Imagine a world where the food on your table not only nourishes your family but also heals the earth. That's what Sander van Stee is working towards every single day.
Van Stee's knowledge of the relationship between soil health, animal welfare, and our food system is both deep and broad. One example: he finally helped us understand why grass-finished beef offers superior nutrition over less-expensive grain-finished beef.
From soil microbes to diversified crop planting, van Stee explains both how and why the popular narrative around cattle farming is dead wrong. He's leading an agricultural revolution that prioritizes planetary health without sacrificing productivity.
This episode is an eye-opener for anyone skeptical about the scalability of regenerative methods. Another example: regenerative farming has the power to revitalize even the most degraded lands.
His story is a call to action for consumers to use their purchasing power to support sustainable farming practices.
Regenerative agriculture is not just about growing crops—it's about sowing the seeds for a healthier future.
------------------------
Connect with Sander van Stee
Website: https://moraleats.com/
Chances are, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you didn't need to change your life and get healthier.
So take action right now. Book a call with Dr. Ovadia's team.
One small step in the right direction is all it takes to get started.
How to connect with Stay Off My Operating Table:
Twitter:
Learn more:
Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings
Imagine a world where the food on your table not only nourishes your family but also heals the earth. That's what Sander van Stee is working towards every single day.
Van Stee's knowledge of the relationship between soil health, animal welfare, and our food system is both deep and broad. One example: he finally helped us understand why grass-finished beef offers superior nutrition over less-expensive grain-finished beef.
From soil microbes to diversified crop planting, van Stee explains both how and why the popular narrative around cattle farming is dead wrong. He's leading an agricultural revolution that prioritizes planetary health without sacrificing productivity.
This episode is an eye-opener for anyone skeptical about the scalability of regenerative methods. Another example: regenerative farming has the power to revitalize even the most degraded lands.
His story is a call to action for consumers to use their purchasing power to support sustainable farming practices.
Regenerative agriculture is not just about growing crops—it's about sowing the seeds for a healthier future.
------------------------
Connect with Sander van Stee
Website: https://moraleats.com/
Chances are, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you didn't need to change your life and get healthier.
So take action right now. Book a call with Dr. Ovadia's team.
One small step in the right direction is all it takes to get started.
How to connect with Stay Off My Operating Table:
Twitter:
Learn more:
Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings
Welcome back folks. It's the Stay Off my Operating Table podcast with Dr Philip Ovedia. I'm the village idiot, jack Heald, and we are joined today by someone who says a boot instead of about Phil, introduce our guest. Yeah, I don't know that he really says a boot, but you know.
Dr. Philip Ovadia:We'll get a few A's in there, I guess, but excited to, I think, have our first Canadian guest. I'm trying to go through the mental roller deck and see if we've had any other. Well, yeah, we actually. We have had one other Canadian on here now that I think about it. But anyway, excited to explore and do a little bit of a dive into our food supply, which is very relevant to our health. So, looking forward to this conversation, we have Sandra Van Stee with us today from moral eatscom, and I'm not going to ruin too much of his story, I'm going to let him tell it, says Sandra, why don't you kind of introduce yourself to our audience and tell us what you do?
Sander Van Stee:I'd love to. I'm actually only just recently Canadian. I got my Canadian citizenship not that long ago because our family immigrated to Canada from the Netherlands when I was four years old and the reason for that is my dad, together with my uncle, they milk cows in Holland and with the price to the Hilton compared to the Canadian dollar in that time, and also the land prices is really compact in Holland and the air culture was nowhere near as as competitive in Canada at that time. So they were able to sell one farm in the Holland and buy two here in Canada and farm separately. So that's why our family immigrated.
Sander Van Stee:And then, ever since I was a little kid, boys loved animals. I remember when I was around 10 years old I stayed up all my money and I bought two goats from one of our neighbors and they're still in the trailer and we bought them over to our farm and they're they're scared, they were freaked out. So I went in there in the trailer to try to calm down, kind of relax, and show them that they had nothing to fear. And when I was in there trying to pet them and everything, one snuck behind me and jumped out of the trailer and I was heartbroken because we couldn't find this goat back anymore. I didn't know where it went and just out of comfort like normally most kids might go to their mom or something that, or to their brothers or their dad. But I actually went to the barn and I found my favorite cow and ever since I was a little kid it always helped me calm down, always made me happy, spent time with the animals and that's true to this day and so I've always known I want to do something working with animals.
Sander Van Stee:So, going through high school stuff with that, I started considering maybe I should be a veterinarian. So I had to get my, my grades on track and start studying, taking schools seriously. So I did that, applied to the University of Guelph, got my application ready, got my grades to where they needed to be and got all my references, everything in order and lots of experience, all the stuff that they want for your application. And I had my application ready but then didn't send it in. Right on that time I realized that I could work more with animals as a farmer than I could as a veterinarian, because I'd have to be dealing with the pet owners or the owners of the farm animals and only about half my job would be actually working with the animals.
Sander Van Stee:So, 2010, I came home to the family dairy farm and started farming together with my parents. And then, 2015, we built a new dairy barn and that period before building the barn was filled with all sorts of frustrations, because I came home from school with all sorts of ideas, lots of plans, lots of energy of how I'm going to improve the farming and get the cows to thrive. But unfortunately, you just can't beat a poor environment. And the barn that we were milking in before it was built in 1987. And it was one of the first freestyle barns built in Ontario and they didn't really know what they were doing. It was just based off of what they thought a cow might want, but they didn't really know. But yeah, the cows suffered in that barn. They didn't thrive, they didn't live long enough and there was always all sorts of a long shlue of different diseases and stuff that came just basically from stress and heat stress and poor, poor laying line down and the floors weren't ideal, and the list goes on and on. But anyway, we moved them over to the new dairy facility in 2015. And it was.
Sander Van Stee:That was a very enjoyable process because all of a sudden, the cows they really, they really came in their own. They really started improving and they had produced more milk. Their bio condition improved. You can just tell that they were happier.
Sander Van Stee:And ironically, around that same time as the cows health improved, my own health started slipping. I think just neglecting my health and neglecting sleep and just pushing through frustrations and just going through hard work and just it took a toll and it finally collapsed around that same time. And then that really was an inflection point in my life because it had me questioning the healthcare system, my own health choices, but also the way we farmed. And I was really interested in the welfare side of things, because these farm animals it is so much to improve my life. I wanted to give back in some ways and try to find ways to improve their lives even further than we already have. But that led me to find out about regenerative agriculture and learning about that and try and find ways to apply that to our farm.
Sander Van Stee:And it's very intimidating to take our entire dairy farm we have a decent sized farm and to transition all that over to regenerative agriculture and try to find the customer base and sell direct.
Sander Van Stee:So what I've done is I've planted some pastures and I'm doing some pasture turkeys as well as some grass fed beef, which are crossbed to our whole steins and we raise them. Grass fed grass finished and then the pasture turkeys. They're following in behind the grass fed beef and they're moving every single day around the pasture and they complement each other really well and it mimics the natural systems where, like, the wild birds would fall behind the massive herds of bison that would roam across North America. So we're mimicking that, we're taking lessons from nature, and it works really really well because on the same pasture we were raising the grass of beef, but then we're also raising turkey on the same land. So, like it really helps economics of regenerative agriculture, which is really important, it needs to be profitable for it to be sustainable, for it to be a movement that can really grow and make a difference in agriculture.
Dr. Philip Ovadia:Yeah, and we want to dig into that. You know regenerative agriculture, but before we go there let's maybe get some of the basics because I think you know for a lot of people in our audience. You know we talk about the importance of eating meat and consuming dairy, but you know that means going to the supermarket or maybe going to your farmer's market and buying meat and buying dairy and people don't think about what it takes to produce that, to get it to market. So talk a little bit about kind of the life cycle of the cows and maybe a little bit about the difference between dairy cows and beef cows.
Sander Van Stee:Yeah, dairy cow is an animal that's been selectively bred over generations and generations that genetically produces milk really really well, whereas a beef animal it's been. It's the opposite it's been selectively bred to put on meat really efficiently. So these two animals that are basically the same breed but they're specialized to such extremes that they're they look completely different Like. If you look at a true dairy animal, you see the bones sticking out and that's actually a well conditioned dairy animal. They actually are unhealthy. If you see them round and plump and then a beef animal because they're bred to put on meat and muscle so efficiently, that's when you really see.
Sander Van Stee:You don't want to see bones sticking out in the ribs of these beef animals and what you typically have is in the dairy industry, like they're the animals, they're born on the farm, they're raised and then around two years of age, that's when they will have their first calf and that's very similar for beef and for dairy and then after that first calf, the whole same animal will be producing up to 40 on their leaders on their first lactation and then up then like 60, 70, 80, whatever leaders in later lactations when they have their second and third calf, whereas the beef animal they might have five or 10 liters of milk, just enough for the calf.
Sander Van Stee:And then though the beef farms, they'll raise their calf and then wean them off, and then they'll continue to raise them on grass and or, depending if there's grain finished, though the last several months of the life they'll finish them on grains, but then the whole same animals. It's just they're just constantly putting out raising, like you're raising the next generation of dairy cows to fill that dairy herd up and replace any animals that you might lose, and then, on the dairy side too, the bull calves they can either become. They can either go to the veal industry or sometimes they raise a steer, depending on the area that you're in, where we are. Actually the veal industry is a thriving industry.
Jack Heald:And veal is a. An animal is slaughtered before it reaches full maturity for meat. Is that right?
Sander Van Stee:That's right. Yeah, for veal they typically get to be around seven or eight months old and then a steer like a grain finished steer will get to be 15 or 16 months old and a grass finished steer will get to be 24, 25, 26 months old and usually the mature size of the frame is pretty close around 24 months of age. That's when they hit their true mature size. They still fill out a little more up until three years, but the majority of their frame is there with two years.
Dr. Philip Ovadia:And in the kind of traditional, you know system, oftentimes that that cow won't spend their whole life cycle on one farm, there'll be. There are sort of you know what we call the cow calf operations, and then there are the feedlots you know the finishing operations, and so it's not common although I know you do things differently and many others do things differently but the more common situation is that that that cow may go through two or three different you know farms before, or ranches before, before coming to market.
Sander Van Stee:That's right With, like the commercial agriculture, there's a real push for efficiency and along with that, one of the consequences is specialization, where you just focus on doing one thing extremely, extremely well and you have all your systems in place, and it's just you just. And then it's just one animal after another. You treat them the exact same, you know exactly how to handle them and treat them and do and feed them and or vaccinate or whatever you might do in that operation and to, and then you just focus on doing that so well and so efficiently and and then so, yeah, so the consequence of that is specialization. So you have your guys that it's just a feedlot operation where they might only have that animal for two to four months and that's it. They just there's putting the last little bit of fat on them and then the other cow calf guys are all they do is they, they, they have a herd of of of mother cows and then they have the cows which they keep until weaning and then, after weaning, they, they, they will send it to another farmer potentially, or they might bring right up until finishing.
Sander Van Stee:But yeah, typically you see a lot separation. Daring Street is a little bit different. Typically, most dairy farmers will raise their own replacement heifers. So they'll usually they'll keep all of their heifer calves, but then the bull calves will go. They'll usually sell to another farmer that will raise the bull calves either as veal or as steers, and then and then those steers could then go into a third farm, like you said.
Jack Heald:To be finished, so the that efficiency I mean the way you described it that doesn't seem like a bad thing, that seems like a good thing. Why, why do you choose to do it differently?
Sander Van Stee:Yeah, there's consequences when you're pushing for pure efficiencies. For example, it's more efficient to have an animal finished and ready for slaughter at 15 months or at eight months. Because you don't have to feed this animal for a million days. Your costs are much lower. I don't think it's too controversial to say that a longer life is an improvement in welfare. There's consequences from a welfare perspective as far as the longevity of these animals. There's health consequences when you're finishing an animal earlier in life when they're still growing their frame. They don't naturally want to put on too much fat, yet they want to grow their skeleton and to feed them in a way that makes them put on fat despite the fact that they're still growing into their frame is you're almost forcing them into a state of obesity and a lack of health. There's consequences as well when you're pushing for efficiency.
Sander Van Stee:Also, what you find when you're specializing is that you're separating animals from the crops. You have massive farms where you just have the animals and you have other farms where all they do is grow your wheat and your corn and your soy and that's all they do. Animals are meant to be on the land and have a positive impact on that land. The manure is a very unique product that is great for fertility in the soil and it helps it recycle those nutrients. When you're pushing for efficiency and you're specializing towards just cropping, for example, you end up using lots of synthetic fertilizers and there's lots of consequences for soil health for pushing for efficiency and specialization in that direction.
Dr. Philip Ovadia:That leads us into understanding that difference between what regenerative ranching is. I think most people in this audience are going to understand grass-finished versus grain-finished beef and what the differences might be there. Regenerative ranching is a whole other aspect of this. Just give us again the basics of what is regenerative ranching.
Sander Van Stee:Very simply put, regenerative culture is when you're prioritizing the health of the soil instead of only prioritizing efficiencies. That's simply put. If you take a layer deeper, a little more complex, what that really is is you're trying to have a very diverse population of microbes in the soil. You have a living, breathing soil. It's a beautiful, complex ecosystem with a large food chain where you have your bacteria, your fungi, your protozoa, your nematode, which is like your worms, your arthropods, your insects. It's a huge food chain. When you have this food chain in place in the soil with the plants, what the plant can do is it can trade sugars that it creates with photosynthesis, with the sunlight. It can make sugars. It can trade sugars for nutrients with these microbes. The sugars are the base food supply for this whole population of microbes. The plant trades sugars for nutrients. They can get these nutrients on demand. It's a beautiful system, but the problem is those microbes are very sensitive. You have to treat them in a certain way.
Sander Van Stee:There's five principles that we like to follow for regenerative agriculture. Those are you want to have the biodiversity of the microbes, but also the plants that you're growing and the animals that you have on the land. You need to minimize disturbances on the soil, which could be compaction from large equipment or sprays or tillage. You need to have living roots in the soil all year round, because microbes need roots and plants in order to grow. That's the base of the food chain those sugars. You need to have armor on the soil to protect it from the harsh sunlight and you need animal impact. And when you follow those five principles, you can maintain that healthy population of microbes in the soil. Unfortunately, it's so easy. Those microbes are so sensitive that as soon as you drive over there with a heavy piece of equipment, the fungus die off. And there's some species of fungus that are true keystone species with making this whole food web work. And then that diverse ecosystem collapses and then that plant can no longer ask those microbes for nutrients. So then the plant.
Sander Van Stee:If you don't apply synthetic fertilizers, the plant stops growing. And then, even from the other side of things, if you have a healthy micro-library population, but then you start spraying, adding fertilizers to these crops, the plant no longer needs the microbes to get these nutrients. If you add synthetic nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, the plant no longer needs the microbes. So then it no longer exudes these sugars into the soil and then the microbes die off as well and then the plant requires now the synthetic fertilizers and it ends up being a bit of an addiction, because it's difficult to get it all right to have that healthy microbial population where you can get away from fertilizers. And then if you have a commercial farm and you just take away things like those synthetic fertilizers, there's nothing grows, you can't grow anything on the land, the farm can't profit. So it truly is an addiction. You're addicted to these synthetic fertilizers because if you don't use them you can't grow anything, and because you're using it you can't grow anything. It's a vicious cycle.
Jack Heald:The very first question that pops to mind is can land be reclaimed and so how long does it take?
Sander Van Stee:That's to be. I'm working on some experiments right now where I can fast forward it. For example, it's very important to be able to fast forward it for the sake of efficiency, because I want to be able to produce food, and not just the meat but also the row crops and stuff like that. You want to be able to produce that in a way so that it's still at a cost effective price for the consumer, as the consumer actually be willing to pay for it. If the farmer is walking there in the wheat field and saving everything by hand, like back in the day that wheat's going to be so expensive, nobody will want to loathe for bread.
Sander Van Stee:Unfortunately, things like heavy equipment is hard to get away from that. Maybe one day, with automation robots, we can have a whole swarm of robots harvesting a wheat field instead of a combine, but until then you need some of these heavy equipment to harvest it and then you cause that compaction or any other Some people. If you are already using synthetic fertilizers, how do you stop that chain reaction and reestablish that diverse population? One way we can do that, to fast forward it, is you can make a really potent compost that has a massive diversity of microbes by having no term, but there's still oxygen in this compost pile. With pipes and stuff like that, you make this really potent compost and then, instead of applying the compost directly to the land, you wash gently wash the microbes off the compost, you separate the organic matter from the compost and you're left with just the microbes, and you apply these microbes to the soil to kickstart that diversity. That's something that I'm working towards as well.
Jack Heald:There was a method to my madness. One of my close friends just inherited a big hunkle of farmland, or at least it used to be farmland. I think she's being paid to not grow anything on it because the US government does that. She's asking me what do you think I should do with this? I don't know, beats the heck out of me. I do know that it was basically a commercial wheat farm not too many years ago. I assume it suffers from all the problems that you're describing. The addiction to commercial fertilizers is the one that really caught my ear. We're talking several hundred acres. I don't know what that is in Canadian money, but it's a lot. Microbes, microbes over several hundred acres.
Sander Van Stee:Yeah, actually, what it works out to is about one pound of compost does one acre of land.
Jack Heald:Oh my Lord.
Sander Van Stee:So it is actually very, very scalable, but it's almost. It depends on how you want to fire and what you want to produce on that fire and what you're passionate about. But it sounds very complex and it is. You have to be very it does. I don't want to do it.
Sander Van Stee:It can be a whole lot simpler and that's typically what you see in the regenerative agriculture space is, if you plant a diverse population of crops or plants as part of your pasture, you plant it all into pasture and it's not Don't just plant grass and clover, which is just two separate families. You might have 10 different grasses and you might have clover and you might have a whole bunch of other plants within that same family, but it's still just two families. You need at least four, five, six different families in your planting that diverse populations of plants as your pasture, and then you use grays that you rotationally graze it, and that's typically what you see in the regenerative agriculture space is you see farms that raise animals using rotational grazing, and that's amazing because if you do that, for those of us who didn't grow up on a farm.
Jack Heald:Rotational grazing is.
Sander Van Stee:Is when you break your pasture into small pieces and you move them every single day to a fresh piece of pasture. So that's in contrast to like continual grazing, when you have this massive pasture and you let all the cows out into this massive pasture and you put a bucket of water in there and you forget about it because they have grass for a whole year.
Dr. Philip Ovadia:And that gives the different areas of the pasture a chance to regrow before the beef is gonna recirculate to that area.
Sander Van Stee:Yes, and that rest is critical for soil health and regenerating the soil, regenerating the environment, because it's during that rest where the plant regrows above ground but also below ground, and that's when all that carbon, all that organic matter into the soil and all the microbes in there, that whole ecosystem. That's a crazy amount of carbon that you can put into the soil, that. But it has to rest because when you do continual grazing, you might, you'll see lots of grass, but every single day you'll get a little nip here, a little nip there, and every single day that plant needs to pull from its root system to regrow, restart that growth, every single day. So it's actually constantly pulling nutrients from the soil instead of building up that soil health and building up the nutrition and building up the carbon and the organic matter. So the rest is critical, like you said. But it's beautiful because it's so simple. That's why you that's typically what you see you just you have your pasture, you, and you graze your animals, you move them every single day and then when you do it that way from day one, say you have a completely A soil that's completely devoid of life and then you start managing it this way.
Sander Van Stee:Typically they say it takes about three years to really get that diverse population of microbes and get that really humming and get that whole system working. So it's a much simpler way. But then it takes three years, which is not a crazy amount of time when you look at the scale of farming. But then if you're going away from doing grass-fed or pastured animals, unfortunately you're going to keep disturbing it every single year. So you never get that three-year period to really get going and to really get the benefits of that soil health, where you can start seeing returns, where you can start making economical sense to manage your farms in a regenerative way, which is what needs to happen for this movement to grow, for this really be a way to feed the world.
Dr. Philip Ovadia:And the economic sense comes from the fact that now you don't need to be buying all this fertilizer and specialized GMO crops and all of that. You can kind of let the land do it itself One of the other things I wanted to zero in on that you mentioned. You said that this process puts carbon back into the soil and of course, everyone knows that it's the cows that are destroying the environment, right? So how can that be?
Sander Van Stee:No, the cows are actually a critical part of bringing the carbon back into the soil. Before colonization of North America, the plains were crazy fertile and they were growing so much grass and that's because the massive herds of bison and it's hard to say how many, but there were millions of bison that would roam across North America Like a huge, huge population, huge herds of bison, and they were concentrated and then they moved to fresh pieces of pasture as they grazed that pasture down and the predators would be falling behind them, constantly, keeping them moving and stuff like that, and that's the natural way. And then through modern agriculture, we were slowly starting to just with commercial agriculture practices, we're losing that organic matter in the soil, we're losing the nutrition of that soil and the nutrients in that soil. Over time. Some areas, depending on how much rainfall you get in your area, some parts are turned to desert. You get all the dust bowls and stuff like that, all the dust blowing, and some of these areas will actually turn to desert because they're managed the way that we typically do with commercial agriculture and that's with tillage and plowing and then row cropping, model cultures instead of having diversity, and continuous grazing instead of rotational grazing, which takes a little more effort and then you lose that health of that soil. So then, luckily, where we are, we have regular rainfall here in Ontario, so we don't have the desertification that you would get in some other areas where you get less rainfall. But even when you does turn to desert, it's not too late.
Sander Van Stee:You bring those animals back and you concentrate them really heavily and it's crazy how long these native seeds can stay dormant in the soil. They're still there and if you concentrate these animals, all the savory is shown this beautifully in Africa and Zimbabwe. And you concentrate these animals and then you move them on and then right where those animals were, that's where all the manure is, all the fluids from the urine and everything else from the manure and all the nutrition from the manure, even though it's desert and devoid of life, you're adding the organic matter from the manure, you're adding all the minerals and nutrients from the manure, from the animals eating beforehand, and that's enough to kickstart the growth of all these native species from where these animals were concentrated and then that starts growing and then the animals move on to the next spot to kickstart the growth there as well. And in areas that are really dry it works incredibly well, because now you have the life that's starting to regrow. But then organic matter holds moisture. So then the next time it rains it's going to hold far more rainfall. It's not going to wash out, it's not going to disappear, it's going to be held in that environment and the longer you manage it this way, the more organic matter you have, the more plant life, the more microbes in the soil and organic matter in the soil, and then you can increase the water holding capacity even further, to the point where you can actually reverse deserts and bring it back to life, to where it was before colonization or before it turned into a desert in the first place. So, yeah, it's, people love hating on cows, especially because they produce methane as part of the fermentation process.
Sander Van Stee:But it's not the cow's fault. They're almost like a scapegoat, I think, because it doesn't really make any logical sense for there to be an increase in greenhouse gases in the environment from a stable population of remnants and animals in the world. If you look at the population of bison and mega-herbivores that were around the mammoths and everything else way in the past, the total populations have stayed relatively stable to this day. Of the total number of remnants and animals that are producing gases and methane. So it's completely logical for there to be an increasing amount of greenhouse gases from a stable population of remnants. So it doesn't make any logical sense and the only thing is it must be some sort of scapegoat for the industry of all the fossil fuels that are burning that you're actually taking from deep in the soil and you're burning these fossil fuels.
Sander Van Stee:That's not part of a cycle as it would be for animals. It's just you're taking it from the soil and you're burning it and you're putting it into the environment. It's a straight line up and whereas the methane produced by cows, it's part of a whole cycle where the animal eats the grass and then it ferments that grass, it digests it, it creates some gases, some CO2, some methane. It goes out in the environment. The grasses then reabsorb that CO2 to turn back into sugars together with sunlight, and then, even more importantly, there's actually in a healthy pasture or in a healthy environment, the healthy soil, there's acid bacteria that digest methane. They eat methane. They're only food source. They're methanotrophic bacteria, so they actually directly take that methane and bring that back into the soil life and into the organic matter. It's a massive cycle which then grows the plants and the animal eats it again Because it's part of a cycle. It's not contributing to an increase in the greenhouse gases that are staying in the environment.
Jack Heald:It's energetically and chemically neutral.
Sander Van Stee:Yes.
Dr. Philip Ovadia:Yeah, and the logic and science that you're discussing has no part in the discussion as to why we should not be eating meat. Right, exactly that's what they lead us to believe. So I guess some basic questions again that people might be thinking. So you're in Ontario, canada. It gets pretty cold, grass doesn't grow year round, so how do you keep your cattle fed if you're not feeding them greens?
Sander Van Stee:In the regenerative agriculture space there's two different directions. You can go in the winter if you're further north we're not all in New Zealand or in England where we can graze all year round. So what you typically see is either you have the animal staying outside and you have bales set out in the fall and you leave these bales out all winter and then you gradually move these animals from one bale to the next bale, to the next bale and you're still having them out on pasture, and then you're grazing bales. You're bale grazing, which has a lot of benefits because you don't have to build a barn, you don't need this massive investment to house these animals all winter long. Plus, especially if it's dry hay, the seeds that are in that hay can reseed the pastures. So you can strategically place these bales, maybe in ball spots or spots where they're a compaction or damage done, and you can put the bale there and you can reseed that piece of pasture. And then also the cows can be fairly wasteful. They're trampling it, so you're actually adding organic matter to fuel that regrowth come spring. So bale grazing can be a very beautiful system.
Sander Van Stee:Unfortunately it doesn't work where I'm at because it's too wet.
Sander Van Stee:For bale grazing to work, ideally, you need cold, dry winters. However, where I am, we get regular thaw cycles throughout winter and we get a lot of snow fall, which is wet but also insulates the ground and prevents that frost from really stabilizing the ground to the point where it can handle the weight of a cow. So if I were to try bale grazing, I'd basically have to sacrifice a piece of my pasture that they can trample and make into a big mud pile. So what I do instead is I house them indoors and then I feed them fermented hay, because you also need fairly dry conditions to make top quality hay, whereas quite often when it's the perfect time to make hay, it's going to start raining where we are. So the fermenting it is a quicker process. You don't have to sit on the field for as long, so you can still have top quality feed stored, but instead of stored by being dry, it's stored by being fermented, and then we feed that fermented hay to the cows or to the steers in the winter.
Dr. Philip Ovadia:Amazing Just thinking about how nature accounted for all of these things. One of the other real fascinating things I've learned from talking to ranchers you mentioned how, for a good regenerative strategy, it's not that you need grass, but you need varieties of grass. One of the things that I found fascinating and I was hoping you could comment on is that those different varieties of grass will have different nutrient profiles and the cows will pick which grasses to eat at certain times of the year, depending on the nutrients that they need at that time.
Sander Van Stee:Yeah, it's true, even more so. They'll even pick medicinal leaves. If they're having some gut issues or some stomach worms or something like that, they'll actually pick things like a willow tree and they'll eat the leaves from that tree to help clear out maybe some worms or some stomach upset. They'll self-medicate too. It's not just a variety of grasses and it's more important if you're planting a pasture, which, if you have a native pasture land, that's much better, because then you have all the native species of plants and seeds that are growing there already.
Sander Van Stee:Yeah, different grasses, some of them are unique, but different families of plants attract different microbes to their roots. So you need the grasses, but then you also need Brassica species, like the same family as your cabbage and your kale and your broccoli, something from that family. Then you need some flowering plants that attract a completely different group of microbes to their soil. And by having that diverse families of plants not just grasses, but a whole bunch of different kinds of plants and flowering plants and all those species that's how you, over time, over the three-year period, you develop that diversity. By having enough different plant families that have attract different micro populations to their roots.
Jack Heald:I have probably learned more about farming in the last 30 minutes than I have in the rest of my life, and I grew up in cattle country. In fact, the beef that I grew up eating was raised less than five miles from my house, so I theoretically should know a lot more about this than I do. But holy smokes. So the microbes that we are replenishing in this soil that we're trying to rebuild, where do they come from?
Sander Van Stee:Yeah, they grow. Basically they're attracted to the roots and a lot of them are basically there already and some of them, like the fungus and stuff like that they can like. If we're like the compost, example depends on your base materials, they'll come, and the bacteria, they're ubiquitous, they're in the environment, they're everywhere and then so basically it's almost true, if you feed it they'll come, like if you build it they'll come, kind of thing. That's kind of how it works because these plants, these microbes, they are everywhere. So if they have the food they'll call and they'll thrive.
Sander Van Stee:And it'll start from one and then it grows. That population explodes from there. If you have the ideal environment, if you have the sugars from the plants, then you have the bacteria and you have the fungi digesting the organic matter and, like, you have that base of that food chain and then, like the nematodes, and like the worms and stuff that they'll come in because they have food supplies, they'll come from deep in the earth or like, and then the population will explode when you have that that food chain and you have the ideal conditions for them.
Jack Heald:I remember having a guy I worked with back in my 20s it was in a computer store, so I don't think anything big here, but I was in. We were in Texas, he was from the Midwest, I want to say maybe Michigan and for some reason the subject of cattle and pastures came up while we were sitting around waiting on customers to come into the computer store and he talked about how rich the pastures were back in Michigan and he used a metric I'd never heard of, which was cattle per acre or head per acre. And I remember in Texas there's a ranch called the King Ranch which is famous for being the largest ranch in the world. But that's just in terms of measured, in terms of acreage, how many acres the ranch is. And I learned that in Texas they measure acres per head. How many acres of ranch do you need to raise one cow?
Jack Heald:So my question is is the ability of the land to support a certain number of cattle limited by geography? Is there, can you get to? You know you can get to optimum for wherever you are and that's as far as you can go, or can you actually? Is there more to it than that? In other words, it is a place that traditionally measures acres per head. Can it be? Can the soil be enriched, can the entire environment be changed by this kind of regenerative farming, so that everything that we can do more in the same space?
Jack Heald:Most definitely, and it depends on that is not the answer I was expecting.
Sander Van Stee:Depending on where you are and what environment and especially depending on how much rainfall you get. That difference between how much animal can support in the worst case scenario to the best case scenario is bigger depending on if you have less moisture. So in a dry, arid area and you switch from continuous grazing to rotational grazing, you can double the amount of animals that you're that you, that that land can support because you have much more moisture holding capacity. When you have that organic matter, if you manage it away where you had that microbial life, you increase the organic matter in the soil. When you do get a rainfall, that soil will hold on to that water for far longer and then that grass will continue growing when normally it would start getting drought stressed already. So then in dry areas, the opportunity to improve the yield from your land and how much food you can produce, that opportunity is massive. With regenerative agriculture, where you get more moisture, that difference is small. You can get away with a lot more when you get regular rainfall.
Dr. Philip Ovadia:So if that's the case and it basically sounds like regenerative agriculture is more efficient and earlier you were talking about how you know in general the food industry is trying to solve for efficiency what's keeping regenerative ranching from kind of being the standard and being more widely adopted?
Jack Heald:Yeah, obviously.
Sander Van Stee:Yeah, it's great. We're going full circle here again, so that's great. So the efficiency comes back again to what I was talking about earlier is how many days are you feeding this animal before you get a finished product? So if you have an animal that's finished and ready for slaughter at 15 months compared to 25 months, that's where you start seeing a decrease in efficiency with regenerative agriculture. Because these animals are living much longer, you're feeding them for more days and then also the labor requirements for moving them every single day is greater and bringing the water to where the animals are, whereas if you just have a big open pasture and you just put a water bucket in there and you forget about them till fall, depending on where you are, that's no work at all. It's pretty easy managing them. That way you can. One employee or one farmer can handle so many more cattle, whereas if you manage them in a more intense way with this regenerative agriculture, moving these animals every single day, it's much more labor intensive as well.
Sander Van Stee:And also, regenerative agriculture also pushes towards generalization, which is pros and cons. It's difficult for a farmer to get that really, really specialized, really deep knowledge base where they can do things everything perfectly, because whenever you learn, you inadvertently learn through some mistakes. So the more things, more buckets that you got your hand in, the more mistakes you got to make before you figure it all out, and that affects your efficiencies as well. But then, on the pro side, when you have a farm and you manage to have this diversity of incomes, you're more stable financially because you have more sources of income, but also it's healthier for your farm as an ecosystem, because it doesn't have to be this massive weakness of, say, the crop farmer who doesn't have any animal impact, or the dairy farmer that only has milk cows and needs that really rich grass.
Sander Van Stee:If you treat it as an ecosystem, you can have the best of all the worlds within the regenerative agriculture space, where you have your birds and you have your cattle, and then you might have bees and stuff as well, as well as some row crops, and you might have some cover crops on your row crops and then you might graze that as well every once in a while to have the animal impact on your corn and your bean fields and stuff like that. So, yeah, there's given takes, but as a whole, typically you do end up having higher costs with regenerative products, with the exception being in really, really dry areas where all you're doing is raising beef. There I think, even I think you would be more profitable with regenerative culture in the really dry areas where you just have pasture and you raise beef, just because that difference is so massive in these dry, arid environments.
Jack Heald:Wow, okay, the obvious conclusion from listening to this brief conversation is that anyone who claims that what they really care about is the long-term welfare of Earth's environment would absolutely support the type of regenerative agriculture that you're espousing here. Anyone who opposes that is not logically in favor of the long-term environmental health of the planet.
Sander Van Stee:Am I overstating that. I don't think so, and it comes back to your food dollars. You got to vote with your food dollars. If you go, to the supermarket.
Jack Heald:It doesn't matter how cheap the food is if the planet can't produce food anymore.
Sander Van Stee:That's true, but that way of farming is brought about from people picking that ground beef that's 10 cents cheaper than the ground beef beside it, and that's how we go down that road. It's all supply and demand, and farmers aren't evil. They're doing the best. They're trying to do the best they can with what they have and what people truly say they want. So you can say this is terrible and I want this, but unless you're actually proving it with your food dollars, the farmer can't afford to produce it. The best thing is you find an actual farmer that is producing food in a way that you believe food should be produced and you build a relationship with that farmer and buy food directly from him.
Jack Heald:And then that's how the that's the familiar field, isn't it?
Dr. Philip Ovadia:Yes indeed.
Jack Heald:I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt Sandra, but our very first guests on this show two and a half years ago, texas Slim, has been saying for as long as I've known him shake a rancher's hand, Shake a rancher's hand. It's so cool to hear this again.
Dr. Philip Ovadia:Yeah, so go into that a little bit about local sourcing of your beef, of your meat, of your food in general, versus what again? The argument that I would make against what you just said about the consumer voting with the food they buy is that I think the vast majority of consumers don't even understand that this is an option. They're not really given that option. But I agree, of course, we agree completely. But talk about the power of sourcing your food locally whenever possible.
Sander Van Stee:It's the greatest way to make an impact on agriculture. You can post all you want on social media. You can stand on the side of the road or whatever with your billboards or whatever like that, but what really makes a difference is your food dollars. It's money talks, because a farmer can't afford to produce food in a regenerative way if they can't sell the products, if they're in a similar boat that I'm at, where you heavily leverage. Farming is a very unique business where you need a massive amount of equity just to play in that game. You're equity rich but cash poor. You can hardly afford to pay the bills, but apparently you're rich. It's a really unique business. When you're making payments on farmland or anything, or equipment or buildings, you are required to make these payments. There's only so much risks that you can take financially without risking your entire business.
Sander Van Stee:Where would the regenerative egg movement be if the farmers that are experimenting and sticking their necks out are all going broke? No farmer will dare try it, it'll just die right there or even to a lesser extreme. If those farmers trying regenerative agriculture practices but they're not making a profit, they're not growing, they're just getting by and paying the bills and that's it, well then their neighbors will grow quicker than they do. Over time that regenerative agriculture movement will peter out and then the commercial agriculture will just overtake it and it'll just be a fad. We don't want that either. For the movement to be sustainable, it needs to be profitable. That's the unfortunate reality of it. We can all be dreamers, but if we can't pay the bills, it's not going to last. That's why it's so powerful to vote with your food dollars and get to know that rancher, whether that be at your local farmers market or you can go and order things online with some of these conglomerate where they source from other farmers and they're like the middleman, like your butcher box and stuff like that.
Sander Van Stee:The very best thing you can do is buy directly from that farmer. Get to know that farmer, see asking questions or read whatever material that guy might put out and learn about how they're producing food. And if you support that, buy from that farmer so he can thrive and his neighbors will be paying attention. Believe me, the farmers in the community. They talk and they say who's buying firemen, who's growing, who's doing well, it's like all the gossip in the farming and agriculture community. They love that stuff and they're always learning from each other. If you have a farmer that's doing these regenerative agriculture practices, that's doing the rotational grazing, and that farmer is doing well, well, his neighbor will be more likely to adopt those practices as well, and that's how you really grow this movement to the point where we can even start seeing more and more of these products in supermarkets and stuff like that.
Jack Heald:One of the images I have never had go through my head until just now is a group of farmers sitting around gossiping like that. I don't know that's just the farmers gossiping each other and that's funny.
Sander Van Stee:Oh yeah, that's right, that happens.
Dr. Philip Ovadia:Wow, I did have the pleasure of spending this past weekend at the Florida Beef Initiative with Texas Slim and with a number of Florida ranchers and it was amazing and it was very spirit-lifting seeing the good work that they're doing and what they're trying to do. I guess talk a little bit about, then, what your. You talk some about some of the changes that you've been making at your operation, but talk a little bit more about that. And I guess I'm also curious to hear what the reception from your local community has been like.
Sander Van Stee:Yeah.
Sander Van Stee:So then, my focus is very much on the welfare perspective and that's what brought me to regenerative agriculture. And we have a commercial dairy farm already and, like when I was learning about regenerative agriculture, it was tempting just to sell it all and start over and start on this perfectly regenerative farm and on a smaller scale, debt free, risk free, and to start producing food in this new way. The temptation was there, but luckily I realized that that's just my brain trying to take the easy road and avoid this reality of living a life that's not in alignment with this new knowledge that I've gained of the benefits of regenerative agriculture. So I didn't do that, I didn't sell everything, because it would be much more powerful for me to be an example in commercial agriculture and document the transition of a commercial farm into a fully regenerative farm that's diverse and has multiple streams of income. So, to that end, instead of risking the dairy farm and just diving in there and risk the reality of not being able to pay our bills anymore, I decided to do it on a smaller scale on the side and start growing some pastures, and we crossbreed our dairy cows to beef already, which is great because, like I was mentioned earlier. The veal industry is a thriving business in our area, but then, which is a massive improvement over some places in the world where the farmer came in a ford to raise the bullcalf so the veal industry is an improvement to some degree, but crossbreeding them to beef and then raise them as grass-fed beef and raise them to 24, 25 months of age is a huge improvement in my eyes from a welfare perspective, which is my end game. That's what the real mission of. What I'm trying to accomplish with more elites is improve the lives of farm animals, look for unique ways to make that happen. So that's what I'm doing on a small scale right now is that I raise a certain amount of these beef crosses as grass-fed, grass-finished beef and I'm doing that rotational grazing that I described earlier.
Sander Van Stee:And then we have a flock of turkeys that I follow three days behind our pastured beef, and the three days is something that I try and maintain wherever they are throughout the farm, because it's about three days for the insects in the larvae to start to hatch and then the bugs that are attracted to the manure from that are left behind by the beef and then the turkeys can eat those bugs, they can eat those insects and then they spread out the manure to spread out the nutrition throughout the pasture.
Sander Van Stee:And then the birds they also don't like super tall, luscious grass because they have a hard time wallowing through there. So the beef they nicely bring that down a little bit, they eat it down and it's trampled a little bit and it's much shorter and then the birds can access and walk around this pasture much better. So then the birds get the benefit of the manure and the insects from the manure and the shorter grass. And then the birds their manure is unique in that it's crazy high in nitrogen and grass rise of nitrogen. So then these birds, they're adding their manure to the mix and then that really boosts the growth of this pasture, which then the bulls will then come back around, say four to six or whatever weeks later, depending on how much rain you get, and they get this extra lush pasture that's been fed by the manure from the turkeys. So it's like they they compliment each other really, really well.
Jack Heald:Just thinking about. My wife will sometimes sit in the office while we're having these interviews and she'll hear them, but often she doesn't what they talk about. Today I'm going to be able to tell her I learned about turkey manure. That's just awesome, turkey manure.
Sander Van Stee:I'm sorry, the manure is very valuable, that's right, and the animals, their manures, are different. And then like, and then from the dairy side of things I'm doing some unique experimentation from a welfare side of things where I'm trying to find a way to have the mother cows raise their own calf up until weaning and then and then and then. And how do it in a way where the calf can thrive? And that's key because it's only an improvement in welfare if the calf does well, and that's the sticking point. That's why in commercial agriculture it's they're typically removed. They're typically removed because the environment for a baby calf to thrive is different than the environment for an adult cow to thrive. So typically when you keep them together the calf gets sick. There's a massive of, there's a bad bacteria pressure from, like, the manure and stuff for that from the mother cow, and also the ventilation is different. The cows they thrive in the cold, but then the calf, they can't have anything that's too windy or too cold or else they'll get pneumonia and stuff like that. So, like, the calf can be typically be very sickly when left with a mother. So that's why they're typically separated.
Sander Van Stee:But modern dairy housing has improved to the degree and like and we're learning more over over all these years of building these barns of what a cow and a calf actually needs to thrive. So the opportunity is coming, it's becoming a reality, where we can design a barn where the calf and the cow can thrive, so the cow can actually raise its own calves, which is great, because I believe it's a massive improvement in welfare, because one of the ways that I like to measure welfare is how well the animal can express their natural behaviors and one, unfortunately, one of the behavior, natural behaviors that dairy cow doesn't have the opportunity to express is their maternal behaviors Because, like I said, like the calf needs to be able to be healthy and thrive and live for it to be truly an improvement over the regular commercial way of doing things. So that's one of the things I've been, I've been working towards for for years now is making all these little baby steps, little adjustments in management and housing and to to get that, get that product where, like, eventually, we have all, all the cows raising their own cows and right now, because we're in Ontario and it's a regular commercial farm, their house indoors all year round the dairy cows, because once I I designed the barn for for this system where the cows can raise their own calf. I also want to be able to have them give them access to pasture again and do rotational grazing with our commercial dairy herd as well. Well, hopefully, at that time it will no longer be a commercial dairy farm, it'll be part of our more elites company. But those are all the things that I'm working towards.
Sander Van Stee:And then, like, I want to add the pigs and the chickens, like I want to add all that in there, and also like I've been experimenting with, like the compost that I was telling you about earlier, to you, with, like having that really potent, diverse compost so that I can, I can kickstart and do some row cropping still, and and just, and it's like it's not just for my sake, it's an example.
Sander Van Stee:Like I document all this as much as I can on social media and stuff like that, and like on our emails and everything else, and I really want to be able to be an example to our neighbors and to commercial agriculture in general, to show different ways and of of where we can make this transition possible and profitably and and do way, do it in a way that like cause, like for for row cropping example, like, for example, if you can do it in a way that you can cut back on fertilizer or get rid of fertilizer entirely, that in of itself would be enough to make regenerative agriculture attractive for commercial for commercial farmers. You don't necessarily need the consumer to say I'll pay a premium for this, for these products If you can do it in a way where you just get rid of fertilizers. Cause fertilizers is a massive investment.
Jack Heald:Wow, I'm, I'm Phil, I want to. Just I have the questions are just bubbling and boiling here and I, I, I would love to keep this guy on a lot longer, but we're, we're coming up on an hour here. Um, one of the one of the questions that I would like addressed is a beef quality, um, um, what is the qualitative difference, if any, between grass-finished and grain-finished beef In terms of nutrition? And Well, I'm not asking about cost, retail cost. I'm asking about is there a qualitative difference as human beings, as people who eat this food, between grass-finished and grain-finished?
Dr. Philip Ovadia:And then I'm going to add on top of that is there, then, a difference between grass-finished and regeneratively pastured raised grass-finished?
Sander Van Stee:Yeah. So if they've done biopsies from the muscle of grain-finished steers and grass-finished steers and when they look at the actual muscle of the animal, there is less aging in the animal that's raised on just grass, the animal is not aging as quickly. There's less glycation end products, there's less oxidative stress, there's less proteolysis. The animal is just healthier and living a better life, a healthier life, and, not surprisingly, that does translate into the actual nutrition of the final product, of the meat that you have on your plate. So the grass-finished products they're higher in omega-3 fatty acids. It's a healthier fat. There's an anti-inflammatory aspect of those omega-3s. You also have a higher amount of certain vitamins, like your vitamin E and vitamin A, which also have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. And then there's also nutrients that are actually just anti-inflammatory and antioxidants in of themselves, but there's also things like phytonutrients. So phytonutrients are nutrients that originate from plants. So grass-fed products they're much higher. They're actually a really good source of plant nutrients because the animal cells have had a very diverse diet, which is where the difference is between regenerative agriculture, like regeneratively raised grass-fed, which is maybe your continuously grazed or commercial grass-fed products. There's a difference and it comes back to the soil. The healthier the soil, the more diverse the microbial life in that soil, the better and the more diverse amount of phytonutrients that you're going to get in that final product.
Sander Van Stee:Interestingly, it's not just the nutrients from the plant that you get in that final product. It's not just nutrients from the plants. You're also getting nutrients from the fungus and from the bacteria and all those microbes in the soil. You're getting those as well. They're making their way all the way up the food chain to the final product. You're getting nutrients from fungus, the healthy fungi in the soil. You have those, you can find those. They have all sorts of different effects on your body, like different anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effects on your body. There's a massive difference. You can quite often see the difference. You can see the difference in the color of the fat and the darker, more yellow fat. That's the extra of the M&A. That's in there.
Jack Heald:You can see it Darker fat is. I don't want to oversimplify, but that's what I'm doing. Darker fat is healthier fat.
Sander Van Stee:Yeah, it is. You don't want the people to be too focused on that, because then you end up having tricks where you start injecting them. You start injecting them with night traits and whatever else. But yeah, yes, they don't do that with fat at the moment.
Dr. Philip Ovadia:Yeah, absolutely fascinating. That last piece that you were just talking about echoes what the episode that will come out two weeks before this one with Dr Eric Berg was talking about many of those same things. It's really been fascinating. Like I said, I think this will be very informative for people learning about the food. I hope it gets people to be more intentional about the food that they're eating. We, of course, talk a lot on this program about being intentional about eating whole real food. Then I think the next level that I hope people start to take it to is really thinking about where that whole real food is coming from and the quality of it and the efforts that go into making that the best food possible. So thank you for all you're doing. Tell people where they can find you, and do you only sell locally or can people order online from you?
Sander Van Stee:So at the moment we are only delivering within Ontario. That's hopefully something that we can change eventually. I hope to be able to keep growing, but that's what we're doing at the moment. So people that are listening, that are in Ontario, our favorite way to keep in touch is with email. We don't have to rely on some sort of algorithm to put our content in front of you. So anybody that signs up to our email list through our website, they'll be entered to win a free meat box from us, a sampler meat box where they can try all of our different products. So that's our favorite way to keep in touch. But then people that are from farther away. Like social media, I do a lot of short clips on TikTok and Instagram and on YouTube shorts as well, on Facebook. So on Facebook, where more elites farms, instagram, where more elites, and then on YouTube and TikTok it's Sandra Van Stee.
Jack Heald:All right, well, we'll make sure all of that information shows up in the show notes where you can click on it and go learn more about more elites and Sandra Van Stee and this whole regenerative farming thing, and maybe even learn about Turkey poo I don't know. This was awesome. All right, well, for Dr Phillip Ovedia, this has been the Stay Off my Operating Table podcast. Thanks for joining us and seriously check out Sandra Van Stee and moralleadscom. This is, we're changing the world and y'all are part of this community. Thanks for being part of it. We'll talk to you next time.