Episode 7 of Let’s Talk Claremont. We look at the Ohio Department of Education’s surprising use of AI to score student essays and share some local headlines. We then sit down with Sarah Ison of Flourish and Roam to talk about her farm, owning a small business, how to incorporate local food into your diet, and a lot more.
[00:00:11]
Unknown:
We've been living in sin so long. All Hello, and welcome to the seventh episode of Let's Talk Claremont. Really appreciate you listening, and we are going to start this as we always do with a little bit of news. The first thing I came across, was kind of by mistake, but the Ohio Department of Education, like most states, I'm sure, does standardized testing to just kind of assess the competency of of students. What's interesting though is they use AI to score these tests. Now for something like biology or chemistry or or math, that seems pretty straightforward because those answers are typically pretty black and white, but they also use it to score students' essays, their writing.
And they transitioned to the scoring method in 2018. Now the Ohio Department of Education doesn't call it AI, but it uses machine learning and statistical models to kind of replicate human scoring decisions. So, you know, arose by any other name. Right? The platform they use is called Cambium, and I hope I'm pronouncing Cambium right, but it's Cambium Assessment, and more than half of The US states actually use this platform. I don't know if they use it to score writing, but they use it in their scoring. I actually found this out, because as I was going through school board meetings, I I saw a video and it turns out that students at, middle school students at West Claremont, they they dug into this a little bit more because they looked at essays that this AI scored well, and they found out they didn't really like them. They didn't, read particularly well.
And that's because AI, when it's scoring these things, it's preferencing stuff like large vocabulary words and complex sentence structures, but it's not really accounting for any kind of style or personality in the writing, which, you know, in some contexts, you don't want a very stylized essay, but in others, it's it's it's necessary. And they did such a good job that they presented their findings in front of some national organizations. They presented to our our one of the representatives in Claremont, Adam Bird, which, you know, congratulations to them. It was very impressive work what they did.
I I bring this up because I find it concerning as somebody with kids who are probably going to be, taking these tests at some point in their in their lives. Like I said before, for kind of cut and dry subjects like math and and, you know, chemistry or biology or maybe history, I think, would probably be tough, but writing in particular. We don't write for robots. We write for people. And I I think it's a bad idea to teach students to write to make AI happy. That that doesn't seem like what we should be doing. Now I know that you'd probably need an army of people pay an army of people to actually assess these the writing of these students, but so I don't I don't know if there's a good fix for it. I just don't think this is a particularly good idea.
So moving on from that, Batavia Township, they're conducting a parks and events survey. So if you've got an opinion about the parks and the events that they've been putting on, you can go over to bataviatownship.org and take that survey. They also launched an Instagram account. They don't have a link to this on their website just yet, but they seem to be doing a pretty good job of posting zoning hearings and public notices and stuff like that. So if you're looking for a place to keep up to date with, Batavia Township notices, I would, go over there and follow them on Instagram. They have a Facebook page, but if you prefer Instagram, like I think a lot of people do, I would follow them over there.
Williamsburg, they're gonna start, some street paving in July, and it's gonna affect North Eighth Street, Eighth Street, Hudson Street, Mulberry Street, and Jasmine Avenue. In Milford, the Milford the Milford High School boys volleyball team, won the first Eastern Cincinnati Conference championship. So congratulations to them. So I I've in the last couple episodes, I've I've kind of forgotten to do this, but, I do want to talk about getting in touch with us. You know, we have a Facebook page. We have, an email info at let's talk clairemont dot com, because I I really want to engage the listeners of this program.
You know, I can do my best job of of googling around and and looking at, you know, council meetings and school board meetings and news articles and all of that stuff. But some of the best information I could possibly get is just boots on the ground. You know? Tell tell me tell us what is going on in your community. You know? Tell me what I'm doing bad. You know? I'm always happy to have some constructive criticism. Tell me what we should be talking about. Give me ideas for interviews. You know? That all of that stuff would be great and very helpful. So if you've got something to tell us or you just wanna, you know, keep up to date with what we're doing, please follow us on Facebook or get in touch with us at info@let'stalkclaremont.com.
For the interview today, we talked to Sarah Ison, one of the owners of Flourish and Roam down in Moscow. Her and her husband have a a really interesting or pretty great story. They both got their PhDs in animal science down in Texas, and then they decided to move back to Clermont County and start their farm, Flourish and Roam. And in the interview, we talked to Sarah about, you know, about, obviously, about her farm, talk a lot about raw milk, and in particular, a two a two milk, which, I think she said she's one of two dairies in the county that actually produces a two a two milk, so that's kind of a big deal. We also talked to her about owning a small business, regenerative farming, how to incorporate local healthy food into your diet, and a lot. This is actually one of our longest interviews.
It's not one it is the longest interview. So, and, you know, again, I always say this about pretty much everybody I've interviewed so far, but I mean it about everybody I who I've interviewed so far. It was a great conversation, and I think I enjoyed it, and I really hope you do too. So thanks again for listening, and, let's get to the interview. Alright. Well,
[00:07:07] Unknown:
I think we'll just get into it. Perfect. And and why don't you just tell everybody who you are and and and what you do? Awesome. My name is Sarah Ison. I own Flourish and Roam along with my husband, Josh. We're located in Moscow in the Southern part of Clermont County. We pasture raised beef, pork, lamb, chicken, and also have a raw a two a two dairy herd share. So I I know we were talking about the dairy a lot, but can you just go into what a two a two actually is and why that's a kind of a big deal? So a two a two is a specific type of protein in all dairy cattle. If you look back at history, it used to be a two a two. Mhmm. And through just selection of a genetic mutation, nothing that humans did, it would just occurred naturally and this a one protein popped up. Okay. Well, when this a one protein popped up, these cows automatically just caused increased milk production. And so when you look at the economic profile of it, they started selecting for this a one protein and higher milk production. And so it really kind of drowned out the a two a two gene from being present. And so we raise Guernseys is a we have all Guernseys, one Jersey cow, and you can look for this a two a two protein. And one thing that we really liked for it is a lot of people who'll say they are lactose intolerant.
They actually aren't lactose intolerant. They actually just can't handle the a one protein and I like to describe it as your intestinal lining is really has these round balls. Mhmm. I know you can't see if you're listening to it, but it's like a little c shape and, the a one the a two protein will be really smooth like a round, ball that'll sit real nicely, and it's just gonna fit right on the intestinal lining in your gut. Yeah. But a a one protein might have like a little jagged edge and it might have Okay. A triangle shape. And so once it hits that that intestinal line, it kinda can rough it up. And so that's kind of the digestive upset that some people get. So if you aren't able to consume milk or dairy products, I always recommend maybe try a two a two and see if your digest can actually handle that, a two protein. And so we're finding we have friends and neighbors who their kids can't have could never have dairy products, and now they can actually have a two a two dairy milk in our milk. So that's like one of our our biggest success stories that we can continue to, just drive us forward every day is hearing, those stories of how, you know, especially kids, or, older women, my mom, not not old, but as she's gone as she's When she get older, your Yeah. Your body changes and, yeah, you start noticing those changes. And, she's able to have the cream in her milk, from our a two a two cows and with her coffee in the morning. She thought that she would originally the last five or six years that she wasn't gonna have dairy products. That's awesome. So, yeah. That's the the fun part of it. There really aren't too many a two a two dairies around here, are there? There's not. There probably are a two well, I think in Clermont County, I think we're one of two. Yep. Gareon Clermont County now. There'll be a couple of people who have a couple of dairy cows off and on. Sure. But for the most part, you really have to do a genetic test. It's a simple blood test to see what they are and and select for it intentionally.
[00:10:11] Unknown:
And I I guess we probably should have backed up on this because you you do have a PhD in animal science as well as your husband. I do. Yes. We have. We have. So so you can get pretty nerdy about this if If we if we wanna go down that track. Oh, we definitely can. I I absolutely will. So how did how did you come to start this? I mean, you've got your doctorates and and then you decide to come out to we were Moscow Moscow, Ohio
[00:10:33] Unknown:
to start a farm. Yeah. So I grew up right here in Clermont County. My actually, my husband and I both did. I'm went to Felicity. My husband went to Batavia. Yeah. And so we're very familiar. My family just lives about a mile and a half, from the farm that we're sitting on right now. We went to undergraduate, graduate school in at Texas Tech, and this was never never in the game plan, never coming back. What was in the game plan? Definitely never farming. So What was the plan after getting PhDs? Well, we we gave ourselves six months. We had our daughter when we were living in Texas, and we were like, you know what? We really kinda wanna have our daughter around family, her grandparents. Our grandparents were both important to my husband and I. And so we gave ourselves six months to move back to Clermont County and find a job. Yep. We could, you know, support us. I was offered a a post doctorate position to work remotely on epidemiological, research Sure. That I could do remotely. So I had a job coming back. So is your is your specialty epidemiology? It is. Both yeah. Yeah. Technically, both of us Okay. Are epidemiology. So, like, animal epidemiology. Animal health. We looked a lot of zoonotic diseases. So diseases that can pass between animals and people back and forth is really where we focused on. Well,
[00:11:43] Unknown:
I'd feel remiss if I didn't ask you about bird flu because there was a whole bunch of bird flu stories, and I think people getting scared about bird flu. Do you have a take on that? Or Yeah. The If you don't wanna talk about it, that's why. Like, I don't wanna No. No. The AVNI I know there's hot button issues. I tried I wanna, like You know job this fall. That's one reason that kinda makes us a little unique to be doing what we're doing. Right? Like, raising animals in a way that's different than maybe a commercial Mhmm. Facility, different than anything we worked in, from a research point. About it too is before we started recording, especially with raw milk, I mean, you need to be very, very, very clean. So I mean Yeah. Being diligent in your cleanliness, handling us,
[00:12:23] Unknown:
your animal health, watching your animals, knowing how to to handle everything, everything with avian influenza. It's, yeah, that's definitely a rabbit hole we could could go down. Listen. If you don't want to talk No. I I think that Frankly, I I mean,
[00:12:37] Unknown:
because I've I've heard in the news. I've heard people say like, oh, no. Raw milk and bird flu. Raw milk and bird flu. And for the life of me, I'm not an epidemiologist.
[00:12:45] Unknown:
I'm just a a guy, but I have never heard of anybody getting the flu from drinking milk. So there's there's different strains of flu and different strains of influenza. Same thing that they push to have your influenza vaccine every year, it's it's different. So with the avian influenza, it at this point, and my husband, I have the same kind of take on it. It's it's endemic. It's worldwide. It's not gonna go away. Right? Certainly. So, if we're not seeing people get sick from it, if we're not seeing people dying from it, yes, I think we should monitor it and see what we can do from an animal health standpoint.
They are seeing large they were seeing large flocks of chickens, dying from it. But from an economical standpoint as well, I don't think that it's, the best practice to go in and just kill a a million bird flock to try to control it, when it's spread it's already in the wild bird population. It's spread by birds flying over your pasture and pooping or pooping in the dairy barn. So that's kind of where we're our take is on it. Like, at this point, like, it it it's endemic. It's not going to go away. There are I know that there's changes, and they've been announced, like, from the state level even here, the the lax the the regulations on what that looks like. But there's you'll see across the state even now, there's county fairs that are not allowing poultry at their county fair. It's still a possibility even here in Clermont County that the the four h members or FFA members have their birds that they're raising now for the county fair at the July.
In the July or the July, they could come down and say you're not allowed to have those birds at the fair. So it it's still a But they're not coming in and telling you gotta kill all your birds. No. They're not gonna tell you you can go in and and kill. There are certain regulations in place that, depending on the flock size that you have. We don't have enough birds on our property that they're not routinely testing for it. Okay. But there's been a lot a big pushback from state poultry organizations to not allow those mass, extaminations of of those flocks. So I think that's probably the big push. Well, no. Also, in in
[00:14:51] Unknown:
correct me if I'm wrong because, again, you're obviously the expert. But it just seems like it would be a better idea
[00:14:59] Unknown:
to let the birds get bird flu and the ones that live well. Those are the ones that probably are gonna be okay the next time bird flu comes around. Right. But if you go through and kill all the birds, even the ones that And be able to create that immunity. Exactly. And it it that's kind of our take on it too with I'll use broiler chickens. Mhmm. And broiler chickens and turkeys, you can kinda group together. For the most part, they have a really short lifespan in terms of when you're processing, a harvest ready bird compared to a lane bird flock that might be, you know, two years. And so they could be able to potentially pass it on Yeah. To another the next generation of birds. And so that's where a lot of that was coming from control to make sure that didn't happen as well. But I agree. I think that you're building up kinda that strong immunity against, what's being passed on. And we look at it now since we're actually on more from the boots from the ground side versus the academia or the research side of it is how do we mend those two sides from a research and and a government maybe legislation side of it to the actual on farm practicality of what this actually looks like. So if you heard about bird flu or avian influenza in your milk, well, they're looking from genetically at a small segment of DNA Right. Through a molecular detection method that is not PCR?
There's PCR as one, yeah, way to do it. So you're looking for If I'm wrong, well, PCR is just an amplification process. Correct. And so it doesn't mean it's actually,
[00:16:29] Unknown:
living. Right. Or So so even if there's maybe it's not a live viral fragment. It could Well, it doesn't tell you about the load either, does it? It just Yeah. You just set your PCR up so that
[00:16:40] Unknown:
it'll replicate whatever you're looking for. Yeah. There's there are different ways to look to see what the initial replication based on the number of cycles that you get a detectable level Okay. That is there. But for the most part, it's still not gonna tell you what that is. But if it's not a live viral product protocol that's in there, and then again, like you mentioned, if you have a good gut health microbiome, the virus that could potentially be in there is probably not. Right. I've never got a flu from drinking. Yeah. It's a different you're not gonna get the kind of flu like you would normally associate between influenza between people. And especially in our dairy cows, we are gonna start noticing if they do get sick, we're we're gonna start noticing probably that something's wrong before you as a person is gonna drink our milk. You're gonna notice that their milk production is going down. We're gonna notice that maybe they're not holding weight or gaining weight, the way that they should be. Right. And that's gonna say red fun to us. Let's let's see what else was going on with this animal before it goes into Right. Human edible milk products.
[00:17:38] Unknown:
So they're my wife and I drink raw milk, and and we love it. But like we talked about a little bit before, I was incredibly skeptical about it. Can you just talk about the safety of raw milk and how it's really at least in my mind, it doesn't seem to be anything to be really scared of. It it it's more delicious than normal milk. So It is pretty delicious. And we mentioned our kids definitely can notice and throw a fit if they don't have their Absolutely. Their full milk,
[00:18:02] Unknown:
available to them. And for us, I I'm only gonna speak to our raw milks in general because that's what I'm experienced with. And when we started looking at, we came from a real scientific background. Walnut was huge taboo. Everything we believed in, we wrote dissertations on pathogenic bacteria that come from dairy kettles, and and and so it was really important for us to, like, have a full grasp of what this system looked like. And as we started on our own health journey of having our pasteurized meats and really looking at, like, how else can we heal here up heal our gut Mhmm. And making sure that we're supplying our body with the most bio avail viable bioavailable nutrients possible, raw milk kind of just seemed like the next step for our family.
And, we knew in order for it to we had our youngest son would have been like just over two at the time, and I'm not gonna be fully as a mom. I'm I'm still gonna be skeptical and and and making sure that I'm keeping my kids safe at all costs. And if it was gonna be that we knew that in order to have the sanitary practices that we wanted to from how our cows are milked, how we handle each of our teeth, how we clean our our cows before milking, how we handle our equipment. We had to do it ourselves. So that was like putting our our full trust in into the whole system because we know how complicated it is. Yep. Our milk is not the cheapest on the market, but we are very diligent in replacing our hoses because I think a lot of the the other ways that you can get sick from raw milk is actually not from the dairy cow and it's not from the bacteria in the soil.
It's actually from bacteria that can grow in your milking equipment If it's not cleaned and sterilized properly, you're not Imagine it's like lines in a bar. Exactly. Yeah. So you're cleaning them constantly every single day, and you're replacing your lines, you know, on a a very routine schedule. And that comes at an extra cost along with that. And so that was our biggest thing if we're gonna make sure that we're getting all those bioavailable nutrients that we're having full control of the system,
[00:20:01] Unknown:
and then showing that same confidence that we can show for our our consumers and our customers as well. And I think if people wanted to get into raw milk because, like I said, we use AeroCrest up in, And Goshen. And Goshen. We went there and met them. Like, we we you can go and look at their cows. You can go and look at what they do.
[00:20:19] Unknown:
So I guess I I would say if anybody's into raw milk, make sure you do that. Like, know who's making your milk. They'll just, like, get a herd share somewhere and I think that's a big thing. If if somebody doesn't want you on their farm, we're we're pretty transparent with having people out and we want them to see. We want their kids to see where milk comes from. We want them to see where their meat comes from and their eggs and like it it that's kind of part of it and why we want customers to come here to pick their milk up is because having that relationship like I'm kind of I know I'm I'll say it. I am anti let's make this legal because I think there I think there are going to be a lot of red tape and a lot of Yeah. Things that go along with doing The system seems to be working. I mean, you can go and get a herd chair and Yeah. Absolutely. Or you can get And pet milk. Well, the the pet milk thing, I don't know if you know, but, last week, the ODA announced that you actually have to put a FDA approved food dye in your pet milk now. I did not know that. Yeah. So it has to be a gray to a black FDA. Oh, really? You have to they have to sell. Into into do No kidding. Yeah. I did not know that. When was this? Last week. So it's it's really new. That is new. Yeah. Because I know we've we drink tons of milk, so Katie picked up some pet milk somewhere that we absolutely gave to our pets. Yes. Yeah. So making sure that for us, it's that because of it's a very it's a it's a delicate product. Yeah. We wanna make sure people aren't, where I see a lot of issues is you can go to any big grocery store and walk by and you see somebody stocking the shelves. Well, how much time is that product setting out in the open air environment from moving from one truck from the farm and then it goes to the tank facility and it's all chilled, but then it gets unloaded at and out of a a big shipping truck at the grocery store, and then it sits outside. How how long is it before it actually gets chilled back? And so there's gonna be a lot of temperature abuse. And for us, that's why we're like, this can't be a widely available product. Like, you can't put this through the mass grocery system that's currently there. It's it's not so much it's not from the farm. That's not where the issue is gonna come from. It's not actually gonna come from the bottle or it's gonna come from that that last final mile, as I say.
And sitting on a truck for five hours. Yeah. But then it's gonna get unloaded from the truck at the I'm not gonna name large grocery stores, but it's gonna sit literally on their floor outside Yeah. Before it gets chilled again. And so you can't have an unpasteurized product and let it sit out Right. For because it just turns into a petri dish. I mean, that's Eventually, I mean, it's it's a our milk is really clean. Like, we have a hard time making yogurt out of it. I do add Oh, really? Active cultures into it, and it'll it'll take a little while, for it to really turn into a really thick what we are used to as Americans as a thick yogurt.
So it it takes a while because the bacteria load is so low. Like, it's almost it's undetectable when we do our our daily, milk test here at the farm and our our weekly larger testing, and so making sure that we're adding that back in. But I think there's a lot more use a lot more opportunities for mishandling of the product, as it goes into a larger commerce system.
[00:23:16] Unknown:
Well, you're also not just a dairy because you were sitting next to a freezer full of delicious looking meat. One of the things that Katie and I have been having trouble finding are hog shares. Can you talk about the hogs that you have? And because the the pork chops in there look crazy. They look delicious. Yeah. We we we raise pastured beef Mhmm. Pork, lamb, and chicken.
[00:23:41] Unknown:
The hogs that we raise are % Berkshire, and they're meat quality tested Berkshire, which means that the the breeding that they've done for them, they'll take a pork chop, and they will put it through a panel testing to say what's the juiciness, what's the tenderness, what's the flavor profile of this. We also wanted an animal that was maybe a little bit slower growing. They can handle being out on pasture. All of our sows will farrow out on pasture. Okay.
[00:24:04] Unknown:
Do they tear up the fields?
[00:24:06] Unknown:
For the most part, you have to manage it pretty well, but they have their area. As long as you give them a good enough space to kinda roam and you've given them good diversity of soil. So we've been putting them in an area maybe that had a little bit of historically, had been crop farmed before. Let them root that up and then you come back and in the spring you put down some seed, let that grow and so that there's always that forage coverage kind of coming back on. And, we never wanted to farrow pigs. It's a lot of work especially pasture farrowing them. We had always heard and they can be having small children, having sows in the boar around can be dangerous. Yeah. But we People don't realize pigs are They they can be dangerous. Yeah. They're Yeah. They can be dangerous. Get hand fed every day, and my husband Josh hand feeds them every day. So they're they're pretty friendly. I mean, you never Is it hard when they have to go to the abattoir?
The the sows that you eventually have to call. Yes. I mean, you you get your favorites Yeah. Yeah. Every now and then. You know, they always say don't name them and, you know, you gotta look at them kind of in personally, but I feel like that's Right. Near impossible for anybody. My husband and I, we both grew up in four h and raising animals since we were nine and going through that. Like, I remember my first, beef, my first feeder calf that I I showed, and I cried at the fair. Yeah. My dad bought it back, and then it it jumped the fence and chased my grandma across the yard through a barn. And at that day, I called my neighbor. I said, come get this gal. And that was for me that was like, okay. They as much love as you put into, they're still an animal at the end of the day, and there's a purpose that God gave us, to have them to nourish our families.
And, yeah, not every day is easy on us. Yeah. You do build that, especially having our kids. I sometimes worry that raising our kids around it all the time, everybody's so fortunate and you have to raise your kids this way. But as a mom, I sometimes look at us like, am I? Like, I don't wanna desensitize them as well, but they also knew that death is a part of life. Yeah. And, That's just a tough balance for any parent. It is. You know, it's But I it's You wanna keep your kids Yeah. You wanna protect so innocent. But And and but they know. I mean, it's it's great. My three year old, he was like, climb underneath the dairy cow. I wanna check her teats out. It's like but they that he knows that's where his milk comes from. And so they know, like, how we can best treat our animals with what we're doing, and that gets them even more respect to understand. Like, our kids will eat meat before they eat anything else because they know they worked for that. They're not gonna waste it. It's not gonna get thrown in the garbage can. They're gonna eat that whole Yeah. That whole hamburger at the end of the night, because they put in just as much time and and work. Is that one of yours? He is.
[00:26:37] Unknown:
He's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he our daughter was born in Texas, but we moved home when she was, like, five months old. So she didn't she knows she was born in Texas. She's a a Texan at heart. She knows that. At heart. But, yeah. She's I've worked in Texas for about a year or two. A little less than that. I was, oil rigs. Okay. Because I I studied geology as an undergraduate, and then I went on to study creative writing. And there's not a whole lot of jobs for poets out there. So I was like, I'll go I'll go to the oil field because they pay money. The other thing is yeah. But I love Texas. If we did too. It was If it wasn't for the heat. Like, I can't We moved out there. The summer we moved out there was,
[00:27:23] Unknown:
the year of the haboob that came through, like, the big wall. Oh, it's like the you know, on on Aladdin, the big wall of, sand. Oh, yeah. Yeah. We that was they're like, there's dust storms and sandstorms out here. Well, that was our first sandstorm. I was like, there's no way people inhabit this place because it was like this 50 foot wall of sand. They're like, no. This is like something that happens every, like, two hundred years. So that was a a new experience. I'm like, but we we enjoyed it. When we were there, it was the best thing for us in school, and we knew that, like I said before, Texas, it was Texas Tech. It was Texas Tech. So, I mean, we were From now, about half mile from, you know, hundred thousand head feedlots Yeah. And dairies, and we traveled all around North Texas and New Mexico, Colorado, getting to experience that. So we've seen large agriculture and what those systems look like in large abattoirs, and it gives us like a whole picture of how they function at work. And so that's where I feel like makes us experts to speak on it as well. Oh, yeah. Because we've seen it. There's a lot of things like, you know, ask, other people like what their thoughts are, but they've never seen it. And I'm like, oh, you can drive down the road and you can see them and you can experience them. And I think that's truly understanding the whole system behind it, and I'm not saying they're wrong. They're just different. And and If you're gonna feed 300,000,000 people,
[00:28:39] Unknown:
like, not everybody can eat farm
[00:28:43] Unknown:
raised, you know, grass fed beef. If you can, that's great. Right. But, you know, if if we're gonna feed the world Until more people wanna be farmers. Right. And, again, that's where I that's where I think the the nuts and bolts kinda come together and what what that scale looks like, because if you wanna get it starts out we were never full time farmers. We are now, but, like, when we moved back from Texas, my husband ended up getting a job working in a corporate agriculture biotech company with aquaculture and trade primarily and in Southeast Asia and Vietnam, Indonesia, Mexico, and, traveled the world on that part of it. And, it wasn't until we grew this part of the business that he was able to come in here full time and really being able to find that balance. But you have to work that five to nine and then that Oh, yeah. That that nine to five kinda thing, you know, so until more people are I think one of my wife's dreams is a dairy cow.
I'm sure Josh would love the the help and to see what that kinda looks like. Oh, no. No. No. Dude, do not help my wife get a dairy cow because I'll be Josh was always anti dairy for the like, we've had this business for eight years and since day one, people are like, when are you getting into dairy? And we're like, absolutely not. We'll never have dairy cows. And finally, last year, I was like, hey. I found this dairy cow. It's a good deal.
[00:29:54] Unknown:
It's a good deal. I wasn't. She's super sweet. And he was like, oh, fine. And then but that was like, we got her in April. Was it like a dog? He was very he was like, no. We're not getting a dog. And then you get the dairy cow. It's like, oh, I gotta go feed Bessie. And then by, like, he's like, well, then she needs a friend. We can't just have one right now. And so we found another dairy cow. And then by November,
[00:30:14] Unknown:
we had three, four, five, six, seven, nine, and then we have five calves right now. So Yeah. The rest of them are on him. And he's like, I need to buy these. I came out of West Coast. Are you breeding your calves too? Or your cow your dairy cow? Yeah. So the dairy cow's I imagine you'd want to with a two h. Yeah. Yeah. So you have to in order to get milk, you have to have a Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Got it. And, so we use artificial insemination Mhmm. To breed them so we don't have to have a bull here. Because those are those can be really dangerous. They can be dangerous. Unpredictable in terms of Yeah. And we don't really need them. We don't have enough dairy cows to justify having a bull. They have to, like, then keep separate, from everybody else, but AI is kinda great technology you can use,
[00:30:52] Unknown:
in the agonist Artificial insemination. Intelligence.
[00:30:55] Unknown:
Not the artificial. The the artificial You don't have robots out there. Type of AI that was actually here. And, so we have another local farmer who, breeds a lot of beef cattle, and he'll come over and and help
[00:31:06] Unknown:
us get that done. So you've got pork, and, obviously, you have beef. Yeah. What kind of,
[00:31:12] Unknown:
beef cattle do you have? And you How do you raise them? Yeah. They're out a % on pasture. Okay. Through regenerative farming, so we use a lot of rotation. Ask you about regenerative because that seems to be a a buzzword. It is kind of a buzzword, and I think we were always against using it because a lot of people are like, what is this? What is this? What is this? And so it's becoming a little bit more common, but really regenerative farming is working on healing the land. So our first and foremost goal is to look at the soil. And my husband will say we're grass farmers before we're cattle farmers. Right. And so really focusing on making sure that we have really good soil Mhmm. That we have a lot of microorganisms
[00:31:49] Unknown:
on our soil, a lot of worms in our soil. And I don't think a lot of people realize soil when you say soil, like, it's not dirt. Right. I mean, it's life. Yeah. It's it's it has to be a lot. Things in there. Yeah. That are contributing to the health of plants and animals and everything. Yeah. So it's not just like a bunch of dirt. Microbiome as well. And what's also interesting, most people still don't think about is
[00:32:08] Unknown:
the reason that cows grow, it's not actually what they eat. It's their gut microbiome. It is the microbiota and the bugs in their stomach Okay. And actually that actually makes them grow. That's what actually produces the protein and it breaks it down for their bodies to grow. Okay. So it's just as important for that gut microbiome in the cows to be super healthy and diverse as it is with their With their nuts. Yeah. And what they're consuming. Yeah. Yeah. So regardless of what they're eating, if their gut microbiome is not in check and doesn't have a lot of diversity, they're not gonna grow big and strong either. And so having a really good diverse soil that can grow a lot of diverse forages and grasses and native grasses, then that's what actually makes your cows.
[00:32:50] Unknown:
So what what is it, what are the nuts and bolts of the regenerative farming look like? I mean, so I think you kinda mentioned a little bit with the pigs. If it's been like a monoculture field, you'll let the pigs out there and they'll root it up and Right. What they do. So can you kinda tell me how the whole thing
[00:33:06] Unknown:
works together? Yeah. So the farm that we're sitting on, my parents have owned for the last twenty five years. The last eight years, Josh How many acres do you have? It's a 12 here. So you have a this is a big farm.
[00:33:17] Unknown:
Yes. It It was a thousands of acres. Right. Right. Yeah. In terms of two people just doing it. To do it.
[00:33:24] Unknown:
When we come from West Texas, like, we have friends and ranches out west, and we're like, oh, we tell them they're like, how much Thousands of acres, half of the state. You know, hectares. Yeah. And so half of the farm my dad had leased out for crop farming. They were never full time farmers. They had cow calf herds, so they would have the cows and the baby calves. They would wean them, and then in spring, they'd sell them at the stock market or the stockyards. The stockyards. Kind of the the traditional system that's set up. When Josh and I moved home from Texas, I told my dad, I was like, hey. I think I wanna sell some cows. Like, I need some income. We're moving home. How can I do this? The rest of my family has worked in sales and stuff. I never want to be in sales, is what I do for a living. During the club. Now so I was Oh, you're selling something you love, which is a lot of different. And it it is different than anything the rest of my family did in sales, and that was like That's some weird sales jobs, and I hate it. Big part of it is, like, you have to really enjoy what you're doing. They enjoyed what they're sale selling. I finally found something that I was passionate about and so for us it's making sure that, like what is regenerative grazing, having healthy soil. So we had farms that were part of the fields that were crop farmed and so monocultural they didn't have any type of cover crops put on them. So after the crops came off in the fall, they didn't put seed back on them to have constantly green growth in there. So we don't soil immersion that we're dealing with compaction, and so really what we've been working on the last eight years is to get a good diversity of so of grasses, different kind of legumes that are nitrogen fixers that can pull in the bacteria And beans. From the soil. Yeah. Yeah. Beans like soybeans are a nitrogen fixer, so we use instead clover and salvia, as those nitrogen fixing bacteria in the soil.
And then also killing the seed bed that are weeds Yeah. That are constantly there. And so my husband will say that I need to stop focusing on the weeds, and I'm I'm I'm getting away from that now and, making sure we're focusing more on the grasses that we do wanna want to grow in the diversity. So it's been really neat. We're actually part of a five year, ecological outcome verification study where they came and and looked at the different diversity of soil that we have and looking at the different forages that are here, if there's any native plants that are here, and then based on our practices, so us rotating our cows every day, putting them to new areas, and we integrate our cows and our sheep and rotate them in different areas based on the needs of that ground. Okay. So we'll go. And do you do a lot of soil testing, I imagine, or or not? Or do you just kinda We probably we don't really do. We've done some. We took some samples last year and set them off, but we don't we'd rather look at, you can get some information from standard soil tests, but there's a lot of things it doesn't give you because those soil tests are still, they are built for telling you what you should put on your soil to raise a crop. Yeah. So there's there's a lot of limitations to it. That makes sense. You can tell probably just not as much but just different by putting a shovel in the ground and pulling it up, but really also looking at the diversity of your plant species and seeing how those are changing. And so that's part of this ecological study is saying okay if we take this 10 by 10 area how many plant species are here? There might be five or six where our goal is at the end of five years can that plant diversity be ten, fifteen species without us actually coming in and planting seeds Right. And introducing it. So we're already seeing native plants come up that we've never planted. Yeah. But we actually have native seeds who have been dormant for fifty, sixty, seventy years. He's never had a chance. He never had a chance come back up. So that's really cool to see. What kind of plants?
A whole bunch of different native grasses. I can't tell you the genus. Oh, that don't know. Parts of it. But we That'd be lost on me anyway. So That that's, I don't know what all those. That's why we have some experts come in that do all that. But we'll just use a really good diversity of, like, we planted we first started a, kind of our own little test plots here to see what we can integrate. We planted, because it had only been bare from those crop farms. We planned a good stand of of alfalfa and timothy and orchard grass and clovers and, some rye grass, and then we did our own little cover crop with oats as a nurse crop to cover. Do you, do you sell the the grains, or do you just use it for feed? No. No. That would just be the grain that we planted for the cows to eat in the ground. So it'll it'll grow up as grass Yeah. Yeah. And then the cows will come along and graze it. So I see. I see. So you're not harvesting it. No. We don't we don't harvest any of that at all. You you do rye?
So the rye was just in the pasture for the the cows to to eat directly out of it. So we weren't actually harvesting it. We're actually letting the cows Yeah. Eat it before ever seeds out or we'll let it seed out, in some areas because we want that seed to go back down and put more seed in the ground as well. So just kind of being strategic in areas, that we want to see. We've never raised and fed our cows the same way every year because we're constantly adding new forages, new crops, or trying something different. And I think that's the other part of regenerative farming is always being open to trying new things. We started with doing bale bale grazing. You might hear that term where you'll put a bale of hay out in the wintertime.
Let the cows come to that and move that. And then we started two years ago, we got a hay bale unroller. And so during the wintertime, we can take hay out to them, unroll it on the ground. Okay. It does create a little bit of waste from the hay, but it allows those cows to go out and naturally fertilize, lay down manure, across pastures, and then the hay seed that's in there and the hay will go back down in the soil, creates a nice organic material, and then you'll see that hay seed coming back up in areas as well. So that's pretty cool. Well, that's what it's designed to do. Right? Like, the cows eat it. They fertilize things, and the seeds are in the fertilizer, and then they come. Right back up. Yeah. So that's what's kinda neat about it. And then with our our chickens, we do raise pasture chickens, which is not for the faint of heart.
[00:38:55] Unknown:
Lot of work. My wife eats chicken. She she raised chicken. She grew up in Owens Hill. Okay. And she raised chickens and I was like, you know, she'll say, why don't we get a dairy cow? Why don't we start with small with chicken? She's like, no, I hate chicken. Well, there's the layer chickens and the broiler meat chicken Yeah. As well. So, yeah, the the layer chickens are a little bit Order layer chicken. The layer chicken is the ones that have the Oh, layers. Layers. Layers like egg layers. Egg layers. Yeah. I thought you meant, like, layers in a cake. I was like, oh, no. Complicated chickens. Yeah.
Yeah. So you you mentioned a while ago, about your health journey. Can you talk more about that? Because I think I think there's a lot of people that are starting to pay more and more attention to what they're eating. So it I'd just be interesting to hear how you kinda went down that road. Yeah. And I I it's definitely something I'm still on. I think we're still on and my husband and I and our our kids and our family. And,
[00:39:46] Unknown:
so really looking back to, like, when we're kids and having conversations with my mom of the food products that we were fed. I I grew up in the early late eighties, early nineties. Anybody? And so I might not be old to a lot of people, and then I have some high schools to work with. I'm like, oh, you're old. I'm like, cool. That they're like, your college My daughter called me old man the other day, and I thought, oh, no. It's happened. I gave a pair of sweatpants that from my college, like, equestrian team to a friend's high schooler, and she's like, yeah. I'm wearing these. They're vintage. I was like, excuse me. Vintage. Vintage. So I was like, not not that old. But when you looked at, like, what we were we grew up in the nineties, and it was like, oh, pop tarts every morning before school. Yeah. And, like, I mean, we never had pop. Like, that was anything, but, like, there was just, like, all these, like, super processed, really easy, convenient, like, mini muffin and stuff. Yeah. And my mom's like she's like, I just I didn't know Yeah. That what that was. And so as I started getting a little older and Man, you're also a parent. Like, Katie and I try our best to feed our children good food, but, I mean sometimes we're just busy. Right. We are yeah. You're super busy as a parent and so it's like how do you find that balance between like working multiple jobs and like always on the go and and balancing that out. And so, I really started noticing when I was pregnant with my second son or with my first son, my second kid, that, I should probably back up. My daughter, we were I had got pregnant with her at the end of my PhD. I spent my first trimester with her when I lived in France. Well, you did you have to defend your thesis? I I had just had her, so I wrote my dissertation.
[00:41:14] Unknown:
So you didn't have to defend your thesis, like, three months pregnant or, nine months pregnant or something? No. I pretty much did. I wrote my dissertation. I she was born the December,
[00:41:23] Unknown:
and I defended the following April. Oh, man. So she was, like, four months. So That was postpartum. So you had to go through your whole Yeah. Oh, man. The whole part of it. That's that had to have been stressful. Had a good PhD advisor who pushed me to get, like, all my articles published Yeah. Yeah. Before doing that. So everything was, like, already peer reviewed, and they just had to sign off that I That's good. Had not mess it up at that point. That's good. But, so I had being pregnant my first trimester in France, like, their food system was way different. Mhmm. We would go So just I don't mean to interrupt you. Is it actually true that the grains in Europe are different than the grains we have here? I hear mixed things. It's like, well, that's why you can go to Italy and eat pasta at night. They're different. The entire system is just built differently. Okay. So you go into the grocery store, you go into the fresh markets. When I say fresh markets, like, we had markets that we would go to on Sunday. They came into town. They came either from the farmers came into town from, like, the South Of France or from, Italy up through to Paris. We were in Paris. And once a week or twice a week, you go down to a fresh market and every brought all their fresh fruits, all their fresh vegetables. And when I say It's a cultural thing to just shop daily. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Like, you have, like, not a lot of fridge space or freezer space. Right. So it's not like in America where you'll go on Saturday and get your food. Or going to Costco and you're not doing your Costco haul. You don't like every three months or something. You're you're truly stocking up and doing. But really it's it's a cultural things in terms of your cooking. Like they'll cook as a family for have a big lunch or they'll cook as a family and have a big dinner and make those. You're not going out and having easy quick convenience things. I mean there are some things that are there that are quick and easy but for the most part you're having your even there when I say that the fruit and vegetables are coming from Italy into Paris, well when you look at the size wise that we're see you're here outside of Cincinnati, that would be the same as our vegetables coming from, like, the Middle Of Kentucky, maybe Southern Kentucky. Right. Tennessee, like, it's not that far four or five hours versus now here in The United States. In, like, the South Of France and Italy. I mean, you can grow citrus. A huge different variety.
And so what they were eating was still pretty geographically located versus now we might be getting things that are, like, three or four times as far away. Right. But if you want an orange in the middle of the summer, then Right. Yeah. And so we push more for, like, eat what seasonally, like, what do we have here in The US or here in Ohio that's available and kinda eating seasonally, based on what we can get, and looking at really, can we fuel ourself with something that is nutrient rich? And I told people, I was like, you know, maybe you can't eat our ancestral blend every single day or can't afford it. Maybe it's not in your family budget. But what can you make those easy swaps with Right. That can? Like, what small decisions, like, you talked about milk like, you could go through a gallon of raw milk a day, but maybe it doesn't financially align with your family budget. Right. But can you add it in Right. To it? Can you get the benefit of it? Yes. Like, maybe it's not a full swap, but can you start with a half gallon and add that in
[00:44:16] Unknown:
as a swap for it every day? Well and I you know, honestly, I didn't I probably should've, but I didn't look at your your beef prices because Katie and I, got a beef from the stalls. Yeah. Beckett Johnson. Yeah. Yeah. I know exactly you're there. Yeah. And I did the math on it. And I mean, it was expensive because we bought half a cow, which was, like, 300 pounds. Right. You need to financially plan most families do, then it's gonna be a big investment initially. But if I'm if I if I did my math right, it only came out to be about, like, $5 a pound for the whole thing. Maybe 6 or something. I don't know. I I did the math. Yeah. And it was like, you know, if I go to the grocery store and I buy a rib eye, it's I think now it's almost
[00:44:56] Unknown:
maybe $20 for a rib eye or something. Probably for, like, a choice rib eye. Yeah. But, yeah, I tell customers, like, if you wanna buy, like, a half beef or a whole beef, you're looking around, like, 8 to $9 a pound finish. That's for all your ground beef, all your steaks, everything your roast. And again again, you know, it's ground beef. But even ground beef at the supermarket I went to dollar
[00:45:14] Unknown:
DG. Oh, did they they did the rebranding than the DG.
[00:45:19] Unknown:
A couple weeks ago when their ground beef in the store was $10 a pound, and I was like, cool. That's like crap ground beef. Yeah. It's not good. It it it it's truly a lot of trim and a lot of filler. Yeah. Not filler in the way that it's like not it's all 100% beef that's going in there, but it's not whole muscle cut Right. Beef. It's not single animal source. It's not dry aged. All of our beef is dry aged. Like, you're getting, like, high end beef when you buy direct from a For $89 a pound. Yeah. And and I was like, can you talk about, like, our beef doesn't shrink up? Like, it's because it goes to the dry aging process. So, like, that water has been removed from it. And they're like, yeah. Your beef patties don't shrink up. I'm like, yeah. Because that's what real beef should should do. And so you're truly getting a pound of beef. You're not getting, like, something that's been overinflated because because it's got a bunch of water in it. Hasn't been dried out of it. Yeah. So, yeah,
[00:46:09] Unknown:
it's not it's not cheap as a one off cost, but, I mean and the beef is just it's just better. Yeah. I mean It's much better. Even growing up, I remember,
[00:46:18] Unknown:
I mean, my mom and dad are the same way. Like, they didn't grow raise cow when I was younger, but they would buy a I've what I've learned is a call cow, which is an old mama cow that is no longer breeding. Yeah. And that was, like, what my parents bought. And, I was like, why couldn't I chew this meat and the steak? And I was like, oh, now I know why because it wasn't actually finished beef. And so that's the other part of why our beef is probably a little bit more expensive because it is a % finished. The beef are raised. But, yeah, more expensive in terms of maybe, like, a one off cost. But like you said, you go to Dollar General, you can get a more like a pound of Right. For the same price. Happy ground beef. We try to add price. Have, like, a lot of price points in terms of what the products and packaging and based on, like, what you can fill, like, if you have a freezer space or a large freezer. So, like, we have our meat subscription boxes, which are a great value. You do get, like, two pounds I did see that. That's a great idea. Pounds of ground beef, for life of your membership right now through the end of the month, and they deliver to your door, and that gets you a good variety of beef, pork, chicken, kind of what you're looking our our little ones, like, peeking in the window at us. And, so that gets you a good variety of those products, but all the way down to an eighth of a beef. So maybe you don't have the budget for a half a cow, but you can still get a really good Yeah. Savings by just doing an eighth of a cow. Yeah. Plus if maybe you have a smaller family or maybe you don't eat beef that often.
Like I said, just integrating this really nutrient dense meat once or twice a week into a meal. What can what kind of swaps can you make? Because when you look at, like, even eating out, because it's we are live a super busy lifestyle. Like, we're constantly traveling and driving and Yeah. Going here and making deliveries and and picking things up. But it's like throw something in the crock pot. Like, how can you easily throw in Crock pots are amazing. I love crock pots. Like, have one or two of them so you're constantly, really swift, swapping out, those meals and having something available. Like, I tell people, like, cook three or four pounds of ground beef at a time. Yeah. Freeze half of it, and then you've got something to pull out and throw it in the skillet, and it's only gonna cook up in five or ten minutes. So those nights where you're like, I'm just gonna, like, drive through and, like, Wendy's like, oh, cool. You just spent $75 for a family of, like, four or five because I know that's, like Yeah. With with crappy
[00:48:23] Unknown:
food. Yeah. That doesn't make it feel good. Can we please do that? I was like, oh, fuck. Like,
[00:48:28] Unknown:
like, we finally were like, okay. We did. And I was like, oh, this was up. And then you just feel bad afterwards. And, like, the kids are like, I'm still hungry. I was like, yeah. Because you had crap. Right. That was basically food. I'm like, so I'm gonna go feed you again. And so, like, I'm not gonna say, like, we don't eat out period because we are still human and we and we've done that. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, but how good, like, definitely doesn't align with your pocketbook and your budget eating out. But I was like, I can take the same, like, two and a half pound $33 roast, and I found our family of five. Plus we have breakfast for tomorrow, plus we have lunch for tomorrow. And it was a fraction of the price. Yeah. So it once you get through, like, how you can use in the diversity that you learn to add into it of, like, use that Chuck roast and make breakfast tacos in the morning. Like Yeah. It's super easy. And you're like, I don't think you're using tacos, like, from a Chuck roast. Like Yeah. It's really the beef. Here's another
[00:49:18] Unknown:
hack, I guess, you could say. If you if you've never tried it before, sous vides. So Katie and I found on Facebook Marketplace, like, some guy selling a ridiculous amount, like, five or six sous vides for, like, $50. Like, yeah. We'll give that a shot. Try. She loves them because you talk about a chuck roast. She'll stick a a chuck roast in that sous vide, and you'd I'm assuming you're familiar with the sous vide. If somebody's done it, but we've had customers that that love them. And Because it's almost like a cross pot. So I guess for if anybody's listening to this that doesn't know what a sous vide is, it basically just holds water at a constant temperature. So she can take a chuck roast and she can put it in the sous vide for, like, twenty four hours, And it's like a steak. Like, we'll eat it as if it were a steak. It's so tender just from being heated. Yeah. And it it almost tastes as good as a rib eye just like as a steak. Yeah. So it a sous vide is another really good hack. Way to easily. Yeah. And I think you can take some of those, like, maybe less common or less desirable cuts to you, like the rib eyes. Like I mean, to get them Because they're frozen, obviously. Yeah. So instead of letting them thaw, she'll just stick them right in the sous vide. And then defrost and cook at the same time. And you'll need to keep your eye on it Yeah. Because it's a constant temperature. So you're not gonna overcook your beef. And then all you have to do is throw it, you know, sear it, and then you've got a nice delicious steak. Crust on it. Yeah.
So if
[00:50:37] Unknown:
And it takes away that, like, intimidation, I think, too, on some some different cuts. You're like, I have this nice steak and Yeah. Yeah.
[00:50:43] Unknown:
I don't wanna mess this up. I've cooked I like I think I cook a very, very good steak, but every time I would do it, I would still get nervous. Mhmm. I'd because, because, you know, you do your little test of, like, is it done? Is it done? Or should I cook it with a thermometer? But no. Sous vide, I can't
[00:51:00] Unknown:
recommend it. We might have to break down. Maybe there'll be a good Christmas present for that. Well, they're not they're
[00:51:04] Unknown:
not super expensive. I I think a new one maybe $75
[00:51:08] Unknown:
or something and that you should get out of it is. Well, that's why I think I think integrating some of those, like, good kitchen appliances. Like, we have a a a pretty big dehydrator, but we also we dehydrate a lot of things. We also, like, make our yogurt and stuff in it. And so making customers some of those You don't have a freeze dryer, do you? Not yet. It's on the bucket list. My wife would have been so jealous. Not Those things aren't cheap either. They're not cheap. But, we have some customers and some friends that have them, so we've, like, freeze dried some milk to dry around with some things and doing it. But, like, making some of those initial investments and things you'll lose in use in your kitchen, like, every week or, like Yeah. Or it's gonna be, like, a freezer. Oh, yeah. Like, we have a a gigantic freezer and, you know, again, not cheap, but we also have 300, 4 hundred pounds of beef in it. Right. And a deer if I can get it. You can, like, go and have that stock in your kitchen, and I I say have a prepared pantry. Yeah. And it doesn't have to be it's not going to Costco and Walmart and buying all these things off a checklist. It's it's finding small things that you can make swaps Yeah. Along the way. And so, like, if you have your potatoes, say you still bought your potatoes at Kroger. Cool. Well, they're gonna go bad. So, like, slice them up, put them in the dehydrator. Well, now you've got them, and you can throw them in your stocks and your soups and and stuff to have and can them as well. Like, that's so great. My mother-in-law cans. That's what she she cans, like, 70 quarts of green beans for us for Christmas now. It's like her present to us. And so having kind of those things that you can make really easy swaps in the kitchen to, and I always recommend, like, finding your, like, top five, like, your family's top five recipes that you can as a mom or a dad that you're, like, super exhausted at the end of the day that you can throw together in in no time and and having that variation. One of the best things my mom ever gave me was
[00:52:45] Unknown:
I actually put it I laid it out in a program on a computer, but it's just like a little cookbook of, like, all the stuff that she could just whip together. Yeah. And I that is the for me, next to the joy of cooking because I I enjoy to cook. Katie cooks most of the time now, but I enjoy it. Joy of Cooking is a fantastic recipe book. If you don't have I don't have that one. I'll have to look at that. Get a copy of Joy of Cooking because it's got everything in it. But this little tiny
[00:53:11] Unknown:
cookbook that my mom gave me, it's got the most use and it's got paper stuck in it and This is the best though. And then finally, I think as you do continue for if, like, people are just like, I I don't enjoy cooking or I don't know how to cook. It's like, I think the more time you just spend in the kitchen, you're like, no. So it's like my mom will say, like, well, what when then she went into this, like, she's never made a meatloaf the same time. She just put stuff out of the cabinet. But I think that's that's kind of like the one of the joys that you'll eventually find, I think, is literally open your cup and be like, okay. What do I have? And you can, like, easily throw in there and not talk about AI. I was talking to another friend of mine. She's getting ready to to have her second child, and she's like, I went to ChatChaPT, put, like, a list of, like, what's in my pantry and said give me, like, five recipes I can put in a freezer. Yeah. And she's like, we have your beef. She came and picked up some chicken that she needed and, like, had all the spices and just all these random things that she didn't know to put together. Right. So it's like using AI that's super easy and to come up with this really quick and easy recipes as well. Well, I think you'll find it. I found this when I cooked and I Katie finds this as it is kind
[00:54:12] Unknown:
of she just enjoys that challenge sometimes of just throwing things. You talked about me. I chuckled when you said meatloaf. My wife had a a a bad time with meatloaf for a couple times. The first meatloaf she did, she looked in the freezer and we had some ground beef, but we also had this, like, roll of Italian sausage. So it's like spiced Italian sausage. So she tried to combine those two, and it was too much meat. It was it was very weird. It was a very weird flavor. So we laughed. We're like, oh, too much meat. She tried it again, and I think she put too many bread crumbs and crumbs in it because it, like, jiggled, and it would dissolve in your mouth. So we we yeah. So we said, oh, now it's too much loaf.
[00:54:52] Unknown:
So Okay. I do it. That's so fun. She actually came upon it for like a minute. But I think that's, like, the way you can can work through is, like, find, like, we'll take, like, our we have the ancestral or primal blend ground beef Yeah. Which has the heart and liver. So you're talking about, like, huge nutrient packed into access. And I am heart is very good. I so I I got a
[00:55:10] Unknown:
a dough a couple years ago, and we and I don't know if beef heart is the exact same. I think it's a little tougher, But we just cut it up like a steak and pan fried it.
[00:55:21] Unknown:
It was the best cut of meat I've ever had. And it's like it's like the liver. I can't do beef liver. I've never been able to liver an onion to some people. Not me. I've never had that. I know. I think we've got one that are first. An ancestral blend, like, I that's my favorite way to do it. Exciting feeds my kids. I'll put it in, like, spaghetti or sauce. Orgganese is so good. It is very good. And so you're getting all of that really good nutrients, but it's, like, actually in an edible form that you can enjoy because that's why I want our meals and our meat and everything we consume to be enjoyable. Is that something I could ask a a butcher to do for me? Like, the next time because we'll probably get another cow from the Yeah. The Johnson's. If I talk to the butcher, would they I don't know if every butcher does. Okay. But definitely talk to him ahead of time. So with our when we get it made, or if Do you notice a taste difference with the look of it? I explained it as it has a little bit more of a bold flavor. Okay. So Deers, you know, can be some people say it's gamey. It's kinda got a I just think people cook it wrong. That's Right. Right. So it's just a little bit bolder flavor.
You'll some people will be like, it's a little it tastes different. Right? It's not it it is gonna be different. It has liver. It's 20% between the heart and the liver. So it's just a little bit bolder flavor. Some people will then take it and maybe mix it with another pound of ground beef. Their first couple times, they get used to to having it and then you'll just You know, I guess I got a grinder. I could probably just do that. Yeah. You could. At home. Yeah. Probably wanted to try it. Absolutely. That's how we do it. Before I get Before our our processor. Of Some of the processors will have a minimum, like, maybe they'll have a 25 pound grind minimum before they'll do a specialty grind. Okay. And then they'll do a processing charge on top of that. So, like, for us, we'll maybe get a whole, like, 400 pounds of it made at one time.
And, so then we're just paying that grind fee one time so we don't really have to charge it. So if a customer buys, like, a quarter or a half from us and they want five pounds of the ancestral blend, well, we just pull that out of our retail case so you don't have to pay an extra 15 or $25 for this five five five pounds. But, yeah, most processors probably can do it. And it's becoming so popular now. People are realizing that, like, hey, this is really easy way to get all those extra micronutrients. Most processors are gonna be like, yeah. Like, you know You don't wanna just eat a liver. Right. Right. Some people really like it. It's just a little bit too strong of a Have you I've because I've never eaten liver. What what does it even taste like?
I haven't had it since I'm I'm chuckling one of our our neighbors. I grew up with her kids and and stuff, so she would always make liver and onions, and I just, like, I hate it. Just
[00:57:39] Unknown:
I couldn't get over. Well, you get that from people. It's like the smell's bad. Smells a little bit bad.
[00:57:44] Unknown:
We dehydrated. I probably shouldn't have said. We dehydrated liver, and our dehydrator for our dog as pet treats. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the smell is still in our dehydrator. You can't get it out. So do not do that, especially not in the house. So we We have a dehydrator. It's a pretty it's a pretty bold, flavor profile to it. But when you mix it with the ground beef, you're it's a lot more milder, and you know that you're getting all those extra micronutrients. And I think that's a better there's a lot of supplements that are on the market right now. Yeah. My wife's taking some. I always caution people and, like, just it goes back to knowing your farmer and where they came from. Right? Like, if
[00:58:17] Unknown:
Well, supplements in general, you to be Yeah. And
[00:58:21] Unknown:
need to do any research. It makes me cringe when I think of all these supplements start being marketed to women and, like, oh, take this to be a futurist. And I'm like, cool. So it it it, like, kinda hurts me because I'm like, this woman is probably postpartum. She's probably or premenopausal or doing something else that her hormones are, like, fluctuating all over the place. And then you just took it from a dairy cow that is probably a calderry cow. It was in the commercial dairy industry, maybe. And she had probably had a lot of additional hormones, not ingested into her, but, like, for her in order to get bread, and just kinda misused and kind of just not the best
[00:59:05] Unknown:
source Right.
[00:59:07] Unknown:
Of those uterine cells Right. To get there. So I'm kinda like, just really be cautious where they're coming from. Well, I think too
[00:59:18] Unknown:
I've I don't I can't remember who it's some ancient Greek, but it food is medicine. Mhmm. Right? And I think it's easy. I fall into this trap, I'm sure, where it's you think, oh, well, I'll just take a supplement, and then that is I don't need to worry about all of this stuff. It's like, no. You need to worry about what you're putting in your like, the food that you're And and the bioavailability of it. Like, by the time that you take something and
[00:59:41] Unknown:
and and break it down and then you're diluting it pretty much to put it into a capsule. Right. Okay. So point zero zero one of whatever you're trying to achieve is your body is gonna actually be able to ingest and then metabolize and then make it into whatever your body is lacking versus if you actually go to the source and eat a real food from the ground You're gonna get a lot more nutrients. And it's gonna be bioavailable. That's what people aren't Yeah. Recognizing. I think supplements are great at the margins. You know? I'd I'd I'd like them. I take a multivitamin. I take c and d and some other things. Yeah. And I've had, like, my Dutch test done to really see, like, what my body is lacking because postpartum with baby What's the Dutch test? I haven't heard of that. I can't tell you exactly. So it's going to, look at so you go to the doctor and they do a blood test, and they'll, like, look at your blood panel. Mhmm. And they're like, oh, yeah. Well, you have really high cholesterol.
[01:00:32] Unknown:
Yeah.
[01:00:33] Unknown:
Okay. But it doesn't tell you why. What part of your metabolic, what what metabolically is causing that? Or is it not? Because when you look at what actually cholesterol and how your body breaks it down, like, your cholesterol and high cholesterol is not gonna come from the beef Right. And the fat that we come from. It's I have a suspicion that
[01:00:51] Unknown:
cholesterol in particular has been a boogeyman that
[01:00:54] Unknown:
probably isn't warranted. Oh, and then you look at, like, pharmaceutical companies and how they want your your body to interact Right. With different things and respond to other certain medications. Right? Like, we're gonna really focus on this one thing, but that's not the root cause Right. Of the issue. So the Dutch test is really gonna look at metabolically what is going on in your body. Yeah. So when I had my second son, my testosterone, even as a female, was, like, not borderline, like, stupid low, but it was really, really low. Yeah. And so that was causing my estrous cycle and everything else to be kind of thrown off. Sure. And so, yeah, I was taking a couple vitamins to help get that. And she's like, you know what? My potassium is soup is really low. So I need to make sure I'm taking my, you know, eating one banana a day because I need extra calcium. How am I or potassium? How am I gonna get that extra storage of potassium because my body wasn't storing potassium? Well, potassium is a precursor in order for part of the metabolic cycle for testosterone. So, like, it's it's these cycles and understanding where these cycles interact with each other. So there's, a lot I I used a she's actually a pharmacist. She created her own little company down in Texas, but there's a couple of, doctors' offices now here around Cincinnati that are pretty cool that will look at real metabolic
[01:02:08] Unknown:
names of that? Or maybe tell me off off mic because listen. You can put them in, like, the show notes and stuff so you can share them because they're they're Well, I'm honestly, I'm thinking about my for my wife and I because we've I've been trying I I think since COVID, we have become more skeptical of doctors and and of the way doctors just seem to prescribe the problem and not look at, like you said, the root cause. Like, what is actually causing this? What can we solve with just better diet, exercise? Like, you know, you go like you said, you go to the doctor and he says, oh, you got high cholesterol.
Here's your what were they? Statins or something that they that they'll give you instead of saying, like, oh, maybe you should eat better and run on the treadmill
[01:02:50] Unknown:
and get some fresh air. Right. And it's not Let's do that first. Always what you're eating because I we have a a a wonderful customer. He's been a customer of fries for a long time. He just retired. He's a cardiothoracic surgeon. Mhmm. And he's he loves our rib eyes, and he will, ma'am, will buy the butter to put on his Thanksgiving turkey. I mean, he's Greek. Like, he's like, this is the the the customers, the the patients he saw on his operating table were not because they're eating steak. Right. There's a lot of other parts Yeah. Of the puzzle that are are going into it. Throw a pill at that. Yeah. I mean It's not fixing the problem. It's not getting into the root problem. No. And before you know it, you're you've got a cabinet full of pills, and who knows how they Yeah.
I I don't wanna disparage doctors, but you put that many chemicals into anything, and you just don't know how they're gonna interact with each other. And they they might cause one issue, but it also can cover up another one without really getting to get into that root cause. So finding there's a lot of good, like, homeopathic doctors and, they've created, different, I don't know, their own little offices and stuff. Some of them is covered by insurance. Some of it's not. Yeah. Like, some of you might be able to use, like, health savings plan to to pay for some of the tests because they're they're not super cheap. But when you're looking at the overall investment into your health, like, it's really main need to take place Right? It's like of what that looks like. One thing that I've that you should invest money in. It's probably your health. Yeah. You know? Right. Because it's that's ultimately when you look down the road, how you're interacting with your kids, what your long term health and your ability to be active later in life Yeah. Of what that looks like. You only get one chance to to really fix that when you're you're younger. Well, I I go to the gym not every morning because
[01:04:28] Unknown:
part of growing muscle is actually resting. Right. Like, you know, that's I I don't think people a lot of people really, you know, they think you go to the gym and it's like, that's where you're growing muscles. It's like, no. No. No. You're growing muscle when you're sleeping, when you're eating. What you're doing in the gym is destroying your muscles so that they do that. But You have to do it in time to recover. Literally, that's the part of it. Literally. Because if you and I've fallen into this trap where I've just lifted too hard too long, and then your body just nope. Nope. You should either you get hurt or you get sick or something like that. But, anyway, I do that because, oh, I love doing it. But I don't wanna be 60 years old and not be able to lift up my grandkid or, you know, run around in the yard or something like that.
And I've, I like lifting because I think that's but, you know, there's tons of ways to do it. Yeah. Yeah. And my my husband, he played college football. And Oh, did he really? Yeah. He was a What do you what position?
[01:05:24] Unknown:
Defensive line. Defen I can't tell you which one.
[01:05:27] Unknown:
Oh, you know, he's a big fella. Yeah. Yeah. But I can't remember where you said you went to To Moorhead. Yeah. Moorhead. So it's with technically a d
[01:05:34] Unknown:
I don't know. It's pretty it I got I play rugby. So you understand, like, as a college athlete, like, it's pretty demanding. And he's also I don't know. Like, I played rugby in college because the rugby parties were very funny. So I don't know if I would have called myself a college athlete. I will speak for him for for that part, but I'm sure they had a good time. And, but it's kinda the same thing, like, they worked out and and did stuff all the way. I mean, he is significantly less body mass now than he was and, especially if we played the lineup. Yeah. But he looks like a strong guy now. I bet he was Yeah. But he was a lot bigger Yeah. Than and so but he works every day outside now, and so it's, just changing how he's grown and adapt. He's like, I couldn't lift weights like I used to. He's like, that was so hard on your body, but he feels much better overall because yeah. Well, it's Being in college and lifting and then fueling your body with Little Caesars and Yeah.
[01:06:27] Unknown:
No. It's because I've I've lifted on and off since I got played football in high school, and that's where I learned how to lift, which is nothing you have to do. You have to learn how to do it because if you don't know you know, you can look at somebody squatting. Like, oh, that's an easy thing to do, but then you get under and you realize like, oh, you're waving all over the place. Anyway,
[01:06:47] Unknown:
you just I don't know. You just feel better doing it than, like, working. Just being outside because I've I've working in my office at home. Right. And some days, I'll come down and I just feel drained and then I go outside. It's like, oh, this is what I was missing, sunlight. Yeah. You know? And I get kind of, a little envious of Josh sometimes because he's, like, literally working outside. Yeah. Great. There's some days, I mean, when it's icy cold and snow, and I haven't been outside for three days because I'm inside with the kids, and we've had these blizzards. And he's outside in it or couple Saturdays ago where it just
[01:07:15] Unknown:
rained all day. Oh, yeah. Because the animals, it's this is a full time Full time job. Like, you're outside. I imagine you can't take many vacations and things like that. It's a balance. You know, he's gone a couple places.
[01:07:25] Unknown:
Take a couple days, and I'll take a couple days, but we haven't been But somebody's gotta be here. Yeah. Somebody's gotta be here. We've been very blessed to have, good friends that can step in and, milk while he was being gone or or help us, and my parents are close by. So but, yeah, we haven't taken a full family vacation for a couple years. So we're we're working towards that. That's one of our big goals to to be able to do, but really making sure that, yeah, he's he'll be soaking wet, and and there'll be times I'm working at my computer. I do a lot of the indoor, back end office things I handle and manage. So I get a little jealous of him being outside. So I try to take at least, you know, one day a week to Yeah. To get out there and work with them. And you can tell, like, moving cheap fence and, like, your body you're using muscles you're you're not used to. So if anybody wants to come see what work is, we always open up that opportunity to to come experience, like, what it's really like. Yeah. Because I I want people to have that appreciation of the work that goes into it because I think there's a lot of times you're you're not real sure. You think you know what it is, and I can only share so much on social media. It's hard to, really get a feel for the heavy lifting of what that includes and what it does to your body. But it it's good. When I talk to I go to a chiropractor once a week because that's the other part of, like, full body wellness and health, and I know my body needs that to get really strong.
And historically just some hereditary things my family has had. And it's it's helped me tremendously in the nervous system and regulation and lifting weights. We were like, yeah. Do the farmer carriers are the best thing. I was like They are really good. They are good. And I was like, cool because I do this all the time. Because I'm a farmer and I carry things. You know, five gallon buckets filled with feeds, and they're, like, 25 pounds each. So I'm, like, doing this,
[01:09:01] Unknown:
on a daily or weekly basis makes a big difference. I actually started doing farmer's carries. Not I'm not a farmer. Yeah. But, you know, I'll get They're just good for you and your boss. Well, actually, briefcase carries where you carry, just on one side, and it's good for your core because it helps you stay I hurt my back, like, a week and a half ago or something like that. So my thinking is is that if I I need to strengthen my core to take the strain off, I also probably need to lose about 20 pounds. But, but, yeah, farmer's carries are Yeah. Really good. They're really manual labor's good. I mean, I think at a certain point, we're we're built to do this kind of stuff. Like, our bodies are built to move. They're built to interact with the world. And if you sit in an office all day, like like I do many days, I never feel as good as if I'm out in the yard with my kids or take a walk with my daughter or something like that. It just
[01:09:51] Unknown:
When you mentioned you have, like, your own little garden and stuff too. And Yeah. So I think any any kind of work like that you can incorporate into your life Yeah. Is it's also gonna get your body to move in ways that you're not gonna get at the gym. Exactly. You're you're really going to realize because I think even though you try to, like, stick to a gym schedule and you're like, I'm gonna do arms to stay or legs to stay and do this, you're really not pushing your your muscle and your body to work in ways that it was designed to do. No. Yeah. And then I think also it's this variable of, like, I'm gonna move sheep fence. Like, I'm bending over. I'm picking up this. I'm doing squats. All, like, it's like circuit training. Yeah. All in once when you're when you go to the gym, you're not necessarily it's still very rudimentary It is. And routine.
[01:10:30] Unknown:
When it's I I look at it like if you go to the weight lifting, not if you're if you're doing CrossFit or something like that. It's a different story. I just lift heavy things. That's what I like to do. It trains your body to be strong, but then if you want if you wanna actually be more efficient at work out in the world, like actual work, you then need to train that strength to do that work. Like, going to the gym and lifting weights is great for getting strong. Like, it'll teach you how to bench press really well, and that's great. But if you don't then take your body and go do something with that and train your other muscles to do things with the strength you have, it's not gonna Right. Then I don't do that, but I don't But I should. Well, you have to come out and, you know I might take you up for time.
[01:11:15] Unknown:
Come in. Well, you love free labor. It it goes to that whole whole body wellness thing. Like, what can you add into your daily routine or your weekly routine Mhmm. That's gonna help overall your longevity in life? Yeah. And so all the way from nutrition to physical activity and,
[01:11:29] Unknown:
You know, I heard something, and this could be absolutely false, but it stuck with me for whatever reason that one of the biggest indicators of longevity is actually grip strength. And the reason for that is as you get older, one of the biggest causes of mortality are just slips, trips, and falls. Mhmm. So if you've got the grip strength to stop yourself, then you've got a much better chance of, you know, making it to a ripe Never heard of that. That's a great Yeah. Again, I don't version blank. Yeah. No. It makes I have no idea if that's true. But Right. Yeah. When you think about bone density, especially because your muscles waste away. As you get older, your bones get less and less dense. But if you have that that work, like, especially, I talk about lifting,
[01:12:11] Unknown:
increases your bone density, and then you keep it builds muscle mass so that you've actually got muscle mass to lose as you get older. Yeah. So You have to feel your muscle mass too. I think that's Yeah. When you look at the studies, Joshua, my husband, he will kinda mention sometimes, like, his mom is she just retired. She was a a cardiac nurse, and, so she eats super,
[01:12:33] Unknown:
super healthy. She has her entire life. She walks like three or four miles every morning,
[01:12:38] Unknown:
and but she eats a lot of of greens and and salads and stuff. And as she has started to age now, her she's realized, like, her muscle deterioration because so she's been incorporating meats More proteins. And protein into her diet, and she's like, like, I gotta I gotta do this. And, and she's realizing it now even though she's been super healthy, her entire life, but as she's, like, gotten older and still being super active, and so she's been doing a lot of she'll make, like, bone broth or stock I love bone broth. A lot of it. And so she'll we'll give her Marrow too. Yeah. She'll take the the soup bones, from the beef and the chicken Yeah. And make stock. And that's been a really great way for her to incorporate,
[01:13:19] Unknown:
that back into our diet because she realizes now how important. I used to do that for recovery from lifting because I think I remember I remember where Katie got the bones. Oh, yeah. Actually did a bunch of collagen and stuff that's in it's skin light. I would, I would make ramen, soft boil and egg, and then put all of that in a bone broth and eat that for lunch. Yeah. That's a great, like, fraction. I could actually
[01:13:38] Unknown:
tell that I was recovering better. Yeah. Because you're literally it's bioavailable again. Like, if you like the creatine and the collagen drinks like the powder, you can buy it, but, like, you're not gonna I do. You're not gonna have the same recovery though. It's just having some bone broth and When again might be a little bit different to drink after your sweaty workout. Well You can make it cold,
[01:13:56] Unknown:
and put it in But the thing with, like, protein and and creatine, again, it's at the margins. Right? Like, I'll have a protein shake with creatine in it after my workout, but that's not my only protein for the day because I'm also eating beef and chicken and things like that. I'm also not like a professional power lift or anything. I just like going Very few people are. Yeah. No. It's I have a pretty respectable bench press, and it's it's getting up there. But,
[01:14:18] Unknown:
Yeah. Making sure you're just really continue to nourish your body the way it really, really needs to. And I think also as, like, a a young a mom with young kids and stuff looking out things that I can feed my kids like I wish I could go back and change some of their first foods a little differently. And I started getting the end of number two and number three I was like oh okay yeah we like don't need these pre made baby foods. Yeah. I was like, I was never gonna feed my kids pouches. Like, we were still on the go. And I was teaching at college for a while too and so super busy and traveling. So I was like, here's some pouches, but, like, then by baby num three, I was like, oh, look. You can buy these fillable pouches and I can make it myself. Yeah. You can buy them off Amazon or you can make your own puree and put it in there. We we had the well, I guess Dominic's offered those pouches, but I mean Yeah. Still like even apple sauce. You can make your own apple sauce and put it in there instead of buying those preemie pouches. Yeah. Yeah. Super easy to do. And same thing with, like, the bone broth is, like, feeding that as, like, first foods versus
[01:15:11] Unknown:
Which is bone broth is crazy easy to make. You just kinda stick it in a crock pot or whatever. Let it go. I so I take,
[01:15:17] Unknown:
try it. Smell delicious. I cook my bone in chuck roast, and we eat from it, and then I leave the bone in there, and then I'll put some apple cider vinegar, maybe some other vegetables or root vegetables in there to let it cook down. Yeah. And then I strain it off, and I'll I'll freeze that, into even little ice cube trays or Yeah. Into to bigger I think she actually even made her own a bullion.
[01:15:37] Unknown:
Oh, yeah. I think I think it was from what was left over from the bone broth. I think she blended it all up, all the vegetables and stuff. Yeah. And then And then made her own bullion. Yeah. And so it's like then you're not contributing to waste, and you're also not buying something that's probably has a lot more
[01:15:53] Unknown:
other additives in it that you don't need the preservatives Right. That we have a lot of the shelf stable Yeah. Yeah. Stuff, which is why I like my dehydrator because, again, you can Those things are It's a lot of things you don't that's probably that dehydrator and a crock pot would probably be the two things I would tell people to have in their kitchen
[01:16:08] Unknown:
just to Well, especially because we like, I'd we did that garden, and I I was I'm not a fan of gardening. And it it was an okay garden. But I think some some people think, oh, I do this garden. What am I gonna do with all this food if you have a dehydro or if you just learn how to can. Yeah. Learn Canning is not It's just too intimidating
[01:16:28] Unknown:
at first, but once you do it, it's not too bad. No. And I always say too, like, if we I mean, we grow some tomatoes. We actually planted some. My my son keeps picking in the window, like, loves watermelons, cantaloupe, and Yeah. Yeah. And so we actually are that's what we're planting this year. And so it's like you don't have to plant everything. Right. Like, what is one thing you enjoy planting in your garden that your family enjoys eating? Right. And just do that. And then find another farmer to source the rest of it. And so that's when people ask us, like, well, what vegetables do you grow? When do you have a garden? And I was like, we don't, but here's, like, some other local farmers that Well, I know. And I've do know. I need to actually email him again to try to get him on, but there's a CSA by me.
[01:17:03] Unknown:
So there are places where you can go to essentially, it'd be like getting a herd share or Right. Or a half cow or something. He'll just he's got his little farm there, and he'll box up all the vegetables. And it's very reasonably priced. I mean, it's not gonna break the bank. Yeah. And especially if you like if your family will do a diversity of different things, like those fishbowl CSAs are a great way to go. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of those here in Clermont County, and, we are
[01:17:26] Unknown:
my husband and Aaron are on the Farm Bureau board. And so we have, we do a farm tour. We've done it. I think this will be normally it's in September. This will be year five or six, I think Okay. That we're doing it. But there'll be different farms that are involved. And we work with the, Claremont County Visitors Bureau, and then they'll market it, and they create a little roadmap for people to go and is to go to different farms. Really? Yeah. And there'll also be farms that are maybe even, large production crop farms so you can, like, see big combine tractors, but a lot of it are small farms like ours that raise maybe they'll just do bees or they'll do organic vegetables like, Bear Creek organic farms at Bear Creek. We have a lot of their they have a commercial kitchen. They make all their pasta sauces and salsas. Okay. We sell them here. And she'll do vegetables, raw vegetables as well. And so you can go around to these different farms and actually see them kind of all in a weekend Yeah. And get to meet your own farmers and kind of pick and choose who you want, which has also been really great. You might have to send me information on there and tell me where to go. Yeah.
[01:18:27] Unknown:
What was it in the eighties or the nineties where some agricultural, I guess, probably the guy running the Department of Agriculture said get big or get out?
[01:18:36] Unknown:
I've heard that before. I don't know who said it. I can't remember either. There's there's some truth. Well, I I was kinda wondering even, for us to be to farm full time, and we're not as big as we need to be. Right. And that's I mean, it's tough. It's hard. The margins, land prices, we were husband and I were actually talking on our way home last night. We were past a farm. We're like, we should have bought that. Like, eight years ago, we're like, it was too much Yeah. What we saw at the time of, like, we should have bought that. And, we're kinda, like, talking about, like, my a farm my dad passed up because it was a thousand dollars an acre. Yeah. What is it? You know, twenty five years ago. Yeah. 10 to 15 for the same farm. And he's, like, kinda kicking himself because now we're at the point of we're second generation here on this farm, but my my mom will tell everybody that my husband and our first generation farmers because we still we rent the whole thing. Like, we we have had to invest everything Right. That we had working off farm because that's how farmers get started. You you work off farm to invest that into your farm Right. So you can grow into that. And so we we have a lot of different we call them enterprises, our beef, our pork, our chicken, our dairy, and we call it enterprise stacking. We have have this enterprise that complements a customer base and serves a customer base that we have that wanted their beef. And then they're like, hey, can you do chicken? We're like, sure. So we like started missing chicken, and we've added everything in here so they complement each other.
But it's because we can raise our pasture chicken on the same Yeah. Land area that we're raising cattle during different times of the year. And so they complement each other, which is part of the regenerative process but we can't make a living on raising 600 chickens and Right. You know five cows. You have to scale that. So there is a big part of scaling that goes along with it. I think the thing is now is getting creative. Yeah. With it. People ask, how do you how do you get into farming relationships? It's the only way you're gonna get in, unless you, you know, are sitting on a trust fund and can go out and and spend have the money, Right. You know, because The hundreds of thousands of dollars. The bank is isn't gonna loan us money to go buy the next, you know, hundred acres right now. You have to have the financial backing of it in order for institutions to loan you, the money of it. So either having that off farm job income. But the other thing is, like us, going and finding another farmer, there are people that do not have kids or do not have grandkids interested in taking over the operation, and they've invested their whole livelihood in it. They don't wanna see it going into development, and I'm not anti development. Yeah. I need customers. We still are actively doing so we we wanna see if there's a I'm not either, but I always get a little sad when I see a field go. It does it does it is it is kinda hurt and knowing that, there's there's parts of across the state. You can look at Columbus area. There's literally it's running, young farmers out because they literally cannot afford because the land prices are so high, and it's hard for that generation that's looking to sell, especially if they don't already have a relationship with that farmer Right. To let them lease it, to a lease to own, go under a land contract. Yeah.
[01:21:37] Unknown:
I imagine as a farmer too, you know, if I farm my whole life, I don't have any kids or grandkids that wanna do it, and some guy comes with a big bag of money and says, I'll buy everything.
[01:21:47] Unknown:
Well, okay. Yeah. But if he doesn't have the the biggest thing is where I see if some if you wanna get into farming, said farmer doesn't have those people. What's he gonna do with a couple million dollars? Yeah. That's true. He's not gonna but what he can do is you show him that you want to put in the work. Right. You know what work is. You wanna go work alongside him a couple years without getting paid. That's the biggest thing we have. We'll we'll get high schoolers and we're I'll talk about a grant program we're doing with the career and tech school. And I've we've told high schoolers for years, I was like, you wanna do this, like, go volunteer. Yeah. I worked in vet clinics after vet clinics for for years without getting paid because I wanted to be a veterinarian or I thought I did. And do it when you're young. And do it when you're young. Do it when you're young. Because when you don't need money. Right. When you don't need money. I was like, okay. Yeah. You're 15. Like, I will admit there are some of them that they need the job, the income to help Yeah. Their family. But I was like, a lot of them, I was like, you don't need the money. You want money because you wanna, like, go down to, like, get your, you know, big b coffee, like, before school. You don't need that either. And, so I was like, go volunteer. Like, I was like, I'm not gonna have there's certain tasks when you come to our farm to volunteer, I'm not gonna have you do because I consider those paid tasks. But there's also tasks that, like, if you wanna learn about this business Or just learn about work too. Yeah. Because not everybody really knows what work is. They don't know what work is. And so if you wanna learn what this business is, because it's a business and people are like, oh, I'm like, no. We have to we have to make money or we can't we can't pay the bills. Like, people don't want us to, like, make money. It's like we have to make money. It's not a lot. Like, and so making sure that they are getting that opportunity, but there are farmers out there, that are looking for somebody to pass it on to the next generation.
[01:23:19] Unknown:
Well, I mean, there's a tons of bit because not just farms, but I think businesses in general. I think there's a lot of the older generation that started up a small business, and they don't wanna see it go to the wayside. So if you're an industrious young person, you know Yeah. Pick pick what you love and then go find one of those people. You know? Yeah. I think it's building that work ethic.
[01:23:37] Unknown:
We have another customer, a neighbor down the road. I was just talking to Josh last night, and stopped by here to pick up his steaks, and he said he works for a very large construction company here in Cincinnati. And he said over the next five to six years, they're gonna be in a really hard position because their foreman can't train the younger generation. The younger generation doesn't wanna learn how to do the skilled part of the labor. Well, and that's what's I think, you know, you think about farming, construction, the all the trades.
[01:24:05] Unknown:
If we're not careful, we're gonna lose those skills. You know, there's this painting I think I saw it at the Cincinnati Art Museum, but it was I wish I could remember the name of it. I've tried to look it up, but this image is always stuck in my head. It was of a a sheepherder, and he he was in the kind of relaxing against, you know, these gigantic Roman aqueducts. And you look at that and you think, nobody knew how to do that after a certain period in time. Like, they're just these wonders of engineering are just crumbling and providing shade for some guy that's just grazing his sheep. And if you're not careful, you're gonna lose
[01:24:41] Unknown:
our ability to create incredible things if you don't pass on those skills. Yeah. And when we look at trying to keep a lot of jobs here in The US, like, in keeping our food system local, there's gonna be parts of it that do come along with the manual labor Yeah. Side of things. And that does scare a lot of people away because, I mean, my brother went and he works, not on the farm. Let's just put it that way. And he he works a corporate job and but at the end of the day he he misses Yeah. Being on the farm and he actually just moved for the summer. He moved his family out to my my family's, farm for the summer to get his kids back into nature and be on the farm and to see how, what work is and and to do stuff and be outside all the time without, you know, having to worry about all the things. We're actually getting ready to start at the end of the month. Our family like, farm family Fridays is what we're calling it. Okay. And it's literally just for families to come and for their kids. And You have to give me information, like, all of love. Yeah. We'll just share it on our newsletter, social media too. Okay. And it just it's it's literally just to be outside.
Yeah. No strings attached. Like, it's not I'm not creating entertainment. Like, we're not providing anything. We are literally giving you a safe space to be outside and to meet other like minded families, because we've learned we homeschool our kids, and we've found that a lot of people, like, are looking for a community that, like, they want their kids to just be outside, like, not as structured. Even a park, going to a park is still a pretty structured Yeah. Play environment. So just letting them be kids, like, figure out things in nature that play with what's around you. Yeah. Get hurt. Get hurt dirty. Get hurt dirty. I was like Yeah. Bring extra fluid out. There will be water hoses you can rinse off afterwards.
But just, like, be present. You know, everybody's gonna be sitting around so you can watch the kids and and kind of thing and That's one of those like hang out. One of the things I I love when you find
[01:26:30] Unknown:
a group of people like that with kids is how
[01:26:34] Unknown:
less stressful it is just to have your kids because you everybody can see them and they're fine, but it's kind of relaxes you a little bit because they're like, okay. They're with a bunch of kids. Right. I can see them. I'm gonna just relax now. And as parents, I think, they need that sometimes too. It's just a little yeah. Realize that I think for us, it's also been we have found a sense of community doing this that we never never was on, like, our bingo board Right. Of of of what that was gonna look like, and we've had customers who have become some of our best friends through all of this. And, I mean, we're That's also a testament to your to your business. I mean, the business is relationships. Right? It is. And it's it's like I we have people that are on our customer list. It's like, I'm sure if, like, we need anything or we have, like, we had our sheep shearing at the April, and I just threw out, like, one email. It's like, hey. If you wanna come help because, like, like and people showed up, like Yeah. Beyond what we imagined. And Josh and I I'm gonna get teary.
This is gonna be the second interview where somebody gets teary. Because, like, we people just showed up and Josh looked at me, like, halfway during the day. He's like, this is so nice. Yeah. Because the year before, it was, like, just him and I. Mhmm. And I'm sure she was not easy. I don't know. I mean, we're not sure that we we hire, some shearers coming, like, the professionals, but there's so much physical stuff that comes in with, like, getting them a herd into the barn. And then you have to, like, separate them and sort them out and then you have to make sure that the sheep are ready for the shear. Yeah. Yeah. So shear is just staying there hearing but, like, somebody has to catch them Yeah. Yeah. And and get it and then manage the wool and you're pulling the wool off and and putting it over the side and kinda cleaning it and so, like, there's a lot of moving parts and he's just looking. He's like, this is so nice. He's like, I he's like, I couldn't have done what I did last year because it was Yeah. It was beyond it was beyond the physical demand that he could physically do and emotionally deal with. So to have the people just showed up was
[01:28:18] Unknown:
it was amazing. That's really awesome. Yeah. And it's it's really nice when you can build a community like that. I mean, it's
[01:28:25] Unknown:
kind of the dream. Right? Yeah. You've just got people that'll help you. Yeah. It's so rewarding beyond waste. Like, I mean, because it's it's not always financially rewarding. Like I said, we're working through that Right. That part of it. And so it to me, that's like it keeps us wanting to to do it. I feel like this is on the hard days because there's a lot more hard days. Yeah. I bet. I think anybody that owns their own business or, you know, what you're doing is, having those those times that you're like, this this is what's really worth it, and this is what's gonna make it. And this is kind of the road I think that God continues to open up and show us, like, this is we're doing the right thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
[01:28:59] Unknown:
So you're involved with the Farm Bureau. Right? Okay. I I was a little nervous. I was like, geez. That's how I got in touch with her. It was. Yeah. I think that's why you're originally calling Yeah. That is that is. And I don't know why I was self conscious about that. But, can you tell me about that or what the Farm Bureau does? And I'd looked it up a little bit. It kinda seems almost just like a Chamber of Commerce for farmers.
[01:29:19] Unknown:
Kind of a little bit. Yeah. And so, really, the the Ohio Farm Bureau and the American Farm Bureau, it's a grassroots organization that is aimed at protecting And I'm sorry. You're on the board. Right? Yeah. I am on the on the board here in Claremont County. Okay. I've sat on, like, some advisory boards for the Ohio Farm Bureau, and Josh is actually on the Ohio Farm Bureau Young Ag Professionals board. Okay. So we have the county board, which is here locally, and, we have, can't remember. We have, like, six or seven farmers or agriculturalists that are on the board. Okay. And what makes it a grassroots organization is the big thing behind the organization is also to lobby on behalf of farmers and protecting our rights or what we're doing, because it's really easy for other people to tell farmers what to do when they don't really understand.
[01:30:06] Unknown:
So they fight everything. Anybody understands that farmer you know, you have this stereotype of kind of the the kind of backwoods
[01:30:12] Unknown:
farmer that doesn't know anything. Yeah. It's like, no. They're scientists and business people. They're all wrapped up into one. Yeah. Yeah. On on everything. So even I I told you earlier, we got finally a high speed Internet. Yeah. Last year, my dad has a business in Mount Washington, and he's had high speed Internet for forty years. Yeah. And we finally got it. I mean, if if you talk about disparity across, like, rural communities and especially it became highlighted, like, during COVID when these students then were sent home to work on computers and homework. I was like, I still I had college professors, but I was like, I have I can't be on this call unless the public library is open, and they're like, you're lying. I'm like, cool. Like, no. I, like, I can only go and do this and access it when the public library is open. When we were in Felicity,
[01:30:53] Unknown:
because it's the same thing. Yeah. Like, it's maybe you get a satellite and who knows if that's getting reception. But we I think I can't remember from Spectrum or whoever it was. We asked them to put a line in there. We're like, okay. We'll come out and look at it. Like, well, it'll cost you $14,000. I was like, no. Wait. What? 14 what? No. So we had to go off these little air thing. It's tough. Tough. Yeah. It's really tough. So as part of the farm year, like, they lobbied from the state to
[01:31:20] Unknown:
for a rural broadband development. So that was just, like, one part of it, but that just shows, like, it's also not just building up farmers, but farmers are the rural community or part a huge part of it. And so that's building the community part of it. And so, I actually was I lobbied at the state and the house You purchased it. At the state. Yes. Nice. Over the last two months. What does what does that actually look like? People talk about law. So I was testifying, and I the farm here was putting, we know health insurance is like a whole other we got a whole podcast series on health insurance. Right? And especially for being an entrepreneur, small business, a young family, health insurance. I'm a freelancer. I know it's it's it's a mess. It's it's a mess. And, so Farm Bureau, Hyro Farm Bureau is looking at having their own health insurance network. It's not a new concept. You the Hyro Farm or the Tennessee Farm Bureau has been doing it for seventy five years. So it would kinda be if you're a Christian. Like a PEO or something? No. It's its own well, I don't know exactly what that is, but I'm gonna say It's like a professional
[01:32:19] Unknown:
employee. The the only reason I know this is because I have a client that does this. But, essentially, what they do is they offer small businesses. They essentially just pool all of their employees together so that they can go out and collectively bargain for I guess it would be really similar to that because it would be its own, like, large
[01:32:38] Unknown:
clump conglomeration.
[01:32:39] Unknown:
Yeah. Essentially, you get a bunch of people together. You get your buy in. So you have a bigger buy in power. So instead of us being, like,
[01:32:47] Unknown:
GE or PNG in Cincinnati, we're farmers creating our own kind of buy in program. So, we have to you have to you have to get state legislation to allow that. You can't just say yeah. You it's you have to change legislation to allow for that network, to be able to occur.
[01:33:06] Unknown:
We have customers. Yeah. No worries.
[01:33:10] Unknown:
Right here. No. You're fine. Picking up his milkshake. So you have to, thanks, Rob. So you have to change legislation if you want to do something like that. Yeah. So we have to our farm has to put forward and has to get written approved by the house and the senate. Yeah. Yeah. To get signed legislation. So I had shared we had a round table discussion with another local congressman, earlier in the year, and they asked what are some of the issues that are keeping young farms and young families from going on to the next generation. I was like, oh, let me tell you my health insurance story. It was kind of like Right. You know, my kids still do not have health insurance right now. Yeah. It it like, literally, we don't have health insurance from because it was this big mess, and I'm still trying to battle through it. And, and so I was asked to go share my story up in front of the the state and the house committee members That's really cool. To do it. So it was really cool. It's And you have to sit in that little seat, you know, with the microphone. Oh, yes. Well, these are, like, the rooms were set up a little different so you're up in front of the podium, in front of everybody that's on that committee. So virtually, it's the same thing, and it's broadcasted. You can go back and look at it to see it, and the senators and congressmen can ask you questions based on, what it is. And then they'll have, like, our Ohio Farm Bureau legislative people who are really experts and know all the everything about the Ohio Yeah. Code and legislation there to ask, like, really specific details, but more of anybody can go and share their story. So if there's any issue that you have and you can go and tell them. And so that's what I think is so what got really us involved in the Farm Bureau is the relationships that they have with our senators and, our congressmen or congresswomen, to be able to, like you can go and knock on their door and sit down, and they wanna hear your stories. They wanna, see what's impacting You hear that a lot is that it it does make a difference. It it does. And some people are just emailing You can't senators. You can't see, like, what goes, on the TV Right. Large media outlets, because that's not really what's happening. I've been I was on the partners advocacy leadership, which is a kind of specialized training program that the American Farm Bureau did. It's a three year program, and so we were even in DC multiple times talking up there and, sit down on a table just like we are and talk about kind of those issues of what we're we're seeing, what's impacting us, how's it impacting us. And I think that's where I'm like, if you really wanna make a difference in your local community, like, go make the make the trip. Even if it's not to the State House, like, go to your county Yeah. And go and talk to your county officials and even in your township. Like, very few people will attend township meetings and
[01:35:58] Unknown:
So it's even tough to find good minutes for township meetings. I mean, I when I started this, I thought, like, oh, well, I'll just look at all the meeting minutes, and I'll just read through them and see if there's anything interesting. A lot of times, those minutes aren't approved for, like, a month. And it's just really tough to fit to know what's going on. Yeah. And and this is where government really happens. Like, if there's something that's gonna impact me, it's gonna happen at our in Patavia, at our Embassy. Right? Like, that's that's gonna impact me more than whatever is going on. And I think sometimes it's taking us as,
[01:36:32] Unknown:
say, the constituents as the people Yeah. To go and be like, these minutes aren't getting posted the way that they're supposed to be. Right? Like, you you sometimes do need to keep them accountable. Yeah. And and then going and knocking on the doors and be like, excuse me. Right. What's going on? Last two minute months meetings haven't been posted if they are if they're supposed to be posted or whatever. They're supposed to be made available publicly within thirty days. Well, it better be made both publicly. And so, we have every right Yeah. To go and and do that. And sometimes it's taking and knocking somebody's curtail off if Yeah. If they're there for a little while and Yeah. In doing that, I'm not scared to, you know, share my backstory and what that looks like and how it impacts me. And they they really do genuinely care. And listen, I mean, there's a huge variation. I mean, nobody's getting paid a bunch of money to get a commission or something. No. It's like No. Even I think zoning commissions are voluntary. Right. And even our state legislators, they're they're not making Yeah. And for as much time as they spend away from their families, I mean, most of them, especially, we're really fortunate here in Claremont County. We have great Yeah. Representatives, that work really hard for us, and most of them have, in our part, you know, Claremont, Brown, Adams County, they're they come from farming backgrounds, so they they understand us as farmers. So that's also why they open their doors pretty easily for us too, but we've worked, with maybe representatives in, like, Hamilton County or Fayette County that, agriculture is not the number one part of of their county. And so, they might have a little bit different priorities. Yeah. But at the end of the day, they're constituents' priorities. They they do have Like, the priorities of Cincinnati Metro Area are gonna be way different than somebody on Moscow, Ohio. So So it's like finding just kind of those overlaps too. And so we've even, as a farm mural, like, county board, have, like, talked about what does that look like, what kind of issues do we want to work and and do? So we know that even our our local school systems, at the end of the day, that's part of our rural development part of it. And so we had to be kind of just careful, like, what lines we walk on, what issues, to make sure we're having the farmers' true interest, but also those rural communities have become a huge part of what we wanna do. Yeah. And so as a Farm Bureau board, well, as part of Farm Bureau, at the county level, we get certain grant money. It was Ohio Farm Bureau was founded by in partnership with Nationwide Insurance. Okay. So Nationwide actually founded Farm Bureau as part of it. They had separated out, but Nationwide still provides grant money to each of these counties to do programming Nice. And educational programming for the farmers in different programs.
And so we get an allotment of money that we have to write grants for Yeah. To show that what this what this money is gonna go to. Man. Yeah. And, so part of one of the grants that we wrote this year was with the Grant Career Center Okay. Over in Bethel. Yep. And Josh and I have sat on the board and the animal science department, over there for, I don't know, five or six years. It's been a while. Yeah. And we've been doing that. And so we've been, been really interacting with the the high school students through their program, also to see what it looks like. What because it's it's a workforce ready program. It's not a a college prep course. It's truly designed to educate and prepare students to go out into the workforce. Maybe they don't wanna do the college route is really what the initial intent for Right. Those those programs are. And so what we were seeing was a lack of availability for these students to go into a, a paid work internship program. Mhmm. We're having students that because as a small business, like, we still haven't grown enough. Like, I can't hire a high schooler to work for me forty hours a week or twenty hours a week. We hire them off and on for individual jobs, but we definitely don't have the the time. Like, they don't have the time if they are are only gonna be with us for three months. Yeah. Well, it takes me thirty days to train them. Right. It's not a really good ROI for me Right. In our our business.
So we were taking this grant and using it to truly build a workforce readiness program. Yeah. And so there was a twelve week training program where different farmers, different businesses, different organizations, like, Ohio Wien's jobs and, NRCS and, the National Resource Conservation. And we came and talked about sustainability and what we expect as employers if you're going to get hired. So there was, like, twelve weeks of them coming along, and we would go to the Grant Career Center after school, like, 02:30, three thirty, and they'd sit through this training program. And then the program pays for these students to go out to these farms and businesses to work. Nice. So they would come here, and they would get paid to help us load out chickens from our brooder house where we grow baby chicks Mhmm. Out to our pastured chicken.
They could help us with cleaning the milk and stuff. The grant career center. This is through the grant career center. So yeah. But the So anybody could take advantage of this program? No. It just the grant Career Center students. Oh, no. No. No. I'm sorry. I I meant, like, employers and farmers. Oh, yep. Any other employers or members. So if you're a small business and yeah. So you have to be a Farm Bureau member because that's how it's kinda That makes sense. So you had it. So we had a couple farms who were not previously Farm Bureau members. So you did have to become a Farm Bureau member. Because of also insurance reasons, we have the ability for the students who are coming onto our property. Again, some of these small farms didn't have the insurance coverage for people to come. Dues? I'm a is it Yeah. For the Farm Bureau. Yeah. Yeah. You do. We now went to, like, a one due flat system. I think it's a hundred and $75 a year. That's not much. It's not much. When you look at also, we have full time lawyers on staff. You have an issue and a question, you call, like, them up, and they will be right there. I mean, when when you look at what they're doing on the back end Yeah.
To to allow us to keep doing what we're doing in CAUV. The, there are certain things to make sure that we get in a different tax bracket for farmland compared to developmental development land and and building and stuff to make sure those are being supported and pushed forward. And, I always say if you're growing bees in your backyard or you have a small garden, like, you're a farmer. You're a farmer. There's people there that it's there to protect you. I get a lot of customers who who live in the city and they want, you know, to have three or four chickens for to provide their own food. And some of those county ordinance ordinances don't allow them to do that. Yeah. It's like, hey. Guess what? As a farm bureau, like, we have a lot of voice together. Yeah. Go and you can actually lobby them and go to your town council and, like, here's some things that you can change, to support that. Because I think that's the I have a big issue with those ordinances. I mean, I get maybe they don't wanna have a rooster because it crows, but I'm like, yeah. But some people's dogs bark a lot louder than the rooster does. I mean, I get it. You don't like, if you're living in in the suburbs, you don't want your backdoor neighbor to have, like, 50 chickens or something. That Right. But able to be able to have, like, three or four, and you have a good waste management plan and and stuff in place. But Don't get me started on HOAs.
[01:43:20] Unknown:
I I, for the life of me, cannot understand why people would live somewhere that has a homeowners association. Like, when you tell me I gotta pay you to tell me what to do with my house.
[01:43:31] Unknown:
No. Thank you. That's why we live out here. Yes. That's why Katie and I live where we live. We live, we are the only town. I'm I'm I think we're the only township in the state of Ohio that's not zoned. Oh, really? I'm pretty sure Washington Town do it. If there is, there may be only one other one. But we So there's, like, no zoning? We we don't have zoning. Wow. Don't come here to Washington, Don't jump. No. Just don't move back. Stay away. Stay away. I know. It's it's a great place, but,
[01:43:56] Unknown:
we like it here. Everybody's Stay away. Yeah. So we don't we don't have a zoning board. We don't we don't have any zoning. So
[01:44:04] Unknown:
I mean, there there is limitations to it. There's Yeah. Depending on your neighborhood put up anything. You still have to get permits to do stuff from the the county, but, yeah, we don't have to we don't have anybody through zoning. That's right. Who wants to to work on you? If you wanna put a a house or a barn or a chicken coop up, you Just do it. You can do it. Yeah.
[01:44:21] Unknown:
You gotta love the the country country. Yeah. You just your ability to do pretty much whatever you want. Yeah. Are there any because I do like to keep my eye on what's going through the legislature. Are there any farm related legislation
[01:44:36] Unknown:
that's going through right now that Yeah. I think, when we look at from the state level, like I mentioned, the health insurance is a is a big part of it. The the raw milk and putting the the diet and the pet food is a big thing. There's always there's always a lot of legislation. Gosh. There's so many different things that we could talk about. But I think if when it it really is gonna, like, impact, I'll say, most of your listeners probably in terms of, like, what food they're eating, the food availability. We know that, there's some federal funding cuts that got made. Like, we had cuts to the food pantry program. It was a a program that allowed for farmers to sell their food at a profitable price for them to, like, local food pantries. Okay. And then those also translated over to school health, school lunch programs as well. And so we saw funding getting cut from that. And so you can you can look at a fresh food availability for those food pantries, especially in the rural parts, of not having that real food access is So they would essentially give money to the food pantries, and they could come to And then the food pantries could go directly to the farmers and buy, versus a lot of food pantries get their food from donations from large grocery stores that's, like, near shelf life. Right? And so when you're looking at the nutrient availability of this food Yeah. Like, they're pretty much getting the second stuff. And so it was allowing people that never had access to real fresh food to have that. And so we don't have that right now. So there's work to to try to get some of that back funded to help, again, the bigger overall community.
[01:46:09] Unknown:
I don't think a lot of people realize about Roy because I I acutely well, I was made acutely aware of it when I was living in Felicity.
[01:46:17] Unknown:
It's really sometimes not that easy to get food. Oh, we live in a food desert. A lot of people don't wanna like, we we don't have public transportation out here. We don't have Ubers. We don't have I mean, we we don't have a ways to get around. So And I don't know how far you are to, like, a Kroger or something, but Felicity was, like, forty minutes. Oh, so our closest Kroger would be the one that's either in well, we have the New Richmond IGA, which is about twelve minutes. So that's about the closest, the closest Kroger. There's one in, Amelia.
Yeah. That would be the closest or Anderson. So thirty to forty five minutes. To Mount Orbs. Or Mount Orbs. Yep. If you're out on that, that's probably still, yeah. I'm on the the Western part. So you're still about forty minutes from it. And then we have the Dollar General and Family Dollars, but their fresh food availability is not is not good. And, and so that's why we kinda built this store here. And so during the summer, we will have vegetables available from local farmers that people can come by. We did that last year. We didn't have refrigerator, so it made it a little bit more limited. So we'll have more availability this year to be able to offer that as well. We bring in apples from apple orchards here in Ohio. We had peaches. We had another customer that had peach trees in their backyard over on the West Side. Really? And so we bought peaches and brought them in. They're like, we have all these peaches, like, Ohio peaches, and they're like, they live on the West Side in some neighborhoods. I didn't even know there were Ohio peaches. There's Ohio peaches, and so we were able to to have those and sell them through here. So it was really offering So you can I mean, were they just, like, peaches in somebody's yard or something? Like, they had peach trees. Okay. Well, I didn't know that Dozens crates and crates of so I think that's, like, for us, it was, like, really building that connection and that bridge that people were looking for, because it's not here. I mean, yes. Kroger will deliver out here. Yeah. But at what cost? And, again, that doesn't build the local system. Like, for us, we are able to now employ, some high schoolers and give them that next step into their future career. We're able to donate back to our local school systems and do fundraisers and donate a half a hog that they can raffle off to use for different program. We're working with, even though our kids are homeschooled, we'll work with the local, like, with Felicity, and they're creating a grant to provide food education for their students in career development. And so we can work with them and provide them that opportunity and letting those students come here and seeing what not only us as agricultural, but, like, also a business. I think there's very few students that get to interact with entrepreneurs that you can build your own business. And what does that look like? What are considerations and things? And in terms of your your profit and loss and expenses and and management and cash flow that, a lot of people aren't exposed to anymore, because it's it's hard to us entrepreneurs, we're always really busy. And so and then you're like, who do I even talk to? And so finding those small businesses and having those conversations, because I think there's a lot of opportunities. As I mentioned, these business owners are are getting older and phasing out. They're looking for people to come in and and,
[01:49:09] Unknown:
train and Yeah. Pass that to the next generation. Katie and I talk about I mean, our oldest is five. So it's not like college is around the corner. It's quick, though. Yeah. It yeah. I've been realizing that. Every day I look at her, I'm like, oh, geez. She's taller. But we talk about college a lot and we but we're not sold on it, you know. And I would much rather see my son or my daughter go into a program like that where they actually because, you know, you go to school and you learn about business and theory. Mhmm. When you go to school and you learn about a lot of things in theory. You know, a lot of it's just kind of book learning and that's great. It has for something like epidemiology, I mean, you can't just wake up one day and say I'm gonna be an epidemiologist. Right. You've gotta go learn that. But there's so many other things. And frankly, like, if you wanna have a nice successful life,
[01:50:02] Unknown:
there is really a lot of opportunity to learning how to be a carpenter and starting your own business. Skills are definitely Yeah. Right. Right. They're in demand. Yeah. They are. Yeah. And that's where we were trying to kinda bridge that gap of, like, I think if there's even, like, some small small business programs because I was like, gosh. I was in school for not even I was in college for thirteen years. Yeah. And, getting advanced degrees, I was like, and I never took a business class. I was like, probably looking back, I was like, I probably should have taken a couple business classes, But at the end of the day, I was like, I never would have because I was like, I that wasn't the route I was ever gonna be on. And so one thing if you did take a business class, you get into a business Yeah. And you realize, like, how do you this is Yeah. This is completely different. You know? Part of it. Right. You have to have that real experience to see really removes those layers of what that actually looks like and get to it. And so one thing we're seeing even working with the grant career center students, there's some of these, programs that they wanna go into that maybe require or these their skills that they want, they require specific certification.
Well, there's no funding available Yeah. To get a certificate for $2,500. Like, that's it. They can go you can get a hundred thousand dollar loan to go to college, a 40 degree on and come out with a piece of paper that has no skilled training. Right. And but they can't get a loan for $2,500 for a small business loan. Right. And so that's why we've been trying to bridge this gap too. So I've sat on several different scholarship committees both here at the county, at the state level, and the national level of, like, changing these scholarships to allow for these career focused students Yeah. To have access to funding. Yeah. Because that was where I saw, like, a huge gap. And I I mean, I was very much of a college that was always my my plan for what I was doing. But now seeing that, I was like, this is this isn't for everybody. And, but we need to make it easier for these students that they've some of them, they are hard workers, and they they want they want to do it. This is they know exactly what they wanna do. But by golly, they need $2,500. So it's like finding a small business to, like, loan them the money to go get the certification.
[01:52:01] Unknown:
Which you I mean, that is so crazy. You'll give you'll give a 19 year or an 18 year old kid hundreds of thousands of dollars Mhmm. That they cannot go bankrupt on. If they're saddled with that for the rest of their lives. They're going down a career that yeah. Never it doesn't it's not gonna make enough back based on, like, what the current pay grade is to And you'll just throw all kinds of money at that person. But then you look at a person who wants to work and be in the workforce and potentially start their own business Yeah. And you won't give them $2,500.
[01:52:28] Unknown:
Yeah. And I that's where I think we can collectively make a difference in, like, through Farm Bureau and other organizations that we do have, like, continue to lobbying and showing that, like, making there are some small business things as, like, from an agricultural standpoint through the farm search farm service agency and the USDA,
[01:52:46] Unknown:
but they're not super available yet like they would be if you were going to, like, a four year Yeah. College. On small business I mean, it's kinda cliche to say, but small business really does that's how the country runs. I can't remember the statistic, but it's some absurd percentage of people are employed by small businesses. I don't know exactly how you classify I'm sure there's a classification for small business, but, I mean, that's that's how people work. I mean, the entrepreneurs are incredibly important for prosperity.
[01:53:15] Unknown:
Yeah. And I think we sometimes we don't look at like, we don't see a lot of those independent businesses as being a collective like they are. Yeah. And I think I mean, we I know we have our, I don't know, our county level. What's the different organizations that we can be a part of, like, the businessmen's
[01:53:34] Unknown:
associations and stuff. Oh, oh, like, Kiwanis or Yeah. Where,
[01:53:38] Unknown:
I mean, the Chamber of Commerce is the county Chamber of Commerce. Yeah. And I we haven't gotten involved in that, because I feel like it's just another thing. I was like, we probably show showed to see what resources they have available to to connect us all and stuff. But I mean, it sounds like the Farm Bureau essentially fills that role It does. For farmers. Yeah. So
[01:53:56] Unknown:
so if somebody wanted to do what you did, what would what would your advice be to them?
[01:54:03] Unknown:
My number one I'm gonna say is come and and get experience. Yeah. Make sure you're building those relationships. Just go show up. See what you can do. We actually have a young man. He was recommended to us, through another farm, and they said, hey. We're we're doing our sheep sharing. He just started showing up, and he shows up every couple hours, a week. Yeah. And now we're like, can we trust this guy? And now I'm like, okay. He, like, here's these really skilled tasks that he was able to to learn and do. And I think that's the the number one thing is just getting experience to do it.
It's gonna take a lot of grit. Yeah. It you're not gonna with any small business, not even just farming, like, you're gonna have another job to, like, help get you started and pay for it and realizing. But really just having faith in yourself that you can do it. Yeah. Find people to cheer you on along the way. I've been very fortunate. I come from a family of entrepreneurs. So my dad and, I have an uncle, a couple of uncles who have recently, like they sit down with me. It's it's not easy. My brother, he's a business person. That's what he does for a living too. And have somebody go through with your businesses and your numbers to look at it, that can be real with you. Yeah. I think that's the hard thing too. Like, finding somebody that can actually look through the numbers, help you understand. Honest feedback is Yeah. It's not easy. It's rare, and it it sucks. Yeah. But And then they they pushed us to really reach our goals and set our set our goals a lot higher than even what we thought was gonna be possible, and, that that's been our big thing even this past year for us.
I had my uncle. Like, he really set us up to he pushed us hard to to to get where we need to be this year to keep going into next year, and we've, like, been crushing those goals. And it's I know it's because of him and my dad pushing us that we were able to do that. So there are people out there that are willing to to sit down and and work it with you and Yeah. And figure out what that business plan is. I don't have a formal business plan per se,
[01:56:00] Unknown:
but I have a I work for a guy. Kind of a road map of what that looks like. I work for a guy who was starting a it's a very bizarre business. But one of the things that he said was is the the first thing you get rid of when you start a business is your business plan. It's like you get you come up with this plan on paper and then you get into it. It's like, oh, okay. Well, none of this is valid anymore because I didn't think of these. 90% of what we do is never on our original business plan Right. For what that looks like. I still think it's it's a good exercise for people who wanna start a business to kind of corral your thoughts and get you started. On what you But it's just like any plan. Like, you you don't wanna be so inflexible that you don't, you know,
[01:56:38] Unknown:
I guess, innovate or move away from it. Right. And I think that's the the biggest thing is, like, when starting our business is the reason I started doing it, I noticed, like, here in Cincinnati, when I came in, I was like, nobody was, like, direct marketing. Mhmm. Like, very few people were direct marketing. We had people who in our community, like, yeah, they'll they'll sell a beef share. Yeah. But they don't have a website. Yeah. Well, it's like the Johnson's. Like, we we just know the Johnson's. Are. Right? Like, just through relationships and stuff. But I didn't see anybody nobody living in Hamilton County. Very few people living in Hamilton County have a farmer as a neighbor. Yeah. It's easy when you're living out here in Felicity, like, drive down the road. A lot of customers in Hamilton. Yeah. In Hamilton County. Yeah. That's the majority of our customers. Subscription thing I think is is We have customers all across the country. We ship to Really? Yeah. East Coast to West Coast, Florida, Maine, California, Colorado, everywhere between. So That's awesome. I mean, I I Congratulations. Yeah. I wanna focus and, you know, really serve our our I consider our local community Hamilton County, Clermont County as our our main target areas. But at the end of the day, if there's customers across the country that they they love our family and what we do, and, they they trust us. They build a relationship. Well, trust us. From that Especially with when it comes to people growing your food. Yeah. Yeah. Trust is is huge. A big part of it. Do you partner with any restaurants or anything? Like, have you tried doing it? We we don't. Just out of curiosity? Yeah. It's it's a it's a it's a hard situation. Because, you know, restaurants work on a really small margins. Oh, yeah. And so we've had, like, a local food truck. It's got, like, ground beef and stuff from us to make sure they have really good high quality ground beef. It's still kind of a big trend, like, farm to table type stuff? It is. Yeah. And I think a lot of restaurants, making sure that we the ones we've worked with, like, those they'll buy a half a cow. So and they'll do truly, like, nose detail Yeah. Yeah. Within their menu. But if somebody comes to be like, hey. We just wanna source rib eyes, and we don't wanna pay, you know, cool set of price. I was like, yeah. We don't we don't have a hundred thousand cows. I can't Right. I can't. Source you that. But because when you look at I'll use a a half a cow for instance. If somebody buys a half a cow, will I get 12 rib eyes off of that half? But then I still have a 50 pounds of ground beef. Well Right. I've You got to do something with it. Go bankrupt only selling rib eyes. I have to do the rest the ground beef. And so sometimes we'll be able to move their ground beef through, some restaurants. But from right now, it's it was never part of our business plan. So just direct to curious. I'd rather be able to find households that want that whole nose to tail experience. Right.
So I do have we are in one other it's not in Claremont County. It's in Hamilton County. Okay. It's called the Ohio barbecue store. Okay. And so we have a freezer down there. It was opened by a gentleman named Will who actually lives right here behind us. Oh, really? Here in Clermont County, and, he's a big barbecue pit master, opened a barbecue story. He has, like, all the smokers and grills and all the fun things like that and all the seasonings, and he has classes on cooking. Oh, really? And so we have a freezer with our meat. He wanted local meat down there. So he did have County? It is in Hamilton. Right in, in Anderson. Oh, nice. Yeah. Right off Richmond Avenue. Yeah. Yeah. Kinda where the old Panera used to be across from Kroger. I don't I don't know. Oh, yeah. I'm I am directionally challenged. I, at any given time, have Well, it's a high barbecue store. It's, like, right there in Anderson. Okay. Of everything. So if you're around the Anderson area, you can get your beef. Yeah. Right there. Right there. Yeah. There's a lot of people come out here to the farm. Yeah. But, yeah, you can get It's a wonderful drive. There. Yeah. Even even on a rainy day, it's still nice to I can get from here to down I used to go to Findlay Market. I could get from here on a Sunday morning at 5AM to Findlay Market in thirty five minutes. That's not bad. No. No. Pulling a trailer. Yeah.
[02:00:09] Unknown:
I think and I'll check the time, but I'm pretty sure we've been at this. Oh, yeah. I actually have to take my daughter to swim class soon. But before we wrap everything up, why don't you just tell people where they can find you,
[02:00:21] Unknown:
how they can get involved, just promote yourself as much as you want. Yeah. So Flourish and Roam flourishandroam.com. We're on social media, Instagram, Facebook, kinda everywhere in between. Our farms out here in Moscow. Our website has all of our information. Our farm store self serve. Cuppin come shop seven days a week. Nice. Excellent. Well, thank you again, and, I'm gonna call it a successful podcast. Absolutely. Thank you.
[02:00:49] Unknown:
Let me get this off. Thank you so much. Well, I hope you enjoyed that interview. I enjoyed it like I enjoy all of these interviews so far. And thanks again to Sarah for having us out to her farm and and for taking the time to talk to us. I think we're obviously gonna have to have her back on at some point because I don't think you, you know, you don't meet somebody with a PhD in animal science that actually has hands on experience running a farm. I don't think you meet that kind of person every day, so we'll definitely have to have her back. I was also able to score some pork chops from her, some from their, Berkshire hogs, and they look absolutely delicious. They're it's crazy. I've never seen pork chops like it. They're kind of marbled like a like a rib eye. I'm really looking forward to eating them, and I'll be sure to tell everybody how how they are. So let's get into some events.
This Friday, May 16, there's the Homeschool Discovery Day Creek Crawl that's gonna be at 1PM at the Catherine Stagmarr Park. And in case I'm pronouncing that incorrectly, it is 6662 Goshen Road, Goshen, Ohio. And it's just a hands on science exploration for homeschoolers. Recommended ages are five to 13, and, the students, they'll just wait in a creek, learn about fossils, aquatic insects, creek wildlife. It sounds like a really great program for homeschools, for homeschoolers. The event is free, but you should pre register, because space is limited.
This weekend, mustard seed market, that's gonna be the sixteenth from four to 8PM, the seventeenth, from 10AM to 4PM, and the nineteenth from 10AM to 3PM at the Claremont County Fairgrounds. I actually won't be here this weekend, so, unfortunately, I'm gonna have to miss this. My wife is definitely gonna be going, though. And there's just, you know, hundred local shops and small businesses and live music and food and fun. It's a really great event. And so if you're looking for some place to take your family, and spend a nice afternoon, I would I would definitely go to the Mustard Seed Market.
This Friday, the sixteenth, is the sweetheart stroll at Pattison Park from 08:30 to 09:30PM. And it's just a date night. You get to, you know, take your date to the park, and it's gonna be lit by lanterns, and you can pick up a lantern at the trailhead and just kinda stroll through the park at sunset. It sounds like a really great date night, and it's free, so even better. There's the Adventure Gear Expo trip planning and ideation. That's gonna be this Saturday, the seventeenth, from 04:30 to 07:30PM, and that's a drop in. So you're not gonna have to sit there for three hours. You can just come whenever whenever, whenever you can.
And what you do is you just learn about, the parks free adventure pack, gear loan program. So they've got all this, kind of outdoor gear that you can you can, use for free. So if you're thinking about getting into, you know, some more serious outdoor activities, this is a good way to kinda dip your toe in into that hobby. There'll be, park staff will be there, and they'll answer any questions and they'll help you kinda plan your outdoor adventures. And this one, again, is also free. So I would check that out if you're if you're looking into getting into the hiking and camping, but, don't wanna sink a whole bunch of money into, into the gear. There's the, Spring River Paddle. That's gonna be this Saturday, the seventeenth, from two to 3PM, and it's a guided canoe event adventure on the Ohio River, and you get to explore the river's ecology.
You might paddle into some backwater tributaries. I think that's weather dependent, the tributaries, but, canoes and life jackets are provided. You should arrive fifteen minutes early, so get there by 01:45. And it's completely free, but it's only for ages 12 and up. So no no kids. Obviously, that would be a nightmare to bring, like, a five year old on a canoe in the Ohio River, so don't don't try to do that. The River Days Festival, that's gonna be Thursday, May 22 through Saturday, May 24 at Front Street in New Richmond. And it's just a multi day festival. It's gonna have carnival rides, live entertainment, food, crafts, family friendly activities.
So it sounds like it's just gonna be a a really fun time for everybody. So go check that out. Cooking with Cicadas. I think Kaye talked about this. I can't remember if she talked about it during, the interview or after the interview when we were just kinda chatting. But Cooking with Cicadas, it's gonna be Friday, May 23, 06:30PM to 07:30PM at Clingman Park. I didn't realize this was gonna be a cicada year, so I guess we should all prepare for that. But this event is gonna be, it's a short hike, and then you get to eat cicadas. I'll be honest, that that's not my thing, but if you're looking to eat cicadas, I'd say go for it. They'll have some precooked, cicadas you can and you can experiment with kind of different seasonings and toppings.
I think Kay said she hasn't eaten one, but she's gonna eat one. So if you do go to that, make sure you you hold her to that and that she actually eats a cicada. And the last one we have is flower pounding, and I know I'm gonna pronounce this one wrong. It is flower pounding tatakizomi. I think it's it's a Japanese word, so I hope I got even in the ballpark of that. But that's gonna be Saturday, May 24 from 2PM to 03:30PM at Clingdon Park. And what this is is there's a a Japanese art of, oh, man, Ta Takizome. But what it is is you dye things. You take a flower and a hammer, and you hit the flower with the hammer on the thing that you're dying, and it dyes it.
So you'll learn obviously how to do that, but you also learn how to identify common flowers, and you get to dye your own handkerchief. So actually seems pretty cool, and possibly a good way to take out some frustrations. So if you're interested in that, and I'm not gonna try to pronounce that again, but if you're interested in it, I would go check that out. And before we wrap this up, I'm just gonna make another pitch to to get in touch because we wanna hear from you. We're on Facebook. You can go there. You can message me on Facebook. You can leave comments, and we also have an email, info@let'stalkclaremont.com, because we want boots on the ground information. We wanna know what's going on in your communities. We wanna know we should be talking about, who we should be talking to, what what I'm getting wrong, all that kind of stuff.
So if you've got something to tell us, please head over to Facebook or shoot us a message at info@let'stalkclaremont.com. That's all we got for today. And, again, I really appreciate everybody that's listening.
We've been living in sin so long. All Hello, and welcome to the seventh episode of Let's Talk Claremont. Really appreciate you listening, and we are going to start this as we always do with a little bit of news. The first thing I came across, was kind of by mistake, but the Ohio Department of Education, like most states, I'm sure, does standardized testing to just kind of assess the competency of of students. What's interesting though is they use AI to score these tests. Now for something like biology or chemistry or or math, that seems pretty straightforward because those answers are typically pretty black and white, but they also use it to score students' essays, their writing.
And they transitioned to the scoring method in 2018. Now the Ohio Department of Education doesn't call it AI, but it uses machine learning and statistical models to kind of replicate human scoring decisions. So, you know, arose by any other name. Right? The platform they use is called Cambium, and I hope I'm pronouncing Cambium right, but it's Cambium Assessment, and more than half of The US states actually use this platform. I don't know if they use it to score writing, but they use it in their scoring. I actually found this out, because as I was going through school board meetings, I I saw a video and it turns out that students at, middle school students at West Claremont, they they dug into this a little bit more because they looked at essays that this AI scored well, and they found out they didn't really like them. They didn't, read particularly well.
And that's because AI, when it's scoring these things, it's preferencing stuff like large vocabulary words and complex sentence structures, but it's not really accounting for any kind of style or personality in the writing, which, you know, in some contexts, you don't want a very stylized essay, but in others, it's it's it's necessary. And they did such a good job that they presented their findings in front of some national organizations. They presented to our our one of the representatives in Claremont, Adam Bird, which, you know, congratulations to them. It was very impressive work what they did.
I I bring this up because I find it concerning as somebody with kids who are probably going to be, taking these tests at some point in their in their lives. Like I said before, for kind of cut and dry subjects like math and and, you know, chemistry or biology or maybe history, I think, would probably be tough, but writing in particular. We don't write for robots. We write for people. And I I think it's a bad idea to teach students to write to make AI happy. That that doesn't seem like what we should be doing. Now I know that you'd probably need an army of people pay an army of people to actually assess these the writing of these students, but so I don't I don't know if there's a good fix for it. I just don't think this is a particularly good idea.
So moving on from that, Batavia Township, they're conducting a parks and events survey. So if you've got an opinion about the parks and the events that they've been putting on, you can go over to bataviatownship.org and take that survey. They also launched an Instagram account. They don't have a link to this on their website just yet, but they seem to be doing a pretty good job of posting zoning hearings and public notices and stuff like that. So if you're looking for a place to keep up to date with, Batavia Township notices, I would, go over there and follow them on Instagram. They have a Facebook page, but if you prefer Instagram, like I think a lot of people do, I would follow them over there.
Williamsburg, they're gonna start, some street paving in July, and it's gonna affect North Eighth Street, Eighth Street, Hudson Street, Mulberry Street, and Jasmine Avenue. In Milford, the Milford the Milford High School boys volleyball team, won the first Eastern Cincinnati Conference championship. So congratulations to them. So I I've in the last couple episodes, I've I've kind of forgotten to do this, but, I do want to talk about getting in touch with us. You know, we have a Facebook page. We have, an email info at let's talk clairemont dot com, because I I really want to engage the listeners of this program.
You know, I can do my best job of of googling around and and looking at, you know, council meetings and school board meetings and news articles and all of that stuff. But some of the best information I could possibly get is just boots on the ground. You know? Tell tell me tell us what is going on in your community. You know? Tell me what I'm doing bad. You know? I'm always happy to have some constructive criticism. Tell me what we should be talking about. Give me ideas for interviews. You know? That all of that stuff would be great and very helpful. So if you've got something to tell us or you just wanna, you know, keep up to date with what we're doing, please follow us on Facebook or get in touch with us at info@let'stalkclaremont.com.
For the interview today, we talked to Sarah Ison, one of the owners of Flourish and Roam down in Moscow. Her and her husband have a a really interesting or pretty great story. They both got their PhDs in animal science down in Texas, and then they decided to move back to Clermont County and start their farm, Flourish and Roam. And in the interview, we talked to Sarah about, you know, about, obviously, about her farm, talk a lot about raw milk, and in particular, a two a two milk, which, I think she said she's one of two dairies in the county that actually produces a two a two milk, so that's kind of a big deal. We also talked to her about owning a small business, regenerative farming, how to incorporate local healthy food into your diet, and a lot. This is actually one of our longest interviews.
It's not one it is the longest interview. So, and, you know, again, I always say this about pretty much everybody I've interviewed so far, but I mean it about everybody I who I've interviewed so far. It was a great conversation, and I think I enjoyed it, and I really hope you do too. So thanks again for listening, and, let's get to the interview. Alright. Well,
[00:07:07] Unknown:
I think we'll just get into it. Perfect. And and why don't you just tell everybody who you are and and and what you do? Awesome. My name is Sarah Ison. I own Flourish and Roam along with my husband, Josh. We're located in Moscow in the Southern part of Clermont County. We pasture raised beef, pork, lamb, chicken, and also have a raw a two a two dairy herd share. So I I know we were talking about the dairy a lot, but can you just go into what a two a two actually is and why that's a kind of a big deal? So a two a two is a specific type of protein in all dairy cattle. If you look back at history, it used to be a two a two. Mhmm. And through just selection of a genetic mutation, nothing that humans did, it would just occurred naturally and this a one protein popped up. Okay. Well, when this a one protein popped up, these cows automatically just caused increased milk production. And so when you look at the economic profile of it, they started selecting for this a one protein and higher milk production. And so it really kind of drowned out the a two a two gene from being present. And so we raise Guernseys is a we have all Guernseys, one Jersey cow, and you can look for this a two a two protein. And one thing that we really liked for it is a lot of people who'll say they are lactose intolerant.
They actually aren't lactose intolerant. They actually just can't handle the a one protein and I like to describe it as your intestinal lining is really has these round balls. Mhmm. I know you can't see if you're listening to it, but it's like a little c shape and, the a one the a two protein will be really smooth like a round, ball that'll sit real nicely, and it's just gonna fit right on the intestinal lining in your gut. Yeah. But a a one protein might have like a little jagged edge and it might have Okay. A triangle shape. And so once it hits that that intestinal line, it kinda can rough it up. And so that's kind of the digestive upset that some people get. So if you aren't able to consume milk or dairy products, I always recommend maybe try a two a two and see if your digest can actually handle that, a two protein. And so we're finding we have friends and neighbors who their kids can't have could never have dairy products, and now they can actually have a two a two dairy milk in our milk. So that's like one of our our biggest success stories that we can continue to, just drive us forward every day is hearing, those stories of how, you know, especially kids, or, older women, my mom, not not old, but as she's gone as she's When she get older, your Yeah. Your body changes and, yeah, you start noticing those changes. And, she's able to have the cream in her milk, from our a two a two cows and with her coffee in the morning. She thought that she would originally the last five or six years that she wasn't gonna have dairy products. That's awesome. So, yeah. That's the the fun part of it. There really aren't too many a two a two dairies around here, are there? There's not. There probably are a two well, I think in Clermont County, I think we're one of two. Yep. Gareon Clermont County now. There'll be a couple of people who have a couple of dairy cows off and on. Sure. But for the most part, you really have to do a genetic test. It's a simple blood test to see what they are and and select for it intentionally.
[00:10:11] Unknown:
And I I guess we probably should have backed up on this because you you do have a PhD in animal science as well as your husband. I do. Yes. We have. We have. So so you can get pretty nerdy about this if If we if we wanna go down that track. Oh, we definitely can. I I absolutely will. So how did how did you come to start this? I mean, you've got your doctorates and and then you decide to come out to we were Moscow Moscow, Ohio
[00:10:33] Unknown:
to start a farm. Yeah. So I grew up right here in Clermont County. My actually, my husband and I both did. I'm went to Felicity. My husband went to Batavia. Yeah. And so we're very familiar. My family just lives about a mile and a half, from the farm that we're sitting on right now. We went to undergraduate, graduate school in at Texas Tech, and this was never never in the game plan, never coming back. What was in the game plan? Definitely never farming. So What was the plan after getting PhDs? Well, we we gave ourselves six months. We had our daughter when we were living in Texas, and we were like, you know what? We really kinda wanna have our daughter around family, her grandparents. Our grandparents were both important to my husband and I. And so we gave ourselves six months to move back to Clermont County and find a job. Yep. We could, you know, support us. I was offered a a post doctorate position to work remotely on epidemiological, research Sure. That I could do remotely. So I had a job coming back. So is your is your specialty epidemiology? It is. Both yeah. Yeah. Technically, both of us Okay. Are epidemiology. So, like, animal epidemiology. Animal health. We looked a lot of zoonotic diseases. So diseases that can pass between animals and people back and forth is really where we focused on. Well,
[00:11:43] Unknown:
I'd feel remiss if I didn't ask you about bird flu because there was a whole bunch of bird flu stories, and I think people getting scared about bird flu. Do you have a take on that? Or Yeah. The If you don't wanna talk about it, that's why. Like, I don't wanna No. No. The AVNI I know there's hot button issues. I tried I wanna, like You know job this fall. That's one reason that kinda makes us a little unique to be doing what we're doing. Right? Like, raising animals in a way that's different than maybe a commercial Mhmm. Facility, different than anything we worked in, from a research point. About it too is before we started recording, especially with raw milk, I mean, you need to be very, very, very clean. So I mean Yeah. Being diligent in your cleanliness, handling us,
[00:12:23] Unknown:
your animal health, watching your animals, knowing how to to handle everything, everything with avian influenza. It's, yeah, that's definitely a rabbit hole we could could go down. Listen. If you don't want to talk No. I I think that Frankly, I I mean,
[00:12:37] Unknown:
because I've I've heard in the news. I've heard people say like, oh, no. Raw milk and bird flu. Raw milk and bird flu. And for the life of me, I'm not an epidemiologist.
[00:12:45] Unknown:
I'm just a a guy, but I have never heard of anybody getting the flu from drinking milk. So there's there's different strains of flu and different strains of influenza. Same thing that they push to have your influenza vaccine every year, it's it's different. So with the avian influenza, it at this point, and my husband, I have the same kind of take on it. It's it's endemic. It's worldwide. It's not gonna go away. Right? Certainly. So, if we're not seeing people get sick from it, if we're not seeing people dying from it, yes, I think we should monitor it and see what we can do from an animal health standpoint.
They are seeing large they were seeing large flocks of chickens, dying from it. But from an economical standpoint as well, I don't think that it's, the best practice to go in and just kill a a million bird flock to try to control it, when it's spread it's already in the wild bird population. It's spread by birds flying over your pasture and pooping or pooping in the dairy barn. So that's kind of where we're our take is on it. Like, at this point, like, it it it's endemic. It's not going to go away. There are I know that there's changes, and they've been announced, like, from the state level even here, the the lax the the regulations on what that looks like. But there's you'll see across the state even now, there's county fairs that are not allowing poultry at their county fair. It's still a possibility even here in Clermont County that the the four h members or FFA members have their birds that they're raising now for the county fair at the July.
In the July or the July, they could come down and say you're not allowed to have those birds at the fair. So it it's still a But they're not coming in and telling you gotta kill all your birds. No. They're not gonna tell you you can go in and and kill. There are certain regulations in place that, depending on the flock size that you have. We don't have enough birds on our property that they're not routinely testing for it. Okay. But there's been a lot a big pushback from state poultry organizations to not allow those mass, extaminations of of those flocks. So I think that's probably the big push. Well, no. Also, in in
[00:14:51] Unknown:
correct me if I'm wrong because, again, you're obviously the expert. But it just seems like it would be a better idea
[00:14:59] Unknown:
to let the birds get bird flu and the ones that live well. Those are the ones that probably are gonna be okay the next time bird flu comes around. Right. But if you go through and kill all the birds, even the ones that And be able to create that immunity. Exactly. And it it that's kind of our take on it too with I'll use broiler chickens. Mhmm. And broiler chickens and turkeys, you can kinda group together. For the most part, they have a really short lifespan in terms of when you're processing, a harvest ready bird compared to a lane bird flock that might be, you know, two years. And so they could be able to potentially pass it on Yeah. To another the next generation of birds. And so that's where a lot of that was coming from control to make sure that didn't happen as well. But I agree. I think that you're building up kinda that strong immunity against, what's being passed on. And we look at it now since we're actually on more from the boots from the ground side versus the academia or the research side of it is how do we mend those two sides from a research and and a government maybe legislation side of it to the actual on farm practicality of what this actually looks like. So if you heard about bird flu or avian influenza in your milk, well, they're looking from genetically at a small segment of DNA Right. Through a molecular detection method that is not PCR?
There's PCR as one, yeah, way to do it. So you're looking for If I'm wrong, well, PCR is just an amplification process. Correct. And so it doesn't mean it's actually,
[00:16:29] Unknown:
living. Right. Or So so even if there's maybe it's not a live viral fragment. It could Well, it doesn't tell you about the load either, does it? It just Yeah. You just set your PCR up so that
[00:16:40] Unknown:
it'll replicate whatever you're looking for. Yeah. There's there are different ways to look to see what the initial replication based on the number of cycles that you get a detectable level Okay. That is there. But for the most part, it's still not gonna tell you what that is. But if it's not a live viral product protocol that's in there, and then again, like you mentioned, if you have a good gut health microbiome, the virus that could potentially be in there is probably not. Right. I've never got a flu from drinking. Yeah. It's a different you're not gonna get the kind of flu like you would normally associate between influenza between people. And especially in our dairy cows, we are gonna start noticing if they do get sick, we're we're gonna start noticing probably that something's wrong before you as a person is gonna drink our milk. You're gonna notice that their milk production is going down. We're gonna notice that maybe they're not holding weight or gaining weight, the way that they should be. Right. And that's gonna say red fun to us. Let's let's see what else was going on with this animal before it goes into Right. Human edible milk products.
[00:17:38] Unknown:
So they're my wife and I drink raw milk, and and we love it. But like we talked about a little bit before, I was incredibly skeptical about it. Can you just talk about the safety of raw milk and how it's really at least in my mind, it doesn't seem to be anything to be really scared of. It it it's more delicious than normal milk. So It is pretty delicious. And we mentioned our kids definitely can notice and throw a fit if they don't have their Absolutely. Their full milk,
[00:18:02] Unknown:
available to them. And for us, I I'm only gonna speak to our raw milks in general because that's what I'm experienced with. And when we started looking at, we came from a real scientific background. Walnut was huge taboo. Everything we believed in, we wrote dissertations on pathogenic bacteria that come from dairy kettles, and and and so it was really important for us to, like, have a full grasp of what this system looked like. And as we started on our own health journey of having our pasteurized meats and really looking at, like, how else can we heal here up heal our gut Mhmm. And making sure that we're supplying our body with the most bio avail viable bioavailable nutrients possible, raw milk kind of just seemed like the next step for our family.
And, we knew in order for it to we had our youngest son would have been like just over two at the time, and I'm not gonna be fully as a mom. I'm I'm still gonna be skeptical and and and making sure that I'm keeping my kids safe at all costs. And if it was gonna be that we knew that in order to have the sanitary practices that we wanted to from how our cows are milked, how we handle each of our teeth, how we clean our our cows before milking, how we handle our equipment. We had to do it ourselves. So that was like putting our our full trust in into the whole system because we know how complicated it is. Yep. Our milk is not the cheapest on the market, but we are very diligent in replacing our hoses because I think a lot of the the other ways that you can get sick from raw milk is actually not from the dairy cow and it's not from the bacteria in the soil.
It's actually from bacteria that can grow in your milking equipment If it's not cleaned and sterilized properly, you're not Imagine it's like lines in a bar. Exactly. Yeah. So you're cleaning them constantly every single day, and you're replacing your lines, you know, on a a very routine schedule. And that comes at an extra cost along with that. And so that was our biggest thing if we're gonna make sure that we're getting all those bioavailable nutrients that we're having full control of the system,
[00:20:01] Unknown:
and then showing that same confidence that we can show for our our consumers and our customers as well. And I think if people wanted to get into raw milk because, like I said, we use AeroCrest up in, And Goshen. And Goshen. We went there and met them. Like, we we you can go and look at their cows. You can go and look at what they do.
[00:20:19] Unknown:
So I guess I I would say if anybody's into raw milk, make sure you do that. Like, know who's making your milk. They'll just, like, get a herd share somewhere and I think that's a big thing. If if somebody doesn't want you on their farm, we're we're pretty transparent with having people out and we want them to see. We want their kids to see where milk comes from. We want them to see where their meat comes from and their eggs and like it it that's kind of part of it and why we want customers to come here to pick their milk up is because having that relationship like I'm kind of I know I'm I'll say it. I am anti let's make this legal because I think there I think there are going to be a lot of red tape and a lot of Yeah. Things that go along with doing The system seems to be working. I mean, you can go and get a herd chair and Yeah. Absolutely. Or you can get And pet milk. Well, the the pet milk thing, I don't know if you know, but, last week, the ODA announced that you actually have to put a FDA approved food dye in your pet milk now. I did not know that. Yeah. So it has to be a gray to a black FDA. Oh, really? You have to they have to sell. Into into do No kidding. Yeah. I did not know that. When was this? Last week. So it's it's really new. That is new. Yeah. Because I know we've we drink tons of milk, so Katie picked up some pet milk somewhere that we absolutely gave to our pets. Yes. Yeah. So making sure that for us, it's that because of it's a very it's a it's a delicate product. Yeah. We wanna make sure people aren't, where I see a lot of issues is you can go to any big grocery store and walk by and you see somebody stocking the shelves. Well, how much time is that product setting out in the open air environment from moving from one truck from the farm and then it goes to the tank facility and it's all chilled, but then it gets unloaded at and out of a a big shipping truck at the grocery store, and then it sits outside. How how long is it before it actually gets chilled back? And so there's gonna be a lot of temperature abuse. And for us, that's why we're like, this can't be a widely available product. Like, you can't put this through the mass grocery system that's currently there. It's it's not so much it's not from the farm. That's not where the issue is gonna come from. It's not actually gonna come from the bottle or it's gonna come from that that last final mile, as I say.
And sitting on a truck for five hours. Yeah. But then it's gonna get unloaded from the truck at the I'm not gonna name large grocery stores, but it's gonna sit literally on their floor outside Yeah. Before it gets chilled again. And so you can't have an unpasteurized product and let it sit out Right. For because it just turns into a petri dish. I mean, that's Eventually, I mean, it's it's a our milk is really clean. Like, we have a hard time making yogurt out of it. I do add Oh, really? Active cultures into it, and it'll it'll take a little while, for it to really turn into a really thick what we are used to as Americans as a thick yogurt.
So it it takes a while because the bacteria load is so low. Like, it's almost it's undetectable when we do our our daily, milk test here at the farm and our our weekly larger testing, and so making sure that we're adding that back in. But I think there's a lot more use a lot more opportunities for mishandling of the product, as it goes into a larger commerce system.
[00:23:16] Unknown:
Well, you're also not just a dairy because you were sitting next to a freezer full of delicious looking meat. One of the things that Katie and I have been having trouble finding are hog shares. Can you talk about the hogs that you have? And because the the pork chops in there look crazy. They look delicious. Yeah. We we we raise pastured beef Mhmm. Pork, lamb, and chicken.
[00:23:41] Unknown:
The hogs that we raise are % Berkshire, and they're meat quality tested Berkshire, which means that the the breeding that they've done for them, they'll take a pork chop, and they will put it through a panel testing to say what's the juiciness, what's the tenderness, what's the flavor profile of this. We also wanted an animal that was maybe a little bit slower growing. They can handle being out on pasture. All of our sows will farrow out on pasture. Okay.
[00:24:04] Unknown:
Do they tear up the fields?
[00:24:06] Unknown:
For the most part, you have to manage it pretty well, but they have their area. As long as you give them a good enough space to kinda roam and you've given them good diversity of soil. So we've been putting them in an area maybe that had a little bit of historically, had been crop farmed before. Let them root that up and then you come back and in the spring you put down some seed, let that grow and so that there's always that forage coverage kind of coming back on. And, we never wanted to farrow pigs. It's a lot of work especially pasture farrowing them. We had always heard and they can be having small children, having sows in the boar around can be dangerous. Yeah. But we People don't realize pigs are They they can be dangerous. Yeah. They're Yeah. They can be dangerous. Get hand fed every day, and my husband Josh hand feeds them every day. So they're they're pretty friendly. I mean, you never Is it hard when they have to go to the abattoir?
The the sows that you eventually have to call. Yes. I mean, you you get your favorites Yeah. Yeah. Every now and then. You know, they always say don't name them and, you know, you gotta look at them kind of in personally, but I feel like that's Right. Near impossible for anybody. My husband and I, we both grew up in four h and raising animals since we were nine and going through that. Like, I remember my first, beef, my first feeder calf that I I showed, and I cried at the fair. Yeah. My dad bought it back, and then it it jumped the fence and chased my grandma across the yard through a barn. And at that day, I called my neighbor. I said, come get this gal. And that was for me that was like, okay. They as much love as you put into, they're still an animal at the end of the day, and there's a purpose that God gave us, to have them to nourish our families.
And, yeah, not every day is easy on us. Yeah. You do build that, especially having our kids. I sometimes worry that raising our kids around it all the time, everybody's so fortunate and you have to raise your kids this way. But as a mom, I sometimes look at us like, am I? Like, I don't wanna desensitize them as well, but they also knew that death is a part of life. Yeah. And, That's just a tough balance for any parent. It is. You know, it's But I it's You wanna keep your kids Yeah. You wanna protect so innocent. But And and but they know. I mean, it's it's great. My three year old, he was like, climb underneath the dairy cow. I wanna check her teats out. It's like but they that he knows that's where his milk comes from. And so they know, like, how we can best treat our animals with what we're doing, and that gets them even more respect to understand. Like, our kids will eat meat before they eat anything else because they know they worked for that. They're not gonna waste it. It's not gonna get thrown in the garbage can. They're gonna eat that whole Yeah. That whole hamburger at the end of the night, because they put in just as much time and and work. Is that one of yours? He is.
[00:26:37] Unknown:
He's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he our daughter was born in Texas, but we moved home when she was, like, five months old. So she didn't she knows she was born in Texas. She's a a Texan at heart. She knows that. At heart. But, yeah. She's I've worked in Texas for about a year or two. A little less than that. I was, oil rigs. Okay. Because I I studied geology as an undergraduate, and then I went on to study creative writing. And there's not a whole lot of jobs for poets out there. So I was like, I'll go I'll go to the oil field because they pay money. The other thing is yeah. But I love Texas. If we did too. It was If it wasn't for the heat. Like, I can't We moved out there. The summer we moved out there was,
[00:27:23] Unknown:
the year of the haboob that came through, like, the big wall. Oh, it's like the you know, on on Aladdin, the big wall of, sand. Oh, yeah. Yeah. We that was they're like, there's dust storms and sandstorms out here. Well, that was our first sandstorm. I was like, there's no way people inhabit this place because it was like this 50 foot wall of sand. They're like, no. This is like something that happens every, like, two hundred years. So that was a a new experience. I'm like, but we we enjoyed it. When we were there, it was the best thing for us in school, and we knew that, like I said before, Texas, it was Texas Tech. It was Texas Tech. So, I mean, we were From now, about half mile from, you know, hundred thousand head feedlots Yeah. And dairies, and we traveled all around North Texas and New Mexico, Colorado, getting to experience that. So we've seen large agriculture and what those systems look like in large abattoirs, and it gives us like a whole picture of how they function at work. And so that's where I feel like makes us experts to speak on it as well. Oh, yeah. Because we've seen it. There's a lot of things like, you know, ask, other people like what their thoughts are, but they've never seen it. And I'm like, oh, you can drive down the road and you can see them and you can experience them. And I think that's truly understanding the whole system behind it, and I'm not saying they're wrong. They're just different. And and If you're gonna feed 300,000,000 people,
[00:28:39] Unknown:
like, not everybody can eat farm
[00:28:43] Unknown:
raised, you know, grass fed beef. If you can, that's great. Right. But, you know, if if we're gonna feed the world Until more people wanna be farmers. Right. And, again, that's where I that's where I think the the nuts and bolts kinda come together and what what that scale looks like, because if you wanna get it starts out we were never full time farmers. We are now, but, like, when we moved back from Texas, my husband ended up getting a job working in a corporate agriculture biotech company with aquaculture and trade primarily and in Southeast Asia and Vietnam, Indonesia, Mexico, and, traveled the world on that part of it. And, it wasn't until we grew this part of the business that he was able to come in here full time and really being able to find that balance. But you have to work that five to nine and then that Oh, yeah. That that nine to five kinda thing, you know, so until more people are I think one of my wife's dreams is a dairy cow.
I'm sure Josh would love the the help and to see what that kinda looks like. Oh, no. No. No. Dude, do not help my wife get a dairy cow because I'll be Josh was always anti dairy for the like, we've had this business for eight years and since day one, people are like, when are you getting into dairy? And we're like, absolutely not. We'll never have dairy cows. And finally, last year, I was like, hey. I found this dairy cow. It's a good deal.
[00:29:54] Unknown:
It's a good deal. I wasn't. She's super sweet. And he was like, oh, fine. And then but that was like, we got her in April. Was it like a dog? He was very he was like, no. We're not getting a dog. And then you get the dairy cow. It's like, oh, I gotta go feed Bessie. And then by, like, he's like, well, then she needs a friend. We can't just have one right now. And so we found another dairy cow. And then by November,
[00:30:14] Unknown:
we had three, four, five, six, seven, nine, and then we have five calves right now. So Yeah. The rest of them are on him. And he's like, I need to buy these. I came out of West Coast. Are you breeding your calves too? Or your cow your dairy cow? Yeah. So the dairy cow's I imagine you'd want to with a two h. Yeah. Yeah. So you have to in order to get milk, you have to have a Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Got it. And, so we use artificial insemination Mhmm. To breed them so we don't have to have a bull here. Because those are those can be really dangerous. They can be dangerous. Unpredictable in terms of Yeah. And we don't really need them. We don't have enough dairy cows to justify having a bull. They have to, like, then keep separate, from everybody else, but AI is kinda great technology you can use,
[00:30:52] Unknown:
in the agonist Artificial insemination. Intelligence.
[00:30:55] Unknown:
Not the artificial. The the artificial You don't have robots out there. Type of AI that was actually here. And, so we have another local farmer who, breeds a lot of beef cattle, and he'll come over and and help
[00:31:06] Unknown:
us get that done. So you've got pork, and, obviously, you have beef. Yeah. What kind of,
[00:31:12] Unknown:
beef cattle do you have? And you How do you raise them? Yeah. They're out a % on pasture. Okay. Through regenerative farming, so we use a lot of rotation. Ask you about regenerative because that seems to be a a buzzword. It is kind of a buzzword, and I think we were always against using it because a lot of people are like, what is this? What is this? What is this? And so it's becoming a little bit more common, but really regenerative farming is working on healing the land. So our first and foremost goal is to look at the soil. And my husband will say we're grass farmers before we're cattle farmers. Right. And so really focusing on making sure that we have really good soil Mhmm. That we have a lot of microorganisms
[00:31:49] Unknown:
on our soil, a lot of worms in our soil. And I don't think a lot of people realize soil when you say soil, like, it's not dirt. Right. I mean, it's life. Yeah. It's it's it has to be a lot. Things in there. Yeah. That are contributing to the health of plants and animals and everything. Yeah. So it's not just like a bunch of dirt. Microbiome as well. And what's also interesting, most people still don't think about is
[00:32:08] Unknown:
the reason that cows grow, it's not actually what they eat. It's their gut microbiome. It is the microbiota and the bugs in their stomach Okay. And actually that actually makes them grow. That's what actually produces the protein and it breaks it down for their bodies to grow. Okay. So it's just as important for that gut microbiome in the cows to be super healthy and diverse as it is with their With their nuts. Yeah. And what they're consuming. Yeah. Yeah. So regardless of what they're eating, if their gut microbiome is not in check and doesn't have a lot of diversity, they're not gonna grow big and strong either. And so having a really good diverse soil that can grow a lot of diverse forages and grasses and native grasses, then that's what actually makes your cows.
[00:32:50] Unknown:
So what what is it, what are the nuts and bolts of the regenerative farming look like? I mean, so I think you kinda mentioned a little bit with the pigs. If it's been like a monoculture field, you'll let the pigs out there and they'll root it up and Right. What they do. So can you kinda tell me how the whole thing
[00:33:06] Unknown:
works together? Yeah. So the farm that we're sitting on, my parents have owned for the last twenty five years. The last eight years, Josh How many acres do you have? It's a 12 here. So you have a this is a big farm.
[00:33:17] Unknown:
Yes. It It was a thousands of acres. Right. Right. Yeah. In terms of two people just doing it. To do it.
[00:33:24] Unknown:
When we come from West Texas, like, we have friends and ranches out west, and we're like, oh, we tell them they're like, how much Thousands of acres, half of the state. You know, hectares. Yeah. And so half of the farm my dad had leased out for crop farming. They were never full time farmers. They had cow calf herds, so they would have the cows and the baby calves. They would wean them, and then in spring, they'd sell them at the stock market or the stockyards. The stockyards. Kind of the the traditional system that's set up. When Josh and I moved home from Texas, I told my dad, I was like, hey. I think I wanna sell some cows. Like, I need some income. We're moving home. How can I do this? The rest of my family has worked in sales and stuff. I never want to be in sales, is what I do for a living. During the club. Now so I was Oh, you're selling something you love, which is a lot of different. And it it is different than anything the rest of my family did in sales, and that was like That's some weird sales jobs, and I hate it. Big part of it is, like, you have to really enjoy what you're doing. They enjoyed what they're sale selling. I finally found something that I was passionate about and so for us it's making sure that, like what is regenerative grazing, having healthy soil. So we had farms that were part of the fields that were crop farmed and so monocultural they didn't have any type of cover crops put on them. So after the crops came off in the fall, they didn't put seed back on them to have constantly green growth in there. So we don't soil immersion that we're dealing with compaction, and so really what we've been working on the last eight years is to get a good diversity of so of grasses, different kind of legumes that are nitrogen fixers that can pull in the bacteria And beans. From the soil. Yeah. Yeah. Beans like soybeans are a nitrogen fixer, so we use instead clover and salvia, as those nitrogen fixing bacteria in the soil.
And then also killing the seed bed that are weeds Yeah. That are constantly there. And so my husband will say that I need to stop focusing on the weeds, and I'm I'm I'm getting away from that now and, making sure we're focusing more on the grasses that we do wanna want to grow in the diversity. So it's been really neat. We're actually part of a five year, ecological outcome verification study where they came and and looked at the different diversity of soil that we have and looking at the different forages that are here, if there's any native plants that are here, and then based on our practices, so us rotating our cows every day, putting them to new areas, and we integrate our cows and our sheep and rotate them in different areas based on the needs of that ground. Okay. So we'll go. And do you do a lot of soil testing, I imagine, or or not? Or do you just kinda We probably we don't really do. We've done some. We took some samples last year and set them off, but we don't we'd rather look at, you can get some information from standard soil tests, but there's a lot of things it doesn't give you because those soil tests are still, they are built for telling you what you should put on your soil to raise a crop. Yeah. So there's there's a lot of limitations to it. That makes sense. You can tell probably just not as much but just different by putting a shovel in the ground and pulling it up, but really also looking at the diversity of your plant species and seeing how those are changing. And so that's part of this ecological study is saying okay if we take this 10 by 10 area how many plant species are here? There might be five or six where our goal is at the end of five years can that plant diversity be ten, fifteen species without us actually coming in and planting seeds Right. And introducing it. So we're already seeing native plants come up that we've never planted. Yeah. But we actually have native seeds who have been dormant for fifty, sixty, seventy years. He's never had a chance. He never had a chance come back up. So that's really cool to see. What kind of plants?
A whole bunch of different native grasses. I can't tell you the genus. Oh, that don't know. Parts of it. But we That'd be lost on me anyway. So That that's, I don't know what all those. That's why we have some experts come in that do all that. But we'll just use a really good diversity of, like, we planted we first started a, kind of our own little test plots here to see what we can integrate. We planted, because it had only been bare from those crop farms. We planned a good stand of of alfalfa and timothy and orchard grass and clovers and, some rye grass, and then we did our own little cover crop with oats as a nurse crop to cover. Do you, do you sell the the grains, or do you just use it for feed? No. No. That would just be the grain that we planted for the cows to eat in the ground. So it'll it'll grow up as grass Yeah. Yeah. And then the cows will come along and graze it. So I see. I see. So you're not harvesting it. No. We don't we don't harvest any of that at all. You you do rye?
So the rye was just in the pasture for the the cows to to eat directly out of it. So we weren't actually harvesting it. We're actually letting the cows Yeah. Eat it before ever seeds out or we'll let it seed out, in some areas because we want that seed to go back down and put more seed in the ground as well. So just kind of being strategic in areas, that we want to see. We've never raised and fed our cows the same way every year because we're constantly adding new forages, new crops, or trying something different. And I think that's the other part of regenerative farming is always being open to trying new things. We started with doing bale bale grazing. You might hear that term where you'll put a bale of hay out in the wintertime.
Let the cows come to that and move that. And then we started two years ago, we got a hay bale unroller. And so during the wintertime, we can take hay out to them, unroll it on the ground. Okay. It does create a little bit of waste from the hay, but it allows those cows to go out and naturally fertilize, lay down manure, across pastures, and then the hay seed that's in there and the hay will go back down in the soil, creates a nice organic material, and then you'll see that hay seed coming back up in areas as well. So that's pretty cool. Well, that's what it's designed to do. Right? Like, the cows eat it. They fertilize things, and the seeds are in the fertilizer, and then they come. Right back up. Yeah. So that's what's kinda neat about it. And then with our our chickens, we do raise pasture chickens, which is not for the faint of heart.
[00:38:55] Unknown:
Lot of work. My wife eats chicken. She she raised chicken. She grew up in Owens Hill. Okay. And she raised chickens and I was like, you know, she'll say, why don't we get a dairy cow? Why don't we start with small with chicken? She's like, no, I hate chicken. Well, there's the layer chickens and the broiler meat chicken Yeah. As well. So, yeah, the the layer chickens are a little bit Order layer chicken. The layer chicken is the ones that have the Oh, layers. Layers. Layers like egg layers. Egg layers. Yeah. I thought you meant, like, layers in a cake. I was like, oh, no. Complicated chickens. Yeah.
Yeah. So you you mentioned a while ago, about your health journey. Can you talk more about that? Because I think I think there's a lot of people that are starting to pay more and more attention to what they're eating. So it I'd just be interesting to hear how you kinda went down that road. Yeah. And I I it's definitely something I'm still on. I think we're still on and my husband and I and our our kids and our family. And,
[00:39:46] Unknown:
so really looking back to, like, when we're kids and having conversations with my mom of the food products that we were fed. I I grew up in the early late eighties, early nineties. Anybody? And so I might not be old to a lot of people, and then I have some high schools to work with. I'm like, oh, you're old. I'm like, cool. That they're like, your college My daughter called me old man the other day, and I thought, oh, no. It's happened. I gave a pair of sweatpants that from my college, like, equestrian team to a friend's high schooler, and she's like, yeah. I'm wearing these. They're vintage. I was like, excuse me. Vintage. Vintage. So I was like, not not that old. But when you looked at, like, what we were we grew up in the nineties, and it was like, oh, pop tarts every morning before school. Yeah. And, like, I mean, we never had pop. Like, that was anything, but, like, there was just, like, all these, like, super processed, really easy, convenient, like, mini muffin and stuff. Yeah. And my mom's like she's like, I just I didn't know Yeah. That what that was. And so as I started getting a little older and Man, you're also a parent. Like, Katie and I try our best to feed our children good food, but, I mean sometimes we're just busy. Right. We are yeah. You're super busy as a parent and so it's like how do you find that balance between like working multiple jobs and like always on the go and and balancing that out. And so, I really started noticing when I was pregnant with my second son or with my first son, my second kid, that, I should probably back up. My daughter, we were I had got pregnant with her at the end of my PhD. I spent my first trimester with her when I lived in France. Well, you did you have to defend your thesis? I I had just had her, so I wrote my dissertation.
[00:41:14] Unknown:
So you didn't have to defend your thesis, like, three months pregnant or, nine months pregnant or something? No. I pretty much did. I wrote my dissertation. I she was born the December,
[00:41:23] Unknown:
and I defended the following April. Oh, man. So she was, like, four months. So That was postpartum. So you had to go through your whole Yeah. Oh, man. The whole part of it. That's that had to have been stressful. Had a good PhD advisor who pushed me to get, like, all my articles published Yeah. Yeah. Before doing that. So everything was, like, already peer reviewed, and they just had to sign off that I That's good. Had not mess it up at that point. That's good. But, so I had being pregnant my first trimester in France, like, their food system was way different. Mhmm. We would go So just I don't mean to interrupt you. Is it actually true that the grains in Europe are different than the grains we have here? I hear mixed things. It's like, well, that's why you can go to Italy and eat pasta at night. They're different. The entire system is just built differently. Okay. So you go into the grocery store, you go into the fresh markets. When I say fresh markets, like, we had markets that we would go to on Sunday. They came into town. They came either from the farmers came into town from, like, the South Of France or from, Italy up through to Paris. We were in Paris. And once a week or twice a week, you go down to a fresh market and every brought all their fresh fruits, all their fresh vegetables. And when I say It's a cultural thing to just shop daily. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Like, you have, like, not a lot of fridge space or freezer space. Right. So it's not like in America where you'll go on Saturday and get your food. Or going to Costco and you're not doing your Costco haul. You don't like every three months or something. You're you're truly stocking up and doing. But really it's it's a cultural things in terms of your cooking. Like they'll cook as a family for have a big lunch or they'll cook as a family and have a big dinner and make those. You're not going out and having easy quick convenience things. I mean there are some things that are there that are quick and easy but for the most part you're having your even there when I say that the fruit and vegetables are coming from Italy into Paris, well when you look at the size wise that we're see you're here outside of Cincinnati, that would be the same as our vegetables coming from, like, the Middle Of Kentucky, maybe Southern Kentucky. Right. Tennessee, like, it's not that far four or five hours versus now here in The United States. In, like, the South Of France and Italy. I mean, you can grow citrus. A huge different variety.
And so what they were eating was still pretty geographically located versus now we might be getting things that are, like, three or four times as far away. Right. But if you want an orange in the middle of the summer, then Right. Yeah. And so we push more for, like, eat what seasonally, like, what do we have here in The US or here in Ohio that's available and kinda eating seasonally, based on what we can get, and looking at really, can we fuel ourself with something that is nutrient rich? And I told people, I was like, you know, maybe you can't eat our ancestral blend every single day or can't afford it. Maybe it's not in your family budget. But what can you make those easy swaps with Right. That can? Like, what small decisions, like, you talked about milk like, you could go through a gallon of raw milk a day, but maybe it doesn't financially align with your family budget. Right. But can you add it in Right. To it? Can you get the benefit of it? Yes. Like, maybe it's not a full swap, but can you start with a half gallon and add that in
[00:44:16] Unknown:
as a swap for it every day? Well and I you know, honestly, I didn't I probably should've, but I didn't look at your your beef prices because Katie and I, got a beef from the stalls. Yeah. Beckett Johnson. Yeah. Yeah. I know exactly you're there. Yeah. And I did the math on it. And I mean, it was expensive because we bought half a cow, which was, like, 300 pounds. Right. You need to financially plan most families do, then it's gonna be a big investment initially. But if I'm if I if I did my math right, it only came out to be about, like, $5 a pound for the whole thing. Maybe 6 or something. I don't know. I I did the math. Yeah. And it was like, you know, if I go to the grocery store and I buy a rib eye, it's I think now it's almost
[00:44:56] Unknown:
maybe $20 for a rib eye or something. Probably for, like, a choice rib eye. Yeah. But, yeah, I tell customers, like, if you wanna buy, like, a half beef or a whole beef, you're looking around, like, 8 to $9 a pound finish. That's for all your ground beef, all your steaks, everything your roast. And again again, you know, it's ground beef. But even ground beef at the supermarket I went to dollar
[00:45:14] Unknown:
DG. Oh, did they they did the rebranding than the DG.
[00:45:19] Unknown:
A couple weeks ago when their ground beef in the store was $10 a pound, and I was like, cool. That's like crap ground beef. Yeah. It's not good. It it it it's truly a lot of trim and a lot of filler. Yeah. Not filler in the way that it's like not it's all 100% beef that's going in there, but it's not whole muscle cut Right. Beef. It's not single animal source. It's not dry aged. All of our beef is dry aged. Like, you're getting, like, high end beef when you buy direct from a For $89 a pound. Yeah. And and I was like, can you talk about, like, our beef doesn't shrink up? Like, it's because it goes to the dry aging process. So, like, that water has been removed from it. And they're like, yeah. Your beef patties don't shrink up. I'm like, yeah. Because that's what real beef should should do. And so you're truly getting a pound of beef. You're not getting, like, something that's been overinflated because because it's got a bunch of water in it. Hasn't been dried out of it. Yeah. So, yeah,
[00:46:09] Unknown:
it's not it's not cheap as a one off cost, but, I mean and the beef is just it's just better. Yeah. I mean It's much better. Even growing up, I remember,
[00:46:18] Unknown:
I mean, my mom and dad are the same way. Like, they didn't grow raise cow when I was younger, but they would buy a I've what I've learned is a call cow, which is an old mama cow that is no longer breeding. Yeah. And that was, like, what my parents bought. And, I was like, why couldn't I chew this meat and the steak? And I was like, oh, now I know why because it wasn't actually finished beef. And so that's the other part of why our beef is probably a little bit more expensive because it is a % finished. The beef are raised. But, yeah, more expensive in terms of maybe, like, a one off cost. But like you said, you go to Dollar General, you can get a more like a pound of Right. For the same price. Happy ground beef. We try to add price. Have, like, a lot of price points in terms of what the products and packaging and based on, like, what you can fill, like, if you have a freezer space or a large freezer. So, like, we have our meat subscription boxes, which are a great value. You do get, like, two pounds I did see that. That's a great idea. Pounds of ground beef, for life of your membership right now through the end of the month, and they deliver to your door, and that gets you a good variety of beef, pork, chicken, kind of what you're looking our our little ones, like, peeking in the window at us. And, so that gets you a good variety of those products, but all the way down to an eighth of a beef. So maybe you don't have the budget for a half a cow, but you can still get a really good Yeah. Savings by just doing an eighth of a cow. Yeah. Plus if maybe you have a smaller family or maybe you don't eat beef that often.
Like I said, just integrating this really nutrient dense meat once or twice a week into a meal. What can what kind of swaps can you make? Because when you look at, like, even eating out, because it's we are live a super busy lifestyle. Like, we're constantly traveling and driving and Yeah. Going here and making deliveries and and picking things up. But it's like throw something in the crock pot. Like, how can you easily throw in Crock pots are amazing. I love crock pots. Like, have one or two of them so you're constantly, really swift, swapping out, those meals and having something available. Like, I tell people, like, cook three or four pounds of ground beef at a time. Yeah. Freeze half of it, and then you've got something to pull out and throw it in the skillet, and it's only gonna cook up in five or ten minutes. So those nights where you're like, I'm just gonna, like, drive through and, like, Wendy's like, oh, cool. You just spent $75 for a family of, like, four or five because I know that's, like Yeah. With with crappy
[00:48:23] Unknown:
food. Yeah. That doesn't make it feel good. Can we please do that? I was like, oh, fuck. Like,
[00:48:28] Unknown:
like, we finally were like, okay. We did. And I was like, oh, this was up. And then you just feel bad afterwards. And, like, the kids are like, I'm still hungry. I was like, yeah. Because you had crap. Right. That was basically food. I'm like, so I'm gonna go feed you again. And so, like, I'm not gonna say, like, we don't eat out period because we are still human and we and we've done that. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, but how good, like, definitely doesn't align with your pocketbook and your budget eating out. But I was like, I can take the same, like, two and a half pound $33 roast, and I found our family of five. Plus we have breakfast for tomorrow, plus we have lunch for tomorrow. And it was a fraction of the price. Yeah. So it once you get through, like, how you can use in the diversity that you learn to add into it of, like, use that Chuck roast and make breakfast tacos in the morning. Like Yeah. It's super easy. And you're like, I don't think you're using tacos, like, from a Chuck roast. Like Yeah. It's really the beef. Here's another
[00:49:18] Unknown:
hack, I guess, you could say. If you if you've never tried it before, sous vides. So Katie and I found on Facebook Marketplace, like, some guy selling a ridiculous amount, like, five or six sous vides for, like, $50. Like, yeah. We'll give that a shot. Try. She loves them because you talk about a chuck roast. She'll stick a a chuck roast in that sous vide, and you'd I'm assuming you're familiar with the sous vide. If somebody's done it, but we've had customers that that love them. And Because it's almost like a cross pot. So I guess for if anybody's listening to this that doesn't know what a sous vide is, it basically just holds water at a constant temperature. So she can take a chuck roast and she can put it in the sous vide for, like, twenty four hours, And it's like a steak. Like, we'll eat it as if it were a steak. It's so tender just from being heated. Yeah. And it it almost tastes as good as a rib eye just like as a steak. Yeah. So it a sous vide is another really good hack. Way to easily. Yeah. And I think you can take some of those, like, maybe less common or less desirable cuts to you, like the rib eyes. Like I mean, to get them Because they're frozen, obviously. Yeah. So instead of letting them thaw, she'll just stick them right in the sous vide. And then defrost and cook at the same time. And you'll need to keep your eye on it Yeah. Because it's a constant temperature. So you're not gonna overcook your beef. And then all you have to do is throw it, you know, sear it, and then you've got a nice delicious steak. Crust on it. Yeah.
So if
[00:50:37] Unknown:
And it takes away that, like, intimidation, I think, too, on some some different cuts. You're like, I have this nice steak and Yeah. Yeah.
[00:50:43] Unknown:
I don't wanna mess this up. I've cooked I like I think I cook a very, very good steak, but every time I would do it, I would still get nervous. Mhmm. I'd because, because, you know, you do your little test of, like, is it done? Is it done? Or should I cook it with a thermometer? But no. Sous vide, I can't
[00:51:00] Unknown:
recommend it. We might have to break down. Maybe there'll be a good Christmas present for that. Well, they're not they're
[00:51:04] Unknown:
not super expensive. I I think a new one maybe $75
[00:51:08] Unknown:
or something and that you should get out of it is. Well, that's why I think I think integrating some of those, like, good kitchen appliances. Like, we have a a a pretty big dehydrator, but we also we dehydrate a lot of things. We also, like, make our yogurt and stuff in it. And so making customers some of those You don't have a freeze dryer, do you? Not yet. It's on the bucket list. My wife would have been so jealous. Not Those things aren't cheap either. They're not cheap. But, we have some customers and some friends that have them, so we've, like, freeze dried some milk to dry around with some things and doing it. But, like, making some of those initial investments and things you'll lose in use in your kitchen, like, every week or, like Yeah. Or it's gonna be, like, a freezer. Oh, yeah. Like, we have a a gigantic freezer and, you know, again, not cheap, but we also have 300, 4 hundred pounds of beef in it. Right. And a deer if I can get it. You can, like, go and have that stock in your kitchen, and I I say have a prepared pantry. Yeah. And it doesn't have to be it's not going to Costco and Walmart and buying all these things off a checklist. It's it's finding small things that you can make swaps Yeah. Along the way. And so, like, if you have your potatoes, say you still bought your potatoes at Kroger. Cool. Well, they're gonna go bad. So, like, slice them up, put them in the dehydrator. Well, now you've got them, and you can throw them in your stocks and your soups and and stuff to have and can them as well. Like, that's so great. My mother-in-law cans. That's what she she cans, like, 70 quarts of green beans for us for Christmas now. It's like her present to us. And so having kind of those things that you can make really easy swaps in the kitchen to, and I always recommend, like, finding your, like, top five, like, your family's top five recipes that you can as a mom or a dad that you're, like, super exhausted at the end of the day that you can throw together in in no time and and having that variation. One of the best things my mom ever gave me was
[00:52:45] Unknown:
I actually put it I laid it out in a program on a computer, but it's just like a little cookbook of, like, all the stuff that she could just whip together. Yeah. And I that is the for me, next to the joy of cooking because I I enjoy to cook. Katie cooks most of the time now, but I enjoy it. Joy of Cooking is a fantastic recipe book. If you don't have I don't have that one. I'll have to look at that. Get a copy of Joy of Cooking because it's got everything in it. But this little tiny
[00:53:11] Unknown:
cookbook that my mom gave me, it's got the most use and it's got paper stuck in it and This is the best though. And then finally, I think as you do continue for if, like, people are just like, I I don't enjoy cooking or I don't know how to cook. It's like, I think the more time you just spend in the kitchen, you're like, no. So it's like my mom will say, like, well, what when then she went into this, like, she's never made a meatloaf the same time. She just put stuff out of the cabinet. But I think that's that's kind of like the one of the joys that you'll eventually find, I think, is literally open your cup and be like, okay. What do I have? And you can, like, easily throw in there and not talk about AI. I was talking to another friend of mine. She's getting ready to to have her second child, and she's like, I went to ChatChaPT, put, like, a list of, like, what's in my pantry and said give me, like, five recipes I can put in a freezer. Yeah. And she's like, we have your beef. She came and picked up some chicken that she needed and, like, had all the spices and just all these random things that she didn't know to put together. Right. So it's like using AI that's super easy and to come up with this really quick and easy recipes as well. Well, I think you'll find it. I found this when I cooked and I Katie finds this as it is kind
[00:54:12] Unknown:
of she just enjoys that challenge sometimes of just throwing things. You talked about me. I chuckled when you said meatloaf. My wife had a a a bad time with meatloaf for a couple times. The first meatloaf she did, she looked in the freezer and we had some ground beef, but we also had this, like, roll of Italian sausage. So it's like spiced Italian sausage. So she tried to combine those two, and it was too much meat. It was it was very weird. It was a very weird flavor. So we laughed. We're like, oh, too much meat. She tried it again, and I think she put too many bread crumbs and crumbs in it because it, like, jiggled, and it would dissolve in your mouth. So we we yeah. So we said, oh, now it's too much loaf.
[00:54:52] Unknown:
So Okay. I do it. That's so fun. She actually came upon it for like a minute. But I think that's, like, the way you can can work through is, like, find, like, we'll take, like, our we have the ancestral or primal blend ground beef Yeah. Which has the heart and liver. So you're talking about, like, huge nutrient packed into access. And I am heart is very good. I so I I got a
[00:55:10] Unknown:
a dough a couple years ago, and we and I don't know if beef heart is the exact same. I think it's a little tougher, But we just cut it up like a steak and pan fried it.
[00:55:21] Unknown:
It was the best cut of meat I've ever had. And it's like it's like the liver. I can't do beef liver. I've never been able to liver an onion to some people. Not me. I've never had that. I know. I think we've got one that are first. An ancestral blend, like, I that's my favorite way to do it. Exciting feeds my kids. I'll put it in, like, spaghetti or sauce. Orgganese is so good. It is very good. And so you're getting all of that really good nutrients, but it's, like, actually in an edible form that you can enjoy because that's why I want our meals and our meat and everything we consume to be enjoyable. Is that something I could ask a a butcher to do for me? Like, the next time because we'll probably get another cow from the Yeah. The Johnson's. If I talk to the butcher, would they I don't know if every butcher does. Okay. But definitely talk to him ahead of time. So with our when we get it made, or if Do you notice a taste difference with the look of it? I explained it as it has a little bit more of a bold flavor. Okay. So Deers, you know, can be some people say it's gamey. It's kinda got a I just think people cook it wrong. That's Right. Right. So it's just a little bit bolder flavor.
You'll some people will be like, it's a little it tastes different. Right? It's not it it is gonna be different. It has liver. It's 20% between the heart and the liver. So it's just a little bit bolder flavor. Some people will then take it and maybe mix it with another pound of ground beef. Their first couple times, they get used to to having it and then you'll just You know, I guess I got a grinder. I could probably just do that. Yeah. You could. At home. Yeah. Probably wanted to try it. Absolutely. That's how we do it. Before I get Before our our processor. Of Some of the processors will have a minimum, like, maybe they'll have a 25 pound grind minimum before they'll do a specialty grind. Okay. And then they'll do a processing charge on top of that. So, like, for us, we'll maybe get a whole, like, 400 pounds of it made at one time.
And, so then we're just paying that grind fee one time so we don't really have to charge it. So if a customer buys, like, a quarter or a half from us and they want five pounds of the ancestral blend, well, we just pull that out of our retail case so you don't have to pay an extra 15 or $25 for this five five five pounds. But, yeah, most processors probably can do it. And it's becoming so popular now. People are realizing that, like, hey, this is really easy way to get all those extra micronutrients. Most processors are gonna be like, yeah. Like, you know You don't wanna just eat a liver. Right. Right. Some people really like it. It's just a little bit too strong of a Have you I've because I've never eaten liver. What what does it even taste like?
I haven't had it since I'm I'm chuckling one of our our neighbors. I grew up with her kids and and stuff, so she would always make liver and onions, and I just, like, I hate it. Just
[00:57:39] Unknown:
I couldn't get over. Well, you get that from people. It's like the smell's bad. Smells a little bit bad.
[00:57:44] Unknown:
We dehydrated. I probably shouldn't have said. We dehydrated liver, and our dehydrator for our dog as pet treats. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the smell is still in our dehydrator. You can't get it out. So do not do that, especially not in the house. So we We have a dehydrator. It's a pretty it's a pretty bold, flavor profile to it. But when you mix it with the ground beef, you're it's a lot more milder, and you know that you're getting all those extra micronutrients. And I think that's a better there's a lot of supplements that are on the market right now. Yeah. My wife's taking some. I always caution people and, like, just it goes back to knowing your farmer and where they came from. Right? Like, if
[00:58:17] Unknown:
Well, supplements in general, you to be Yeah. And
[00:58:21] Unknown:
need to do any research. It makes me cringe when I think of all these supplements start being marketed to women and, like, oh, take this to be a futurist. And I'm like, cool. So it it it, like, kinda hurts me because I'm like, this woman is probably postpartum. She's probably or premenopausal or doing something else that her hormones are, like, fluctuating all over the place. And then you just took it from a dairy cow that is probably a calderry cow. It was in the commercial dairy industry, maybe. And she had probably had a lot of additional hormones, not ingested into her, but, like, for her in order to get bread, and just kinda misused and kind of just not the best
[00:59:05] Unknown:
source Right.
[00:59:07] Unknown:
Of those uterine cells Right. To get there. So I'm kinda like, just really be cautious where they're coming from. Well, I think too
[00:59:18] Unknown:
I've I don't I can't remember who it's some ancient Greek, but it food is medicine. Mhmm. Right? And I think it's easy. I fall into this trap, I'm sure, where it's you think, oh, well, I'll just take a supplement, and then that is I don't need to worry about all of this stuff. It's like, no. You need to worry about what you're putting in your like, the food that you're And and the bioavailability of it. Like, by the time that you take something and
[00:59:41] Unknown:
and and break it down and then you're diluting it pretty much to put it into a capsule. Right. Okay. So point zero zero one of whatever you're trying to achieve is your body is gonna actually be able to ingest and then metabolize and then make it into whatever your body is lacking versus if you actually go to the source and eat a real food from the ground You're gonna get a lot more nutrients. And it's gonna be bioavailable. That's what people aren't Yeah. Recognizing. I think supplements are great at the margins. You know? I'd I'd I'd like them. I take a multivitamin. I take c and d and some other things. Yeah. And I've had, like, my Dutch test done to really see, like, what my body is lacking because postpartum with baby What's the Dutch test? I haven't heard of that. I can't tell you exactly. So it's going to, look at so you go to the doctor and they do a blood test, and they'll, like, look at your blood panel. Mhmm. And they're like, oh, yeah. Well, you have really high cholesterol.
[01:00:32] Unknown:
Yeah.
[01:00:33] Unknown:
Okay. But it doesn't tell you why. What part of your metabolic, what what metabolically is causing that? Or is it not? Because when you look at what actually cholesterol and how your body breaks it down, like, your cholesterol and high cholesterol is not gonna come from the beef Right. And the fat that we come from. It's I have a suspicion that
[01:00:51] Unknown:
cholesterol in particular has been a boogeyman that
[01:00:54] Unknown:
probably isn't warranted. Oh, and then you look at, like, pharmaceutical companies and how they want your your body to interact Right. With different things and respond to other certain medications. Right? Like, we're gonna really focus on this one thing, but that's not the root cause Right. Of the issue. So the Dutch test is really gonna look at metabolically what is going on in your body. Yeah. So when I had my second son, my testosterone, even as a female, was, like, not borderline, like, stupid low, but it was really, really low. Yeah. And so that was causing my estrous cycle and everything else to be kind of thrown off. Sure. And so, yeah, I was taking a couple vitamins to help get that. And she's like, you know what? My potassium is soup is really low. So I need to make sure I'm taking my, you know, eating one banana a day because I need extra calcium. How am I or potassium? How am I gonna get that extra storage of potassium because my body wasn't storing potassium? Well, potassium is a precursor in order for part of the metabolic cycle for testosterone. So, like, it's it's these cycles and understanding where these cycles interact with each other. So there's, a lot I I used a she's actually a pharmacist. She created her own little company down in Texas, but there's a couple of, doctors' offices now here around Cincinnati that are pretty cool that will look at real metabolic
[01:02:08] Unknown:
names of that? Or maybe tell me off off mic because listen. You can put them in, like, the show notes and stuff so you can share them because they're they're Well, I'm honestly, I'm thinking about my for my wife and I because we've I've been trying I I think since COVID, we have become more skeptical of doctors and and of the way doctors just seem to prescribe the problem and not look at, like you said, the root cause. Like, what is actually causing this? What can we solve with just better diet, exercise? Like, you know, you go like you said, you go to the doctor and he says, oh, you got high cholesterol.
Here's your what were they? Statins or something that they that they'll give you instead of saying, like, oh, maybe you should eat better and run on the treadmill
[01:02:50] Unknown:
and get some fresh air. Right. And it's not Let's do that first. Always what you're eating because I we have a a a wonderful customer. He's been a customer of fries for a long time. He just retired. He's a cardiothoracic surgeon. Mhmm. And he's he loves our rib eyes, and he will, ma'am, will buy the butter to put on his Thanksgiving turkey. I mean, he's Greek. Like, he's like, this is the the the customers, the the patients he saw on his operating table were not because they're eating steak. Right. There's a lot of other parts Yeah. Of the puzzle that are are going into it. Throw a pill at that. Yeah. I mean It's not fixing the problem. It's not getting into the root problem. No. And before you know it, you're you've got a cabinet full of pills, and who knows how they Yeah.
I I don't wanna disparage doctors, but you put that many chemicals into anything, and you just don't know how they're gonna interact with each other. And they they might cause one issue, but it also can cover up another one without really getting to get into that root cause. So finding there's a lot of good, like, homeopathic doctors and, they've created, different, I don't know, their own little offices and stuff. Some of them is covered by insurance. Some of it's not. Yeah. Like, some of you might be able to use, like, health savings plan to to pay for some of the tests because they're they're not super cheap. But when you're looking at the overall investment into your health, like, it's really main need to take place Right? It's like of what that looks like. One thing that I've that you should invest money in. It's probably your health. Yeah. You know? Right. Because it's that's ultimately when you look down the road, how you're interacting with your kids, what your long term health and your ability to be active later in life Yeah. Of what that looks like. You only get one chance to to really fix that when you're you're younger. Well, I I go to the gym not every morning because
[01:04:28] Unknown:
part of growing muscle is actually resting. Right. Like, you know, that's I I don't think people a lot of people really, you know, they think you go to the gym and it's like, that's where you're growing muscles. It's like, no. No. No. You're growing muscle when you're sleeping, when you're eating. What you're doing in the gym is destroying your muscles so that they do that. But You have to do it in time to recover. Literally, that's the part of it. Literally. Because if you and I've fallen into this trap where I've just lifted too hard too long, and then your body just nope. Nope. You should either you get hurt or you get sick or something like that. But, anyway, I do that because, oh, I love doing it. But I don't wanna be 60 years old and not be able to lift up my grandkid or, you know, run around in the yard or something like that.
And I've, I like lifting because I think that's but, you know, there's tons of ways to do it. Yeah. Yeah. And my my husband, he played college football. And Oh, did he really? Yeah. He was a What do you what position?
[01:05:24] Unknown:
Defensive line. Defen I can't tell you which one.
[01:05:27] Unknown:
Oh, you know, he's a big fella. Yeah. Yeah. But I can't remember where you said you went to To Moorhead. Yeah. Moorhead. So it's with technically a d
[01:05:34] Unknown:
I don't know. It's pretty it I got I play rugby. So you understand, like, as a college athlete, like, it's pretty demanding. And he's also I don't know. Like, I played rugby in college because the rugby parties were very funny. So I don't know if I would have called myself a college athlete. I will speak for him for for that part, but I'm sure they had a good time. And, but it's kinda the same thing, like, they worked out and and did stuff all the way. I mean, he is significantly less body mass now than he was and, especially if we played the lineup. Yeah. But he looks like a strong guy now. I bet he was Yeah. But he was a lot bigger Yeah. Than and so but he works every day outside now, and so it's, just changing how he's grown and adapt. He's like, I couldn't lift weights like I used to. He's like, that was so hard on your body, but he feels much better overall because yeah. Well, it's Being in college and lifting and then fueling your body with Little Caesars and Yeah.
[01:06:27] Unknown:
No. It's because I've I've lifted on and off since I got played football in high school, and that's where I learned how to lift, which is nothing you have to do. You have to learn how to do it because if you don't know you know, you can look at somebody squatting. Like, oh, that's an easy thing to do, but then you get under and you realize like, oh, you're waving all over the place. Anyway,
[01:06:47] Unknown:
you just I don't know. You just feel better doing it than, like, working. Just being outside because I've I've working in my office at home. Right. And some days, I'll come down and I just feel drained and then I go outside. It's like, oh, this is what I was missing, sunlight. Yeah. You know? And I get kind of, a little envious of Josh sometimes because he's, like, literally working outside. Yeah. Great. There's some days, I mean, when it's icy cold and snow, and I haven't been outside for three days because I'm inside with the kids, and we've had these blizzards. And he's outside in it or couple Saturdays ago where it just
[01:07:15] Unknown:
rained all day. Oh, yeah. Because the animals, it's this is a full time Full time job. Like, you're outside. I imagine you can't take many vacations and things like that. It's a balance. You know, he's gone a couple places.
[01:07:25] Unknown:
Take a couple days, and I'll take a couple days, but we haven't been But somebody's gotta be here. Yeah. Somebody's gotta be here. We've been very blessed to have, good friends that can step in and, milk while he was being gone or or help us, and my parents are close by. So but, yeah, we haven't taken a full family vacation for a couple years. So we're we're working towards that. That's one of our big goals to to be able to do, but really making sure that, yeah, he's he'll be soaking wet, and and there'll be times I'm working at my computer. I do a lot of the indoor, back end office things I handle and manage. So I get a little jealous of him being outside. So I try to take at least, you know, one day a week to Yeah. To get out there and work with them. And you can tell, like, moving cheap fence and, like, your body you're using muscles you're you're not used to. So if anybody wants to come see what work is, we always open up that opportunity to to come experience, like, what it's really like. Yeah. Because I I want people to have that appreciation of the work that goes into it because I think there's a lot of times you're you're not real sure. You think you know what it is, and I can only share so much on social media. It's hard to, really get a feel for the heavy lifting of what that includes and what it does to your body. But it it's good. When I talk to I go to a chiropractor once a week because that's the other part of, like, full body wellness and health, and I know my body needs that to get really strong.
And historically just some hereditary things my family has had. And it's it's helped me tremendously in the nervous system and regulation and lifting weights. We were like, yeah. Do the farmer carriers are the best thing. I was like They are really good. They are good. And I was like, cool because I do this all the time. Because I'm a farmer and I carry things. You know, five gallon buckets filled with feeds, and they're, like, 25 pounds each. So I'm, like, doing this,
[01:09:01] Unknown:
on a daily or weekly basis makes a big difference. I actually started doing farmer's carries. Not I'm not a farmer. Yeah. But, you know, I'll get They're just good for you and your boss. Well, actually, briefcase carries where you carry, just on one side, and it's good for your core because it helps you stay I hurt my back, like, a week and a half ago or something like that. So my thinking is is that if I I need to strengthen my core to take the strain off, I also probably need to lose about 20 pounds. But, but, yeah, farmer's carries are Yeah. Really good. They're really manual labor's good. I mean, I think at a certain point, we're we're built to do this kind of stuff. Like, our bodies are built to move. They're built to interact with the world. And if you sit in an office all day, like like I do many days, I never feel as good as if I'm out in the yard with my kids or take a walk with my daughter or something like that. It just
[01:09:51] Unknown:
When you mentioned you have, like, your own little garden and stuff too. And Yeah. So I think any any kind of work like that you can incorporate into your life Yeah. Is it's also gonna get your body to move in ways that you're not gonna get at the gym. Exactly. You're you're really going to realize because I think even though you try to, like, stick to a gym schedule and you're like, I'm gonna do arms to stay or legs to stay and do this, you're really not pushing your your muscle and your body to work in ways that it was designed to do. No. Yeah. And then I think also it's this variable of, like, I'm gonna move sheep fence. Like, I'm bending over. I'm picking up this. I'm doing squats. All, like, it's like circuit training. Yeah. All in once when you're when you go to the gym, you're not necessarily it's still very rudimentary It is. And routine.
[01:10:30] Unknown:
When it's I I look at it like if you go to the weight lifting, not if you're if you're doing CrossFit or something like that. It's a different story. I just lift heavy things. That's what I like to do. It trains your body to be strong, but then if you want if you wanna actually be more efficient at work out in the world, like actual work, you then need to train that strength to do that work. Like, going to the gym and lifting weights is great for getting strong. Like, it'll teach you how to bench press really well, and that's great. But if you don't then take your body and go do something with that and train your other muscles to do things with the strength you have, it's not gonna Right. Then I don't do that, but I don't But I should. Well, you have to come out and, you know I might take you up for time.
[01:11:15] Unknown:
Come in. Well, you love free labor. It it goes to that whole whole body wellness thing. Like, what can you add into your daily routine or your weekly routine Mhmm. That's gonna help overall your longevity in life? Yeah. And so all the way from nutrition to physical activity and,
[01:11:29] Unknown:
You know, I heard something, and this could be absolutely false, but it stuck with me for whatever reason that one of the biggest indicators of longevity is actually grip strength. And the reason for that is as you get older, one of the biggest causes of mortality are just slips, trips, and falls. Mhmm. So if you've got the grip strength to stop yourself, then you've got a much better chance of, you know, making it to a ripe Never heard of that. That's a great Yeah. Again, I don't version blank. Yeah. No. It makes I have no idea if that's true. But Right. Yeah. When you think about bone density, especially because your muscles waste away. As you get older, your bones get less and less dense. But if you have that that work, like, especially, I talk about lifting,
[01:12:11] Unknown:
increases your bone density, and then you keep it builds muscle mass so that you've actually got muscle mass to lose as you get older. Yeah. So You have to feel your muscle mass too. I think that's Yeah. When you look at the studies, Joshua, my husband, he will kinda mention sometimes, like, his mom is she just retired. She was a a cardiac nurse, and, so she eats super,
[01:12:33] Unknown:
super healthy. She has her entire life. She walks like three or four miles every morning,
[01:12:38] Unknown:
and but she eats a lot of of greens and and salads and stuff. And as she has started to age now, her she's realized, like, her muscle deterioration because so she's been incorporating meats More proteins. And protein into her diet, and she's like, like, I gotta I gotta do this. And, and she's realizing it now even though she's been super healthy, her entire life, but as she's, like, gotten older and still being super active, and so she's been doing a lot of she'll make, like, bone broth or stock I love bone broth. A lot of it. And so she'll we'll give her Marrow too. Yeah. She'll take the the soup bones, from the beef and the chicken Yeah. And make stock. And that's been a really great way for her to incorporate,
[01:13:19] Unknown:
that back into our diet because she realizes now how important. I used to do that for recovery from lifting because I think I remember I remember where Katie got the bones. Oh, yeah. Actually did a bunch of collagen and stuff that's in it's skin light. I would, I would make ramen, soft boil and egg, and then put all of that in a bone broth and eat that for lunch. Yeah. That's a great, like, fraction. I could actually
[01:13:38] Unknown:
tell that I was recovering better. Yeah. Because you're literally it's bioavailable again. Like, if you like the creatine and the collagen drinks like the powder, you can buy it, but, like, you're not gonna I do. You're not gonna have the same recovery though. It's just having some bone broth and When again might be a little bit different to drink after your sweaty workout. Well You can make it cold,
[01:13:56] Unknown:
and put it in But the thing with, like, protein and and creatine, again, it's at the margins. Right? Like, I'll have a protein shake with creatine in it after my workout, but that's not my only protein for the day because I'm also eating beef and chicken and things like that. I'm also not like a professional power lift or anything. I just like going Very few people are. Yeah. No. It's I have a pretty respectable bench press, and it's it's getting up there. But,
[01:14:18] Unknown:
Yeah. Making sure you're just really continue to nourish your body the way it really, really needs to. And I think also as, like, a a young a mom with young kids and stuff looking out things that I can feed my kids like I wish I could go back and change some of their first foods a little differently. And I started getting the end of number two and number three I was like oh okay yeah we like don't need these pre made baby foods. Yeah. I was like, I was never gonna feed my kids pouches. Like, we were still on the go. And I was teaching at college for a while too and so super busy and traveling. So I was like, here's some pouches, but, like, then by baby num three, I was like, oh, look. You can buy these fillable pouches and I can make it myself. Yeah. You can buy them off Amazon or you can make your own puree and put it in there. We we had the well, I guess Dominic's offered those pouches, but I mean Yeah. Still like even apple sauce. You can make your own apple sauce and put it in there instead of buying those preemie pouches. Yeah. Yeah. Super easy to do. And same thing with, like, the bone broth is, like, feeding that as, like, first foods versus
[01:15:11] Unknown:
Which is bone broth is crazy easy to make. You just kinda stick it in a crock pot or whatever. Let it go. I so I take,
[01:15:17] Unknown:
try it. Smell delicious. I cook my bone in chuck roast, and we eat from it, and then I leave the bone in there, and then I'll put some apple cider vinegar, maybe some other vegetables or root vegetables in there to let it cook down. Yeah. And then I strain it off, and I'll I'll freeze that, into even little ice cube trays or Yeah. Into to bigger I think she actually even made her own a bullion.
[01:15:37] Unknown:
Oh, yeah. I think I think it was from what was left over from the bone broth. I think she blended it all up, all the vegetables and stuff. Yeah. And then And then made her own bullion. Yeah. And so it's like then you're not contributing to waste, and you're also not buying something that's probably has a lot more
[01:15:53] Unknown:
other additives in it that you don't need the preservatives Right. That we have a lot of the shelf stable Yeah. Yeah. Stuff, which is why I like my dehydrator because, again, you can Those things are It's a lot of things you don't that's probably that dehydrator and a crock pot would probably be the two things I would tell people to have in their kitchen
[01:16:08] Unknown:
just to Well, especially because we like, I'd we did that garden, and I I was I'm not a fan of gardening. And it it was an okay garden. But I think some some people think, oh, I do this garden. What am I gonna do with all this food if you have a dehydro or if you just learn how to can. Yeah. Learn Canning is not It's just too intimidating
[01:16:28] Unknown:
at first, but once you do it, it's not too bad. No. And I always say too, like, if we I mean, we grow some tomatoes. We actually planted some. My my son keeps picking in the window, like, loves watermelons, cantaloupe, and Yeah. Yeah. And so we actually are that's what we're planting this year. And so it's like you don't have to plant everything. Right. Like, what is one thing you enjoy planting in your garden that your family enjoys eating? Right. And just do that. And then find another farmer to source the rest of it. And so that's when people ask us, like, well, what vegetables do you grow? When do you have a garden? And I was like, we don't, but here's, like, some other local farmers that Well, I know. And I've do know. I need to actually email him again to try to get him on, but there's a CSA by me.
[01:17:03] Unknown:
So there are places where you can go to essentially, it'd be like getting a herd share or Right. Or a half cow or something. He'll just he's got his little farm there, and he'll box up all the vegetables. And it's very reasonably priced. I mean, it's not gonna break the bank. Yeah. And especially if you like if your family will do a diversity of different things, like those fishbowl CSAs are a great way to go. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of those here in Clermont County, and, we are
[01:17:26] Unknown:
my husband and Aaron are on the Farm Bureau board. And so we have, we do a farm tour. We've done it. I think this will be normally it's in September. This will be year five or six, I think Okay. That we're doing it. But there'll be different farms that are involved. And we work with the, Claremont County Visitors Bureau, and then they'll market it, and they create a little roadmap for people to go and is to go to different farms. Really? Yeah. And there'll also be farms that are maybe even, large production crop farms so you can, like, see big combine tractors, but a lot of it are small farms like ours that raise maybe they'll just do bees or they'll do organic vegetables like, Bear Creek organic farms at Bear Creek. We have a lot of their they have a commercial kitchen. They make all their pasta sauces and salsas. Okay. We sell them here. And she'll do vegetables, raw vegetables as well. And so you can go around to these different farms and actually see them kind of all in a weekend Yeah. And get to meet your own farmers and kind of pick and choose who you want, which has also been really great. You might have to send me information on there and tell me where to go. Yeah.
[01:18:27] Unknown:
What was it in the eighties or the nineties where some agricultural, I guess, probably the guy running the Department of Agriculture said get big or get out?
[01:18:36] Unknown:
I've heard that before. I don't know who said it. I can't remember either. There's there's some truth. Well, I I was kinda wondering even, for us to be to farm full time, and we're not as big as we need to be. Right. And that's I mean, it's tough. It's hard. The margins, land prices, we were husband and I were actually talking on our way home last night. We were past a farm. We're like, we should have bought that. Like, eight years ago, we're like, it was too much Yeah. What we saw at the time of, like, we should have bought that. And, we're kinda, like, talking about, like, my a farm my dad passed up because it was a thousand dollars an acre. Yeah. What is it? You know, twenty five years ago. Yeah. 10 to 15 for the same farm. And he's, like, kinda kicking himself because now we're at the point of we're second generation here on this farm, but my my mom will tell everybody that my husband and our first generation farmers because we still we rent the whole thing. Like, we we have had to invest everything Right. That we had working off farm because that's how farmers get started. You you work off farm to invest that into your farm Right. So you can grow into that. And so we we have a lot of different we call them enterprises, our beef, our pork, our chicken, our dairy, and we call it enterprise stacking. We have have this enterprise that complements a customer base and serves a customer base that we have that wanted their beef. And then they're like, hey, can you do chicken? We're like, sure. So we like started missing chicken, and we've added everything in here so they complement each other.
But it's because we can raise our pasture chicken on the same Yeah. Land area that we're raising cattle during different times of the year. And so they complement each other, which is part of the regenerative process but we can't make a living on raising 600 chickens and Right. You know five cows. You have to scale that. So there is a big part of scaling that goes along with it. I think the thing is now is getting creative. Yeah. With it. People ask, how do you how do you get into farming relationships? It's the only way you're gonna get in, unless you, you know, are sitting on a trust fund and can go out and and spend have the money, Right. You know, because The hundreds of thousands of dollars. The bank is isn't gonna loan us money to go buy the next, you know, hundred acres right now. You have to have the financial backing of it in order for institutions to loan you, the money of it. So either having that off farm job income. But the other thing is, like us, going and finding another farmer, there are people that do not have kids or do not have grandkids interested in taking over the operation, and they've invested their whole livelihood in it. They don't wanna see it going into development, and I'm not anti development. Yeah. I need customers. We still are actively doing so we we wanna see if there's a I'm not either, but I always get a little sad when I see a field go. It does it does it is it is kinda hurt and knowing that, there's there's parts of across the state. You can look at Columbus area. There's literally it's running, young farmers out because they literally cannot afford because the land prices are so high, and it's hard for that generation that's looking to sell, especially if they don't already have a relationship with that farmer Right. To let them lease it, to a lease to own, go under a land contract. Yeah.
[01:21:37] Unknown:
I imagine as a farmer too, you know, if I farm my whole life, I don't have any kids or grandkids that wanna do it, and some guy comes with a big bag of money and says, I'll buy everything.
[01:21:47] Unknown:
Well, okay. Yeah. But if he doesn't have the the biggest thing is where I see if some if you wanna get into farming, said farmer doesn't have those people. What's he gonna do with a couple million dollars? Yeah. That's true. He's not gonna but what he can do is you show him that you want to put in the work. Right. You know what work is. You wanna go work alongside him a couple years without getting paid. That's the biggest thing we have. We'll we'll get high schoolers and we're I'll talk about a grant program we're doing with the career and tech school. And I've we've told high schoolers for years, I was like, you wanna do this, like, go volunteer. Yeah. I worked in vet clinics after vet clinics for for years without getting paid because I wanted to be a veterinarian or I thought I did. And do it when you're young. And do it when you're young. Do it when you're young. Because when you don't need money. Right. When you don't need money. I was like, okay. Yeah. You're 15. Like, I will admit there are some of them that they need the job, the income to help Yeah. Their family. But I was like, a lot of them, I was like, you don't need the money. You want money because you wanna, like, go down to, like, get your, you know, big b coffee, like, before school. You don't need that either. And, so I was like, go volunteer. Like, I was like, I'm not gonna have there's certain tasks when you come to our farm to volunteer, I'm not gonna have you do because I consider those paid tasks. But there's also tasks that, like, if you wanna learn about this business Or just learn about work too. Yeah. Because not everybody really knows what work is. They don't know what work is. And so if you wanna learn what this business is, because it's a business and people are like, oh, I'm like, no. We have to we have to make money or we can't we can't pay the bills. Like, people don't want us to, like, make money. It's like we have to make money. It's not a lot. Like, and so making sure that they are getting that opportunity, but there are farmers out there, that are looking for somebody to pass it on to the next generation.
[01:23:19] Unknown:
Well, I mean, there's a tons of bit because not just farms, but I think businesses in general. I think there's a lot of the older generation that started up a small business, and they don't wanna see it go to the wayside. So if you're an industrious young person, you know Yeah. Pick pick what you love and then go find one of those people. You know? Yeah. I think it's building that work ethic.
[01:23:37] Unknown:
We have another customer, a neighbor down the road. I was just talking to Josh last night, and stopped by here to pick up his steaks, and he said he works for a very large construction company here in Cincinnati. And he said over the next five to six years, they're gonna be in a really hard position because their foreman can't train the younger generation. The younger generation doesn't wanna learn how to do the skilled part of the labor. Well, and that's what's I think, you know, you think about farming, construction, the all the trades.
[01:24:05] Unknown:
If we're not careful, we're gonna lose those skills. You know, there's this painting I think I saw it at the Cincinnati Art Museum, but it was I wish I could remember the name of it. I've tried to look it up, but this image is always stuck in my head. It was of a a sheepherder, and he he was in the kind of relaxing against, you know, these gigantic Roman aqueducts. And you look at that and you think, nobody knew how to do that after a certain period in time. Like, they're just these wonders of engineering are just crumbling and providing shade for some guy that's just grazing his sheep. And if you're not careful, you're gonna lose
[01:24:41] Unknown:
our ability to create incredible things if you don't pass on those skills. Yeah. And when we look at trying to keep a lot of jobs here in The US, like, in keeping our food system local, there's gonna be parts of it that do come along with the manual labor Yeah. Side of things. And that does scare a lot of people away because, I mean, my brother went and he works, not on the farm. Let's just put it that way. And he he works a corporate job and but at the end of the day he he misses Yeah. Being on the farm and he actually just moved for the summer. He moved his family out to my my family's, farm for the summer to get his kids back into nature and be on the farm and to see how, what work is and and to do stuff and be outside all the time without, you know, having to worry about all the things. We're actually getting ready to start at the end of the month. Our family like, farm family Fridays is what we're calling it. Okay. And it's literally just for families to come and for their kids. And You have to give me information, like, all of love. Yeah. We'll just share it on our newsletter, social media too. Okay. And it just it's it's literally just to be outside.
Yeah. No strings attached. Like, it's not I'm not creating entertainment. Like, we're not providing anything. We are literally giving you a safe space to be outside and to meet other like minded families, because we've learned we homeschool our kids, and we've found that a lot of people, like, are looking for a community that, like, they want their kids to just be outside, like, not as structured. Even a park, going to a park is still a pretty structured Yeah. Play environment. So just letting them be kids, like, figure out things in nature that play with what's around you. Yeah. Get hurt. Get hurt dirty. Get hurt dirty. I was like Yeah. Bring extra fluid out. There will be water hoses you can rinse off afterwards.
But just, like, be present. You know, everybody's gonna be sitting around so you can watch the kids and and kind of thing and That's one of those like hang out. One of the things I I love when you find
[01:26:30] Unknown:
a group of people like that with kids is how
[01:26:34] Unknown:
less stressful it is just to have your kids because you everybody can see them and they're fine, but it's kind of relaxes you a little bit because they're like, okay. They're with a bunch of kids. Right. I can see them. I'm gonna just relax now. And as parents, I think, they need that sometimes too. It's just a little yeah. Realize that I think for us, it's also been we have found a sense of community doing this that we never never was on, like, our bingo board Right. Of of of what that was gonna look like, and we've had customers who have become some of our best friends through all of this. And, I mean, we're That's also a testament to your to your business. I mean, the business is relationships. Right? It is. And it's it's like I we have people that are on our customer list. It's like, I'm sure if, like, we need anything or we have, like, we had our sheep shearing at the April, and I just threw out, like, one email. It's like, hey. If you wanna come help because, like, like and people showed up, like Yeah. Beyond what we imagined. And Josh and I I'm gonna get teary.
This is gonna be the second interview where somebody gets teary. Because, like, we people just showed up and Josh looked at me, like, halfway during the day. He's like, this is so nice. Yeah. Because the year before, it was, like, just him and I. Mhmm. And I'm sure she was not easy. I don't know. I mean, we're not sure that we we hire, some shearers coming, like, the professionals, but there's so much physical stuff that comes in with, like, getting them a herd into the barn. And then you have to, like, separate them and sort them out and then you have to make sure that the sheep are ready for the shear. Yeah. Yeah. So shear is just staying there hearing but, like, somebody has to catch them Yeah. Yeah. And and get it and then manage the wool and you're pulling the wool off and and putting it over the side and kinda cleaning it and so, like, there's a lot of moving parts and he's just looking. He's like, this is so nice. He's like, I he's like, I couldn't have done what I did last year because it was Yeah. It was beyond it was beyond the physical demand that he could physically do and emotionally deal with. So to have the people just showed up was
[01:28:18] Unknown:
it was amazing. That's really awesome. Yeah. And it's it's really nice when you can build a community like that. I mean, it's
[01:28:25] Unknown:
kind of the dream. Right? Yeah. You've just got people that'll help you. Yeah. It's so rewarding beyond waste. Like, I mean, because it's it's not always financially rewarding. Like I said, we're working through that Right. That part of it. And so it to me, that's like it keeps us wanting to to do it. I feel like this is on the hard days because there's a lot more hard days. Yeah. I bet. I think anybody that owns their own business or, you know, what you're doing is, having those those times that you're like, this this is what's really worth it, and this is what's gonna make it. And this is kind of the road I think that God continues to open up and show us, like, this is we're doing the right thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
[01:28:59] Unknown:
So you're involved with the Farm Bureau. Right? Okay. I I was a little nervous. I was like, geez. That's how I got in touch with her. It was. Yeah. I think that's why you're originally calling Yeah. That is that is. And I don't know why I was self conscious about that. But, can you tell me about that or what the Farm Bureau does? And I'd looked it up a little bit. It kinda seems almost just like a Chamber of Commerce for farmers.
[01:29:19] Unknown:
Kind of a little bit. Yeah. And so, really, the the Ohio Farm Bureau and the American Farm Bureau, it's a grassroots organization that is aimed at protecting And I'm sorry. You're on the board. Right? Yeah. I am on the on the board here in Claremont County. Okay. I've sat on, like, some advisory boards for the Ohio Farm Bureau, and Josh is actually on the Ohio Farm Bureau Young Ag Professionals board. Okay. So we have the county board, which is here locally, and, we have, can't remember. We have, like, six or seven farmers or agriculturalists that are on the board. Okay. And what makes it a grassroots organization is the big thing behind the organization is also to lobby on behalf of farmers and protecting our rights or what we're doing, because it's really easy for other people to tell farmers what to do when they don't really understand.
[01:30:06] Unknown:
So they fight everything. Anybody understands that farmer you know, you have this stereotype of kind of the the kind of backwoods
[01:30:12] Unknown:
farmer that doesn't know anything. Yeah. It's like, no. They're scientists and business people. They're all wrapped up into one. Yeah. Yeah. On on everything. So even I I told you earlier, we got finally a high speed Internet. Yeah. Last year, my dad has a business in Mount Washington, and he's had high speed Internet for forty years. Yeah. And we finally got it. I mean, if if you talk about disparity across, like, rural communities and especially it became highlighted, like, during COVID when these students then were sent home to work on computers and homework. I was like, I still I had college professors, but I was like, I have I can't be on this call unless the public library is open, and they're like, you're lying. I'm like, cool. Like, no. I, like, I can only go and do this and access it when the public library is open. When we were in Felicity,
[01:30:53] Unknown:
because it's the same thing. Yeah. Like, it's maybe you get a satellite and who knows if that's getting reception. But we I think I can't remember from Spectrum or whoever it was. We asked them to put a line in there. We're like, okay. We'll come out and look at it. Like, well, it'll cost you $14,000. I was like, no. Wait. What? 14 what? No. So we had to go off these little air thing. It's tough. Tough. Yeah. It's really tough. So as part of the farm year, like, they lobbied from the state to
[01:31:20] Unknown:
for a rural broadband development. So that was just, like, one part of it, but that just shows, like, it's also not just building up farmers, but farmers are the rural community or part a huge part of it. And so that's building the community part of it. And so, I actually was I lobbied at the state and the house You purchased it. At the state. Yes. Nice. Over the last two months. What does what does that actually look like? People talk about law. So I was testifying, and I the farm here was putting, we know health insurance is like a whole other we got a whole podcast series on health insurance. Right? And especially for being an entrepreneur, small business, a young family, health insurance. I'm a freelancer. I know it's it's it's a mess. It's it's a mess. And, so Farm Bureau, Hyro Farm Bureau is looking at having their own health insurance network. It's not a new concept. You the Hyro Farm or the Tennessee Farm Bureau has been doing it for seventy five years. So it would kinda be if you're a Christian. Like a PEO or something? No. It's its own well, I don't know exactly what that is, but I'm gonna say It's like a professional
[01:32:19] Unknown:
employee. The the only reason I know this is because I have a client that does this. But, essentially, what they do is they offer small businesses. They essentially just pool all of their employees together so that they can go out and collectively bargain for I guess it would be really similar to that because it would be its own, like, large
[01:32:38] Unknown:
clump conglomeration.
[01:32:39] Unknown:
Yeah. Essentially, you get a bunch of people together. You get your buy in. So you have a bigger buy in power. So instead of us being, like,
[01:32:47] Unknown:
GE or PNG in Cincinnati, we're farmers creating our own kind of buy in program. So, we have to you have to you have to get state legislation to allow that. You can't just say yeah. You it's you have to change legislation to allow for that network, to be able to occur.
[01:33:06] Unknown:
We have customers. Yeah. No worries.
[01:33:10] Unknown:
Right here. No. You're fine. Picking up his milkshake. So you have to, thanks, Rob. So you have to change legislation if you want to do something like that. Yeah. So we have to our farm has to put forward and has to get written approved by the house and the senate. Yeah. Yeah. To get signed legislation. So I had shared we had a round table discussion with another local congressman, earlier in the year, and they asked what are some of the issues that are keeping young farms and young families from going on to the next generation. I was like, oh, let me tell you my health insurance story. It was kind of like Right. You know, my kids still do not have health insurance right now. Yeah. It it like, literally, we don't have health insurance from because it was this big mess, and I'm still trying to battle through it. And, and so I was asked to go share my story up in front of the the state and the house committee members That's really cool. To do it. So it was really cool. It's And you have to sit in that little seat, you know, with the microphone. Oh, yes. Well, these are, like, the rooms were set up a little different so you're up in front of the podium, in front of everybody that's on that committee. So virtually, it's the same thing, and it's broadcasted. You can go back and look at it to see it, and the senators and congressmen can ask you questions based on, what it is. And then they'll have, like, our Ohio Farm Bureau legislative people who are really experts and know all the everything about the Ohio Yeah. Code and legislation there to ask, like, really specific details, but more of anybody can go and share their story. So if there's any issue that you have and you can go and tell them. And so that's what I think is so what got really us involved in the Farm Bureau is the relationships that they have with our senators and, our congressmen or congresswomen, to be able to, like you can go and knock on their door and sit down, and they wanna hear your stories. They wanna, see what's impacting You hear that a lot is that it it does make a difference. It it does. And some people are just emailing You can't senators. You can't see, like, what goes, on the TV Right. Large media outlets, because that's not really what's happening. I've been I was on the partners advocacy leadership, which is a kind of specialized training program that the American Farm Bureau did. It's a three year program, and so we were even in DC multiple times talking up there and, sit down on a table just like we are and talk about kind of those issues of what we're we're seeing, what's impacting us, how's it impacting us. And I think that's where I'm like, if you really wanna make a difference in your local community, like, go make the make the trip. Even if it's not to the State House, like, go to your county Yeah. And go and talk to your county officials and even in your township. Like, very few people will attend township meetings and
[01:35:58] Unknown:
So it's even tough to find good minutes for township meetings. I mean, I when I started this, I thought, like, oh, well, I'll just look at all the meeting minutes, and I'll just read through them and see if there's anything interesting. A lot of times, those minutes aren't approved for, like, a month. And it's just really tough to fit to know what's going on. Yeah. And and this is where government really happens. Like, if there's something that's gonna impact me, it's gonna happen at our in Patavia, at our Embassy. Right? Like, that's that's gonna impact me more than whatever is going on. And I think sometimes it's taking us as,
[01:36:32] Unknown:
say, the constituents as the people Yeah. To go and be like, these minutes aren't getting posted the way that they're supposed to be. Right? Like, you you sometimes do need to keep them accountable. Yeah. And and then going and knocking on the doors and be like, excuse me. Right. What's going on? Last two minute months meetings haven't been posted if they are if they're supposed to be posted or whatever. They're supposed to be made available publicly within thirty days. Well, it better be made both publicly. And so, we have every right Yeah. To go and and do that. And sometimes it's taking and knocking somebody's curtail off if Yeah. If they're there for a little while and Yeah. In doing that, I'm not scared to, you know, share my backstory and what that looks like and how it impacts me. And they they really do genuinely care. And listen, I mean, there's a huge variation. I mean, nobody's getting paid a bunch of money to get a commission or something. No. It's like No. Even I think zoning commissions are voluntary. Right. And even our state legislators, they're they're not making Yeah. And for as much time as they spend away from their families, I mean, most of them, especially, we're really fortunate here in Claremont County. We have great Yeah. Representatives, that work really hard for us, and most of them have, in our part, you know, Claremont, Brown, Adams County, they're they come from farming backgrounds, so they they understand us as farmers. So that's also why they open their doors pretty easily for us too, but we've worked, with maybe representatives in, like, Hamilton County or Fayette County that, agriculture is not the number one part of of their county. And so, they might have a little bit different priorities. Yeah. But at the end of the day, they're constituents' priorities. They they do have Like, the priorities of Cincinnati Metro Area are gonna be way different than somebody on Moscow, Ohio. So So it's like finding just kind of those overlaps too. And so we've even, as a farm mural, like, county board, have, like, talked about what does that look like, what kind of issues do we want to work and and do? So we know that even our our local school systems, at the end of the day, that's part of our rural development part of it. And so we had to be kind of just careful, like, what lines we walk on, what issues, to make sure we're having the farmers' true interest, but also those rural communities have become a huge part of what we wanna do. Yeah. And so as a Farm Bureau board, well, as part of Farm Bureau, at the county level, we get certain grant money. It was Ohio Farm Bureau was founded by in partnership with Nationwide Insurance. Okay. So Nationwide actually founded Farm Bureau as part of it. They had separated out, but Nationwide still provides grant money to each of these counties to do programming Nice. And educational programming for the farmers in different programs.
And so we get an allotment of money that we have to write grants for Yeah. To show that what this what this money is gonna go to. Man. Yeah. And, so part of one of the grants that we wrote this year was with the Grant Career Center Okay. Over in Bethel. Yep. And Josh and I have sat on the board and the animal science department, over there for, I don't know, five or six years. It's been a while. Yeah. And we've been doing that. And so we've been, been really interacting with the the high school students through their program, also to see what it looks like. What because it's it's a workforce ready program. It's not a a college prep course. It's truly designed to educate and prepare students to go out into the workforce. Maybe they don't wanna do the college route is really what the initial intent for Right. Those those programs are. And so what we were seeing was a lack of availability for these students to go into a, a paid work internship program. Mhmm. We're having students that because as a small business, like, we still haven't grown enough. Like, I can't hire a high schooler to work for me forty hours a week or twenty hours a week. We hire them off and on for individual jobs, but we definitely don't have the the time. Like, they don't have the time if they are are only gonna be with us for three months. Yeah. Well, it takes me thirty days to train them. Right. It's not a really good ROI for me Right. In our our business.
So we were taking this grant and using it to truly build a workforce readiness program. Yeah. And so there was a twelve week training program where different farmers, different businesses, different organizations, like, Ohio Wien's jobs and, NRCS and, the National Resource Conservation. And we came and talked about sustainability and what we expect as employers if you're going to get hired. So there was, like, twelve weeks of them coming along, and we would go to the Grant Career Center after school, like, 02:30, three thirty, and they'd sit through this training program. And then the program pays for these students to go out to these farms and businesses to work. Nice. So they would come here, and they would get paid to help us load out chickens from our brooder house where we grow baby chicks Mhmm. Out to our pastured chicken.
They could help us with cleaning the milk and stuff. The grant career center. This is through the grant career center. So yeah. But the So anybody could take advantage of this program? No. It just the grant Career Center students. Oh, no. No. No. I'm sorry. I I meant, like, employers and farmers. Oh, yep. Any other employers or members. So if you're a small business and yeah. So you have to be a Farm Bureau member because that's how it's kinda That makes sense. So you had it. So we had a couple farms who were not previously Farm Bureau members. So you did have to become a Farm Bureau member. Because of also insurance reasons, we have the ability for the students who are coming onto our property. Again, some of these small farms didn't have the insurance coverage for people to come. Dues? I'm a is it Yeah. For the Farm Bureau. Yeah. Yeah. You do. We now went to, like, a one due flat system. I think it's a hundred and $75 a year. That's not much. It's not much. When you look at also, we have full time lawyers on staff. You have an issue and a question, you call, like, them up, and they will be right there. I mean, when when you look at what they're doing on the back end Yeah.
To to allow us to keep doing what we're doing in CAUV. The, there are certain things to make sure that we get in a different tax bracket for farmland compared to developmental development land and and building and stuff to make sure those are being supported and pushed forward. And, I always say if you're growing bees in your backyard or you have a small garden, like, you're a farmer. You're a farmer. There's people there that it's there to protect you. I get a lot of customers who who live in the city and they want, you know, to have three or four chickens for to provide their own food. And some of those county ordinance ordinances don't allow them to do that. Yeah. It's like, hey. Guess what? As a farm bureau, like, we have a lot of voice together. Yeah. Go and you can actually lobby them and go to your town council and, like, here's some things that you can change, to support that. Because I think that's the I have a big issue with those ordinances. I mean, I get maybe they don't wanna have a rooster because it crows, but I'm like, yeah. But some people's dogs bark a lot louder than the rooster does. I mean, I get it. You don't like, if you're living in in the suburbs, you don't want your backdoor neighbor to have, like, 50 chickens or something. That Right. But able to be able to have, like, three or four, and you have a good waste management plan and and stuff in place. But Don't get me started on HOAs.
[01:43:20] Unknown:
I I, for the life of me, cannot understand why people would live somewhere that has a homeowners association. Like, when you tell me I gotta pay you to tell me what to do with my house.
[01:43:31] Unknown:
No. Thank you. That's why we live out here. Yes. That's why Katie and I live where we live. We live, we are the only town. I'm I'm I think we're the only township in the state of Ohio that's not zoned. Oh, really? I'm pretty sure Washington Town do it. If there is, there may be only one other one. But we So there's, like, no zoning? We we don't have zoning. Wow. Don't come here to Washington, Don't jump. No. Just don't move back. Stay away. Stay away. I know. It's it's a great place, but,
[01:43:56] Unknown:
we like it here. Everybody's Stay away. Yeah. So we don't we don't have a zoning board. We don't we don't have any zoning. So
[01:44:04] Unknown:
I mean, there there is limitations to it. There's Yeah. Depending on your neighborhood put up anything. You still have to get permits to do stuff from the the county, but, yeah, we don't have to we don't have anybody through zoning. That's right. Who wants to to work on you? If you wanna put a a house or a barn or a chicken coop up, you Just do it. You can do it. Yeah.
[01:44:21] Unknown:
You gotta love the the country country. Yeah. You just your ability to do pretty much whatever you want. Yeah. Are there any because I do like to keep my eye on what's going through the legislature. Are there any farm related legislation
[01:44:36] Unknown:
that's going through right now that Yeah. I think, when we look at from the state level, like I mentioned, the health insurance is a is a big part of it. The the raw milk and putting the the diet and the pet food is a big thing. There's always there's always a lot of legislation. Gosh. There's so many different things that we could talk about. But I think if when it it really is gonna, like, impact, I'll say, most of your listeners probably in terms of, like, what food they're eating, the food availability. We know that, there's some federal funding cuts that got made. Like, we had cuts to the food pantry program. It was a a program that allowed for farmers to sell their food at a profitable price for them to, like, local food pantries. Okay. And then those also translated over to school health, school lunch programs as well. And so we saw funding getting cut from that. And so you can you can look at a fresh food availability for those food pantries, especially in the rural parts, of not having that real food access is So they would essentially give money to the food pantries, and they could come to And then the food pantries could go directly to the farmers and buy, versus a lot of food pantries get their food from donations from large grocery stores that's, like, near shelf life. Right? And so when you're looking at the nutrient availability of this food Yeah. Like, they're pretty much getting the second stuff. And so it was allowing people that never had access to real fresh food to have that. And so we don't have that right now. So there's work to to try to get some of that back funded to help, again, the bigger overall community.
[01:46:09] Unknown:
I don't think a lot of people realize about Roy because I I acutely well, I was made acutely aware of it when I was living in Felicity.
[01:46:17] Unknown:
It's really sometimes not that easy to get food. Oh, we live in a food desert. A lot of people don't wanna like, we we don't have public transportation out here. We don't have Ubers. We don't have I mean, we we don't have a ways to get around. So And I don't know how far you are to, like, a Kroger or something, but Felicity was, like, forty minutes. Oh, so our closest Kroger would be the one that's either in well, we have the New Richmond IGA, which is about twelve minutes. So that's about the closest, the closest Kroger. There's one in, Amelia.
Yeah. That would be the closest or Anderson. So thirty to forty five minutes. To Mount Orbs. Or Mount Orbs. Yep. If you're out on that, that's probably still, yeah. I'm on the the Western part. So you're still about forty minutes from it. And then we have the Dollar General and Family Dollars, but their fresh food availability is not is not good. And, and so that's why we kinda built this store here. And so during the summer, we will have vegetables available from local farmers that people can come by. We did that last year. We didn't have refrigerator, so it made it a little bit more limited. So we'll have more availability this year to be able to offer that as well. We bring in apples from apple orchards here in Ohio. We had peaches. We had another customer that had peach trees in their backyard over on the West Side. Really? And so we bought peaches and brought them in. They're like, we have all these peaches, like, Ohio peaches, and they're like, they live on the West Side in some neighborhoods. I didn't even know there were Ohio peaches. There's Ohio peaches, and so we were able to to have those and sell them through here. So it was really offering So you can I mean, were they just, like, peaches in somebody's yard or something? Like, they had peach trees. Okay. Well, I didn't know that Dozens crates and crates of so I think that's, like, for us, it was, like, really building that connection and that bridge that people were looking for, because it's not here. I mean, yes. Kroger will deliver out here. Yeah. But at what cost? And, again, that doesn't build the local system. Like, for us, we are able to now employ, some high schoolers and give them that next step into their future career. We're able to donate back to our local school systems and do fundraisers and donate a half a hog that they can raffle off to use for different program. We're working with, even though our kids are homeschooled, we'll work with the local, like, with Felicity, and they're creating a grant to provide food education for their students in career development. And so we can work with them and provide them that opportunity and letting those students come here and seeing what not only us as agricultural, but, like, also a business. I think there's very few students that get to interact with entrepreneurs that you can build your own business. And what does that look like? What are considerations and things? And in terms of your your profit and loss and expenses and and management and cash flow that, a lot of people aren't exposed to anymore, because it's it's hard to us entrepreneurs, we're always really busy. And so and then you're like, who do I even talk to? And so finding those small businesses and having those conversations, because I think there's a lot of opportunities. As I mentioned, these business owners are are getting older and phasing out. They're looking for people to come in and and,
[01:49:09] Unknown:
train and Yeah. Pass that to the next generation. Katie and I talk about I mean, our oldest is five. So it's not like college is around the corner. It's quick, though. Yeah. It yeah. I've been realizing that. Every day I look at her, I'm like, oh, geez. She's taller. But we talk about college a lot and we but we're not sold on it, you know. And I would much rather see my son or my daughter go into a program like that where they actually because, you know, you go to school and you learn about business and theory. Mhmm. When you go to school and you learn about a lot of things in theory. You know, a lot of it's just kind of book learning and that's great. It has for something like epidemiology, I mean, you can't just wake up one day and say I'm gonna be an epidemiologist. Right. You've gotta go learn that. But there's so many other things. And frankly, like, if you wanna have a nice successful life,
[01:50:02] Unknown:
there is really a lot of opportunity to learning how to be a carpenter and starting your own business. Skills are definitely Yeah. Right. Right. They're in demand. Yeah. They are. Yeah. And that's where we were trying to kinda bridge that gap of, like, I think if there's even, like, some small small business programs because I was like, gosh. I was in school for not even I was in college for thirteen years. Yeah. And, getting advanced degrees, I was like, and I never took a business class. I was like, probably looking back, I was like, I probably should have taken a couple business classes, But at the end of the day, I was like, I never would have because I was like, I that wasn't the route I was ever gonna be on. And so one thing if you did take a business class, you get into a business Yeah. And you realize, like, how do you this is Yeah. This is completely different. You know? Part of it. Right. You have to have that real experience to see really removes those layers of what that actually looks like and get to it. And so one thing we're seeing even working with the grant career center students, there's some of these, programs that they wanna go into that maybe require or these their skills that they want, they require specific certification.
Well, there's no funding available Yeah. To get a certificate for $2,500. Like, that's it. They can go you can get a hundred thousand dollar loan to go to college, a 40 degree on and come out with a piece of paper that has no skilled training. Right. And but they can't get a loan for $2,500 for a small business loan. Right. And so that's why we've been trying to bridge this gap too. So I've sat on several different scholarship committees both here at the county, at the state level, and the national level of, like, changing these scholarships to allow for these career focused students Yeah. To have access to funding. Yeah. Because that was where I saw, like, a huge gap. And I I mean, I was very much of a college that was always my my plan for what I was doing. But now seeing that, I was like, this is this isn't for everybody. And, but we need to make it easier for these students that they've some of them, they are hard workers, and they they want they want to do it. This is they know exactly what they wanna do. But by golly, they need $2,500. So it's like finding a small business to, like, loan them the money to go get the certification.
[01:52:01] Unknown:
Which you I mean, that is so crazy. You'll give you'll give a 19 year or an 18 year old kid hundreds of thousands of dollars Mhmm. That they cannot go bankrupt on. If they're saddled with that for the rest of their lives. They're going down a career that yeah. Never it doesn't it's not gonna make enough back based on, like, what the current pay grade is to And you'll just throw all kinds of money at that person. But then you look at a person who wants to work and be in the workforce and potentially start their own business Yeah. And you won't give them $2,500.
[01:52:28] Unknown:
Yeah. And I that's where I think we can collectively make a difference in, like, through Farm Bureau and other organizations that we do have, like, continue to lobbying and showing that, like, making there are some small business things as, like, from an agricultural standpoint through the farm search farm service agency and the USDA,
[01:52:46] Unknown:
but they're not super available yet like they would be if you were going to, like, a four year Yeah. College. On small business I mean, it's kinda cliche to say, but small business really does that's how the country runs. I can't remember the statistic, but it's some absurd percentage of people are employed by small businesses. I don't know exactly how you classify I'm sure there's a classification for small business, but, I mean, that's that's how people work. I mean, the entrepreneurs are incredibly important for prosperity.
[01:53:15] Unknown:
Yeah. And I think we sometimes we don't look at like, we don't see a lot of those independent businesses as being a collective like they are. Yeah. And I think I mean, we I know we have our, I don't know, our county level. What's the different organizations that we can be a part of, like, the businessmen's
[01:53:34] Unknown:
associations and stuff. Oh, oh, like, Kiwanis or Yeah. Where,
[01:53:38] Unknown:
I mean, the Chamber of Commerce is the county Chamber of Commerce. Yeah. And I we haven't gotten involved in that, because I feel like it's just another thing. I was like, we probably show showed to see what resources they have available to to connect us all and stuff. But I mean, it sounds like the Farm Bureau essentially fills that role It does. For farmers. Yeah. So
[01:53:56] Unknown:
so if somebody wanted to do what you did, what would what would your advice be to them?
[01:54:03] Unknown:
My number one I'm gonna say is come and and get experience. Yeah. Make sure you're building those relationships. Just go show up. See what you can do. We actually have a young man. He was recommended to us, through another farm, and they said, hey. We're we're doing our sheep sharing. He just started showing up, and he shows up every couple hours, a week. Yeah. And now we're like, can we trust this guy? And now I'm like, okay. He, like, here's these really skilled tasks that he was able to to learn and do. And I think that's the the number one thing is just getting experience to do it.
It's gonna take a lot of grit. Yeah. It you're not gonna with any small business, not even just farming, like, you're gonna have another job to, like, help get you started and pay for it and realizing. But really just having faith in yourself that you can do it. Yeah. Find people to cheer you on along the way. I've been very fortunate. I come from a family of entrepreneurs. So my dad and, I have an uncle, a couple of uncles who have recently, like they sit down with me. It's it's not easy. My brother, he's a business person. That's what he does for a living too. And have somebody go through with your businesses and your numbers to look at it, that can be real with you. Yeah. I think that's the hard thing too. Like, finding somebody that can actually look through the numbers, help you understand. Honest feedback is Yeah. It's not easy. It's rare, and it it sucks. Yeah. But And then they they pushed us to really reach our goals and set our set our goals a lot higher than even what we thought was gonna be possible, and, that that's been our big thing even this past year for us.
I had my uncle. Like, he really set us up to he pushed us hard to to to get where we need to be this year to keep going into next year, and we've, like, been crushing those goals. And it's I know it's because of him and my dad pushing us that we were able to do that. So there are people out there that are willing to to sit down and and work it with you and Yeah. And figure out what that business plan is. I don't have a formal business plan per se,
[01:56:00] Unknown:
but I have a I work for a guy. Kind of a road map of what that looks like. I work for a guy who was starting a it's a very bizarre business. But one of the things that he said was is the the first thing you get rid of when you start a business is your business plan. It's like you get you come up with this plan on paper and then you get into it. It's like, oh, okay. Well, none of this is valid anymore because I didn't think of these. 90% of what we do is never on our original business plan Right. For what that looks like. I still think it's it's a good exercise for people who wanna start a business to kind of corral your thoughts and get you started. On what you But it's just like any plan. Like, you you don't wanna be so inflexible that you don't, you know,
[01:56:38] Unknown:
I guess, innovate or move away from it. Right. And I think that's the the biggest thing is, like, when starting our business is the reason I started doing it, I noticed, like, here in Cincinnati, when I came in, I was like, nobody was, like, direct marketing. Mhmm. Like, very few people were direct marketing. We had people who in our community, like, yeah, they'll they'll sell a beef share. Yeah. But they don't have a website. Yeah. Well, it's like the Johnson's. Like, we we just know the Johnson's. Are. Right? Like, just through relationships and stuff. But I didn't see anybody nobody living in Hamilton County. Very few people living in Hamilton County have a farmer as a neighbor. Yeah. It's easy when you're living out here in Felicity, like, drive down the road. A lot of customers in Hamilton. Yeah. In Hamilton County. Yeah. That's the majority of our customers. Subscription thing I think is is We have customers all across the country. We ship to Really? Yeah. East Coast to West Coast, Florida, Maine, California, Colorado, everywhere between. So That's awesome. I mean, I I Congratulations. Yeah. I wanna focus and, you know, really serve our our I consider our local community Hamilton County, Clermont County as our our main target areas. But at the end of the day, if there's customers across the country that they they love our family and what we do, and, they they trust us. They build a relationship. Well, trust us. From that Especially with when it comes to people growing your food. Yeah. Yeah. Trust is is huge. A big part of it. Do you partner with any restaurants or anything? Like, have you tried doing it? We we don't. Just out of curiosity? Yeah. It's it's a it's a it's a hard situation. Because, you know, restaurants work on a really small margins. Oh, yeah. And so we've had, like, a local food truck. It's got, like, ground beef and stuff from us to make sure they have really good high quality ground beef. It's still kind of a big trend, like, farm to table type stuff? It is. Yeah. And I think a lot of restaurants, making sure that we the ones we've worked with, like, those they'll buy a half a cow. So and they'll do truly, like, nose detail Yeah. Yeah. Within their menu. But if somebody comes to be like, hey. We just wanna source rib eyes, and we don't wanna pay, you know, cool set of price. I was like, yeah. We don't we don't have a hundred thousand cows. I can't Right. I can't. Source you that. But because when you look at I'll use a a half a cow for instance. If somebody buys a half a cow, will I get 12 rib eyes off of that half? But then I still have a 50 pounds of ground beef. Well Right. I've You got to do something with it. Go bankrupt only selling rib eyes. I have to do the rest the ground beef. And so sometimes we'll be able to move their ground beef through, some restaurants. But from right now, it's it was never part of our business plan. So just direct to curious. I'd rather be able to find households that want that whole nose to tail experience. Right.
So I do have we are in one other it's not in Claremont County. It's in Hamilton County. Okay. It's called the Ohio barbecue store. Okay. And so we have a freezer down there. It was opened by a gentleman named Will who actually lives right here behind us. Oh, really? Here in Clermont County, and, he's a big barbecue pit master, opened a barbecue story. He has, like, all the smokers and grills and all the fun things like that and all the seasonings, and he has classes on cooking. Oh, really? And so we have a freezer with our meat. He wanted local meat down there. So he did have County? It is in Hamilton. Right in, in Anderson. Oh, nice. Yeah. Right off Richmond Avenue. Yeah. Yeah. Kinda where the old Panera used to be across from Kroger. I don't I don't know. Oh, yeah. I'm I am directionally challenged. I, at any given time, have Well, it's a high barbecue store. It's, like, right there in Anderson. Okay. Of everything. So if you're around the Anderson area, you can get your beef. Yeah. Right there. Right there. Yeah. There's a lot of people come out here to the farm. Yeah. But, yeah, you can get It's a wonderful drive. There. Yeah. Even even on a rainy day, it's still nice to I can get from here to down I used to go to Findlay Market. I could get from here on a Sunday morning at 5AM to Findlay Market in thirty five minutes. That's not bad. No. No. Pulling a trailer. Yeah.
[02:00:09] Unknown:
I think and I'll check the time, but I'm pretty sure we've been at this. Oh, yeah. I actually have to take my daughter to swim class soon. But before we wrap everything up, why don't you just tell people where they can find you,
[02:00:21] Unknown:
how they can get involved, just promote yourself as much as you want. Yeah. So Flourish and Roam flourishandroam.com. We're on social media, Instagram, Facebook, kinda everywhere in between. Our farms out here in Moscow. Our website has all of our information. Our farm store self serve. Cuppin come shop seven days a week. Nice. Excellent. Well, thank you again, and, I'm gonna call it a successful podcast. Absolutely. Thank you.
[02:00:49] Unknown:
Let me get this off. Thank you so much. Well, I hope you enjoyed that interview. I enjoyed it like I enjoy all of these interviews so far. And thanks again to Sarah for having us out to her farm and and for taking the time to talk to us. I think we're obviously gonna have to have her back on at some point because I don't think you, you know, you don't meet somebody with a PhD in animal science that actually has hands on experience running a farm. I don't think you meet that kind of person every day, so we'll definitely have to have her back. I was also able to score some pork chops from her, some from their, Berkshire hogs, and they look absolutely delicious. They're it's crazy. I've never seen pork chops like it. They're kind of marbled like a like a rib eye. I'm really looking forward to eating them, and I'll be sure to tell everybody how how they are. So let's get into some events.
This Friday, May 16, there's the Homeschool Discovery Day Creek Crawl that's gonna be at 1PM at the Catherine Stagmarr Park. And in case I'm pronouncing that incorrectly, it is 6662 Goshen Road, Goshen, Ohio. And it's just a hands on science exploration for homeschoolers. Recommended ages are five to 13, and, the students, they'll just wait in a creek, learn about fossils, aquatic insects, creek wildlife. It sounds like a really great program for homeschools, for homeschoolers. The event is free, but you should pre register, because space is limited.
This weekend, mustard seed market, that's gonna be the sixteenth from four to 8PM, the seventeenth, from 10AM to 4PM, and the nineteenth from 10AM to 3PM at the Claremont County Fairgrounds. I actually won't be here this weekend, so, unfortunately, I'm gonna have to miss this. My wife is definitely gonna be going, though. And there's just, you know, hundred local shops and small businesses and live music and food and fun. It's a really great event. And so if you're looking for some place to take your family, and spend a nice afternoon, I would I would definitely go to the Mustard Seed Market.
This Friday, the sixteenth, is the sweetheart stroll at Pattison Park from 08:30 to 09:30PM. And it's just a date night. You get to, you know, take your date to the park, and it's gonna be lit by lanterns, and you can pick up a lantern at the trailhead and just kinda stroll through the park at sunset. It sounds like a really great date night, and it's free, so even better. There's the Adventure Gear Expo trip planning and ideation. That's gonna be this Saturday, the seventeenth, from 04:30 to 07:30PM, and that's a drop in. So you're not gonna have to sit there for three hours. You can just come whenever whenever, whenever you can.
And what you do is you just learn about, the parks free adventure pack, gear loan program. So they've got all this, kind of outdoor gear that you can you can, use for free. So if you're thinking about getting into, you know, some more serious outdoor activities, this is a good way to kinda dip your toe in into that hobby. There'll be, park staff will be there, and they'll answer any questions and they'll help you kinda plan your outdoor adventures. And this one, again, is also free. So I would check that out if you're if you're looking into getting into the hiking and camping, but, don't wanna sink a whole bunch of money into, into the gear. There's the, Spring River Paddle. That's gonna be this Saturday, the seventeenth, from two to 3PM, and it's a guided canoe event adventure on the Ohio River, and you get to explore the river's ecology.
You might paddle into some backwater tributaries. I think that's weather dependent, the tributaries, but, canoes and life jackets are provided. You should arrive fifteen minutes early, so get there by 01:45. And it's completely free, but it's only for ages 12 and up. So no no kids. Obviously, that would be a nightmare to bring, like, a five year old on a canoe in the Ohio River, so don't don't try to do that. The River Days Festival, that's gonna be Thursday, May 22 through Saturday, May 24 at Front Street in New Richmond. And it's just a multi day festival. It's gonna have carnival rides, live entertainment, food, crafts, family friendly activities.
So it sounds like it's just gonna be a a really fun time for everybody. So go check that out. Cooking with Cicadas. I think Kaye talked about this. I can't remember if she talked about it during, the interview or after the interview when we were just kinda chatting. But Cooking with Cicadas, it's gonna be Friday, May 23, 06:30PM to 07:30PM at Clingman Park. I didn't realize this was gonna be a cicada year, so I guess we should all prepare for that. But this event is gonna be, it's a short hike, and then you get to eat cicadas. I'll be honest, that that's not my thing, but if you're looking to eat cicadas, I'd say go for it. They'll have some precooked, cicadas you can and you can experiment with kind of different seasonings and toppings.
I think Kay said she hasn't eaten one, but she's gonna eat one. So if you do go to that, make sure you you hold her to that and that she actually eats a cicada. And the last one we have is flower pounding, and I know I'm gonna pronounce this one wrong. It is flower pounding tatakizomi. I think it's it's a Japanese word, so I hope I got even in the ballpark of that. But that's gonna be Saturday, May 24 from 2PM to 03:30PM at Clingdon Park. And what this is is there's a a Japanese art of, oh, man, Ta Takizome. But what it is is you dye things. You take a flower and a hammer, and you hit the flower with the hammer on the thing that you're dying, and it dyes it.
So you'll learn obviously how to do that, but you also learn how to identify common flowers, and you get to dye your own handkerchief. So actually seems pretty cool, and possibly a good way to take out some frustrations. So if you're interested in that, and I'm not gonna try to pronounce that again, but if you're interested in it, I would go check that out. And before we wrap this up, I'm just gonna make another pitch to to get in touch because we wanna hear from you. We're on Facebook. You can go there. You can message me on Facebook. You can leave comments, and we also have an email, info@let'stalkclaremont.com, because we want boots on the ground information. We wanna know what's going on in your communities. We wanna know we should be talking about, who we should be talking to, what what I'm getting wrong, all that kind of stuff.
So if you've got something to tell us, please head over to Facebook or shoot us a message at info@let'stalkclaremont.com. That's all we got for today. And, again, I really appreciate everybody that's listening.
Introduction and Ohio Department of Education's AI Scoring
Local News Updates: Batavia Township and Williamsburg
Engaging with the Community and Listener Feedback
Interview with Sarah Eisen: Flourish in Rome
Understanding A2 Milk and Its Benefits
Journey to Starting a Farm in Clermont County
Discussion on Avian Influenza and Raw Milk Safety
Regenerative Farming and Soil Health
Health Journey and Nutritional Insights
Challenges and Rewards of Farming
Involvement with the Farm Bureau and Advocacy
Advice for Aspiring Farmers
Conclusion and Upcoming Local Events
