Welcome back, Regenerative Renegades. Thanks for joining us. Today, we have a great guest, Finnine. Make peace. I'm really curious to hear the story of how you ended up being a regenerative renegade, how you got involved in this space. Most of the time we have people that are food or ag one or the other. Maybe almost all the time, I would say. So I don't think that's your past, but we're going to learn. So a little uh background on Finney, a gifted, engaging speaker and educator in the regenerative agriculture movement. He brings a rich and vibrant voice to advancing food systems through soil health. He is a presenter, media creator, and leader in the field of regenerative agriculture and soil health. He's the Kiss the Ground co-founder, producer of the great films Kiss the Ground and Common Ground, and partner at the Ryospe. So, Finneyan, how are you today?
SPEAKER_02I'm doing great, Matt. Good to see you. And uh all my love to the whole fam and the whole brigade over there.
SPEAKER_00Thank you very much. That means a lot. Um so I, you know, I want you to go back and tell us your story. Um, I'm so like I said, I'm so curious. Go back as far as you want, but I'd like to hear the journey and uh how you ended up uncovering and probably being the you bringing regenerative agriculture to the masses, you know, and in so many times for years and years, I felt like I was in an echo chamber going to conferences with us all talking about the same thing, and we weren't piercing the outer world, and uh you successfully did that. So take it away, Fine. Let's let's hear your journey.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Uh thanks, Matt. Um it's interesting. I I I just wanted to start by alluding to what you just mentioned. And yeah, we myself and the other co-founder not the usual suspects to do what we've done in the space of regenerative ag. And for anyone listening out there, I think one of the coolest things about the regenerative ag movement is how welcoming and not just welcoming, but encouraging of those folks who aren't the usual suspects to get involved. Because I think uh probably because of the essence of holistic thinking and understanding ecosystems, I feel like a lot of the leaders inside Regen Ag so instantly saw that folks coming in from the outside were valuable and necessary in order to reach a wider audience and bring these uh attention to this movement to more people and make it more accessible. So, in essence, Matt, I don't know if anyone out there has seen this uh this YouTube clip, but you can go search it later. It's basically how to start a movement. And in this video, there's a there's a a band playing at a festival and everyone's sitting on the ground. And one guy is starts dancing, this kind of hippie looking white dude's dancing and he's doing his thing. And to him, he's he's emphasizing a point, which is leaders do their thing no matter what. They are the scientists, the indigenous knowledge holders, the farmers and ranchers who have learned something, uncover something, and they're they're doing it. And they're doing it with all their uh ferocity and and and push. But then in that film, the uh a young gentleman comes up and starts dancing with the old white dude with the shirt off, and the the young guy starts just dancing along with him. And then a few of his friends are like, woo-hoo, let's go dance. Um, and then within minutes, there's 20 or 30 of them. And then literally thousands of people are congregating now dancing. But the point of the thing is that you have to have leaders to in order to start a movement. But what often gets overlooked is the essential and powerful, and uh one of the most important parts of starting a movement is that second person. If there isn't a person who gets it, sees it, embodies it, respects it, and makes it available, it is very hard for movements to reach critical mass in that tipping point, such that the people who were left were like, we better join that party. Uh, and that's what we're seeing right now. You and I were just at Climate Week. The, the, the word of the week was regenerative agriculture at Climate Week. And 15 years ago, when we started, uh, we only dreamed of that. You know, I'm hearing from the dedication and and and depth of some of these massive companies and middle companies and governments taking so seriously this conversation for pre-gen ag. So, long story short, is kiss the ground and our essence was that second person. Um, how do we be that? How do we uh evoke that? How do we, at the very core, stay connected to the source, those leaders, and portray what they're trying to say, but translate it in a way and make it available for more people. But um, that's kind of the gist of it. But my story goes back to, you know, probably being considered, I would consider myself an a lifelong activist. Um, grew up in activism, environmentalism. I grew up homeschooled out in the country. So there's a lot of stuff that primed me.
SPEAKER_00Um you were homeschooled out in the country?
SPEAKER_02Homeschooled out in the country. And what does that mean? I mean didn't go to school. Upstate New York, Ithaca. Upstate New York, okay. Um, but lots of times in the woods, just you know, when you're a kid being able to have tremendous amount of time, just soaking up what nature is, how it works, composting, gardening, you know, getting a lot of our food, stable foods from our gardening and stuff. So my priming on that of what it is, how it goes, and in nature and everything was pretty big. And then um one in interesting fact was in 12th grade of my high school, I was in a very small 250-kid high school from sixth to 12th graders. And my kind of AP bio class had four PhD students from Cornell in the in the class. And in that class, I was out with them testing soil. And guess what that test unveiled? This is the test that showed that oak growth from miles apart were blocking airborne viruses by doing what? Sharing signals through mycorrhizal fungi. So my level of priming was probably way bigger than your average person who was a touring musician for in Hollywood, like doing music and activism. So when I heard at the age of 28, 29, heard a four-hour lecture from a gentleman named Graham Sate, a little rewind, the co-founder Ryland Engelhart had heard this guy speak in New Zealand on a panel of scientists saying, Can human beings sustain themselves on planet Earth? And the first five said, Nope, we're doomed. The last guy was like, they're right, but hey, soil, this magical thing we can help regenerate. So, Ryland, a friend of mine from Ithaca as well, grew up with him. Uh, I'm kind of known as his activist environmental friend, and he's like, You got to hear about this. So he convinces this guy, Graham Sate, who you might know, to stop in LA and speak to us. I bring my sound system, we set up an auditorium. Graham does a four-hour lecture, and this is one of the encyclopedias of the regenerative ag movement, we call him. He like knows everything. And he lays down human health, soil carbon, biodiversity, uh, the whole gamut. But the thing that stood out for us the most was obviously the carbon thing at that point of like, oh my God, we have a place to put carbon. So up until that point, as an activist, uh environmentalist, I had seen pretty much everything out there as a how do we do less harm and how do we go off the cliff slower? Up until my 28, 29, whenever that was, I really didn't think we had a proper diagnosis for the problem. It was all just like, how do we band-aid a little bit better? Yes. But that's that's that sustainable conservation mentality of very logical, of like it's getting bad out there. How do we stop the bleeding? Um, but when he laid this all out, it it was too good to be true. I I was raised pretty critical, thinking minded, of like, this this gotta be some catch here. And so we shook that night after this four-hour lecture. I'm like, if this is all true, we shook hands. We said, we're dedicating our lives to getting the word out, because this is the biggest thing ever, ever, when it comes to like humans actually having a chance for the world to thrive again. So lo and behold, it was true. And I I jumped into the I jumped into the the work and we met every single week. That was the dedication. Like, we don't know what we're gonna be, we don't know what we're gonna do exactly. We're pretty darn sure we have to help spread the word through media or whatever. But we just met every week in Ryland's living room, and I started sitting in the garage all the time. Just I was touring musician, so I could take myself off the road and just sit for six months and study the heck out of this stuff.
SPEAKER_00Um and wait a minute, wait a minute. You were a touring musician?
SPEAKER_02That was my profession when I was in my twenties. So I was yeah, doing that music stuff. So I was my own boss. I could be like, all right, I'm gonna study soil until the cows come home here. Uh instruments. Uh at that point I was front front man singer. Oh early in life was a drummer and then became a drummer again later in life.
SPEAKER_00Um so did you learn that at home, homeschooled, too? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02My family did a motorhome trip around the country when I was 10 uh for 10 months. And uh that's when my family, we all started playing guitars. My fa my parents brought like four guitars on a teeny Winnebago, and we all, you know, six of us trove around the country and we all learned guitars at that point. My older brother kind of started the first band. So um yeah, music was was most of my life. Um I thought that's what was gonna always be. But um my wife.
SPEAKER_00So whenever you want to break into song, just go ahead and, you know, we'll play along. Yeah, or dance if you want, yeah.
SPEAKER_02I was yeah, I was also a professional dancer. Um touring. I was a professional swing dancer for my teens touring around the world um teaching swing dance and competing and all that stuff.
SPEAKER_00Um all kinds of lessons I wanted to.
SPEAKER_02Well, shout out to homeschooling.
SPEAKER_00Not such a bad, not such a bad idea. Right. Um Right. I learned that late in life after I raised my kids.
SPEAKER_02But the uh I was getting at was the uh I forget where we were exactly, but the um initial phase of it was really like deconstructing this. This is all real. Is this regenerative thing actually possible? And something else was happening as I was diving in, doing as much research as I could, I was reaching out to everybody, Matt. So it's a good thing we brought up music really quick, because in the LA region, being a professional musician and making your way is hard. It is a freaking hard job. I know farming is ranching is hard too. I grant that, but it is a competitive as heck environment. So here I am, someone who's my own agent, my own manager. And then I go and start calling these people in the soil world. I'm like, hi, can I speak with Raton Lal, please? Expecting a secretary to book me out for a month from now, maybe, maybe, right? This is Raton Law, and I speak to him for like an hour. So that was my reception into this movement, which was like, yes, come on in, help us out immediately. So I give a lot of credit to the movement as I started off with who's the the leaders in this and how generous with their time and encouraging for like a nobody I was. I was just literally some random guy in LA checking in with them. But there was a positive energy there that was very encouraging and welcoming, which I give a lot of credit to us, you know, putting our whole lives into this is a big part because of who was who was at the center and who was giving us time a day, Ray Archiletta and these other folks just being extraordinary, um savory, just welcoming in completely to be like, yes, please help do it. So that's a little bit of the history. And then we were basically like, okay, we we're not the farmers and scientists, we're not the indigenous knowledge holders, but we're in LA and we're good at pointing at things. And so that was really the essence of Kiss the Ground's mission, awakening people to the possibilities of regeneration. If it happened to us, it can happen to to anybody else. That was kind of the premise of our of our starting point.
SPEAKER_00Well, and it's so true. You know, I've experienced the same thing. You know, I came out of I was raised close to the land, much like you, not homeschooled, but in on the land every day, and you you develop an appreciation for nature and how it works and how chaotic it is, but how sensitive it is to and and how it can be changed. Um but then when I learned about this space, I had a similar experience. I heard a talk, my heart lit on fire. I was like, this is it. Uh I I this is this is in some ways is familiar, but yet new, and it has all kinds of potential. I can see how it solves a lot of issues and on fire. But up until that point, the same, same kind of thinking. It's like, well, recycle, you know, drive less. Um, you know, the various checkpoints of we got to slow down this detigration. Um, but then when you get in the space, it's so true that I was amazed. I came out of the corporate marketing and you couldn't reach those people to save your life, you know, and it was all very regimented and controlled and time would no one gave time, and then get into this space and people like, oh, you want to sit down and talk for the afternoon? Like, what? What? Right, exactly, exactly. And so it was foreign to me as well. And and then, and then you I but you once you're in it, you do understand that you need we collectively need that second person, just like you talk about. That that second person that comes in with fresh eyes, that can see uh, you know, have a different context, but start that dance. It's it and it's still necessary today in a big way, but you know, there is people like you coming in that that get that get that started. And we've all we all know how well we all know how lonely it is to be the first person on a dance floor. But yeah, that's it without that, it it it's impossible.
SPEAKER_02But it and it's cumulative, it's compounding. That's the cool thing. When there's more second people, as when I was training soil advocates, um I was always encouraging them. I'm like, I'm talking about me as a second person, but I'm also talking about you as a second person. Like it is, you know, and then and if we all embrace that, this was a big lesson for our soil advocate training. We trained about 5,000 people from 30 different countries at this point, um was basically reminding people that they're just as important. And I think that's a that's a big thing that I I learned early on in life is that you can change the world, right? And a lot of people don't really believe they can. But even embracing how important a second person is versus the leaders are the only important people. There's there's an automatic hierarchy. A lot of people in our society, I think, tend to give away um the potential of their own power because they're not observing like it's an ecosystem, it has to function together. You have to play a part. If there's only one part that's highlighted, there will be imbalances. But like, give yourself that power, that recognition. I mean, even some one of our advocates, like uh Erin Martin, you know, she's out there doing all of that food is medicine stuff, just kicking butt. But I remember early on of just like, no, it's tag you're it, you know, Alan and Ray tag me, but I'm like, we I gotta, I gotta infuse that same energy of a tag you're it, because the potential of any of these people going through that is that it's just as important, just as big of a role to play to move this forward.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And that's I guess people listening that I it's so important to know that we need you. Yeah. You know, we don't just want you, we need you. We need you to take action in whatever way you're called, action is so necessary. And the and there's hope. There's hope to taking this action. So many issues.
SPEAKER_02Another thing in it, too, is that that ecosystem mind of it is I talked early on about not being usual suspects in this, right? Just a Tory musician activist guy. Uh now, you know, talking with all these ag leaders and stuff. But we've always at Kiss the Ground, we're always encouraging people to see that their unique abilities, natural, because you're you're talking about you. You're coming in from a different space and angle too. It's like we desperately need an ecosystem brain of people who have these skills. And I'll probably talk about in a little while with the rhizosphere we're building, is like we literally have um Wall Street and bank level AI guys who, yeah, they saw the movie Kiss the Ground, they were like, oh my God, they had an aha moment. But they have skill sets that are so usable for this movement to move forward. And so that's where the encouragement is not become us, it's become more of you inside of this ecosystem because gosh darn it, we need it, and it's gonna help all of us move forward.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I was just crossed my mind, you know, the producers that raise cattle and our ranchers, farmers, whatever. I joke quite a bit, but it it is true. Most days, most times, they'd like to occupy their time talking to animals and not people. So when people come along that you recognize, like, oh, this person likes to talk to other people. This is great. We need people like that. Because the unique ability of the farmer-rancher is generally not getting in front of a group of people or even having a conversation one-to-one. It's like quietly working, doing their work, but I I need others. We I need others to talk.
SPEAKER_02And I think um I would give a yes and to that, Matt, which I because I've experienced it firsthand of people moving out of their own way. And some of these things are just so surprising, where people's consideration of themselves as a spokesperson is sometimes true in terms of their essence. Maybe they're, you know, extremely uh phobic of that. But a lot of people just haven't been given their own permission to themselves or given quote unquote permission from someone else who they're thinking should. But some of the silly things when I'm training advocates, about 25% of them were farmer ranchers. And one of the silliest ones was like, oh yeah, I never thought I could like speak on this stuff because I don't know how to make slide decks. And I was like, Are you kidding me? The reason you're not speaking is because you don't have slides that look beautiful and you don't know, you don't want to make us I will give you 350 slides to personally use however you want, edit the heck out of them. But like those are some things that were were funny in my experience, and not slighting the the folks who are kind of not putting themselves in the mix, but um that sometimes that was it. And then all of a sudden, six months later, they're out on the speaking thing, they're talking to local uh officials, they're they're out presenting at conferences. But those are the kind of things of like we do discount often of like this person, yeah, I don't feel like being. What is the reason you don't actually want to be? Because your story is so your why, your, your, your reason for doing this is so profound. And if you give people that that uh for themselves to carry and and basically empower them within that, their ability and and then help them with some some coaching on on public speaking. I've been shocked, Matt, in terms of like the transformation of like, I am a speaker. You're like, yeah. Obviously, there are some of those folks just never will, never want to. Totally get that. But there are a lot of folks who kind of just made that up about themselves, quite obviously.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we're told that a lot. You know, it's scary to speak, it's don't do it, you know, that's for special people, not you. You know, we're told that and we believe it. And we believe it. And then what's cool, I agree, I'm going through my mind, people that I've known that have w risen up and like, oh my gosh. That well, because it's authentic. You know, and people recognize authentic. And if it doesn't really it doesn't matter how polished you are, it doesn't matter. It's just the content and being authentic. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And people think you need to start with a a TED talk or something. You're like, no, no, no, no. Just speak at an elementary school. I don't care. Just let your s let your voice start coming out, let those thoughts start coming through and know that it's natural, not that it has to be a memorized, rehearsed 18-minute talk for your first time. Have you done a TED talk? I did a couple TEDxes, but not an official TED yet. Okay. I have to look that up.
SPEAKER_00I haven't watched that.
SPEAKER_02How about you?
SPEAKER_00Have you done one? No. I can't do that. I'm telling myself I can't do that. You're full of it. You're full of it. Yeah. It's on the list. I have to do it. It's just, yeah. For some reason, haven't it?
SPEAKER_02I'd be glad to help if you whenever you're going to be able to do it. Okay.
SPEAKER_00Thank you. I need it. I need lots of help. So you progressed through this, and let you can we go into a little bit on you, you know, you're the light turned on, and you ultimately ended up making these films, producing these films. What was that like? It was it what you expected? You know, how did that all transpire? Great question.
SPEAKER_02Um so early within Kiss the Ground forming, we we knew we had to make media. That was kind of the biggest depth of the calling, was like we have to make media. The first piece we made was called the Soil Story, is an animated piece, narrated animated piece. Um, that was most importantly a tool for the movement itself to use. So we we were that collective sounding board interviewing all these different leaders from the space to create something that was under five minutes, that was a comprehensive version of what we're now calling the kind of thesis of what regenerative ag can do, highlighting carbon mostly, but also talking about biodiversity, water, and and these other critical elements and outcomes that happen from it. But that piece uh was kind of our first short form piece, and we knew we had to keep creating short form content. But early on, a kind of random coincidence was the filmmakers, uh, Josh and Rebecca Takel from Big Picture Ranch. The filmmakers happened to live right before Ryland, the other co-founder, moved in. They lived in the house where our office was, the garage. So their business, Big Picture Ranch's business office was the same garage Kiss the Ground was born in. I lived, I lived a half a block down the street from that. So And where was that? In Venice Beach, California. It was in LA, okay. Yeah. And so um that office is where we started Kiss the Ground. And so the filmmakers would sometimes be coming back to that house to check on certain things, and we convinced them after becoming friends to help make this movie with us. And they're already famous documentary filmmakers around fuel stuff, like oil and gas and stuff. And so it took some time, Matt, to convince them to make a film about dirt or soil. They were like, what? But we had to go in and like do some of that uh same type of activism of like, come here, come into the garage. Let me show you on a whiteboard of like exudates going into feed microbes in the soil from the roots. So you can understand soil aggregates holding the carbon. Like, sometimes we assume people will know just by casually mentioning, like, oh, but a lot of folks need that extra push. So I encourage anyone out there, when you're like, this is a water solution, you can't just say it's a water solution in most people's brains, or you can't just tell them it's a carbon solution or biodiversity solution. You, you, you gotta sometimes paint the picture, make the graphic, draw it out on a napkin. I don't care. But like people need a little bit of a push because a lot of people nod their head for anything just to get out of a conversation. And sometimes they need that push of like, I'm gonna get you to get this, come hell or high water. And so some of those things of you know, being actively persuading them, but also showing them literally how it works. We're like, Well, I remember we gotta make that up.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I remember clearly when Kiss the Ground came out with the first graphics and the little short that visually represents. I was like, oh my gosh, look at someone has put this down into graphics and you I can understand it, and others can understand it. It's like this is awesome because we were so devoid of it. All we really had was words.
SPEAKER_02Well, that that's that's fun. The just through my memory back to uh it's probably like 10, 10 o'clock at night. I'm in the garage. This is the you're talking about the soil story, which has the the first carbon bubbles and the human and the plant and everything. Yeah, yeah. So that's that was one of those moments you're like, we have to tell the story, but I'm in the garage. It's like 10 o'clock at night. And finally it was like, what if it's bubbles? What if the bubbles can move in between different things and show be shown everywhere? And that way we can cycle them all through. And that's where now everyone uses carbon bubbles to show it all out there. But it came from a garage of like, I have to say something.
SPEAKER_01I love that.
SPEAKER_02A bunch of other bad ideas came out. So just people reminding us like we didn't just naturally do that. There was a bunch of crap that happened to was like, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. And then the bubbles hit, and it was like, oh, we can we can use that. It's perfect. It's perfect. Something you can't see, really, that's happening all around us. Amorphous goes into different things, makes all the things that are alive.
SPEAKER_00So yeah, stuff like that. That was a big moment. Seeing that for me was a big moment.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so then the films um we started off with Josh and Rebecca to make the big documentary, Kiss the Ground, took eight years to make.
SPEAKER_00Oh my gosh, really?
SPEAKER_02Four, four different versions of narrating with Woody Harrelson. Um, I mean, this is just a and my shout out to my friend Ryland for just, you know, there were several times this film was dead in the water because funding had run out. And, you know, Ryland's just a perpetual we can do this mentality. It was just like, all right, here's the next $40,000 check. Let's go, let's start up again, you know. Just so that film was made in a very took a very long time to make because it was put on pause as soon as money ran out. It was just like we can't go until there's money again. So it was a a long time, but in the meantime, we were continuously making short form content and continuously using what we had made, continuously hitting the the whole movement to to allow these concepts to get out before the film came out finally in 2020.
SPEAKER_00Wow. So were the the players involved for eight years as well? Like I'm thinking about Gabe Brown and I mean Ray Ray Ray jokes all the time.
SPEAKER_02He's like, Oh, I thought this was dead. I didn't think these guys, I thought they were full of SHIT. Like they told me it was gonna come out on Netflix or something. He's like, ah, it's never gonna happen. Because it felt like that for us sometimes, of like, you know, you get these amazing momentum swings and then it just collapses for six months, or it's a tough thing to get through. But um yeah, I think if we hadn't finally achieved it, I think it would definitely have made a lot of people lose lose belief in in us. Because, you know, you're you're you're carrying such a weight of like, we gotta do this, we can't do this, but when it finally happens, it's you know. What what were those years?
SPEAKER_00Beginning and ending. What was the eight years?
SPEAKER_02Thir fourteen we started the film, and then the film came out, let's see. 2013 we started yeah, that same year we met Josh and Rebecca. So 2013 to I guess it's seven years total. But yeah, to 20.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Okay.
SPEAKER_02So seven years more. And then the the second film took way less time to make grounds uh common ground, and now we're working on groundswell uh for the trilogy, finishing that up now.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Yeah. Wow. Big work though. So necessary and just exciting to have that for everybody in the space.
SPEAKER_02Parallel work, like the biggest little farm, John and his whole team, like there was a moment, I don't know if this is okay to say out there, but there was a moment we were like debating on making a film together. And it was just like, you know, these are gonna be two different, they're very different, you know, they have different reasons for being. And so, but there was a moment of like, are we gonna make these films together? There's gonna be one movie. Um, but I'm so glad we didn't, because my God, that film's amazing, but it had such a different vehicle and and and connectivity. Our film was more macro. And so, you know, those are just some funny instances of like how the movement was moving at that point.
SPEAKER_00But so you knew them when they were producing that film?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, we all went through the producing together on the same timetable going through. So Wow. Yeah. But there was a moment of like, are we going to do this together? Before everyone really kicked kicked it into second gear.
SPEAKER_00So what do you see happening in in that space in film? Okay. So you have groundswell, but w outside of that, like do you see others being attracted in? What do you see happening or what do you think's going to happen?
SPEAKER_02I think there's I think there's been a a heavy dosage reminder that it's it's not ever going to be or can't be done by one thing. You know, even just how you know 10 million plus people have watched Kiss the Ground, but that's still so few people. A lot of people have heard of it, but not a lot of people watch a documentary, quite honestly. Like it's hard to. I know a lot of people send me documentaries to watch. I'm like, oh geez, I have to find an hour and a half to watch that. And of course, I watched other stupid things on Netflix where I could have watched a cool page documentary.
SPEAKER_00I'm not saying I don't know. I don't know about the hours I spend watching Yellowstone.
SPEAKER_02Right. I'm just like, uh I could have, but somehow this is more entertaining. But the point being is, I think through our work, one of the big impacts we've had is not taking it on as our own, of like, we are the ones who do the media. It's like inspiring other people that together we can all jump into this more frequently and more consistently. Um, so I think there's so much room for like TV shows and constantly other people making documentaries. There's just way more. Like my friend Oliver, who, you know, he made Feeding Tomorrow kind of stuff. So there's there's just so much stuff that have has come through that I hope, upon hope, that we're encouraging more people to do it, to take these big steps or little steps of you know, the short form content, how many people be can become active contributors? Because I think we often count that more people have had the same priming we have, Matt. Like I'm sure when you had your aha moment, if you go back in your own life, you have things that connect you to that. But a lot of people who are hearing something, the first thing they see, like a kiss the ground or a little clip from kiss the ground or whatever, might be their first priming. That's not gonna get them over the hump to becoming an active, committed, involved part of this movement. So if we think in the priming scheme of like how many people need priming from different things, it does mean all of us raising our voices louder, using more media content to get it out there and not just saying, like, oh, those people over there are the ones who are gonna make it, we'll wait for their next one to come out or something. So I hope that people hear that and understand that they can, whether they're directly involved in ag when and ranching in some way or form, or they're they know someone who is like, there's a role for anyone to step up and get the word out, especially with all the tools that are disposal to do so. If you look at the even this the safe soil movement, how many people they encouraged to become contributors around the world in that. Uh and they they just flew right past us in terms of numbers and how many people were reached because they were encouraging more people to to participate.
SPEAKER_00Well, you know, unfortunately, what I've seen in my experience is thought that priming takes different forms, and one of the real common forms is health. And almost everybody has some incident or incidents close in family friends in health that that prepares them to help look for solutions and then ultimately contribute and embrace those solutions. So it's it's not great that that's where it's coming from, but it's real and that's where we're at. And that's the one thing that can point you if you want to get past the conventional band-aids and health and get to more lasting regenerative solutions that leads you to this space. One way or another, it leads you to this space.
SPEAKER_02That's why it's almost like the regenerative ag is like the the solution that keeps giving. I mean, I say it's it's kind of hilarious when you come as an environmentalist of how siloed so many solutions were, and then as you nitpick them, they get like thinner in terms of their actual offering. But like the fact that regenerative ag at its core and at its at its highest, or even in the in the middle of its best state, it is so profoundly good on the re on the side of human health, where you're like we have the climate carbon solution, we have the water solution, we have the biodiversity solution. And so when you look across the board, it's like it's it seems too good to be true. For folks listening out there, it's like I encourage you to sink your teeth into even just the the profiles. And we all guess this stuff 10 plus years ago. Like, yeah, it's probably, but now we have all of this evidence. This keeps reiterating, yup. When this is a healthy system, when these cows are eating a diversity of healthy grasses with all of these uh nutrients becoming available, it shows up in the meat. Of course it does. I mean, it's logic says it does, but now we have this substantial proof and constantly getting more and more of it. And we know all the players out there who are leading this, it's just incredible. But that's one thing that I think is allowing regenerative ag to win, is because at the core of it, it just makes so much sense. It's so logical when you break it down on any of these vantage points, water, human health, uh, biodiversity, whatever, it just makes sense where you're like, yeah. And then of course the evidence just completely backs us up every, every year. It's just more astounding what we have.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, more data, more data all the time, more evidence all the time.
SPEAKER_02Whatever someone's passion is, whether you're someone who really cares about nature and and and that, you can be like, yeah, I care about the the profile of the omega-3s and my my stake, and I want to start being more healthy with the other things I'm taking from where the farms are coming from. But then even like lifestyle choices and and what people remember, like something that always shocks me, Matt, is knowing the financial um repercussions of having a regenerative um uh grazing operation where you're having more biomass accumulated, less feed needed, less sickness in your in your herds. It's such a win-win on the economic side. But hearing for these massive ranches across the country that some of the biggest reasons that these really big landholders are moving into regenerative is they want their birds back. And that that to me is like another human, and it gives me chills every time I bring it up because it's like that's a human thing where it's like someone is doing this not for the financial gain. Yes, it's gonna be beneficial, but they have a deep wanting and a need for their birds to be back. They don't have bird songs anymore. And they grew up on these prairies or these places and they felt it and they hurt. They had the streams running, crystal clear water that have been dried up. So those things that bring us back to our childhoods or bring us back to our legacy of stewards on the land being possible. So many people have given up hope that it was even a glimmer of possibility. And then when they see it and they're like, again, they have the same skepticism I did. Like, if this is true, hell yeah, I'm gonna try this. And that's why it's so amazing the evidence we have now behind us of like you can get your birds back. I was just on Rome Ranch, uh, another, you know, slightly competitors with you guys through through their their business, but I'm sure we're all we're all friends. It's like Rome Ranch, I mean, they bought a property eight years ago. The listing of the creek wasn't on the listing because it had been dry for 45 years. Above them, all the miles of creek bone dry. Three years in, they get a creek running year round and it's running year round now for for eight uh for five years. They're the headwaters of a creek that everyone in the surrounding areas in central Texas thought was done forever. Like that creek is dead and gone, never flowed for 40 years. And that's the kind of stuff like fresh water seeping out of springs to feed a creek that runs year-round in under three years in central Texas that was going through drought at the time. So these are the kind of things which like, and bird populations galore, like people when they see it and they go there and they experience it. That's why I'm excited about making more short form content these days that's helping people get bite-sized things. You don't have to watch a whole documentary, but just be like birds. Holy crap, pardon my language, or water. Oh my God, I I can't believe this. I want people to not believe it and I want them to second guess like their assumptions about the future. But for me, as raising kids and thinking about the future, grandkids, it's like regenerative is the biggest shift in feeling like I could even have kids in the first place.
SPEAKER_00Well, um, knowing that. Like And you know what what it what one went through my mind as you were talking about that is I think for all of us, but I'll speak for myself, you have that aha moment, you it all comes together, you st you begin to learn of the benefits, and I'm 20 years later still learning of the benefits. Great. But in there's a part of my brain that's like, all right, I gotta poke holes in this because I gotta make sure that everything I'm saying is true and and sustainable. That this so you know you're t checking yourself all the time, like, I wanna make sure, I want to make sure. And then you just get it just compiles higher. You know, it's like, oh yes, this is true.
SPEAKER_02I think you're speaking of something. I just I haven't thought about this before, Matt, but this just popped in my head of like the humbleness of not just the rancher farmer community in general, but this community in Regenerative Bag, the humbleness of which we approach this right now compared to these jerks, let's call them, who are promoting carbon capture schemes that are just pointless big machines or sucking, like the confidence those people have to pitch for billions of dollars. Oh my, can you give us a little bit of that confidence? Because my God, we deserve it. Our solution is so much more prolific and touches everything. But we're we're more, you know, we're more humble and we're more like, uh, yeah, you know, we want to be really sure. Not as much as some scientists out there who are like dancing around any any decision ever, but yeah, that's something I want to feed into this community of like, we, this is it. This is the biggest solution. Because if you anyone watching, please do this today if you can. Go to Google Earth, pick anywhere on planet Earth, and nine times out of 10, you're gonna land in some form of ag country somewhere, and you're gonna see clear as day how much of the land is impacted by agriculture. 99% of it is degenerative, meaning the landscape function and holding capacity, water, et cetera, is plummeting, going down. Regenerative ag literally changes that trend. It regenerates landscape, it functions again, water cycles return, biomass returns, um, feeding, holding capacity of the land increases, carbon, et cetera, et cetera. But if we really get that that view, Matt, to see how much, because I don't think most people in the world can actually conceive of how much land is touched by agriculture. If we don't have agriculture that is regenerating, we're on a free fall across the world in terms of an area the size of England being degraded so much that it can no longer sustain or continue to be in production even with chemical additives. That's the size of land that's being lost to complete degradation every year, the size of England. So we have to have regenerative agriculture to solve not just climate, but like human, human ability to sustain themselves on planet Earth. Like climate refugees, we call them up. Like, no, they're mostly desertification refugees of people who've been in land that's been degraded too much. We can regenerate that land. I mean, even food aid and water aid, some of the most moving stories that I get from you know video clips of people sending me of like this group of people used to walk three or four miles every day to get water and were on this much 50% or 70% food aid and 70% water aid. Now they have water coming out of their springs because they were doing regenerative grazing. They have more cattle, more grass, more fresh water. And we can't food aid our way out of this if it's happening all around the globe. It's like local, local sovereignty, local water sovereignty, security, food security, like that is what changes if we're going to have future wars and or not. Like people being able to live in a great way because they have the abundance that nature can provide, without regeneration, you you can't get there. And humans have to be involved. You can't just another thing I I just want to throw out, because I I love when people get this difference, is you can't rewild the whole world, Matt, because some places like where I'm from in Ithaca, New York, you can rewild very fast because there's enough rainfall and there's enough humidity that the natural environment, even if it's heavily hurt or degraded or tilled, it will come back into a forest. But if you do the same thing in New Mexico or any of these drier regions that get less humidity and precipitation, it's in perpetual free fall into degeneration. We have to step in, use things like animals, cows, to change the conditions with their urine, their cow pies and their hoof prints and change how water is moving through that system to make the conditions that bring back the grass species that make them come back. Without humans helping to do that, we are in free fall in too many areas around the world. And letting them go back to nature isn't going to solve it because there's just naturally created conditions. We have to go in and manage. Humans have to be the brains. Beavers are the other ones. They can do it in some areas, but beavers can't go everywhere. So how are we utilizing humans and animals working together? But not a lot of animals are out there being like, let me reconstruct this ecosystem to function in five years. Not a lot of them can, unfortunately. Beavers are cool, but humans and beavers are pretty much the main ones that can do that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah, that's that's just a great point. It just I hope everyone lets that sink in, that we have to manage our way forward. Yes. It's not a good thing.
SPEAKER_02Conditions, conditions, conditions. We will not get those old grass species back and those other species back without creating the conditions. And if we do create the conditions, the pace they come back, the compounding mat, once it starts, the regenerative feedback loop of compounding so that those conditions uh for the first seeds come and then the next ones come, that's the stuff, the trophic cascades of hope that exist here. It's just that's the stuff that I want people to just say, we don't have to Johnny appleseed our way out of this, if meaning like we don't have to go around and spread all those old native seed banks. They are there waiting for the conditions for us to help them get back to, and then voila, magically in shorter periods of time than we ever thought possible, these huge grasslands come back. Like Dr. Alan Williams, he's one of my favorite practitioners in this, because he's always evolving and always moving on the cutting edge. But what he says is so important, it's what used to take us 15 to 20 years to accomplish, whether it's on biomass or or resilience or economics or uh feed for our cattle, we're now doing in three to four years. That's a testament to this movement of the generosity, the sharing of knowledge. But new practitioners who are getting into this, the the amount of information and knowledge they have at their fingertips with all of these amazing practitioners is so much greater than it was 15 or 20 years ago. So it's not going to take you 15 to 20 years to accomplish what Gabe or someone did. Like you can actually do this so much quicker and so much more rapidly.
SPEAKER_00I never really thought about that. That's true. When I go back 20 years and the searching around for how should I do this? What am I doing wrong? And I made a lot of mistakes and learned by those mistakes and then try to learn from others' mistakes and all that, and it kind of that, you know, and then that knowledge is built. But I've seen, I just want to say I'm so fortunate. I've seen and what went through my mind is this CRP land that was just nothing but a gravel pit when we started, this little microcosm of maybe 20 acres. We're like, all right, we're gonna fix this. I don't know exactly how, but we're gonna fix this. And then you could look down at your feet and it was gravel. You know, there was a plant every foot or so of some brome or something that was there, but that was it. And now I go there and it's a sea of native grasses that it took about five years, and then all of a sudden, one spring, they were there. And now they're going to seed, and you know, you just it's like, oh, there it is. And now we can get well, just this last week, we had an event out at the farm. We got caught in rain. I wish I would have taken advantage of the example that in the fields and pastures that we're grazing, we didn't have runoff with sheets of rain coming down, five inches in two days, just sheets of rain. And and not spread out, but like there's a pop-up shower. All right, there's two inches. There's an inch. There, you know, and I drove around afterwards and I looked, and there was no runoff. Like the grasses were not run down from the water running down the hills. I it just took it up. The only place we saw runoff was off the roofs onto the driveway right where we were at with a bunch of people. But when I drove around everywhere else, it was like, oh my gosh, look. I don't see any runoff anywhere.
SPEAKER_02It's it's the it's the magic of the soil sponge. And this is where again, I'm not trying to be disparaging to people out there, but most adults don't know how springs work, Matt. They don't know why a spring flows or not. They're just like, oh, climate change, mate, the spring stopped flowing. You're like, dude, the land doesn't work. It's like concrete. The water runs off, it carries even more topsoil with it, four tons per acre, uh, approximately. But if you make it a sponge, just uh as I was saying, I'm I'm uh I was just on Rome Ranch making a little video, and their infiltration rate can do 10 to 15 inches per hour. The average right around them is a half an inch per hour. So they could handle a five-inch mega downpour in an hour and capture all of it, or even 10 inch, their neighbors can handle a half an inch per hour. So everything else is running off carrying with it topsoil and causing more degradation. These are the kind of things that when we just blank things, just climate change is causing this. Be like, yes, climate or whatever we want to call too much CO on the two in the atmosphere is exasperating a problem. It's increasing heat indexes on its own. But if we talk about bare ground and degraded ground, is far more of a problem for water in our future, of how water moves, of how heat island is created by the intense temperatures of bare ground. These are things that can be regulated and change so dramatically. Like Rome Ranch was uh, I believe, 80% bare ground when they started. And most of their places now are at 90 plus percent covered. So if you think about root depth penetration, it's just like a no-brainer of like we can change exactly how you did, and we can have these completely dramatic results. Alejandro Carrillo, if everyone watches uh Common Ground, it's on Amazon. Alejandro Carrillo is in the freaking desert in Mexico, and we think it's a desert, but this is again like the reminder, it's not supposed to be a desert. We made that desert. And why we know that is because anywhere there's gullification, meaning where the where the the water has cut through the land so deeply, you can see like a big ravine. Yes, the top of that soil, about five inches deep, looks like complete dust. Right below that, though, why is there a massive mat of carbon-rich soil, black soil? Black, yeah. It's because grasses used to be pumping carbon out of their long roots into that. So it is a native grassland that's waiting for the conditions to come back. It is not a desert, unequivocally. I lived in California, so frustrated time and time again. People just being like, oh yeah, this is a desert. Be like, the Central Valley used to be a freaking wetland with so many birds and and Valley of Eden. Just I mean, I mean, speaking of which, I mean, the the Fertile Crescent wasn't a joke. It was actually fertile. They turned it to desert, you know? And so it's just people realizing most of the deserts, almost every desert, I argue, uh is human-made. We made them. We can we can regenerate them. And it's it's waiting for us to do it.
SPEAKER_00I thought we were going to talk a little bit about that microclimate that they've tracked down there around that ranch because of the holding of the land, they can't. Oh, for allojandros, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Well, I mean, that's the other thing is when the when the when the soil's healthy and it's able to hold and retain water. Remember, soil aggregates, most of them are holding 20 times their weight in water. They're they're micro mega sponges. But when a plant is able to uh access that water year-round because it's a a moist sponge all around the roots of that plant, that plant's able to evapotransport it, meaning put up water all the time and cool constantly. That's a if a plant is weeping and dying and looks like it's uh falling over or dry, that that plant is no longer putting moisture in the air through its photosynthetic process. Well, when you have plants putting up water vapor, they're cooling the temperature of that land. And they're also putting out in the water vapor, there's these tiny molecules that are allowing for water to form around. And so raindrops are in huge part formed by teeny little particles coming out of the plants, the aerosols there. So formation of cloud seeding basically coming from plants is is it's a recent conversation, but everything from big forest and the Amazon to massive plains with grasslands, they're seeding clouds. And not only that, so that's small water cycle helping there, but cooler land allows clouds that are coming in to actually rain on it. So if you have too much uh radiant heat, you're pumping off your bare soil. Clouds dissipate. And you watch countless videos of satellite images of clouds coming over Australia. As soon as they hit those desertified areas that are radiating mass amounts of heat, they dissipate and move away from those places. So bare ground perpetuates drought, as Alan Savory says. Um, so when we cover our ground, so many things are happening to revive our water cycles and where it rains, how it rains, how consistently, and how much moisture is available. So it seeds and it also uh allows for and attracts those rain clouds to actually precipitate there.
SPEAKER_00And along the lines of managing, so when we till up ground and we create basically a desert because it doesn't have plants on it for a big part of the year, you don't have green days, you know, 100 million acres of corn, for example, that most of it is still tilled without cover crops. You're creating a desert that's not doing that whole action that you just described. And so what do you get? You get boom or bust, you know, you it's either dry or all of a sudden really wet, but you don't have that constant regeneration of the of the water happening. And we and we create that through our management, our management.
SPEAKER_02People can do this at home, Matt, and I encourage all my advocates out there to share it with their family and friends. Today, if you go in after you watch your your Google Earth videos to see what what the reality is, go to your kitchen and get some flour, put a cup of flour on one plate, pat it down with your hand, put two slices of bread on the other plate, and then poke some holes in a paper cup and use it as your rainfall simulator, pour that water in, have it trickle out of the cup with the holes in it. Do it over both of those, and you're gonna watch the flour act like tilled degraded soil. The uh the water hits the top of the flour, a little bit of it gets wet, the rest of it just runs off, carrying with it all of that flour. That's that's showing your soil runoff. You do the same thing on the bread, it's infiltrating immediately, it's absorbing and retaining, and you feel how uh wet and gushy that that bread is. Now imagine that bread is covered with plants that are um cooling the surface and protecting that so it doesn't dry out quickly. But this is the favorite part of this experiment, uh Matt, is once you keep filling the bread with water on the bottom of the water, lo and behold, clear liquid comes out. What the heck is that? That's your springs coming back. That's that's literally a spring. And people, again, I've dealt with so many knowledgeable adults, no idea that that's how springs are formed, and they can show themselves with a piece of bread versus flower. But then you're gonna take your finger and rub that little thin layer of of wetness of your flower, rub it off the top of the flower, right underneath that, bone dry. How would you feel to be that that plant in that flower? You'd be like, I want to be the plant that's got my roots in the bread, because that flower is bone dry right under top. So you're back to a drought. The sun comes in.
SPEAKER_00Bread is awesome because it it uh imitates the aggregates. And it's really true. Again, I'll say when we test soil on land that we we are either leasing or buying to uh convert into a grassland, and we take some of that soil up, it is dust. I just want to tell everybody it is dust. It's a it's a it's dirt, and you could put water on there and it's gonna run off. And when it rains, that's exactly what happens. You get the ravines, you get the runoff, you get the topsoil on the edge of the field that gets stopped by whatever grass is left at the fence line that was allowed to live. And it it's just so real when you look at it, and then you look at what we just experienced. And we're in clay. Clay does not absorb water very well. It's a very compact dirt. We're building topsoil, black topsoil on top of that clay, but clay itself is really tough to regenerate. And and even with that clay, we're getting these big rain events that that the water is still with enough plants and just a little topsoil, you can still retain that water. You don't need three feet of rich collector to do it. It's amazing what nature can do with just a little bit. Um it's a it's a fun experiment. It's it is it is, and we're we're all living in the clean water, it's like Ray Archuletta's water sim or rain simulator. Yeah, yeah. And you see the clean water coming through uh the healthy soil, you're like, yep, there it is. And then you see the brown water that's coming through the degraded soil.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell We just always have to question our our assumptions of what is and why it is. Like, how often do people just see muddy water and just think like, oh, there was a rainstorm? Be like, that's that is so many billion tons of topsoil running off. Like nature did not invent muddy water. Sure, when there's a uh a landslide or something random, but like if there was muddy water as much as there is now, there would never have ever been soil anywhere because the rate of degradation of soil is so much greater now than soil formation. The planet Earth would never have had soil if that was nature's natural way of doing it. That's a good point. Period. Like we wouldn't have what's what is soil? We wouldn't know because that's not what's supposed to happen. So whenever you see muddy water, that is wrong. Something bad is happening.
SPEAKER_00That's right. That is whether it's a pond or a stream or whatever. Yeah, yes, something's nice. It should be a it's a red flag. All right. Well, you've been very generous with your time, Finan. I I just want you to leave us with some words of hope on what you see happening and even like what you've seen progress over the last 15 years and your involvement, like just kind of a bird's eye view of this is what I've seen happen, and where, you know, where are we going? Is this picking up steam or you know, what it is.
SPEAKER_02It is, and it is I I feel like some people are are kind of like, oh, I'm too late to the game. But like, no, if if I was you, if I got to get in now to help in any way I could, so much easier, so much more potentiality uh for businesses, for entrepreneurs, for people who are in government, for people who are in existing businesses that, you know, wanting to help their company shift their sourcing dramatically. Like, this is the time. My God, if you didn't have to, like we were just saying about being a rancher now, be like, you don't have to go through that 20-year figure it out by yourself things. There's there's ways to help. There's carbon markets, there's all these other things that can be like jumpstart your way into this. Um, so get involved. Number one, I want to give a shout out to uh, you mentioned earlier the Rhizosphere helping this project. Basically, you know, I've seen this movement for 15 years, and one of the biggest stumbling blocks is is the ease of market access for those who are already existing in the system, to those that are coming on who are trying to source or or have a ranch or farm that are trying to get their product out there that is regenerative. Um, This is something that at the rise of sphere.io, we're trying to help people who are in the processing, producing, uh, buying, or even service providers to be able to better connect. It's a matchmaking service that I mentioned, like Wall Street guys from uh who who help with AI development all over the place with banking, they're they're in there building um this AI system so that we can actually have the farm and ranch and food system get updated so it can actually be moving quicker, more connected, and be able to have very quick and easy access to each other and have it federated so it's not top-down owned by anybody. But this is like finally, let these people connect so they're not just you know hamstrung by a middle person who has to make all those phone calls for them. Like if you got two million pounds of potatoes, we want to find a buyer and you should be able to access a whole network of potato chip companies, whoever who are doing regenerative like that should be at your fingertips. So that's the risesphere I think.
SPEAKER_00And it's so needed. That is so needed because it's so exciting. We're all on these little islands and these little um pillars, you know, separate, you know, and and it comes from the case. There's very few people who know all of Yeah, yeah. No, no. Do you know someone that could is asked all the time? And I ask it all the time. Oh, we're looking for this. Do you know somebody? And it's very limiting. It's very limiting. It's limiting in the market, it's limiting in you.
SPEAKER_02I get calls like this and I'm like, I I don't know. I do know some, but I'm not gonna spend my weekend like finding all my contacts and sending them to you. I used to do that all the time, but my wife just started nipping me in the butt on that kind of stuff of like, you can't just volunteer and help everybody get all the things. But um so that's really cool. I also think in this space, Matt, the uh I've had kind of a flip in my my head around because there were some bad actors and some BS actors in the carbon market space who were kind of polluting the potential of it. But there are some people now who I'm I'm seeing and starting to see the potential of leveraging funding and to tools and training. Some of these carbon companies are actually helping ranchers, especially get into this and have additional income streams that are beneficial to them, but also helping them access training and tools like pasture map and these uh ranching systems that you can have with razor grazers, where you can go anywhere and do it. Like practical things that help really leverage that were sourced from the what do ranchers need people who actually know this stuff uh from the ground up. So there's some of the good stuff that's happening. There's still some folks who are kind of playing the greenwash, just get the funding stuff, but there are some good guys. Some encouraging ranchers out there to start looking into that to see because we need to go fast and we need to have less handicaps and less people saying, I don't have the money right now to do this, I wish I could. Uh this is the kind of support that can kind of have people leapfrog a bit. Oh, that for sure.
SPEAKER_00That additional revenue stream that's directly reflecting what your effectiveness, it's awesome. You know, like yeah. And it's substantial. You know, there's limited revenue streams. If we can stack a couple that reflect that contribution to the environment and to health in general, that would be awesome. And we're like that close, I think. We're that close.
SPEAKER_02It's it's burgeoning out there. So I encourage everyone out there, become a spokesperson for this. Even if you're brand new to this, the amount of ability you have to reshare content to get this conversation going in your neck of the woods and be that second person for your own community. Uh it's always something I encourage people to do, even myself sometimes, of like, where am I where am I making this accessible to people? Because this truly is Matt. There is not a solution out there that touches more real lives, period, around the world. If we talk about water security, biodiversity collapse being halted or reversed, um, not just carbon sequestration, but just livelihoods of people around the world. And I I care deeply about suffering, and I see so much of the suffering because we are limited in resources. But if you watch the abundance unfold through regeneration, it is a game changer. It is the biggest game changer and it solves these other problems. And we're we're sick. We we have all this cancer, we have all these other things, and we have an ability now, clearer than we ever have to have multiple solutions. Um, and the the only losers, quite frankly, are people who've been kind of the drug dealers uh of our time anyway, the corporates that have kind of just leveraged sick people, sick land. Um, they're the ones that lose unhealthy people and healthy land. And unfortunately, it's time for them to lose because they've been they've been taking advantage for way too long.
SPEAKER_00And just be aware that they don't want to lose. Wait, I need to get one more. Yeah, they do. They do.
SPEAKER_02And they're they're they're bending a little this direction so they don't totally lose when we when we turn the Titanic. But one more shout out is honestly, and this isn't just for you guys, but the fact that folks can go to the grocery store now and make a decision on their meat products that is so different. And for folks out there to realize now, if we've if we go back 15 years ago, the dream of having products available that are regenerative, meaning their impact is as profound as what Matt and I have just discussed all through today in terms of what you're eating, not just for your own health, the profile of things like meat, but to be able to go from consuming what we kind of call keif meat that is fed the keifo things that has the dramatic degradation from all the feed, but also from the feedlots themselves. Um, the profound switch that that is for your own health, but also your impact for your family, the consumption you have, to be able to go to the grocery store right now and pick up a pound of Thousand Hills meat or some of these other companies that are doing it. There's plenty of so massive. And people making that one switch, whether it's your your beef or your eggs, like these are things we eat almost three times a week or four times a week sometimes that really matter for your own health, but really, really, really matter for the long-term potential of us having water security, having our grasses and prairies come back. This is the the people that are doing it, the fact that the products are now available for consumers. This is a chance to act. No matter who you are, where you are, you can use your dollars. And it's not way more expensive. It is slightly more expensive sometimes, but it's it's so good for what your impact is, but also for your own health that the worth itness is if you don't even care about the environment, just do it for your own health. You're saving somewhere else if you're doing it for your own health on your long-term health costs or wherever you look at your vitamins, your additional oils you have to take, whatever it might be. Those things cost a lot, but like finding it in your beef, but also like water security, streams coming back, birds coming back, like biodiversity class being halted. Like this matters and it's happening because people supporting the food that is doing the work. So as a consumer, we all are, we all eat. Please take those considerations seriously and pass it on. Hey, friend, this is better for you. And holy crap, watch this video of what it's doing for the world. Go to Amazon tonight and watch Kiss the Ground or Common Ground, understanding that eating Thousand Hills beef is actually doing those things, having those outcomes. That's huge. That wasn't around when when I got in 15 years ago, Matt. And the fact that that's here for people, take advantage of it, be a part of it in that way, if that's the only thing you do.
SPEAKER_00Thank you, Finney. And yes, that's common ground or kiss the ground on Amazon Prime. You can you can watch it. It's uh it's an easy watch. It's so enlightening.
SPEAKER_02It's fun. We got celebrities like Woody Harrelson and Aquaman and Rosario Dawson. I mean, who doesn't want to see those people anyway? Yeah. Now they're in awesome documentaries.
SPEAKER_00Yep. And that education is so important, and we do need to share and share this with other people. Uh but we can't do it without a market. We cannot do it. We can only go so far with the current market. The market has to grow. If we're going to change that land, we need the market. And just one little statement. With every pound that's consumed of true regenerative beef, we can convert the size of a school bus to regenerative practices. That's with every single pound.
SPEAKER_02Wow. I love that. I love that.
SPEAKER_00Yep.
SPEAKER_02So that's I'm going to keep that one. That's great.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. It's a it's we did the calculation. Actually, the inspiration I have to give credit to Mickelob Ultra and their organic Mickelob Ultra. They had a Super Bowl ad that talked about how much land would be converted with a six pack. And I thought, well, I guess I can have a steak and a beer, and it'll do twice the good. Yes. I love that. That's great.
SPEAKER_02So man, it's been a it's been a pleasure. Uh always rooting for you guys. Love your work. Likewise. Likewise. That's awesome. So everyone out there, join the movement, get involved, share, share, share. Uh now's the time. Use your skills. The movement needs you. Find your path.
SPEAKER_00Thank you, Fine, for devoting your life to this. That's huge. I really appreciate it. Go get them.
SPEAKER_02You too. You too.