his last town job

Cate: 02:06:15

was, he was a Montessori school teacher, so he carries with him that, uh,

Cate: 02:06:20

mentality about children and fostering that creativity and that usefulness.

Cate: 02:06:25

So that sort of Montessori approach to make the entire environment

Cate: 02:06:29

around them, like at their scale, like all the utensils of their size.

Cate: 02:06:34

So they pick up that whisk and it feels natural in their hands.

Cate: 02:06:37

So Heston whisks the eggs with me and it makes sense to him because it

Cate: 02:06:42

at his, at his scale and his level.

Cate: 02:06:44

Yeah.

Cate: 02:06:45

Building that into a child that's gonna feel really useful and have purpose,

Cate: 02:06:52

I think is, you know, I'm hopeful.

Cate: 02:06:57

He seems pretty awesome so far.

Kate: 02:07:00

he seems very awesome.

Kate: 02:07:04

, I wanna ask you some, we've talked a lot about driving forces and

Kate: 02:07:09

purpose, and one of the things that you've written about that I think

Kate: 02:07:15

is really beautiful is the way.

Kate: 02:07:19

Your father, even after death, serves as part of the voice in your head and part

Kate: 02:07:25

of the conversation that you have with yourself as you go throughout the world.

Kate: 02:07:30

And I think what I didn't realize before recording this podcast with you

Kate: 02:07:34

was just how much heritage and family systems you're carrying, that you are

Kate: 02:07:43

carrying the voices of both of your parents, that you are carrying the

Kate: 02:07:50

epigenetics or the intergenerational strengths, however we wanna put it, of

Kate: 02:07:55

this long lineage of function and beauty.

Kate: 02:07:59

And you're also carrying this relationship with your father.

Kate: 02:08:06

And I'm, I'm doing a podcast on Wednesday with a woman who talks about home,

Kate: 02:08:10

home, death care, and home funeral care.

Kate: 02:08:12

Mm-hmm.

Kate: 02:08:13

. Cate: And she talks about

Kate: 02:08:16

forming a relationship with our dad.

Kate: 02:08:18

And this really

Cate: 02:08:19

struck me.

Kate: 02:08:20

Oh, that's still a relationship that we have.

Kate: 02:08:25

And as I was thinking about it, I think out of anybody, I know

Kate: 02:08:29

you exemplify carrying that

Cate: 02:08:31

relationship with you daily,

Kate: 02:08:34

and I hope it's okay that we touch on this and, and let me know if it's not.

Kate: 02:08:38

But I, I love, I love the way that

Cate: 02:08:40

you write about this.

Cate: 02:08:43

I love to talk about my dad.

Cate: 02:08:45

I always just, I'm nervous or I, I preface it with that the, um, like

Cate: 02:08:50

emotions just live very close to the surface, so it's not a bad thing.

Cate: 02:08:54

Yeah, they're just, they there, they're there and they

Cate: 02:08:56

present when I talk about him.

Cate: 02:08:57

But my dad passed away, God, I guess it would've been a year,

Cate: 02:09:03

not a year and a half yet.

Cate: 02:09:07

November of 2021.

Cate: 02:09:11

And, you know, such, I think I've spoken a lot about him and it's

Cate: 02:09:17

probably perceived such an incredibly important force in my life.

Cate: 02:09:23

So

Cate: 02:09:27

the loss of that in physical form has been a huge adjustment for the whole family.

Cate: 02:09:38

And one of the ways that I have learned to adjust is through not necessarily

Cate: 02:09:50

physically speaking out loud to him every day, but absolutely talking to him

Cate: 02:09:58

every day and the cycles of grief, like.

Cate: 02:10:11

That time was so interesting because I was a brand new mother.

Cate: 02:10:18

Heston was about three months old when things started to shift with his health.

Cate: 02:10:23

He had been sick with cancer, but he had been doing very well and it

Cate: 02:10:27

just kind of all of a sudden things shifted and took a different turn.

Cate: 02:10:31

And so I was still was kinda like wide open portal post-birth, learning how

Cate: 02:10:41

to be a mother, and then in between the space of like birth and then death

Cate: 02:10:48

of my father and that continued on after he passed that liminal space,

Cate: 02:10:55

which is, I mean, very disembody time.

Cate: 02:10:59

I've never really experienced that sense of disembodiment that I did then.

Cate: 02:11:04

And I would say then, as in like a year and what, what really kind

Cate: 02:11:12

of has helped me, yeah, has to just reframe this relationship with

Cate: 02:11:19

him in which he was my best coach.

Cate: 02:11:22

He was my dear friend, he was my confidant.

Cate: 02:11:27

When I doubted myself, he had the confidence in me to

Cate: 02:11:33

just say, you're doing great.

Cate: 02:11:34

Keep going.

Cate: 02:11:36

And there were moments in those early months where I really crumbled because

Cate: 02:11:42

I thought I didn't have him to turn to.

Cate: 02:11:44

And that's not true.

Cate: 02:11:49

Uh, he lives in me.

Cate: 02:11:51

He is the reason I make decisions, the way I make decisions.

Cate: 02:11:56

The principles he set me up with, I mean, he actually did a, an

Cate: 02:12:03

interview with my aunt who was training to be a hospice nurse.

Cate: 02:12:08

Hmm.

Cate: 02:12:08

And when she asked him, what are some of the lessons that you have,

Cate: 02:12:15

I viewed on your daughters, right?

Cate: 02:12:17

That, that you give you comfort.

Cate: 02:12:22

He didn't really wanna talk about anything specific.

Cate: 02:12:25

He just wanted to talk about these, like the principle that he imbued

Cate: 02:12:31

on us and that we carried those principles so clearly and he had

Cate: 02:12:36

all the confidence in the world because we carried those principles.

Cate: 02:12:42

So, I mean, what are those principles?

Cate: 02:12:46

You actually highlighted this in your notes, which made me so happy to see like

Cate: 02:12:50

what is, what is one of those principles that I carry with me every single day?

Cate: 02:12:57

And this is a quote, he gave me great books throughout my lifetime.

Cate: 02:13:02

But, um, this was a, an article that this man Ira Sand Pearl wrote.

Cate: 02:13:08

Ira Sand Pearl was one of his teachers when he left college and studied at

Cate: 02:13:12

Joan BA's Institute for nonviolence.

Cate: 02:13:15

Ira Sand Pearl was one of those teachers, and one of the leaders of that

Cate: 02:13:19

movement was a dear friend to Joan Baez.

Cate: 02:13:21

He owned a bookstore in the Palo Alto area of California.

Cate: 02:13:25

And when Joan Baez was a high school student, she used to

Cate: 02:13:28

go hang out at his bookstore.

Cate: 02:13:30

And so Ira Sand Pearl is like this formative figure of who Joan Baez became.

Cate: 02:13:36

And so this piece that Ira Sand Pearl wrote, my dad sent to me.

Cate: 02:13:42

And one of the sentences that I just wanna highlight from that piece that is like

Cate: 02:13:47

a principle my father imbued in us, is that the ends do not determine the means.

Cate: 02:13:56

The means determine the ends.

Cate: 02:13:59

And when you, when you operate from that perspective, I think that creates

Cate: 02:14:05

a type of human that will look at the world in the way that I look at the

Cate: 02:14:11

world in which, yeah, I will reverse engineer things and understand that like

Cate: 02:14:18

those means will determine the ends.

Cate: 02:14:20

And so consciously, like be be very conscientious about.

Cate: 02:14:26

The work you do, the impact you have, the decisions you make, and how you apply

Cate: 02:14:31

yourself in the short time on Earth.

Cate: 02:14:40

I love that.

Cate: 02:14:42

I think

Kate: 02:14:42

that that in so many ways encapsulates so much of this conversation

Kate: 02:14:48

and so much of that, that purpose that you have unshackled here on earth,

Kate: 02:14:57

and to carry that voice with you, to carry that relationship with you.

Kate: 02:15:08

I think from the outside looking in there, it is like a seed in the

Kate: 02:15:15

way that you are building so many of the other relationships that are

Kate: 02:15:20

taking root within your community.

Kate: 02:15:22

Yeah.

Cate: 02:15:24

And can I, um, can I give you one more quote please.

Cate: 02:15:29

Cause I want the whole world to think about this and I think about

Cate: 02:15:32

this, and this was, um, in one of those conversations about regret that

Cate: 02:15:37

my dad had with me, things he may have, things he may have regretted.

Cate: 02:15:42

This came up and he touched on this because he didn't really.

Cate: 02:15:53

He was reflecting on like, why didn't I continue with my life as an activist?

Cate: 02:15:59

He met my mother.

Cate: 02:16:00

He supported her and her academic endeavors to get her

Cate: 02:16:04

PhD and become a psychologist.

Cate: 02:16:05

He became a contractor and he supported our family through being a contractor.

Cate: 02:16:10

And he felt like he had perhaps left this activism behind, you know?

Cate: 02:16:15

And so he was reflecting on this maybe regret of like,

Cate: 02:16:20

why didn't I continue that?

Cate: 02:16:23

And I would say to him, like, dad, look at the three daughters you created.

Cate: 02:16:27

You just created three activists out in the world like you did

Cate: 02:16:32

your part, , because me and my sisters are all driven way.

Cate: 02:16:39

But this is something he said in one of those conversations,

Cate: 02:16:43

and I'll just read it.

Cate: 02:16:47

But there were so many ways to pursue work, paying work that could have been

Cate: 02:16:51

a career, working against idiot ideas that lead to war, hunger, the ruining

Cate: 02:16:57

of lives and loss of human potential.

Cate: 02:16:59

That racism means oppression of innocent people based on just

Cate: 02:17:03

where they were born on the planet.

Cate: 02:17:05

There's no shortage of idiot ideas out there that need to be worked against.

Cate: 02:17:10

That's maybe the definition of an activist doing important work against idiot ideas,

Cate: 02:17:16

harmful ideas, unsustainable ideas.

Cate: 02:17:19

We need more activists and less obedient people, Tom Halstead.

Cate: 02:17:25

Hmm.

Cate: 02:17:27

So in no matter where we are and what exact work we end up doing

Cate: 02:17:34

in the world, there's always an opportunity to work against the

Cate: 02:17:39

idiot ideas that need us to revolt.

Cate: 02:17:46

. Yes.

Kate: 02:17:47

Yes.

Cate: 02:17:49

A revolution.

Cate: 02:17:50

A revolution of, of time, of, of beauty and of peace.

Cate: 02:17:55

I mean, his, his, his pacifism, his hi, hi.

Cate: 02:18:00

His, uh, rebelling that like, uh, violence is the answer.

Cate: 02:18:05

Like he was ready to go to jail based on those principles.

Cate: 02:18:09

And so in all the revolutions that I think myself or my sisters, uh, work

Cate: 02:18:15

on, they are ones of nonviolence.

Cate: 02:18:18

You know,

Kate: 02:18:20

I wonder for people that are listening to this and an economy of peace

Kate: 02:18:31

resonates with them that a Tom Halstad level of activism resonates with them.

Kate: 02:18:39

Do you have any, any parting words for the loops and the circles and

Kate: 02:18:45

the revolutions that we create?

Cate: 02:18:50

Hmm.

Cate: 02:18:51

I think to really like to write that statement down and spend

Cate: 02:18:55

time thinking on it, that the ends do not determine the means.

Cate: 02:18:59

The means determine the ends.

Cate: 02:19:02

And really, like our time on planet Earth is so finite and small, and the

Cate: 02:19:15

work that we do, it really matters.

Cate: 02:19:18

It, it really matters where we place our energy.

Cate: 02:19:22

And there are so many ways to make a, a living in which you can contribute

Cate: 02:19:29

your unique genius to create a more beautiful, a more peaceful world.

Cate: 02:19:37

And, and, and think about that.

Cate: 02:19:41

And things don't have to change or shift, or you don't

Cate: 02:19:44

gotta quit your job right now.

Cate: 02:19:46

But like, if, if that idea were to pollinate and the creative genius of

Cate: 02:19:52

people were applied in ways that created beauty and peace, and we thought about

Cate: 02:19:59

how we consume from the food that we eat, to the fiber on our body to, you

Cate: 02:20:08

know, where we buy our groceries, to how we pay it forward in the world.

Cate: 02:20:14

That ripple.

Cate: 02:20:15

Like I wanna come back to that story of this woman, Megan, starting

Cate: 02:20:18

this one event in Central Oregon and how big those ripples become.

Cate: 02:20:24

There's so much opportunity to find your place in all of these movements,

Cate: 02:20:29

and it doesn't, you don't have to be the farmer to participate in

Cate: 02:20:32

creating an agriculture of peace.

Cate: 02:20:35

You know, you can be the cook, you can show up in the kitchen.

Cate: 02:20:39

We can't do this if you don't show up in the kitchen and cook and have

Cate: 02:20:44

reverence for that, which we grow for you.

Cate: 02:20:46

So we need you to cook.

Cate: 02:20:47

So actually, let's bring this back to something you and I went off on

Cate: 02:20:51

in New York, which is like, Woohoo.

Cate: 02:20:53

Yes.

Cate: 02:20:54

We really need you to cook.

Kate: 02:20:55

Like we need you to cook.

Kate: 02:20:57

We need you to cook.

Kate: 02:20:59

I could get what?

Kate: 02:20:59

It's the intersection of health and agriculture and creating strong families.

Kate: 02:21:08

All of these things

Cate: 02:21:10

we need you to cook.

Cate: 02:21:11

We need you to cook, and I won't do it anymore justice.

Cate: 02:21:14

And say like Michael Pollen did a series called Cooked

Cate: 02:21:18

that you can find on Netflix.

Cate: 02:21:19

So next time you sit down and chill out and do your Netflix time, watch

Cate: 02:21:23

Michael Pollen's series cooked and you'll be so inspired to cook.

Cate: 02:21:27

Because it doesn't need to be complicated, but we need you to participate.

Cate: 02:21:31

Nope.

Cate: 02:21:31

In this economy of peace, we're trying to build in agriculture and we need

Cate: 02:21:35

you to demand that the companies you buy products from, like think about

Cate: 02:21:42

the producer and they think about the impacts on land and when it, in the raw

Cate: 02:21:46

material sourcing, we do and we really actually, we need people to participate

Cate: 02:21:52

in politics like local politics.

Cate: 02:21:55

I mean all this stuff that we talked about earlier.

Cate: 02:21:57

Mm-hmm.

Cate: 02:21:57

, whether it's access to food or it's water in your region to grow that food

Cate: 02:22:05

or it's land use policies, people have to participate in that avenue too.

Cate: 02:22:12

But anyways, I mean, I could get all cerebral about all the asks I have,

Cate: 02:22:16

but like I, I love actually bringing it back to that thing that you and I both

Cate: 02:22:21

could just go off on, which is that revolution really starts in the kitchen

Cate: 02:22:27

because you know what, like my own health journey, your health journey, the

Cate: 02:22:33

health of community and place, like it all starts with that which we consume.

Cate: 02:22:38

Like our brains won't function very well.

Cate: 02:22:41

We won't think very clearly will exist in sort of this brain fog of

Cate: 02:22:46

feeling shitty if we don't eat well.

Cate: 02:22:49

So we need your mind to work very well, so you can put yourself

Cate: 02:22:53

to work in the best of ways.

Cate: 02:22:56

And that will start in the kitchen.

Cate: 02:22:58

So if you want a revolution, if you of beauty and of an economy of peace,

Cate: 02:23:04

then I guess I'll just ask you to cook.

Cate: 02:23:10

Hmm.

Cate: 02:23:12

. Kate: I love it.

Cate: 02:23:13

It's perfect.

Cate: 02:23:13

I have absolutely nothing to add.

Cate: 02:23:15

Please cook your way to this revolution.

Cate: 02:23:17

Cook your way to an economy of peace.

Cate: 02:23:19

Yeah, yeah.

Cate: 02:23:20

Um, we will have links for everything in the show notes, but where can people find

Cate: 02:23:26

you?

Cate: 02:23:28

So you can find me on Instagram in some ways.

Cate: 02:23:34

Uh, you know, uh, the Farm is Kasad Family Farms.

Cate: 02:23:38

You can find me at Range Revolution.

Cate: 02:23:42

You can find me at Halstead Hatco.

Cate: 02:23:45

We actually just started this perfect imperfect YouTube page.

Cate: 02:23:50

I think the title of the page is First Generation Organic Farming on YouTube.

Cate: 02:23:55

And we're really aiming to share more the stuff we talked about earlier,

Cate: 02:24:01

our closed loop farming system, and how we've implemented these organic

Cate: 02:24:06

practices and scaled our operation from a three acre farm to 360 acre farm.

Cate: 02:24:13

Um, we really wanna start kind of peeling back the veil and showing people more.

Cate: 02:24:17

So, uh, follow us on YouTube.

Cate: 02:24:20

Uh, it will be, uh, a fun journey to kind of roll that.

Cate: 02:24:25

Well,

Kate: 02:24:26

I love, I love every bit of that.

Kate: 02:24:28

I can't wait to, I can't wait for people to hear this and I can't

Kate: 02:24:33

wait for people to hear Chris.

Kate: 02:24:34

And so I'll give that little teaser that Chris is gonna come on here eventually and

Kate: 02:24:39

talk to me too, and we'll explore more, more elements of Kasad family farms and

Cate: 02:24:45

all of this together.

Cate: 02:24:46

And I'm just so grateful for the

Kate: 02:24:49

work that you're doing in the world.

Kate: 02:24:50

You inspire me and you inspire me in so many different levels.

Kate: 02:24:54

Like you inspire me in, in the way that you parent and the way that

Kate: 02:24:58

you entrepreneur, in the way that you farm, in the way that you dream.

Cate: 02:25:04

Hmm.

Cate: 02:25:04

Really, really big dreams.

Cate: 02:25:06

Oh, right.

Cate: 02:25:07

Back at you, Kate.

Cate: 02:25:08

You're such a kindred friend.

Cate: 02:25:10

, really.

Cate: 02:25:11

It's uh, what a fun and just like wonderful experience to do this with you.

Cate: 02:25:16

You have such a gift.

Cate: 02:25:17

Like yeah, you really pull out some incredible things of people.

Cate: 02:25:22

And you know this like I support you to no end.

Cate: 02:25:29

Thank you.

Cate: 02:25:29

Thank you for

Kate: 02:25:30

that support that's meant the world to me.

Kate: 02:25:36

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The

Kate: 02:25:40

Mind, body and Soil Podcast.

Kate: 02:25:42

If what you found resonated with you, may I ask that you share it with

Kate: 02:25:46

your friends or leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts.

Kate: 02:25:51

This act of reciprocity helps others find mind, body, and soil.

Kate: 02:25:56

If you're looking for more, you can find us@groundworkcollective.com

Kate: 02:26:01

and at Kate underscore Kavanaugh.

Kate: 02:26:03

That's k a t e underscore

Cate: 02:26:07

K A V A N

Kate: 02:26:09

A U G H On Instagram.

Kate: 02:26:12

I would like to give a very special thank you to China and Seth Kent of the

Kate: 02:26:16

band, allright Allright for the clips from their beautiful song over the

Kate: 02:26:20

Edge from their album, the Crucible.

Kate: 02:26:22

You can find them at Allright allright on Instagram and