Episode 75
Building an Agriculture We Can Live In with Cole Mannix
In this episode, I (Kate Kavanaugh) sit down with Cole Mannix of Old Salt Co-Op to talk about vertically integrating the agriculture of the middle with systems that are built to serve ranchers and consumers alike. Cole talks about his innovative business (and funding) structure, the upcoming Old Salt Festival in Helmville, Montana in June (I went last year and spoiler alert: it’s amazing) and the business they’re building to serve a regional food system. At least, those were all the topics that brought us to the table to talk. But what came out was something a bit different - it was about what it means to live a good life and a good death, about how limits can give us surprising freedom, and what it means to build a business that you can truly live in. This episode is about taking risks and dreaming really big dreams, really digging into what it means to build bridges and communities, and about what we might leave our children. Cole, with a varied background in biology, philosophy, and theology who grew up on the Mannix Family Ranch, had a lot to say, and to be honest, I just sat and listened.
Find Cole and Old Salt:
Old Salt Co-Op Festival Early Bird Tickets
Resources Mentioned:
The Cross and the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth
Support the Podcast:
Connect with Kate:
email: kate@groundworkcollective.com
Current Discounts for MBS listeners:
- 15% off Farm True ghee and body care products using code: KATEKAV15
- 10% off Home of Wool using code KATEKAVANAUGH
KateK20 for 20% off Herbal Face Food
Transcript
Howdy, I'm Kate Cavanaugh, and you're listening to the Mind, Body, and Soil podcast, where
Speaker:we're laying the groundwork for our land, ourselves, and for generations to come by
Speaker:looking at the way every thread of life is connected to one another.
Speaker:Communities above ground mirror the communities below the soil, which mirror the vast community
Speaker:of the cosmos.
Speaker:As the saying goes, as above, so below.
Speaker:Join me as we take a curious journey into agriculture, biology, history, spirituality,
Speaker:health, and so much more.
Speaker:I can't wait to unearth all of these incredible topics alongside you.
Speaker:Hello, everyone.
Speaker:I am Kate Cavanaugh, and I am your grateful host of the Mind, Body, and Soil podcast,
Speaker:where we are exploring the threads of what it means to be humans woven into this earth.
Speaker:And I think today's episode is actually a beautiful example of what it means to be humans
Speaker:woven into this earth and to find that human aspect of an ecosystem while honoring an ecosystem.
Speaker:Today's guest is Cole Mannix of Old Salt Co-op, and we dive right into this episode,
Speaker:really getting to talking some about what he is building out in Helmville, Montana,
Speaker:and also getting a chance to discuss something deeper.
Speaker:We kind of hit some beautiful points about his business at the beginning, but I strongly
Speaker:recommend sticking around for the totality of the episode as we really find ourselves
Speaker:in the deep end.
Speaker:Cole has some incredibly beautiful things to say that I deeply appreciated.
Speaker:I want to give a quick shout out at the end.
Speaker:Cole invites anybody who is looking to join a team that has a lot of meaning and some
Speaker:skills to give that Old Salt is looking for those people.
Speaker:And so if you're one of those people, I just want to throw that out there for you at the
Speaker:beginning.
Speaker:And I want to say that I attended the Old Salt Festival last June where I had just the
Speaker:best time.
Speaker:And one thing that came into my mind during this interview that there was recently a bit
Speaker:of a study that was exploring some of the efficacy of various forms of antidepressants
Speaker:from talk therapy to SSRIs, to walking and exercise, to counseling about exercise.
Speaker:The one thing that was truly an outlier, walking was at the top of the list, so you know that
Speaker:I am right there walking it out with you.
Speaker:But one big outlier at the very top that was incredibly effective, more effective than
Speaker:anything was dancing.
Speaker:One thing that I loved at Old Salt was the opportunity to do some dancing and to just
Speaker:dig in deep with my community.
Speaker:I got to meet so many people that I had been orbiting in the internet space for a really
Speaker:long time, but I also got to meet some of you and I hope to do the same this year.
Speaker:As always, sometimes some references come up in the course of a podcast that I kind
Speaker:of want to revisit in the intro to prepare us.
Speaker:And one of the things that Cole mentioned that I had never heard was the idea of the
Speaker:Hamish line.
Speaker:And I did a little bit of digging and there's a great op-ed piece in the New York Times
Speaker:by a gentleman named David Brooks discussing the Hamish line.
Speaker:I thought I would read a little piece on that because I think that this is something that
Speaker:I'm going to be noodling on and I will link it in the show notes as well.
Speaker:So these are some excerpts from the Hamish line by David Brooks.
Speaker:Recently, I did a little reporting from Kenya and Tanzania before taking a safari with my
Speaker:family. We stayed in seven camps, some were relatively simple without electricity or
Speaker:running water, some were relatively luxurious with regular showers and even pools.
Speaker:The simple camps were friendly, warm and familial.
Speaker:We got to know the other guests at big communal dinner tables.
Speaker:At one camp, we got to play soccer with the staff on the vast field in the Serengeti
Speaker:before an audience of wildebeests.
Speaker:At another camp, we had impromptu spear throwing and archery competitions with the
Speaker:kitchen staff. Two of the Maasai guides led my youngest son and me on spontaneous
Speaker:mock hunts, stalking our quote unquote prey on foot through ravines and across streams.
Speaker:I can tell you that this is the definition of heaven for a 12 year old boy and for
Speaker:someone with the emotional maturity of one.
Speaker:The more elegant camps felt colder.
Speaker:At one, each family had its own dinner table, so we didn't get to know the other guests.
Speaker:The tents were spread further apart.
Speaker:We also didn't get to know the staff who served us mostly as waiters as they would at a
Speaker:nice hotel. I know only one word to describe what the simpler camps had and what the
Speaker:more luxurious camps lacked, Hamish.
Speaker:It's a Yiddish word that suggests warmth, domesticity and unpretentious conviviality.
Speaker:It occurred to me that when we moved from a simple camp to a more luxurious camp, we
Speaker:crossed an invisible Hamish line.
Speaker:The simpler camps had it, the more comfortable ones did not.
Speaker:This is a generalized phenomenon which applies to other aspects of life.
Speaker:Often, as we spend more on something, what we gain in privacy and elegance, we lose in
Speaker:spontaneous sociability.
Speaker:Restaurants and bars can exist on either side of the Hamish line.
Speaker:At some diners and family restaurants, people are more comfortable leaning back, laughing
Speaker:loud, interrupting more and sweeping one another up in a collective euphoria.
Speaker:They talk more to the servers and even across tables.
Speaker:At nicer restaurants, the food is better.
Speaker:The atmosphere is more refined, but there is a tighter code about what is permissible.
Speaker:Hotels can exist on either side of the Hamish line.
Speaker:Whole neighborhoods can exist on either side of the Hamish line.
Speaker:Alan Ehrenhalt once wrote a book called The Lost City about old, densely packed Chicago
Speaker:neighborhoods where kids ran from home to home, where people hung out on their stoops.
Speaker:When the people in those neighborhoods made more money, they moved out to more thinly
Speaker:spaced suburbs with bigger homes where they were much less likely to know their neighbors.
Speaker:In the 90s, millions of Americans moved outwards so they could have bigger houses and
Speaker:bigger lots, even if it meant long commutes.
Speaker:Research by Robert Frank of Cornell suggests this is usually a bad tradeoff.
Speaker:People are often bad at knowing how to spend their money.
Speaker:I've been at least as bad as everybody else in this regard.
Speaker:Lottery winners, for example, barely benefit from their new fortunes.
Speaker:We get some extra income.
Speaker:We spend it on privacy, space and refinement.
Speaker:This has some obvious benefits.
Speaker:But suddenly we look around and we're on the wrong side of the Hamish line.
Speaker:We also live in a highly individualistic culture.
Speaker:When we're shopping for a vacation, we're primarily thinking about where the travel
Speaker:companies offer brochures showing private beaches and phenomenal sites.
Speaker:But when you come back from vacation, you primarily treasure the memories of who the
Speaker:people you met from faraway places and the lives you came in contact with.
Speaker:I love this so much.
Speaker:And he wraps it up and he says, by experiences instead of things, by many small
Speaker:pleasures instead of a few big ones, pay now for things you can look forward to and
Speaker:enjoy later, to which I'd only add.
Speaker:Sometimes it's best to spend carefully so you can stay south of the Hamish line.
Speaker:I think that so much of this conversation spoke to a sense of deep community and
Speaker:that the bonds that we forge, this side of death, are vitally important for what it
Speaker:means for us to live a good life and that the memories that we are creating, the
Speaker:connections that we are helping to forge and that we are forging in this life are
Speaker:going to be a part of what we're building and that we can't lose sight of that.
Speaker:And I can't help but come back to this idea that Cole had that perhaps we're not
Speaker:building businesses to sell.
Speaker:And as a business owner who's been through the ringer the last year, as my long term
Speaker:listeners will know, perhaps we're building businesses to live in.
Speaker:And I think that in a world that really favors consumer packaged goods and CPGs, that
Speaker:this is an important concept and to build these experiences like the Old Salt Festival
Speaker:where we are getting to dance together, getting to meet one another, getting to forge
Speaker:those connections south of the Hamish line that we will be able to take with us.
Speaker:And I just really took a lot out of this episode and I'm excited to share with you
Speaker:all of that. It just it really meant a lot to me to explore some of these connections
Speaker:and some of these ideas with Cole.
Speaker:And I think that you'll really enjoy it, too.
Speaker:A couple of little notes before we get to Cole, just podcast notes.
Speaker:First of all, please come join us at Old Salt.
Speaker:Second of all, I want to say that this is a podcast produced by me and me alone.
Speaker:Do all of the editing, all of the marketing, all of the bits and bobs, and that this is
Speaker:the business I'm building to live in.
Speaker:This is the hill that I have decided to die on.
Speaker:These conversations, this container has become my life's work in a way that I don't
Speaker:think I expected it to.
Speaker:And your support in that would mean the world.
Speaker:It has been hard to run this and another passion forward business.
Speaker:And so some of the best things that you can do to support my work in this are to
Speaker:subscribe to the podcast on whatever channel you are listening to, to share these
Speaker:episodes. Fifty percent of podcasts are found by word of mouth.
Speaker:And so if this episode resonates, please share it along.
Speaker:If you can leave a rating and review that helps others find the podcast, boost it
Speaker:within the algorithm.
Speaker:And if you feel so called to subscribe to my sub stack or leave a one time tip, those
Speaker:are in the show notes as well.
Speaker:I am so appreciative of your listenership.
Speaker:I hope that you feel that we are building something together.
Speaker:And I want you to feel a sense of that in in these conversations and for the messages
Speaker:that you send me and the guest ideas that you send me, I love receiving them and am
Speaker:always happy to engage in the DMs or via email.
Speaker:And I'm just really grateful to be here.
Speaker:It's conversations like this that fill my cup.
Speaker:And so thank you.
Speaker:And without further ado, just this awesome episode with Cole Mannix of Old Salt Co-op.
Speaker:Ease in, however we however we end up easing in.
Speaker:I actually I think at the outset, I want to thank you, and I think that and I was saying
Speaker:this before, it's really neat to do this podcast after having spent time with you and
Speaker:after having gone to Old Salt Festival last year.
Speaker:And one of the things I wanted to thank you for and one of the things that kept coming
Speaker:up as I prepared this interview was.
Speaker:How beautifully you are weaving together community on a lot of different levels and a lot
Speaker:of different layers, and you did something for me that you probably aren't aware of,
Speaker:which you connected me to some of some people that have been in my community for a
Speaker:really long time that I had never met in person, and it was really special to get to
Speaker:spend time, you know, Jillian Lukosky, who her her husband, Rob, has been on the podcast
Speaker:and her and I have been orbiting one another for 15 years and had never met in person.
Speaker:And we had a chance to hug one another.
Speaker:And I got to meet Christy from SingHat and Caroline Nelson, who had been on the podcast
Speaker:and we had formed this friendship.
Speaker:And Kate Havstad and I got to see each other and we love that.
Speaker:And Ed and I got to see each other and I love that.
Speaker:And so you you really created a space for me to not just connect with my community, but to
Speaker:get a chance to meet some new community members.
Speaker:And Old Salt last year was truly, truly one of the highlights of my year.
Speaker:And so I wanted to actually thank you at the outset of this.
Speaker:Well, it's just my pleasure and thank you for being a part of it.
Speaker:Yeah, it really was the people who came that made it.
Speaker:Yes, land is a community.
Speaker:We're just part of it. Yes.
Speaker:This is something that I have really picked up as I've listened to you in other interviews
Speaker:is a deep sense of.
Speaker:Wanting to bring people together, and I heard that word time and time again, as I listened
Speaker:to you talk, you talked about people, you talked about the people that you wanted to
Speaker:connect back to their food, that you wanted to connect to a regional area back to
Speaker:Montana, back to a sense of place, but also with one another and connecting to people
Speaker:within the Old Salt framework that you're building and just this strong sense of
Speaker:community. And so maybe a good question to start this is, is why people and why
Speaker:community in the way that you see it?
Speaker:Yeah, John Kemp in a podcast I was listening to him on said that regenerative agriculture
Speaker:is about restoring relationships between microbes, plants, systems on the agricultural
Speaker:side. But he also pointed out that it's about restoring all the other relationships,
Speaker:too. And so that's the way our economy works, the way that human beings relate to each
Speaker:other. And I think it's the latter that's often not thought about in agriculture, because
Speaker:we we think, OK, producers are over there and consumers are over here.
Speaker:This is supply chain in the middle.
Speaker:But eaters, that's all of us, are in agriculture.
Speaker:Wendell Berry talks about that eating is an agricultural act.
Speaker:And you said last year at the festival, I think from the stage, you said this is really
Speaker:about culture and agriculture.
Speaker:Old South Festival is sort of a culture.
Speaker:And I remember emailing David James Duncan, who spoke and author at the festival last
Speaker:year, and I said. You know, we are thinking about using this language like land is
Speaker:pain or referencing that we think that that's an old, old, old idea.
Speaker:It's an indigenous idea in a lot of ways.
Speaker:And he said, well, actually, that idea can be found across the globe.
Speaker:And it's one of the best ideas that we've ever had.
Speaker:It's one of the it's not even so much of an idea as just a an awareness of belief
Speaker:system of sense of the.
Speaker:And I think that's such a thing.
Speaker:Yeah, I do, too, I couldn't agree more.
Speaker:And I think that that cultivation is something that has to happen both from a place
Speaker:of intention. And I think that a lot of what you're doing at Old Salt is intentionally
Speaker:cultivating that sense of kinship.
Speaker:But I also think that.
Speaker:It's such an old idea in certain ways that there is a passivity to it that we are, you
Speaker:know, in some of my work, the way that I think of this is that we are made out of place,
Speaker:right, those microbes that are in the soil that are nourished by the cattle out there,
Speaker:or whether it was bison tens of thousands of years ago, whatever it is, they nourish
Speaker:the grasses and those grasses become a part of the flesh of bison and those microbes,
Speaker:too. And there's this reciprocity.
Speaker:And then that flesh becomes part of us.
Speaker:It crosses a one cell wall, thick membrane and becomes our very selves.
Speaker:And yet at the same time, we are only 10 percent human, right?
Speaker:Only 10 percent of our cells are human.
Speaker:The rest are microbial and members of other communities.
Speaker:And so this is very much about that sort of passivity of we just become place in the
Speaker:act of eating, which, as Wendell Berry put it, and as you put it, you know, we are all
Speaker:a part of agriculture within that that framework.
Speaker:I think it's a really beautiful thing to become made of place and to have that sort of
Speaker:passive and active relationship to land.
Speaker:Yeah, I really you said it well, and it's not just that we're hungry for actual
Speaker:nourishment, I think it's that we're hungry for connection to place and each other.
Speaker:And so it's just one more kind of really fun thing.
Speaker:It's hard to know when you organize an event like that.
Speaker:What is it really going to feel like until you actually hold it?
Speaker:Yeah, and I think, you know, my biggest hope is that it's.
Speaker:It does connect people to the place and it enriches our place to bring new people in.
Speaker:I would say it's kind of interesting, too. You can't control what it all feels like.
Speaker:And we're about to launch this new restaurant in a month called The Union by Old Salt. And
Speaker:we're as curious as anybody else what it's actually going to feel like. Like, will live
Speaker:music feel like the right fit in there or not? And will it be more on the boisterous
Speaker:side or more on the sort of quieter side? I don't know. It's part of the fun of it.
Speaker:You just discover it as you go.
Speaker:I'm curious, number one, how the festival felt after opening it. But I have to say,
Speaker:you know, one of the things that I've learned in business over the last 11 years is that
Speaker:when Josh and I opened up the butcher shop, we had this idea of what it was going to be
Speaker:and who was going to fill it. And we were dead wrong. And one of the things I've learned
Speaker:that's really beautiful is that anticipatory feeling of waiting to see who fills it and
Speaker:wanting to be in service to who comes and shows up and wanting to remain flexible and
Speaker:adaptable in my own business model to be able to encompass what is here, what comes.
Speaker:And so I'm sure that the festival is in a process of adaptation after you've felt it.
Speaker:And here you are doing that again for the restaurant. And I think that's a really it's
Speaker:a really beautiful skill as a business owner to be able to have that flexibility, that adaptability.
Speaker:Well, the feedback last year on the festival was that people
Speaker:left with more energy than they came with. And that was, I think, the highest compliment
Speaker:anybody's made it. That is like, yeah, inspiration side of things. And you know,
Speaker:you're going to be tired after a weekend, but are you good tired?
Speaker:Yeah. Is your cup full?
Speaker:Is your cup full? Yeah. And so, yeah, hopefully that can happen again. And I think
Speaker:we've got a really wonderful shot. A lot of same people are involved. A lot of new people
Speaker:are involved. I love that. And since we're in the middle of it, I do want to say that by the
Speaker:time that this podcast comes out, early bird tickets will be available. Tickets are available
Speaker:for June 21st through 23rd. Correct me if I'm wrong. Okay. And I'm going to be there and I
Speaker:can't wait. I can attest to the fact that I left with I left with a very full cup and a cup that
Speaker:ran over into other spaces the rest of the year. Connections that felt really salient that I got
Speaker:to carry with me outside of Helmville. Yeah. Well, it's billed as a Montana celebration of
Speaker:land stewardship, but it's really a celebration of land stewardship that, you know, happens to
Speaker:be in this Montana place. But I think what was kind of cool about last year was that I did
Speaker:anticipate a lot of Montana folks, but we had people from all over the place. Hawaii, North
Speaker:Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Colorado, Maine. And I didn't know that you had come from New York,
Speaker:so New York. Yeah. And Diana Rogers came from New York. Yeah. And so, yeah, it was pretty amazing.
Speaker:Some people just driving by on the highway and saw for the first time there's this tent city
Speaker:in Helmville, Montana, where there isn't even a door. Like, what is that? So they just stopped in.
Speaker:That's incredible. I mean, to get drive-by traffic for something like that is a really
Speaker:special thing. And that really puts a lot of different people in a place together with a
Speaker:really special opportunity to interact at a level that felt like putting the culture
Speaker:back into agriculture. And I wrote that down, that you were blending together storytelling,
Speaker:you were blending together music and the joy of eating, of all of these incredible makers that
Speaker:are also connecting back to place through their wares. And it felt like an ecosystem and a place
Speaker:of connection and building community, I think, in a way that some of the conferences where you
Speaker:feel like you're being talked to, it felt so much like being connected with instead.
Speaker:Well, that's one of the other best compliments I've heard.
Speaker:Well, it comes from my heart.
Speaker:Well, there's a whole bunch of random fun stuff. I mean, it's a little hard to describe quickly,
Speaker:but we blew an anvil 300 feet into the air, which is kind of an old
Speaker:ranch tradition that shall return as long as no insurance company hears that on the air.
Speaker:And this year, the fire will be about kind of almost
Speaker:tapas and bites. It will be the same aesthetic experience of whole animal cooking, but we'll
Speaker:have kind of more food trucks to make people full at whatever time of the day. But the fire will
Speaker:really be about like bites to eat and like little delights. And so Eduardo and his team will be back
Speaker:with Montana Mex and Surnant. And I think Woodbury Kitchen will have this Maryland,
Speaker:Chesapeake Bay mashup where they bring some mussels and combine it with a little bit more
Speaker:Montana cuisine. I love that. Spike and Denzel. And then, you know, like a tram that is,
Speaker:you know, I don't know if you've seen that you can pedal on them and they've got an electric motor
Speaker:and you have a beer. And so it's going to be driving that back road where you can kind of
Speaker:see the valley and have a drink. Fantastic. I love that. That's really innovative.
Speaker:I think Kate's on the path of making a, I always say it wrong. It's not a maze,
Speaker:but it's a walking circle with a labyrinth. Yeah. Did she tell you that this week?
Speaker:Yeah. She told me a week or 10 days ago, something like that.
Speaker:I think that was born out of conversation that Kate and I were having on the phone. So I'm glad
Speaker:to hear that because the labyrinth was something that her and I have been talking about.
Speaker:Well, good job instigating that. I'm really excited.
Speaker:I think Dom and Otto's going to come out from Texas and kind of talk about low straw
Speaker:and we'll demonstrate low stress livestock handling. Maybe have some mules there and
Speaker:a packing demo, talking to a guy about an iron forging demo. We'll have a butchery demo. So
Speaker:it'll be fun to kind of just find ways to augment it. Yeah. I think that that lends a sense of
Speaker:participatory. This is another word I noticed that you use a lot and that's something I think
Speaker:is really important that we are participators in our food system. And one of the things I loved
Speaker:about the festival was its participatory nature. Again, you're not just sitting and taking in,
Speaker:but you are a participant in that community and in that place for a weekend in a way that I think
Speaker:gives you ownership and agency, especially for Montanans that are looking to bring some
Speaker:old salt meat home. But I think across the board, be a participator.
Speaker:This brings up something that I've been thinking a lot about actually since the beginning of
Speaker:Western Daughters is what it means to be a bridge in multiple different communities and to build
Speaker:bridges. And I think especially the time and space that we're in, the sort of social climate that
Speaker:we're in, I think that this is really important work. And as I was listening to you, I noticed
Speaker:that you are bridging so many different things. You are bridging an urban and a rural space,
Speaker:both literally having come from a really rural background in Helmville and now living in Helena
Speaker:and bringing some of that meat from your family ranch into Helena and across Montana,
Speaker:especially in more urban environments. But you are also bridging what I think is an
Speaker:incredible important bridge and something I've spent a lot of time trying to build between
Speaker:producer and consumer, especially where you're really trying to give value back to the producer
Speaker:in a way that it hasn't been for some time and also reaching the consumer with an incredible
Speaker:product. And I also couldn't help but be struck that you are in many ways a bridge
Speaker:between generations in your family, that you are in between your children and your parents
Speaker:in an intergenerational family ranch and business. And that I think those functions as a bridge,
Speaker:and I'm not sure that word resonates with you, are really important where we are right now.
Speaker:And I kind of wanted to begin to tease at some of those.
Speaker:Mm-hmm. Well, yeah. In the best case scenario, hopefully I could be a reconnector of the circle,
Speaker:and that's sort of a bridge. I think so many of our systems need to be recircularized.
Speaker:So do I.
Speaker:But I grew up in a really tiny but very connected community and family.
Speaker:My mom and dad and my sets of aunts and uncles all were in business together, and I was the
Speaker:oldest of the fifth generation on the ranch. And I was the oldest of four siblings, but we also had
Speaker:13 first cousins just on that side who all had a connection to that place. And then the community
Speaker:itself, even though we don't have a store, and I was the... For the first several years of Patriot,
Speaker:I had another classmate. But the last three years, I was the only kid in my class,
Speaker:and I was a valedictorian at that point, and graduated with a neighboring community called
Speaker:Ovanto from eighth grade. And then Drummond, where we went to high school, about 30 miles away,
Speaker:was really tiny. And then for me, Helena felt like the big city, going to undergrad here.
Speaker:And Boston felt like the really big city where I went, kind of continued education.
Speaker:But I was always... I'm just... I think coming from a really intact community
Speaker:and a really fortunate place in terms of the family, it just made me... Everything I was
Speaker:interested in, it always ended up kind of connecting back to... People in Boston had
Speaker:questions about the West, opinions about the West. They had questions about the food system,
Speaker:strong opinions about it. And Montana was, even then, before Yellowstone, kind of a fascination.
Speaker:And so it got me interested in what we did for a living back home in a way that I had never
Speaker:been so deeply interested in. And we had been encouraged. I always thought I wanted to be a
Speaker:rancher growing up. We were encouraged to kind of leave the ranch for at least five years,
Speaker:and I did that. And I thought that that path was almost leading me away from the ranch,
Speaker:but what it ended up doing was just make me all the more interested in intact landscapes,
Speaker:wild, wide-open places, food system that actually nourishes people,
Speaker:a human society that could actually last. And so it just made me want to reconnect back home.
Speaker:And I ultimately couldn't imagine myself living anywhere else other than Montana,
Speaker:so I did find my way back here. And now I'm deep in it with trying to get this
Speaker:I know you are.
Speaker:this old salt thing to work.
Speaker:I want to touch on intact some because I think that this is an interesting piece. And circularity
Speaker:has been a big theme on the podcast and also the idea of when we break the idea of the circle. I
Speaker:had an interesting conversation with a gentleman named Dan Egan in terms of phosphorus and the
Speaker:nutrient cycle, and also with Ben Goldfarb, who wrote a book about beavers, about creating more
Speaker:circularity in the system. And I think that intact is such an interesting term because I think that
Speaker:we are coming from a place where we have broken that circle, where we have broken
Speaker:that chain in so many different ways. And one of my big questions has become,
Speaker:what does it mean to heal it again, to bring it back to wholeness? And as far as you're concerned,
Speaker:and I don't know why I'm picking on all the words you use, but one of the words you use a lot in
Speaker:interviews is integrity. And I love the word integrity, because the opposite is to disintegrate.
Speaker:And so for me, the word integrity means to bring back to a sense of wholeness, a sense of
Speaker:intactness. And I think that's a big question mark on my mind right now is how do we do that?
Speaker:How do we heal that circle?
Speaker:That's such a good question. It's hard to answer it quickly or to even start to talk about it
Speaker:quickly, but you're right. I mean, it's just about a corpse and a living body look almost the
Speaker:same and they have the same heart, but the one is still a whole living thing. And it's kind of
Speaker:hard to put your finger on really what makes the difference. I think we can try to latch on
Speaker:to any given piece of what it would mean to have a better food system. And they're all important.
Speaker:But if you latch on to any given thing in isolation, you end up with something that
Speaker:doesn't work by itself, obviously. That's not super complex to say that.
Speaker:It's deceivingly complex because we love to isolate things in the way that we live today.
Speaker:Yeah. I think so many people want to just say, hey, give me a better product where I usually
Speaker:shop and give me a label that shows me it's a better product and gives me trust
Speaker:and allow me to continue basically living the way I am used to and allow me to not have to change.
Speaker:And I will buy you a better product. And that will allow me to feel a little bit better about
Speaker:my purchase. Maybe I'll spend a little bit more, but that's as deep as the relationship goes.
Speaker:But the remaking of a food system and regenerative agriculture, becoming more resilient,
Speaker:it's got to be essentially a transformation of the whole. And
Speaker:we've got to rebuild our relationships with our neighbors, other people. And in my case,
Speaker:thinking about ranchers and farmer customers, we've got to start doing business together again
Speaker:so we know something about each other. And I'm sort of doing business with somebody if I
Speaker:ship it to Brea, but I'm not going to have the same context as if I can sell to somebody who
Speaker:lives in Bozeman or even lives in Coeur d'Alene or Spokane from me,
Speaker:these urban markets that do have some familiarity with the landscapes near me
Speaker:and many of them care what the future of those landscapes look like.
Speaker:And it's not as if I think that the farmer's market is the only way to sell
Speaker:product. Not at all. I'm really interested in agriculture of the middle. I'm really interested
Speaker:in a scale where instead of 100 processing plants, maybe you've got 1,000 and there's
Speaker:more of them, they're smaller. If one set breaks, there's redundancy. But it's also just because
Speaker:smaller companies have better relationships with their employees. They have the opportunity to be
Speaker:a community. And the same thing I think is true of a group of customers. At a certain scale,
Speaker:things just really can retain intimacy. And it's really hard to say where the line is,
Speaker:but you kind of know when you cross it. I can't remember who used to use the word Hamish line,
Speaker:but there's a difference between going into a restaurant that feels like a cafeteria
Speaker:and a restaurant that feels like it's cozy and there's a personality to it. And they said it
Speaker:was about which side of the Hamish line. And I can't even remember if I'm using that word right,
Speaker:but it sticks in my mind. But it's that way, I think, with the food system and scale.
Speaker:And I am just so used to this point. I know a lot of
Speaker:farmers and ranchers who are excellent stewards of the land, but they have basically no way,
Speaker:in the existing markets that have been developed, they've got no way to connect with people who
Speaker:give a damn about that stewardship. Because those people may say that they want to see
Speaker:soil health and riparian areas that are thriving, fisheries, etc. Wolves and grizzly bears.
Speaker:But they basically have the same prioritization of convenience in the way that they purchase.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:And I think they sort of feel like they're waiting for producers to get better.
Speaker:Basically, we all have to get better. And the thing really doesn't work unless you've got
Speaker:everybody changing the system at once. And the buyers really do have a ton of power.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:And so I don't need to go convince every wholesaler in the country to carry my product,
Speaker:but I'd love to convince 5,000 individual families to buy meat with integrity from Whole Salt.
Speaker:There is so much I want to dive into. And I want to come back to that idea that you said
Speaker:at the beginning, the idea of a transformation of the whole, and the idea that that transformation
Speaker:is something that both consumers and producers are going to be a part of, and that this food
Speaker:system has to be transformed in order for it to work. There's a lot of pieces that I want to touch
Speaker:on. But I really want to touch on what it would mean to feed 5,000 people. And this is something
Speaker:that I sat down with Josh this morning and talked about the number 5,000. I heard you,
Speaker:whether it was on Anthony's podcast or Ed's podcast, talk about feeding 5,000 Montana families
Speaker:Old Salt meat. And I know that at Western Daughters, we've talked a lot about what
Speaker:a small number that is, and what a big number that is both. But it ostensibly feels
Speaker:relatively small, relatively doable. And yet, it is a big number, especially, and I heard you say
Speaker:that less than 2% of Montanans are eating meat that is raised in Montana. And I think that that
Speaker:is that right? Almost. It's less than 2% of the meat that is eaten in Montana,
Speaker:regardless of who it's eaten by, actually came from here and was processed here.
Speaker:Yeah. Okay. So I have that a little flip-flopped. Yeah. And I think that this is so important,
Speaker:because I think that that statistic is pretty true across the board. Any state that you go to,
Speaker:that's going to be about where that's sitting. And what it means to feed 5,000 families,
Speaker:to connect with and build that relationship that is allowing a system to transform,
Speaker:and to simultaneously build, and I love this, I wrote this down, an agriculture of the middle,
Speaker:where you have some vertical integration that is producer-owned and giving value back to producers,
Speaker:where it hasn't been for a long time, is both something that feels achievable and something
Speaker:that is not easy to achieve. And I think it takes a lot of bravery, and it takes some big
Speaker:dreams to do it. And so, I do want to touch on what is both big and small.
Speaker:There seems like a lot of biblical themes that show up in my stuff, because the feeding of the
Speaker:5,000 or salt from Europe. You have a master's in theology. You didn't mention this. And an
Speaker:undergrad in biology and philosophy, which I think plays well into a lot of...
Speaker:Well, I'll start on this kind of a real practical level, which was that
Speaker:for about 17 years, my own family's ranch, which is a cow camp operation in the Blackfoot Valley
Speaker:of western Montana, there's maybe 1,200 mother cows at any given time, a few hundred finishing
Speaker:animals, some replacements, sometimes some yearlings that we bring in just to graze in
Speaker:the summertime, extra grass. And then we have maybe a band of sheep from the first day in July
Speaker:through the first day in September that graze weeds. And they're not ours. We don't own them,
Speaker:but they come in and we kind of get the benefit of weed control, and the folks that own them get
Speaker:a bit of free grass. And in my case, a lot of times I hear the story is that, hey, well,
Speaker:dad or grandpa screwed it up, and we really got it now. We fixed it. We came in and really figured
Speaker:this out. I've heard that story a lot recently, but we're sort of the opposite where our parents
Speaker:and aunts and uncles, it's not like they are perfect, but they have done an amazing job,
Speaker:not only of adapting, learning, maintaining their own relationships and business together. It's like
Speaker:being married to six people, you know? And I guess being married to five people because six
Speaker:wouldn't be an even number, but yeah, you're sort of married to your spouse plus four others.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:And they've done an amazing job. And I think us, our generation is just trying to figure out,
Speaker:okay, how can we come in, be involved and not screw this up? Because it gets more complex as
Speaker:you go. So I have three siblings and I think I'm going to get this right, three first cousins
Speaker:that are all back. I'm not on the ranch. I live in town and I'm part of this kind of connected
Speaker:the family ranch, but I don't work on it. And anyway, this is a roundabout way of just
Speaker:giving some context. We do a little forestry. 17 years ago, we started a beef enterprise.
Speaker:And so of all the stuff we sell every year, maybe 25% of what we raise is now sold locally,
Speaker:maybe 30% to 35% by value. But in terms of by livestock, it's 20 to 25% probably.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And we just kind of had, and I've been witnessing this right along. We
Speaker:got to a point with it where we're selling a few hundred animals a year that way.
Speaker:There's a lot of complexity now with packing orders in the freezers, communicating with those
Speaker:customers, running the route system. And during COVID, we did run up against basically the custom
Speaker:processor we mostly use who does a great job. They really do, but they were just bottlenecked.
Speaker:And yet the difference between... So how do you solve that problem? If you want to keep growing
Speaker:locally and you want to get out of the commodity system that you really just don't like at the end
Speaker:of the day as much as possible, how do you... We basically faced the decision to either step back
Speaker:and re-enter the commodity system mostly because it's just too hard to do local food
Speaker:and it's... Or grow this thing significantly. Yet we didn't have the capital, we didn't have
Speaker:the skillset, probably didn't have the risk appetite by ourselves to go do that. Because
Speaker:if you're going to... Okay, you're bottlenecked on processing. Okay, so let's build processing.
Speaker:Well, instead of now being able to sell two or 300 a year to keep a processing facility
Speaker:busy and pay back the note, it's going to have to be two to 3,000 a year. It's a big growth
Speaker:gap to jump the valley of debt. So I came to the family and said, well, what if we
Speaker:work with other producers that we already know and trust to build a brand? We market together,
Speaker:we'll build infrastructure together, we'll raise money together. And if it works,
Speaker:it can bring in more farms and ranches that participate and sell livestock into the company.
Speaker:And I'm going to get back to 5,000. I know. I like where you're going.
Speaker:We sell to about 600 people, 600 individuals, and that's about half our local business,
Speaker:the other half is wholesale. The wholesale is really tapped out. Grocery is kind of a
Speaker:wholesale grocery in a lot of ways. We have one wonderful... A couple wonderful natural
Speaker:food stores we sell to, but by and large, it's a place you go to die if you're a small food brand.
Speaker:It's true. And the margins are so tight.
Speaker:They're tight, yeah. And so you have to...
Speaker:Unbelievably tight.
Speaker:The same really is true. There's a little more... I see a little more opportunity in
Speaker:local restaurants, but for the most part, when you sell to local restaurants, they're buying burger
Speaker:and they're using that on their menu to say we buy local, but most of it isn't local.
Speaker:And part of that is just because we don't have the infrastructure to really process it,
Speaker:distribute it, break up all the carcass, utilize it. Either we never had it and
Speaker:certain parts of the country, that local infrastructure, or we don't yet have it.
Speaker:But 600 individuals buy from us every year, twice a year on average, and on average, $300 a time.
Speaker:And so it starts to be pretty... So anyway, 600 people buy an average of about $600 a year,
Speaker:right? Of essentially just raw beef. We don't have value-added products. We don't have lamb
Speaker:yet. We don't have pork yet. But we basically just said, there's not such a distance between
Speaker:600 and 6,000 or 5,000. I can picture Helena, it's got 40,000 people. Zula has got 100,000 people.
Speaker:When you actually do your market research and you say, oh my God,
Speaker:of all the people who make over X amount per year in these urban areas surrounding me,
Speaker:and of all those people who eat meat, and of all those people who eat local,
Speaker:even at that 600 direct customers, we might have 4% of the market already.
Speaker:How much direct to consumer opportunity is there? Could we get to 12? Maybe. But when you start
Speaker:saying, oh, I'm going to get 25 or 30% of a market, you're probably kidding yourself.
Speaker:But I think what we know is the margin works when you sell to individuals.
Speaker:And when you do sell to individuals, you don't put yourself out there with a big contract for
Speaker:$100,000 of sales a week to some wholesaler that could drop you tomorrow.
Speaker:So those people, building a relationship with them, they can make your little system work.
Speaker:And it's not like once we build a foundation like that, it's not like you can't do other things.
Speaker:It's not like you can't branch out in the wholesale. It's not like
Speaker:direct to consumer is the only way to buy anymore. But for little brands like us that
Speaker:are trying to survive in an industry that has gone completely one way, where it's just all
Speaker:very controlled and consolidated, that's where the opportunity is, is eating around the edges and
Speaker:earning the right to exist until perhaps you're big enough to start.
Speaker:Not as if we aspire to be huge, but you're just big enough to say, yeah, okay, I could do a 10
Speaker:head a week restaurant wholesale contract with a distributor.
Speaker:Yeah. I think that that was a really beautiful walkthrough of what it takes. And I think that
Speaker:one of the things I know that we've struggled with in educating people or talking about the
Speaker:story of what it is that we do at Western Daughters is a lot of talking about this
Speaker:transformation of the system that we are trying to facilitate. And that also involves talking about
Speaker:what the other side of that is and the sort of complete vertical integration of the commodity,
Speaker:conventional, consolidated meat industry, and what it would mean to build an alternative to that
Speaker:that can really thrive and flourish. And that so much of that is about direct to consumer,
Speaker:because it returns value back to the producer. And I think when you're looking at, I think the
Speaker:average is about 2.4% margins across agriculture, which means a lot of people are operating in the
Speaker:red. And having operated and talked about owning the butcher shop here on this podcast a decent
Speaker:amount, I've talked about our margins, which aren't dissimilar from that. And just what a tight rope
Speaker:you're walking. And when you build that relationship, when you build that bridge and that
Speaker:connection, you are opening the door to something else being possible in reciprocity, and in
Speaker:connection, and with people. And I think that that's a really big piece of this too, is that
Speaker:this is with people, and this gives people a sense of agency and a sense of that connection
Speaker:that they might be seeking. I think that agency is so critical, is feeling like
Speaker:despite all the trends and the major challenges of making a difference, if you can find a
Speaker:kind of, what is the smallest viable number? What is that kind of minimum viable product?
Speaker:And you start to realize, you know, there's 10 people in this room that
Speaker:really resonate with each other, and that are willing to sacrifice. And they share a vision
Speaker:of what health and a better community looks like. And it's not so hard for us to go, and then it's
Speaker:20, and then 50, and then 100. And if you can wrap your head around it, you can really have something
Speaker:to work for, to hope for. It's not just the direct-to-consumer model, because
Speaker:lots of companies have direct-to-consumer models, and they like the idea of skipping the
Speaker:middleman and having a bigger margin. But in this case, one of the ways Old Soul is trying to be
Speaker:particularly different is that there's a whole bunch of niche meat companies out there that
Speaker:they have a lot of incentive to just go buy the livestock for the best price they can.
Speaker:And I see, you know, $2.80, $2.90, $3 for hot carcass weight prices for beef at a time
Speaker:when if you're going to be competitive with the commodity alternative, you're going to have to be
Speaker:$3.50, $3.60. And so I don't really want to encourage producers to sell $3 a hot carcass
Speaker:weight beef to third-party brands where they're losing money compared to their commodity alternative.
Speaker:What I want to see is some ranchers who can, first of all, get a price that is at least as
Speaker:good as their best commodity alternative. And in this market, in my mind, on a grass-finished beef
Speaker:coming out of the West, $3.50, $3.60. It's so funny. I'm trying to translate really quickly.
Speaker:I deal mostly in cold carcass weights, and so I'm trying to do some quick math, and I'm not there.
Speaker:This isn't perfect, right? I mean, but you kind of get the general area, like I think $3.40 to $3.60.
Speaker:If you're not doing any of the marketing, you're not paying for processing, you're just selling an
Speaker:animal. And you're trying to say, okay, I could have sold that animal before I finished it as
Speaker:a yearling or as a calf. And so what do I have to make as a margin on that animal to be competitive
Speaker:with what I otherwise would have done? And then in addition to paying enough up front,
Speaker:I think the producer needs to have a bigger share of the food dollar.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:And so the way Old Salt was set up with its vertically integrated enterprises,
Speaker:if our restaurants are profitable, if the processing facility is profitable,
Speaker:and once our investors are paid back, who brought all the capital to make this happen,
Speaker:the producers, we're actually an LLC, but we built ourselves like a co-op in the way
Speaker:our operating agreement works. And so after the investors are paid back, the producers can take
Speaker:half of all of the profits generated by all the enterprises and receive it back according to how
Speaker:many livestock that they market through the company compared to how many overall livestock
Speaker:we buy from members. And if we have one thing that's unique about us, I think that might be
Speaker:the most unique. Cooperatives attempt to do that, but a cooperative was going to be a little bit too
Speaker:stale and inflexible of a structure to manage restaurants together with manufacturing together
Speaker:with events like a festival together with an e-commerce brand. So we kind of had to get
Speaker:creative in building an LLC operating agreement that could function and provide patronage like
Speaker:a cooperative does. I think that this is beautiful. And I think when we're talking
Speaker:about transforming a food system, we have to come up with different business models.
Speaker:And I'm curious how you.
Speaker:How you even arrived at that, because I do think that we need, we need a different way of doing business on a lot of different fronts, and also a different way of capitalizing and funding businesses in non traditional ways. You know, I know that that for us, traditional lending has not been an option. And so there's kind of these parallel paths that we have to build businesses that are structured different, and that put a lot of emphasis on
Speaker:producing and we also have to forge funding paths that are that are not not the traditional path.
Speaker:Yeah, I mean, that theme is just constantly repeated, as probably in any industry that's trying to have a bit of a revolution. Yeah.
Speaker:Steward Lending is our main bank. They've been tremendous in giving us a sense of confidence that this could actually work, we could get the financing to stand this thing up. And they're not our only lender. But they are, were our first and likely we wouldn't have got a first.
Speaker:It's one of those, you need money to make money, you need an investor to get investors, you need somebody to take that first vote of confidence.
Speaker:They were a real risk partner in a way that I've never seen a bank be a risk partner. So it's almost like an oxymoron to think of a bank.
Speaker:Yeah, that is. And that's actually really,
Speaker:you have, you have all the risk. But Steward was a risk partner. And they provided a lot more than just underwriting. They provided business support, when we needed to find a grant writer, or when we needed to think about, hey, we need to augment our team.
Speaker:Or, you know, we found that they helped us find a great group called Kitchen Table Consultants, who's really been helping us significantly recently. So anyways, Steward was one of these unconventional things that I think is necessary for the system to change. And I think our, our business model itself is one of our innovations.
Speaker:I remember, so I, in between when I thought I was going to be a Jesuit priest, and when I kind of came into the meat industry, I guess, I went to work for a group called Western Landowners Alliance. And I worked on, the organization worked on things like communications,
Speaker:peer-to-peer learning, and policy. And so I wound up thinking a lot about economic incentives, and how the Endangered Species Act, and the Farm Bill, and state wildlife migration policy affects your ability to manage intact landscapes profitably. Because when you have private land involved, it has to be profitable, or it doesn't last.
Speaker:And so I just thought about incentives a lot. And for me, building the operating agreement for Old Salt Co-op was really about trying to make sure that the incentives were aligned correctly. If Old Salt works, it will ultimately put more money back to the stewardship of land. And we also built a path for some of the workers to become owners and have governance over time. And we, I think we built a path to treat investors fairly.
Speaker:In exchange for their risk, without making them the drivers of the company, we wanted to make sure that it was the users of the business that ultimately controlled its destiny. And so it was like, okay, well, we don't want to sell, we're not trying to build a brand to flip, we're trying to build a brand to live in. Our exit strategy is a good bet.
Speaker:Yeah. Wow. Okay, you don't want to build a brand to flip, you want to build a brand to live in. I have all of these questions about risk and longevity, too. You know, you've said a couple of different things in terms of knowing where that line is when you've gotten too big, and about wanting to have a good death, you know, wanting to build a brand to live in, and about risk, which I think
Speaker:a lot about risk these days, because actually, with Western Daughters being 11 years old, it's decreased my risk tolerance. Josh, Josh feels a little bit differently. He still has a little bit of a stomach for it. I don't because it's been such a hard run. But I don't quite know how to ask those questions. I'm going to circle the drain for a second. But
Speaker:one of the things that I thought a lot about, as I was listening to you talk is that being a part of an intergenerational operation, in my mind, you know, as someone as someone who's not a part of something like that, it must change your view of both history and the future, that you are you are this bridge, and you can see it between what your parents have done, which you said, you know, all of you have done.
Speaker:All of you have a have a positive view of that in a time where you hear a lot that, oh, you know, parents left me with this, this mess, or whatever it is. And imagining what this brand might live in someday for for your kids, for your nephews, for your nieces, and how that changes, and if that changes your mindset for you, just because you do have this connection that I think not everybody has.
Speaker:And in my imagination, that changes a little bit what risk means. It changes a little bit what integrity means and what it means to build something not to sell. In a time where that is all we do, we build CPGs, so that we can sell them to, you know, the big, the big brands.
Speaker:This is a, this is about integrity. This is about intactness and wholeness for a community, for a family, for a landscape, private land, as well as public land. So I know that was a lot of words. I'm hoping maybe you can pull something out of it.
Speaker:Well, in a lot of, in a lot of ways, it's like, so we, we've been in this little valley, my family has, since the 1860s on my grandma's side, 1880s on my dad's side. And I think being somewhere for a long time like that and wanting to still be there in 100 years from now, it, it does change a lot of people's minds.
Speaker:It does change your perspective. In a lot of ways, it also helps you understand how much we're short timers. Like we've just, we've hardly been in here for, for any time. There are a lot of other people in that valley for a lot longer than we've been. And so we value, you know, time on, in a place. And I think that does matter. But, and you also, but you also see how short it is.
Speaker:We have this woman who collected some petrified wood on our place, a geologist. A few years ago, she dropped off the wood that she had collected back to us. And she had labeled it all like 20 million year old red oak and elm, which, you know, we don't have that stuff.
Speaker:No. No. Okay. We got lodgepole and ponderosa pine and dead fir. And, but it like, that's amazing to have right on that same landscape and realize just how brief our time.
Speaker:Yeah. And, um, but you know, your, your question was really about risk. And I think in some ways, I think the family is really conservative and anybody had been in a place long enough. You careful because, you know, new things are risky, but you're also know that adaptation is required. So you always have to have your feelers out there for where is adaptation and change needed to be embraced.
Speaker:And I really think my grandma and grandpa were particularly good about being open to new things. They often were careful about new things, but I remember there's kind of a back to land movement where a bunch of New York and New Jersey people showed up in the Blackfoot Valley and they were the first ones to hire a fellow who showed up at the door with hair down to his butt and no shirt on and bibs, a soccer player.
Speaker:And he, he now still lives on the ranch and he became the kind of the irrigation manager in the Valley for a long time. And they were just open to new things. It was a little different to meet, to meet Randy, I think, but he's become a tremendous member of the community and they were just, they extended the benefit of the doubt to him. They had a generous, in theology, they'd said it's a generous hermeneutic of an, you know, of interpretation and, um, they were open to new things.
Speaker:And I think that extended to their kids. Um, like they were very open to hearing out fish, wildlife and parks about the, one of the first easements that came through their habitat Montana program and the U S official wildlife service and any agency or nonprofit partners that approach them and about an idea for the riparian areas, because we have had a lot to learn and still do about how our operations are impacting the ecosystem.
Speaker:And, um, I think at the end of the day, like we would be very much more conservative with something that risked the ranch, but not so conservative about other big risks that like, we think that the ranch is already at big risk because of the way that the industry currently works. And we think our society is that big risk.
Speaker:And so the status quo is riskier than just about any form of entrepreneurial activity I can think of. And, and so like, yeah, it's all, it's all kind of relative. Like we all sat around, I remember Cooper Hibbert, he's one of our board members, wonderful ranch manager with his family's place near cascade and Hillary and Andrew Anderson with the JBRL ranches and my brother.
Speaker:We sat around in a snowstorm in Melville in early 2000, or I'm sorry, this was a,
Speaker:what I meant to say was like early 2020, right before, I guess it was right during COVID it was
Speaker:yeah, fall of 2020. Yeah. Yeah. That would have been, yeah. And we just said, Hey, our business
Speaker:model of selling calves and yearlings is not probably good. And it's not like our, like our
Speaker:ranches, but this industry is probably not going to be viable in 20 years. So are we cool with that?
Speaker:Or are we, and we'd already, I think each one of us had been part of failed efforts to build a,
Speaker:a different kind of meat company. Yeah. And the Hibbert's and the Manix's had been part of the
Speaker:same one that I actually was the director of operations for back in 2012 to 2014.
Speaker:And that failed. So we had seen, we had fallen hard. It was sort of the Manix for our family.
Speaker:It was sort of our attempt to participate in a larger brand that could scale a little bit more
Speaker:and eventually control its processing. And it wasn't our own family brand, but it was a third
Speaker:brand that we worked with and it failed and it fell hard on its face. And then the Anderson's
Speaker:had been a part of another failed local meat company brand. It's a hard lesson to learn.
Speaker:And this one is no easier this time around. I think some, I don't, I don't want to paint like
Speaker:to this story as like something I have figured out. We are struggling really hard. You know,
Speaker:I make $0 an hour. My wife supports us. She is the reason why I can even take this risk.
Speaker:But I, I really see it as like absolutely a necessity. I, I am willing to die on this hill
Speaker:and hopefully live on it, but you have to kind of be willing to decide what you're going to
Speaker:give your life to. And I, I finally, I found a place where this is kind of where I want to
Speaker:live or die. And it doesn't mean that I know exactly what I'm going to be doing 10 years from
Speaker:now, but I want this to work so bad and I'm willing to give up everything. And it's really
Speaker:freeing to find what that is for you. The first thing I ever, I was the kind of person that wanted
Speaker:to keep all my options open and you know, this menu of all these possibilities.
Speaker:Maybe your background speaks to generalism and in a way that I, I, yeah, I get,
Speaker:you know, like I love to just sit and play the banjo all day and I could envision a version
Speaker:of my life where I thought the world was going great and I could just do that. And I actually
Speaker:think people are changing the world and playing the banjo too. So I, that maybe just stopped my
Speaker:talent. But my, I guess my point is the first most freeing decision I made was I want to be
Speaker:in Montana. My, all my roots were here. I couldn't imagine moving away and not being with grandma
Speaker:Darlene through her and the rest of my family, but she's sort of the symbol of it. And she's
Speaker:still with us. She's my last remaining grandparent. And then the second most freeing decision I made
Speaker:was to get married to Eileen. And that was one of these things where it limits you. It says,
Speaker:okay, she couldn't imagine her life outside of the Helena area around her mom and dad and her
Speaker:siblings. And then the third most freeing decision was, okay, I'm going to give my
Speaker:life to this whole crazy notion of old soul. And we're fighting to make payroll every week
Speaker:and we're raising millions of dollars that don't really come into the bank account. You could just
Speaker:use them, but it's debt and leverage that makes you have to deliver to investors and banks and
Speaker:you know, your customers. So it is absolutely terrifying. And if I thought, if I sat back to
Speaker:think about risk too much, I'd be so paralyzed. I couldn't move. So instead I just embrace how
Speaker:risky it is. And, but I feel fully alive. Like this is the set of problems I asked for.
Speaker:Um, like we're in it now. Like, let's go try to be salt of the earth. Let's try to go enhance
Speaker:our community and our landscapes. Thank you. Number one, I think for
Speaker:detailing the weight of risk. I think sometimes we talk about risk in a way that removes it
Speaker:from ourselves when I think that risk is so, so integral to what it is to dream really big and to
Speaker:find a hill that you want to die on and to have freedom in wanting to live and die on that hill.
Speaker:And I appreciated that addition really deeply. And I want to thank you because, um,
Speaker:I know that the, the risk that Josh and I have taken with Western daughters, like it, it weighs
Speaker:heavy and it means it means the world to me, right? Like that, this is what I have devoted my
Speaker:life to. And I think that that is a part of risk is finding a sort of freedom in limit as you were
Speaker:talking, you know, and, and we've talked about this some on the podcast that sometimes that limit
Speaker:or that container gives us freedom. The, the container of a marriage, the container
Speaker:of making a decision of where you're going to devote your life gives you freedom to live in
Speaker:that risk, to live in that dream both and to carry both, but it's not easy and it's salty,
Speaker:right? I mean, it's a salty place to be and it, it takes, it takes some grit to, to, to be there.
Speaker:For sure. Yeah. Yeah. I think the, you know, the living and dying on something is very connected
Speaker:to me because, um, and I've heard, I think I've heard you talk about this a lot of just
Speaker:this relationship with death. Um, so many of us are paralyzed by that fear and we spend our,
Speaker:our lives trying to avoid the question, um, or, you know, set ourselves up and put a lot of stuff
Speaker:in the barn and that you can't take with you. And, um, and that's, you know, an old story there. Yeah.
Speaker:And, um, I'm, I'm forgetting the fellow that wrote this article. I can't, I don't know why I'm
Speaker:forgetting his name, but it's called the cross and the machine. And from my background, that really
Speaker:speaks to me. Oh, was it Paul Kingsnorth? It was Paul Kingsnorth. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker:And, uh, I really do think like the machine analogy, like many things are like a machine
Speaker:and you can compare it to a machine, but the living world is not a machine. And it's, um,
Speaker:it's a mystery, deep mystery, even, you know, as deep as people go in science. And it's not like
Speaker:I have all this depth in science. I'm curious to have a little tiny bit of background,
Speaker:but at the end of it, there's so many questions that science isn't qualified.
Speaker:to answer. You can't, at a certain point, you can't go back and answer the question of why is there
Speaker:something rather than nothing. And the very fact that life exists and is so, it's such a, there's
Speaker:suffering. And a lot of people lead, for the extent to which there is extreme suffering,
Speaker:leads a lot of people to despair. And I can, I've not experienced those depths of suffering,
Speaker:probably like a lot of people, I certainly have experienced suffering, we all do. But it's,
Speaker:I don't, I'm not searching for a world where suffering doesn't exist. I don't think that's
Speaker:real. But I am, I'm searching for a world where suffering is redeemed, because it's part of
Speaker:something beautiful. And there is no agricultural system I know of, or natural system, you know,
Speaker:that doesn't have death in it. But there are some systems where they have death that
Speaker:it's not a beautiful death. It's, if you think of the way chickens are raised,
Speaker:or a lot of hogs, there's no beauty in that. And again, it's not, it's a little bit like this
Speaker:question of like, what's a big enough scale? Where does, where do you cross the Hamish line?
Speaker:What is ag of the middle? But it's sort of like, you know, when you see it, you know,
Speaker:when you've crossed the line into something that isn't beautiful. And I can see the most
Speaker:vibrant farm or ranch in the country has plenty of death. But that death is creating more life.
Speaker:And it goes back to support more life. And there's, there's beauty in the life that
Speaker:the thing had before it died. And I just think about that for,
Speaker:there's so many legitimate concerns out there. And amongst our customers that did the animal
Speaker:live a good life. And there's, and I think those are all really important. But a good life
Speaker:still involves death. And it involves risk. And I don't think,
Speaker:you know, I'm maybe just being a little too abstract here. But
Speaker:no, not for this podcast.
Speaker:Does money and do what I like to make 100,000 a year or more? Yeah. But
Speaker:me too. There's diminishing returns after a certain amount of wealth for the quality of
Speaker:their life. And so I don't think the goal of creating a business is to become financially
Speaker:secure necessarily. I think financially things have to work and they have to give a good enough
Speaker:support to each part of the system to allow it to continue and to reinvest in itself. And
Speaker:so while I think like, do we need to feed the world in agriculture? Well, yes, the world has
Speaker:to be fed. But I don't think the American meat industry has to feed the world. That's not his
Speaker:job. No, the job is for us is to manage the land we have at the carrying capacities that it can
Speaker:sustain, maintain or improve its ecological integrity over time and produce good food.
Speaker:And produce good food. And if everybody has the freedom in their own backyards to do it the same
Speaker:way, then, you know, I have some trust that if we're looking first at the land and its capacities
Speaker:and we're saying, how's it doing from the water system to the carbon cycle, to the variety of
Speaker:biodiversity that it supports. James Rogers has this quote about the goal of agriculture being
Speaker:more heartbeats per acre, which I love. Lots of different types of heartbeats.
Speaker:Yeah. I'm not even sure like
Speaker:the analogy limps when it comes to microbes probably, but I could think of them as sort of
Speaker:heartbeats. Yeah, and being a heartbeat in a way. Being a heartbeat of soil in many ways,
Speaker:that they are a heart. Anyway, so yes, we have to be productive. And yes, all the people in the
Speaker:system have to make money enough to support themselves. But there's a real, ultimately,
Speaker:you get back into the realm of like, what is a good life and philosophy and theology and what
Speaker:makes people happy and what makes systems work to say that, yeah, money isn't the only thing.
Speaker:There's a lot of things that have to work. And as much as I want money and stability,
Speaker:I'd be willing to trade a lot of that for time and mental bandwidth and relationships,
Speaker:connections, right? Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker:And so you've got to optimize those things.
Speaker:I have a lot of thoughts tonight. No, this is the kind of conversation we often have on this
Speaker:podcast. And so I love this. I've been thinking a lot about death and I've been thinking a lot
Speaker:about this idea of circularity. And I've been wondering if that conversation that I had with
Speaker:Dan Egan about phosphorus, there was this idea of what would it take to re-solder that circle?
Speaker:And I've been asking myself that question a lot the last couple of months. And one of the things
Speaker:I've been musing about is whether or not it's our relationship with death, that it is our
Speaker:relationship with death that informs the completion of that circle in so many different ways because
Speaker:death is that point of transformation, that the difference between a live body and a corpse is
Speaker:honestly a transformation into decay, into all the microbes that outnumber our own cells,
Speaker:10 to 1, beginning to take over and proliferate in their capacity, beginning to give back the
Speaker:minerals and nutrients that I've come to think of as us borrowing from deep time. We talked about
Speaker:those 20 million year old fossils and I think in many ways when you look at the nutrient cycle,
Speaker:we're borrowing some of the minerals that make up our body from these deep time cycles and we go
Speaker:back into that cycle for those nutrients of life to be used again. But I think that death is also
Speaker:where you can see a limit, right? It is the idea that we can't have growth in perpetuity, whether
Speaker:that's in a business or on a landscape. We have to recognize a point where an asymptotic line
Speaker:becomes an S-curve and begins to shift and set that and to build a business as you so beautifully
Speaker:put it that we can really live in, not built to sell but built to live in. And part of imagining
Speaker:the living in that is knowing that this time is short and that death is there and that death
Speaker:is an impetus for us to live a good life now while we are here. And that was one of my questions for
Speaker:you because I heard you say that on Anthony. It's like, what is a good life? I thought a lot about
Speaker:that leading up to this. And I think a good life is knowing that that death is there and wanting
Speaker:it to be a good one and wanting it to be a connected one with people that we love, right?
Speaker:I think death gives us a lens where we can say that money is not the most important thing. It's
Speaker:those connections. It's the relationships that we're building, the communities that we're
Speaker:building, the ecosystems that we're building that will be lived in by others at some other place
Speaker:in time. And so, I wonder a lot if death heals it in some ways.
Speaker:I think you're totally right about it. In a way, it's the ultimate limit. And if you're going to
Speaker:say, okay, well, I'm not going to live forever and therefore my possibilities are intrinsically,
Speaker:my opportunities are intrinsically limited, then it says, okay, then what are the other
Speaker:smaller limits? Like I mentioned earlier, deciding to be in Montana, deciding to get married to a
Speaker:certain person, deciding to do a certain kind of work. Those are smaller limits that give you some
Speaker:freedom in the context of the ultimate limit to say, okay, what will it mean to live the richest
Speaker:life I can? And to feel that when I die, hopefully I could have contributed to fertility.
Speaker:Not just my decaying body, but hopefully your life and your impact. And that seems to be that
Speaker:sense of leaving a legacy. I think that's a different way of saying it. One, I don't like
Speaker:as much, but you think about the Greeks wanting their name to be preserved throughout this.
Speaker:And I'm not so interested in the name being preserved, but I do think it goes back to that
Speaker:same desire to become part of fertility rather than to have detracted from it or to degrade it.
Speaker:To be a taker. My uncle Brent always talks about being a giver. Are you a giver or are you a taker?
Speaker:Well, we're always both. We all take. We take so much from, I think about, so I'm rambling here a
Speaker:little bit, but I think the difference between the kind of agriculture that I think we have and
Speaker:the kind of agriculture that I hope for is the difference between a canal and a stream.
Speaker:They both deliver water. And you could say that a canal delivers it more efficiently in some ways.
Speaker:It has a more singular purpose. But the inefficiencies of a stream, all the bends and
Speaker:the dips and the rocks and the logs creates the opportunity for life. Life exists in inefficiency.
Speaker:And love is inefficient. You think of the most inefficient process you could
Speaker:ever imagine for me is raising children. And we have two little boys. It is really inefficient.
Speaker:And you can't, dad always said that with things, efficiency, with people,
Speaker:inefficiency, it's intrinsically inefficient to communicate well, to maintain a relationship.
Speaker:But when you decide, okay, I'm just going to go ahead and lean into that inefficiency,
Speaker:it's the most rewarding thing in the world. And it actually is what allows life to exist.
Speaker:The patient living with inefficiency. And it just, you think of all the riparian area habitat,
Speaker:and all of the wet spots that are maintained longer into the dry
Speaker:summer and fall by the activity of beavers. And it's really about spreading out the things that
Speaker:provide life and providing all these little pockets of inefficiencies for things to make a home in.
Speaker:Good community is a really, probably a really inefficient one, but it's one that's connected
Speaker:and spends a lot of time with each other, communicates heavily. You really understand
Speaker:it's an interdependence. So in a lot of ways, I want an inefficient agricultural system.
Speaker:Yeah. And one of the things I was going to say, because I think that's a beautiful metaphor for
Speaker:building a business. And I think that any of us that hope to learn anything from an ecosystem,
Speaker:and I'm always learning from the one I'm in, right? It teaches me something every day,
Speaker:is about how we live the rest of our lives. And I think that the word efficiency, I love everything
Speaker:that you said, but I think it depends on what you see as efficiency. And I think that through the
Speaker:lens of the last 150 years of creating something that's more reduced, that is more linear,
Speaker:that is more singular in purpose and in mission, just that bottom line, just that terminology of
Speaker:efficiency works counter to what it is to build a complex ecosystem of thriving members, land,
Speaker:people, businesses, producers, consumers, families, communities, regions,
Speaker:that it could never touch. And I think that when we get into looking at something through a more
Speaker:context-oriented holistic lens, it is about seeing that the efficiency is in the inefficiency,
Speaker:and it is in those spaces that you build for people to flourish. And I just think that's
Speaker:fantastic on so many different levels. Yeah. And I don't mean to be too cute about it.
Speaker:And I know, once you get a business, you have to be able to deliver a product at a good enough
Speaker:price that people can attain. It needs to be accessible. And you don't want people to be
Speaker:paying for a waste of time or laziness. And so I'm deep in trying to get more efficient about
Speaker:how we allocate responsibilities across the country, the company, trying to build tools
Speaker:that make us sharper about where our labor dollars are going, really understanding how
Speaker:to allocate our overhead, making sure we understand what our cost of goods sold are.
Speaker:And we are constantly in search of, despite the fact that I kind of despise technology in a lot
Speaker:of ways, we depend on it. You have to figure out good ways to use it. And I think just rejecting
Speaker:it entirely probably doesn't allow you to make the impact that you hope to see in the world.
Speaker:And yet embracing it wholesale as if it's God is also a problem.
Speaker:I think your grandparents probably had a good lens to look at that through where you're conservative,
Speaker:you're careful around new things, but you're also open to them. I think that that is a good
Speaker:tack to take with technology. And I agree completely that we work to build a lot of
Speaker:efficiencies at Western Daughters so that it can function more as an ecosystem, more
Speaker:short-con activities, because it's hard to run a business, because it is such slim margins.
Speaker:There has to be efficiency built in. But this is, again, coming back to that holistic context
Speaker:that you're trying to build something that works, that is sustainable, that can last,
Speaker:that you can live in, that can support you. I do not take a paycheck from Western Daughters.
Speaker:And neither does Josh at this time. And that's tough. And so you want to build something that
Speaker:is supportive of you and of other people and a community and an ecosystem and soil.
Speaker:Absolutely.
Speaker:Drive it home.
Speaker:One thing I do want to touch on at least briefly before we wrap up, and I know we're coming close
Speaker:on time here, at least quickly, is the USDA processing, because I think that that puts
Speaker:death back in the equation in a really specific way. And one thing I want to say at least before
Speaker:we get off is that you've said a lot that you want to do for meat what microbreweries did for
Speaker:beer. And I think that one of the interesting things about processing in particular is that
Speaker:we don't champion it in the same way. You would never wear a hat from your local processor. And
Speaker:as a consumer, I would, in the same way that you would from a microbrewery. And I think actually
Speaker:connecting death back into that system is incredibly important. And having access to
Speaker:how you process that meat, especially as people that want to see more whole animal
Speaker:utilization enter the marketplace, is a place where, yet another place where transformation
Speaker:can happen.
Speaker:Yeah. I go back and forth between, I follow a guy named Farmstead Meatsmith. The channel is
Speaker:called Farmstead Meatsmith. And I think there's a lot that is poetic and beautiful
Speaker:about what they do. And I think they might be in Oklahoma or somewhere. They were in the Pacific
Speaker:Northwest and now they're down there. And it's very much like one animal at a time, 100% carcass
Speaker:utilization, cultivating the skills of self-reliance. And yet what I've had to balance that with is
Speaker:that if I want to see our family's ranch continue, and I don't see a version of the world where
Speaker:we are all homesteaders who spent too much time in the Bay Area to see what life looks
Speaker:like there. Too much time, not like I've spent a ton of time, but I've been in New York and
Speaker:Boston. And I just, part of this kind of medium scale of agriculture, yes, I value farmers
Speaker:markets and I value urban agriculture for sure. But I, one of the unique things about
Speaker:these ranches in Montana that I have kind of said about, hey, my job is to serve them
Speaker:continuing to exist. And one of the cool things about these four ranches together, they probably
Speaker:manage 400,000 acres of private and public land. And it's not, they're not wealthy because
Speaker:of agriculture at all. Like if they just sold the land, they would be wealthy. But like
Speaker:I said, we're looking for a business to live in rather than one to flip. And so if we're
Speaker:going to maintain those intact ecosystems and part of them being like one operation
Speaker:at some scale is grizzly bears are expanding their range because they've got these connected
Speaker:landscapes and wolves are expanding their range and migratory birds have a home. And
Speaker:so maintaining those large landscapes means the ability to sell 2000 livestock a year.
Speaker:And if I want to do that, I'm going to have to have a USDA facility because basically
Speaker:those are the rules that have been set up for us. And I wish that food safety law was
Speaker:different than it is right. In so many ways, you could build a very safe meat processing
Speaker:facility for a third of what it is going to cost us as we're building these plants. And
Speaker:yet it is what it is. So it's the mountain I think we have to climb if we want to see
Speaker:this agricultural middle. And, you know, that takes the kind of recovery of a lot of
Speaker:skill sets that across the country, the skill set of breaking down an animal and utilizing
Speaker:the carcass. But it really takes skill sets of a plant administrator who can work with
Speaker:labeling compliance and HACCP plans and that can really build a good relationship with
Speaker:the regulators. And it takes a traceability system. And it takes, you know, finance, financial
Speaker:expertise and acumen to manage the grant and the loan side and manage the investors and
Speaker:the whole flow of money that fuels it. And then you have to make damn sure that if you
Speaker:build that facility, which anybody can plan a facility and get it built, but then keeping
Speaker:it busy is processing is, yes, very consolidated in our country, but just as consolidated
Speaker:as distribution, just as consolidated as the retail environment it's sold in. And so we've
Speaker:got to, at the end of the day, processing won't help us unless we can really gain access
Speaker:to a market, to people who will buy from us. And that's why the customer has so much power
Speaker:to fuel this, to decide that this is the kind of agriculture that they want to fuel and
Speaker:to put their daily resources of eating into it. Like we need the customer's help. And
Speaker:part of the microbrewery thing, we wanted to do what, for me, what microbreweries have
Speaker:done in the beer world is just that at the end of the day, local food is about community.
Speaker:It's about relationship. It's about connecting with each other. It's about something sexier
Speaker:than frozen meat in a cooler at a farmer's market. It's about a place. It's about places.
Speaker:And so that's kind of why we've waded into the restaurant world and have one of our own
Speaker:and another one launching at the end of the month and a festival. There's places where
Speaker:people come together, customers with producers, with everybody in the middle of that supply
Speaker:circle. And I think during COVID, the federal government came out with a lot of low interest
Speaker:loans and grants to fund processing across the country. And I'm delighted to see that.
Speaker:But in a lot of ways, it was a very partial response to what is a very systemic problem.
Speaker:And so I wish we would have had the foresight, let's say, to spend half as much on processing
Speaker:infrastructure, but to provide funds for schools and institutions to be able to actually buy
Speaker:the product that is the product of these processing facilities. Because otherwise, if these small
Speaker:processors that are all being built or augmented across the country, there will be a lot of used
Speaker:equipment facilities on the market in a few short years if they aren't able to really gain market
Speaker:access. And I wouldn't say that the landscape for brands that move meat products has become easier
Speaker:since COVID. I mean, in some cases, COVID gave it a shot in the arm and kind of woke some folks up.
Speaker:They realized that things are fragile and they don't want to be fragile. But in a lot of ways,
Speaker:we kind of forgot really quickly. And we went back to business as usual, life as normal.
Speaker:A very short term memory.
Speaker:Yeah. And so processing is so critical. I think we need to be able to sell to neighbors. And
Speaker:right now, if we're going to sell commercially to neighbors, we need inspected processing services.
Speaker:So these plants are critical, but just as critical is that market access and the ability
Speaker:to actually find a group of customers who will keep that processing facility and its employees
Speaker:busy doing what they do well. Yeah. And I think one of the things that I think has been really
Speaker:beautiful about this conversation is how often you come back to consumers and just how much power
Speaker:they have. And I think that this is a message to consumers in a lot of ways in how you can be
Speaker:involved and how you are a part of place. I mean, whether or not you are conscious of it,
Speaker:you are a part of that agricultural supply chain. And that moment that you realize that you can be
Speaker:a part of this transformation, I think is a really big one. And that is about finding those places,
Speaker:those restaurants, those festivals, those farmers and ranchers whose hands you shake and digging in
Speaker:a little bit. Yeah, I think that's right. I think there's a group in the hunting world called
Speaker:Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, and there's a brand called Meat Eater. And a couple of the
Speaker:things that they've done so well is that they've helped people, wherever they live, understand
Speaker:there's a way to participate in public lands. You can refine your skills as a hunter. You can
Speaker:refine your cooking skills of the animals that you might harvest. You can learn how to use maps,
Speaker:and you can go explore the landscape and go engage in this incredible network of public
Speaker:lands we have across the West. And I think agriculture is harder to engage people in
Speaker:and help them feel ownership in because it's private land. And it's just not like they can
Speaker:just go, if you want to be in agriculture yourself as a producer, you can find ways to do that.
Speaker:But if you're a customer, how do you really participate and dive in? How do we feel like
Speaker:we're together in that mission, rather than just basically being a passive customer?
Speaker:Because I don't really want the customer that just says, look, I'm looking for a better product.
Speaker:And that's kind of the extent of my interest. I want customers to find a place or a set of places
Speaker:that they get to know over time and they invest in those places through the products that come
Speaker:from those places. Because places are not just land. They are people and economies and main streets
Speaker:and rural communities. And so if you decide to become part of that place through its products,
Speaker:you also need some other ways to engage too. And that's kind of what the restaurants and the
Speaker:festival are trying to do with Old Salt is like, what are the ways that we can show that we are a
Speaker:real place rather than just some product online? And I really am hoping to engage customers who
Speaker:give just as big a damn as I do about a world that we'll be proud to share with our kids.
Speaker:And having, we don't live by bread alone. We need to feel meaning in our work and in our impact and
Speaker:what our resources go towards, our time and our money and all of our resources. So I really hope
Speaker:that we can engage customers in this mission that all of us being part of agriculture to create a
Speaker:more beautiful agriculture. We're talking about eat good meat and be salt of the earth when it
Speaker:comes to the meat side of things. And land is kin, we talk a lot about, and that just means,
Speaker:hey, we're all part of the land. And if we're going to restore land, it means not just restoring
Speaker:soil and water, but it was restoring our relationships with each other and the way
Speaker:we do commerce together. And I guess one of the things I know we're wrapping up here, Kate. One
Speaker:of the things I wanted to just say to the audience is like, it really takes a lot of people who give
Speaker:a damn. And so beyond the customers, if there's people who are listening out there who are,
Speaker:they've got skills and data and operations or in marketing or in butchery or on the culinary side,
Speaker:and they want to engage with like a brand that like really cares about this stuff and is creating,
Speaker:is helping to augment hopefully its place. Find us, oldsaltcoop.com, shoot us a message
Speaker:or ping us on Instagram or social media, because we're definitely looking to build our team on the
Speaker:marketing and the sales side and on the butchery side and on the culinary side. And it's not,
Speaker:there's really cool things happening across the country. But if Montana seems like an
Speaker:interesting place to be to you, come find us because we need all the help we can get.
Speaker:I love that. And I'll include a note in my intro too, for those that don't make it to the end,
Speaker:that little shout out was there, because I think that this is really important. And I think that
Speaker:being a part of something like this is a way of giving meaning. We're not just,
Speaker:what was the exact phrase that you used? We're not just here to bread.
Speaker:Yeah, we don't live by bread alone.
Speaker:We don't live by bread alone. Thank you. You gave me a couple of nuggets today that I really,
Speaker:really deeply appreciated.
Speaker:I think of Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning.
Speaker:Yep. Okay. Yeah. Oh, I think that's a beautiful way to wrap it up. I had this kind of
Speaker:question. You said something about, you do such a good job of, and you said something on Anthony's
Speaker:podcast about engaging tradition in a thoughtful way. And I think that you do that. And I think
Speaker:that you are building bridges to all of these different places and building a system that
Speaker:gives back and that gives meaning. And I'm really appreciative of this interview,
Speaker:actually. You find me in a funny place in business. I know that you and I have talked about
Speaker:Western daughters. And this was really inspiring for me to dig in a little bit.
Speaker:And I want to thank you for giving that to me and giving me that dose of community that
Speaker:you gave me this summer that I can't wait to experience again this summer. And just,
Speaker:there's a lot of wisdom in this podcast that I'm really grateful for. And so, thank you.
Speaker:Because I think one of my questions was to ask you, what is a good life? And I think,
Speaker:though, you're welcome to expound on it. I think that you touched on that multiple times
Speaker:in a lot of really beautiful ways.
Speaker:Well, I don't think there's one good one-liner for that.
Speaker:No, there never could be.
Speaker:I'm really grateful to just be part of the conversation with you. And thank you for
Speaker:creating a space where it feels really natural to talk about all these things.
Speaker:That's not easy to do. So, thanks for your stewardship of the conversation.
Speaker:Thank you. That means a lot to me because this is a big piece of what I want to build to live in.
Speaker:So, I appreciate you saying that. And I can't wait to come back out this summer and see you
Speaker:and see everybody. And hopefully, for those that are listening, see some of you too.
Speaker:And I'll have links to the festival in the show notes and to Old Salt. Is there any place else
Speaker:that you want people to find you? We'll have Instagram links, website links.
Speaker:I think that's just right. Yeah, OldSaltFestival.com. We'll take you right to the
Speaker:festival page. And like you said, when this podcast airs, the early bird tickets will be live.
Speaker:And OldSaltCoop.com is our main website. That's where you can find our meets or our
Speaker:eating establishments or our podcasts that we've done with ranchers about the restoration efforts
Speaker:that they're doing, whether it's a stream or a grazing setup, or whether it's wildlife,
Speaker:like how do you manage livestock amidst large carnivores, all those kind of questions. So,
Speaker:that's where you can find us. And I'm just grateful for the time today, Kate.
Speaker:Cool. Thank you so much. I'll see you this summer.
Speaker:See you this summer.
Speaker:Great.
Speaker:Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Mind, Body, and Soil podcast.
Speaker:If what you found resonated with you, may I ask that you share it with your friends
Speaker:or leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts? This act of reciprocity
Speaker:helps others find mind, body, and soil. If you're looking for more, you can find us at
Speaker:GroundworkCollective.com and at Kate underscore Kavanaugh. That's K-A-T-E underscore K-A-V-A-N-A-U-G-H
Speaker:on Instagram. I would like to give a very special thank you to Chyna and Seth Kent of the band
Speaker:All Right All Right for the clips from their beautiful song Over the Edge from their album
Speaker:The Crucible. You can find them at All Right All Right on Instagram and wherever you listen to
Speaker:music.
