Regenerative vs “Sustainable” Farming: Reviving Soil Health

Burned out CTO → regenerative farmer. Kevin Marshall of Indigo Acres (Guthrie, OK) breaks down why regenerativegoes beyond “sustainable,” how living soil (fungi + bacteria) feeds plants, and how his 1-acre market garden built a six-figure business—without chemical crutches.

 What you’ll learn

• Regenerative vs. sustainable: why “not getting worse” isn’t enough
• Living soil 101: mycorrhizae, cover crops, compost, and no-till basics
• How a microfarm plans the week: harvest, pack, deliver, re-plant
• Crops that work on small acreage (lettuce, beets, carrots… and kohlrabi)
• The business side: reducing waste, picking profitable crops, building loyal customers

Listen to the full episode here or watch it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/I2tMbo-_aqI

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

Transcript

0:00:00 - (Kevin Marshall): A lot of the conventional agriculture that we have is destroying. It's going in negative direction. It destroys the soil, depletes the soil nutrients and goes a different way. So sustaining is creating an ecosystem that sustains it and keeps it from degrading. And that's a good thing. And it could be energy consumption, maybe using solar on your farm to reduce, you know, inputs in the world. Regenerative is going beyond sustainability. It's taking the soil and making it better, regenerating it where it's already been depleted, adding the nutrients back through cover cropping or composting or different, there's different methods for different type of farms.

0:00:46 - (Josh Bellieu): Hey, everyone, welcome to Ultra Life Today. You know, I saw an interview a number of weeks back that actually got me excited and filled with hope for the first time in a while. You know, I've been into health since I was 16 and, and I just continue to see things that fragment our society and our health, pulling people apart. And when I watched this interview, I realized that many of the answers that I've been searching for are literally right under my feet.

0:01:11 - (Josh Bellieu): So we brought you a really interesting person from Oklahoma this week. A gentleman from Indigo Acres out in Guthrie, Oklahoma. His name's Kevin Marshall. We're going to talk about regenerative farming. We're going to talk about the difference between these types of foods that are grown, the way Kevin grows them and the way other people grow them. And I think by the time you end this, you're going to be inspired. You're going to be filled with hope that we can actually do things to change a lot of the situations in our world that have been plaguing us. Kevin Marshall, Indigo Acres. Welcome to the podcast.

0:01:43 - (Kevin Marshall): Thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here.

0:01:44 - (Josh Bellieu): Yeah, we're so stoked. You know, I met you at a dinner with your wife that we were hosting for health coaches that do natural grocers. And I happened to be privileged to sit near both of you. And when I started hearing what you were doing, I just kind of put a place marker on that and it's like, someday and here we are. And so I'm so excited about it. So, you know, I'm always interested in a bit of backstory. I remember that day sitting there eating dinner with you both and hearing how you basically exited a 35 year career in information technology.

0:02:21 - (Josh Bellieu): And what did you do? You went out and like stuck your hands in the dirt and started doing something completely different. And I'm like, I've got to hear this story. So tell Me how that actually transpired for you. Maybe there was something knocking on your heart for a long time, but I'm really intrigued to hear about that.

0:02:37 - (Kevin Marshall): Well, it's interesting. People ask me a lot how to make that transition. And it wasn't that. While I was working in this IT career, I had an inspiration to do something else. The bottom line, I got burnt out and I quit. I quit my job with absolutely nothing lined up. I had no plans to go into farming. After 35 years, I'd had a great career. I did everything in technology, security, infrastructure, programming.

0:03:02 - (Kevin Marshall): My last job, as the CTO of a healthcare company in Oklahoma City, had responsibilities. All the IT infrastructure for three hospitals, about 75 to 100 medical clinics, physical therapy, and became very stressful. The world, the corporate world has changed. There's a lot of profit and we could use the word greed.

0:03:22 - (Josh Bellieu): A lot of captured industries isn't there. That changes everything.

0:03:25 - (Kevin Marshall): And for a year I tried to find another job because I thought it was the job and all the doors closed on me for the first time. So just I came home one day and told my wife I got to quit my job. She said, okay. The marriage was challenged because, wow, how.

0:03:42 - (Josh Bellieu): Cool to have the support of your spouse.

0:03:44 - (Kevin Marshall): Well, I think it's a better pack my bags and get out my. There you go. But we said, hey, you know, we're going to quit our job. We're going to have to sell a house. And we did. So I quit the job, gave notice, transitioned out of that company, left with six weeks notice, left on good terms. Then we sold our house and bought a little acreage out in the country with absolutely no plans.

0:04:06 - (Josh Bellieu): This is incredible.

0:04:08 - (Kevin Marshall): To start farming. I had been a gardener my whole life and had that as a passion. And we had some chickens out on this little acreage and start a little bigger garden. But I was like, what are we going to do for money? I kept continuing to look in a career change in it. I kept trying to call companies, I got some phone interviews, but those doors just kept closing. Been in my free time, which I had a lot of it. Finally, for the first time, start a large garden. And Robin finally said, you need to start selling your vegetables at the farmer's market.

0:04:37 - (Kevin Marshall): My response, I think was, are you on crack?

0:04:40 - (Josh Bellieu): Right. This is not a business. We're certainly not doing this for a living, right?

0:04:45 - (Kevin Marshall): I know nothing about farming. And so I fought that for about a year and struggled and thought about it and prayed about it. And little by little it's like, maybe I should try and After a year, we jumped in and submitted an application to a farmer's market, got accepted, and spent way more money on signs and booths and tents than we actually had produce in the stand. But our first week, we sold $104 of produce, and I walked away stoked.

0:05:13 - (Josh Bellieu): Knowing, I bet you felt like a king because you hadn't made that equation, that this could enrich our lives per personally by eating. But then it can actually enrich our lives, and we can be passionate about something. I bet it was hard to be passionate about it for all those last years.

0:05:30 - (Kevin Marshall): For the last several years. And it was time to make a change. So, yeah, I got the bug. And, like, I'm going to do this the rest of my life now. I got to go learn how to farm.

0:05:38 - (Josh Bellieu): Yeah, now you're not alone. You know, one of my favorite stories in the Bible is the Apostle Paul, and he's wanting to go somewhere, and he's on a mission, and the doors keep closing on him, and finally there's only one left. So he goes down that road, and the rest is history. He remains in that place several years.

0:05:52 - (Kevin Marshall): That's kind of like Jonah and the Whale. I fought and argued with God for a year. I'm like, no, that's not me. That's not me. And, you know, the doors were closed, and finally I got thrown out on the beach, I guess.

0:06:01 - (Josh Bellieu): That's fantastic.

0:06:02 - (Kevin Marshall): And it's like, oh, this is where I'm supposed to be in my life.

0:06:06 - (Josh Bellieu): And so remind us what age you actually were when you made this transition.

0:06:10 - (Kevin Marshall): When I left the corporate world, I think I was about 51. And we started Indigo Acres when I was 53.

0:06:15 - (Josh Bellieu): Okay, I just got to ask, because I didn't even think about it, why Indigo Acres? Where the name come from?

0:06:21 - (Kevin Marshall): So several years before we started the farm, we started learning about healthy living and food. We attended a seminar at our church by Jordan Rubin, the founder of Garden of Life, and we became passionate. My wife became a health coach, and during her early years, she started using the phrase eat the rainbow every day. A variety of colors to make it healthy. And so when we started it, we wanted to incorporate that in.

0:06:45 - (Kevin Marshall): Indigo is one of the official colors of the rainbow.

0:06:47 - (Josh Bellieu): It is indeed.

0:06:48 - (Kevin Marshall): Orange Acres or Blue Acres. Didn't makes sense. Indigo Acres.

0:06:51 - (Josh Bellieu): Yes. And red, orange, yellow, and blue are very boring words. Indigo rolls off the tongue, and it's like, whoa, get my attention.

0:06:57 - (Kevin Marshall): So it has to do with the rainbow.

0:06:58 - (Josh Bellieu): Yeah. Okay, so you've told us a little bit about moving into this and how it just kind of found you, which. I love those stories. Something found. My passions always have a tendency to find me. I don't end up finding them, you know, and that keeps me. Keeps me energized, keeps me going. Back in those early years of Indigo Acres. And how many years have you all been doing this?

0:07:21 - (Kevin Marshall): This is our ninth season.

0:07:22 - (Josh Bellieu): Ninth season. Okay. In those early years, what are some things that just hit you in the face that were these bottlenecks and challenges that you're just like, did I make the right choice here? I'm curious. Every day.

0:07:35 - (Kevin Marshall): Every day for about the first four years, five years, maybe year six, there's been that really, really struggled first couple years, even in generating revenue. I think we did $9,000 of revenue in our first season, which is technically, we made a profit. But not enough to.

0:07:51 - (Josh Bellieu): Yes, well. Well below poverty level.

0:07:53 - (Kevin Marshall): Well below poverty.

0:07:54 - (Josh Bellieu): Not for a couple.

0:07:55 - (Kevin Marshall): And not enough to get paid. It was just paid some bills and continued doing it and struggled, but just had this drive in me to get through it. I mean, you know, Robin once said, if anybody can do it, I can. She knew my drive, and having her support helped tremendously.

0:08:11 - (Josh Bellieu): Absolutely.

0:08:12 - (Kevin Marshall): But we got through some hard times, but all of a sudden realized, especially in those first years, we struggle because I didn't have the knowledge. And we tried to find local farms to mentor us. And the type of system that I was doing just didn't exist in Oklahoma. It was very popular in Europe and Canada and different parts of the US and so Robin was like, go find somebody to mentor you. And I'm like, there is none.

0:08:38 - (Kevin Marshall): It's my job. My job is to learn it, learn it well, and to teach.

0:08:43 - (Josh Bellieu): I love it. I love the fact that that was already entering into your mind is, how can I duplicate myself? Because one person can only so much. So when you wake up of a morning and it's. Let's say it's a work day, not a day where you get to come and hang out with me and talk. What does Kevin, or what do Kevin and Robin do? What's a typical day of you walking through this life called Indigo Acres that you have expanded and now begun to teach other people about?

0:09:10 - (Kevin Marshall): Over the years, it's changed significantly because early on, I didn't know what I was doing, and it was just trying to do it. But it's become very structured. It's a business. Every day is. There's. There's something scheduled because we have commitments and deliveries and orders and processes. We have wholesale deliveries that go out on Tuesday. So On Monday, the wholesale orders prepared, packaged and labeled and ready to go.

0:09:32 - (Kevin Marshall): We also have to harvest on Monday to determine what we have to sell later in the week. So we then we update our website Monday evening. People can place our orders for pickups on Wednesday through Friday and so forth. And so. And then there's days that we plant, and there's days that we do weed management. And it's just a very structured approach. But day always starts with a walk in the gardens because things change very quickly in Oklahoma, from past problems to disease to maybe a broken irrigation line. And all of a sudden a quarter acre is flooded or something.

0:10:05 - (Kevin Marshall): So I walk the property every morning with a cup of coffee and enjoy that time. And that kind of dictates the rest of the day.

0:10:12 - (Josh Bellieu): So I know just enough to just barely be dangerous on these subjects. But when it comes to, you know, I've gotten into this whole concept of, you know, studying carnivore diets and studying the whole hunter gatherer thing and studying the. The keto diets. And I've realized, you know, that we have availability of everything, especially here in the United States. But you look at other cultures and you see that they're eating the fruits and vegetables is a very seasonal thing that isn't. I've got a smorgasbord, and I can grab, you know, all the blueberries and peaches and everything I want, you know, and just.

0:10:46 - (Josh Bellieu): And have all that available all the time. How do you go about, especially here in Oklahoma, choosing what actually goes into the ground for what season. Is there a real method to that madness?

0:10:57 - (Kevin Marshall): There's a lot of factors to go in first. The first thing we consider is the nutritional value. Indigo Acres was found on the principle of food as medicine. There's a lot of things we could grow that. Such as corn or potatoes that are high in starches and peas and different things. We just don't grow those because they're not. We don't see. See those as medicine.

0:11:16 - (Josh Bellieu): Much less. Much less healthy. Maybe some sustenance, but that's about it.

0:11:20 - (Kevin Marshall): But we also. It is a business. As much as I would like to just grow this food.

0:11:25 - (Josh Bellieu): Yeah, There are other people that want potatoes, isn't there?

0:11:27 - (Kevin Marshall): Yeah, I've got two employees that on payroll day. They like the money to be in their account. They like to get paid. So we also have to look at the profitability. We're a very small farm. People are very surprised how many acres. Our total property is two and a half, but we only grow on about one acre.

0:11:43 - (Josh Bellieu): Oh, Nice.

0:11:44 - (Kevin Marshall): And we grow a lot of food well into this year. We're going to do well over into the six digits on our gross sales on one acre. And so part of what we grow is stuff that can be a lot of food grown in a small amount of space. Lettuce is our number one cash crop. Now surprises a lot of people in Oklahoma because it's hard to grow in Oklahoma. Beets, carrots. You notice I haven't mentioned tomatoes. People think tomatoes is the number one crop. It is for other farms, but from a competition standpoint, when I was at a farmer's market, everybody had tomatoes. If you bring, right, £5,000 of tomatoes and you only sell £2,000, you then get a nice food fight later in the day with £3,000 of tomatoes. Yep.

0:12:26 - (Kevin Marshall): And you don't get paid.

0:12:27 - (Josh Bellieu): So I love you bringing up the business strategy of what you had to do because, yeah, we have to survive. Right. You have to go ahead and make money and pay your people. Absolutely. You've got how many people total are working with you now on this little kind of one acre ecosystem you've created?

0:12:41 - (Kevin Marshall): I've got two full time employees and an apartment guy that comes in on an as need seasonal basis. And we also have a couple volunteers that come out and work for food.

0:12:49 - (Josh Bellieu): See, I was shocked when a friend of mine began to tell me almost 20 years ago that you could actually make a uniquely profitable ecosystem on an acre of land. And that if that principle of doing that, replicating that and inspiring other people to do the same thing, that people would literally be able to not only drop out of the system, they'd be able to eat healthy. They could even exchange crops with other people. So we're back to the days.

0:13:16 - (Josh Bellieu): A barter now and stuff. And he painted this incredible picture. And I'm just so finally glad to meet somebody that's actually rolled up their sleeves and is doing it. It's super exciting. So, okay, so some key crops, beets, carrots, lettuce, varieties of lettuce or just.

0:13:33 - (Kevin Marshall): We grow a few varieties of head lettuces, a romaine lettuce, and we have a leaf lettuce and also a red romaine lettuce. We also do a lettuce mix which changes from season to season. Some things don't grow well in the summer. We mix that variety as the seasons change, so it blends throughout the season.

0:13:51 - (Josh Bellieu): Are there, have there been any times in these years that you've been doing this, that you've got these core products that you just told me about has there ever been something new that came along that you're like, I just got to try that. I've got to see if I can grow that and see if that's going to be something that's going to fit well into our business strategy.

0:14:11 - (Kevin Marshall): We experiment each year with some, some new stuff.

0:14:14 - (Josh Bellieu): Give me an example. Yeah.

0:14:16 - (Kevin Marshall): Fortunately, early on in my learning curve I met a national consultant, guy named Michael Kilpatrick. That spindle Coleman came to our farm once. He mentioned, never experiment with more than 5%. Don't go out and put a third of your stuff in a particular crop that you don't know will grow in your environment or be able to sell in your sale. But one of the products that we then did add on a very small scale early on is this little thing called karabi.

0:14:43 - (Josh Bellieu): I don't even know if I know what that is.

0:14:45 - (Kevin Marshall): Nobody knows what it is.

0:14:46 - (Josh Bellieu): I think I probably read it and you know, Adam Pain's not here today, but he will bring these things from the Asian market in to eat. And I've not, not only never heard of them, you know, they're unpronounceable and he'll make me taste them. Yeah, tell me what karabi is.

0:15:02 - (Kevin Marshall): So krabi is a brassica, it's related to the cabbage and broccoli, things like that. So it actually has cancer fighting properties in it. So it's very healthy. But it's this bulb thing with stems that come up. My wife used to call it the vegetable from outer space because it had these antennas.

0:15:16 - (Josh Bellieu): Nice.

0:15:18 - (Kevin Marshall): But you peel it back, you can eat it raw. We put it in salads and initially nobody knew what it was, but they would come by our booth and go, what is that? We joke about it and we give them a sample and they're like, that's good. Now we have people going, when's the broccoli or the karabi going to be ready? So way cool. We don't make a lot of money on it, but we do add it because it brings our customers in.

0:15:39 - (Josh Bellieu): I was actually going to say that's a pretty cool hook. You know, when you, when you have something up there that they've never even read before and you're like, you need to try this. That's a great idea. So I've heard the word now. It's been the buzzword that is used throughout the corporate world, you know, sustainable, sustainable, sustainable. And when I watched this documentary, or first of all saw this interview and then watched the documentary initially called Kiss the Ground, I was like, Forget sustainable, let's talk regenerative.

0:16:10 - (Josh Bellieu): This is a whole different planet and world that I was unfamiliar with. Tell me, you know, describe for us what this concept may be of sustainable is, which certainly can carry over a little bit into regenerative, but it's a whole new ballgame when you're doing regenerative. Tell us about that.

0:16:26 - (Kevin Marshall): Yeah, so the first kind of the difference of the two sustainable is exactly that sustaining. A lot of the conventional agriculture that we have is destroying. It's going in negative direction. It destroys the soil, depletes the soil nutrients and goes a different way. So sustaining is creating an ecosystem that sustains it and keeps it from degrading. And that's a good thing. And it could be energy consumption, maybe using solar on your farm to reduce, you know, inputs in the world.

0:16:53 - (Kevin Marshall): Regenerative is going beyond sustainability. It's taking the soil and making it better, regenerating it where it's already been depleted, adding the nutrient nutrients back through cover cropping or composting or different, there's different methods for different type of farms that actually add implements. The soil continues to improve, improve on its own.

0:17:14 - (Josh Bellieu): So my family actually had a wheat farm forever. I didn't get raised on it. We had people that owned several farms and they would own their own, but then they would go ahead and plant and work our farm as well. When you've got somebody doing that, and this is what is so strange, when you see the interviews and some of these documentaries out there, you have individuals, Kevin, that you think a 50 or 60 or 70 year old farmer would remember the time when they actually were farming on real soil.

0:17:53 - (Josh Bellieu): And yet as you see these people that are mentoring these farmers in these local community meetings and you find out that they're like, yeah, I think my great grandfather did that. But that's not anything we've done for several generations now. It's all about laying down the chemicals and all that kind of stuff. What are the reasons that. I mean there's obvious, I'm a very non chemical guy, there's obvious reasons not to use chemicals, but what really drives the health of the soil by not using chemicals. Because you mentioned something about saying Josh Bell, you paraphrase was as there's soil and then there's real soil and you got a lot of fake soil out there that's not really doing anything but degenerating.

0:18:37 - (Josh Bellieu): And what you're doing is turning something around that is regenerating something that is necessary for our environment, our ecosystem, our planet. So yeah, tell, tell me about the whole what's happening when you're taking chemicals out? Maybe. How long does it take somebody? I think in the past when conventional farmers would see this kind of stuff, they would just go, we can't ever turn the corner. We're relying on government subsidies. We can't do any of this stuff. So what do we do?

0:19:06 - (Josh Bellieu): Give me a little snapshot before we move into our next segment here of why you don't use chemicals and what magical happens when you stop using them.

0:19:15 - (Kevin Marshall): So you said soil versus good soil. We call it dirt versus good soil. Dirt is just dirt. It's dead. It's just powder is dust. Think of it that way. Soil is an ecosystem. If you took a shovel and dug down in there and got a microscope and looked into it, you're going to see fungi and bacteria and all kinds of living creatures. It said in healthy soil, not dirt. In one handful of healthy soil, you can have anywhere from 1 to 7 billion living organisms.

0:19:46 - (Kevin Marshall): And so when you use chemicals, it starts destroying that life. That life dies when you till dies. So what we're doing is creating ecosystem by not adding chemicals and killing it and not adding stuff. What happens to the plants? This fungi goes over here, six, seven feet away from my plant, grabs some nutrients that's not being used and creates this chain towards the plant's roots. And the roots releases these carbohydrates or starches to feed the fungi. And the fungi in turn feeds the plant. So this ecosystem is a healthier environment for the plants to live.

0:20:24 - (Josh Bellieu): Nice. You've been listening to Kevin Marshall of Indigo Acres. If you want to reach out and find more about what they do, Indigo acresok.com this is ultra Life today. If you enjoy what we're doing, thank you. Like, subscribe, share. Keep doing what you're doing. Thanks.

0:20:47 - (Kevin Marshall): Sam.