45. Beef Back Better: Supplying Fully Grassfed Beef in El Salvador with Owen Gwilliam

Owen Gwilliam is the owner and operator of Beef Back Better, a fully grass-fed beef supply company in El Salvador, Central America. With an extensive agricultural background in organic certification, he emigrated from Australia in 2022 seeking a new life and a new start.

In this podcast we talk about the joys and challenges of starting a beef enterprise in El Salvador, regenerative farming, bitcoin, why he and others are leaving developed western countries for El Salvador, which cattle breeds are most suitable for Central America and much more. 

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TIMESTAMPS

0:01:16 Podcast begins - Bringing Grass-Fed Beef to El Salvador
0:15:38 Regulation Challenges in Agricultural Industry
0:27:35 Organic Certification and Nguni Cattle
0:39:53 Latin American Challenges and Opportunities
0:49:56 Quality Food in El Salvador

LINKS
Website - https://www.beefbackbetter.com/

Twitter - https://twitter.com/beefbackbetter

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Transcript

Owen Gwilliam: 4:12

Yeah, I just want everybody in El Salvador to be able to access local grass-fed beef without additives, and I don't even care if it's my company or not. I want to bring the beef back better to El Salvador.

Dr Max Gulhane: 4:34

Welcome back to the Regenerative Health podcast. I'm Dr Max Gullhane. In this episode, I'm speaking with Owen Guilham. He is the owner and operator of the fully grass-fed beef supply company Beef Back Better in the Central American country, El Salvador. With an extensive agricultural background in organic certification, Owen emigrated from Australia to El Salvador in 2022. In this podcast, we talk about the joys and the challenges of starting a new business in a foreign country, the state of the beef industry in El Salvador, what he's trying to achieve in his operation, why many people from Western countries are leaving for a new life in this Central American country, and much more. I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I enjoyed speaking to Owen. Owen, thanks for coming on.

Dr Max Gulhane: 5:31

Thanks for having me Give us an idea about what you're up to in El Salvador and how you made the move from Australia to that country.

Owen Gwilliam: 5:43

Sure. I've lived here in El Salvador now for about one year. I wanted to get out of Australia for various reasons. I wasn't sure whether I would be able to get good beef here. I'd been for a visit already and a lot of the supermarket beef was not very good and all imported. I had in the back of my mind that I would see if. I didn't even know if there would be good grass-fed cattle operations in El Salvador or not, I wasn't certain that I would try to open this business when I moved here. But after a few months of being here and getting to know my way around and meeting some farmers, I actually found a really good grass-fed cattle operation family operation. You can't buy a grass-fed beef anywhere in the country. I saw the opportunity and just connected the dots, built a refrigerated supply chain. Now we deliver through the city and beach area every Monday mixed packs of local grass-fed beef and it's excellent quality, I'm happy to say, amazing.

Dr Max Gulhane: 6:55

I'm very interested to hear exactly about the details of your project but I guess for the listener, tell us about why you chose El Salvador and maybe the context in which you decided to leave Australia initially.

Owen Gwilliam: 7:10

Sure, well, I'm a Bitcoiner and I'm a freedom person. I had trouble finding luck-minded people in Australia because there aren't really that much, or I couldn't find them the freedom-oriented people. I've been interested in Bitcoin for some years now because of the way that it removes the ability for governments to print money. After many years, I have worked out I think I've worked out that the root of many of the problems is the dodgy money that we use, the money that the government can print and the banks can create out of thin air at no cost. They do it constantly. They just create it out of thin air. They call it lending, but it's actually creating money out of thin air. You can't do that with Bitcoin. So I went down the Bitcoin rabbit hole and I'm still going, really and it brought me all the way to El Salvador. So El Salvador announced that they made Bitcoin legal tender. Here Is it two years ago now, alongside the US dollar. There's a new government here Well, it's coming up to four years now who also have cracked down on crime. So it's now a very safe place.

Owen Gwilliam: 8:20

So it seems like it was pretty simple what President Bacchelli enacted here Lock up the gang members and implement Bitcoin and he also happened to drop the COVID requirements very early. There was a strict lockdown here at first, but it only lasted a couple of months and then they opened the borders entirely. So a lot of refugees from Canada who didn't want to get the jab and from Australia and everywhere else who basically wanted medical freedom, who also, if they happen to be Bitcoins, they're coming here. So we have a good expat community here, and a lot of them also happened to want to eat a lot of beef, which is good for me, which led to the business kind of going fairly well so far. So El Salvador is a really interesting place from a freedom point of view. Using Bitcoin here and not paying capital gains tax on it using it for most of my day-to-day transactions is a joy.

Dr Max Gulhane: 9:21

Wow, very interesting. And for those listeners who have listened to my earlier episodes with Texas Slim, he is doing similar kind of things with his beef initiative in terms of using Bitcoin particularly as a tool to facilitate access to beef that, I guess isn't really dependent on anyone else. That was kind of the main message that I understood from his use of Bitcoin in this particular context.

Owen Gwilliam: 9:55

Yeah, so it's really powerful. Unfortunately, the one main farm or group of farms that we work with are interested in Bitcoin and happy to receive part of their payment in Bitcoin. So if the disaster scenario happens where governments are wanting to limit your beef consumption for the greater good, and they'll be able to do that very easily through the banking system or through central bank digital currencies, although they can kind of already do it through the banking system, this central bank digital currency thing is this sort of almost already exist. Governments and banks can already stop transactions whenever they want. You can't do that with Bitcoin. So if you're armed with Bitcoin and you know your local farmer or your local middleman like me, then hopefully you can continue to get some black market beef. I don't think it'll go that way in El Salvador. I think it's definitely going to go that way in Australia, which is very sad for my friends and family there.

Dr Max Gulhane: 10:53

Yeah, look, it's an interesting kind of confluence of geopolitical, social, societal, economic and undercurrents that seem to be converging on the recommending the reduction of consumption of beef.

Dr Max Gulhane: 11:10

And I think that's been happening for a while now and maybe one of the watermark kind of events was the IARC World Health Organization determining on processed beef to be a probable cost-introgen on quite shaky scientific grounds, and I feel like in occurring at the same time has been various kind of corporate pushes towards more of a plant-based diet and we've got the Seventh Day Adventist religious movement that is behind a lot of plant-based food companies and it seems like we're being pushed from all angles, owen, towards eating less beef, when I know in people like Dr Anthony Chaffee we advocate very strongly for beef consumption because it is really fulfilling all of our micronutrient needs as humans. So I think that it's very important that people do have access to high-quality beef. So I'm understanding more and more where you're coming from in terms of preserving access to that beef. Can you tell us about your operation in El Salvador and what exactly? Are you farming yourself or you're simply in between farmers, or how is it operating? Yeah, sure.

Owen Gwilliam: 12:31

So before I came here, I well, I've worked in agriculture for many years, worked in organic certification for a long time, so I'm a consultant and expert in organic certification, but I hadn't ever really done any farming firsthand. So during the COVID period in Australia, I actually bought a little farm and raised some cattle and had the best couple of years of my life. It was great fun, but it was very hard work. So I learned that I didn't want to be a farmer, but I do want to work with farmers. So when I came here, as I was saying, I wasn't sure that this would even be possible to have, whether they were good cattle producers locally. But I found some and they are very fortunate on the land that they have. It is irrigated country, very deep volcanic soil let's literally underneath the volcano and they have endless groundwater year round they have just crystal clear groundwater pouring out of the ground. So because in El Salvador we have very, very wet and very dry season six months of dry so if you come here during the dry season you see a lot of skinny cattle, but not at this farm. They've got irrigated grass and they just they don't do any. They don't even use any fertilizer or synthetic pesticides or herbicides. They just use rotation, just cattle rotation, and they're not doing it because they heard Joel Saladin talking about it or something. They're doing it because it works and it's profitable for them and that's the way they can get the highest stocking carrying capacity and that's the way they can get fat cattle. So they are really the only fat cattle that I found and they also happen to have one of the few government approved abattoirs on their farm. In fact, there's only three government approved abattoirs in the country. There was four, which one of them was run by a local government, and the federal government shut it down because apparently apparently this is what I've heard because they were putting the awful in the river. So now there's only three government licensed facilities. However, there are hundreds of non licensed facilities, but we're fortunate to use a licensed facility and it's so good that a lab at a time.

Owen Gwilliam: 14:35

So the only thing we had to do was tweak the processing and introduce aging. So none of the beef here was being aged. It was all cut fresh on the supermarket shelf if it was local. Most of it's imported and all the imported stuff is drenched in a chemical brine, so it's often from a feedlot or concentrated animal feeding operation, cafo, and then across two borders or either from Honduras or Nicaragua, and it's frozen and it's thawed. It's got preservatives, flavor enhancers, texturing, texture softeners. I couldn't believe that the stuff they put in this meat and it tastes terrible because of it and it's impossibly tender. So most of that. So I didn't want to eat that. So I was just thrilled to find a good farm that I could age a carcass in their cool room for a week and we could butcher and it turned out that it's excellent quality. So we just do a weekly kill.

Owen Gwilliam: 15:31

I go to the farm or one of the farms that are owned amongst his brothers, because you're only allowed to own a certain amount of land here, which is a legacy communist law. So it's spread out amongst different owners but it's managed mostly together and I go every week. We select an animal, I'm there for the kill and obviously all the cleaning and everything, and then come back a week later Again. Obviously all the cleaning and the processing bring it actually back to back to my house. I have a dedicated room here and freezes and vacuum packing machine and grind up and we do the final butchering and packing. So it's all vacuum packed and then frozen and delivered every Monday. So I get to the farm every week, but I don't actually have to work as hard as farmers do.

Dr Max Gulhane: 16:26

Cool, and it sounds like El Salvador had a similar setup to a lot of countries, and particularly the US, where they're growing an amazing quality beef but for some reasons the consumer doesn't have access to these animals. And it's this bizarro world that we live in, where you can be within a stone's throw of some really high quality beef, but that beef is being exported and then you're buying in some beef that again has been through all form of intervention and chemical contamination for various reasons, all the way from when the animal was alive to when it was butchered and then eventually delivered to you. So it's fantastic what you've done, because it really sounds like you're providing a service and a kind of access to meat for people there that otherwise wouldn't have. You make an interesting point about the abattoir system, and I've talked at length with Jake Wolke about this, and that's, I believe, how we met, because we were both yes and I was able to meet Jake face to face recently on a visit to Australia, so that was great.

Dr Max Gulhane: 17:33

Oh, fantastic, Fantastic. But he makes the point that really the bottlenecks are processing in Australia and it sounds like in other countries too. So I feel like a big key or piece of the food system decentralization puzzle is actually not only growing the beef but also having places where it can be butchered without driving it 300 kilometres and then aged close to where people can buy it.

Owen Gwilliam: 18:02

Yeah, exactly, and the biggest barrier to entry in terms of processing facilities in Australia is regulation. It's just the requirements, in my opinion, completely over the top in terms of the level of cleanliness and the level of procedures. For trying to think of some absurd examples like if you've got one peeling tile in the corner, they'll make you replace the whole floor. That the government inspectors. So some some. I've helped our local guys improve their food hygiene practices and they here. They also come under some pressure from government. It's funny things they come under pressure for and unfortunately it's escalating here. But from a hygiene point of view things were also not that great here. So it's a complex, nuanced argument about appropriate levels of regulation, if any. But we only having three licensed facilities in this country is a concern to me and it would again as the government that gets in the way. It's probably hard to get that license.

Owen Gwilliam: 19:19

At the level of the cost of trying to start something like that in Australia, with the labour cost but also just the regulatory burdens, it's insane. And it's even worse in the United States where they because meat is pretty safe, actually If you keep it cool and you keep it covered, you've got a huge leeway. It's very safe and then you're going to cook it anyway. You're more likely to get food poisoning from salad. But they just go overboard in the developed countries to the point where you have absurd things happening, like drenching or like in Nicaragua for the product that's coming in, like drenching it in preservatives which are poison. And in the United States they even use irradiation for ground beef, for mince. They irradiate it for your safety.

Owen Gwilliam: 20:07

I could not want to eat that crap. So we're a long way behind that here and maybe because it's a small country and because the Baccheli government seem to be sensible, things won't go too silly and there'll be some just appropriate rules in place and we can have some more legal facilities spread around the country. So even for us, we want to move into the east of the country. It's a small country, but we want to have a distribution centre in the east where there's a bit of a Bitcoin centre opening up in a town called Berlin, of all names, but there's not a certified avatar over there. So we're a bit stuck at that. So at the moment we'll just be having to drive it over there each week.

Dr Max Gulhane: 20:49

Yeah, it's a fine line, isn't it? Because we obviously don't want people getting sick, and food hygiene standards I mean, it's something that we take for granted in the Western world, but it is important. We also think back to how great-grandparents used to eat their beef, and it was in a little shed with fly screen. The beef was just hanging in there and it would just be chopped off.

Owen Gwilliam: 21:15

Well, here, mostly at these unlicensed facilities and at the local markets that most people go to, it's killed and butchered that day and just hung on display even for the next day as well, with no refrigeration and no fly screen, and there was nothing between that and the supermarket product. So that's where I fit in in terms of the business is creating the refrigerator supply chain, vacuum packing, freezing it down and home delivering.

Dr Max Gulhane: 21:38

Yeah, yeah, that sounds great and, yeah, we're all for what seems to be common sense rules around this and it's hard, because I think some solutions, especially in Australia, might look like mobile abattoirs or maybe something like on a big B-double, but it's difficult for people for small scale regenerative farms, to have a processing facility on site, so that's something that it sounds like is a challenge, no matter where in the world your farm is based. Can you talk to us a little bit about the practices of the farm, because I really am an advocate for using minimal intervention for beef as possible and for all types of animal agriculture, and the reason is that I think that it creates the highest quality food product. So you mentioned that your animals don't get any form of intervention and what else is involved in the process of raising these cattle.

Owen Gwilliam: 22:42

Yeah, well, they do something like cell grazing or adaptive multi-patic planning or holistic management or whatever you want to call it. They do a rotational system on irrigated pastures, but they're not improved pastures, it's just natural. And I don't recognise the species, not being from here, but there's something like Caqiu and just your regular grasses and there's some legumes in there. It's quite a diverse pasture. I don't recognise what they are. They use barb wire fencing and they run as few mobs as possible and they rotate and then they give the grass time to grow. So and they're doing that for productivity reasons the only supplement is salt. They don't use any grains or any medicines. If there's a sick animal, if it's good enough to be used, it'll be killed and processed or it'll be disposed of if it's too sick, they're not having to use antibiotics and they're not having to drench, which I put down to the rotation, which the other big benefit of rotating is that you break the disease cycle, so you're not likely to have internal parasites and so on. The cattle are Brahmin cross, so they're resistant to ticks. So the way the process works is that most of them they're not a breeding operation. This is a surprise to me. They're not a breeding operation.

Owen Gwilliam: 24:06

They buy lots of sort of three month old, three to six month old cattle, peasant steeves from the villages right up into Guatemala and then bring them to the farm to then finish them. For usually about two years We've been doing two to three year old heifers. They have heaps of heifers that I don't know whether they're actually barren or whether they just don't focus on breeding because of the way that has evolved here, that you buy the calves from the villages where they're raised. That's the only reason we couldn't be certified organic. Related to my background in organics is that we don't actually know in the first three to six months what they've been fed, but for the last year or two of their life they're just on pasture. They also do forage cropping so they grow some sugarcane and corn to then just graze off, which I found very interesting. They just graze it off and there's actually one farm that's in a wetland area where they do yard the cattle and cut the grass and bring it to the cattle, which initially I thought, gee, that's sort of like feedlot, why wouldn't you just have them on pasture? But it is a really wet area and I think it's appropriate that they keep the cattle off it. I was very interested to learn I hadn't seen that type of system. But it's just this sort of wetland area. It's very productive but it's very soft. They can't get vehicles or animals don't get bogged. So generally not vaccinated. Generally the chemical companies haven't pushed in here much. The government, the Department of Agriculture here, is probably the biggest risk in terms of them trying to demonstrate that they're using the latest technology and doing a good job, like they've been posting a lot on Twitter lately about testing for bird flu everywhere. I hope you have PCR tests, great but they haven't been too active in pushing vaccines or synthetic treatments. Unfortunately, this farm this farm I'm working with already doing rotational methods.

Owen Gwilliam: 26:20

All the handling is done on horseback and the animals are very quiet. The genetics are Brahman dairy cross, which is almost all the cattle here at Brahman dairy cross. I don't really know why. There were some other breeds brought in over the years, but it's just these tropical looking cattle. But there are some with horns and with shorter ears and without a hump that are half dairy.

Owen Gwilliam: 26:41

So they're a multi-purpose animal and most people say that. Many people say that you can't get good beef from Brahman animals. But our beef is excellent quality and I put that largely down to the low stress handling and being well fed. Always I think that Brahman get a bad name for beef quality because they're often in crappy areas and they have months at a time where they're hungry. That's because they're the only cattle you can raise in those areas. So there are more Brahman cattle there, but in this case Brahman dairy cross very well fed, very low stress handled. They're all super quiet and that's one of the ways we select the animals for processing is their temperament and so it's a pretty good farming system and it's pretty sustainable and it's excellent quality beef.

Dr Max Gulhane: 27:39

Amazing. It sounds like that's a great example of regeneratively regenerative agriculture and regenerative practices being Whatever regenerative is.

Owen Gwilliam: 27:46

This is one of my Sorry to interrupt, this is one of my interests is what is regenerative agriculture? Because we don't have a definition. It has sort of connotations, but I fear that the word regenerative as regards agriculture could end up like the word sustainable agriculture, because sustainable agriculture is bull crap. Right, I was hearing about that when I was studying agriculture at university 20 years ago. Sustainable agriculture then meant using more herbicides, less tillage and just driving the tractor on the same lines every time. And that's going to be sustainable. So regenerative I mean. I even heard the chair of the National Farmers Federation in Australia refer to herself as a regenerative farmer. I was like it's not my definition. But then again, what is the definition?

Owen Gwilliam: 28:43

Have you thought about that much.

Dr Max Gulhane: 28:44

It's a good question. I think the way I think about it is is the process of grazing your animals is it leading to a net increase in microbial matter in soil, moisture in organic matter in the soil? Is it improving the quality of the land or is it simply maintaining or depleting it? So I mean at the most basic level, that is how I define it and I think Jake Wolke will describe it as are you increasing the commons, these common resources like water, like pasture. So I mean, that's, I guess, how I define it. Do you have a definition or do you have an idea?

Owen Gwilliam: 29:29

Well, I agree with you. It certainly has this sort of cyclical and improving kind of connotation. But everything you said just now is exactly out of organic standards. That's what organic farms are supposed to be Improving the soil, improving the biodiversity, improving the productivity that's all included in organic standards. But there's a sort of a split between organic and regenerative, and some of the regenerative people are trying to rewrite the book. If they do rewrite the book, it's going to look exactly like the organic standard. So maybe compliance, maybe the erosion or the watering down or lack of compliance with organic operations has led us to this situation where we have found another word to use. Are you familiar with the certification, the regenerative organic certification? That's from the US but now available in Australia as well.

Owen Gwilliam: 30:23

No go and explain that to us. So ROC, regenerative organic certification is that what the C is? Roc you have to be organic plus more. And it's very appropriate in the United States because the US organic standard has big holes in it and it's unique to the US. Basically the rest of the developed world have pretty good organic standards and pretty good certification systems in my experience, and the US is a good system but it has some big gaping holes. Like you can have large numbers of animals in houses in the US and you can do hydroponics in the US and still call it organic and that's very unlike the rest of the world. So ROC popped up in the US and it was like you've got to be, as a baseline, organic plus meet these additional requirements and so maybe that'll become popular in Australia. I know that ACO certification limited are offering it now in Australia.

Owen Gwilliam: 31:23

So ROC that might be the definition of regenerative that, in terms of a written, transparent definition, maybe their standard is the best one.

Dr Max Gulhane: 31:35

Yeah, and to me there's always going to be creep in terms of these certifications and that's why I don't actually hold too much kind of interest in whose farm is certified to the letter of the law, because eventually they get captured and diluted by entities and bigger entities that want to be able to market and greenwash their products. So I think that the beauty of meeting a farmer and something that Texas Slim talks about and something that I'm a very big advocate for is really bypassing or obviating all these kind of standards. Because if you can just go to the farm where your food is raised and you're like, okay, and the farmer looks you in your eye and shakes your hand and tells you that he doesn't use drenching, he's not vaccinating, he's not spraying his whole pasture with herbicide, then to me that is the most reliable kind of that trumps any form of stamp on a piece of paper.

Owen Gwilliam: 32:30

I totally agree and that's always been. My whole career has been in organic certification and I've always had that little bit of conflict where in my ideal world we wouldn't need certification because you wouldn't be buying direct, you wouldn't be buying supermarket. So if things go as I want them to, I'll end up out of a job. But I've always been okay with that and I have settled myself with saying well, in the meantime I've got nothing against third party certification systems. But what you said is correct they eventually they can be manipulated or influenced and there's nothing better than actually knowing your farmer or trusting your supplier. Like me, I guess I'm not technically the farmer, but my customers here trust me and trust that I know about farming and that I'm keeping an eye on what's happening at the farm.

Dr Max Gulhane: 33:23

Yeah, I mean. And the more money that gets involved, the less you seem to be able to trust these types of certifications and the more likely they're going to simply reflect these corporate interests rather than the truth.

Owen Gwilliam: 33:38

Well, also, the more that governments get involved, I think they get worse as well, because the governments just get lobbied then by the lobbyists and then that makes it even worse. Sorry, go on.

Dr Max Gulhane: 33:49

They get used as a tool of the corporations. I wanted to talk about Nguni cattle quickly because, for the listeners they know that I'm very passionate about this African breed that are incredibly resilient and able to thrive in quite marginal country. It sounds to me that the environment of El Salvador would be perfectly suited to this type of African cattle breed. Have you familiar at all with the Nguni?

Owen Gwilliam: 34:17

Play through seeing Jake Wolke's posts, no knowledge beyond that. Everyone seems to have advice about what breeds I need to urgently bring into this country. I've just seen it as a. It's just not the weakest link for me at the moment. The quality is really good somehow, although the genetics could be improved, like the rumps. There's not a lot of fat cover on the rumps and stuff like that. Maybe things could be improved. But it's not the weakest link.

Owen Gwilliam: 34:47

Very interested in this breed. Having natural bigger and pest resistance and still being reasonably productive and maybe, generally speaking, being an older breed generally can work very well because a lot of the modern breeding that's been done with plants and with animals is for one particular aspect, like just for yield, for instance, or with vegetables it's just for insect resistance. That's what they breed for. Every year they're selecting your broccoli to make it more poisonous. Often there are some negative side effects, like the merino sheep. They bred the merino to have more skin because they wanted more wool and the more skin means there's more folds in the skin which means the flies get in so they have to use more pesticide to prevent fly strikes. So I'm very interested in older breeds. I'm assuming it's a less interfered with breed.

Dr Max Gulhane: 35:43

Exactly. I mean, as far as I'm aware, it's one of the oldest breeds in terms of proximity to an ancestral cow that hasn't had human selection pressure. It has had a certain amount of human selection pressure and that was from the Zulu tribes who basically used it as the lifeblood of the tribe, the wealth. That was how they stored value and basically supported themselves. But it is much closer to an ancestral animal than a lot of the British breeds.

Dr Max Gulhane: 36:15

I agree with you in terms of the taste and I think that I'm not necessarily too fast about the exact breed. I think you can get most breeds to taste quite good if you do the things that you mentioned on, which is graze them, rotate them on really, really, really good pasture, treat them well, treat them with respect and love, just stress them out and then hang the carcass for a good couple of weeks. I think if you do all those things then most beef tastes pretty good. I think in Goonie particularly though in this setting would mean that farmers would be able to perhaps get more productivity out of their cattle.

Dr Max Gulhane: 36:54

Some of these cows are carving for 16, 17 years year after year and then again being so survivable, they're less likely to need any kind of intervention, which makes it a more humane exercise. But it's very difficult and maybe some of the listeners can help us work out the logistics. But essentially we need to be flushing embryos in South Africa or Zimbabwe and then getting them transferred over to El Salvador. I don't know what the regulation would be like that to be around, but maybe in a five-year time.

Owen Gwilliam: 37:27

Well, the government here are doing artificial insemination training for free for farmers. So lots of locals are now learning how to do AI artificial insemination, which is different to embryo transfer, but would be another way to do it more slowly, to introduce some genetics at least, to just be to bring semen in. So yeah, I'm open to learning about that. But, as I said, my main supplier are not a breeding operation. Anyway, depending how things go here, I think I'll get involved in a breeding operation locally and become more interested, but at the moment, with the business bootstrapping itself, it's not the weakest link for now.

Dr Max Gulhane: 38:07

But in Goonie, it will definitely be on the list and I'll be in touch with you and Jake to work it out. Yeah, how much of the land is cultivated for pasture, for raising rumen and agriculture in El Salvador? Is it a big part of what's going on there? Is it going to be expanded?

Owen Gwilliam: 38:26

No, it's dying, which I intend to reverse. So I don't know the percentage makeup. I'm picturing the map, I don't know the stats. But there are two very different types of production areas, whether you're on the irrigated flats or you're on dry land, hill country. And some of that dry land hill country is very high in altitude, so maybe that's technically a sort of a different growing environment. That's where a lot of coffee is produced, for instance.

Owen Gwilliam: 38:56

So most of the low land irrigated country is under sugarcane. There was a lot more cattle production and it's gradually converted over to sugarcane where I think they basically the owner of the land just enters into a contract with the sugarcane mill and they even sort of contract grow it for them and they just get a price per acre. I think it's something like that, and so that has taken over and they do use a lot of herbicide. They love it. The hill sites, they grow corn and beans and they do two crops, at the start of the wet and the end of the wet. But there's all these. So the hill country will be perfectly good for as breeding and as part of a mixed farm, but for six months of the year it's very dry, so there's only a small percentage of that good irrigated country is under cattle and the land's already very expensive. So I obviously must refer to seeing cattle on this country rather than cultivating it and planting sugarcane and spraying herbicides constantly in the rows of the sugarcane and then making this sugar stuff, which is mostly poison. It's good for making alcohol, but otherwise it's not really food.

Owen Gwilliam: 40:22

So sorry, what was your question? How much of it? I think there's room for expansion here, but it basically taking it, taking back some of the sugarcane country. I think One of the problems the reason that I've heard from a couple of big growers in Nicaragua, big grass-fed cattle operations that is that they didn't set up here because of the rule about the how much land you're allowed to own. You're only allowed to own 240, I think it is hectares, which is a hangover from communist era, and so these guys, to be profitable, want to run more like a thousand hectares of grass-fed cattle operation and so they go to Nicaragua rather than setting up here. So I think that rule will go away and I think cattle production will increase here, because I think it can be genuinely more productive than that intensive sugarcane production.

Dr Max Gulhane: 41:11

Yeah, and that's an exciting thing. It sounds like a lot is changing in El Salvador, and has changed over the past four or five years, so who knows what could be on the horizon? El Salvador is actually a Spanish-speaking country and I imagine that you would have had a fair few challenges kind of setting up your operation in speaking a different language in a completely different kind of economy that you were used to working in. Maybe talk to us about a couple of challenges that you've had and how you overcome them.

Owen Gwilliam: 41:44

Yeah, you're exactly right. The language is the biggest barrier and remains the biggest barrier for me, despite having been here a year. I can understand a lot of Spanish and I can ask for what I need, but I can't have deeper level or technical conversations at all still. So, fortunately, one of the brothers in this farm speaks English. That's made it possible. That really made it possible. That was a real bonus and he enjoyed. We're good pals. I'm learning Spanish gradually.

Owen Gwilliam: 42:21

I employed a Venezuelan guy who's living here and so he now, yeah, whenever I need someone to negotiate in Spanish, he can help with that, and he also drives for me, because the driving here is quite hectic. Driving in Latin America is a bit of a different thing. Everything is a challenge in Latin America. So I think some for me from where, because of where I come from, like, and because it's a developing country, like, even something simple like opening a bank account will mean you'll be at the bank for three or four hours. Things don't always work properly. You know, trying to get one thing done in a day is a good target to pushing it. So there are challenges every day, but it's also part of the adventure. Every day is an adventure as well. So, yes, having a Spanish speaker on board if you want to try to start an enterprise here, will be important, and if you can also avoid driving, I highly recommend it.

Owen Gwilliam: 43:21

Employ a local driver. And yeah, I mean, I was just really fortunate to that one of the farmers already actually speaks English. Yeah, and availability of goods and services is a problem. Like you can't get, for instance, good probiotics of all things or something like electrolytes. That's. It's improving every day. There are new shopping centers opening and more products turning up on the show every day here at the moment, so I expect that will be improved.

Owen Gwilliam: 43:54

But getting quality, getting the things you need I just came back from Australia and brought a suitcase full of things that you can't get here to keep me going for a few more months. So the challenge of the cultural barrier and the language barrier the main thing. But it's also like I couldn't do this in Australia because there's already lots of other people doing it and because it's too expensive to put someone on staff and because of the regulatory burden. Like I was, what I was doing in Australia on the small farm was mostly illegal. Everything I was doing that was illegal is ridiculous.

Owen Gwilliam: 44:28

Here you'll be welcome and people need everything. You couldn't get local grass-fed beef in a refrigerator splash-own, it just didn't exist here. So there's so many more opportunities to fill here, and not just for the foreigners. So almost half our customers now are locals, which I'm really proud of, really pleased about, because there's a real mentality here which is changing as well is a mentality here that everything from El Salvador is crap and that everything that's imported is good. When locals realise that this beef that's excellent quality is Salvadorian, they're really thrilled and have some pride in the country again. So constant challenges and also constant opportunities in trying to start something up in a Latin American country.

Dr Max Gulhane: 45:15

It sounds like a grand adventure and it sounds very exciting and interesting. I was going to ask you who you were selling to, and I was under the impression that the standard of living or the socioeconomic level in El Salvador was obviously not as high as the developed nation like the US or even some of its close neighbours. So who are you selling to? Are they local? Are you the highest socioeconomic people? Are you selling to expats as well, and who are your main markets?

Owen Gwilliam: 45:45

It's mostly been the bit coiners and just through word of mouth, and then also the other expats that have been living here for a while or visiting to go surfing. There's world-class surf breaks here as well. So if you're visiting here, usually you surf for a bit coiner or there are a fair amount of expats already here just for other reasons cost of living and so on. So most of our customers are the bit coiners and sometimes they're a bit transient. They're coming for a few weeks at a time, but many of them have relocated here. So a lot of Canadians have escaped for medical freedom, who also happen to be bit coiners, buy from us every week or every fortnight, depending on how much they consume, but more and more so it is locals, which I'm really thrilled about, and yes, they're the middle class locals. So there are a lot of very poor people in El Salvador that live on a few dollars a day. The minimum wage here is only $13 a day US dollars, but lots of people work for less than that because most businesses are informal that you're a coconut vendor or you're selling bottled water at the traffic lights, or everyone's doing something to try to make buck, which is great. Everyone's an entrepreneur and most of the economy is informal and people live very cheaply. The poor people live very cheaply.

Owen Gwilliam: 47:03

There is also a middle class. Usually they might be working for an American company or something like that, or the American government. That are a fair few government employees here, as well as a huge US embassy that gives and overseas income is not taxed locally. It's territorial tax law, which is another good thing for me and other expats that are coming here. If you're doing remote work, you can get a remote working visa here very easily and potentially not paying any tax back home and not paying any tax here either.

Owen Gwilliam: 47:31

So locals that have maybe worked for a foreign company or spent some time working in the US or have started a company they've started a restaurant or a hotel or something and there's this middle class here now and sometimes driving quite nice cars and motorcycles and renting fairly nice apartments. They're also yeah, a lot of them are becoming our customers too and they're Salvadorian and they're really pleased that there's local produce and they're health conscious and nobody here is too caught up in climate change. I mean, the younger generations may be being infected with wokeism, but most people here just want to have a good time, want to have a peaceful life and spend time with family, and that's one of the things about. One of the benefits of a Latin American Catholic culture is that people just want to spend time with their family and have a good time and make a buck and leave one another alone.

Dr Max Gulhane: 48:29

They don't want to be just signal. No, enjoy a great barbecue of grass-fed beef.

Owen Gwilliam: 48:38

Yeah, exactly, so the middle class are able to pay the price that we charge and the poorer folk will. I'd like to have some really cheap ground beef products available for the locals, but it's very hard to compete with the Nicaraguan imports. It is nuts how cheap. I don't know how they produce it the Nicaraguan wholesale price, for if you're running a restaurant here or something, you can get Lomo, which is supposedly tenderloin I don't think it always is tenderloin but for like $5 a pound. So $5 US per pound. Sorry for the conversion. Whatever that is, Anyway, it's dirt sheet. I cannot produce it for that much, not even club, no way. So it's going to be hard to find to get those customers. But I guess as the economy grows here, more people will enter the middle class. Let's hope.

Dr Max Gulhane: 49:42

Yeah, and it's a process of education and more people realise the health benefits of eating fully grass-fed beef, and I think it will all come together very nicely. And I mean, I've travelled extensively and I've seen that in all these countries people eat a diet that's pretty rich in seed oils and processed refined grains and sugar. So part of the educational helping people become healthier will be making them realise that if they can eat more beef and beef that they can afford and hopefully that's your beef or someone similar's beef then they're going to get healthier. But I guess it's a progression and it's a journey for everyone and not just people in Australia and the US and the UK as well.

Owen Gwilliam: 50:29

Well, that's true. I mean obesity is a huge problem in the US and Australia as well. In Australia you have less of an excuse to not know about it, to not know about your health. Like there's so much information available now, like the work that you're doing and many others, it's almost an excuse to not realise that you shouldn't be drinking all this soda and that you should be eating real food and animal products good for you. But most people still in Australia don't know that. So here it is terrible.

Owen Gwilliam: 50:57

It's people go in the villages. People will go to the local tender and buy three litres of fizzy drink in the morning and drink it that day and obesity is a massive problem. And if you go to the airport there's a lot of wheelchair like elderly or unwell people in wheelchairs getting on and off the plane to go to the US for treatment and stuff like that. It's astonishing. It's a huge problem. Mostly, I think it's the sugary drinks. So, hopefully, education. But even the little tiendas are just full of, like you say, seed oil, like fried flour and some seed oil, all these snacks that are terrible. So I am going to do jerky, we're going to start doing a jerky or a built on product and try to get that on some tienda shelves. What about Wolbins?

Dr Max Gulhane: 51:43

So we're doing Wolbins already.

Owen Gwilliam: 51:44

Yeah, we're doing liver and heart from the start as an add on to our mixed packs. It's just like a three, four dollar add on to the mixed pack and we're doing tallow. I just finished a batch of tallow. I'm like Roth for myself. We haven't got up and running with Roth commercially yet, but also now adding kidneys and tongue on and anything and by special order we can do it. We can get whatever, but always the liver and the heart are reliable. Yeah.

Dr Max Gulhane: 52:16

Amazing I was very curious to talk to you on because you're not the first person who's moved to El Salvador. And Dr Jack Cruz, who I've done three interviews now and who has a very big personality and force in the circadian quantum health space, has got his own place in El Salvador. So it seems to me that it's becoming a little bit of a hub for people who are interested in a decentralized approach to their respective fields, and you're obviously decentralizing beef production and agriculture and Dr Cruz is decentralizing health. So I'm curious to see what happens in the future in terms of El Salvador and what it becomes.

Owen Gwilliam: 52:56

There's so much cool stuff happening here now, Like there are homeschooling groups. There's already Montessori school and Astana school, and now there's the homeschool groups and there's you can come and do whatever you want here. It's great. You can come and start a cult if you want, probably, but there are all sorts of interesting folk coming here and the common theme is the freedom oriented people and that's been huge. I get so much support emotionally, I guess on financial as well, but from the Bitcoin and Freedom community, so much support. It's a really enjoyable process providing good quality food to all these free thinking types.

Dr Max Gulhane: 53:40

Yeah, I mean it's interesting and fascinating and I think if people are respecting each other and simply not hurting anyone else, then it's great that they can just express whatever their interests are and build community, Because essentially that's what I think is the way forward is that if we build strong communities with strong access to high quality food, then that's how people thrive, and not only on a physical level with high quality food and solving or preventing metabolic disease but also from an emotional and community point of view. So it's something that gets lost and what you left when you came to El Salvador, I think that the past three or four years has represented an idea in many ways in urban like city, Melbourne and cities in terms of community. That was the antithesis of community, what was happening. So it sounds very exciting what you're doing over there in El Salvador.

Owen Gwilliam: 54:39

It is indeed. Yeah. When are you coming for a visit?

Dr Max Gulhane: 54:42

Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, maybe soon. So it'll be great to see you and check things out. And what's your vision Like? Where do you, where do you hope to take beefback better? I'm very interested in hearing what you're planning and what you want to share in terms of the vision.

Owen Gwilliam: 55:01

Yeah, I just want everybody in El Salvador to be able to access local grass fed beef without additives, and I don't even care if it's my company or not. I want to bring the beefback better to El Salvador. Beyond that, I'd also love to see the health situation improve and the tenders selling more healthy products rather than. I don't really know how to do that, so I'm just focusing on the thing that I do know how to do, which is just processing these animals one at a time, getting them out there and the people's kitchens. And you know there's so much more I can do. I don't know there's always more and I don't always know what to do next.

Owen Gwilliam: 55:50

I've been trying to we bootstrap this business from nothing and I've just been trying to do the week, only address the weakest link and not go in and spend a stack of money and then have it fail.

Owen Gwilliam: 56:01

I do want to expand into the east of the country and I do need to diversify my suppliers because we'll reach a limit of production and just to have that redundancy built in.

Owen Gwilliam: 56:14

And you know, people suggest I should talk to the government about spreading the word, and I generally just want to avoid talking to governments and just do the work and make the product available and hopefully have people find out about it and as the demand increases then we can take on more suppliers. I don't have a grand plan. Perhaps perhaps, like Texas Slim, has more of a broader vision, which is great, but the simple plan is just to make it available and to make people realize that it's good. Like this, just so it's everyone, every expert, will say that Brahman beefs no good, and this is like I've had some of the best stakes of my life here from our own animals, which is really and I've had many customers saying that to me, saying that was the best stake of my life Like it's not heavily marbled and it's only aged for a week, but a week is seems to be enough to get that baseline tenderness and flavor profile. So dispelling the myth about Brahman cuddle being no good for beef, I guess is also her mission.

Dr Max Gulhane: 57:25

Yeah, well, I've eaten cross, Brahman cross, fully grassfed beef and, like I said earlier, I think it's all in the care of the animal what the animal is eating and, again, how long it's hung for. So, yeah, great, great stuff, and congratulations for taking the risk and for setting up in a very, very unknown wild west type area, and it sounds like you're really helping people and creating value and giving them access to what we both know is an essential human need. So good on you and I'm really looking forward to visiting one day and seeing everything that you're doing. Where can people get in touch with you if they want to learn more? Or maybe they live in El Salvador and they want to buy some beef off you?

Owen Gwilliam: 58:10

Sure, thank you and thanks for having me on. Thanks for those kind words. I appreciate it. Beefbackbettercom is the website and you can just order through WhatsApp. If you're coming to El Salvador, let us know with a little bit of warning and we can arrange a delivery for your arrival. I'm not really on Twitter much anymore because it's sort of going bad, so really just the website. If you want to check out the website, we've got our mixed packs on there and some photos at the farm and stuff like that, so it's just beefbackbettercom.

Dr Max Gulhane: 58:44

Well, that sounds like a great holiday. To arrive at a inviller in El Salvador and have a massive meat tray of regenerative beefbackbetter meat ready waiting for you, sounds pretty ideal to me. Okay, I'll include all that information in the show notes. Thanks again for your time, thanks for sharing your journey with us and, yeah, we'll see you in touch.

Owen Gwilliam: 59:07

Thanks for having me Good to talk.