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December 20, 2022

How to get high-quality, real food with Tyler Dawley

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If you want high-quality, real food, you have to go to the source, the farmer. On episode 569 of the 40+ Fitness Podcast, we meet Tyler Dawley of Big Bluff Ranch and discuss regenerative farming and food quality.

Transcript

Let's Say Hello

[00:03:01.290] – Allan

Hello, and thank you for being a part of 40+ Fitness podcast. The day we were supposed to record this hello section and the discussion for this episode was the day that Rachel's husband, Mike was going in for surgery for his kidney cancer. I don't have a lot of details yet, but the surgery was successful. The doctor feels really good about it. Not a lot of details, but just want to let you know that that's why we won't have a hello section this week. We'll learn more next week. Otherwise, let's get on with the show.

Interview

[00:04:08.230] – Allan

Tyler. Welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:04:10.820] – Tyler

Great, thanks for having me. I'm excited.

[00:04:12.530] – Allan

I'm excited too. I've talked on the podcast quite a bit about how particularly when I was living in the United States, I made a habit of making friends with farmers, either whether it's at the farmers market or otherwise. I was always looking for farmers in my area to provide fresh, high-quality meat because I knew it would be better for me. And I could tell and know where that came from. It didn't get shipped across the world, across the country. The animals are humanely raised and it's someone that's actually looking out for not just a product, but looking out for their family. Because when you work on a ranch or a farm, that's how you feed your family.

[00:04:48.320] – Tyler

Absolutely true. I mean, we eat a lot of chicken around here.

[00:04:52.430] – Allan

I can imagine. So now your site says that you do regenerative farming. Can you kind of give us a definition, or at least your definition of what that means? And how is that different from the industrial agriculture chicken I'm going to find in a standard supermarket?

[00:05:09.340] – Tyler

So regenerative agriculture is this really cool, amazing thing that lots of farmers are moving into, but it's still a little bit of a Wild West. There is not a set definition of what regenerative agriculture is right now. So every farmer rancher is going to have a slightly different take on it. My take on it is that my job as the steward of our family ranch is to put as much life back into our soil and that it gets expressed back to us through plants, and that we can take those plants and raise our cattle on it, raise our chickens on it, and then that animal gets turned into food for our bodies. And that this regenerative agriculture is this big ball of goodness where you focus on any step of the chain, the animals or the ground, or the soil mobicrobes, or the health of the product or the health of the people. If you really kind of aim to make one link of that chain, the healthiest possible, it almost inexitably links back to everything else. So I can't really grow a super, amazingly healthy chicken for you without worrying about the pasture that it's on.

[00:06:22.800] – Tyler

And I can't really have a healthy pasture without worrying about the soil microbes and the water infiltration rates and take it the other way around. If I really want to worry about my water infiltration rates, where that's how much rainfall I actually absorb into our soil, which is we're in California. We're in a mega drought. So I think about a rain a lot right now. I want every single drop as much as possible to go straight into our soil because that's going to grow grass. Well, how do I encourage that rain infiltration? Well, I need a porous soil structure. How do I encourage a soil porous structure? Well, many cool things, but basically roots. Roots from plants. Okay. How do I get as many green plants as possible for as long as possible? Well, I'm talking about planting things. I'm talking about grazing it the correct way. Okay, great. Now I'm like talking about plants. Now, how do I graze those plants? Well, now I'm talking about cows or sheep or goats or chickens. What sort of chickens do I need to do to graze that plant? Well, I need a certain you see how it goes.

[00:07:28.900] – Tyler

It links all together. And so in my mind, if you can concentrate on any part of this whole food chain and take it to its most natural healthiest state, almost by default, your entire chain will have to production chain will have to be regenerative. So like I said, there's not really a good answer. You get one of us talking about it, and we're just going to go for a while.

[00:07:52.220] – Allan

Well, right. But the interesting thing is industrial agriculture, they just lay concrete and raise their chickens and kind of disregard the rest of it. So what fundamentally now, other than the pollution and other problems that's probably causing, what makes regenerative type farming the chickens that you're raising cows that you're raising better than the cows that I would get at, say, just a standard grocery store.

[00:08:18.210] – Tyler

Right. So the conventional birds now, and I don't want to point fingers at the farmers, at the system, any farmer you ever meet, all they're going to care about is the lifestyle of their birds. You just can't raise animals and not care about them. You may not know a better way, but you're doing the absolute best you can. So it's not like conventional farmers are evil. They just are kind of trapped in a system. But their system is really aimed at efficiencies and control and reducing the variabilities down to nothing. So they're raising big barns that they have fans on them. So the air intake is carefully regulated that, for instance, if they lose electricity, that there's no actual native air flow that they have suffocation that they control everything down to the air, to the light, to the feed, to how much space these birds have. And it's very, very close to being a factory as you possibly could get with a living creature. What we do, we pretty much try and go the exact opposite way. We're putting those birds back out onto pasture. They're out in the sun, they're getting a little bit hot, they're getting a little bit cold.

[00:09:29.810] – Tyler

They can huddle up together if they want. They can spread apart if they want. And just like humans, if you get some sun, you get some exercise, you have the right social environment, you're eating the right sort of food, you're just a healthier person. So it's the same thing with our chickens that we are trying to provide an environment to these chickens where they can be as much of a chicken as they possibly can be. Like I said, that kind of links back into the whole chain. A healthy, happy chicken has to be on pasture. That pasture pretty much has to be well managed. And if you have a healthy, happy chicken, it's going to turn into a healthy, happy meal that you get to sustain your body with, and then you become healthy and happy. It's this big, big thing. So it's all about finding the right system in Mother Nature. That's kind of what all this regeneration stuff is about, that Mother Nature is a really good hands off manager. She sets up systems and sets back and says, hey, this is a system. Here it goes. So example like the buffalo in the Midwest that they would be herded around by the wolves.

[00:10:37.700] – Tyler

And so plants evolve for raising heavily in a long rest period. Now, those bison maybe stay too long, or maybe they don't come back at the right time. They'll be ballpark correct, but they're not going to be precisely correct. Well, us humans, if we step up and we're like, oh, what is the Mother Nature's system? Okay, she needs to graze something down, have enough rest period that these plants are fully recovered before our animals come back. We can take Mother's Nature system and then actively manage it. We can go from a passive system to an active system. And as long as we're using her blueprint, we can do some pretty amazing things. So that maybe is another definition of regenerative agriculture, is using mothers of nature's blueprint in an active manner, not a passive manner.

[00:11:29.120] – Allan

I have a friend that I worked with in the industry when I was in corporate. And just about the time I was leaving corporate, he was leaving corporate. His wife's father ran a chicken farm, one of the standard big name, company sponsored little farms, and they would literally drop off a certain number of chicks at a certain point. Tell him the feeding schedule, the temperatures, everything he was supposed to do in between chick drop off. They go do an inspection, give him a list of things he had to have done before the drop off. Then they would come by when it was time to pick up the chickens and then he'd get ready for another load. And that was just his cycle. Like you said, it was very regulated. And he was told everything he was supposed to do, down to the exact amount of food to feed them each and every time and the type of food to feed them each and every time. Those chickens never saw the outside until they were basically picked up to go be harvested. You have over 2500 acres, so you're able to rotate these chickens around and make sure they're in an optimal environment for their lives.

[00:12:31.310] – Tyler

Yeah, that's the whole point of what we do is to with our chickens, with our beef, and we plan to get into goats and sheep next spring. That's another part of my regenerative answer, is that your farming should match your environment. That we're in California, we're Mediterranean climate, we're hot and dry in the summer, gets really kind of into the weeds, but it's a lot of fun. But anyways, it means that we should be growing lots of goat and sheep in California. We should be eating lots of goat and sheep in California. And that our meat cases here in California grocery stores should reflect the fact that we have a different environment. It should not look the exact same here in California as it does in New York State or Florida or I don't know what it would look like in Panama, but I imagine Panama still probably has lots of beef, lots of chicken, some pork. Anyways, I don't know. So the idea is that that's kind of what we're doing because we are trying to steward our landscape in an active manner according to Mother Nature's blueprint. Mother Nature wants small ruminants out here.

[00:13:35.400] – Tyler

So that's kind of what we're growing into. So we do chicken now. You can buy chicken from us. We'll have a little bit of beef here in the spring. And then we're just going to be growing and getting bigger and getting better at growing the exact right animal mix for Big Bluff Ranch to Hammond County, Northern California.

[00:13:54.490] – Allan

Cool.

[00:13:54.890] – Tyler

It's pretty exciting. I get excited about that.

[00:13:56.920] – Allan

Yeah, that sounds exciting. I would enjoy that myself. I'm going to go into a grocery store and I'm going to see all of these words. And most of them, in my current opinion, is that they're just marketing words at this point. When someone sees something that's organic or a vegetarian chicken that laid an egg or omega three in the egg, what's going on there and where's the line between what this is actually what it is and then this is just a marketing thing?

[00:14:24.920] – Tyler

Right. So third party certifications is what we would kind of call that in the industry. Third party audit, some outside agency comes in and says, okay, you're doing things the way you say you're going to do. And they have a checklist of practices that they bring with them and they come to your operation and be like, have you done this? They do that, and then they run down the list. And so each one of those terms is regulated. So free range, vegetarian fed. Well, that might be an affidavit, but organic, you already kind of teed me up for this. It goes into this big ball of like green washing and self promotion and it's really tough to be able to make good choices when you go into the grocery store because these companies know that people want to eat good meat and they're willing to pay more for it. And they realize that all they have to do is slap a label on it and people are going to assume that they're getting what they're actually buying, or assume that what they're buying is what they want, which is not really the case. So case in point, one of my favorite pet peeves is vegetarian fed chicken.

[00:15:32.990] – Tyler

Chickens are not vegetarian in the slightest. They eat a lot of grass, don't get me wrong. But if they have any sort of red meat, live protein running around, they're after it bugs. So if you actually see something that's a vegetarian fed egg, that diet is actually counter to the most healthy diet a chicken should be eating. And that to get the protein into that diet that they could have gotten from animal proteins. They're doing weird convoluted exercises to get the right protein levels from plant sources. So vegetarian fed, that's just a complete bunk. Don't even bother. You're paying more for worse. Free range. Your first image of free range is like, oh, chickens. There's a red barn and green grass and white hens running around with the farmer in overalls and taking care of Julie here and Juliet over there. And that's not the case at all. Free range is one of these big conventional barns and that they have access to outside. That's it. Free range is access only and that's access only. That's not even saying that they use that access. What that means is that at a certain point in the animals production cycle, doors are open to let the birds go outside.

[00:16:53.830] – Tyler

Chickens are hugely creatures of habit and usually these doors are opened up well into their lifespan where their habits are pretty much just rock solid. And they're like, there's something weird about this wall. I know this is a solid wall, I can't go through it, but it's got a different color and there's something weird and blue out there. I'm not going out there. I don't know that. It's not the pasture raised birds that you expect from the term free range. They're not free range. They're living in a barn with access to outside. So yeah, free range is better than nothing. It is showing that they have taken some steps to improve the living condition of the birds. But it's not what you would expect because everyone always says, hey, Tyler, you guys are Pasture raised you must be free range. I'm like, well, we are so much more than free range. So the other standard would be organic. And now organic is a worldwide term. It's got a lot of regulations and stipulation, which means there's lots of loopholes there. But I think there's a lot to be said for making directionally the right choices.

[00:18:00.020] – Tyler

You can't be perfectly correct every time, but if you do the best you can, moving the forward in a good direction, it's better than nothing. And so even though there are tons of issues with organic, I think organic in general is better than non organic. It's a surprising amount of organics end up in the American animal production system. We get a lot of Chinese organic soybean and random commodities. Now, is that stuff organic product coming from China really, truly, 100% organic? Probably not. But is a bad organic better than a conventional operation? Yeah, I would say yes. So organic is something especially when you start talking about chickens, that's really only talking about their input. So it's talking about their feed. That means the feed has no herbicides, no pesticides in it, other controlled substances. That means the birds themselves are not being fed antibiotics, no growth hormones, although that's another tricky thing. Everyone always says no growth hormones on chicken. Chickens are not allowed to have growth hormones, so it's no growth hormone chicken, because you can't do it, you just can't do it. So it's just another silly marketing term, no antibiotics, but organics does not really talk about it does, but not a lot.

[00:19:24.290] – Tyler

It does not talk about outdoor access. You can be an organic chicken farm and keep them completely enclosed in a barn and in control every single environment. It's not perfect, but it's probably a lot better than just a conventional chicken that doesn't have any organic standards behind it at all. So you do get into a murky area when you're really trying to do this. So to get back to your point about knowing your farmer, I think that's really your best standard. And just talk to them and go with what they're doing. Even if they're a conventional farmer, just the fact that you can talk to them and that they're local and you're keeping a local farm in the rural community is hugely important. That the average age of the farmer, I believe, is 65 or 67 now. That we are just at the beginning of a huge cultural transition in agriculture, where our farmers are aging out, they're going to be done here in the next decade or two, and that there's no one really coming behind them and the ones who are coming behind them are struggling. And that you want to support as many of farmers as possible.

[00:20:34.080] – Tyler

Because what's happening is that big money likes to get into agriculture. Land is a really good place to store money. It retains value. So, for instance, I believe, I'm not 100% sure, but Bill Gates is now the largest land owner or the largest farmland owner in the United States, right?

[00:20:53.100] – Allan

I think it's actually both. Yeah. And it is predominantly farmland that he's buying. Yes.

[00:20:57.680] – Tyler

Right. And so that's one guy in charge of however many millions of acres do you really want? And I'm not even saying whether or not he's doing things right. I'm just saying that do you really want one person control over that much land? And he's not even a farmer. He's probably got some really smart farmers working for him. But ultimately you want small people who can touch the land. That there's this great saying, the best fertilizer is the footsteps of the farmer. Right. And that you want your farmer in your community taking care of your community. You don't want someone just down the road. You don't want to be bringing in stuff from Bill Gates. I mean, it's just..

[00:21:40.620] – Allan

The way I like to say it is this, this is the stuff you feed your family. I don't know what they feed their family. An executive at a poultry company. I don't know where they get the meat to feed their kids. It may or may not come from their company, but it's just one of those things. When I know a farmer lives on the land, you're taking care of the animals and they are the source of nourishment for you and your family.

[00:22:04.020] – Tyler

It's absolutely true. Just an example for you that this is a kind of a fun story. So we have been going the regenerative, organic, sustainable route since the early 80s. I was very short back then, but my dad, he was the one who started this change in the ranching structure. And there's this one really illustrative story he likes to tell at the time, and it's still somewhat commonly practiced. You can add to cows, you can give them growth hormones to steers for feedlot purposes. And that if you do that on farm before they go to feed lots, you get a little bit more pay. It's a bonus value added process. So you bring your calves in and you give them these subcutaneous growth pellets and it's shots. No one likes this. Your kids don't like shots. Calves don't like it. But you kind of do it. But there's some kicking and struggling and my dad shot himself with a growth hormone, a cow growth hormone, and nothing happened to him. He's still all around. He's totally fine. Finest he's ever been. Right? But he's like, I don't really particularly like having this chemical in my body.

[00:23:11.530] – Tyler

And then once you have that realization, you're like, I don't like it in my body. Why do I like it in my cow's body? Because if it goes into the cow's body, it's going to end up in my body. Right. So to your point about the farmer is eating his own food. That's exactly it. That we stopped doing those growth hormones in the mid 80s because my dad decided, I don't want to eat that. I don't want to do that to the cows, and I don't want to eat that. And so even before we started doing direct marketing our beef, we stopped because it wasn't right. We didn't believe in it. So it's a good metric.

[00:23:46.110] – Allan

So Big Bluff Ranch has been around for quite some time. Can you tell us a little bit about the history and where you are today?

[00:23:54.540] – Tyler

Sure. So my grandpa bought the ranch in 1960. So it was my mom's dad, and he was a city boy, and he had dreams of being a cowboy. And that's actually why we're called Big Bluff Ranch, because he told Graham, he's like, Graham, I bought a ranch. And he's like, she's no, he didn't. It's a big bluff. He didn't buy a ranch. Big Joker. And so he brought her up some time later and said, here you go, here's the Big Bluff Ranch. So that's why we were a Big Bluff Ranch, not because of our big hillsides, which we do have, but because Graham thought Grandpa was full of BS. And then my parents moved up here permanently. In the late 80s, agriculture changed in the we had to work a lot harder at making money. And that led my dad down the path of holistic resource management at the time, which was Alan Savory, who has a very well known Ted Talk these days. He is now called the Holistic management. He's in charge of the Savory Institute, and he's just got all sorts of cool stuff going on. And he is the one that kind of started us thinking about how Mother Nature farms.

[00:25:03.020] – Tyler

And so his central thesis, and it's a very small part of what he talks about, is he talked about the herds of wildebeest or what have you in Africa, and how they're herded together by lions and they eat everything here, and then they're gone, and then it rains and the grass grows back and then the wildebeest come back. And that it's a very fluid, ever moving system. And he came up with ways, among others, of how to take that natural process and apply it to our style of production. So for us, we don't use wolves, although that would be kind of fun. We use electric fences. So in the late 80s, my dad got into range management. Range management, which is taking care of your grass. If you want the grass becomes good, you want your animals to be eating your grass. And so in the 90s, we started changing our beef genetics. 2000, Michael Poland wrote an article in The New Yorker, I believe, called Power Steer, which really blew up the grass fed beef movement. And I graduated college in 2000 and was pretty much immediately at farmers markets. Farmers markets with our grass fed beef.

[00:26:10.220] – Tyler

Then we wanted to bring other prio teams there. So we tried goat, we tried lamb, which was fun, but no one ate it, although they should because it's delicious. We tried a little bit of chicken and we did not have fun doing it that first time. And we came up with the rule, four legs only. We're only going to raise animals with four legs. So the only animal left was pork. So we got into pasture pork and that was way worse than chicken. Oh my God. Because we had a really large population of wild pigs at the time. And so we had wild boars mating with our domestic sows our sows barrowing completely out of cycle in all sorts of random places. And the genetics of the piglets was weird because they were half Russian and half domestic, no good. So we got out of that eventually. Quickly we got back into chicken because no one else was either smart enough or dumb enough to get into chicken. I still haven't figured it out. Probably smart enough not to get into chicken. But we got into chicken. We got up to about 1800, had a year processing on farm, reached a processing bottleneck where he had to figure out what we were going to do next.

[00:27:19.450] – Tyler

And I ran into a guy who said he could sell more than he could raise, I could raise more than we could sell. That was about 2009. So for the past twelve years, or whatever the math is, we've been growing and getting better at producing pasture poultry at scale. Not very much as big bluff ranch, mostly under contract, growing or some wholesaling. COVID changed everything, as everyone well knows. And we decided that we didn't like the precariousness of only having one or two contracts, that we needed a, we wanted to talk to people we like, talking to people we like sharing the joy of what we produce and getting the feedback directly. Because our chicken is really good, really, really good. And you don't get that sort of feedback when you sell to a wholesaler. They don't care. They're like, here's your check. And like, oh great, how's the chicken?

[00:28:12.660] – Tyler

Bad. Good enough. And so that's what we're doing now. So we're going kind of back to our original roots of direct marketing, but not through farmer markets, through shipping it to your doorstep. So that's kind of who we are now. We're a super awesome pasture raised chicken operation who will ship chicken to your doorstep. So this is a funny story. Everyone always says it tastes like the chicken my grandma used to make. So yeah, your grandma definitely had her own good recipe, don't get me wrong. But what she really had is she had her own chickens in the backyard that were being raised on pasture in the sun eating grass that she would process and cook for you. That's what made her chicken so good. So when people get our chicken, they're essentially buying grandma's chicken. And so when they make their own recipe or use Grandma's recipe, they're like, oh my God, I finally figured it out. I know how to do it. It's like, yeah, you get a really good chicken and you get a really good grandma's chicken recipe. Kind of depends on the chicken. So that, I guess, would be our long story to the short point of us.

[00:29:15.040] – Allan

Well, Tyler, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest, and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:29:24.310] – Tyler

Three. So I personally am kind of in the paleo, ancestral, kind of go back to what we were designed to do type philosophy. I'm not like any sort of perfectionist by any means, but it really makes a lot of sense to me to do the things that your body was sort of meant to do. So I've gotten really into rucking these days. So I put on a heavy backpack and I take nice walks around the ranch. I'm actually posting little videos on LinkedIn these days. LinkedIn is actually my social media addiction. I don't know. I never really got sucked into Instagram. LinkedIn though, can't tell you why I love it. So I believe in kind of doing the things that your body was designed to do. So carrying heavy things. I like barefoot shoes. I'm actually wearing some barefoot shoes now, so I'm into that whole barefoot movement. I do also believe in getting sun at the right time. It just makes sense. So I don't know if I have anything particular or any specific tactic. I think all the ones you hear that kind of come from that like, hey, this is what we used to do as a species.

[00:30:33.190] – Tyler

I kind of believe that sort of stuff. And generally speaking, when I do it, I feel a lot better. So I'm like, well, feels good, so I'm going to keep doing it.

[00:30:42.260] – Allan

If someone wanted to learn more about you and Big Bluff Ranch, where would you like me to send them?

[00:30:47.570] – Tyler

Yeah, just come on over to bigbluffranch.com. You will see pictures of me, pictures of the ranch, the chickens, and how we raise them. And you can hit a Shop Now button. Buy some chicken if you think that's a good idea. And if you just want to keep chatting with me. I love talking to anyone about this sort of stuff. I've got contact info there tyler@bigbluffranch. Yeah, I think our phone number is on there too. You could just call me. My dad would probably answer the phone, but that's all right. He's pretty fun to talk to as well. Ask him about his growth hormone incident.

[00:31:20.490] – Allan

All right, well, thank you Tyler, for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:31:24.250] – Tyler

No, thank you for having me. It was great.


Post Show/Recap

[00:31:34.970] – Allan

Welcome back, Ras.

[00:31:36.420] – Rachel

Hey, Allan. Another fun interview. I always like to hear how farmers get started or how people manage a ranch. The Big Bluff Ranch. Sounds like a really cool place.

[00:31:46.500] – Allan

It is. A lot of things we couldn't talk about on the podcast. But if you go to his website, they actually have a lake out there that you can fish. And you're not going to catch trophy fish out there, but you can go stay in a cabin and fish and swim and enjoy the lake. They're in Northern California, so realize that their seasons are limited when it's actually warm enough to maybe swim. But it's a cool place to go hang out. And if you run into Tyler, he'll talk chicken. I've always talked about get to know your farmer. Granted, you'd be buying this chicken from Northern California, but you would know your farmer. You know the family that's doing this. Like I said, his father is going to pick up, probably the one that pick up the phone and you can actually have a conversation with this farmer and he's going to tell you exactly how they raise their chickens and what it's like. And as a result, you end up with a better quality food product, which makes a better quality nutrition, which improves what you are. Now, these are not grocery store prices.

[00:32:51.570] – Allan

Not even if you look at organic and you know it says organic, it's going to cost more. But these are going to cost a lot more because this is not a mass produced thing. This is a family owned they're doing it themselves. They're processing it right there. And so this is not something that's put into a factory situation where all the chickens are living on concrete. Drop the food eight weeks, ship them out, slaughter them and ship them to the stores. This is a family doing this hand managed. So it's a very different environment.

[00:33:21.860] – Rachel

You mentioned that they might produce about one, 1800 hundred chickens or so per year versus your friend who has a turkey farm might get in maybe closer to a million chickens per year.

[00:33:32.080] – Allan

Yeah, well, that's what happens.

[00:33:34.930] – Rachel

Big difference.

[00:33:34.930] – Allan

Yes, it is. And so if you tickle, if you live down in the southeast, you see this a lot because that's where a lot of these chickens are done is there'll be chicken trucks and there's a truck and they literally like these little wire cages and they cram chickens in these low wire cages. And these trucks are driving down the road towards the slaughterhouse with thousands and thousands of these chickens. And it's literally just a factory. And they are just a product going into that factory. So it's not set up where the chickens are roaming around enjoying their lives. They're not. And so these chickens, I mean, literally, he's got pictures on his website. It's so cool. They're like out in the field and they're doing what chickens do. They're just hanging out. They're eating bugs and living their lives, eating grass and eating bugs and mice and snakes and everything else. But the important thing is he talked about the whole biosystem, and some things we didn't talk about was okay, in a normal industrial agriculture, they want to control everything. And granted, he wants to control what he can control, but he's not going to be out there killing the bugs because he knows the bugs are a part of the process to make the grass grow.

[00:34:45.240] – Allan

That's going to feed the cattle and the sheep and the goats, and then the birds are going to peck around there. Of course, the animals are going to go to the bathroom. That's going to potentially draw flies and maggots and other things. The birds are going to eat that. I know it sounds disgusting sometimes, but that's what they are. They're carnivores. They're little raptors is what they are. They're little raptors. They're going to eat what they're going to eat. And so you let them run around and you let them cuddle, and you let them have their time together and basically enjoy their lives instead of being crammed into a warehouse where they can't move and in many cases are brutalized. It's a very different thing. And so if you believe in the quality of your food and you're really working hard to make that better, organic is going to be better than not. Vegetarian is not better than anything else. It's a marketing term, so don't fall for marketing. Organic actually does mean a little something. It's better. Vegetarian does not mean better. Omega three does not mean better. So be careful with the wording.

[00:35:47.890] – Allan

And it was really hard because they're really good at advertising. And another word that Tyler and I talked about afterwards. Sometimes I should probably just leave the mic on because sometimes we're having really cool conversations after we get off the phone or off the recording. But I wanted to talk about the word natural. Natural means absolutely nothing, and it's true. In any kind of food product, you see the term natural. It means nothing. It has no meaning whatsoever. In fact, when you see natural flavors on a box, all that really means is that chemical for flavor exists in nature. Therefore, they can make it in a factory, they can make in a lab and call it natural because it already existed. We earned okay, like a vitamin. They can say it's natural because the chemical already exists, that they understand it, it's been identified, and then they can make it through this chemical process. They can call it natural. It means absolutely nothing. So there's a lot out there that's meant to mislead you to market. But here's the thing, whole foods are harder to do that, too, than boxes, cans, jars and bags. And so just as you go through this process, if you're trying to eat better, do better.

[00:37:04.780] – Allan

If you want to have something great, and you want to understand the difference when I say if your grandmother walked into a grocery store, she wouldn't recognize 95% of what she sees.

[00:37:14.400] – Rachel

Right.

[00:37:14.990] – Allan

Go ahead and buy one of Tyler's chickens or a couple of them, because I think he sells them in packs. They are not cheap. But you're going to taste the difference from what you're getting today and understand that. Then do the research and find someone close to you that does something similar, and you might find it for a better price. But if you want to try it, Tyler makes it very easy. You go to his website, you can order it. They'll ship it to you right to your door. I think you can buy, like, two chickens or six chickens or whatever ship to your door. Not cheap, but it's going to be high quality. You're going to enjoy the food, and you're going to recognize the difference between high quality, nutritious, well raised poultry and the stuff you're getting in the store.

[00:37:59.690] – Rachel

It's absolutely worth trying. It would be a surprise to do a taste test between what you get at the store versus a farm. We've got a couple of farms. As you know, I live kind of out in the sticks in a kind of a rural area we've got. Turkey Farm is right down the road, and the cousins of that family have a chicken farm on the other side of town. So it's great. It's if you happen to live in a rural area or near one, you can go check out your farmers and see what you can find. And it sure would be fun to have a taste test between the two.

[00:38:29.000] – Allan

Well, I think what I'm going to do, I wouldn't want to do a taste test because I'm not going to buy that crap if I have a choice. But anyway, one thing I think I'm going to do is when I go back to the States, my daughter Summer is getting married in May. When I go back, I'm going to check in with Taylor and see what a shipping time is and maybe have some chickens shipped to my mother's house in North Carolina.

[00:38:50.190] – Rachel

Sure.

[00:38:50.750] – Allan

So when I go to visit her before the wedding, I can try a couple of his chickens.

[00:38:55.300] – Rachel

Oh, that would be cool.

[00:38:56.640] – Allan

I don't know when he'll get to the goats and the sheep and that type of thing. I'm cool with that. Tammy not so much for goats, sheep, or lamb. That's not her thing. But at any rate, I am. I'll eat it, but she wouldn't. But at this whole point, I think I'm going to give it a shot when I do travel back, is to try to have some of that ship to my mother's house so we can give it a shot and see how it is.

[00:39:16.240] – Rachel

Sounds great.

[00:39:17.650] – Allan

All right. Well, Rachel, again, I hope everything goes well with Mike today that we're recording it, and we'll talk soon.

[00:39:25.490] – Rachel

Take care.

[00:39:26.310] – Allan

Okay, bye.

[00:39:27.270] – Rachel

Bye. Bye.

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