Transforming Agriculture with Regenerative Practices

Transforming Agriculture with Regenerative Practices

In today’s rapidly changing world, agriculture stands at a crossroads. Traditional farming methods have long been the dominant narrative, but the focus is shifting. Regenerative agriculture emerges not just as a trend but as a necessity—a method promising to restore ecosystems, yield economic benefits, and foster community collaboration. 

Join Josh Bellieu’s conversation with guest Ben Pasley from Mt. Folly farms as they discuss regenerative agriculture and its benefits. Ben shares insights on transitioning farms from conventional methods to more sustainable practices. 

They discuss government grants, the importance of local supply chains, and the need for a balanced approach to farming. By utilizing practices like cover cropping and prescribed grazing, farms can be more sustainable and profitable. Ben highlights his commitment to better food and soil, aiming to revolutionize farming and bring healthier foods to consumers.

Listen to the full episode here or watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/ze7anZlZlpA

Visit UltraBotanica.com to learn more about us and how you can get a free sample of our products.

Transcript

0:00:00 - (Ben Pasley): How earlier we were talking about these hundred thousand head feeders. Well, it's a similar problem at the plants. They've gotten so large and they've created these externalized costs that everybody else in the area and community are paying, whether they know it or not. They're having to, you know, operate in this, you know, economic system where scale means cheaper.

0:00:28 - (Josh Bellew): Right.

0:00:29 - (Ben Pasley): And they have taken that to the extreme. And that's not necessarily, you know, what we're saying. We know we're going to have to get to a certain level of scale just to manage our costs. Any good entrepreneur knows that. But at what cost are you willing to sell out your people, your community and externalize the cost to your consumers at a rate of staggering proportions? So I can't get into like too crazy of a specific about it, but it was gut wrenching for even a.

0:01:01 - (Ben Pasley): I mean, think of me. I've lived on a farm and operated a farm my entire life. And it turned my stomach in ways that no one should have to be experienced to live through that, work in that, or, you know, subject the animals to that.

0:01:28 - (Josh Bellew): Hey, good morning, good afternoon, good evening wherever you happen to be in this world where I am. It's a rainy, floody kind of day here in Oklahoma at the Ultra Botanic Studios. This is Ultra Life today. I'm Josh Bellew. Ever since I met a couple of brothers from Kentucky over the phone a couple of years ago, I got fascinated with some things they're doing. I always love meeting people that have generational backgrounds and things, everything from wild crafting herbs to growing hemp to making moonshine and healthy food.

0:02:08 - (Josh Bellew): And one of them just happened to join me today from a, from a group that we'll call Mount Folly. You can look up Mount Folly.com and anywhere you want to find these guys on social media at Mount Folly. That's, that's MT F O L L Y. I've got Ben Pasley that I'm interviewing today and we're going to talk about a lot of stuff, but we're going to get into something that's really hot right now. Some of you are probably having big advertisements for movies called Kiss the Ground and Common Ground that have won all kinds of awards that are streaming right now.

0:02:50 - (Josh Bellew): Two of my very favorite movies of all time that really enlightened me to the whole idea of regenerative ranching and farming. Hey, Ben Pasley, what's going on out there in Kentucky today?

0:03:02 - (Ben Pasley): Brother Josh, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity. Anytime we get to talk about regenerative agriculture, you know, maybe where the USDA is headed and you know, all the opportunities that are in this space to not only grow better food, but take better care of our soil as a nation, as a people, as a community. I appreciate the opportunity. So thank you for having me.

0:03:27 - (Josh Bellew): Yeah. Okay, run down real quick. This, I mean, when I first met you guys, I told you I romance about people who have a rich history of growing up in the mountains, in the hill country and stuff. Give us a quick snapshot of your, your relatives and what brings you up to today and what makes you guys so passionate about what you're doing.

0:03:48 - (Ben Pasley): Absolutely. So like you said, Ben Pasley. I'm from central Kentucky in the rolling hills. I'm actually an eighth generation Kentuckian. I'm a fifth generation farmer in my county. So that means that, you know, my great grandfather first came here at the turn of the, you know, 1900s. And the story of that, the, that we tell everybody. His name was John William Pasley and he came to Clark county when he had seven boys, two girls. He showed up and bought 30 acres, had a milk cow, a little patch of tobacco and a garden and $30, that's all he showed up.

0:04:32 - (Josh Bellew): Wow.

0:04:33 - (Ben Pasley): He came out of the mountains into the rolling hills and this is where he decided to stop. And when those boys, when the last one finally died and it was around the 60s, which, you know, a couple of them served in World War II and they all came back alive fortunately.

0:04:50 - (Josh Bellew): Nice.

0:04:50 - (Ben Pasley): When by the time the last one died, they had several thousand acres under management, several hundred head of cattle under management, several hundred head. I'm sorry, several hundred acres of tobacco, which we're in tobacco country, you know, here in the Carolinas. But, you know, they had a family legacy that they started then, you know, hundreds of years ago. And you know, so I was raised, you know, into this farming family.

0:05:18 - (Ben Pasley): But what really set us off into our current businesses with Mount Folly was I connected with Laura Freeman of formerly she founded Large lean beef in 85.

0:05:30 - (Josh Bellew): Right.

0:05:31 - (Ben Pasley): In 2008. You know, we've created these. And this is going to be a special part of why and what we're exactly doing, but got us into value added farm products. Because Laura Learned in the 80s, 90s and 2000s that it's one thing if you're trying to, you know, impact your own personal farm. It's another thing if you're trying to impact a farming system within a farming commute within multiple farming communities.

0:06:01 - (Ben Pasley): So we're trying to have a bigger perspective than Just our personal farm or farms, I should say, because, you know, we're trying to make impact at scale and not, not at a national scale, but within our region. Because these regional systems and regionalizing supply chains, whether it's Covid or tariffs or what, whichever thing you want to point at, you know, having strong community and regional systems is one of the, you know, aspects of our brand that we want to know, be able to talk about and you know, make stronger.

0:06:38 - (Josh Bellew): Yeah. Now the complexity is I began to look into what it is that you guys are strategizing to do out there in your community and with these mid sized farms, you know, a thousand to fifteen hundred acre farms, it got me really excited. But I thought, man, these people are playing a chess game of trying to mobilize and help farmers kind of shift their mindset from what they may have been doing to what is happening now. That's actually going to give you guys more bang for your buck, really open up supply chain opportunities so that you guys can get really lean and mean and efficient in what you're doing.

0:07:20 - (Josh Bellew): Now I understand that and obviously your background kind of inspires what you're doing today, but you're taking it to a whole new level. Now in one of our conversations, you, you mentioned to me early on that you guys had applied for a grant. And I'm going to come back to this USDA thing in a little bit as well. But you guys had applied for some kind of grant that we're calling a climate smart commodities grant.

0:07:49 - (Josh Bellew): And I think there's some pivoting that's actually having to take place right now. But tell me a little bit about that grant and what you guys envision being able to do as you roll out in phases and what you're doing there.

0:08:02 - (Ben Pasley): Sure. So we were awarded a climate what, what the Biden administration called a climate smart commodities grant. And that essentially is connecting producers with, you know, the middlemen like ourselves that are sourcing commodities, turning them into a value added product and then consumers. So we were already on both sides of this. And you know, the other thing I like to point out to people is, you know, we're in central Kentucky, you know, we're in the heart of, I think Mitch McConnell slogan was God, guns and coal.

0:08:39 - (Ben Pasley): And so being able to talk about the climate and the impacts of the climate were never really easy for us in the same manner as it is to talk about, you know, regionalizing supply chain.

0:08:51 - (Josh Bellew): No kidding.

0:08:52 - (Ben Pasley): So we weren't really heavy using the climate terminology, but we were able to accomplish the goals of that grant itself, which at its most simplistic definition is we have been paying farmers to implement NRCS practices that can be prescribed. Grazing, planting cover crops, planting trees, all the things that can create for a good ecosystem and a, you know, you know, the step in the right direction of regenerative agriculture. Learned in the last, on April 14, we learned that President Trump and his USDA are going to be canceling that program.

0:09:34 - (Ben Pasley): But at the same time have said that all these former projects, as long as they've paid at least one farmer in the last two years, which we paid several, so we're fine. We are going to be able to apply for a new project which is going to be called Advancing Markets for Producers. It's not going to be so heavy on the climate language, but the priority of this program is going to be twofold. It's going to be how easily can we get payments to farmers and are you going to be able to create products that will pull these commodities at a value to the farmer all the way through the supply chain?

0:10:16 - (Ben Pasley): And we're proud to be able to say that we're already doing that. And if we're gonna be able to provide some extra NRCS funding to our farmer network in the greater Ohio River Valley. So I'm talking everything from Ohio down even to the Carolinas, even, you know, even northern Georgia, Tennessee, Missouri, Indiana, Illinois, you know, this entire part of the country that we can sign people up for and implement some rather simple practices. And some of these farmers might already be administering some of these practices.

0:10:54 - (Ben Pasley): But because we're already in our proof of concept and we're selling wholesale retail anywhere that we can, you know, move some of our beef, we're already there.

0:11:06 - (Josh Bellew): So you guys have a proven supply chain. One of the struggles I've seen as I've looked at some of these documentary movies that are so powerful, is that the shifting of the mindset from someone that's just been doing the basic agro farming over the last several decades in their family to then moving into these regenerative practices. But it sounds like you guys have personally implemented these yourselves within your own culture there, and you've already got other people at various phases of doing some of these things that would move a farm from what we've seen as the conventional utilized pesticides, you know, and it just looks like a strip farming thing to what I've looked at is these amazing, amazing ecosystems that are lush and look natural and stuff.

0:12:02 - (Josh Bellew): Can, can you describe briefly a little bit about coming into one of those areas and how quickly you can implement these practices. Because I know back in the day the whole idea was, well, we can't, we can't embrace these without losing our shirt, me being a traditional farmer. But you guys are turning these things around really quickly these days by implementing some of these strategies. Give us a little snapshot of how that works and how quickly someone can do it. Because at the end of the day for me, I'm a business guy, I'm an entrepreneur, you guys are entrepreneurs.

0:12:39 - (Josh Bellew): It's all about how quickly can I begin to feed my family and even multiply revenue back to me. And it sounds like you're accomplishing that.

0:12:49 - (Ben Pasley): Yes, well, you hit it right on the head at the end of the day. Well, the first thought needs to be financial. You can't. Unless you were just independently wealthy, you don't need to go out and borrow, you know, 180% of your worth to go implement some practice that doesn't work. We have to have almost like the three legged stool of decision making between the financial aspect from the family, community aspect, all the way down to what are the results of that.

0:13:19 - (Ben Pasley): So I'm sure you have listeners from all over North America and different farmers are going to have different, I mean, not only different soil types, but different levels of risk to different equipment that will. A certain practice might make more sense for him to start with and then add on later, add on more later. So for us, you know, we're trying to take it in the step of a direction in our part of the country. I'll say is lifetime pasture access.

0:13:50 - (Ben Pasley): You know, that is the first thing that we can say for our supply chain. Our animals have lifetime pasture access forever. And when a farmer starts that way, you know, the easiest thing to do is to buy some different species of grasses to create a more diverse ecosystem in their pasture. Alright? Then say if they had row crops that they fed some of that corn back to their cattle, then it'd say, alright, well first thing we can do is let's do some cover crops.

0:14:22 - (Ben Pasley): So even if you do two till or no till, we can at least start with COVID crops. Because that cover crop can keep the soil engaged not having minimal erosion and can be good fuel for the microbiome of the soil when it is terminated in some way, shape or form. Now from there it can get more complicated by going fully organic. For example, like you said, no chemical, no synthetic fertilizers. It can also get more complicated than saying, all right, we're grazing in our, in our pastures now we're Gonna do prescribed grazing where we move these animals every three to five days.

0:15:03 - (Ben Pasley): And that's when you can start to have more cattle per acre. So that then if the farmer can have more cattle per acre, all of a sudden his revenue went up because his inventory just increased. You see what I'm saying? It's. It creates a system that is ecologically viable and diverse enough that it can sustain as many mouths, if you will, mouths on the farm and off the farm.

0:15:29 - (Josh Bellew): Yeah. And when. And when I heard some of these numbers from people that just had 1,000 or 2,000 acres and they began to rotate the animals from pasture to pasture, like you're talking about laying in some cover crops and stuff, I was astonished because I thought this is like the difference between this family just kind of getting by and having to exist on government subsidies and being able to ultimately become independent and actually make as much as 40% more per acre, which ends up being able to create a legacy.

0:16:12 - (Josh Bellew): I mean, it's like, why would the kids not want to leave if they're walking into some kind of profitable, sustainable thing where they can't send their kids off to college, they can't have money to do things? I mean, I was really astonished that the older way is actually the more profitable way. Has it helped you guys? I mean, you guys have been around in that area for a long time. I suspect being the leader of the charge can have people on both sides of the fence. You've got opposition and people wanting to join you.

0:16:47 - (Josh Bellew): How hard has it been for you guys to raise your hand in the community and say, hey, look, we've put together a plan. We actually have a way to do this. We've proven it ourselves. Now y'all come and let's do this thing together. Has that been a big challenge, or has it been not too difficult for you?

0:17:09 - (Ben Pasley): Not as difficult as I originally thought it was going to be two years ago, when the beef aspect of our companies really started to take off, when we got the Climate Smart grant, I thought that it was going to be almost impossible to find enough of the, what's called, you know, backgrounded cattle, seven, eight, nine weights, because a finished animal gets up to 13, 14, 1500 pounds. And I just didn't think that there were enough of those animals out there, let alone find a farmer, you know, willing to even do something different.

0:17:46 - (Ben Pasley): But we've absolutely found some. Some great willing partners. I've also seen that it's kind of this new transitional period of, like, the leaders on farms, you know, the younger generation and in farmer terms, younger is like, you know, men and women in their 40s. Wow. The 40 year old farmers that have been farming with their families for the last, you know, say 10, 20 years that you're starting to see this transition go on where now the key decision holder is kind of this next generation and they are willing to make decisions or maybe try something new or just think outside the box of the idea with regenerative farming, with the idea of how can we take the best care of our land because this is what is able to kind of like this is the starting point of our viability.

0:18:44 - (Ben Pasley): If we take care of the land, it'll take care of us. And you know, every farm's a little different but you know, we've seen issues with soil erosion, we've seen issues with, you know, mpk uptake with some of the row crop farmers that you know, oh, we just, we buy, you know, anhydrous and put ammonia nitrate on it and we have this unbelievable, you know, expense for our fertilizer. Well, what are other options out there? Is there a composting option? Is there a compost tea option? You know, what, what kind of nitrogen rich cover crops can we add into the rotation where we may not be able to eliminate the fertilizer but we're buying less of it?

0:19:26 - (Ben Pasley): You see what I'm saying? So being able to think about it in that type of constructive way with the newer generation has been. We're kind of fortunate in our timing in a lot of this stuff.

0:19:38 - (Josh Bellew): Well, that's so cool. You know, I'm reminded I had a friend who passed away a number of years back, but we were super close and he had gotten into mining deposits of humate and rich with fulvic acid and stuff out in Colorado. And his father in law happened to be like a generational rancher that you know, at any given time had cattle grazing on, you know, 25 to 40,000 acres. And they devised a little experiment where they segregated some of these cattle and began to implement the, the humic and fulvic in the water feed systems for these cattle and in some, in some of their feeding as well.

0:20:29 - (Josh Bellew): And the differences that they were getting in finished weight and the health of these animals and what they were bringing at market was staggering to me. And it really took this old timer and convinced him, you know, in short order that this is a really profitable way to farm and it's going to be one that's going to allow me to leave a legacy of better land to all of those coming up after me. And it sounds like you guys have demonstrated that very same thing out there.

0:21:02 - (Ben Pasley): Absolutely. I mean it's a constant struggle. I mean we're working on it to constantly be able to improve it. But we are at least fortunate that the timing, it's so strange how the timing of having a, you know, a pastured product that we're essentially like when we talk about that we're going to be bringing part of the supply chain back from the Midwest. A lot of people don't realize that in Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Nebraska, that's where majority of our extremely large meat feeders are, you know, trucking cattle out that are everything from 5, 6, 7, 8, 900 pounds, feeding them on feed for 150, 180 days.

0:21:49 - (Ben Pasley): And then they go to a packing plant somewhere out there. And these, these feeding operations are, you know, have a lot of externalized costs that are not always direct. Like, you know, we're talking about a hundred thousand animals on one 5 acre track or 10 acre, that all the rain runoff from their manure, all of the phosphates that are coming off in their urine, you know, all of the, all of the problems when you centralize something to that magnitude.

0:22:22 - (Ben Pasley): And what we're trying to do with our program, say if there's a farmer that's interested in trying something new that we get backgrounded 7, 8, 9 weights 8, 800 pounds. Say that go to that farmer's, you know, pasture system and go from 800 pounds to 130 or 1300 pounds. Then we can take them to our processing facility here in central Kentucky and turn them into a value added product. That, that hasn't happened the last 30 years. All we've seen is, you know, farmers want to take their animals to the stockyards and then they get trucked out west.

0:23:00 - (Ben Pasley): Well, that's 2,000 miles away. Those are more food miles. When they truck the animal out, they truck the finished beef back. So if we could eliminate 2,000 food miles for every serving or calorie in the protein space of beef, like that's a, that's a win, win as far as we're concerned and specific. We're kind of getting close to touching on the topic of is it better for you?

0:23:27 - (Josh Bellew): Because we are. Because I was about to say to you, I'm looking at my producer Thomas right now through the glass here at Ultra Studios. I'm Josh Bellew hanging out with Ben Pasley of Mount Folly. Down the hall I've got a buddy named Kyle. He's got a roomie that he works with, you know, right, right next to him. I would say out of 30 people on our staff, including our CEO Adam Payne, who's, who's out hanging out with some naturopaths today out in Arizona.

0:24:00 - (Josh Bellew): We all buy, we all buy grass fed and grass finished and don't mind paying more. We've noticed the difference in eating that meat, the health that it gives us, the vitality it gives us in our everyday life. It seems to me in some ways the pandemic prepared us for paying higher prices at the grocery shelf. But now I'm actually buying grass fed meats that are not that much more expensive than the other meats and happy to do it. You know, what is that?

0:24:40 - (Josh Bellew): Is that kind of, is it really beginning to shift all over the country?

0:24:45 - (Ben Pasley): So I wouldn't say there's a couple different designations I want to point out here. So you have the commodity beef that's, you know, trucked out to the Midwest, that is on almost 100% corn diet. Then you have the grass fed and grass lifetime fed. That is all that they ever eat. And really the only way to really put some weight on those cattle at the very end is they have to be eating a high calorie, almost like an alfalfa ration.

0:25:17 - (Ben Pasley): It's almost impossible to do like in the winter or like in some of your more arid states like New Mexico, Wyoming. I don't, you know, in that area of the country, I don't know how in the world you could finish, you know, grass fed. Now there are some guys in Montana that are doing it. Amazing. But that's some of the best grasslands in the world.

0:25:38 - (Josh Bellew): Right.

0:25:38 - (Ben Pasley): You can find up in Montana, you know, and Idaho in that general area, part of the Dakotas too. But what we're doing given on our area, what works good for us and what our customers really seem to like, we are doing lifetime pasture access with some grain we're able to feed. You know, they have that constant option of those diverse pastures that they can always be eaten on grass, but we're able to supplement with grain. So we're doing grain on grass is how we're calling it.

0:26:12 - (Ben Pasley): And the big designation is lifetime pasture access.

0:26:16 - (Josh Bellew): Gotcha. And ultimately is the goal to be able to phase out the grain in favor of everything just being 100% in the regenerative or climate smart agriculture zone, as you discussed earlier.

0:26:33 - (Ben Pasley): So we're taking a different approach to the corn aspect itself. A lot of folks, excuse me, a lot of folks when they hear monoculture corn with synthetic Fertilizers, you know, they think that can't be regenerative at all. But our approach is almost a poly farm approach where the corn is grown on the same farm. If it's not non gmo, it's certified organic and if it is non gmo, it's no till and it has cover crops behind it where this one poly farm is able to supplement not only that animal on its pasture, but it's feed source with its grain. You know, it's drinking water from the same streams because the streams are clean and good and you know, are able to supplement its entire diet.

0:27:23 - (Ben Pasley): And that's been our approach to start. Now I'm not gonna say that's brilliant.

0:27:29 - (Josh Bellew): Because you've created an ecosystem right there within a thousand to fifteen hundred acre farm. That's brilliant.

0:27:37 - (Ben Pasley): Absolutely. Because one the, the devil's advocates of grass fed beef would say, which in the aspect of the anti climate aspect of beef, because you have to remember in the, in the 2000s, 2010s, a lot of the pro climate consumers did not buy beef and they switched to vegan burgers and soy burgers and those things because the data then said oh, cattle belch and pass methane at a substantial rate. So the devil's advocate on grass fed beef would say the lifetime for these grass fed animals to get up to a butcher weight or 1300 pounds can be 34, even sometimes 36 months.

0:28:30 - (Ben Pasley): So that animal has a very long life that it is eating and belching and you know, having the negative aspects of these animals.

0:28:39 - (Josh Bellew): Right.

0:28:40 - (Ben Pasley): So in our model we are gaining just as much if not as fat, if not faster than what the commodity beefs are. Where we're able to raise an animal for 24 to 26 months of its life, it's weighing 13, 1350, you know, is yielding out so that it makes, you know, sense for us as the processor as far as like pounds of meat per animal.

0:29:04 - (Josh Bellew): Wow.

0:29:05 - (Ben Pasley): It doesn't have that extra year of its life where you're having to, you're having to stretch out your income waiting for that animal to be fully finished. Now the other. I'm sorry, do you have a thought there?

0:29:18 - (Josh Bellew): Well, I was just gonna say I, in what you're talking about there, being able to shave these times down, to get these animals certain size and then maintaining the way they're eating and being in control of that the entire time, being able to ensure non gmo, being able to ensure that the actual grain that you are feeding them is coming from the ground and is organic, it's astonishing to me. One of the things that occurs to me though, and I know you guys have been such forward thinkers in regard to this grant program.

0:29:55 - (Josh Bellew): You guys are, are in the, you guys are in the business of discipling people. I ran across some names as I was investigating you guys, Dylan Kennedy, Alice Melendez, who are actually doing training, mentorship, community engagement and education to help you guys bring all these other farmers on board and even to domino these ideas out into other states. How's that been working for you guys and is that a real uphill challenge or have you been able to kind of snap in some of these ideas you have in engaging other community members to get on board with you?

0:30:39 - (Ben Pasley): Yeah, they've been the boots on the ground to recruit some of the farmers, most of the farmers in the program. And when you, when you're in this regenerative agriculture space, the biggest problem is how do you certify the farms themselves? And what Dylan and Alice are going to be, you know, focusing on here in the near future is that they, one of these third party entities is called the Savory Institute.

0:31:09 - (Ben Pasley): Alan Savory, originally from South Africa, is a brilliant mind in the space of holistic management and regenerative agriculture. So what Dylan and Alice have been doing is they have created, they have created a certified, they call them hubs, but it's a, it's a non profit entity. But this savory hub that's in our bio region in the greater Ohio River Valley is called Fieldspeak. And if you dig deep enough in Mount Folly.com you'll be able to find that.

0:31:39 - (Ben Pasley): But this third party accredited savory hub that is ran by Alice and Dylan are going to be able to provide that third party, you know, boots on the ground application of, you know, are you certified regenerative? Do you want to be? How can you be? What's the most physically, you know, balanced way that you can approach the problem? And so Alice and Dylan, that's their current thing that they're going to be working on, having a third party certifier that's not in house of us so that they can be, you know, non bias.

0:32:16 - (Ben Pasley): And then one thing that Alice does, she's gonna love this shirt, but this is our shirt from the Heritage Food Festival that she's had every year. And it's about the, you know, as you mentioned earlier, the old ways of getting back to how things are done where we have, you know, on farm chicken processing and how to, how to process your own chicken, how to render Your own lard that Dylan does. You know, how to make your own biochar charcoal so that you can have a soil amendment. If you ever heard about biochar, people love biochar, that it's a, you know, charcoal essentially that you can use as a soil amendment that creates essentially a home for these microbiologicals in our soil.

0:33:00 - (Ben Pasley): It's one of the best applications you can add to your, you know, your farm, your garden to create a healthy soil. And that's one of the things at the Heritage Food Festival that we have like, you know, trainings and examples that Dylan and Alice both lead. And I mean they'll even have a seed swap, they'll have a variety. But it's about doing things the old way. And that's, that's a, an idea of what Alice and Dillon have been doing and are going to continue to do.

0:33:28 - (Josh Bellew): Yeah, I'm glad you brought up the Heritage Food Festival thing and what you just mentioned, because the biochar thing is all about creating an environment that allows those microbes that have been missing from the, you know, the last multiple decades of farming done the way it's been done currently, and moving it back to the old ways, you're saying that the biochar basically creates this astonishing environment for the microbes, the enzymes that we actually want in the soil that make a difference in the quality of the food that we're eating.

0:34:04 - (Josh Bellew): It really kind of puts that on steroids. Doesn't really does.

0:34:09 - (Ben Pasley): And we've done some small tests on the farm ourselves. You know, Dylan's even made some 50 gallon kind of like test kilns, if you will, and shows you how to make those to, at the festival. But you've also found a provider of biochar at scale out of the Carolinas where we've trucked in, I mean, truckloads, literal truckloads of biochar, and then spread them like with a manure spreader and then let them work their way into the ground.

0:34:41 - (Josh Bellew): Now, I want people to fasten their seat belts for this next, next part because I got just a taste of this from, pun intended, from talking to your brother Zach, and I wanted to bring the question up. It wasn't on our original list of questions, but I know it's, I know it's not going to shock you, but you guys did a little bit of a USDA tour and I don't want to bash another letter agency, but you guys actually were checking out processing plants. I think you may have gone as far out as Colorado and Stuff.

0:35:17 - (Josh Bellew): Tell me. Just pull the covers back a little bit on some of the horror stories you learned because I remember Ben, I remember Zach basically saying we're gonna have to be building our own processing plants after what we saw. Tell our viewing public what you saw. Because I'm hoping under the current administration, along with all the other house cleaning they're doing, that I know has put a little bit of a burden on you guys. I hope they're gonna go clean up these USDA plants. Tell us what you saw when you there and inspected some of these things.

0:35:51 - (Ben Pasley): Well, I mean, it's, it's hard for, to put into perspective to the general public because I would say that, I mean, less than a quarter of a percent of the population has ever been in one of these industrial plants. Right. The simplest and most. Maybe the easiest way to say it is that it was a factory of turning animals into consumer cuts. And when you're talking about 2000, 2500 animals per shift, that's not even in a day.

0:36:31 - (Ben Pasley): They do 5,000 animals in a day. And you know, they had some scares during COVID They had some. Now, I mean, if you believe the talking heads, they don't have this issue. But if, you know, anybody from the Latin America community, their workforce, which is predominantly from Central and Southern America, they're scared and they're at risk of losing their workforce. And my personal, personal opinion, but the, the boots on the ground effect of these industrial processors is just overwhelming. You know how earlier we're talking about these hundred thousand head feeders. Well, it's a similar problem at the plants.

0:37:21 - (Ben Pasley): They've gotten so large and they've created these externalized costs that everybody else in the area and community are paying, whether they know it or not. You know, they're, they're having to, you know, operate in this, you know, economic system where scale means cheaper.

0:37:44 - (Josh Bellew): Right.

0:37:44 - (Ben Pasley): And they have taken that to the extreme. And that's not necessarily, you know, what we're saying. We know we're going to have to get to a certain level of scale just to manage our costs. Any good entrepreneur knows that. But at what cost are you willing to sell out your people, your community, and externalize the cost to your consumers at a rate of staggering proportions? So I can't get into like too crazy of a specific about it, but gut wrenching for even a.

0:38:17 - (Ben Pasley): I mean, think of me. I've lived on a farm and operated a farm my entire life, and it turned my stomach in ways that no one should have to be experienced to live through that. Work in that or, you know, subject the animals to that.

0:38:32 - (Josh Bellew): Well, I know that after my brief conversation with your brother Zach, and again, he didn't try to get too specific, but it was easy for me to read between the lines. It made me feel so good about the meats that I am choosing to buy off the shelf from these family farms, you know, that are doing it right. And so I really want to congratulate you guys for taking the deep dive into, here's the current culture of what's taking place from farm to table out there.

0:39:06 - (Josh Bellew): We're going to revolutionize that, we're going to change that and at the same time we're going to begin to heal the land, create a different micro or ecosystem within our soils, to take it back to where it was decades, hundreds of years ago. And at the end of the day, we're going to be putting food on the table for our kids and our grandkids and our great grandkids, that's actually going to help sustain their life, give them a better quality of life.

0:39:35 - (Josh Bellew): You know, one of the things I found that's been astonishing to me, the healthier I eat, the less food that I eat. It's really strange how the grass fed and the grass finished meats, the vegetables that are grown right, the grains that are grown right and sprouted and things like that, I get full a lot quicker eating those foods. So there's just got to be all kinds of nutrition enzymes and things that we've been missing in our food that we're now getting through these what should be called old forms of food. But we're actually calling them, you know, new because they're new to us.

0:40:19 - (Josh Bellew): But man, I just want to congratulate you guys for what you're doing because you've taken on a monumental task in trying to bring these mid sized farms along, create mentoring programs for them, create ways to disciple and at the same time show them this is commercially viable. Now one of the things that blew my mind, and maybe you can speak to this, when I was watching the movies, the original movie, if I remember right, it was called, I think it was called Kiss the Ground. And now the most recent one, Common Ground, they were showing pictures of a guy that had basically started doing the regenerative ranching on his farm right next to one of these total strip farming operations.

0:41:04 - (Josh Bellew): And you had this road running right down the middle. And what was so bizarre is this guy's land on the left of the camera that you were looking at that had only implemented these regenerative practices about six years before. It looked beautiful. It looked lush, it looked totally different. And he was talking about how it would actually rain on that land and that land would sequester enormous amounts of carbon.

0:41:35 - (Josh Bellew): And then the camera would pan over to the neighbors and it's like, really, these are across the road from each other and one looks like a desert and one looks like the Garden of Eden. Tell me a little bit about that, because it just blew my mind that you could literally attract rain to an area by doing these regenerative farming practices that then would end up sequestering much greater amounts of carbon than you ever could doing it the other way.

0:42:11 - (Josh Bellew): Talk about that a little bit for those people that are really hung up on the whole eco thing out there and don't believe, you know, that we're doing any. Don't believe that the traditional agro farming is doing anything to hurt the atmosphere and hurt this idea of carbon sequestration.

0:42:28 - (Ben Pasley): Yeah, no, you hit it on the head when you're talking about even not just sequestering more carbon, but within, like the savory ecological outcome verification, like what we're using. It's the look of all the cycles. It's the water cycle, the carbon cycle. There's minerals, there is. I mean, the aspect of the animals that are, you know, even the small rodent animals that are dying and decomposing, you got good, healthy decomposition going on in the soil.

0:43:00 - (Ben Pasley): The having all these systems working together in the best way possible. I mean, not just how much carbon can be sequestered, but when it rains. I mean, that's the. That's the best way to put into perspective. Yeah, you have one of these ecologically diverse systems or farms or fields, and it's able to soak up as much of that water as possible. You're talking about resilience to drought, resilience, resilience to erosion, resilience to all these aspects that the commodity commercial farmer has to battle in other ways that either they just are losing a substantial amount of topsoil every year, or they are, you know, constantly having drought issues, or they're having, you know, one thing after another.

0:43:53 - (Ben Pasley): Because regardless of how you feel about the climate argument, I mean, our climate is changing in a way of we are seeing, you know, the pendulum swing further and further away from the middle, which means we could have, I mean, we just had 30 some days of rain, you know, before that. We've had droughts in the previous years. Yeah, right. As soon as, like, soybeans are putting their blooms on and we're, we're afraid we're not going to have pod fill.

0:44:22 - (Ben Pasley): And, you know, having a diverse ecological system that can be resilient, not just how much carbon can we sequester, we know that we're sequestered enough carbon because we can see, you know, how we have plants on the soil year round or how deep and diverse the root structures go when we have a rye cover crop and, you know, it's, it's able to change and always be growing. But being able to have one of these regenerative systems next to a commercial operation is some of the best marketing you can have on why it's so great to look at the bigger picture of how can we impact acres in the best way and create that legacy. You said legacy earlier. I like that word.

0:45:08 - (Josh Bellew): Yeah. Well, the. Yeah, the thing that blew my mind is the visual, the visual acuity, the optics of looking at those two totally diverse ways of doing things, and one being completely unsustainable and creating less money in the farmers pocket at the end of the day, or the rancher's pocket, and one that's literally creating a legacy within the soil, within the microbes in the soil, within the nutrients in the soil, within the actual finished product that's coming off that soil, and then the legacy of the family being able to pass on something that is going to be reproducible and producing more money.

0:45:51 - (Josh Bellew): Again, I was blown away. I mean, I can't. I've got to say it one more time. If you haven't seen those two documentaries, Kiss the Ground, Common Ground, you need to watch them because you're going to be blown away that what Ben Pasley is talking about here can actually shift and change the cycles of rain within environments around the country where they're basically producing things on the ground that are influencing more rain coming into those areas.

0:46:22 - (Josh Bellew): And I just think that is staggering. I know we could, we could go on and on. So I've got a last couple of questions. Before I do, though, I want to make sure to mention a couple of times, go to Mount Folly.com to learn about what these people are doing. Mt F O L L Y.com and then if you're on Instagram, if you're on X, if you're on Facebook, you know, it's just at Mount Folly. MT F O L L Y. Don't believe there's any period in any of that. So again, Mount Folly.com MT F O L L Y.com

0:47:02 - (Josh Bellew): you can connect with what Ben Pasley, Zach Pasley, all These people are doing to put in place these programs that can be duplicated in other areas of the country. And believe it or not, guys, our own tax dollars are beginning to pay for some of these things. So if got local politicians that you want to point to something that's working, you mention these guys in the letters that you're writing to your state legislators, to those people that are representing you on the House floor and the Senate floor locally, and let them know, hey, they're doing this, it's profitable, it's working, it's working in a short period of time and it's creating legacy opportunities that are not going to have to rely on the government in the future.

0:47:52 - (Josh Bellew): So lining up a couple of the last things. You know, what have been the biggest challenges and lessons that you've learned as you've dove into doing this, Ben, and you and your crew out there, tell me a little bit about that and how you've overcome those.

0:48:10 - (Ben Pasley): I would say like our biggest challenge is really from just a basic entrepreneurship aspect of the economic vibe of it because like you just pointed out, there are some public funds that are supporting these efforts. There are a few, I mean really great operations that are just 100% doing it by themselves. But if we are going to have an impact of scale across the nation, you know, there are some NRCS dollars, which is the nation pool of money from the USDA that are going into these practices.

0:48:49 - (Ben Pasley): This money was first spent by President Obama in 2008, 2009, for cover cropping. And they had no idea it would have this kind of great impact over the long term. We could expand the practices.

0:49:02 - (Josh Bellew): Amazing.

0:49:03 - (Ben Pasley): The hardest thing to overcome by far was it continues to be the economic viability of it. Because at the end of the day, and we're unique being a grant awardee in our current situation because we're a for profit business. Right. And you know, we're incentivized to go create a huge network of farmers and impact those dollars per farms as, as drastic as we can. And so that's, that's probably, I mean that's, that's my overall hardest thing to overcome is the constant economic viability of it. Because it's not just the farmer buy in our cattle as a nation.

0:49:44 - (Ben Pasley): We have one of the smallest cow herds that's ever been had in the last 73 years.

0:49:49 - (Josh Bellew): Wow.

0:49:49 - (Ben Pasley): And that's because, you know, most people would keep back their heifers for their cow herd, you know, and then turn them into a commercial cow and they're making babies for their 15, 18 years of life.

0:50:01 - (Josh Bellew): Right.

0:50:02 - (Ben Pasley): Heifers are bringing just as much money as steers right now. So we've seen a pattern over the last 10, 15 years that people just. Just keep selling their heifers because they need money now. They don't need, you know, 12, 14 calves out of that animal over the next 15 years. They need their money now. And so that's one of the aspects of our AMP grant under President Trump that we're gonna implement is a heifer retention incentive.

0:50:30 - (Ben Pasley): And that's going to be one of the aspects. Talking about how do we overcome economic viability. Well, by having more cattle that we can source is going to mean that we can then process more animals, and we can then obviously sell to more customers that can eat a better product that's better for them.

0:50:49 - (Josh Bellew): So will some of these people that are listening to us and as we run into other people like you out there, can they learn kind of the buzzwords and a little bit of the strategy that you put together? Because it seems like more and more these days since the whole Covid debacle happened, it seems to me that people on Capitol Hill, both on a local and on a federal level, are listening more to the people out there, and they're wanting to hear what the average person is saying.

0:51:24 - (Josh Bellew): Can they learn some things by going to Mount Folly.com? if they are legacy farmers in this space, is that the best place I can point people for them to kind of get a roadmap on the best way for them to get in touch with their local poly politicians and begin to move the needle? Because for me, I'm all about spending tax dollars for this kind of stuff all day long. Because, you know, I have a legacy of farming in my family that we finally ultimately sold off the family farm to a legacy farmer.

0:51:57 - (Josh Bellew): And, you know, I'd like nothing more than for them to get on the bandwagon and start farming and ranching the way you guys are doing it. Is Mount Folly.com a resource that we can send people to to begin to learn what you guys have done?

0:52:12 - (Ben Pasley): Yes, that's a good starting point. But if someone is a current farmer that's not in the greater Ohio River Valley and say they want to find a project either similar to ours or just want to know what's out there, we recommend people to go talk to their local USDA office or what a lot of people call their FSA office. Okay, that is a great starting point. I mean, anybody can Google around and try to find something, but the local fsa offices know exactly what programs or partnerships in our case are creating these market opportunities for producers.

0:52:51 - (Ben Pasley): And I know that, excuse me, there isn't a official list yet of all the partnerships for advancing markets for producers or amp a m p. That list should be coming out and hopefully the next next 60 to 90 days. But there's definitely going to be these new partnerships that are going to be signing up more farmers and impacting more acres in the near, near future.

0:53:17 - (Josh Bellew): Well, you keep me plugged in because we want to do anything we can to push the message out there. Again, Mount Folly.com you've been listening to Ben Pasley on Ultralife today. I'm Josh Bellew. I can't thank you enough, Ben, for what you, your brother and your team are doing out there to actually change our world, to make a differ and give us legacy opportunities in the ranching and the farming space.

0:53:43 - (Josh Bellew): But as well as me being able to feed my kids and grandkids food that's going to sustain them and make them healthier as they move through life as well. Again, Mount Folly.com and then of course, wherever you're feeding on social media, it's ountfolly that's at the at sign MT F O L L Y Ben, we want to get you back on sometime and get some updates from you. But gosh, it's fun talking to a Kentucky guy that's got a legacy of everything from wildcrafting herbs to growing hemp to moonshine distilleries, CBD distilleries. All the ways that you're influencing entrepreneurs out there in your area of the world, man. Keep up the great work and pass on my best to the rest of the team, okay?

0:54:32 - (Ben Pasley): Absolutely. Thank you, Josh. And if I could summarize and say one thing, please. We are trying to make better food with better soil and that's our sentiment.

0:54:42 - (Josh Bellew): Gotta love it, man. Ben Foley or Ben Pasley from Mount Folly.com thanks again, Ben.