Jake from Walkie Farm shares his remarkable transformation from struggling with chronic health issues to becoming a successful regenerative farmer and innovative food distributor. After years of dealing with skin conditions, dairy intolerance, and breathing problems, Jake connected his poor health to his diet and decided to take action when his wife became pregnant. Starting with zero farming experience and learning entirely from YouTube, he built a thriving operation that now feeds over 100 families with grass-fed beef, pork, chicken, lamb, and eggs while employing four full-time staff.

The conversation explores the principles of regenerative agriculture, which focuses on improving soil health, water quality, and biodiversity through proper animal management. Jake explains how his farming mimics natural migratory patterns, moving cattle daily and following with chickens to break pest cycles and distribute nutrients. This approach has allowed him to maintain incredibly high stocking densities while building soil health - his operation runs 60,000 kilograms of live animals per hectare compared to neighbors who struggle with 150 kilograms per hectare on degraded land.

A major highlight is Jake's groundbreaking 24/7 staffless butchery - the world's first fully automated meat shop where 400 members can access fresh, farm-processed meat around the clock using smartphone apps. Jake also discusses his specialty double-aged dairy beef from retired dairy cows aged 5-14 years, which offers intense beef flavor that many customers find overwhelming compared to bland, industrial meat. His success with carnivore nutrition during his wife's pregnancy resulted in effortless conception and a symptom-free pregnancy, contrasting sharply with their previous fertility struggles.

Key Takeaways

  • Regenerative farming can support 60,000 kilograms of livestock per hectare while building soil health, compared to conventional operations struggling with 150 kilograms per hectare on degraded land
  • Moving cattle daily and following with chickens 3-4 days later breaks insect cycles, distributes nutrients naturally, and prevents overgrazing while maximizing land productivity
  • Older cattle aged 5-14 years produce significantly more flavorful beef with deeper nutritional profiles, though many consumers find the intense beef taste overwhelming after being conditioned to bland, industrial meat
  • Switching to strict carnivore nutrition resolved chronic skin conditions, dairy intolerance, breathing problems, and fertility issues - conception occurred on the first try after previous struggles
  • A 24/7 staffless butchery model using smartphone apps and access codes has operated for two years with zero theft, demonstrating consumer trust and demand for quality farm-direct meat
  • Cattle breeds like Nguni that remained closer to their wild genetics show superior fertility (calving at 18 months vs 24+ months), easier births, and better feed efficiency compared to highly domesticated breeds
  • Epigenetic effects from poor nutrition compound across generations - Pottinger's cat experiments showed it took four generations of proper nutrition to restore full health after dietary damage
  • Carnivore pregnancies typically eliminate morning sickness and hyperemesis, with women reporting abundant energy and symptom-free pregnancies compared to previous plant-inclusive pregnancies
  • Carnivore Bar Sponsorship and Guest Introductions
  • Jake's Health Journey: From Chronic Skin Issues to Regenerative Farming
  • Starting a Regenerative Farm from Scratch with No Experience
  • Regenerative Agriculture: Working with Nature vs Chemical Farming
  • Soil Health and Nutrient Testing: How Animals Improve Land
  • Allan Savory's Holistic Grazing: Reversing Desertification
  • Jake's Carnivore Diet: Healing Chronic Health Issues and Fertility
  • Epigenetics and Generational Health: The Pottinger Cat Study
  • Comparing Plant vs Meat Diets: The Masai Study Evidence
  • World's First 24/7 Staffless Butchery: Direct Farm-to-Consumer Model
  • Aged Dairy Beef vs Wagyu: Why Older Cattle Taste Better
  • Nguni Cattle: Choosing Hardy Breeds for Regenerative Farming

This is an auto-generated transcript from YouTube and may contain errors or inaccuracies.

hey guys just want to take a second to thank our sponsor carnivore bar I don't promote many products because honestly all you need to be healthy is just eat meat and that's what you should do but if you're hiking or road tripping or stuck at work and you want something nutritious that is just meat and fat and possibly salt if you want it the carnivore bar is a great option I like this product not only because it is pure meat but also because I really want the carnivore Market to thrive as well the more we support meat only products the more people will make meat only products and this will bring this into the mainstream so if this sounds like something you'd like to check out then take a look and use my discount code HTC to get 10 off which also applies to subscriptions giving you 25 off total all right thanks guys hey everyone we're back with another episode of the how to Carnival podcast and YouTube series we're joined Again by Dr Anthony chafee MD the plan for AMD Anthony welcome yeah thank you very much good to see you likewise and we've also got Jake from walkie Farm here who's a regenerative farmer and is going to tell us all about the cool stuff that he's been up to so welcome Jake good evening thanks for having me um Jake can you tell us about yourself and all the different things that you're doing sure I've got a really varied background and even my current operations are quite all over the place so I I run and manage a bicycle shop with a seven day a week Cafe restaurant inside of it that I owned with my family wow nice um and I when I left school I worked with my father for four years he had a record store my dad hates music and he bought a record store so that's been that's been one of my family's things where 50 years self-employed in Australia over three generations and we joked that it's because we're unemployable but one of our things has always been to buy businesses and industries that we're not interested in and the thought process behind that is so our own Prejudice and bias doesn't uh you know Cloud our view as to what the Market's demanding wow a lot of people that love music that might buy a record store fill the shelves up with rap music when they're living in an older area and they should be having country music and classical music for their markets you're going to meet the market right and then a few years ago I've had pretty screwed up Health nothing chronic but and not even realizing that I wasn't that healthy but in hindsight I'm like I was really screwed up I remember being probably seven or eight years old and I used to yell out and dad would come and help me peel the sheets off my legs in the morning because I'd scratch my legs in my sleep and I was stuck to them my legs with blood so just kind of skin rashes all the time I haven't broke this in the last sort of 18 months I've been breathing through my nose for the first time in my whole life uh allergic to Dairy you know intolerance to gluten like all this stuff that's just sort of normal nowadays and when my wife conceived our first child I've got two sons and a third child on the way due in July I thought you know we've got to do better we've got this child on the way I'm a little bit screwed up I don't want the baby to be screwed up uh we can't be a basket case so what are we going to do about it started organic gardening in my backyard ended up getting 40 chooks out on a lease block moving the chickens around moving the cows around that was in 2019 fast forward to today the farm Butchery business has four full-time staff we're producing beef pork chicken lamb and eggs direct to Consumer we breed our own cattle we've got honeybees we've got a Market Garden a little house Orchard I've just stocked my dams with fish we've got quite a bustling sort of holistic regenerative farm and you know I remember setting myself a goal the New Year 2020 that I wanted to grow enough food that I could feed my family for a month you know just one month I want to do a four-week stint where everything we eat I produced it and we're probably two and a half years in of complete abundance and and you know we're feeding our whole family everything we need plus 100 other families in the region so that our New Year's resolution steamroll yeah that's awesome man that's that's very good and congratulations that you have no background in farming before that you just just got into it uh out of scratch yep first gen farmer educated on YouTube That's So Good that's always a way I have a body of mine is um uh he's a consultant or a surgeon now but he's saying he's just like yeah I I got my whole education on YouTube I just learning how to be a neurosurgeon on YouTube just watching all these videos from all these great neurosurgeons around the world wow there's videos and their surgeries and talking about the different ailments so yeah there's a lot of good information out there yeah it's a credible and obviously you can follow your gut go down rabbit holes at your own pace see what feels right you know there's not a set curriculum in front of you that's just this status quo that you've got to accept so I I really I would never have gone to University to study something because I don't like those parameters that's why I didn't go to university I guess yeah how did you um Jake how did you get started so did you buy a plot of land how did what was that I don't know in any land I'm currently leasing 120 hectares which is about 300 acres uh there are three different titles that I lease off different people the main home block that I've got all my I guess intensive uh um Enterprises on the chickens the pigs because you've got to put out feed and check them every day they're on my father's 100 acres so I leased that block block of land off my parents and that was where I got my side I went and bought a caravan on Facebook for 200 bucks or something and I put it in the paddock mum was mortified it was this old rickety Rusty crooked tan you know it's just a disgusting 200 carrier then and I'll put 40 chooks in it and I started moving it around the paddocks every couple days trying to figure out this pasture chicken thing hauling water hauling feed mucking it out every week it was an absolute nightmare but I loved every minute of it good man that's awesome and so and so you do regenerative agriculture can you explain what the difference between regenerative agriculture is to just normal livestock agriculture showable regenerative agriculture is probably a real tip in the Hat to how our ancestors did it before everything became you know pharmaceuticalized and commoditized uh we're not interested our spin on it is we want to increase the commons so when we're farming we're looking at there's common resources that we all share whether we like it or not and we want to increase the quality and abundance of them so the normal comments that people speak about are air quality and water quality there are a couple examples of Commons you've got the water table under your farm or the stream that rolls through your farm and your farm can either play a role in degrading that or improving that but we push the needle a little bit harder we look at soil as a Commons you know it it's not for us to just destroy the soil for future generations and think that it's ours because we've got the Freehold on the land and I also look at things like social health as my of my community you know my community's health and our social impact the Financial viability of my business and the wages I can pay in the and the businesses that I can lean on to support for me they're all an extension of the commons so that's probably not the way most people describe regenerative they'll they'll say you know we're chemical free and our animals are outdoor and we do all that but what are you working towards it's one thing to have animals outside feeding them GMO free corn you know I like to talk about the values that underpin it and we want to be we want to produce food for people with no externalized costs so cheap food commodity food is subsidized by straight up government subsidies animal suffering in feedlots and factories uh you the use the Reliance and use of pesticides herbicides you guys know the word side means kill and we've got fungicide pesticide herbicide insecticide miter side we've got all these herbicides we don't want anything to have to pick up the tab of our mismanagement laziness neglect or Paradigm so we work really hard organically to bring all those costs in and work with nature and then deliver people a pork chop on the table that they can use to fuel their families yeah and that's um and these sorts of things largely you know mimic or reproduce the same sort of things you see in migratory patterns with animals they're coming through they're not over grazing you just sort of eat myth and then like you say you you moved over two different areas so you're not completely destroying the resources and or diminishing that and depleting them as uh as far as the soil goes like you say I mean animals play a a very important role in that the animals are are eating down the the you know the plant material then they're recycling a lot of those um or those nutrients into the soil so as these animals come through and eat these things down and then leave their their waste they're actually improving the soil so you can do this in a way that that actually makes the soil better instead of slowly degrading and degrading and degrading and that I would imagine if the soil is getting better and better every generation of animals that you have every season that that's going to make the nutrient component of of the meat that you're producing much better as well I would imagine well with the sort of things that we're starting to test with a state-certified lab so we can Benchmark our nutrition because we do soil tests but my customers don't directly eat the soil and I don't feed the soil to my family but the soil does have a relationship with the proteins that we are eating so instead of just doing soil tests we're also starting to do nutritional paneling on our eggs beef pork chicken lamb everything and we we want to open source our soil tests and our nutritional paneling on our range of skews on our website every year we want to update that and offer it to people it's interesting what you said also doctor about the animals having the ability to improve fertility and uh to to push back slightly only ever so slightly that's the only way we're going to build fertility there's no animal free system that improves volatility without synthetic and oil inputs or an exorbitant amount of you know human labor and burning diesel It's we need these animals to do it because we've been brainwashed in this last 10 15 years that animals are somehow bad for the environment but newscheck animals are the environment yeah it's the mismanagement of animals that can be bad for the environment so we need to we need to get back to the the source of the seed as my friend Texas slim likes to say and look at the way these animals move in nature like you said the migratory patterns so we move our clock of sheep and our herd of cattle every single day and three four days behind where they are is our flock of thousand chickens combing through their manure upcycling those nutrients breaking the insect life cycle and we're just trying to you know tip the Hut to Nature and be patient observers and go you know we're going to work in with you best we can yeah that's awesome and yeah you're totally right I mean as um Dr Peter bullish that it was uh you know in this industry is a PhD in forage Agronomy a very interesting guy as a degree in animal nutrition as well so he was saying is that you cannot have plant agriculture without animal agriculture it can't exist and and you do deplete and degrade the soil with all of these just crop after crop after crop after crop I mean in the Bible it said you only do that for seven years and then you have to leave it you know for a for a year and allow animals to come on and and you know eat things grounded you have to leave it for a year and that that's that's that principle and they noticed that thousands of years ago that's something that you have to do and we've forgotten that and we've said oh no no no you just keep you just just keep doing it as long as you can dump a bunch of chemicals on it a bunch of manure on it you should be fine but uh it doesn't it doesn't work like that and we lose a lot of topsoil we lose a lot of um of these nutrients the soil now is much more deplete than it was 50 years ago 70 years ago 100 years ago and that's a direct result of that and and it's only the manure that's even holding that together and you have like you say petroleum-based fertilizers and and nutrients that are going into this that's that's maintaining it that's allowing it to just sort of exist but um but that's not that's not uh you know replenishing it that's not revitalizing it like you would with uh this sort of regenerative approach um I do Wonder have you come across um Dr Alan Savory who does a lot of this sort of uh stuff with like large herds regenerating uh so we just hosted a Savory grazing workshop at our farm last night yeah I've read the book I've actually got my I've got my grazing chart here on the ground next to me my Savory raising shot the great thing about what Alan Savory has done is he's come up with a a decision-making system that helps you uh Farm looking into the future and it takes out a lot of the guesswork you know is it to have sort of to know your context and your goals and then to have a framework where you can put stop gaps in your system if it doesn't rain for 30 days here's the decision I'm going to have to make if it doesn't rain for 60 days here's it because you know most of us get pretty good at looking in the paddock going I reckon that Patty it could feed 60 by 60 cows for the next two weeks but beyond that you can't run all the different Enterprises off the top of your head so I love what Alan Savory has done he's one of the ogs yeah absolutely yeah and as as you're saying you know you can you can either do things and make your land and water sources better or worse and that's something that that there is done literally reverse deserts by by using a lot of you know large-scale animal agriculture livestock bunched and moving like this with a migratory uh herd of buffalo or whatever and they just they just do things a little bit differently and um you know they're defecating and you're urinating on their food supply so it's just like okay so they're gonna have to keep moving so they don't over graze they don't overwork it and they're getting all these nutrients just in a certain area and that in his um you know his his property in Zimbabwe you know it's like right in the middle of the desert there and it's beautiful I mean it's just this burdens you know uh jungle and everything and the it has tightened up the borders of his rivers and things like that they're holding the the the the borders of the the river so they don't flood every year and they don't wash out and um and they're getting better ground groundwater penetration the rain doesn't just wash everything off as wash the seeds off doesn't wash the top soil off it hits and it sinks and it goes into the ground and so his just little area is this green Oasis in the middle of this you know otherwise Barren desert it's pretty amazing a little bit he's stalking right compared to the desert around him would be absolutely through the roof which demonstrates to us that it's not the cow it's the how mm-hmm yeah and and you know and and then with that you know all these animals come as well so now elephants have come to that area you know these other things that more and then the more animals that come in the better it is and it just becomes better and better and better so this is this is positive feedback that just makes the land better makes it it makes it better for the animals and for the plants and everything involved I mean like you say animals aren't bad for the environment animals are the environment you know all these animals have existed for millions of years some a lot longer than that my crocodile has been around like 250 million years like insane like that and so you know these things have been around for a very long time and they've co-evolved and coexisted with the Plant World during that entire time and you start taking out one major piece of that namely the animals and the the plants suffer as well the people don't realize that these are complex systems that rely on each other and you mess with those we used to know that I was taught that as a kid you mess with things as delicate balance in nature and you mess with that and then everything falls apart I mean we've seen that here in Australia with cane toes I mean what what bright spot face you know try that one out like oh we have these bugs here why don't I was bringing some toads toads eat bugs that's great what kind of tilt to add doesn't matter that's but whatever you know cane toads great it's horribly poisonous killing all these animals dogs and and freshwater crocodiles that are eating them well that's devastating and then you know there's all these koalas who like who wants all these damn koalas these fuzzy little things not doing anything not being productive you know and um so why don't we just like reduce the the their breathing potential by giving them chlamydia because if you sterile that's a great idea why don't we go around and give a bunch of koalas chlamydia oh now you have a lot of koalas that have chlamydia like oh look at that they actually they they actually do have sex and so now they're passing is chlamydia now there's this horrible epidemic of koalas with chlamydia and now the populations are dropping below what they want so now these idiots are going around you know giving antibiotics to you know koalas in nature it's just it's just you're causing more problems yeah uh I think we've got one population here in Australia that are on an island that are being used to bring fresh genetics that aren't infected back into that oh wow Mainland because they've been water locked okay now worth a shot but it's just it's just a problem that should never have existed right yeah exactly yeah it's the um the problem of any of any complex system you you mess with a complex system it's the law of um unexpected results but anyway um you mess with a complex system and you're going to get a lot of changes that you were not going to be able to expect or anticipate and are going to be a lot about problems you just leave these things alone and let them work yeah for sure Jake you mentioned that that you've struggled with your health for a long time uh and then you sort of said to your wife all right it's time to do something about it what was it that made you link nutrition and you know what you're putting into your body with with your health because not everybody makes that comes to that obvious conclusion seemingly obviously I think I think most people know and they're just in denial because they're so addicted to Sugar carbs smokes and alcohol you know my wife's a healthy person I have not been a healthy person I'm getting I'm a lot better than I used to be that's for sure but I I knew that if I had KFC for lunch I had a wet cough all afternoon I knew if I had a Snickers bar uh before lunch that I broke out in acne you know I was you know and even even still I remember being geez I don't know 14 or 15 sitting in the doctor's clinic trying to find something for my acne because I didn't like all my pimples I thought it took me off the dating Market in high school so I thought can you give me a pill for this and the doctor said you know just the local family GP who as I remember was an extremely overweight man uh be that as it may he said oh have you noticed if there's any you know thing anything environmental that might cause your uh pimples and I said oh I think maybe when I eat junk food all the whiteheads pop out and he's just sort of giving me a slight push back and he goes well do you think you'd want to eat less junk food and see how that goes and I just said no no he wrote me a script for Accutane oh Jesus which just screwed me up you know I I used people used to stop my mum on the street when I was in the bassinet and they they thought her husband was a dark man because I looked like a little Filipino baby I had such a tan and when I got on that stuff I was like Lord Voldemort I couldn't go in the sun for about the next 10 years without shriveling up and peeling it took me I wasn't on a very long thank God but you know and that's not that doctor's problem that's my problem but a little bit of I guess you know these people when we go to see them as patients they do have authority and a little bit of I think the pushback and and the encouragement could have been a little bit stronger and you know and I'm I'm the problem here I knew what was causing it uh but I I do I do think in the right context with the right person that they could have uh fast tracked the recovery for myself but you know it's not a blame game it's not about a poverty mindset it's about hey guys we're here at the farm creating healing food who wants some no there's you know for every problem there's Solutions so let's get on with it yeah and what have you noticed now what are you eating now yourself and like what have you noticed as far as your health health benefits heaps of kale broccoli come on guys bye uh my wife is 20 weeks pregnant and about four or five months before we conceived we went pretty strict Carnival and with our with our first child you know this is pretty intimate stuff here but we're all amongst friends no one else is going to hear this right for our first child we we tried for about a year to conceive and I was 23 and my wife was 20 and we went to the GP and we said what's what's wrong with us you know why can't we get pregnant and she said how long have you been trying we said a year oh she just laughed at us and kicked us out of the room but the reality is is she said try longer come back in two years and then you've got a problem but the reality is is in school you're told look at a girl sideways if you're not wearing a condom she's going to be pregnant no one talks about your cycles and your hormones and your mood and the right day of the week and pee copulation and all this stuff is a farmer that you become intimately aware of uh and then our our diet like just eat our our diet well my diet especially just for these inflammatory foods and cutting out all this uh junk was already pretty healthy but you know we got rid of the last little bit of pasta and a little bit of sourdough on the weekend or something and we conceived first try my wife's had an amazing uh pregnancy so far zero morning sickness she is working in the kitchen as a chef is a lot like in our restaurant she's doing three you know 30 plus hours a week running the household helping out with a farm full of energy bounces out of bed in the morning and to sort of segue back we're now not strictly just meat but we we we're basically just uh meat Dairy eggs and a little bit of fruit nice yeah really good and yeah that's the thing that I've spoken to a lot of women that do carnivore pregnancies some women have had horrible horrible morning sickness in previous pregnancies and then as soon as they stopped eating all the other stuff and just focus on meat just goes away um not everyone gets that some people get like meat aversions um but the the majority of people find that they get this this massive massive massive benefit and um yeah spoken to a number of friends of mine one lady had hyperemesis so she was having projectile vomiting every single day for 32 weeks and then she was just sort of seeing my stuff more and more on Facebook at the time and she just said you know what screw it I'm going to try it and just started just eating meat that day gone no more mornings so it was really just their bodies just like this is get this stuff out of here we don't want this crap anymore the meat like yep bring it in and then her next pregnancy uh was Flawless and she she felt a bit queasy for a couple weeks and that was it she didn't bomb it once and um now she's on her third carnivore pregnancy and it's just feeling gracious no problem so that's that's something that I think is a direct result of eating something you're much more sensitive to eating the wrong thing when you're when you're pregnant you know your body's trying to protect the baby and it's just like hey get this stuff out of here this is bad for you you're like what what animal in nature gets gets morning sickness and it's just vomiting for nine months out on the Serengeti just puking you know you get pregnant lots and Pregnant gazelles you know they're it's it's uh you know spider die out there and so if you were completely debilitated with fat people and ankles and just vomiting just all day every day like that's a recipe for death in the wild so it it does seem a bit strange and so it's great to see more people like your wife who are having much healthier pregnancies and which I think was going to lead to much healthier babies yeah 100 we we not long read uh Dr Catherine Shanahan's book on epigenetics deep nutrition and uh the generational consequences of lazy eating are frightening like when you learn that information that should be a year seven textbook as far as I'm concerned because you realize that your negligence is giving your kids a really bad platform for the rest of their life you know it's not just you it's I draw the I spoke to Dr Max Gohan about this it's to explain it to someone like myself who's not medically uh trained in a bit of a Dullard it's like putting a tattoo on your arm and then your baby gets born with a matching tattoo yeah they they are taking your your you know contributing to their starting platform interesting hearing you talk about that lady with morning sickness I had one of my customers reach out to me that she's been having horrible morning sickness and the only thing that she's been able to eat that hasn't made her throw up horrendously has been raw I feel it out of my freezes nice yeah very good she's thriving yeah really good that's um yeah it's interesting you say that and I totally agree like the whole epigenetic thing is something that people uh don't know enough about but you have these epigenetic effects epigenetics means that you're you're triggering different genes so everyone has a compilation of genes but somewhere on some are off and sometimes you have little intro you know um some introns and axons and these sorts of things change the actual protein that you code for right so in different different tissue and different cells or at different times you may cut out different parts of this protein and make this version of this protein of this Gene and maybe you turn it off sometimes maybe you'll make a different one other times so there's all these these effects on your genes on which proteins you're going to make for your code because don't just churn out all these proteins you get signals that tell which ones to get printed at a given time and at a given rate and so those are serious serious changes right so if you have you just have to code for something that's one thing but if you're telling if you're turning things on or off in inappropriate time that's going to seriously affect your health and the crazy thing is is that this actually has generational knock-on effects like you say you know you get a tattoo and then your kid has a tattoo and sometimes it actually magnifies in later generation so you get a tattoo on your arm and all of a sudden the kid has a big sleeve and then his kids has full body tags you know and so it just it just sort of compounds there was interesting work um I've mentioned this before but it's a different pottinger and it's called the pottinger's cats it's very interesting uh look at this sort of generational effects on diet specifically because you can actually do science with animal animal nutrition you can't do it with humans it's you know human nutrients is pretty useless but animal nutrition you can actually do a lot of really cool things so this guy was doing this is sort of the 30s and 40s and looking at different cats and you just found that there was a they were very different health-wise eating raw meat versus cooked meat and then the cooked meat cats were much less healthy and they weren't as playful and vigorous and all these sorts of things they were doing surgeries on them for other experiments and they just found the ones that were eating cooked meat weren't surviving the surgeries but the raw meat ones were so okay let's look into that and so they had a lot of cats and they bred them generationally and they looked at their behavior the ones are eating raw meat were much more frisky much more interested in you know sex with the opposite uh gender and procreating you know that's the definite you know that's the the biological purpose of life is procreation right and so they were actively doing that the other cats weren't as as vigorous weren't as interested in in um copulating and their kids were a bit worse so they looked at the skeletons they looked at the bone structures they started off at the same same level but then the next generation of of uh raw meat cats sort of got more developed better developed cheekbones and brains and uh and bone structure and everything like that and they were bigger and then the ones that were cooked they were eating cooked meat they were actually a little smaller the Next Generation and their brains were smaller and their cheekbones weren't as developed and Bone mineralization went from 14 down to like seven percent something like that and so that was strange and then the third generation they're even smaller even smaller brains even less developed zygomatic Arch and cheekbones and now their mineralization was only three percent so it was like their bones were like foam rubber and they were just getting all these breaks and all these fractures like one cat had something over 40 fractures in its skeleton it was just appalling this poor little thing and they were just not interested in playing they were not interested in uh procreating the ones that did and were able to successfully mate um either didn't get pregnant or had stillbirths and um and weren't able to care or weren't able to carry the term and none of them they could not get a fourth generation black cats couldn't it all the raw meat ones were doing great the whole way through then they said okay so where that ends right and that's why you say like you know people say oh well you know we're probably eating X Y and Z and if you have this deficient bubble it doesn't make sense that if we were eating meat it would be deficient because you can't make it through the ice ages with that effect because eventually you're gonna run out people are just gonna die out right so we must have been able to do very very well with just eating Meats that's an aside so then they they put these unhealthy cats these third gen cats on raw meat and they got much healthier and they were able to sort of do better and and for their whatever they developed into they were able to thrive as much as they could and then they were able to procreate and but the thing was it didn't just come back the next Generation they didn't just all of a sudden oh now they're healthy again it took four generations before they were able to breed back to getting the skeletal structure and Bone mineral density and facial structures brain size and behavior of the raw meat cat so it actually has has multi-generational effect every generation got better but they didn't get to where they were supposed to be this should have been the whole time for four generations and I think unfortunately we are sort of uh that third gen cat and our kids are all going to be better and their kids are going to be better than that and uh hopefully eventually we'll be able to breed back to what we were supposed to be which is a hell of a lot taller held a lot smarter much bigger brains and uh much more more robust in general she's such an is such an important thing for people to hear because once you hear that you've got this duty of care flicking your brain for your progeny and your Bloodlines and you've really you should lose sleep if you hear that and your prior to breeding and you're still drinking thick shakes and binge drinking on the weekend and eating Casey for lunch like you should be losing sleep about your behavior yeah I agree yeah and you know if you you know people talk about the different reasons why you eat plants or don't eat meat or whatever and that's fine but you know any sort of ethical qualms really go out the window when you're when you're okay compared to what you know we don't we don't really have an option here you can't have Optimal Health without eating meat you just can't you know even with supplements and all these sorts of things you just can't and so if you want to do that to yourself that's your business but imposing this on not only your children but everyone else's children is is pure evil you are not allowed to do that you are not allowed to destroy a child's life and generations of children after that just because you know you you it makes you you know feel better and warm and fuzzy at night well it's really nice it's sanctimony um isn't it like you're offering your child you know in the court of popular opinion almost I've got um I've got family raising their infants and toddlers on vegan diets which what a contrast I'm over here you know basically carnivore Farm I grow it all on the land and then you've got the the vegan family over there but it's just it's sad I've I've last time they were here I weighed Mike they're the same age as my children so I weighed my kids and measured their height of a wall and then I did the other ones you know there's a lot of variance isn't there that could affect those sorts of outcomes but it was night and day yeah and then that'll compounds as they age as well you know yeah so it was interesting you know because in nutrition it's all pretty useless information uh in human nutrition and it's all biased by Seventh-Day Adventists who really invented the the field of dietetics in 1917 actually founded organizations to look into this but they haven't released that and they think that meat is sinful and that it makes you lustful and so you shouldn't eat it because it's evil and it's wrong so that they already have a bias and that's a very big bias and so they're putting out a lot of these things and it has a very specific Banton so people say oh well you eat more vegetables you get all these better outcomes they've never compared that to a whole food meat-based diet so you don't have these studies where you're looking at whole food meat-based diet versus Whole Food plant-based diet and these things that come out it's always well increase the amount of vegetables that you eat okay and that these guys do better and the people that eat sort of more vegetables okay but what else are they doing they're probably more health conscious in general they're not smoking as much they're not drinking as much they're exercising more that is a thing and these are compounding factors that confuse the issue and so they're not comparing like to like they're comparing apples to oranges and so if you're not comparing whole food plant-based diet and a whole food meat-based diet you have no comparison you have no study that actually matters in that in that field the only study that looked at that that I know of was done was published in 1931 in the journal American Medical Association Jama and it was very interesting they looked at two African populations that were living naturally and the Maasai which are predominantly carnivore just eating eggs meat and blood of their cattle and uh then the I think you that's how you pronounce it was a neighboring tribe that was very interesting because they're very similar genetic populations because they actually were next to each other so there was intramarriage and interbreeding so they had a very similar genetic heritage but they were eating largely Whole Food vegetarian diets and this is a vegan's dream right there's no pesticides to speak of in this part of Africa especially in 1931 and so they were eating largely Whole Food plant-based diets that aren't these new GMO you know constructs that have come out of nowhere these like real plants that they've figured out that they could eat and and then the Messiah they're just eating meat and dairy and that's it what were their differences the Maasai were on average same genetic population were similar enough on average five inches taller for adult males right massive larger brain size in the Maasai less illness less chronic disease less um uh deficiencies less mineral and vitamin deficiencies they check the blood of all the of all of them they found a lot of deficiencies and there's just very low numbers a lot of anemia and low iron in the nihaka Kiyu they get sick a lot easier they they didn't heal from wounds as fast and they found that just by uh just replacing the nutrients that they found that they were deficient in wasn't enough to actually get the health benefits that they found as contrasted with the Maasai but when they put them on meat and just started feeding them meat they did get all of those health benefits and all these problems they had before went away so that's really the best one that we have and it's pretty damn good and so after that if we're going to have any meaningful conversation in this the only studies that we need to that we should be doing now are not just oh here's a survey do you eat more or less this you compare people who eat a whole food plant-based diet that every vegan would agree this is the right way to do it and a whole food meat-based diet which all of us would say that's the right way to do it those are the only only comparison that matter in this discussion because that's what we're discussing that's what we're saying you shouldn't eat meat you shouldn't do a carnivore diet because it's bad for you plants are better okay well we don't have a study that shows that so that's a comparison we need to do yeah well you know comparing whole food vegan diet to people who eat out of the aisles of a supermarket it's just a nonsense yeah of course yeah that's right meat lovers pizzas and they're and they're claiming to be a you know a big meat eater you know they're all sort of contrast but it's not even meat lover's pizza it's just pizza period because sometimes the toppings are meat therefore Pizza is different what we're talking about some of these epidemiological studies they look at surveys they say well how much of this have you eat how much of that have you eaten and do they say oh when you eat less meat things get better in some of these studies a lot of studies say the exact options they actually know they don't have any problems in fact a lot of studies there was one that looked at 175 different countries corrected for a lot of confounding factors like socioeconomic factors as well and they found that more meat people ate the longer they live the healthier they were all right so it's not it's not that all the studies say this that's nonsense and all and the studies that you say that are pretty garbage and so they look at these things and say okay well do you eat pizza how often do you eat pizza okay Pizza three times a week well sometimes there's meat on Pizza therefore meat is pizza so that counts as a serving of meat that's a nonsense that that is that is that is the clear intentional deception and so that's what you tend to find in these in these epidemiological studies most of the most of which are pushed forward by Loma Linda Medical Center and The Seventh-Day Adventist Church so Loma Linda's run by accepted Adventists and these schools of dietetics which The Seventh-Day Adventists found it and so they are going to manipulate the data and manipulate the studies to get the the outcome that they want you know as we know uh from from any sort of Industry research the person paying the only thing that we know from more than anything is a certainty in research is that the person paying for the study generally gets a favorable outcome in the study or else it doesn't get published you know there are studies that go out yep this shows your products bad let's publish it and they say you do that we'll see your ass and so they just don't they never make it you know and so that's the thing so their industry is pushing a plant-based agenda and what do you know all their studies are showing the plant-bases better like I'm shocked I'm seriously shocked can't believe this is happening um Switching gears a little Jake I saw you on the news talking about the world's first 24 7 staffless Butchery what is going on here it sounds amazing so about two years into our farming Journey so we're we're raising the animals on Farm uh processing them and selling them eat direct to Consumer we're not selling anything off into the commodity Market it's all going direct to Consumer awesome and the way to you know the way the food supply chain here in Australia works is you drop it off at your local abattoir which I think the Americans call processing centers it's where the animal gets slaughtered and then it gets consigned to a local Butchery that's got a certified boning room where they can do The Butchery work and then you can pick it up there and you've ticked all the boxes along the supply chain so you'll end up dealing with Ma and Par butcheries to receive your animals cut them up how you want it done and the reality is these doors don't have much capacity for volume you know they're they're normally butcheries are generally quite small businesses in terms of footprint you know Refrigeration is expensive to run expensive to set up so a great local butcher was doing a body of beef a month and a couple pigs a month for me and then covert happened and the Avatar started having to do cut shifts because of you know instead of the guys standing two meters apart they had to stand four meters apart you know whatever they had going on so that just destroyed the local food system just that policy that one policy guys like me our business was kaput finished all done see you later because the Avatar didn't want to see our bodies that's you know Surplus to what they do they want to buy the beef out of the paddock and sell it to The Butchers over the rail and then when I did manage to sneak onto the abattoir by bribery you know giving telling the guy running the sheet that I'll buy him a slab of beer or something then the butcher didn't want it and and I sort of thought you know even when covert's over where I want my business to go in terms of scale and volume because of this you know this drive that we have to feed people there's still going to be no capacity so we had to buy our own Butchery there was a store in town that was on the market it was closed down but it had been a previously run Butchery for about 75 years in Albury so a lot of Heritage in the building and a lot of uh a lot of cobwebs and little uh Rick rack add-ons out the back that I've found over the years so my wife and I purchased that renovated the boning room put some butchers in there and started cutting meat so now we process we do custom processing for 15 other local farmers that sell their protein direct to Consumer so we'd cry back at gluten-free sausages whatever you want custom branded label but to get to your point there was a shop front out the front which people were used to coming in and buying meat and people kept asking me when you're opening up the shop front I said well we're never opening up the shop front this is purely a processing facility for us we sell the meat to the local supermarkets we sell the meat to the local restaurants we do monthly house deliveries buy the meat there and one of my friends who owns a Smokehouse in town I was talking to him in December it must have been 2020 and he said when are you opening up the front I said we're not it's not what we're interested in and he looked at me he said you'll have it open in March and I left that room and I'm like you dog you know you've waived this goal post this Finish Line in front of me and uh so I I madly figured out how to make it work because the reality is all of our produce was already being sold elsewhere basically so we didn't have much inventory to sit out the front it'd never justify a salary if someone's sitting there scanning it I thought I need a little vending machine and that wasn't as easy as I thought it was I thought I could just buy a big vending machine and bolt it into the wall but just a bit of a pain or then I thought I'll do like a self check out like a supermarket or buy one of those Hardware units people can come in check themselves out they're expensive proprietary so I ended up figuring out I basically merged a 24 7 Gym you know the access and Hardware that you use at a 24 7 Gym with some interesting software that helps people self-check out so now I've got almost 400 members that can self-access The Butchery 24 7 completely staffless they use their unique code that they get by coming to a farm tour the farm tours cost nothing but three hours of your time I'm very greedy I don't want to charge you ten dollars for the farm tour but I want three hours of your undivided attention so I can give you a sermon in the pastures and once you've managed to sit through that for three hours you get a code that's our vetting process you know we'll get encouragement you come in 24 7 there's an app on your smartphone and you open the app and you scan the barcodes you hit pay you can pay with Fiat you can pay with Bitcoin if you had gold bullion and you wanted to slide it under the door I'd accept it as well love it then they leave and the you know the follow-up question is how much theft have you had well in the beginning in the beginning I thought I could I could handle a bit of shrinkage because I'm saving a sixty thousand dollar salary every year so if I have five ten thousand dollars worth of theft it's not the end of the world I'll put a couple security cameras in there I know my customers and in over two years of operating we've had zero theft nice that's awesome so it just did Jack just to sort of to recap so how many people are members about 400 there there's not 400 super active members I've probably got there'd be 20 die hards that are in there multiple times a week and then probably another 50 that would come through on a monthly basis the memberships are free and the farm tools are free it's just time they're cutting their own Cuts or like how does that it's all it's all pre-packaged cry backed in the freezer and grabbing what you want and things like that scan it it tallies it up and then you tap your card is that right well you scan it it tallies it up and then you enter your card details on the app on your phone uh because you're using it your phone is the hardware you just downloaded a free app or where it syncs up to you Apple pay or Google pay yeah very cool yeah it's brilliant and and the quality must be unreal because they're buying directly on the farm and it's literally animal is killed whereabouts is the animal killed good under an hour away yeah and then it comes to the boning room yes he gets all chopped up and butchered and then it goes into the fridge and because it's because it's our spacing we can do things the way we want I've put a really uh big new cool room down the back and I've uh mounted uvp lights into the ceiling which is an ultraviolet light that sterilizes airborne bacteria that is susceptible to turning the meat too quick so we want to hang our meat a couple weeks to let it develop tenderness and flavor but sometimes especially in an active store when you open and closing the doors all the day you're hanging the meat for a few weeks and it can start to sweat become a bit slimy or get a bit of um you know mold growth on it or something but this uvp lights just absolutely nailed all of that bad side effects so that's been really exciting yeah very cool and oh what was I going to say yes and what's how how are you able to um work your price point because it's sort of you're just cutting out a lot of men that that probably get people a better quality meat but also might be a better better price point as well is that right or everywhere we sell our meat it's the same price so there's no because you can all go through the same label machine you know it all gets priced the same cut weight per kilo whether it's at the local supermarket or the local restaurant or whatever it might be you know every business has its own operating costs and even though we're staffless we still have some operating costs energy being a massive one I don't know if you guys have been gobsmacked by your electricity bill lately but I nearly fell over with my last one yeah yeah um I suppose you're but your margins are better right if somebody buys it from your store you're getting retail margins if someone buys it from the shop that's that's the best margin capture for us out of all of our sales Outlets um now there probably a few people listening who might be interested Jake are you doing any quarter half or full beasts is that possible yeah sure we do heaps I've got I've got three we're filling three quarters this week or next week now coming up uh we do half and whole pigs half and whole Lambs I do a thing called a crater chickens because we do pasteurized chicken so our crowded chickens is 20 whole chooks and 20 portion Shooks uh you know the bigger the order the more I love you I send pallet loads of meat up to Brisbane which brisbane's like you know thousand K's plus up the coast and people get together with a few families and buy a pallet load between them might be ten thousand bucks worth of meat all up but it makes the freight really economical and it means I can get it up there the kitty split uh so you know this industry needs to scale we've got a lot of um cottage community-minded people which is all brilliant like we need small producers but we also need some people who are ready to feed the world with this integrity-based foods that aren't you know soaked in commodity inputs antibiotics and trenches and and pesticides and all of these things so we're really excited to uh push you know push the needle up a little bit and get some more produce out there nice and so you're able to obviously put it froze and then and then ship it frozen uh and right we do we do everything Frozen a lot of our a lot of our processing is uh seasonal so like when I've got a batch of lambs coming through I might have 80 Lambs all hit the same weight at the same time so we'll pump Them All Through The Butchery but then I might have no lamb for four or five months so you know on one hand in the beginning people found the Frozen like I'll smashing my head against it a little bit because people didn't like the lack of convenience but once you explain to them about how convenient it actually is having a 600 liter chest freezer in your garage and you've got four months worth of food security for your family sitting there begging to be eaten you realize that our perception of uh what is actually convenient and what is even wealth is actually wrong and so we've had a lot of uh success convincing people to fill up their freezes and I don't think I've been asked about why is your meat frozen for two years it's something that the consumers accept okay nice no yeah it needs to be yeah I mean are you about to perfume have you ever do like a like a pallet out to Perth or is it only Brisbane so far well I haven't gone that far uh West but I do get asked a lot in Perth and basically all it would need would someone to be to pack a pallet so if we can if I can get a 4x4 pallet and pack it you know four to six foot tall and put about ten thousand dollars worth of product juice on it then you Freight four five six hundred dollars isn't really a big deal and we can get it over there but boxes that Far West are challenging I haven't even been able to get to Adelaide so at the moment if you buyoff.com we ship down to Melbourne postcodes if you contact me direct I can ship to South Coast Canberra and Sydney but outside of that it's just by by the pallet at the moment which requires a few extra phone calls generally or trade agencies hate me yeah I bet well it's good and and like you say you know it's it's something that can be scalable as this this goes up you know you have you have different areas you can ship it to and become more economical to do that for both parties um I always I was sort of asking to some people that um uh you know grow their own cattle but have you ever done this with like older meat and like like older cows like you're taking it out of a herd or something like that have you ever have you ever tried like older meat because like I got a cow it was I heard about this like in Italy where they they basically they think that everyone else is just eating the yield basically and they'll eat like 10 15 year old cows that's a normal thing for them and the intensity the flavors just beyond anything that you'd find otherwise and I did that once I I went to a Rancher and just said hey I want a whole cow just been eating grass this whole life just the oldest one you got and they had one that was 10 years old they were going to take out of the out of the herd it was it was the best damn you I've ever had in my entire life it was just amazing um it wasn't tough it wasn't it wasn't uh difficult to chew or anything like that I mean I cook things rare to medium rare at most anyway and so that might have something to do with it but I thought I thought the the flavor of meat was just incredible and dark dark yellow You Know Rich fat and everything like that it's just amazing so I don't know have you ever experimented with anything like that we push everything older than the industry uh Works towards and I've actually got a line of beef beef on my website called double aged Dairy beef so I actually go to the local Dairy and I buy retiring Jersey milking cows so I buy these jerseys that are they're normally between five and eight years old I only want cows that have missed their breeding cycle and they're out of sync because the dairies offload animals for a range of reasons they'll be recurring mastitis foot abscess pink eye cancer all this stuff I don't want to inherit all these issues because when you're in a system that doesn't use medical intervention with Pharmaceuticals like ours you have to start with a healthiest based animal you can so we just take these animals that aren't fertile anymore we join them with our mob in our mob we run a bull in every day of the year multiple bulls actually and then we we prank test these animals 10 weeks later so we give them a 10-week journey adjoining and everyone that's empty gets marked and then grass finished to go off for processing so quite often and we have about a 40 coal rate out of that 10 week joining I don't know if that means anything to you but someone listening gets it so those animals they might end up they've come out of a dairy where they've had a mixed feed their whole life right they've had a they've had a bit of grain they've had a bit of silage they've had a bit of whatever it is so we don't sell it under our grass-fed and finished label but they're quite often like you said I think the oldest one I've done is 14 years old we grass finish them for it's normally a minimum of about six months on our farm and then when we get to The Butchery we generally hang them three to four weeks in the cool room just to really let that beep relax it's been standing up a long time you know just give it up give it a break let it hang out for a while and that line of meat in our label is the most polarizing out of all the meats all the produce we do because some people buy it and they go that's not for me I can't have that anymore but do you know why they say it tastes too beefy see we've been brainwashed as a society to want Bland uh moist food like if you actually look up these uh these feedlot chicken factories like your ingrams and your hazeldeans these big boys that put out all the Eight dollar chickens uh Matt Evans on his book on eating meat wrote about how he found they had internal notes that they would use to breed towards benchmarks of um palette palatableness of the food and two of them were um Bland and it was Bland moist and tender I think were there were there things are striving towards so when people buy this Dairy beef and go I can't handle it it's too beefy like well that's what food tastes like like we're going back to real old food here but on the flip side but no restaurants want my beef because you can get grass-fed and finished beef which is all just commoditized you know you can get grass-fed and finished beef from an animal that spent the last four months of his life in a feedlot getting fed loosen pellets you know so it's not a great claim so I can't compete with that but when I get these fine dining restaurants that try my age Jersey beef they go mental on it we're supplying a two chef hat restaurant in beechworth here Providence who does set me a new Japanese style and he absolutely loves the dairy beef he holds every single pump I process he takes every single whole run nice yeah what are you Jake what are you eating yourself do you go for the for the dairy I mean because you can have whatever you want from the butcher shop I assume sure yeah we ate a lot of the dairy we it's not as widely available like we're processing our grass bodies all year long the the dairy beef comes in two batches a year because the dairies de-stock twice a year so we've got like a six month lag after they're de-stocking if that makes sense when we'll get it on and finish it and it does sell really well but the consumers go go nuts on it and I don't like to get in the way of sales but we we you know as a flavor profile dairies our preference at the moment yeah that was that was exactly what I noticed a taste test between like a New York strip like prime prime New York City America that Prime Choice and all that sort of prime is the top one and that's morribly best fat and so Prime New York strip and I had the the older cow New York as well I didn't have the marbling just had a fat you know Rim around it um and so I was feeding the the Prime Cut and I was like wow it's amazing I love this I just love just meet all the time it's amazing and then I tried the the older cow I'm like God this is so good too this is just so amazing and I just ate another bite of that another bite of that another bite of that and I was like all right I'll try the other one again get a comparison again I could not taste the meat in the in the in the Prime Cut I couldn't taste it I couldn't taste any bees you just tasted Rich because it had a lot more fat but I could not taste any beef flavors it completely overpowered it and I really like that I like beef I like the taste of beef and so for me that was perfect and so if you if you go back in history a couple hundred years you know you look at the um the Cowboys pushing the the cattle across the country a finished steer back then was four years old right you know we're reading it how about that 16 months now you could you could get some animals as young as 16 months I've processed some grass-finished animals at 16 months and I think we're exceptional you know normally it's probably closer to 8 18 to 20. but then you've got the other end of the spectrum you've got wagyu cows that have been finished in a feedlot for 600 days I saw somebody talking about on social media the other day so they're standing in a feedlot for almost two years now getting getting cancers you know yeah well yeah that muscle in that intramuscular fat that marbling like that's that's from the carbs and the grains and things like that that's what people forget you know we eat carbs and Grains that happens to us as well like you want muscles you want you know like like grass finished no marbling muscles like that's what I want yeah 100 I sent a photo of us this got this got me in trouble online and I had a few wagyu ranches and slide into my DMs and tell me to pull my head in but I sent a photo of a wagyu Scotch incredibly marbled uh rib eye to a doctor friend and I said if you am I right a patient and their muscle came back like this what would you say and he responded um elderly pre-diabetic yeah you know at best at best yeah and so I'll put that on Twitter so we do see that we do see that on MRIs and quite a lot of times you'll see this um you'll see like the um the uh you know the different muscles around the backs the new paraspinal muscles and everything uh around there around around that's we're looking at the spine but you actually see a lot of that intramuscular fat in there there's a lot of marbling and that I was speaking to someone they said that they were at conference and someone was presenting on back pain in general and they found that that was that was a very very strong correlation with back pain was a lot of intramuscular fat in those Paris muscles and you think about it like they're not a lot of strong muscles they're holding everything together they're holding the joists together so they're just you know ready and creaky and we know from arthritis in general that the stronger your muscles are around that joint protected they are the less pain you have so when you have all this intramuscular fat that that's not good for you and you have a lot of back pain you have a lot of other problems as well and that comes from eating grains just the same thing you know what happened to a wagyu cow the way you get that wagyu marbling you know that that's the same way that would get that marbling it's the same thing and just the fact that people don't recognize that and realize that is is shocking to me because of course the same thing is going to happen to both there is a genetic aspect of the wagyu's predisposition to marbling and they can be incredibly marbled on grass not to the level that you see on Google images for wagyu but I've actually partnered up with a grass-fed and grass finished work your producer who's that Queensland uh I I can't name who they are because they're they're wanting to remain anonymous but we're going to be doing uh a mineral Benchmark on there like a nutrition panel on the meat and then Benchmark it against my animals we're going to be looking at cortisol for as a benchmark for stress and we're going to be looking uh at urea which is a personal interest of mine because the cattle that I use in goonie have got a urea level close to a goat which is another whole rabbit hole we can go to and we're going to compare fatty acids and that sort of thing and then we're also I'm trying to find a wagyu feedlotter that will let me test their animal and do these animals that have been eating corn for 200 days because I'm really interested because you can get a very marbled wagyu out of the paddock with grass but it's you know and I just want to see how all that works it's just a really interesting topic to me because you look at the nutritional um you know Vigor out of different foods and all the most highly prized most beneficial foods are quite often these Wild Harvest very lean animals yeah elk and your deer and things and this and I'm I'm pro-fat you know like we we run Tallow in our deep fryer at the cafe so it's a little bit of a cognitive dissonance that I'm trying to work through in my own head as to why I'm profat but the leaner animals the leaner animals do better we're trying to sort it out yeah well that's that's the thing too I was talking to uh a Rancher when I first got to Australia and they were saying that the whole push on getting away from fat fat being bad actually led the the market so they started breeding out fattier strains and so they started reading leaner and leaner cows and so like he was saying it was like it would ruined the the livestock in Australia we bred for these super lean things and now they don't have as much fat and then people say oh well now you have to grain finish them it's like well what do you want you want the fatty don't you well this is this is the power of not being a customer and not selling into the you know not not silly into a market that just blows with the Wind you know and like our customers health health conscious Whole Foods based and they don't really seem to care like when I sell a steak sometimes they're fattier than other times but they're not buying it for the flavor and they're not necessarily buying it for the fat content they're buying it because of the stewardship that the animal received during its life yeah and that's another thing too you know there's that reason you you don't you know you treat an animal badly in these feedlots and things like that that's not a nice thing so people can can vote with their pocketbook as well and they can they can go towards people like yourself that you know they know that this animal had had a great life and probably in a longer life than most other animals as well 100 yeah especially with the dairy cows you know if you ever end up being able to ship out to Perth let me know we'll get one of those dairy cows I'll look into it there's always uh there's always cows coming through and even the beef breed my I've got short horned cows in my herb that heard that I'm culling they're sort of starting to finish their breeding careers and most of them are between eight and ten as well and the meat's awesome perfect yeah awesome yeah older the better yeah whatever you got and even the ones that especially like the ones that you've had that's just grasp their whole life like that's even better I think yeah just just collecting those nutrients for you know a decade yeah yeah exactly I haven't had much sunshines in that cow yeah yeah exactly right yeah vitamin D energy yeah stored nutrients I love it yeah yeah definitely yeah very cool and so you said you had the goonie cattle does that is that a special breed yeah it's also breed of animals from South Australia out there a quite a different cow and part of our so on the farm we've got our five pillars of production that we use to you know guide our decision making and and drive our principles we've got Animal Welfare environmental stewardship creating healing food building Community making money they're our five principles and I'm Animal Welfare is probably the biggest thing that I spend the most time trying to level up and think through and in our current system welfare is an outcome-based metric so they would look at a free-range chicken farm and say that their their losses their bird deaths are higher than a caged chicken farm so they're therefore the industry is lobbying and arguing that the Caged chickens are in a better welfare environment because the outcome is they're sick less often whatever you know they don't care about the chick can't chicken can't express its nature and flap its wings or sit on a perch or have some fresh water or have some sunshine even so for me welfare very much has to be uh respecting the context of the animal for so for a pig to have a wallow a chicken to have a perch but then you when you'd start putting these animals in those environments a lot of the animals at our Industries have bred for for the last 50 years can no longer handle the environments that they once came from so if you empty a factory farm full of pigs all these pink skin pigs and put them out in a field where they had to deal with all these different bacterias and fungus and and birds carrying different bugs and then the sunshine alone these animals just shrivel up they just can't handle it so this brought me back to the starting post and I'm like if I if I want to really say I'm performing a high level of Animal Welfare I need to be starting with an animal that's fit for purpose a rugged animal that can handle the natural environments and is is as close to its wild counterparts as it can be so these in Goonies have only been domesticated by the the westerners I guess probably not the right word but they've only been acquired by the westerners uh rather reasonably you know the last I don't know 40 50 years or so yeah and they've their South African uh Afrikaans that got these Bloodlines traded them off the nguni people and the Zulu tribes these are their tribal animals so you've got up until very recently you've got animals that have lived hand in hand they've lived lockstep with humans but with uh no pasture improvements with no pesticides with no drenching just to these migratory people and the animals have been with them and so they're smaller they're a smaller frame size so they're better with feed efficiencies they're incredibly fertile so it's it's quite common to have your first calf land on the ground from a mum who's 18 months old now in in Western breeding Cycles you join your cow at 18 months old hoping for a calf when she's you know two years old a bit over two years old or you know so you've sped up the spreading cycle a whole year because of how vigorous the health of this animal is easy carving pulling calves is a nonsense we talked about it before with um people for you know different pregnancy issues that women have but why would nature have a system where the calf gets stuck when it's halfway out um it's it's just not it's not something that would have been common in nature in in in our farming Landscapes like I've spoken to a farm one super it's a type of cow called a Hereford and one year he had a 40 pull rate four out of ten carves he had to pull out of his cows so these are all little things when I started learning about the ingurney I was like tick tick tick they've got all these attributes they've got 80 different colors in their hides so I want to start evaluating some animals and selling tanned hides and instead of having a black cow where you've got one catalog item which is a black eyed now I've got an open access to 80 Hyde so they've got big horns on them yeah they're like every coat is like unique artwork you know barcodes yeah this this is the real nft imagine that that's right yeah yeah that's the thing too you say about like yeah with reading this is like like bulldogs and things like British bulldogs and things like that like I almost can't like breed these things normally I have to do cesarean it's like I mean come on now you you've destroyed that that animals you know and and so yeah we as humans are having some some more more trouble now as well because we're having higher birth weight and higher head size and and head circumference and things like that and people are saying that well this is because our brains are just getting bigger like really in the last 80 years like probably not and um and also you contrast that with adult cranial capacity it's actually smaller our brain size are 11 smaller now than they were before the Agricultural Revolution so our brains are not getting bigger it's just that our infant fetus sizes are growing precociously because I think we're feeding a bunch of carbohydrates and sugar that's just dumping in a bunch of you know uh insulin stuff like that and causing them to grow grow more than they should uh for that period in their life and then all of a sudden they're getting stuck and you have to get instrumented uh deliveries like forceps or switching to cesareans and things like that and uh like you said you know how does that happen in nature you know how are we doing that a hundred thousand years ago you're just gonna die you know and so women that were having babies that were that big they just died they didn't have the the hip actually to do that they were they were going to die that was a major major thing up until very recently when obstetrics became a much more uh um you know you are a much more much more Technologies and things available to it that we're able to to do that but like you say like it's not it's not natural to have a baby not be able to be born without without intervention and so I think the same thing uh can apply to us as well we're eating the wrong thing we're doing the wrong things and that's going to affect our our babies as well and and um so that's really cool about the cow though I haven't hadn't heard about them before me neither you have got me totally hooked on in Gooney cattle that's freaking awesome very I'm very bullish on the part of the pun but I just think if if you're the sort of consumer that wants an animal that's uh organic and hasn't been drenched and then you go down the rabbit hole and you want an animal that's holistically managed by Alan savory's grazing plans yeah to me it's a natural progression to why not have an animal that's more efficient in The Paddock so mind goonie cow eats two and a half percent of her body weight of grass every day for maintenance if you Benchmark that against my short horn cow in the paddock that cow eats four percent for body maintenance and when you contrast the weight difference between the two cows um I could I could I can run two to one yeah I can almost run three to one actually it's more 2.6 it's just weighing the weight difference so that then you've got this whole green agenda and whether you want to buy into that or not it's completely by the buy is you've literally got a cow that's more environmentally friendly because it eats less to live you know so you can have that the answer there isn't so you don't need as many cows the answer is you can have more cows and feed more people and Anthony is very worried about the carbon dioxides in the atmosphere so absolutely excuse me up at night um yes the world's getting greener isn't it yeah I had someone I pointed out to someone you know like actually um you know since the Industrial Revolution CO2 levels have gone up which actually averted a disaster it was um you know all flowering plants involved at a time when CO2 was 10 times what it is now and if it gets below 150 parts per million they will all go extinct they will all die out that's that's that's it you know that's a that's a major uh Extinction event uh on on the world that you know it's into all these different um uh Extinction episodes throughout history and um so we're actually getting dangerously close to that we were we were under 200 parts per million for the Agricultural Revolution and then that came in and that that got us away from that so there's a lot of people a lot of experts a lot of you know Nobel Prize winners in physics and Mathematics and people who came up with all the climate models and things like that who did the math who actually made these themselves they're saying that like actually that's probably not a bad thing you know and um you know since since CO2 levels have gone up the world is greener as you say there's a lot more biomass there's a lot more plant life there's a lot more algae there's a lot more you know uh organisms that are using photosynthesis to live and that's the basis of the food chain and then everything goes up from there and if you have a strong base of a food chain then everything else benefits from that and I was talking to I was talking to someone about this in my medical school and I'm just sort of pointing this out and said that there were there were images from satellites looking at the Sahara Desert and it was and is now turning green is turning green from space it's like that's a Sahara Desert that's not that's not normally green and so it's now green for the first time and and her response to that is like is the Sahara Desert supposed to be green or is it supposed to be a desert I was like that's the end of that conversation like literally this is just this is not going to go anywhere but in fact it's supposed to be green um because before agriculture before uh you know Savory thinks that it's it's livestock uh mismanagement uh that that created the big desert I think it's exact opposite I think it's the Farmland there's all these areas that that turned into deserts like what is modern day Iraq um and uh Saudi Arabia Egypt and the Sahara Desert these were the origins of Agriculture and when you're stripping these nutrients away from the nutrient from from the ground and you're tilling the soil and you're losing topsoil you know you're going to make things go Barren and that's I think exactly what happened you know you had the Hanging Gardens of Babylon you read Gilgamesh just talks about these these these Savannahs and deer and and Cedar forests and things like that is what modern day Iraq now that's that's where that's where they started farming and that's where this just turned it wiped it out into desert the Sahara Desert used to be again jungle Egypt used to be jungle they took soil samples underneath the pyramids and the sinks they found that that's actually that they were built in jungles those were jungle pyramids those were jungle people so all these like movies about you know the Ten Commandments and things like that and like everyone's all this Egypt and uh everyone's like desert and walking around it like no that's not what it was those were and um and they think they and they've wiped them out because of this um Agriculture and uh which which happened in the middle of America during the Dust Bowl in uh in the early 19th century or 1900s I should say 20th century and that and that was turning into a desert we almost had our own Sahara desert in the middle of America which was one of the most you know uh Second and fertile areas of the world you know it had hundreds of millions of Buffalo and and other big animals going throughout there the grass was you know 10 12 feet tall and the topsoil was you know like I don't know 10 or 12 feet thick it was just it just went down forever and we almost destroyed that we almost turned that into a desert and they figured it out this is from you know uh chilling crops and rain and wind blowsy stuff away washes this stuff away and we're losing all the topsoil and that's what it was and then we changed our farming practices and it helped but you know the Sahara Desert used to be you know very green and vibrant and we've seen we've seen again in satellite images with infrared sort of Imaging there's actually like settlements in cities like all throughout what is now the Sahara desert right and so that is this eredos are supposed to be green and I think that that's directly from uh inappropriate forming techniques that we used historically that we've tried to mitigate now but even with the current farming techniques that we have we are still losing 27.5 billion tons of topsoil a year and savory talks about this he talks about how much topsoil is being lost from this so but I think he's he's still sort of in that mindset of what he was taught that oh animals or bad animals are bad but he's he got away from that said no animals aren't bad but I'm seeing the opposite but he still learned that oh animals cause these deserts but he knows that they don't cause deserts he knows that they reverse deserts so I I hopefully he'll come around to that but I think I think it's the agriculture that plants that plant crops that have done that and uh have really just destroyed the land and I think that going back to animal-based Agriculture and the regenerative farming model that you're doing is only going to be beneficial to the environment to the world and to our health in general well I think the agricultural communities that get involved in those heavy tillage practices work like that that they would have been synonymous with set-stocked farming you know just leaving cattles in the same area leaving animals in the same area so it just comes down to once again to mismanagement doesn't it and you can't begrudge these people for it because they didn't know any better you know they'll just they'll just feeding themselves but right now today we've got the tools we've got the knowledge you can you can prove it you know when I do my farm tours I show people go out early in the morning I've got one this Sunday coming up we've got we have about 50 people come on the farm monthly and we walk out in the paddock and it'll be you know 7 30 in the morning so the grass will still have Dew on it it'll still be wet from the night and if you sit down you'll be saturated and if you dig under the leaves of the grass the ground will all be moist and be like chocolate but then immediately next to it where the road starts where we drive our tractor into the paddock right where all the vegetation finishes it's just think cracked Earth and the only difference is ground cover and the only difference that those two pieces of land have is different management and use one we fence off and we graze and the other one we drive on four times a day and it gets compacted and everything dies and you could just see it night and day or when you point this out to people and show them right in your eyes and they understand the power of maintaining ground cover because what we like to say mother nature's modest she wants to cover herself so you know don't leave her soil where let her put some clothes on and you you graze things to the level that they become a desert by constant pressure so to give you an idea our stocking density on our farm at the moment is 60 000 kilograms of live animals per hectare being ten thousand meters squared so I don't have sixty thousand kilograms of animals in a hectare my mob weighs a bit over 20 000 kilos combined and we're grazing them in about a third of a hectare paddocks at the moment moving them every day but you see how I get that that number and I've got so much grass on my farm I don't know what to do at all our stocking rate's really high neighboring farms around the place at the moment would be having something to the uh something to maybe 15 000 kilograms of 15 to 20 000 kilograms of animals to 40 hectares because all the gates are open and the animals have access to the whole farm so we you know we need to flip that what would it be that'd be not 1500 kilos a hectare it'll be 150 kilos a hectare and they've got no grass some one of my neighbors just started buying hay so I'm 20 000 kilos a hectare and they're 150 kilos a hectare similar amounts of animals on a similar amount of land but one's got a lot of grass and one doesn't it just comes down to the management of the animals and the recovery I know I sort of spat a little bit of data out there I hope it made sense but I'm just trying to illustrate we get the pizza it's not the cow it's the how and we know how to do it we've got these skills it's provable we can go in the field and do it yeah have you touched your neighbors about getting on board with this or they just don't don't want to look all my neighbors are beautiful people soul to the Earth helped me out many times over the years but everyone's context is different different ages different physical health different you know financial obligations and at you know the worst partnership in my street has horses in it horse paddocks are the worst paddocks you'll ever see because that don't look at a paddock for food the horse owners they look at a paddock for space so they just leave the horses in there in these reasonable you know horse might have an acre and it's in there all the time and they bring the food to the horse they bring out its pellets and it's loose and just ends up being weeds six meters tall and thistles and birds and things but I look we you know you you're never a prophet in your own land you know so you get on the podcast and you do your farm tours and you you touch people who are ready to hear the message yeah and I'm one of my mantras is path of least resistance so instead of bashing my head against the neighbor's door and trying to convert their Hundred Acres I could have a really easy conversation with somebody and shift their paranormal maybe they've got 20 000 Acres down the road we can start making some real change yeah definitely well very cool great approach um Jake this has been awesome man we really appreciate it uh how can people find you so we're walkingfarm.com uh I'm on Twitter Jake wolke Facebook Instagram we're all over the place but we're shipping now to Melbourne you can buy boxes from our website we'll drop it to you straight in Melbourne or if you want something Sydney Canberra South Coast you can just email me jakewalkie gmail.com and I'll sort you out pretty easy to find awesome sounds good man I'm looking forward to when you can ship to Perth thanks a lot for having me and I'm gonna get I'm gonna get straight on the phone nine a.m Monday morning and figure out how to fill a truckload up how many pallets can you handle Jesus so how much we're going to empowerment oh a few hours quite a few hundred kilos you need to you need to Rally up all your all your kind of carnivore friends and family and to get this yeah I could I could probably rally some of the troops and uh let me know let me know what uh sort of the minimum sort of bulk uh purchase you can do and I'll see if I can scrounge up the truth I've got him squirming now so it's all going to be dumped in your driveway what I'm gonna do with all these we'll work towards something I I'd love the honor to Supply some more doctors I've got a lot of doctors on my list and um that that for me is uh encouraging and and validating I really appreciate it yeah man well awesome man it's really interesting to talk to you and get to get the uh you know get an idea of what you're doing and how much of an impact it's making and hopefully people will you know support what you're doing and that will just grow that and more people will will find that this is a this is a not only a viable but a thriving uh line of business and that will just help everyone thank you so much chuck really appreciate it
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