Regenerative Ag Stories on the Grazing Grass Podcast

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0:00:01 - Cal
Welcome to the Grazing Grass Podcast, episode 126.

0:00:06 - Ben
I think what I have to tell someone who's starting out is that you can start any way right now, but try and do so with a bit of scale.

0:00:16 - Cal
You're listening to the Grazing Grass Podcast, sharing information and stories of grass-based livestock production utilizing regenerative practices. I'm your host, cal Hartage. You're growing more than grass. You're growing a healthier ecosystem to help your cattle thrive in their environment. You're growing your livelihood by increasing your carrying capacity and reducing your operating cost. By increasing your carrying capacity and reducing your operating costs, you're growing stronger communities and a legacy to last generations. The grazing management decisions you make today impact everything from the soil beneath your feet to the community all around you. That's why the Noble Research Institute created their Essentials of Regenitive Grazing course to teach ranchers like you easy-to-follow techniques to quickly assess your forage, production and infrastructure capacity in order to begin grazing more efficiently. Together, they can help you grow not only a healthier operation, but a legacy that lasts. Learn more on their website at nobleorg slash grazing. It's n-o-b-l-e dot org forward slash grazing.

On today's show we have Ben Glasson of Glasson Farms and Good Place Abattoir. He's sharing what he's doing on Vancouver Island with multiple species. I think no matter what you're grazing, you're going to get something from today's episode. Also, his four principles of grazing infrastructure is beneficial for anyone that's grazing animals, especially on lease property. Really good episode. I think you'll enjoy it. However, before we talk to Ben, 10 seconds of my farm. So if I turn out bulls right now, I'm calving at the 1st of May. I turn out bulls right now, I'm calving at the first of May. However, I turned out bulls a couple weeks ago because I wanted to push that beginning of the calving season back a little bit. I wanted to push it back into mid-April. So bulls have been out a couple weeks. But for the spring calving cows, the bulls are out.

For the podcast, we have some really good guests coming up. A couple authors are coming on, so be watching out for those. Also, we're working on some new merch, so be on the lookout for that. We'll talk about it on the podcast soon. One thing we do each week is release a YouTube version of the podcast. We release a YouTube version of the podcast for people who like to consume their podcasts on YouTube. Now, if you're one that doesn't want to listen on YouTube, that's fine, but what you could do? You could jump over to YouTube and subscribe to the Grazing Grass podcast. It'd help us out. We appreciate it. Enough of that. Let's talk to Ben. Ben, we want to welcome you to the Grazing Grass Podcast. We're excited, you're here today.

0:03:38 - Ben
Thank you so much. I'm a long-time listener, first-time caller.

0:03:41 - Cal
Well, thank you, we're so glad you're becoming a caller, but we're also so happy you're becoming a caller, but we're also so happy you've been a listener as well. And to get started, Ben, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your operation?

0:03:55 - Ben
Thanks, cal. I'm here on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, so I'm on a big island. It's about 800 miles long and about 200 miles wide and it's in the Pacific Ocean, a two-hour ferry journey away from Vancouver and our big metropolitan center. And so across the water from us is Vancouver, but to the south of us is Victoria, province's capital, and across from Victoria is Seattle.

0:04:25 - Cal
Oh, okay, yeah, and just on Vancouver Island, is there a large population there? Or, as we get into this a little, bit more. You're selling products. Are you going off island to sell products?

0:04:39 - Ben
There's 2 million people on Vancouver. Island, about a million of which are in the greater Victoria area, so south of the mountains a little mountain pass and so I am two hours north of Victoria in the second largest community on the island, about 100,000 people. I do go over to the mainland and deliver mostly to friends and family that are still over there, because I did my education at Capilano University for tourism.

0:05:06 - Cal
Oh, okay. Well, just in context for me, in Oklahoma we have about 4 million people, so about half that population's on the island. Just to give me some context to work from. Okay, sorry, I jumped into that because I saw when you'd sent in your original information, and look at your website, vancouver island, I thought, oh, this is really interesting for one. I hate to admit I don't know this, but I had to look it up and figure out it was in the pacific ocean versus the atlantic, because I thought is that an island on the east side or on the west side? And obviously, as you, mentioned on the west side.

I'm much smarter now, so thank you, ben.

0:05:46 - Ben
I appreciate that well, the vancouver and you could have associated it with, like vancouver, washington, vancouver, british columbia, vancouver island, that was the leader to, to the pacific oh, yes, yeah, very good in my defense, I've not been to the pac Coast.

0:06:04 - Cal
I take it back. I went to Hawaii. That's not really the Pacific Coast, but it is the Pacific.

0:06:11 - Ben
Yeah, that's more like the Pacific middle of the ocean.

0:06:14 - Cal
It is, you're right. Yeah, so, ben, we've got you located. I want to find out why you even decided to become an agriculturalist.

0:06:28 - Ben
When I was a little boy, we lived in central.

0:06:29 - Cal
Washington.

0:06:29 - Ben
So I was born in Seattle and then lived in Wenatchee Washington. So I moved to Wenatchee Washington when I was six months old and so that was a rural community where there was horses and cows, that when my parents pushed me around in the stroller I would feed grass across the fence to the cows and the horses in the overgrazed little paddocks on these hobby farms. So that was definitely my introduction to rural thinking. And then, at two years old, my parents took me to a rodeo, like my dad's. Coworkers were like hey, we want to go to the OMAX Stampede this weekend. And I was just enamored like nothing but cowboys. Rodeo and ranching was all.

I talked about for the next few years Now. My dad was a cyclist, so we moved to Canada when I was five years old, and then my dad was a cyclist. So, though as a kid I did a lot of horseback riding lessons and things like that, I transitioned more into cycling when we moved to Vancouver Island in 2001 when I was going into grade seven, oh okay so.

So I really focused on cycling then. Although in high school and at the end of grade nine I had a, I was old enough to buy my own bull riding gear and find a practice pen on the Island and started junior steer riding. So that was, was my, my rodeo fix.

That was short-lived because I landed myself in the hospital and lost my spleen to being stepped on, so that put rodeo on the back burner. However, I continued pursuing cycling competitively, and so out of high school I was, uh, traveling for mountain bike contests, slope style, the big backflips and big tricks, and so I was traveling for that all over. So that was like living out my dream of being a rodeo traveling cowboy, because you know, on the road for 24 hours straight to get from British Columbia to Colorado or California and then ride in front of the crowd for not much more than glory for about 30 seconds and drive home empty-handed, yeah, and often battered and bruised, that's for sure so I went to school for tourism thinking I'd build businesses in mountain biking so guiding trail building, bike park building, kids camps and things like that and I worked at that kind of thing through university and then had a two ACL injuries through competition and then a back injury while building mountain bike parks.

That just put me out of that industry.

Going into my last term of university, so going into my last term, I discovered aquaponics which is super interesting because there's there's like ecosystem management, where you have this you're mimicking a wild pond ecosystem with land-based fish farming and then root the water into hydroponic grow beds. That takes up the nutrient rich water and then the clean water can go back to the fish. So it was this mimicking nature, like an artificial mimicking of the ecosystem. So that was really interesting to me. So I did my final research in my tourism degree on the connections between aquaponics and tourism and my top three findings were first of all, you need to connect with local communities. So the Canadian Tourism Commission at the time was big on local eating experiences. So I want to get involved.

And aquaponics is something that people just don't know about, and it's the same with regenerative agriculture. So my research there applies completely to regenerative, because aquaponics and regenerative people just don't know what it is, so we need to teach people. It's an awareness marketing campaign. So, first of all, local eating experiences. Second of all is like being face-to-face with your customer, so direct marketing, local farmers, markets, talking to the chefs that you work with. And then, last of all, is working with education Everything from kindergartners to PhD students, and I have I've had a couple master's students do research. I've had a couple grade three, four classes. I've had university fitness classes and all sorts of people come visit my farm. Now that I'm applying these same principles to regenerative agriculture, to spread the awareness of what it is, oh yeah, and I think you hit on a few topics there.

0:10:35 - Cal
That's so important, but getting out and sharing with others and getting them on your farm is so important Now in that are you doing some aquaponics as well.

0:10:48 - Ben
Not really, so I tried to build an industrial like a business out of aquaponics, first with a pilot plant and then with a industrial complex, but I was working in the startup community in Vancouver trying to fundraise all this money for all this equipment and few speed bumps, including someone who I was working for, a man who ended up to be like ipo fraudster, which was just an insane coincidence. So I burnt out on that and started doing some work with what that my wife was doing, like youth care, 24-hour supervision of teenagers, and so these kids didn't wake up till noon and so I had all this time to spend on youtube in the mornings, and that's where I was watching, like justin rose oh yes he's the, his homesteader of america tour, where he

takes his family all over the united states, and there I was watching a video on aquaponics, but then on his tour he also went to places like greg judy's place and joel salatin's place, and so justin rhodes led me to greg judy and joel salatin led me to Wendell Berry, and Wendell Berry led me to Sir Albert Howard, and then all the way back through through holistic management and everything else.

0:11:56 - Cal
You describe a very familiar journey for so many people right there and Rhodes I watch. Greg Judy, joel Salatin, all those names. Wendell Berry I have not read his books. That was brought up on the podcast a couple of weeks ago that I've got to read those books. But so it's. Those names are very familiar to so many people in this space.

0:12:18 - Ben
They've came similar journeys to get here Wendell Berry's book the Unsettling of America from 1977, you read it today and it reads like it was written yesterday. Like everything that he talks about, there is the precursor and the telling of the beginning of the story which has become our industrial farming complex.

0:12:38 - Cal
Yeah, that's my understanding and I need to read that my to read list is much longer than my read list at this point.

0:12:49 - Ben
And it's narrated by oh it's, it's on audible.

0:12:54 - Cal
Oh, excellent.

0:12:56 - Ben
Oh, I can't remember who it's narrated by, but oh, it's narrated by Nick Offerman. So Wendell Berry's the Unsettling of America, read by Nick Offerman. Who's this? Hollywood Berry's the Unsettling of America, read by Nick Offerman. Who's this Hollywood star that plays all these tough characters but is in real life friends with Wendell Berry because he appreciates regenerative agriculture?

0:13:13 - Cal
and.

0:13:13 - Ben
Wendell's work.

0:13:15 - Cal
Well, I just pulled it up because here I think I've mentioned on the podcast. I'm relatively new to the audiobook experience. I love podcasts, I listen to podcasts, but audiobooks have never really gained traction with me until lately. I've started listening to some, I would say, in the last year now, and so now the struggle is am I going to listen to a podcast right now or audio?

0:13:52 - Ben
So I'm excited to find out that it's on an audio book because, as you know, you have more time to listen than you do to read. Yeah, I always have my Bluetooth headphones on at all times. Everyone releases their new episodes on a Monday and by Monday afternoon I'm like man, what am I going to listen to for the rest of the week? And I usually end up going back and listening to old audiobooks that I've already listened to, like Holistic Management. It's thick, it's dense, and that's why I've read it.

Sorry, listened to it 12 times.

0:14:15 - Cal
And you just did something really interesting that when I listen to an audiobook, I don't know why I feel the need. When I say, well, I've read that book, well, I listened to it book, I don't know why I feel the need when I say, well, I've read that book, well, I listened to it.

0:14:32 - Ben
Cal, I set you up for that because I know you've said that previously, because I just heard you say it in a podcast that I was listening to the other day.

0:14:36 - Cal
And so I'm just yeah, I don't know why it needs.

0:14:38 - Ben
I feel the same way though.

0:14:39 - Cal
But I have to say and this is for authors out there and we have a lot of authors to listen, I'm joking, but it is for authors out there I have some books. I own a physical copy and I own the audio book, because I listen to a book and then I want to go back and read it or revisit areas of it. In fact, for Love of Soil, I've got the audio book, the ebook and the physical book, so it gives me access in multiple ways. I think it gives multiple returns that way.

0:15:16 - Ben
Well, this leads to how I started learning about regenerative agriculture in addition to YouTube. Well, I then was working a professional tourism job at an events company downtown Vancouver and living in the outskirts, so I'd hop on a SkyTrain and that would rip me to town in about an hour, so I had this hour each direction to read.

And I went to the local Vancouver Public Library and I found that it has a great farming section with Wendell Berry and Joel Salatin and all sorts of great books, so that was how I could start reading paper books because my dad, especially, was a huge reader, but I never got the bug because I never had this solitary time to sit down and read.

And so with this time on the train that allowed me to have that. And then, following that, we were looking to move back to Vancouver Island to be closer to my parents as my parents were aging and and then I discovered audiobooks. And then I and podcasts and I was a friend's dad offered me a labor job here on the island where I was power washing and painting things and I could listen to. I was listening to like 300 hours of podcasts a month plus listening to two audiobooks. I got two audible accounts and then was going back and rereading old books as well from audible. So that was how I got my education in regenerative agriculture and when I was still living on the mainland, I would take that sky train and be reading these farming books. And then I started a pilot project with not backyard chickens, because we weren't allowed chickens in our neighborhood, so I started with backyard quail and chicken tractors mini chicken tractors.

So I'd be in my suit, I would walk to the sky train and move my quail tractors, and then I'd hop on the train and, in my suit, be reading my farming books and go to my tourism job and then hop back on the train, come home, and so that was my first pilot project in 2018. And then in 2019, this job allowed me to move to the island, to be closer to my parents and start leasing fields here, and then I started with chickens and some turkeys, and then pigs, and then sheep and now beef cattle as well, did you?

0:17:18 - Cal
continue with your quail when you moved, or did you just go ahead and transition to chicken at that time?

0:17:26 - Ben
well, joel Salton says that Al Nation says that his dad says that you can only be so weird. You can be a Buddhist or you could be a nudist, but if you're a Buddhist, nudist that's a little too weird. So regenerative agriculture is already pretty weird so I knew that quail was a pilot project, and then I wanted to be raising Cornish cross chickens in 2019, whether it was over there or over here.

0:17:51 - Cal
Oh, yes, so you got that opportunity to go to the island, got some land to do chickens. Talk about how you got started with that.

0:18:02 - Ben
Yeah. So one thing for me is scale. Like you have to start at a bit of scale, and so by running spreadsheets I knew that 250 cornish cross broilers in eight weeks was like the sweet spot of economies of scale to make it worthwhile for my time and for it to actually be a business and so I knew that's where I was going to start.

So we moved over to the island and we found the cheapest, tiniest, smallest little house we could afford in town, and I'm five minutes away from some rural, a rural kind of circle route that goes outside between the mountains and town. And so I started with a five acre field and then I partnered on another 12 acre property where I was able to raise some pigs, and now my portfolio is up to about 10 properties.

0:18:46 - Cal
So you were able to go out and get those properties leased.

0:18:52 - Ben
Correct. So the four principles that I operate with are things that I've learned from Joel Salatin and all of these other guys as well. A lot from Greg Judy, and his leased land model is, first of all, detach the land ownership from the farming. So the 10 properties I manage. Now, often at the farmer's market people are like, yeah, but don't you wish you could own some of the farmland or the farm that you work on? And I tell them realistically, here the 10 properties I work on. I did the math the other day and I've just picked up a bunch of new properties 27 million dollars worth of real estate yeah, I wow yeah.

I would love to own land. I would really love to. I never will own any of it here. A statistic that I found recently in doing some research is that north of Williams Lake. So if you look at the province of British Columbia and put a dot in the middle, you'll hit Williams Lake. Oh okay, north of that is like Steve Kenyon he's about at that kind of or that latitude.

Oh okay, and so north of there, farmland in British Columbia sells for $1,000 to $5,000 per acre. South of there, if you exclude the Okanagan, which is like wine territory, the lower mainland, which is like the Vancouver greater area, and Vancouver Island, if you exclude those south of williams lake, farmland goes for five thousand to twenty thousand dollars per acre.

and in the okanagan, the lower mainland and on vancouver island farmland sells for hundreds of thousands of dollars per acre yes, right now there's a number, there's three or five farms, beautiful farms that are about 40 to 80 acres and they're selling for uh, close to three million dollars or more. So I'm never going to own the farmland here and if I want to farm here I'm going to lease. And I was at a memorial for for don whitek he was a old sheep farmer here and I met this other couple, john Buchanan, and he runs a sheep operation down in the capital in Victoria and we were talking and his wife was telling me we do it a little bit different. We lease all of our farmland, we just own a little two acre home spot. And I said that's not different to me. That's what.

I'm doing and they own 40, they operate 40 properties and it's over a thousand acres in a very suburban community.

And that was, and I cannot imagine what the real estate would be so a thousand acres, and I would think it's got to be a hundred million dollars worth of real estate that they farm on. But it's so wonderful to see someone doing just what I'm doing on Vancouver Island, and they've been successful at it for many decades and so it's entirely possible. And though people do think it's weird, them admitting we do it differently, it's not that different and it's it works. And so many people around here don't understand that share land thing, but I describe it as in the prairies, the cattle farmer is renting ground from the grain. In the prairies, the cattle farmer is renting ground from the grain farmer next door and the grain farmers renting ground from the cattle farmer next door. It's just a share of resources for those who specialize in what they do, and for me it's a grass-based livestock one thing you mentioned.

0:22:02 - Cal
There is something that goes through my head quite often, and I don't know if it's Alan Nation said it or who, as you alluded to. It may be along the same lines, but managing the land is more important than owning the land.

0:22:20 - Ben
Absolutely. It is Greg Judy's favorite quote that he heard from Alan. Nation that really changed his paradigm, that that it's not about owning the land, it's about controlling the land yes and controlling it through management and care.

And that's what I always say is that, like I'm a landscape manager, I am an ecosystem developer and the tool is the livestock and I monetize myself. I don't even charge these landowners, I monetize myself through selling at the farmer's market. The byproduct of my land management services is this meat that lands in the freezers and that we can sell to our community to feed them the best darn meat they can find yeah, I love that philosophy and I have to say I was not raised that way.

0:23:03 - Cal
I was raised we growing up my dad they always leased a little bit of property but the home base was bigger than the lease property and so I always had this I've got to buy the land and it took me a while to make. That shift into leasing land is a great way. It's a great way for anyone to get started and to go. Getting out there and finding that land is the hard part. But that mind shift from going out I got to go buy that land really frees you up and helps you get started much earlier.

0:23:40 - Ben
Yeah, it's all about investing as much money into the cash flowing enterprises as you can and as little as you can into infrastructure and the land. So the four principles that I farm with I started getting into them but we really uh dove deep on the land leasing. So the four principles is detach the land ownership from the farming. The second piece is mobile infrastructure, both in the sense that you can bring infrastructure to a farm, use it and move it to another farm, but also, of course, the mobility of our animals, participating with nature, not mimicking, participating with nature in these natural cycles of migrating the animals across the landscape. So that's leased land, detached land ownership from the farming, mobile infrastructure, modular infrastructure. So in order to grow my sheep flock, I add more electric nets and more reels with my cattle and more chicken tractors with my birds. So modular, and that allows you to also keep it human scale. So most of my infrastructure is small enough to pull by hand, like I'm not going to build one chicken tractor that needs some vehicle to pull, I'm just going to build more 16 foot by 12 foot tractors that I can pull by hand. And then the last piece is holding on to as much of the food dollar as possible by direct marketing, so doing as many of the things as possible. So those four principles I demonstrated through my quail project detach the land ownership from the farming I borrowed neighbors neighbors' backyards. Today I lease as many fields as I can in the community.

Mobile infrastructure I had my quail tractors that I literally built in my driveway and they didn't fit in the back of my wife's electric car so I had to walk them down the road to these properties.

Modular infrastructure I started with one property there and one quail tractor and now and then had five by the end of the summer, just like today. I've been adding leased land and adding more chicken tractors this year. And then direct marketing my quail project. There was a car free day, which was like a one-day farmer's market, and I didn't have food permits, so I sold memberships to the quail club and when you bought a membership you got your first set of eggs for free.

Well, today I do three farmer's markets a week and then work with a couple of private chefs and have delivered to restaurants in the past and I sell chicken, turkey, lamb, pork and beef so that I have the diversity on the landscape. And now that I have the diversity in the landscape of these five species and I'm overburdened with doing too many things. I can't figure out which one to quit because they all have a niche in the ecosystem and they all have demand at the farmers market I would love to dive into a little bit more about particulars like your chicken tractor, the design of it and etc.

0:26:13 - Cal
But you bring up a important point there. You're going to three farmers markets. You've got all these different livestock that you're taking care of. How much time is it taking you each day to take care of your livestock? And I know you you mentioned like multiple chicken tractors, so you're getting more. How are you fitting all that into your day? Because it sounds like a lot yeah.

0:26:37 - Ben
Well, often people are asking me oh yeah, how much? How many hours a day do you work? Or how many hours a week do you work, and I just answer simply a week do you work?

And I just answer simply all of them yeah, you know from whether it was my mountain bike career or now, like it was a lifestyle, like I woke up breathing, thinking, drinking, preparing, everything was in preparation for that sport, and now it's for being a farmer. Like this is I'm hyper-focused. Maybe it's for being a farmer like this is I'm hyper focused. Maybe it's a product of adhd or autism, or just me. Being me is obsessive and I'm obsessed with regenerative agriculture and farming, and so my every waking moment is spent doing something towards moving this mission forward, and I have such big goals that that there's the farmers. Work is never done, and that's truly the case now, okay. Well, one thing that I like about podcasts and podcasts that I like is they go into specifics and they they give like tangible real-world examples of things that can be useful yeah, so so realistically, I do three farmer's markets a week, which is a Saturday morning market, and so that gives me the afternoon for chores

a Sunday, a big Sunday market, and that gives me the evening for chores. On Monday and Friday we process poultry and so that's my crew is getting the point where I can leave them for most of the day. I still have to be there to turn on the scalder at 6 30 am and usually do bagging from 5 pm to 11 pm or something. That's what I was doing last night, and then that gives me basically Tuesday and Thursday to do everything, and then I have a Wednesday farmer's market midweek and that's an afternoon market. So yeah, and then Thursday nights I also do a radio show on the local radio station, which is the Tuning Fork, and we talk food and farming and my vegetable farmer friend is my co-host, aaron Grout. Shout out to Aaron, and so the Tuning Fork is super fun. It's a time when we get to just sit down, sit still, but still end up talking about farming.

0:28:42 - Cal
Oh yeah, that sounds very interesting, but still end up talking about farming. Oh yeah, that sounds very interesting, Now let's jump into your chicken operation. I appreciate you breaking down your schedule like that. Now let's jump into your chicken operation. You mentioned a while ago 12-foot by 16-foot chicken tractors. What design are you using?

0:29:05 - Ben
Yes, sir. So I bought the designs for Darby Simpson's chicken tractor and for John Soskovich's chicken tractor and read everything I could on the Joel Salatin chicken tractor, and after all, these books dedicated to how to make exactly the same chicken tractor of them. The last sentence is always, but it always depends on your context and what's right for you.

0:29:28 - Cal
Yes, exactly.

0:29:30 - Ben
So I combined a couple of the designs. So the base of my chicken tractor is like a Joel Salatin chicken tractor which is made of two by two construction I went a little bit bigger than Joel Salatin which is his are 11 foot by 10 foot, I believe, and mine are 12 foot by 16 foot. Now, one thing that's peculiar is that everyone pulls their chicken tractors the long way. Whether it's the, whether it's the range master greenhouse type chicken tractors or small ones, everyone seems to be pulling them the long way.

It just made sense for me to pull it the short way, so I pull it the 12 foot direction oh yeah now I have a back injury previously stated from my mountain bike trail building career, and so there was no way I was bending over to get into the jewel salatin tractor to pull them out or whatever to service them.

So I built a john suskovich tarp tent top with half inch metal electrical conduit bent as the archway for my chicken tractors, so they have like an eight foot peak and I can walk comfortably in them and I can hang an automated water like a bell water one bell water per chicken tractor, as well as two feeders per chicken tractor, and so that allows me to pour two bags of feed to them after moving them so move the chicken tractors and then and pour two bags of feed at the peak, and the goal is for them to just about, or have just run out of feed by the next day's feeding very good, and you read my mind, ben, because I was about to say did you go with a two-foot one?

0:31:06 - Cal
can you walk in it? Because for me, I like being able to walk into them. But, like you mentioned and you're gonna have to help me on john's last name from farming solutions, sus co. There you go, I'm gonna go with that.

0:31:23 - Ben
Seskovich.

His plan is kind of small, but it does give you the ability to walk in there, so you've increased walk-in ability for sure, and his, I think, is only seven foot by four foot and I just can't imagine the inefficiency of pulling something so small like my chicken tractors on a flat but bumpy field. I can forget to put the lawnmower wheels on the back and I can pull them without it, and but I do have two wheels and the wheels are actually one of the most expensive parts. They're about 50 a piece but they're 12 inch rear wheels off of like a husqvarna lawnmower and though those on a couple carriage bolts sticking through the sides of the two by four, two by twos is enough to just elevate the back side of the chicken tractor and then pull it along. So if we were to move to the next species, I also raise turkeys in a similar system.

So my chicken tractors are enclosed with the three quarter inch hardware cloth around the bottom and hardware cloth in three quarter inch is small enough that the predators are not getting in, while my turkey tractor is the same design, only it does not have the mesh around the outsides, it's just open sided so the turkeys can come in and out.

And then I use an electric net. An electric net goes around the turkeys. I also put an electric net around the chicken tractors for the primary purpose of keeping the livestock guardian dog in. Now, part of my context of course everyone's context is different is that I farm. I'm the suburban rancher. I have these five acre fields that are surrounded by one acre luxury homes. So part of my context is that livestock guardian dog gets dropped off in the morning and then about 10 pm I pick him up and bring him home and he sleeps in the dog room.

0:33:18 - Cal
That's an interesting solution.

0:33:23 - Ben
The neighbors would not appreciate him barking all night, so instead my neighbors here in the neighborhood have to deal with Kino the barker.

0:33:32 - Cal
Those livestock guardian dogs. They love to bark for long hours during the night dogs they love to to bark for long hours during the night. But I think you pick out a really good thing there because if you left that dog over there in that barking you're going to cause those homeowners over there some disturbances that they wouldn't be happy with and that might affect your ability to run animals over there.

0:33:58 - Ben
Exactly, exactly, definitely. Part of the context is being a good neighbor. I have a brochure that I've printed to hand out specifically to neighbors, to invite them on a farm tour, to offer them a discount on a Thanksgiving bird and even offer them a free chicken, and just make good neighbors. Because, let's be honest, that livestock guardian dog if I'm not supervising him when I'm moving the chicken tractors and moving that fence, sometimes he wanders into the neighborhood and sometimes the cows are in someone's backyard and one time my wife's pot-bellied pigs got out of that field and went up the road and there was thousands and thousands of dollars worth of manicured, meticulous, like oh man, the amount of damage they could have done but they didn't.

Oh well, good yeah, so I've been lucky.

0:34:40 - Cal
I've been lucky how many chickens are you putting in a tractor?

0:34:44 - Ben
a hundred is a perfect amount, like the humane, ethical standards for cornish cross birds is like two square feet per bird in an industrial barn. So I try and keep that two square feet per bird but honestly like I I stuff them fill with like 150 sometimes and just like start harvesting them early so that I'm decreasing that population as they get bigger. And I harvest because we have a small crew or just getting trained up. We only harvest about 100 birds a day and on batches of five, six hundred now. So I originally was doing batches of 250 for the first year and then was doing batches of 300 per batch, three or four batches a year for a couple years and then last year started with a couple batches of 500 and this year I'm like starting 700 birds and I'll sell maybe 50 or 60 to friends who are also poultry processing customers and then so I'm finishing like 500 birds kind of thing.

0:35:36 - Cal
And then for your turkeys, what? Kind of numbers are you talking about with turkeys?

0:35:42 - Ben
So an important thing to mention, both on chickens and turkeys, is that we have really powerful poultry marketing boards here. That are the government lobby organizations that are supply chain management, that they dictate the amount of production of poultry that's happening in our province to serve the needs, to needs and to keep the market stable. And so that allows small direct vendors is what they call us. On the chicken marketing board side, we're allowed to raise 2,000 broiler chickens per year, and on the turkey marketing board side we're allowed to raise 300 birds per year, so those are my calves. Cutting board side, we're allowed to raise 300 birds per year, so those are my calves. And so I do one batch of 300 turkeys and I harvest them all before or half right before Thanksgiving, half right after Thanksgiving and then freeze the rest for Christmas and then for chickens. This year I'm doing three batches of 500 or 600.

0:36:35 - Cal
Oh, okay, yeah, Very good, and you answered my next question. You're growing your turkeys for harvest in the fall, for the holidays, basically.

0:36:45 - Ben
Yes, sir. However, I do see the opportunity that, in order for the best management of the grass, ideally I would brood a set of turkeys in February because my first batch of broilers comes in March and then put them out on pasture the first week of March, and then they would be fertilizing the field March, april, may, and then harvest them beginning of June, so that spring flush of grass would be bumping with turkey manure yes, it would yeah.

0:37:17 - Cal
Beginning of June, so that spring flush of grass would be bumping with turkey manure? Yes, it would yeah. And that's the amazing thing about if you've never seen a chicken tractor or turkeys after you moved them, the way that grass comes back is just amazing with that chicken manure or turkey manure fertilizing it.

0:37:34 - Ben
Absolutely Like a batch of turkeys, is also more easier to manage on pasture because you can use the net to get into certain corners oh yeah, and do a more even fertilizer and then also do a lighter fertilization, uh, by just giving them a little bit more space and then controlling where they go by pouring feed and placing waters at different points points within that net to control their impact and really cover quite a bit of ground With a batch of 300 birds. Basically I'm covering like three acres and you could definitely double that if you wanted to, specifically for the field health Are you using?

0:38:11 - Cal
how many chicken tractors are you using for your turkeys, or your turkey tractors? I guess we should call them. And then are you keeping them all in one flock?

0:38:17 - Ben
Yeah, I keep them all using for your turkeys, or your turkey tractors, I guess we should call them. And then last year, all in one, flock yeah, I keep them all.

I keep the turkeys in one flock, but I never cross chickens and turkeys because there's blackhead, which is a disease that turkeys can get from chickens, and so I have specific fields that only do turkeys on. Uh, knowing that there's not been chickens there before and I keep one flock of 300 and I've experimented a little bit with and would probably do more of this is to increase the economies of scale of doing my chores every day for the turkeys but being limited to 300 turkeys, putting like 100 geese in there as well if I could sell geese for the holidays as well, and I know luke gross of gross family farm.

He does a batch of turkeys and geese together and so I know that he's having great success with that very good.

0:39:04 - Cal
That's interesting something I hadn't thought about. But yeah, because you have that hard cap on your number of turkeys, you can raise right.

0:39:13 - Ben
However, as a poultry processor, no, no, geese, please. No, thank you. No, thank you. They're so hard to pluck. Ducks are the same. I don't know. At this point I don't think you can figure it out. A cleanly plucked chicken is easy. A cleanly plucked duck or goose? I don't think it's actually.

0:39:33 - Cal
I think it's magic, oh yeah, okay. So we've talked about your chickens and turkeys. Let's move on to your next species.

0:39:45 - Ben
Pigs in the forest. So I have forest pork on my menu at the farmer's market and my favorite question is what do you mean by forest pork? And being able to show it to people is even better when people come out to a farm tour and we're walking out of the pasture and into the woods and they start seeing evidence of well, it looks like there might've been blackberries here at one point and the ground is disturbed here. And then you come around a corner and all of a sudden a herd of 30 hogs come running at you and stop dead in their tracks at two lines of electric wire. This, ladies and gentlemen, is forest pork. And in our beautiful, rich rainforests around here, the pigs in the forest is just magical. And we have the invasive Himalayan blackberry and spurge laurel and holly, and these are all species that, by pouring the feed directly into the root bed, the pigs just make stuff disappear. And with the Himalayan blackberry, some of which are six feet, eight feet tall, when they're through with it, like goats, will step on the canes and eat every leaf and then you will have a mat of blackberry canes Pigs. They will first turn up the root ball and chew on that and then they will knock the vines down and eat all the leaves and then they will just pummel the canes into the ground to the point where they've dried out and broken into nothingness. So you see, you come into an area that was 40 feet deep and 100 feet long of blackberries, and then now you just see a few canes on the ground, the little bit of evidence that once there was blackberries. And then now you just see a few canes on the ground, the little bit of evidence that once there was blackberries here, and then they changed the chemical composition and physically till the ground and the biological composition of the soil, which allows the latent seed bank to come back. In a way that is just amazing to see what comes back next.

So I'm on to a new farm this year and so right now I'm building out. I've got access to eight acres of forest. In the past I've had two acres of forest for the pigs and now I'm expanding that out to. Right now I fenced about three and a half acres just to get started and then we'll expand beyond that as we go here. And this was ground that was previously cleared, probably six or 10 years ago, and is grown up into these bad blackberries and so, and with scotch broom as well. And so I'm really looking forward to renovating this forest over the next couple of years to a point where then we can move on to a different area of forest on this property and then we can graze the cattle through there, because when it was originally cleared the farmer and construction guy in town here he had planted a pasture mix, so I really can't wait to see that pasture mix come back once we've cleared the area of those invasives now with your pigs.

0:42:31 - Cal
You mentioned you had them on, I think you said, two acres before, did you? Are you moving them to that new property and are you able to graze your cattle on that area where they were before, or are you still running pigs there?

0:42:45 - Ben
I lost the lease on that other farm. A new owner came in and just didn't understand the model, and the new operation is a hundred acre farm. This eight acre forest that I'll renovate is the first step into a relationship with this new owner, and there's also 10 acres at the front of the property that a Montessori school has built on, which they're calling the Montessori Farm School here in Nanaimo, and so it's a wonderful opportunity for me to be farming behind them and slowly incorporate more of my production onto this land, but also more of my activities into the school.

0:43:17 - Cal
Yes, that is a wonderful opportunity. I love that.

0:43:23 - Ben
So the technical side of how I run my pigs is there's a siding company that has these wonderful 12 and 14 foot pallets and so I take these pallets and I build a corral with them.

And so this time what I've done is I've built a pad and I need the concrete to be laid next and put a grain bin in the middle so I can have bulk feed delivered from the one feed mill we have on the island, and then that is a central hub, is this pallet corral where when I'm raising, I basically keep four sows which keep giving me two letters a year, so that allows me to have 60 to 80 piglets to market every year and everything's farrow to finish. And so I can I have the central corral and then I can run electric wires two or three wires at like, six inches, 12 inches and 18 inches and then I can run paddocks inches and then I can run paddocks. So in the past I've had like one acre paddocks and then subdivide them with poly reels and step-in posts. However, this time I've created quarter acre paddocks, half a dozen quarter acre paddocks around the corral system oh yeah, so that and and so it's more a permanent system.

And this is what on the just the Justin Rhodes video when he goes to visit Joel Salatin's pig system is. Now that I've got the experience, I know that for my herd size that these are going to be good size paddocks for them. Now the sizing of my paddocks has been a bit random because and my handyman who's a carpenter, it drives him crazy that my paddock sizes are not perfect. But I am going to use that to my advantage that oh, right now we're going to put them in a smaller paddock because we have fewer animals, and then bigger paddock when they have more animals.

So just let the land dictate where the borders go, instead of tape measure now you mentioned there, you bring that feed bin in.

0:45:13 - Cal
You talk about those bigger pallets you get from a roofing company and you mentioned concrete. Are you putting concrete down, did I?

0:45:23 - Ben
understand that correctly. I'm just building a horseshoe out of concrete.

That is just the base for the grain bin oh okay, and then I will bucket feed out of the grain bin to take it into the forest to pour into the invasive species. However, I do intend to build on the platform, on this horseshoe of concrete, build little feed bunkers that will, because the grain bin is in the middle of the corral, so that I can make that a winter, an emergency space. If I'm going to be running the pigs through the shoots and having to sort them off, I can bring them in there. I can feed them for a few days and then, if something was to ever go wrong, it's a fail safe. That okay. Right next to the grain bin is the feeders that are on this dual purpose for the concrete, and so that's something that's again, this being my third property to run pigs on, this is my innovation for the newest property in my portfolio.

0:46:19 - Cal
Yeah, very good. So on the chickens and turkeys, you are processing those. How are you handling processing for your pork, for the red meat for pork, lamb and beef.

0:46:30 - Ben
I use Lester's Butchery, and a big thank you to Brad and Laura. And so Brad Lester was working at the abattoir here in on Vancouver Island. Sorry, Brad Lester was working here in Nanaimo at a facility that he convinced the old man to finally retire in 2020, and so that meant that he went to work for this facility in Duncan and there was an older couple who was holding on to that facility.

They had bought it from the family who had been running it and they were holding it over to try and find an operator, and so brad did not have the skills in business, he just didn't know how to build the plan to buy the facility here in Nanaimo. But this couple who took it over they the other facility. They were able to help brad build a business plan to be able to purchase it, and so I'm really supporting them and they do such a great job. So that's an hour away from me, still an hour south, so it's halfway between me here in Nanaimo and Victoria, that big center at the South.

0:47:27 - Cal
Island. Oh yeah, let's go ahead and move on to your lamb and beef because, as I look at the time, we need to move on a little bit. So tell us about your sheep operation.

0:47:42 - Ben
An opportunity that came from losing my main lease this year and then seeking more land was two vineyards reaching out to us and both who work with each other.

They want grazers to manage sheep underneath their vines specifically during the off season, which is from October until May, at least on the sheep side, because they plant thousands of dollars worth of cover crops for the benefit of their vines, and it's more of a benefit to them if it's grazed off instead of them having to chop and drop it. So the one orchard is over 50 acres of grazeable area and the other one has multiple properties, for another at least 50 acres of grazeable area, and so this is Avril Creek and Unsworth in the Cowichan Valley. And Avril Creek is going to allow us to use one of these on-farm processing licenses, which the provincial government calls FarmGate Plus, which limits us to 25,000 pounds of live weight harvested per year on the farm. So that would allow us to do 250 lambs. So we had a starter flock last year, and I say we because Fernando Medina is my educated Mexican man, came here for school, met a beautiful, wonderfully smart and keen on farming Canadian girl, and so they're my shepherds and they live down there, oh yes.

And so Fernando has been with a starter flock of about 18 ewes for the last year or more and he's decided and I fully support his decision to be all out and all in.

So we're liquidating that flock, which was a mix of like St Croix's and Katahdin's and a little bit of Dorper and a little bit of Barbados Blackbelly, and now we're going to go straight commercial Dorpers. So we're going to take the trailer probably out to Alberta, where there's some more big sheep auctions, and buy 100 ewes in the fall so that we can put rams from a colleague in the Small Scale Meat Producers Association in Cranbrook, which is on the other end of the province. He has top quality Dorper flock that are specifically regeneratively raised and have been for a decade or more, and so we'll grab a couple of those rams and December 1st we'll breed 100 ewes and the ones that take will be our breeding program and the ones that don't will become the lamb harvest next year and then we'll build our flock from there and be able to have a closed herd from there on.

0:50:23 - Cal
What drove your decision to liquidate your present flock and the plan to go into Dorpers?

0:50:32 - Ben
Primarily fence jumpers. And another family that we partnered with, who we leased their 10 acres for summer grazing and they put half of their flock into ours as a custom grazing observation, at least a sample, a taste of it, and so their flock was really hard to manage, like fence jumpers, like crazy lambs that were going underneath and then it was teaching everyone else, and so that, along with Fernando's context being that he's going to have his first child coming up here and so he wanted to, let's shut down, let's get organized, let's buy a little more equipment and just be really ready for when we do want to expand.

0:51:07 - Cal
Yeah, yeah Makes sense. Those fence jumpers will teach the others, and that is no fun.

0:51:16 - Ben
Yeah, and when you only have a dozen or two dozen you can't do the Greg Judy technique of anytime there's a fence jumper. You have a unique eating experience.

0:51:25 - Cal
Right, yes, I agree.

0:51:29 - Ben
But when you have 100 out there, that all look the same. If one jumps you have a unique eating experience.

0:51:35 - Cal
Yes, exactly, and in addition to your sheep, you're also running beef cattle.

0:51:43 - Ben
Yes, sir, and I do so with a herd share program.

And so I wanted to practice custom grazing here on the island, but there's not big producers that I can take cows from um, and so instead I went the other direction in the supply chain to my customers, who all really want to support what I'm doing. They always ask, hey, is there anything we can invest in or do something? So I said, well, let's start our herd share program, which is something that I've heard Greg Judy talk about, something that he does with his landowners. And so they purchase a cow for a set rate and then I go out and shop for cows with that, and then they pay a daily service fee on their cows. They pay a set rate that I established for winter feed and then their dividend, if you will, is the calf and that or their stock splitting if it turns into a heifer calf that they want to retain.

So their options is sell me a yearling into my meat program, keep a yearling and start paying grazing fees on it to harvest for their own freezer and then finally keep a breeder, if it's a heifer calf, to grow their flock. So I have seven, seven cows in the program, five yearlings from last year and a couple new calves on the ground this year and and slowly growing that. But it just allows me to get grazing and I do see different opportunities for other ways to mix the cattle operation, like by bringing in stockers and things like that. Because the problem with the herd share this past year in our first calving season is when I asked all the customers okay, what do you want to do with your animals? Well, we had four bull calves and everyone said, oh, we want to keep them, put them in our own freezer and share them with our friends.

0:53:25 - Cal
So now I don't have anything for my farmer's markets. Right yeah. So I think I'll probably be buying steers to finish, buying them in the end of winter and grazing them through the spring and early summer, and then harvesting them midsummer as our drought comes in option, though, for that land owner or that person that's invested to, to take that calf and to keep it for their own freezer, because that gives them some of that pride of owning it and contributing to regenerative ag and improving the land and then reaping the rewards of it absolutely.

0:54:01 - Ben
It allows people who would love to be doing this, uh, to participate and see the work on the land and do it in a way that allows me to have scale, or at least build towards scale, and so that's exactly it. They do it because they support regenerative agriculture and they want to be participating in this, but the only way they can is with a little bit of money and interest, and support.

0:54:22 - Cal
Yeah, I think that's wonderful, ben. It's been a really interesting conversation. Really enjoyed it as we sped through all the species you're doing on your farm. But it is time for us to change to our overgrazing section, and our overgrazing section is small scale vertical integration vertical integration.

0:54:54 - Ben
Yeah, so in this I mean that, as direct vendors, we take on the five big pieces of the supply chain. We take on the marketing, we take on the production, we take on the processing, we take on the sales and the distribution, and so each piece of these puzzle is very important to holding on to as much of the food dollar, the distribution, and so each piece of these puzzle is very important to holding on to as much of the food dollar as possible. And so, right now, my weak spot is probably the distribution, because I just don't have enough time to deliver door to door. I don't have the infrastructure of a walk-in freezer yet, but these are things that I want to get to, and so I think about vertical integration as meeting the needs of the farming community as well as your own needs, but not an industrial scale, but as a farmer to farmer scale. So the need for processing became very important when, before 2020, in 2018, we had five red meat processors on the island and five poultry processors and I'm talking small scale.

0:55:50 - Cal
Oh yeah.

0:55:52 - Ben
And so by 2020, we only had three and three because two operators on both sides had quit or passed away within months of working. So there was a need. I didn't know where I was going to get my poultry process. Both the facilities I was working at and the other one I also used both shut down, and so that became my mission in the beginning of 2020 to build a poultry processing facility. Now, in October of 2021, the rules changed, which established this FarmGate Plus license. So an abattoir's license was for a fully inspected facility where there was an inspector from the government on site.

Then there's Farmgate Plus, which is £25,000 on farm, no inspector, an annual inspection. And then there's the regular Farmgate, which is only £5,000. But literally, of 50 or 60 Farmgate licenses, all but one are Farmgate Plus.

Oh yeah, and so I was trying to figure out how to make that work and at first I just didn't think the economics made sense. However, I was looking to build a half million dollar shipping container unit which was a freezer, an operating line and an office and bathroom, so that we could be fully inspected and that would allow us to do 300 birds per day with a crew of six or seven. Well, through working with, in fact, working in the inspected facility when it was slated to sell soon with the inspector, we came up with this plan after the rules changed and the inspector and I working on the table together, we were like well, what if we use the farm gate license? And I said you can't scale that. Like 25,000 pounds isn't enough to justify the equipment or a staff. And okay, how do we replicate that? Well, what if we had processing trailer that could go set up on one farm, fill the 25,000 pounds, then move to the next farm, then to move to the next farm, to the point where this year we're going to have four properties licensed and we're going to spend a couple months at each of these farms, which will allow us not to do 25,000 pounds but 100,000 pounds, and that will allow us to have a crew of four working two days a week. And so I've done so with about $50,000 to build the trailer and buy poultry processing equipment from Mike Badger, the executive director of the American Pasture Poultry Producers Association. So I bought the equipment, built the trailer into a clean room and so basically the kill happens outside and the inside is the inspected clean space and then we just use ice to chill the birds down and then send them home that night. So this has been the first step into vertical integration in my operation is okay.

Now I've also built a separate business, which is the processing, and now the Small Scale Meat Producers Association is a provincial-wide organization supporting small farmers. They got a million dollar grant to build a brick and mortar abattoir for red meat in the interior of the province. However, the land dropped through and so they've now started building trailers and they're building their third or fourth one by now and they're leasing them to operators, and so the first one that was built went up to the north, north of the province and it did not do well over the winter. So're like hey, do you want us, would you be interested? And I was already very interested in taking on one of these trailers. So by taking on that trailer, that will allow us to have a poultry trailer and a red meat trailer.

Now one guy I love to listen to is mike calicrate and he's been on a number of times on to the Ranching Reboot podcast. And Mike Calicrate has Ranch Food Drax and he has an on-farm slaughter facility and then he has retail stores in the big cities that are retail butcher shops and so he's hauling not the whole animal from the ranch to the town. He's harvesting on-farm farm at scale and then he takes carcasses. So when you harvest a beef, 50 of the live weight ends up carcass weight. Well, why would you ship 100 when you could ship 50? And so he ships that to his urban butcher shops to be distributed in the community.

So I see that as the next step for me. Like, okay, if we can do on-farm slaughter, well, what's our cut and wrap facility? Now, going back to our previous conversation with Brad and Laura who bought Lester's Butchery, I asked them look, you guys kill two or three days a week right now. Do you earn more killing or cutting? Like, we earn quite a bit more and we are specialists as butchers to do the cut and wrap. So I said, well, in theory, if you guys killed less days and my trailer delivered animals to you to cut and wrap, you would be more profitable. They said absolutely so.

Between that and also an opportunity to build the local food hub, a place where, like a pipe place market in Seattle or like the San Francisco market, like let's have a a year-round farmer's market. Or what's the next step from going from farmer's market? What's our next step? Well, that would be a butcher shop that we can focus on local, on-farm harvested niche product, a very small, almost demonstration butcher shop. So that's another venue, that's another business that I look to build in this vertical integration. And then another piece of it is just a food hub where we can have storage. So after it comes out of that butcher shop, I hope that butcher shop can be 50% of the product going out the front door in the hands of the end consumer, but 50% going out the back door for farmers who can retail it.

The problem is storage out the back door for farmers who can retail it.

The problem is storage.

So let's build a facility that's maybe in a more rural area, that is the locker plant, the freezer, the cooler space for veg farmers, this communal resource, and so when I'm thinking about this vertical integration, it's like, okay, what does my farm need and how do I provide that as a service to the community?

Because regenerative farming is, it's so complex, it's always a moving target. With every decision you make, there's so many different implications, and so it's very hard to train and it's very hard to teach and and to replicate, and so that's why I want to build a farm that is big enough to create an income for me and my family so I can work by myself doing what I want to do, which is moving livestock on pasture. But then let's build these separate businesses that are proven through industry, of all scales, that are linear like poultry processing is very linear, it's very trainable, it's very replicable. So these other businesses are my entrepreneurial outlet to do projects that that are services to the whole community. So my farm can thrive but all the other farms in the community can also thrive.

1:02:35 - Cal
I think that's an excellent plan. I'm just, I'm amazed. I am impressed with your passion, with you going out and doing these things not only to help yourself, but to help others.

1:02:48 - Ben
Yeah, like most entrepreneurs, they want to 10x their company and then cash out of it.

Well, I want to build my dream job and then I want to 10x how many farmers are in this community and so if my side hustle is building these services that we all need, the other thing about it is like the example of Brad, like he's not the guy who wants to deal with the government to get these things set up and go through the paperwork to set up a new business. Well, maybe I have to be willing to be that guy to establish a service business in the farming industry, go through the red tape and then, once we have an established facility, then we find the introvert or the artisan who wants to operate it and just put it in their hands.

1:03:32 - Cal
Oh yeah, I love those ideas and I'm interested and I'm eagerly watching See how it goes for you, because I think that'll be great. It is time for us to transition to our famous four questions, sponsored by Ken Cove Farm Fence. Ken Cove Farm Fence is a proud supporter of the Grazing Grass Podcast and grazers everywhere At Ken Cove Farm Fence they believe there's true value within the community of grazers and land stewards. The results that follow, proper management and monitoring, can change the very world around us. That's why Ken Cove is dedicated to providing an ever-expanding line of grazing products to make your chores easier and your land more abundant.

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1:05:09 - Ben
Well, first of all, I always have my headphones on so that I can be constantly listening while I'm driving and while I'm in the pasture, and so a big one that has been super influential on me has been Diego Footer and Darby Simpson's Grass Fed Life. It's one of the a couple that I'll mention here that are not very active anymore, but those resources are so good or two that I've been interviewed on that are also not very active anymore, but the Farm to Table Talk with Roger Wasson, and then also the Intellectual Agrarian Like those were ones that were really influential when I was first getting started in 2018, 2019. Ones that I listen to all the time right now. Well, of course, this podcast, the Ranching Reboot and Working Cows podcast, and also the Herd Quitter I'm getting more and more into.

As for books like one that's been mentioned a lot of times, but it's essential is Holistic Management. One that I really enjoyed is Ben Hartman. The author came to a Farmers Institute meeting in Langley when I was just getting started, and he wrote the Lean Farm, which is based around the lean manufacturing principles but applied to the farm context.

And so the Lean Farm by Ben Hartman is one of my top resources by Ben Hartman is one of my top resources. A couple others are like. Recently, on Audible came available Land, livestock and Life by Alan Nation and as I was going through the trial, tribulations and turmoil of losing my main lease through the wintertime, that was one that really kept my spirits up because it just described exactly what I was doing, as if it is the solution to everything. Is this weird business model that I choose to live my life around? Youtube and just any resources from Greg Judy, joel Salatin, justin Rhodes, hobbs Margaret and Steve Kenyon, especially because those guys have a lot of like practical. This is exactly how I do it and this is how you also can do it. So that's the kind of content I really like, is exactly how I do it and this is how you also can do it. So that's the kind of content I really like is often just like this interview.

I'm long winded about my life story, but it's not, and so I've heard that story too many times. Well, I got into it because I wanted to change what my family was doing, or I got into it because I was in the city and I learned about it and wanted to just do it. We've heard that story so many times. Let's quickly get into. This is how we're doing it on the ground.

1:07:31 - Cal
Yeah, excellent set of resources there. Just the amount you listed could keep a person busy for a long time. Excellent resources. Our second question what is your favorite tool for the farm? Our second question what is?

1:07:48 - Ben
your favorite tool for the farm. I think my favorite tool and I put it here so that it didn't crowd up the other big list is Kiss the Ground. So that film is something that I can point anyone to and say watch this and understand the global context of what I'm trying to do here. And the funny thing I say about the other Netflix special is the biggest little farm. I say, okay, that is what you can do when you have a multimillion dollar film budget. The biggest little farm.

He was like a National Geographic filmer and then started a regenerative farm from the ground up. I say that's what you can do with a multimillion dollar film budget. Watch that. Then come see what I can do with no money, no experience and no land. Other key tools in my, in my toolkit is my japanese mini truck and so that thing is my workhorse. Like I fire up the diesel truck like two days a month and otherwise that k truck, you know this morning it's already had feed in, it's had fence supplies, it's gonna have, you know, half a cube of water in it in the next couple hours and then it's gonna haul 100 birds to processing on Friday and then on Saturday it'll have three deep freezers in it and be running up the highway at 120 kilometers per hour, probably late to the Qualcomm Farmer's Market, as I always am those trucks look really interesting to me.

1:09:01 - Cal
I just I'm just afraid I wouldn't fit in one.

1:09:06 - Ben
That very well may be true. I know you're tall and so I'm five foot 10 and, yeah, I'm pretty sore after driving that back and forth all day. The last tool is just building relationships, and the God-given gift of the gab that I seem to have has just allowed me to meet so many interesting people and just try and help out as much as I can and just try and share as much of this I can, so that just that tool of building relationships is just so key.

1:09:30 - Cal
All those are excellent tools. That relationship or networking or talking to people is just so important to not only get the word out but to build relationships to help yourself. Thirdly, Ben, what would you tell someone just getting started?

1:09:49 - Ben
I think what I have to tell someone who's starting out is that you can start anyway right now, but try and do so with a bit of scale. So start any way you can right away, but think of it with a bit of scale. Like I say, when you're raising a batch of broilers, it's the same amount of chores to raise a batch of 50 as it is a batch of 500. And so if you're gonna pull your boots on and you're gonna go out and you're gonna pull the chicken tractors and you're gonna pour a bag of feed and then you make sure the water is working, well, figure out the math that will allow you to scale it up or actually make it worthwhile for your time. Just do the math to figure out where you have to be to earn the $25 or $35 an hour that you would otherwise never not work for. So start any way you can right now. Start anywhere, you can Start anyhow, but think of it with a business mindset of how do I start it? So it's worthwhile.

1:10:52 - Cal
I think that's excellent advice there. Ben, figure, put some a pencil to paper and figure out what that number is to get the return you need. Because, like you said, whether you're moving taking care of 50 broilers versus however many you need for that point, it's the same amount of time. It's like if you go move 10 cows, you can be moving 200 in almost the same amount of time yeah, and it's a matter of.

1:11:20 - Ben
Maybe. It's twice the the time that it takes, but it's 20 times, 30 times the amount of production?

1:11:29 - Cal
And lastly, Ben, where can others find out more about you?

1:11:34 - Ben
You can search past episodes of different podcasts that I've been interviewed on, and Glasson Farms is my website, and you can also find me on social media, on Facebook and Instagram. And then my abattoir business is the Good Place Abattoir. And then, finally, my weekly radio show. Past episodes of the Tuning Fork can be found on mixcloudcom if you search the Tuning Fork.

1:11:59 - Cal
Very good, very good. Well, ben, really appreciate you coming on and sharing with us today.

1:12:06 - Ben
Thank you so much, Cal. I will continue to keep listening and learning and can't wait to give you an update in a few years, oh.

1:12:13 - Cal
I look forward to it. I really hope you enjoyed today's conversation. I know I did. Thank you for listening and if you found something useful, please share it. Share it on your social media. Tell your friends, Get the word out about the podcast.

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