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The Cornerstones of Healthy Food Systems Podcast Introduction by David Lucero.
Theme music by Zakhar Valaha

This version was updated in summer, 2023, when we decided to remove the cornerstones.endofite.com website reference. The only change was to remove the word cornerstones from the website reference.

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Mary Lucero: 0:21

NOTE: This podcast was transcribed on a trial basis using AI, and has not been manually corrected. The platform offers minimal capability for correcting the transcript and/or adding notes. Please let us know if you find it useful to have a transcript. We will not continue using the service unless our listeners show that it is helpful to have a transcript. Hello and welcome to the Cornerstones of Healthy Food Systems podcast. We have another guest today. We are going to be speaking with Hank Reid from Natural Grandma Farms, and Hank has been farming for a number of years. I'm going to let him share a little bit of his history, but he contains just a wealth of information about integrated systems and how to combine animals with your crop management. So Hank, welcome.

Hank Reid: 0:50

Well, hello Mary. It is very nice to be involved with promoting regenerative agriculture and the only way it makes sense today, I believe.

Mary Lucero: 1:02

Well, you know, we've heard so many bad things about agriculture in the last 15, 20 years at least, coming out of environmental science. There are many discussions about how agriculture is damaging the planet and, based on the data presented, those are valid arguments. But it doesn't have to be done that way, and agriculture wasn't always done that way, and I think the new wave of the future is looking at better ways to grow food while we actually restore soil health, and the beauty of it, of course, is that you start seeing your yields increase and your inputs decrease as the soil health improves. So I think it's a real hopeful direction to go.

Hank Reid: 1:47

That's absolutely correct, mary. And interesting conversation today. My mother's a 1930 model, if you would. She's 93 years old and we were discussing my son who farms, very much modern, his tractors drive themselves and he uses every tool available from the chemical companies and he's building a quarter of a million dollar shed to put his machinery in so he can work on it. And my mother and I were discussing the microbes that you and I discussed here today, and she made a statement to me.

Hank Reid: 2:23

She says well, I just don't see how we can ever make the change. I don't see how this would ever work. How would your son be able to afford the machinery and that quarter of a million dollar, building farming regeneratively with lower yields and everything? And I said, mom, why do we need to produce mass quantities of corn and soybeans and exported all over the world? And furthermore, if we don't need to produce those single species monocrops, why does he need that $3 million worth of John Deere machinery? And then why would he need that building to work on the machinery? And so sometimes the answer, mary, is very simple. But the solution looks complex just because we're built into this fault system that bigger, better, more export push. I don't know what that kind of makes you think, doesn't it?

Mary Lucero: 3:26

Yeah, I've racked my brain over the question many times because certainly it's not easy to transition, if you're in the conventional mainstream agriculture, towards a more regenerative system.

Mary Lucero: 3:40

And yet I'm seeing people transition all the time.

Mary Lucero: 3:42

Now I've had a couple of growers that I've worked fairly closely with go through some major overhauls of their system and it's not something that can happen overnight and I think everybody needs to do it at their own speed, based on what they're growing and what their system looks like.

Mary Lucero: 4:04

But I don't know anybody who has backed away from the chemicals, developed a new equilibrium and then wanted to return to it, and that tells me that it's paying them economically. The regenerative systems can command higher pricing in the market or reduce input costs to a point where you're achieving the same lifestyle, if you will, the same profit margins, sometimes better profit margins and at the same time your yields are improving with time instead of the problems increasing over time. So there are a lot of complexities to the system, as you well know, and a lot of variables that make every farm different. I don't want to promise that everybody who changes is going to become more profitable, but I think the science suggests that that would be the truth and I think what changes the profitability for some more than others has a lot more to do with government programs and stimulus packages and market policies than it actually has to do with the science of food production.

Hank Reid: 5:26

That's very correct. Our government spends trillions of dollars trying to assist somebody to make war, not make war, and we don't have to name any of that. Everybody knows, but you know. And then the money that is spent on agriculture promotion production here is funneled through big companies towards making them more profitable. The federal crop insurance program for growers probably is corrupt as anything out there. So those of us that are seeking a higher quality of life, not bragging rights for the highest yield or bragging rights for the highest, you know, biggest bank account or, if you would, the biggest loan that was ever seen I mean that's kind of what the competition seems like it's for.

Hank Reid: 6:23

I look at my farm, you know, after I've changed to virginity ways management, you know grazing ways and multi-species grazing, and I can sit out there and I can hear 25 or 30 different birds singing. They're in those fields that are resting for 90 days because there's wildflowers blooming in them and there's warm-season grasses coming back up in them. You drive across the field. In certain times of the year there's spider webs on everything and the dragonflies going through the air by the millions. At certain times you'll come up off the cattle and when you get off of that virginity barrier, you quit seeing butterflies, you quit seeing all the things that bring us life. Without that balance of our ecosystem, I believe we're destined to die, aren't we Mary?

Mary Lucero: 7:19

Yeah, life is interdependent and there has never been a higher order organism, a mammal, a reptile, a bird, that is capable of surviving without this whole web of smaller species that support it. So, yeah, those dragonflies and birds that you're talking about are signs that your field is alive. I have a friend who sells organic fertilizers in the Midwest and he has told me on a number of occasions that when he needs to expand his sales route, if he needs to take on new customers, he'll just go into a new territory and drive down the farm roads and start looking for the farms that have birds on them, because if there's no birds, he knows that he's wasting his time. These are people who are tied into the chemical system and aren't interested in the products he has to offer. But if he doesn't see birds feeding in those corn fields and he knows this one has potential. And I've always thought that was an interesting testimony to some of the differences that you see when you transition.

Mary Lucero: 8:35

I know when we started our farm here and we're newbies big time I mean, my husband grew up on a ranch and they also produced apples, but he's been away from it for a good 35, 40 years and we're just getting back into it now and I'm a total green hand, but we bought our farm in 2020 and we planted the next year and by that summer we had some pastures with we'll raise a few feeder steers and I started noticing because we put in this 18 species cover crop.

Mary Lucero: 9:14

So by summer we have things blooming everywhere and we had every kind of insect humming out there. And what I noticed with the birds, since you mentioned it, is just watching the cattle in the pasture. You would see birds that sat on their back and picked the flies off, but should also see birds that followed them. In the moment there was a dropping those, you know, the flies would come and the birds would be on them, and it was just amazing to me how quickly they'd clean up after those cattle and the whole time they're doing it, they're scratching that organic matter right back into the field as they're digging for insects, and so to me it was just a cool, fascinating observation at how quickly we were seeing the cycle of nature take hold, with no effort on our part other than planting that cover crop.

Hank Reid: 10:16

That's exactly right. Once you see it, you never forget it. I remember, you know I studied, you know Allen Nation and Allen Salvery and all those guys back in the day when Jim Garrish was a pup out of college and up here at Linneas by Linneas, Missouri, at the University of Missouri Research Center. He's working up there with Fred Marks and we made a trip I'm assuming this is late 80s, I'm guessing as a grazing club.

Hank Reid: 10:49

The Green Hills Farm Project Group made a trip to the Wisconsin Grazing Conference and on the way up we stopped in Southwest Wisconsin at a man named Charlie Opus and he had 2,800 dairy cows grazing on 3,000 acres using a New Zealand 27 cow swing and those cows went on pastures one direction in the morning and they come back in to a 3,000 gallon water tank. They went through the parlor and they went out a different direction that evening and they just they didn't have water in the cells, they just had water.

Hank Reid: 11:34

when they come to get milk he gave them a very small amount of grain, just it was snotes and stuff, just enough to make them come in the parlor and Charlie Opus's farm there in Wisconsin in the midst of all the harvest stores and all that. They said that on a day when it rained, that when you got to a road that was that went through Charlie's land, the earthworms come out crawling across that road so thick it would get slick and they'd have car wrecks and the minute you left Charlie's farm there was no earthworms because you went back to conventional farming and that was Mary.

Hank Reid: 12:12

That's over 30 years ago. We weren't even using glyphosate. Then it's the tillage too also, and breaking up those rhizomes, killing that undergrowth, eliminating weeds. Weeds have a function. A deep growing weed works very similar to the warm season grasses. That was in our part of the country before white man got here. They go deep and they bring newt plants up, and then that goes through a room in an animal and is redeposited back on the surface and it's a great big cycle that feeds those earthworms and microbes.

Hank Reid: 12:56

I don't know why people can't see it. I don't understand it. Hopefully us rambling around talking about some of this has sparked some interest in some young people, because I don't know about you, Mary, but I'm getting old so I'm not going to make too many changes from now on. There is people that there's some fantastic young people that have good minds and are health and they're looking forward to what we're talking about making things healthy.

Mary Lucero: 13:31

Yeah, I'm seeing a lot of interest in the subject. I've taught biology classes at the university and, of course I worked for years as a research scientist in an agroecology unit, so to speak. We were doing rangeland ecology, so certainly a larger scale, less intensive management than you have on farms, but the young people coming in were way more open to ecologically sound management methods than the people that I went to school with when I was going through my undergraduate years. There was certainly a culture at the time that seemed to accept that if you weren't using the best technology available and of course the best technology was branded as the technology with the chemicals then you simply couldn't grow, compete and produce. I think one of the funny things that struck me as I started questioning this technology is that once you start looking for it, there have been discussions since the dawn of the agrochemical era from scientists and farmers who have seen the problems with it. This content just gets silenced very quickly.

Mary Lucero: 14:59

But if you look back, even to the Green Revolution publications, everybody familiar with agriculture in the 70s has probably heard of Norman Vorlog, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in wheat genetics, and basically what Vorlog did, beginning after World War II is start developing wheat varieties that could tolerate large amounts of nitrogen fertilizer, and of course they're coming out of the war era.

Mary Lucero: 15:29

We had these massive chemical plants producing nitrogen that was needed for making things like TNT in the weapons industry, but now the weapons industry had diminished, we were no longer at war and we had all this nitrogen left, and so there was a lot of grant money to support efforts like Norman Vorlog's in efforts that found other uses for nitrogen, and wheat at the time would certainly respond to natural nitrogen fertilizer, but it would become very leggy and the plants would topple over and the wheat would land in the mud, and that doesn't help you produce.

Mary Lucero: 16:10

And so Vorlog basically bred short stocky hybrid wheat that could tolerate enough nitrogen to increase the yield, and he was credited with, within a period of maybe 10 years, increasing the wheat production in Mexico four-fold, and so of course this created a stir and he was invited to Turkey, he was invited to Pakistan, he was invited to India to repeat this process, and as I was looking into his story maybe about 10 years ago I wrote a paper discussing this I found some writings by a colleague of his from India, ms Swaminathan, and I'm not going to pretend to pronounce his name correctly, so I'll just say MS Swaminathan. But Swaminathan wrote a very eloquent presentation that he made at an international crop meeting and basically predicted an era of agricultural disaster if we continued using the chemicals without regard for soil health. And I actually got chills reading his text because I knew at that time we are in an era of agricultural disaster and it just bothered me that he was able to predict it and present it and publish it. But it fell on deaf ears.

Hank Reid: 17:49

Nobody, nobody hurting. That's very interesting. Yeah, more is not always better. You know you're talking about the introduction of the nitrogen. You know the anhydrous ammonia was invented to make airstrips. You know it made the ground hard and then they found out it make corn grow. But we know what injecting anhydrous ammonia into the ground does to a live living system.

Hank Reid: 18:17

And I think back Mary to. You know I was a Novartis seed dealer Northrop King Novartis seed dealer in about that same time, you know in the late 80s, when I started looking at the virginity waste and we had these soybean yields up in the 70s and 80s, you know. And along comes Roundup Ready genetics and I remember the first Roundup Ready soybeans. I was a conventional farmer back there, like my son, and even while I was starting the virginity waste we still continued to do rope-draup farming and I remember what they called yield drag.

Hank Reid: 18:57

We just could not get the same yield from any of that GMO grain beans as we was out of the old conventionals and it was a hard sell for a while to sell soybean seed to somebody and back their yield down. And then once everybody seemed how easy it was with glyphosate, they just didn't worry about the yield and started farming more acres. But I'm thinking that that yield drag that I was seeing was probably because glyphosate killed the microbes, is that? Do you think that was the reason, and not that it was just the genetics weren't there? That's what everybody said, is that genetics were just not there yet on Roundup Ready beans. But I'm thinking that we were seeing immediate kill of living microbes in our soil and so then the soybeans couldn't yield because the soil was dying out from under them.

Mary Lucero: 19:56

Right and it's funny. I'm looking now I'm working on some growing trials with some cotton farmers and looking at the microbes associated with soil and these samples and I am just shocked at mid-season growth at how few microorganisms I'm seeing in these. And of course it is Roundup Ready cotton. We don't have details yet on everything the growers have added to their soil, but there's nothing living in that soil and I have seen more microbial activity in samples coming straight out of bare land. In the Chihuahuan Desert and now I'm working at a higher latitude, there's more annual precipitation. It's a little bit cooler. I really expected to see a lot more in terms of microbial activity.

Mary Lucero: 20:55

A lot of people are not aware that glyphosate is patented as an antibiotic and of course, when you go through the testing process with these chemicals, there are some minimal toxicology studies that they have to do. They have to look at things like I can't pretend to tell you the exact details for what was tested on glyphosate, but in general they'll look at broadly recognized standards of toxicity, such as LD50s for rodents and other laboratory animals. So an LD50 is the lethal dose at the dose at which 50% of the animals tested died, and they'll verify what these levels are. And then there are some algorithms they use to reduce the dose to a certain level-presumed safe, below this LD50. But nobody is really running those on the billions of microorganisms that are found in a healthy soil at any given time, and so we have no idea how much you're changing the composition of that microbial community.

Mary Lucero: 22:12

You're not going to kill all of this. There are going to be microbes that tolerate glyphosate. There might even be some that like glyphosate, but what you're going to do is damage the food web. You're going to disrupt the chain of nutrient exchanges that occur between all those microorganisms to help get nutrients from the soil into your plants, and I think this is a big part of why we're seeing the decreased yields when people switch to these roundup ready crops. And of course, now we're using other seeds.

Mary Lucero: 22:49

There's dicamba ready crops and some other herbicides coming in to take the place, because people have begun to protest the use of glyphosate. But in my book, anything that ends in the word side is going to kill things. It's likely to kill a large portion of the microbial community that we never even assessed when we're looking at safety for these. Glyphosate, in particular, was developed to eliminate primary production and a college of thought about primary production as production of all the plants on the planet and, of course, in most people's mindset that's the bottom of the food web. Well, if you take away the bottom of the food web, or the bottom of the food chain the rest of us are dependent on, you're going to see some problems in the ecosystem, and I think that's something we're recognizing today.

Hank Reid: 23:52

Yeah, and you know, back to my lead in talk about my mother saying so, how do we make the change? And you know, education is a big one and I do that, mary, when we go.

Hank Reid: 24:06

You know, we have kind of a pattern here where we have raised you know, the chickens on the grass behind the cows, and we did that so that we could follow the cows with a scratching animal the chicken. Like you said, the birds were behind your cows. We do that so they'll eat the fly larvae out and prevent the pests that affect the cattle and cause pink eye and things like that. So we started looking at ways to put chickens behind our cows to, you know, to break down that organic matter quicker that was coming out of the cows. And so we've done it both with one year. We did a thousand meat birds and chicken tractors, and that's you know. We were using the Joel Salt and Wooden chicken tractors like I'd used 30 years ago. And then I found out I was old, so we found this homage that would manufacture us chicken tractors in aluminum and so they're easy to move. So then we was able to do larger numbers of chickens.

Hank Reid: 25:13

We did up to a thousand meat birds behind our cow herd one summer. And then we switched over to doing eggs, because I don't like processing chickens and gathering eggs is a little easier. So I thought you know I'd gather eggs. And so we developed a network of selling those eggs under our own brand, the Natural Grammar Brand A-Bites in the Kansas City area has probably went to a high v store and bought Natural Grammar eggs. And so we've done the two models, you know, moving them in, like premier one, netting with portable structures.

Hank Reid: 25:46

And then we've done the model where we put them inside chicken tractors and there's nothing compares with a chicken tractor of being able to mob them on animal up and then make them mobile and to be able to manage them at that very high stocking density to have a virginity of effect on us all. And so that's where the chicken tractor comes in to maybe be able to make some of these changes, make some of these young people profitable in a smaller scale farming operation, direct marketing. So we talked earlier that some of your listeners might be interested in how that would work and how it would look. So maybe we ought to switch over and talk about that some.

Mary Lucero: 26:33

Sure we can do that. In fact, I was thinking, as you described your mob grazing, that not everybody is familiar with savory grazing, management or what the philosophy is behind mob grazing, and maybe we could start there by telling people a little bit if you would expand on why it's introduced and what the importance is, and how this fits into the natural rhythms of natural ecosystems.

Hank Reid: 27:08

Absolutely, mary. Yeah, that's so much a part of who I've been all my life that I kind of forget everybody doesn't understand it, but it goes back to the original mobs that wild animals move in. You see it still in African countries, but the United States, you know, the buffalo used to move in mobs that would be 20 miles wide and 100 miles long and we're talking hundreds of thousands of animals moving across an area, eating and browsing and getting what they wanted and then defecating on the land and then the hoof action and then they didn't come back around for a long time and they were pushed around here in America by both predators wolves and like that, and the mountain lions and then also the American Indian, you know, moved. So what we do when we use, you know it's a Joe, salt and word the three M's, the mobbing and using management. And at Natural Grandma we like to tell people that we have two of the M's available to help you with.

Hank Reid: 28:19

We have the ability to teach you how to mob your animals, whether it be chickens or cattle, up into a mob so they make impact and then we have the ability to control them in a mobile way that's easy to move and then how often to move them, and all that goes right back to a learning curve that's hard to learn. So whether we're doing it with the cattle, we do the cattle with, you know, a perimeter fence out of high tensile with a large you know, at least 18 joule or bigger charger running eight or nine or 10,000 volts of electricity, and then we have a few single-wired cross fences with the cattle and then we use portable polywires to break that down to where what we do is a 12-hour move, and we have done, you know, six-hour moves and do it three times a day, but normally we do a twice a day move. A good place to learn some of this is from Greg Judy Reginity Rancher also. He really teaches that well. But we move those animals in that pattern, the cows, and we have rest periods from 30 days in the spring, sometimes 90 to 100 days in the summer, and then we go back and stockpile some grass where we leave some pastures and let them grow up in the fall.

Hank Reid: 29:42

So with the cattle we're moving them a mob that way, and we're following that with chickens, either in chicken tractors or in Premier One netting, and then we've also integrated in goats to control our brush so we don't have to use any chemicals on brush. And we've integrated in now herds, sheep to eat that leafy, weedy, you know type of plant that the cattle don't. So that's what it looks like at Natural Grammall to, you know. Talk about mob grazing and high intensity grazing or, you know, reginity Farming is the overall picture. I guess that they would call it.

Mary Lucero: 30:25

So what is your? What is the impact that this has on your pastures and your soil? How do your pastures look compared to a time when you didn't use mob grazing?

Hank Reid: 30:41

Well, you know they're probably a little bit uglier. You know, back in the day I bought commercial fertilizers before I met Jill Salton I was buying $20,000 worth of commercial fertilizer and I don't know if I ever really did the Columbus type grazing with my cattle. That's where you, you know you turn them out in the spring and then you try to discover them in the fall so you can sell some of them. That's the Columbus theory. But I never was quite that bad. But I was leaving the cattle pretty much in the same pasture all year, trying to set the stocking rate to where, you know they could graze at least six months and I was feeding hay about six months out of the year, which is, you know, the less hay we feed the better. You know we need to try to graze more because you can graze at about a. If you're spending a dollar on hay, you can feed that animal on grass for about a quarter. You don't have to be too much of a mathematician to figure that out. So actually I'm done with all the atenção for vision, my pastures.

Hank Reid: 31:44

Back then I used a lot of equipment. Sometimes we sprayed for weeds, we were putting fertilizer on to make whatever that dominant grass was grow so it overshadowed the weeds, and then we used a mechanical means of clipping the weeds and making it look pretty. So now my pastures. I don't put any mechanical out there or any chemical out there. I do it all with a cattle, and so certain times of the year I got the horse weeds.

Hank Reid: 32:14

You know giant ragweed that's eight feet tall. You know I mean people drive by and they think that farm has no management at all. But you know those weeds are letting insects live there, birds hide under them, clail rabbits. They're not all over the field, but they're in patches here and there, anywhere that you created some bare ground, you know where a water set or a mineral subset, sometimes the cattle. You know it rains a lot and they're in a small area so they do a little palgene and so, yeah, the pastures are kind of uglier if you're looking at making it look like it's, off course. But to me they're beautiful because I know they're full of life.

Mary Lucero: 33:00

And can you see any tangible measures of improved soil health? Do you see more soil organic matter? Do you see more earthworms? Do you see this kind of thing that might tell you, hey, this soil is doing things it didn't do for us 20 years ago. How long have you been doing?

Hank Reid: 33:21

this. Yeah, it's crazy. You ask that because you know, 35 years ago I didn't have a four wheeler or a side-by-side to go out and move my cattle, so I would start from the house like on a rainy day and up around our houses here in Missouri people had released those Canadian nightcrawlers, the big old ones that are about nine inches long, that you pick up with a flashlight when it rains and sell for fish bait.

Hank Reid: 33:47

And we had them around our farmsteads in abundance and they'd get up on the crawl on top of the ground when it rained. And so I'd take a five gallon bucket and I'd catch 60 or 70 of those as I was walking away from the farmstead in a bucket, and then I'd go to the far side of my farm where the cattle might be and I'd release them. And it's hilarious Last fall I had 2,000 hens in a three quarter acre cell. That's about three twenty excuse me, that's about 165 feet. That's what a Premier 1 netting is is 164 feet.

Hank Reid: 34:27

So 164 by 164 gives you approximately three quarters an acre, and I had two of the Joel Salton feather nets you can get them out of his book and get the plans for them and I had two of those A frames sitting there with 2,500 hens on that three quarters an acre and the ground had actually froze once there and I think it was November, and then we got a rain and I'm watching the hen and she's running and I'm looking and I'm thinking that hen has a snake in her mouth.

Hank Reid: 34:57

It was hanging down about four inches on each side of her mouth and she's running and there's about a hundred hens chasing her. And then I look and there's another one and there's another one. There's about ten hens running with, you know, it appears to be snakes in their mouth and I'm thinking, you know it's November. And then I realized they were some of those big nightcrawlers and big earthworms and each one of those hens had about a hundred hens chasing her and it was like the Keystone cops, you know, running around this three quarters an acre carrying earthworms and of course then one gets a hold of one side and one gets a hold of the other and they tear them in two, and so I guess that's an indicator that my soil is pretty healthy, Mary.

Mary Lucero: 35:38

Well, in contrast, I remember a conversation with the grower maybe five or six years ago and he had been concerned about the salt spilling up in their soil. He had this hard pan that was creating problems for them. If I remember correctly, he had six foot shanks that he dragged through that field and if you can imagine the tractor power that takes, he made that effort to try to break up some of these hard pans and he claimed he turned up a lot of white faulty crusted material from underground and described walking back over the field after he was done and just had this sensation that the field was breathing. But the next spring he was excited because he saw an earthworm and he said that in something like 40 years farming he had never seen an earthworm on that field.

Hank Reid: 36:43

That's a shame that somebody has to go to the trouble to burn fossil fuel to do that, and I grew up in the late 60s and 70s in this part of the world.

Hank Reid: 36:54

They had the bee rippers and they thought they were running them 24 inches deep and they really weren't. I know that for a fact because in my day I went to a no-till ripper, an inline ripper, and I would set it with a ruler to be exactly 12 inches deep. And I run it on a man's field where he claimed he had run 20-some inches deep with a bee ripper and I pulled up a gas carbide line that was from back in the late 30s and 40s that had been run out to an old plantation back in the 18s Well, I guess back in the late 1800s they had a gas carbide line that run lamps in their house.

Hank Reid: 37:36

And I caught that ripper that I was on running 12 inches deep. Well, he'd never caught it with that bee ripper. But when you run that bee ripper you have this massive effect of chunks of dirt upheaval and the silly thing is the compaction is just going to come back if you don't put the hair roots and the carbon and you have to put something back in there to keep it from going back together. It has to have something to keep it from sticking. It's not a matter of just tearing it up. I mean, that's what they did to this part of our world in the 1700s. They brought a moldboard plow in here with teams and they were turning under warm-season grasses. That was taller than a man setting on a horse.

Hank Reid: 38:29

They were eight to ten feet tall warm-season grasses and they were turning that under and, as you know, killed it forever. And we get them back now. When we give us all the proper amount of rest, we start seeing eastern gamma grass and blue stem and switch grass. We have all kinds of native grasses now that come up in our fields and 84 are black-eyed susans, and all those things are the diversity that our soil needs to have life in it.

Mary Lucero: 39:05

Yeah, yeah. In fact, I often tell people the best bowl was a man made event. You know, we learned about the bowl in school and it had a huge impact on the US economy in the 1930s. But it wasn't just the drought, it was the fact that for 50 years, land had been turned over to people who had absolutely no experience running farms. To accomplish this, we pushed the historical land managers off the land and replaced them with novices and expected good results, and it didn't happen. But you raised a critical question here at the beginning of our conversation that I wanted to circle back to talking about your conversation with your mother, and how do we transition? And yet, as the conversation has progressed, you've described the fact that you yourself transitioned from a very conventional mindset and conventional practice to what you're doing now. So what inspired your transition and how do we replicate that model so that more people transition?

Hank Reid: 40:26

You know the light bulb that went off in my head. I've been studying the Regenerative Management, intensive Grazing. What are you going to call it back then? That's what we call it, mig. And I did a wagon wheel type. You know a lot of the universities tried and called it a failure, and it was a failure because of the lack of my knowledge of management, where I would, you know, run the animals out in a pie shape and bring them back a quarter miles of water, and I used that Hay mentality where you harvest it all and then move on and the higher the growth of the grass, the better the animals would do.

Hank Reid: 41:01

You know you'd have more and that was all wrong because by the time I got over most of myself they were too mature and then when I tried to come back I had overgrazed and didn't have any recovery. And so that's when I started looking at the University of Missouri Grazing School of Lineups that Jim Garation-Fred Martz taught and you know Joel Salton was, we was one of his early places that he come to Green Hills Farm Project Group. That was the early days when he wrote that first book, pastured Poultry, and I remember, you know, meeting him and then I had a videotape of his and I was playing it in my living room and it was in the afternoon. I don't know if it'd come a rain or what, but I was playing VHS tape on my TV. You know I'm dating myself there.

Mary Lucero: 41:48

And.

Hank Reid: 41:48

Joel said that you know those people that would spend $20,000 on commercial fertilizer and then they would let their cows consume what they grow with it and then let the cows go stand in the pond and under the shade trees and deposit all their money that they had bought. And it's like a light bulb just went click.

Hank Reid: 42:13

And I was that man, and I decided, you know, I needed to change and I quit buying commercial nitrogen for my grass, because all she was doing was making more grass grow in the spring with it, which is when you had too much grass anyways.

Hank Reid: 42:29

I mean, if you're ever going to buy any outside fertilizer you know litter or manure or anything you certainly don't want to put it on in the spring in Missouri. You need to put it on like in August, where you can grow a little more fall growth and have some excess in the winter. You know the grays when the snow and ice had gone and so you know I started learning a different way and then that's. You know I first introduced chickens then and they were just kind of in the backyard. I had a wooden tractor with layer boxes in the back for a few hands and I had some brawlers in a different chicken tractor and we didn't really have a market. We're 100 miles from a city and at that time that was a long ways.

Hank Reid: 43:08

You know I never dreamed that I could haul 40 cases of eggs, you know, at a time to Kansas City and you know, bring home a check for, you know, $3,000. You know I never thought about doing things like that then. But yeah, that's when it kind of went off, was during that time, and I got a cost share and I think that some of that is still available through a quip in most states that you can get a cost share to put in some water lines and some underground quick couplers. We use those quick couplers where you just snap a water hose in and do a portable tank and put some cross fences in. Then I had cells that were 320 feet wide. I think it was 315 feet wide on 80 acres and then I had water outlets over 320 feet and four fences, one down the center and one down each water line, and started moving those cattle around in patterns and had a lot of help from a man named Dennis McDonald.

Hank Reid: 44:14

You know, come and help me lay water lines and stuff. He was one of the men that started the Green Hills Farm Project group with Jim Garrish and, back in that day and, you know, responsible for bringing Joel Salt in here, and so, yeah, just you know, got started that way. And then I had a change in my life, Mary. After about 10 or 15 years of doing that where I was off the farm for about 15 years, it was like 2017 when I came back and really kind of changed it over to Regenerative and that's when we brought the chickens in and right on into 2020 with. You know, with the, what went on in our country at that time made people turn to a more healthy food source.

Hank Reid: 45:01

It's you know a lot easier to market our high quality food now than it was 35 years ago.

Mary Lucero: 45:08

Absolutely. There's. I've seen in the last five years just a total increase in the consumer awareness and the interest in naturally grown food and, of course, organic agriculture sales have been increasing at a very steady pace. A few years ago here in New Mexico, the organic farming conference was the largest agricultural conference in the state and there's an interesting story. It sort of crumbled after that and now we don't have an organic farming conference, but we still have many producers that are either organic or using organic slash regenerative mechanisms.

Mary Lucero: 45:52

So I know that the organic label has its own set of controversy assigned to it. So I don't really like to talk about organic farming as much as regenerative, because I think regenerative is a little bit more loosely defined and has a tighter focus on soil health as opposed to whether what you're putting on the land. But the change is definitely there. People are more interested in this than they were, and so I guess to me, hearing you tell your story, part of what changed your mind was economic. You didn't want to be spending that money on chemicals that were going to go not necessarily to the improvement of your cattle, and I think that's what's driving a lot of this. From the farmer end, from the consumer end. There's a new interest in health and we're recognizing that it really more matters how your food is grown.

Mary Lucero: 46:58

But I think from the farmer standpoint what's going to drive it is economic and, like you said earlier, the education and the awareness that goes with that, because if you don't know there's a more financially sound way to do it, then you're not going to change, and that's out to a lot of growers who recognize that they're probably no longer doing things.

Mary Lucero: 47:24

You know that the conventional approach isn't serving them, but a lot of times you end up with several irons in the fire and if you move too many too soon, the whole system collapses. And so I think there are a lot of people out there kind of on the fence watching the regenerative movement grow, but they're also trying to figure out how they can transition safely and gradually, and I think those people are going to come along a lot quicker than we think because more people do it and gain experience from the knowledge base about how to transition. You'll see more people jumping onto the bandwagon. Resource like yours are going to become more available to people. You've described that the chicken tractor that you started out with was hard to move and clunky and you had to make it, and now you've got these aluminum coops that just slide along the field. Well, the more that we have these resources that make it easier to change, the more people are going to change.

Hank Reid: 48:29

That's so true, mary, and you know it's. I know when you, on your podcast you'll put our website, thenaturalgrammarcom, and you know the grammar is spelled with G-R-A-M-M, like your name, mary, mary G-R-A-M-M-A. And then we also have the YouTube channel that people can come to and just see our farms, see what we do. We film it good, bad or ugly, you know and they can laugh at us in some of the videos and learn something and the others.

Hank Reid: 49:03

But yeah, we offer a chicken tractor. You know all the way from six hens for a backyard and we go on up to the most popular model. You know it's a five by 10 that does about 25 hens, and I know people doing math there 25 hens and 50 square feet, but that's probably not even quite tight enough. And then you know we have 10 by 12 models. We have a 10 by 18 that you can put 120 hens in. So somebody wants to look at commercial and do like three of those together across the field and sell eggs from, you know, 350 hens into their local grocery stores, like we do in local restaurants. And then you know we have a meat chicken tractor that will hold 180 meat chickens and so we have tools that can work for the commercial people or not. And you know I answer every phone call, every text, every email. Sometimes it takes me a little bit to get back to them because there's more and more of them, but we're and that's what, grandma, we're about education. We want to try to teach.

Hank Reid: 50:10

You know, there's no reason for people to do my mistakes and you did ask about the other economic part of how I went At that time, mary, when I started doing the management of Tensy Gracing with cattle. If I remember right, I was getting about $1.30 out of my corn. I was growing around 100 bushel acre and it was costing about $80 for commercial fertilizer to and then you know another $30 for a bag of seed.

Hank Reid: 50:38

I mean, put them after that. There was no profit in the conventional system and I think we're seeing that again. They have put the prices of a bag of corn at $400 and the price of a combine at a half a million dollars, and I don't think there's as much profit in the conventional farming today maybe as there was when I decided to make a switch. So it's just they're bigger players. Right now. The farmers that are out here are playing pretty big. They're using big ball bats.

Hank Reid: 51:17

It would be a little hard for a bank to figure out how to turn that off. It's scary time in agriculture that way, but it's an exciting time if you want to learn it on a small scale. The easiest way to learn how to mob and make a mobile with your management is the easiest way to do this with a chicken tractor. Maybe next year do one for turkeys for meat and next year do one for some brawlers for meat. Once you grow all that grass, a chicken is an omnivore, so you're putting a little bit of grain through it, which that's nutrients back on your farm, this new nutrients. Once that non-GMO grain or organic grain has went through that animal, you haven't put any glyphosate down and your life is coming back to your soil.

Hank Reid: 52:06

The microbes are feeding on all that manure produced, that's coming down on that carbon and making it available to them. Then you're going to want some kind of rumen and animals to consume that grass that you're now growing, that you wasn't before. It's easy to show people what we can do on a small scale and then they can ramp that up. That's the cool thing about tractors is you can diversify the size pretty easily. It's not like going in and building a whole bunch of fences.

Mary Lucero: 52:41

Right Right. It's also very accessible for people who aren't necessarily going into agriculture. They just want to produce some food at home. I know the urban chicken movement is something else that's very much in line with new efforts in urban agriculture. It's quite common now to find families with maybe a quarter acre lot in the back that want gardens and backyard chickens once again because consumers are becoming more concerned about food quality.

Mary Lucero: 53:16

You mentioned the size and scale that somebody needs in order to be profitable on a farm. When your costs are bringing you to a point where you're maybe generating $20 or $40 an acre profit for the year, you need a lot of acres to make a living off of that. You also need efficiencies that cut corners everywhere. Those corners that are being cut are corners that are affecting the nutrient density of the food that's going into the grocery store. Consumers now are waking up and creating more and more demand for more nutritious food. The absolute best way to get the nutrient density high in your food is to make sure you're reducing the distance from the field to the plate. There's no better way to do that than in your backyard. A lot of home gardeners are interested in adding a few birds to their setup, and a small chicken tractor is perfect for that.

Hank Reid: 54:19

Absolutely. I guess the bottom line for me is a typical day of eating for Papa Hank Reed is we raise our eggs right here on our homestead that we live on. It's about three acres, kind of in the edge of a town. It's just old city lots. We've opened those up with. The goats eat the brush off the houses, the poison ivy off the houses. Now we've got grass growing where there used to be trees. I'll have about five grass-raised organic grain eggs out of our backyard. I don't do them over easy, I do them sunny-side up, dr McCullough says is near raw as you can get them.

Hank Reid: 55:10

I put them in a bowl. I do five eggs sunny-side up and I put them in a bowl and let them kind of finish cooking a little bit in that bowl. Then I might do a little piece of toast or something, especially if Lord's made some sourdough bread from a sourdough starter. I'll do a full slice of bread. I might do a couple pieces of bacon just because I like them. I get them from a man who grows heredity chogs on pasture only 25% grain and the rest of it off forage and best bacon in the world. Then for lunch I'll have a natural gramol grass-finished beef burger. That's 80-20 blend. So it fries nice or cook it on the grill. But that fat on there is from grass, not from grain. It's healthy, it's not going to hurt me.

Hank Reid: 56:01

Then I might have a ribeye denigra or something on the grill off a grass-finished egg. Then if you've got fresh garden stuff, you have a salad. We have Amish neighbors. We can get organic vegetables here really easy to supplement that. I guess that's why I do it.

Hank Reid: 56:25

Then I can go out there and smile and listen to Clale listen to that on my farm. That had almost left those farms. We used to have Clale when I was a boy and then it just got away. The habitat's there so they come back. We got metal arcs, we got monarch butterflies, the dragonflies. I can just sit out there in my fields and I know I'm doing the right thing. If that's something your listeners want to do, I would love nothing better than educating them and helping them on whatever scale they're on. I think I could help somebody if they was doing 5,000 acres or a half an acre, even a backyard, it's all the same. It's scalable. The principles are there. We all know what's right, mary. We just got to do what's right.

Mary Lucero: 57:21

I'm so glad that you joined us today. Is there any other point that you'd like to make before we wrap up here?

Hank Reid: 57:34

I always ask people when they come to our homesteading events. We do some of those in South Missouri. Those are our homesteading expo. We do an oaky homesteading expo. Of course we do Mother Earth news fairs. We're out there where people can find us during the show season. I always ask people what is it that you're seeking to do? More and more it's the smaller person that's coming to me. They're just wanting to produce their own food. Let's just ask them how many. Let's say it's chickens. How many layer hens is normally where people start. How many do you need? How many eggs do they need? That's where we start, if they got. Maybe a lot of times they're 55-year-old people that are retiring. They've had a good job, they bought some land and they got an acre or two available. They really don't know what to do with it. Maybe they've been gardening a year or two, so now they're wanting to do some chickens.

Hank Reid: 58:37

I always ask them how many eggs you want. You're going to do your own eggs A lot of them have married, children and grandchildren. So maybe they want 15, 20 eggs a day, so everybody can have five eggs, like Papa Hank. That's where we base it off of how many hens do you want? We size that tractor according to how many. The next question I say is so what's your time restrictions? Can you move it twice a day, like I encourage?

Hank Reid: 59:09

A lot of them can't? They go to work at five in the morning and they're home at 4.30 and that's when they're going to take care of the animals. If they can only move it once a day, then we don't put as many hens in it like a five by 10 tractor and we're going to put 25 or 30 hens in it and move it twice a day. If they can only move it once a day, maybe we only put 18 or 20 hens in, if that makes sense to people. Once we've established that, I always tell them if your budget allows to buy one chicken tractor.

Hank Reid: 59:42

Just start there. If you can afford the second chicken tractor, you probably ought to be doing some meat bird chickens too, and we have ones made just for doing meat birds that are a little less money. I like to ask people questions about where they're at, what is it they're trying to accomplish, and then they can grow off that they can always come back and put six lambs in one of our aluminum tractors later Once people get some of these products and see how easy they are to work with. Mary, we even have a mother cat in aluminum chicken tractor. Right now that we was at the vet getting some shots for some dogs and somebody brought a mother cat in and she had kittens.

Hank Reid: 1:00:26

That night they brought her to the veterinary, just tried to give it away and she had kittens. And two days later I was back there again and they still hadn't given her away.

Mary Lucero: 1:00:33

You know what?

Hank Reid: 1:00:34

Papa Hank did. I brought that mama cat and six kittens home to natural grandma and my wife Laura. What am I going to do with them? I said, well, there's a 10 but 12 chicken tractor out there. We put that mother cat in that chicken tractor and those kittens are about three weeks old Now. They're playing and they're off and around in there. The reason they're in there, Mary, is so they're safe. They're protected from predators. They're also protected from our guardian dogs.

Hank Reid: 1:01:04

They're right out in the tiger with sheep and goats. That's where these units come in. You get livestock and you don't have facilities for them that protects them. You're going to lose your investment and there's nothing worse than giving some chickens for an 11-year-old girl and then they're watching a hot-garry one of them away. I guess that's where I'd start with people. I think one of the most important points even on a farm they can do that in their backyard and kind of learn the virginity methods on a small scale and see how it works for them.

Mary Lucero: 1:01:44

Right, right, I think there's no better way to start than small and at your own pace. The other thing I'm going to add for our listeners here are some links to Joe Soliton's books, since he's mentioned those several times, and that'll kind of help people get an idea about where all this is going and what got you started. Do you know the name of the book that you started building chicken tractors after reading?

Hank Reid: 1:02:24

Yeah, I'm looking at it across the way. There on my shelf it's Pasteur. Poultry was the very first book that Joe did, and then he did Salad Barbeef and, honest to goodness, if you go read those two books, joe will teach you about the mobbing and how that you can do it. Integrate the chickens and the cattle together. Then Joe's. I've been to lots of Joe's stuff. In fact Joe was just down at those are home, stay next boat and we're getting older both of us, but I've watched him many times.

Hank Reid: 1:03:06

People will ask him questions on what I need to do about this. How do I need to do it? And Joe will say are you moving your animals once a day? What he's asking is are your animals in a mob and are you making them mobile and managing them with a once a day move every 24 hours? And if that person tells Joe Salton that they are not doing that, he says well, go home and implement that. And when you've got that going and you're doing that, come back and ask me another question. And I think that's a pretty good answer that I could use here to figure out a way to move some animals every day to a new cell and give that land at least a 30 day rest or a 60 day rest before you come back again.

Hank Reid: 1:03:58

And that's the real learning curve. Just learn to move the animals and it takes some infrastructure and it takes some management to be able to do that. But yeah, joe is a great resource. So is Greg Judy. Those guys won't mind. Greg's got three books out One, gary, she has two books and Joe is up to about 35 or 40, I think, and I have every one of them. So that tells you how much I appreciate his knowledge.

Mary Lucero: 1:04:27

Quite a library. Yeah, it set up a book exchange. Okay, well, we should probably wrap it up, but I thank you once again for joining. I know the listeners will thank you and I thank Laura for her patience. It took us a couple of trials here to get this recording going, but I think you provided a lot of great information for people.

Hank Reid: 1:04:52

Absolutely, mary. Maybe you can do one with Laura someday. She really brings a rich other side of the story to this, and she didn't grow up here in Missouri where I am, and she's done hula culture, raised beds, she's got bees. Starting now she's very passionate about raising her own herbs and all those things. So you might want to podcast with the real natural grandma instead of just pop a hank or something.

Mary Lucero: 1:05:24

And she sounds fascinating. I will have to get to know her Listeners. I want to thank you for tuning in today and to remind you to check the show notes below this episode to find links to Hank's website and also to find links to many of the books he referred to by authors like Joel Salaton and Jim Garrish, who have provided volumes of information for people that want to learn the principles of mob grazing or simply find directions for getting started. Have a great day.

The Cornerstones of Healthy Food Systems

Hank Reid on Mobile Mob Management with Beef and Poultry

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