Regenerative Health with Max Gulhane, MD
I speak with world leaders on circadian & quantum biology, metabolic medicine & regenerative farming in search of the most effective ways of optimising health and reversing chronic disease.
Regenerative Health with Max Gulhane, MD
91. Pioneering Syntropic Agriculture | Tom Bjorksten of Misty Creek Agroforestry
"The future of Food is in Agroforestry" says Tom Bjorkston, the founder of Misty Creek Agroforestry, a regenerative farm in the Northern Rivers of NSW producing beyond organic eggs, chicken and various seasonal crops.
We discuss the cutting edge syntropic and agroforestry practices that Misty Creek are implementing to create a self-sustaining ecosystem that enhances soil health and nutrient density in food production.
The conversation highlights the function of Nguni cattle for regenerative grazing, the challenges of direct-to-consumer model, regulatory nanny state creating regulatory barriers for small scale farmers, the potential for regenerative agriculture to revitalize rural communities and more.
TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Introduction to Misty Creek Agroforestry
06:41 Understanding Syntropic Agriculture
13:29 The Role of Animals in Agroforestry
18:19 Cattle and Nutrient Density in Farming
25:36 The Future of Regenerative Agriculture
28:59 The Nguni Cattle: A Resilient Choice for Grazing
37:35 Navigating the Challenges of Direct-to-Consumer Sales
52:42 The Vision for Misty Creek: Building a Sustainable Future
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#agroforestry #syntropicagriculture #regenerativefarming #nutrientdensity #permaculture #ngunicattle #nguni #regenerativeagriculture, #foodsovereignty
Okay, welcome back to the Regenerative Health Podcast. Today I am sitting down with Tom Bjorksten. Now he is the founder and owner and chief farmer of Misty Creek Agroforestry, which is a regenerative and centropic agricultural operation here on the northern rivers of New South Wales, here on the northern rivers of New South Wales. So, tom, thank you for joining me and, yeah, maybe let's start with a bit about Misty Creek. Like, what do you guys do? What is your yeah, chief operation?
Speaker 2:Yep, so our farm's based around our syntropic agroforestry, so this land used to be a subtropical rainforest and basically that's what the land yearns to be. So what is different about our farm and what's unique about it is this integration of the agroforestry with animals, so that's chickens and cattle, but also using those animals and their biology, their manure, all that kind of stuff for horticulture as well, so directly integrating our cropping with animals as well. And we are a direct-to-market farm as well, so everything that we grow is sold at the local farmers' markets.
Speaker 1:I think the first time I saw your operation must have been on social media at some point and there was some drone footage, and the drone footage showed rows of trees, of cropping trees, and you had chickens in between these rows, and it was called this idea of tree-range eggs. And I had it on one of my Regenerate talks because to me it made so much sense that if we were creating a holistic and interdependent biological system in order to produce not only the highest quality but the most amount of food, then it made sense to me that you would also have some form of trees and plants growing in there. So can you explain what those rows are and how they optimize things?
Speaker 2:Yep. So where do I start? So let's start with. Chickens are jungle animals. They're naturally most at home in the forest or on the edges of forest. So what we've created with that agroforestry is exactly that We've created not exactly a forest, but it's like a constant interaction between the forest and the edge, because you have rows of trees with grass in between. So what that means for the chicken is that, yeah, you know there's a pretty popular pasture raised chicken. You know people are doing it all over the world and we haven't reinvented the wheel there.
Speaker 2:We've just kind of taken that and instead of the chickens being out in an open paddock which, say, in some climates, especially where pastured chicken was popularised in North America, you can get away with it because it's a lot more mild here in the subtropics it's very hot, high summer temperatures, sun directly overhead in summer, so this gives a lot more comfort to the chickens. So what this means is that, say, if they're out in an open paddock, they might only spend three hours of the day foraging, so an hour and a half, and this is in the middle of summer. So they might only spend an hour and a half, and this is in the middle of summer, so they might only spend an hour and a half foraging in the morning, and then, when it gets hot, they'll head back into their shelter. Same again in the evening. Now when I put them in the agroforestry, they can spend all day foraging because they're constantly in the shade. So what that means is the chicken has a happier and healthier life. It's spending more time foraging, it's taking less of the grain, which is good for my bottom line because it's expensive. But it's also better for the chicken because they are getting a more varied diet. And then for the consumer it means there's more nutrients in the meat and the eggs because of more varied diet, different forages, different bugs. They're scratching through the mulch, that kind of forest floor type environment.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and to go back a step, it's because I didn't explain pasture poultry, but the concept of that is that they have a mobile caravan, whatever you want to call it, with electric fence around it and you're constantly moving that to fresh pasture. So, again, great for the chickens because they're constantly getting access to fresh forage grasses, herbs, insects, what have you. But it was also good for the land too, because you know, if you leave the chickens in one spot for too long you're getting tons of manure in the one spot and then that's going to be causing problems rather than benefiting the land. So there we have our nice long rows, because we're moving those with a tractor.
Speaker 2:So another kind of part of our farm too is trying to have these animals in very natural situations, like mimicking how they would live naturally, but also fitting it into our economy, where you have to be efficient and effective and productive, basically to make sure you're profitable so I can keep providing people with food. So the big long rows that means we can move them straight, because every time you turn it takes a lot longer to move them. So, and then within those rows, once the chickens have moved on and often the cattle will come before or after them there's enough manure left that we can crop vegetables behind them directly in that area as well. Crop vegetables behind them directly in that area as well. So then again, your lines help with irrigation and just ease of management, grass management all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:Can you talk a bit more about this idea of syntropic agriculture and agroforestry? Because I guess the next step for people who have decided they're interested in where they want to eat, what they're going to eat yes, they've learned about regenerative farming, they understand basic concepts like rotating cattle and not leaving them in the same areas, but I feel like what you're doing and that's what struck me is this seems like the next level above, which is if we're going to recreate natural conditions and we're living in a subtropical at the 28th latitude. It's different to a lot of other situations where it's just open grassland. So what are you actually doing with this? What does syntropy mean? And, yeah, just explain that concept for us.
Speaker 2:So yeah, so syntropic is basically mimicking the way that a forest functions. But if you take it back very fundamentally, it's actually how any ecosystem functions and that's on the principles of succession. So naturally, natural systems have a tendency to go towards complexity. They will improve the quantity and quality of biomass. The ecosystems and the biomass that makes up it, like the flora and fauna, will become more complex. So basically we can just harness that to grow without the need for any inputs. Because if you think about a rainforest, a rainforest doesn't need fertilizer, it doesn't need chemicals, it doesn't need irrigation, it will just grow on its own. But in nature it can happen slowly. So for us understanding those principles, we can take that and speed it up massively. So what that typically means is understanding what level of succession your land is at. So that determines what species you can grow.
Speaker 2:So if we use any example like, say, you want to grow macadamias and if you just plonk them in a field, if that land's not ready for the macadamia to grow, that's when you need to prop it up with fertilizer. You might need chemicals to deter insect attacks because the insects are trying to tell you that your land is not ready for macadamias. You might need irrigation because the soil is not wet enough. So what we do is we find pioneer species that the land will accept and will grow very easily and prolifically without any inputs, and then we can use that to create the conditions for what we do want to grow.
Speaker 2:And the management tool we do that is by pruning. So what we're planting, we're planting tons of different species and some particular ones that work really well, and then we're cycling that biomass, so we're pruning it, put it down on the ground, and that process mimics how the forest floor forms and starts creating all this fungi in the soil and then we'll create the conditions for what we do want to grow. So we obviously with the addition of the animals, that is kind of like another input that boosts things along. But I see that as a way of yeah, basically kind of boosting it along while also providing another kind of layer to our business and a very what's the right word, you know like one that contributes in a really good way as well.
Speaker 1:So with these rows, I'm guessing, you're growing both crop species and non-crop species, and the crop species being ones that will obviously thrive in that area, and the non-crop species are essentially like sacrificial carbon that you're essentially, I believe, cutting with a machete.
Speaker 2:Yeah, chainsawing yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, can you talk a bit more about that? Yeah, chainsaw, and yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Can you talk a bit more about that? Yeah, so there's kind of two elements to the system. So there's the agroforestry, so there's the trees, and then there's the horticulture, which are the veggies. So they're kept somewhat separate because we'll go back to. You know, we need to be efficient with our harvesting and planting and all that kind of stuff because at the end of the day we're a for-profit farm and so our system is very biodiverse. There's tons of different species. But then we will grow a row of one crop and that will be Brussels sprouts in between your tree rows that have a wide diversity of plants and also grass as well. That will have a diversity of grasses and legumes and herbs. So the specific ways of growing the crops will be yeah, so we have microclimate creation from the trees on either side and then when I know I want to grow some vegetables, I'll run my chickens and my cows through that area. Typically the cows first and then the chickens. They add all their manure and then I'll plant the vegetables. So firstly using the manure of those two species. But then the other critical thing is growing grasses on either side. So that's pretty unique in growing vegetables.
Speaker 2:Most vegetables are grown in open soil that's not covered. So you can either mechanically or chemically control weeds. So what we do is we plant the veggies in rows in the middle with grass on either side, and then we're continually cutting that grass as mulch to mulch around the base of the plants. Now that covers the soil, which means we don't need to weed as the grass mulch breaks down. It provides a steady drip feed of nutrients, which is how plants have evolved. They haven't evolved to have big hits of chemical fertilizer that provides heaps of MPK. They want steady little drip feeds of all the micro and macro nutrients, which is what decaying organic matter does. It feeds of all the micro and macro nutrients, which is what decaying organic matter does. And you also have grasses are very productive in terms of the amount of root exudates they create, so feeding your underground soil army. So every time we cut the grass on the side of the veggies, not only is it providing mulch, it creates soil as well.
Speaker 2:So we're not and this is truly regenerative agriculture, because it is you're regenerating the soil through the process of farming it. And yeah, that is where syntropic agriculture is unique. But it's also the biggest challenge of syntropic agriculture that not many people have solved of taking it from this ideal truly regenerative agriculture to something that makes business sense. And for us, the animals play a huge part of that. Because any farmers listening to this might think, oh, that's a lot of work, and it is, and it can be challenging in a high labor cost country like we have.
Speaker 2:But you're not exactly. You're kind of replacing one type of work with others. So we don't need to weed and we typically don't need to irrigate, we don't need to put on fertilizer, we don't need to do any sprays. So there's four jobs that are a massive part of growing any vegetable crop that we don't need to do. We do need to keep brush, cutting our grass. So it's like you're replacing one with the other, but instead of using inputs that come from multinational corporations come in a box, come in a drum or whatever I'm paying a local person to do that and I'm regenerating the soil and producing really high quality food.
Speaker 2:Yeah that sounds amazing.
Speaker 1:And I think about how each of these individual crops are being farmed in the current paradigm and it looks nothing like what you guys are doing. And again, I'm not saying anything's better or worse, but from my point of view, I'm interested in food. Transparency of the food system, again, is for people to eat high quality food for their health and, obviously, nutrient density. It's pretty clear to me which agricultural school of thought or strategy is going to produce the more high quality food. It's going to be your one, rather than massive set stock cattle or feedlot cattle or any form of monocrop plant production that involves huge quantities of inputs from places I mean in this area.
Speaker 1:You mentioned macadamia. For those who aren't aware of macadamia, it's an indigenous tree that contains a nut here in Australia that has a very high content of omega-9 fatty acids, I believe, but they invariably all need spraying. None of these macadamia farms are anywhere near close to organic, so consequently, they're needing huge amounts of inputs. The advantage, it sounds, of this type of system is that you're creating this truly vertically integrated, internally self-sustaining ecosystem and environment. That doesn't need you to have an account with Bayer, with John Deere, with any of these other companies. My question and this is a technical one, just about this strategy. In a different environment that's perhaps more arid with different soil types, is a form of syntropic agroforestry still possible, but you would just use different plants. Or can you explain? Talk to that.
Speaker 2:Yep, it is possible because it's based on the principles of succession, which work anywhere, and I can't claim to be an expert on that because I haven't set things up in all different climates, but I have seen examples in different climates. It's basically, yeah, you're looking at succession, you're looking at the species that are occurring on your land and then using those. So I've seen examples in Portugal, where it's too dry to grow grasses, which I'm using grasses to feed my vegetables, they grow crops like rosemary and sage and cutting them to put on the vegetables to provide the same kind of idea and say for me, we live, you know, know, here it's very wet, it's been raining non-stop for ages, so I can grow. I often grow my brussels sprouts without turning the irrigation on different climate. You know, okay, you might be regenerating your land for 30 years before you could dream of growing a crop without irrigation, whereas I can, kind of within a couple of years, I can get to that point.
Speaker 2:So, um, short answer yes, it's possible, just you need to. It's like anything. There's no recipe, there's a formula that maybe formula is not the right word. There's principles that are universal, but then it's up to everyone to understand how to apply them, and that's even with what works at Misty Creek, not necessarily work just down the road, because it's unique to to me and the people that work there and the land. People can take inspiration, but you can never copy it yeah, that that makes sense.
Speaker 1:can you talk to the cattle that and how you're using cattle in this system, because to me it sounds like it's something that has beneficial, positive externalities for everything, which is you're potentially increasing the growing capability of the crops, but you're also providing the cattle with pretty nutrient-dense feed Yep.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, it's just another vertical integration. It's kind of, you know, like I'm building the skyscraper, you know, just adding another thing, taking a step back, like I grew up on a large cattle farm in the central west of New South Wales. My family's been breeding cattle for over 70 years so feel very, you know, like I really love cattle, so that's that's part of it too. But they they help our chickens. So our main, our main farm is focused around the. The farm is focused around the chicken. That's that's what brings us most of our income. They help the chickens in terms of the way that I can use them to manage the pasture.
Speaker 2:So with the type of ultra high density grazing where I can create a very leafy, healthy, nutritious pasture, that means my chickens are going to have more nutritious pasture and the grass grows very rapidly around us so it can get up this high very quickly. So if I can move the cattle around and it gets a bit shorter, the chickens have a better pick. So that helps the chickens. It also helps the crops as well because, say, my Brussels sprouts plants when they're finished, a chicken wouldn't exactly eat that, but a cow would come and eat that. So it's just it's.
Speaker 2:It's adding the biology to the, to everything. It's adding like a pleasure. For me, you know, like it's something that I feel really good about, and it also actually pretty much like everything on our farm is market driven. So I see a very strong demand for organic beef. Not too much organic beef around, a lot of grass-fed beef, um. So yeah, just just you know, any any way that I can see market opportunities and leverage my existing infrastructure in terms of cold room facilities and farmer's markets I'm already attending and existing customers.
Speaker 1:I mean, it makes so much sense to me and I think that I'm interested in this idea of, and the common rebuttal to, eating animal foods because, especially if we're, as doctors and health practitioners, recommending people eat a really high-quality diet that includes, necessarily, animal products, it's you know. The next question from the peanut gallery is how do you feed the world? And I think that's a really misplaced question because you're trying to solve a global scale before the local scale, which doesn't make any sense. But if we're answering that question, what you're doing really does answer that question because it's optimizing every single square centimeter of land for food production. And if we replicate your model, obviously with idiosyncratic or changes that are dependent on wherever people or other farmers are, changes that are dependent on wherever people or other farmers are, then you're pretty quickly producing a whole bunch more food than the industrial models or any of these models about food production even could comprehend.
Speaker 2:So, yes, something you said just now they're producing more food but, like so, your industrial system produces more calories but no nutrients. So, like a system like mine, it it's so productive and I think that you know you'd have to look at it but there are, no, no question, producing more nutrients and you know, we know that people are getting enough calories for the most part, but they're not getting. And you know, we know that people are getting enough calories for the most part, but they're not getting enough nutrients. So you know there's a whole thing. You know the industrialization of food.
Speaker 2:So what I've lived through in terms of seeing my family and what's happened to rural Australia, which you know I believe has been echoed all over the world, is that when I was growing up, on the farm was my grandfather, my dad, my two uncles, my older brother, all working on the farm, two or three full-time employees and seasonal workers. Now, on the same farm, my dad, one, maybe two workers, same farm, my dad, one, maybe two workers, you know so that that that land has gone from um having what, what did I say? 10 or 12 people working it down to three. And that's happened all over and that means you know your villages are going and everything, and so you say, you know, then saying oh, we can't feed the world, it's, yeah, because this whole hollowing out of rural society has happened, that it's necessarily you can only have one man on a tractor growing crops and you can't have these productive systems like we have, because it's very reliant on labor.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, my father's farm 7,500 acres, three employees I have 28 acres. I have the equivalent of four full-time staff. So there's a lot happening on a very small space. And the way I see it is, instead of investing millions in machinery, I'm investing in local people, local people working for me. So my farm doesn't rely on a big amount of inputs, but it relies on a lot of labor. But I'd rather see that the majority of my earnings go towards paying people's wages than say, servicing interest payments on machinery or paying agricultural companies for chemicals.
Speaker 1:So it requires a whole cultural revolution and people from the city don't understand it basically, yeah, and what you're describing is really echoing what it sounds like happened with one of the pioneers of this regenerative agricultural movement in Bluffton, georgia, with White Oak Pastures and their work restoring their essential village and township essentially happened because they were able to employ more people using this more human intensive agricultural practices. I mean to me the industrial and the centralized system, it's pseudo productivity and it's producing pseudo nutrition, whereas what you're doing is true productivity because it is producing real nutrition and it is literally regenerating the land and it's a net benefit to this commons which, jake you know, my friend jake wilkie uh, in here australia, talks a lot about. Like, what is regenerative farming? Something that that actually adds to the commons rather than, rather than detracts from it. So it's uh, yeah, it's, it's very elegant and, and again, it's about working with nature. These centralized systems are destructive, they're extractive, I mean mean, someone put it as strip mining the soil is kind of what a lot of monocrop agriculture is and that, I think, is a real fitting saying so.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about a specific type of cattle and I see that you're wearing your Nguni shirt here Now Nguni, which are an ecotype breed of indigenous African sanga cattle. They're a bit of my hobby horse. I'm very enamored with their ability to survive in all kinds of conditions and if we're talking about productivity per square meter of land and we're thinking about per square meter of beef production, then these are kind of the cattle that you want. Per square meter of beef production, then these are kind of the cattle that you want. So talk to me about your experience with cattle and what you're looking at with these Nguni cattle.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, yeah, so our farm's certified organic. So that means that with our beef we're looking for a hardy breed of cattle that can, and not only we're certified organic, we're certified organic in a environment that's very difficult to be certified organic because we have high burdens of parasites. So a lot of buffalo fly, a lot of ticks, internal parasites such as worms, liver fluke all highly prevalent in our area. And when we started, basically when I made my initial inquiries, it was it can't be done. And that's where the Nguni are completely central to my strategy. And when I initially started with cattle and with some other breeds, I was trying to achieve what I wanted to achieve with the grazing and wasn't getting the results I wanted, because this breed has been, you know, thousands of years in Africa of just harsh selection processes. No, you know, and there's a lot of parasites in Africa and you know you survived, you survived, you didn't, you didn't. So if we're talking about specific traits of the Nguni, it's that resistance to parasites. So I've noticed that within my herd that does contain some other animals and some crossbreds of Nguni, that the Nguni and their crossbreds almost have no buffalo fly on them whatsoever and they'll be standing next to breeds of other cattle that may have 100 on each side. Um, they very few ticks, or if they do have ticks, they don't seem to show any sort of problem with them. Like the, the cattle maintain a fantastic body condition nice, shiny coat, you know all the indicators of health. Nevertheless, having some ticks on them, they will happily eat poorer quality forage.
Speaker 2:So for a truly regenerative grazing, you want to be doing a non-selective grazing, which means you're grazing everything. They're not leaving anything behind. A British or Euro breed will really struggle to do that, whereas an Nguni will be able to maintain good body condition whilst doing that. What else I'm lost now. But they are just a fantastic animal and they've basically allowed us to achieve what we want to with our grazing, with our ultra-high density grazing and staying organic, so like low input and staying in good body condition. Because it can be a pretty common thing, especially in our kind of climate, which is not great for raising cattle, that if you've got the wrong breed you can try this regenerative grazing and then your cattle do very poorly. So I see the Nguni thriving under these kind of what I call it tough love, like I really deeply care for my cattle and look after them really well, but at the same time, I'm also providing quite a harsh selection process on them.
Speaker 1:Yeah and look, I'm also providing quite a harsh selection process on them.
Speaker 1:Yeah and look, I'm not a farmer at all, but to me it makes so much sense that if you are trying to graze and you're using an animal that you want that animal to be adapted or suited to the environment you're in.
Speaker 1:And in talking to people and talking to other farmers, it seems like there's a lot of inertia and maybe legacy in agricultural practice, which is they're using this breed because their dad used it, because their father used that, and they're not in fact using an animal that's adapted to the country.
Speaker 1:And here in Australia, which you have massive amounts of marginal country, we've got massive swings of weather that include dry and wet periods, and if you're using a cow that's adapted to a rainy island in the North Atlantic where it's cold and wet, say like an Angus or Hereford, then you're probably not using the exact one that's right for the job. So it seems like a no-brainer, but perhaps it takes someone who's thinking outside the box or hasn't been within these intellectual thinking paradigms to see that the other facet of the problem is that if you care about the ethics of animal welfare, then why would you have a cow that's going to be suffering and what you described with the buffalo fly. I mean, I've seen animals similar as what you described side to side, different breeds, and one looks like some kind of emaciated product of some kind of concentration camp and the other, the Nguni, is thriving. It's the same environment but a different animal, and incredible to make that much of a difference.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so there's a lot of. You know you can, like I mentioned with the syntropic agroforestry if you don't have the right conditions for your plant, you're going to have to prop it up fertilizers, chemicals, irrigations. It's the exact same with animals. If you don't have the right conditions, you can get away with it regular deing, chemical treatments for buffalo, fly dipping for ticks, so you can control it. And I think that's part of why less people have not adapted this kind of breed, because you can kind of skirt around it and you can selectively graze as well, so you allow your cattle to take the best of everything, so they're getting the best nutrition. So we're pushing them to non-selectively graze, which means they're not getting the best of everything. It's much better for the pasture.
Speaker 2:But once you get that cycle, it's not as if the cow's getting, you know, a really poor quality diet. But it is essential that they have that nutritional adaptation to take poor quality forage, have that nutritional adaptation to take poor quality forage. So yeah, we have these crutches that can enable producers to get through or get past that lack of adaptation. A lot of it is market-driven too in terms of what people desire from their beef. So you know, while the yooni is incredible in all these reasons. We've just uh spoke about um it because of the way it's been selected over, you know, thousands of years in africa. It's not been for eating quality, it's been for uh resilience and able to thrive in harsh conditions. So, and that's where a crossbreeding program can come in you can get the resilience, the nutritional adaptation, but you can add some of the carcass quality of the other breeds and get the best of both worlds.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like thinking about this and really maybe giving some more context to the discussion is and I don't think necessarily all you know, all farmers need to go to start breeding purebred and goonie, and really there's reasons for that. And the commodity market that we're discussing, it prizes a black cow and that is you know. Someone described it as interestingly put it it's amazing that a grown man, you know, is choosing a cow based on the color. It's like a kid wants the red toy. It's like these farmers want the black cow and, for better or for worse, that's essentially the reality of the market. And the other reasons why Anguni aren't selected is they've got a small carcass frame. They often have horns. So there's all these reasons that a commodity purchaser might not want this type of cow.
Speaker 1:But, as we were talking about before, we pressed record is that you are catering to a different type of market and that is a market that perhaps me and people who are listening to this podcast are interested in, which is really pure, quality food with extreme transparency and provenance and complete guarantee that there's no chemical additive or input into our food. And when the skin comes off, all the beef looks the same and I think my personal opinion is the grass feeding is the most important kind of aspect to good quality tasting beef and maybe hanging the carcass. So we as consumers don't see that as a problem but totally it does make sense if you're also wanting to remain financially viable to use this breed in a cross, that also makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So there's just the market realities around that and yeah, it depends what market you want to meet. So personally I want to try and bridge the two markets. So the more traditional one that's going to be like, say, their number one trade is tenderness and marbling, which the Yunguni are not known for and it's also difficult in these kind of environments we're in, whereas, because we're in very high rainfall rainforest environment, our soils are typically poorer because the productivity of these environments is held in the biomass, not the soil itself biomass, not the soil itself. Whereas if you go further out west, you have better soil because you're not getting the leaching from the higher rainfall, which means you have higher nutrition grass. And to give that some kind of context, like a lot of good producers in west of the Great Dividing Range, they might be putting on 1.5 to 2 kilos a day on their cattle, whereas here, like the best that I could hope for and I think I'm doing a pretty good job is probably like 0.8 kilos a day and that's just a function of the environment.
Speaker 2:But I think that in Goonee and my cattle model is following two kind of complementary avenues is that I'm looking to get into start selling breeding stock but also beef. So the purebred Nguni plays a big role in that, because if you want crossbreds, you need to have pure animals as well. So I'd like to build up my herd of pure Nguni, but then I'll also be crossbreeding as well to hopefully provide the kind of beef that people like you and I, that your number one criteria is grass-fed and the amazing flavor that comes with that, but also the knowledge that you're feeding your family nutrient-dense, clean, organic. Not everyone is. The biggest criteria is organic, but for some organic food and crossing that market with that tenderness and that kind of stuff, hopefully I can get there. It's still like cattle is a lifetime of work and I'm still a couple of years in, so yeah, it's still got a long way to go.
Speaker 1:It's really exciting stuff. Let's change track now to talk about this challenge of selling directly to the consumer, because my impression of agriculture is that the easy way is to sell into this commodity market, be a price taker, do things the conventional way, use the black cows, use the drenches and all the other chemical inputs and it's the difficult path is to go out on your own and kind of carve out your own market demand and doing kind of what you're doing. So talk about these challenges and how you see them and what you're doing so like what talk about these challenges and how you see them and and what you're doing to overcome them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because it's. It's well. Geez, where do I start? It's such a huge, such a huge topic, you know, because not every farmer is a natural salesman or a natural businessman as well and there's so many different factors. Like you know, our and I, the model that we've pursued has worked. Because of where we are, because we're in the northern rivers, because I would be surprised if there's a stronger farmers market culture anywhere else in the country, a stronger farmer's market culture anywhere else in the country, possibly even the world. Where else can you go to a really strong farmer's market six days of the week? At the furthest you drive is an hour. That I can have a business that's providing myself and others a living by going to three farmer's markets every week. I think that's pretty unique. So that gives me some advantages in terms of kind of what scale I need to achieve.
Speaker 2:Because you know, for some reason, farming is like I don't know, maybe it's like so romanticized on social media and there's that really big back to the land movement that for some reason people think they're immune to this. You know needing a certain amount of sales to make a living, that you know that you can have a great kind of profit margin on, say, like one individual chicken or one individual box of eggs. But then you need to remember that to make a living you need to make about $80,000 a year. So yeah, just trying to get that scale right. And the way that I kind of did it after the initial kind of market testing phases was to figure out, okay, what number do I need to create the standard of living that I want to have? And then okay, so, and then I found that number and then now that I have a good idea of what I can sell things for and what the costs are, then you kind of work backwards from there and then you get your.
Speaker 2:You get what you need to sell, you get what you need to sell and it's, yeah, it requires a good strategy, understanding of the market, but the red tape can be really difficult as well. That's a major challenge, especially for livestock producers. Everyone all over the country will tell you that you know. The major is you know if you want to sell meat it has to go through a licensed facility, and those licensed facilities are shutting out small producers because they see paddock-to-plate producers as threatening the status quo of the meat supply. People all of a sudden are avoiding the supermarkets and whatnot. How can they stop that? Stop doing service kills Pretty easy actually. That was a pretty broad question If you want me to delve into anything in detail.
Speaker 1:Yes, absolutely. These are food supply chain choke points. They're being enabled and maintained by regulatory capture. If people understood more then I think they would be the pitchforks and the torches, but at the moment, people don't understand the process by which their food is made and they're not realizing that they're essentially being deprived from sourcing food directly from a farm that's been killed and processed on that farm, because industry has influenced regulation to make it difficult for you to do that on-farm processing, and it's truly bizarre and makes no logical sense, because it's the 21st century, it's 2025.
Speaker 1:We have the technology to maintain high quality hygiene and food standards anywhere and it would be very, very easy to do that, say, on your property or anyone else's property. But these archaic you could say corrupt laws are preventing us from accessing your produce that you've killed on the farm and us as consumers. We have to pay more because your fuel costs, your labor costs, your transport costs all have to be built in to the price that we pay for that beef. It's pretty bad and I feel like it needs to be more of a big deal than people are making out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and there are some people making some noise about it, which is good, australian Food Sovereignty Alliance being one of them, but it's been happening for a long time. Like I mentioned earlier, my family's been involved with beef for many, many years and my dad said 50 years ago he could have a choice of abattoirs where he'd send his cattle within a three-hour drive. He had all these different towns that he could choose between. Now his nearest avatar is five hours away. Same for us with the chickens. We had one that was 10 minutes down the road, now the nearest one's four hours.
Speaker 2:And you know whether that is an ongoing thing as well is something that's you know it's difficult and I think that, yeah, like all of our customers are fully across this kind of stuff, but I think your average punter in the city actually just has they have no idea what of of what's at stake, that that there is this like independent, yeah, food sovereignty, like being able to, and it goes back to a very personal level in terms of like why can't people eat the food that they choose to eat? So, basically, the government is saying that we're deciding what food you can and cannot eat, and why are adults being dictated what they cannot eat?
Speaker 1:It's completely absurd and it's profound, unreasonable intrusion into the private life and decisions of independent, competent adults.
Speaker 2:You can smoke, you can drink why, can't you choose what food you want?
Speaker 1:Exactly Vaping. We talk about consent in medicine. People have the right to decline all kinds of reasonable treatments, yet we're essentially barred from consuming food in its natural state. So I personally think this needs to be an issue for everyone that they raise with their local member, like on a really, really local level your local state member, federal member. I mean this is one of the biggest issues. I mean we're seeing the encroachment of the pharmaceutical industry. The past five years we've seen it encroached into human health. We won't necessarily talk about that, but in veterinary health we're only kind of one disaster away biosecurity disaster away from the mandating of mandated pharmaceutical inputs. The mandating of mandated pharmaceutical inputs and if you've got a, you know other regulations included. You know herd tagging or whatsoever. Or you mandate vaccine certificates prior to processing and abattoirs. You know pretty quickly you can't easily obtain beef that's pure as the way our ancestors have eaten it for you know millions of years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely yeah. I think that what's important about this is that theoretically, we're in a capitalist society, so if people want this, they should be able to have it. That's kind of how supply and demand works. I also think that it should be a bipartisan issue too like it's conservatives because we've talked about earlier the decline of rural areas and towns by providing jobs again and not just jobs, but dignified jobs and jobs that people love, not just crappy jobs. So, yeah, I'm not one that I'm not like a big thinker of these in terms of what the solution is, I don't know. I'm just kind of like putting my head down and hopefully I can kind of, you know, produce this food in a way and, you know, provide an example and inspiration for others and provide the food that people want. And you know, I'm going to be trying my hardest to kind of get this food to people's plates in the way that they want it. And if I can think of new, newer, novel ideas, hopefully I can and, yeah, that will come out along the way. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It really is such a big issue, this regulation, and I think it was Tolstoy who wrote you might not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.
Speaker 1:I think in this setting we can say you might not be and maybe talking to the audience here you might not be interested in regulation, but if you want to eat pure beef, regulation is interested in you. So I think it's us as consumers and I mean you're doing the hard work to produce this quality food but it's us as consumers who need to essentially be the ones with the pitchforks and the torches at our MPs' offices metaphorically speaking, not literally speaking and demanding change and severe deregulation of agricultural production. I mean, from my personal point of view, I would like to see on-farm killing and processing so I can buy the beef from you. I know the cow hasn't traveled far, it hasn't been in distress. I would like to see sales, farm gate sales of dairy products that don't have to go through industrial producers and manufacturers like Parmalat, fonterra, all these companies and access to other forms of fruit and vegetables. Whatever I feel like I want as a consumer. I mean, those to me are basic human rights that we aren't essentially having access to right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and what I think is that you know so the anyone who wants to defend the regulations will say well, you know what's to stop someone from you know being really unhygienic and you know giving out dangerous food. And then it comes back to like are we treating everyone like they're an idiot? You know so. Um, you could, someone could come to my farm and they step inside my processing room and they see how spic and span everything is, how clean it is. You look at the chicken and it doesn't smell like it's off, and you know. And then you eat it and then you're like okay, cool, this is I. I don't need to see a piece of paper that this fellow's ticked, because I can look at his farm, I can see the produce, I can eat it and I know that he's doing a good job.
Speaker 2:So I think that you know and I read some of the other days like farming automatically makes you a libertarian, because you're kind of like you know why can't we make these decisions for ourselves? Um, you know, it's kind of like when you're at a lookout or something and it's like don't step off the cliff, like yeah, duh, so, yeah. So I think that there's a and it's happening and I hope it will step out from being niche to slightly less niche. That, yeah, that people can come to these farms, they can see how we operate, but most of all, use their common sense. And what will happen is, if you're not doing a good job as a farmer, you'll be weeded out. You won't have return customers, your business won't thrive. Kaput You're doing, it's a self-regulating system. Yeah, yeah, you're doing a good job.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it is. It's totally self-regulating and we don't need regulation and government in there to do that for us. I mean, the arguments about on prosteri is one that have been covered in other podcasts and other people and I'll make a quick comment on it from a medical point of view. And I'll make a quick comment on it from a medical point of view. The outbreaks of listeriosis, that's the common kind of big disease that gets brought up when we're talking about lack of pasteurization. I mean the big outbreaks of listeriosis, especially in the US, are in industrial processing facilities and it's of alfalfa or some other plant. It's very, very rarely from um, from raw, from milk itself. And it comes back to provenance and, as you say, the, the producer. If you, if there's a dodgy producer doing the wrong thing and he's leaving his produce out for days and then trying to sell it, that's going to pretty quickly spread through the, through the community and that you're not going to get business anymore.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and then so you know, and why would you buy something that? So, yeah, so maybe it comes back to increasing people's education around food. And you know, I think we're pretty blessed to live in an area where people do have a very high education around food and what's good quality and what isn't. So, yeah, then I guess there's probably systems of so okay, so it's not feasible for everyone to come and look at the farm, because you know, if you live in Brisbane or Sydney or whatever, how do you do that? So how do we bridge that gap without? Oh, yeah, I guess we're going back to local systems then, and that's, if we can get back to local systems, that's how all of this thrives.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, I think that's the essence and that's something that I've been talking about for a while on my channel and, if anyone's interested, go and check out my podcast with Texas Slim, jake Wolke, david Bushell, brian Usher, right at the beginning of the channel. And yeah, the theme is decentralization and local food production and local food consumption and tying this into the circadian quantum health, for anyone who's interested in how this relates to that. Well, you want to be consuming photosynthetic products that are most proximate to your location, and that is because your mitochondria are going to be looking for synchrony or coherence between the inputs that you're giving them in the form of the light and the temperature signals, as well as the food signals, and they marry up if you're essentially consuming local food. So there's a massive health case for local food consumption. So maybe, tom, talk to us about what your vision is for Misty Creek going forward. What are you excited about? What are you building towards at the moment?
Speaker 2:So our farm is six years old now, so we've been through, yeah, like, a lot of growth phases and a lot of investment phases. So what I'm looking for now is to kind of, uh like, mature the business a little bit, so kind of move from that yeah investment phase where there's, you know, you're constantly reinvesting everything back in the business, to trying to mature that and basically make it more profitable, because I've spent six years investing and it's still going. That's the kind of overarching theme. Specifically, we spoke about the cattle. So I'm developing the cattle because of what we've spoken about, all these regulations and whatnot.
Speaker 2:I see diversity, not just biodiversity on my farm, but diversity in my product offering is very central in terms of the risk of my business. So you know, if for some reason, say I have no ability to process my chickens in a legal way, then not all hope is lost. Another avenue I've just planted a number of kiwi fruits in the agroforestry, so I'm hoping that that's going to be another good avenue for us, because, again, it's something that it grows on either sides of the Brussels sprouts. The chickens and the cows move underneath it. I've just added another product that is using what's already there to grow it better and it'll help. So you know, like I'll go to the brussels sprouts to care for the brussels sprouts, but while I'm there I can also care for the kiwi fruits.
Speaker 2:Um, so it, it, everything is a continuous feedback loop. So, yeah, they're the two main things. So like adding adding a couple of targeted market-driven product lines that add some resilience to my business and I can sell through the same sales channels. And then, yeah, maturing so I can make a living from the farm, a sustainable living. The employees on the farm do too. And yeah, that we can continue to provide the community with food for a long time, because, you know, I do see a high churn turnover rate within small-scale regenerative farms. So, you know, I'm kind of really in this for the long haul and I believe what we're putting in place will enable me to do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, amazing. And obviously your food is sold and sold out very close to home, so people aren't going to be having probably tasted it if you're listening to this, but I can personally attest to its delicious flavor of chickens and eggs. So, yeah, thanks for what you do, Tom, we appreciate it. Any parting thoughts that you want to share with everyone? And, yeah, let us know how people can get in contact with you if they want to discuss things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so yeah, most people listening probably haven't tried it too, because that's been something we've consciously chosen is to sell everything at the farmer's markets, and you know I get bombarded all the time. Do you ship to Sydney? Do you ship to Melbourne? No, we're focused on the local thing. And actually it was just what you said about the quantum circadian, like what's photosynthesizing around you, synchronizing with yourselves, like that's amazing, and just what my personal lived experience is with the kind of um, like the health and vigor that I live, my life and the way I consume, like I can definitely resonate with that um.
Speaker 2:So, you know, I I think parting thoughts is, you know, if you, if you're listening to this and it resonates with you, just find some local farmers, support them, because that's where this revolution is going to come. And if someone can, you know, take an extra five to 10 minutes out of their day to drive to a local farm, or, you know, take your Saturday morning to go to a farmer's market and educate yourself on, you know, what you can buy, that's going to support a farmer and support a local, decentralized system, then do that because it's not just a how do I say it like philanthropic thing that you're like, oh, let's go help these poor farmers. It's like you're doing something for yourself as well and the thing that, yeah, like our farm, continuous feedback loops. You do something good for yourself, you do something good for them and it helps everyone.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well said. Thanks, tom, and you're obviously on Instagram. Is there any other? You don't have a website.
Speaker 2:No, we don't have a website because, like I said, everything's sold at the farmer's markets.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so if people are interested at all, can they DM you on Instagram or are your DMs closed?
Speaker 2:No, no, no, no, yeah, yeah, reach out to us on Instagram Misty Creek Agroforestry yeah.
Speaker 1:Fantastic, great Well, thank you very much, tom. It was great to talk and I look forward with anticipation to see.
