Neil Dudley: The Cowboy Perspective, well, it might be hard to define, but I guarantee if you think about it, you’ve got one in mind. Whether you’re building a legacy, an empire, or a fan base, I bet when your friends look at you, they see some cowboy in your face. Y’all come along, let’s talk about this or that. Maybe when we’re done, you’ll go away with another perspective to put under your hat.
Hey, everybody, we’re back again. It’s time for another episode of the Cowboy Perspective. We’re still in the time of COVID-19 2020. It’s going to be interesting to look back on this time when blessed with enough years, 10, 20 years from now and see how much about our world really is changing and becoming different right here and we’re in the middle of it. So, I hope everybody’s doing well out there. Today, I’ve been given the opportunity to talk to a guy named Matt Maier with a Thousand Hills Lifetime Grazed beef. He is a student of regenerative agriculture, a very interesting and transparent kind of guy who I just love talking to. I hope you enjoy it. I hope you grab some value. If you do, tell a friend about the Cowboy Perspective and what we’re doing here. Just trying to give people insight into healthy lifestyles, entrepreneurship, business successes, and really good stories, heartfelt stories of people. So, without further ado, here we go. Mr. Matt Maier, Thousand Hills Lifetime Grazed, 100% grass fed beef. Let’s talk about some regenerative agriculture.
So, Matt Maier, welcome to the show. I appreciate you doing it, spending a little bit of time with me to just talk about what you’re building at Thousand Hills and a lot of those things you hold dear and feel are really important and why you bother the grind of building a business and raising animals the way you do. So maybe just to get everybody a little more familiar with us, with you, tell everybody where you came from and what it is you’re up to these days at Thousand Hills.
Matt Maier: Yeah. Well, I appreciate you having me on your podcast. It’s always enjoyable to talk about what we do and to help educate people about our food system in this country. I came from what was a hobby farm in Clearwater, Minnesota. I like to say it was a hobby of my dad’s. He worked off the farm in a factory, and I was the only boy, so the farm was my full-time job, especially in the summer, but pretty much year-round, while he went to work. So that gave me a great opportunity to connect with the land and the animals. We are a multi-species 120-acre farm, very typical in the part of the state that we’re in and the country. We had cattle, hogs, chickens, sheep, grew a little bit of grain, a lot of hay ground, pasture ground. Where we’re from, I feel fortunate, we’ve got a lot of water, rolling hills that ultimately had something to do with our name, Thousand Hills, too, and our grass-fed beef company. But what I didn’t realize was happening is I got that really close up view of nature, of animals, of the land and what goes into making food because we ate a lot of what we grew, especially in the protein world and a big vegetable garden and all that. And somehow then working my way through college in food service, I realized that I wanted to work in the food industry, and I love being active and working outdoors and actually had a moment that kind of stuck with me over time that really became one of the big reasons why I ended up involved in Thousand Hills. And that was I was working landscaping in the summers, and then, in my mind, I graduated to working on a sod farm, So I didn’t have to push as much dirt all day. And then I graduated to doing design landscaping on people’s yards. And then I graduated to what I thought was another promotion. I kept moving up in my hourly rate, every place I went a little bit. I started doing chemical applications on lawns. I was about two weeks into that job, and it was a hot muggy day, and I was in the town I grew up near, went to high school, went to college in St. Cloud, Minnesota. I was about into my 13th lawn of the day out of 20, that was my quota, and I got brain fog so bad that I couldn’t find my way to the next address in the town I grew up in. So, I realized something was wrong, sat down long enough to be able to get my bearings to be able to drive the truck back to the warehouse and started asking questions about what was in the chemicals or what chemicals were in the can. And ultimately called the company. And I’m a starving 19-year-old college student at this point and doing a little research, and I called the 800 number on the can. And I said, “Well, what should I be wearing? I feel like I’m kind of exposed here to these chemicals.” And they said, “Well, you should have rubber gloves up your elbows. You should have a rubber apron, you should have rubber boots up to your knees, and you should have some kind of air protection on.” I’m wearing a polo shirt and shorts and tennis shoes.
Neil Dudley: I’ll tell you, I’ve probably been in that exact same situation in my childhood, just kind of out doing a job, and somebody says, here, go spray this on the mesquite trees, and I don’t know what all is in there for sure.
Matt Maier: Yeah. And the owner of the franchise that I was working for is stirring it up with his hand in the tank, stained orange up to his elbow. So, I had to make the decision how important was my health and I’m broke and I’m working my way through school, and I decided I needed to get another job. So, I got another job, fortunately, and formulated my own organic lawn fertilizer, and this was back in the eighties, and ran that the last year of my schooling. So, I used it as an entrepreneurship model and worked with the SBA, did all that stuff and formulated and borrowed my dad’s pickup to drive to Chicago to pick up my first batch and broke the springs on the truck because I was hauling too much weight and to try to hide that from dad. But anyway, I got through that, and I graduated and thought, oh geez, good, I can go get a real job now. And I worked in food and marketing, very conventional food marketing, and started my career at Schwan’s, based in Minnesota. And they gave me a great opportunity to learn a lot about marketing. And then, I wasn’t really built for the corporate ladder I realized after a few years in, so I decided I was going to quit while my overhead was low and start my own business and went into marketing. Anyway, built that business for 10 years, sold that, that gave me the opportunity to stop and think, okay, what am I going to do next? And what kept coming back to me is I wanted to do something to improve the food system. And in doing that research, I was surprised to learn that there were a couple of research outfits that had pinpointed grass-fed beef and the cattle managed in a certain way would be the single biggest thing that you could do to improve the food system and improve our soils. I thought, wow, jeez, I did that while I was a kid. I know how to raise grass fed beef. We didn’t call it that then, but we were grazing cattle. So, I looked around at who was doing this, and this was the early 2000’s. And I found that locally Thousand Hills had already been started, founded by a person named Todd Churchill, and I contacted him and that was a fledgling business, and he was open to a capital investment. So, we partnered up and that led me to grass fed beef. Ever since then, I’ve been learning daily the positive impacts that properly managed cattle on the land have for people and our planet.
Neil Dudley: Yeah. That story is just exciting. It’s fun. It’s cool. It shows, I think it for my listeners, I would say, I don’t know everything about the people that listen to the podcast, but I know they’re usually into health, healthy lifestyles and improving their health through their food, and kind of what you put in your body is really what your medicine is, if you do that right and you think about it and you really understand what those animals you may consume eat is also making it into yourself and your metabolism. They’re also, my listeners, I believe, are really interested in cool stories, which I think you just have a cool story. Your dad had a hobby farm and now you’re through, not just a straight line, a lot of kind of zigs and zags, you’re ending up being a big part or playing a big role in growing grass-fed beef availability to consumers that want it and also playing that small role, big role in improving our food supply. So, thanks for that little bit of introduction and insight into your journey. Maybe tell us a little more specifically about the system. I think people are going to hear this and they’re going to be like, wow, I want to learn about Thousand Hills. So let’s tell them real quick where they can go learn some more about Thousand Hills and maybe how they get their hands on some product if they want to try it. And I guess I just keep rambling on with questions, but you can tell your story a lot better than I can, what is your, when you talk about regenerative, I’m going to click over on the screen because I’m recording that as well so people can see your website, it’s thousandshillslifetimegrazed.com, and you can go to that website and learn more about Matt’s business and what they are all about.
Matt Maier: Yeah. I want to just finish up on that farm story. I didn’t realize what I left out is that was one of those classic stories where I was gone away from the home farm for 20 years. And then I had young kids and I wanted them so bad to have just a taste of the lifestyle that I had that I was raised with. And I was very fortunate to buy a building lot that was adjacent to the farm I grew up on. So, my backyard became 120 acres, and I was able to raise my kids there. And that, to me, just that lifestyle alone was so worth it and affecting how they view nature and food and how it all works together. But, as far as the benefits and the management it takes to raise cattle like this, what we’re really doing, I mean, our mission statement is nourishing soil, plants, cattle, and people, in that order – soil, plants, cattle, and people. So, what we have to focus on, we believe in the regenerative agriculture movement in our practices, we focus on the soil. A lot of our agriculture has been extractive over the last decades and we’re diminishing the nutrition, if you will, in the soil over time. And we work to reverse that and regenerate the soil. It’s not an easy process to start with soil that is depleted and re-establish forage and graze that forage. But we’re successfully doing it. In my own little community project, I’m working with twelve different landowners with land bases anywhere from a few acres to a hundred, and piece this all together in a mosaic of grazing and through it, we have a tributary that runs right into the Mississippi only a mile away from where we’re at. We control not only the land around that tributary all the way to the river, but really what we want to do is activate that soil by putting in a whole cocktail, planting a whole cocktail of grasses, legumes, forbs, because we’ve learned that just the symbiotic nature of all these plants working together, that they actually exchange information, water, even bacteria. And there’s a whole system under there that I don’t completely understand, but it’s the soil biome. They interact to help create abundance in a way. And that’s what nature designed. Nature did not design a monoculture crop of only one species of plant being grown in isolation. We start with that, and then we add grazing and cattle. And what we’re replicating there is what bison and other ruminants and other hooved animals did for thousands and thousands of years in this land and around the world. But we know that they were there in the millions and that they had an impact on everywhere they went. And that was part of building this great topsoil that we’ve been, this whole breadbasket of the world is fed from this rich soil that we’ve had in this country. So, what we do is put cattle on the land, put them in fairly tightly on their density per acre. And then we manage so that they don’t graze too much. We graze about a third of the plant, and they trample some to protect the soil. We firmly believe that soil should always be covered with both live plants and decaying plants. And we leave a third, very important, to keep photosynthesis going. And photosynthesis is so powerful in pulling carbon out of the atmosphere, putting carbon into the soil, which provides food for the plants in a real simplistic way. And I’m not a scientist, but I understand that just barely well enough to try to explain it. Carbon comes in and we have this soil, this carbon where we want it in the soil. And of course, the animals through their hoof faction, their manure, their urine, and even their saliva – I’ve learned that their saliva even plays a role in activating the microbiological activity in the soil. And there’s so much that we don’t understand that’s just being discovered now in our soil. Like this glomalin that is a strand that connects the plants and can go on for meters and meters connecting, and that when we till, we disrupt that glomalin in the land. That was just discovered like 15 years ago.
Neil Dudley: Now, is that beneath the surface?
Matt Maier: Yeah. The [inaudible] fungi, the bacteria, the glomalin, all of this is just churning on, one teaspoon of soil has as many living organisms as people on the planet, just one teaspoon.
Neil Dudley: I think there’s such a thing happening right under our feet when we’re out there, it just goes unnoticed. And I love the fact or the chance to put a little information out there for TCP Nation to like hear and think, wow, I’m glad somebody is paying attention to that. Because in most recent history, we’ve been just cranking out food as fast as we can, let’s feed the world. And I think we lost a little bit of our sight into the damage we might be causing, and I think we still can feed the world, but we need to take consideration.
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I don’t know if I’ve ever heard it put that way. Soil, plants, y’all’s hierarchy of things you want to nurture and take care of. And it makes a lot of sense to me.
Matt Maier: Well, thank you. And the thing I want to emphasize is I don’t demonize anybody that works in agriculture of any type or any food company. I have colleagues and friends that work at all the largest food companies in the country. I know many farmers, relatives of mine that are in conventional agriculture. It’s all a learning process, and all, every person to the man believes that they’re absolutely playing a very good role, they’re good people, really doing the best that they know, but there’s a lot to learn. There’s a lot to learn about where we need to go next in our food system, where we need to go next in our agriculture systems. And there’s a lot of smart, willing people that are going to pick up this torch, and it’s happening. What has it been? Twelve years now that I’ve been involved in regenerative agriculture. The movement is just amazing. We primarily focus on retail grocers and the meat buyer is our gatekeeper to get a product on the shelf. And conventionally, I will say typically it’s a guy and he’s been doing things a certain way for quite a while, typically, and not always open to new ideas, but to see change that’s happened in the last 18 months has been tremendous, where they’re sitting up in their chair, they’re asking questions, they’re giving me from a 20-minute appointment, I end up there for 90 minutes talking. And then they’re saying, “Hey, thank you. I learned something today.” That motivates the heck out of me. I mean, that’s fun when you got the gatekeepers paying a little bit of attention.
Neil Dudley: So, all you listeners out there, did you hear what Matt said? These buyers at these retail- I think I’ve got a lot of people in business that listen to the podcast and are curious and they have ideas and how do I grow my business? How do I get in front of the people? I’m not hearing that that’s easy, but it’s becoming, it’s getting to a place where these buyers, the consumers are demanding stuff, they’re hearing it enough that they’re starting to listen. So, if you have a passion you want to be involved in kind of directing agriculture in a way or being a part of that conversation, please get involved. And here’s a couple of guys talking on a podcast that both sell these buyers on a daily basis, and we can tell you from experience, they’re more and more- I think Matt might agree, I’m not interested in keeping competition away from the space. I want to bring competition to the space because that gets more really learning, and somebody pushing me and competing with me makes me better. It’s not always fun, because sometimes they beat me, and I learned a lot from that.
Matt Maier: Yeah. I think we both agree we like the free market. And to me, the free market will make me better. And it’ll also help me accomplish our mission, or our goal. I stated our mission, but our regenerative agriculture goal is to have a million acres converted under management by 2022. And we’re about a little over halfway there now, but we’ve got a half million acres between our 50 family producers under management. We’re growing, we want to get to the million acres by 2022 and then set a new goal.
Neil Dudley: Now, this is all underneath the umbrella of Thousand Hills?
Matt Maier: It is under the umbrella of Thousand Hills, but General Mills has a goal of a million acres in regenerative agriculture by 2030? Well, of course I want to kick their ass. Excuse me.
Neil Dudley: Don’t worry.
Matt Maier: Just because I’m competitive, but I’m happy to pull alongside of them and contribute to their total and vice versa because it’s about the bigger goal. And to have a little fun along the way too. But that reminds me, you had mentioned people interested in being in this space – there was a conference in Minneapolis, Eco Ag and the University of Minnesota was there. Their president of the University of Minnesota was there. This was under regenerative agriculture; that’s a little bit of a niche, but the president of the University of Minnesota was there supporting it across multiple departments in their bio research, in their ag, in their consumer-packaged goods. I mean, there was a number of departments represented. The CEO of General Mills was there representing General Mills. And this is a conference that maybe is attended by 200 people. You’ve got the CEO of General Mills, of course, the chief renegade of Thousand Hills, me, I was there in attendance. And Land O’Lakes, a number of major food companies were represented there, Cargill. But when that leadership, and to me, General Mills is the number one food consumer marketing company in the world. They know what people want almost before they know they want it. And they’ve seen something in regenerative agriculture where they are all in on it. And to me that speaks very well about the future of this space. It’s going to move in this direction and consumers are pointing towards that with their dollars, with their thoughts, with their direction. And as a consumer, I want to say to your listeners, just on that retail space, you have no idea the power that you have. If five people came into the same store requesting something that’s similar to the same thing, that store will make a change. Because that, number one, that’s how few people speak up, but number two, that’s how much power you have. So, you can, of course, you can order products directly. We sell directly through our website, Thousand Hills Lifetime Grazed or grazgrub.com, G R A Z G R U B. But in that retail space, especially with your independent grocer or your local food co-op or your natural food store regional chain, you have such influence that I just urge everybody if there’s a specific product or a specific practice that you want to see represented on the shelves, just talk to the manager.
Neil Dudley: I think that’s great advice. And you hit the nail on the head. It illustrates how few people even raise a hand in the store. They just kind of think, well, this is what’s available to me, so I’ll pick. It’d be so easy to just stop a department manager, a store manager and say, hey, I’m looking for this. Cause they, as a customer, as a consumer, you’re very important to me, you’re very important to Matt, you’re very important to these retailers. So they will listen because you hold their life in your hands.
Matt Maier: Yup. And I’m just surprised at how responsive they are. I mean, they really are responsive. Maybe one or two, but we all know four friends or relatives that shop at the same store. It doesn’t take too long to get a little posse together to go in and request the same thing, the same practice, whatever, I’m looking for organic tomatoes, they’ll find them.
Neil Dudley: We had kind of the most interesting experience in my career thus far has been rolling out that no sugar bacon about six years ago. We’d go in, sell it to the buyers, and most of the time it was like, look, just take one of our items off the shelf, put this one on. We’re not making them make too big of a decision because getting them to just try it was- Then, one person that wanted it, saw it, found it told their friend, next thing you know, this store can’t keep it on the shelf. And they’re getting lots of interaction from those customers. So, it worked really good. It turned out to be a great product for Peterson’s and helped us grow our company and build a little bigger foot footprint for what we believe in, get to know guys like you. I mean, the amount of cool people I’ve been able to interact with and have conversations with thanks to Peterson’s and the consumers that support Peterson’s has just been phenomenal.
Matt Maier: Yeah, that’s a great side benefit, when you enjoy working with the people in the industry and you’re learning from them all the time, I just love that. Every day, the people that help in some way along with the mission we have or purpose-driven, it’s so motivating. I mean, to get the positive feedback from consumers, like you say, to have gatekeeper buyers paying attention, to work with other producers and ranchers that are experimenting and learning and sharing what they learn with you so you can do a little better and vice versa, everything from genetics on cattle that work better and the type of grazing that we do to the type of forage to the soil inputs that can activate soil faster to make that recovery. I mean, that’s what’s so amazing. Science told us, oh yeah, you can grow an inch of topsoil every hundred years is how it it’s going to happen, is how it historically happens. But yet through these practices, I have found that we can grow an inch or more of topsoil, but more importantly increase the organic matter by five times in five years. I mean, it’s amazing. We started off, most of the soil that we take over is going to be under 1% organic matter, and we can get that through proper intense management to up over 5% in five or six or seven years. And that was unheard of.
Neil Dudley: How long does it take to then deplete it if you don’t pay attention?
Matt Maier: Well, I guess I’ve never actually, I can’t say that I’ve ever actually turned anything over that then was put back into extractive agriculture.
Neil Dudley: I just perceive it’s much faster, like you spend five years building it and you can deplete it in six months.
Matt Maier: Well, it’s kind of amazing, there’s kind of two sides of that coin because nature is so resilient, she’s constantly trying to repair herself. So, she actually slows the extractive process down some through natural healing. And so, most of the damage in our soils have been done since we realized, basically World War II, cheap nitrogen, that’s when there was a wholesale shift of petrochemical fertilizers to feed the world. And we all thought it was something very positive, to be able to extract nitrogen out of petrochemicals. But so, you take somewhere around the sixties or seventies is when that really, that process started in until today. So, you think about it, that took 60 years to just, there’s some soils around here- To deplete it.
Neil Dudley: Yeah, my perception could be way off. I just, maybe it feels quicker because it’s sad, it’s kind of like there’s been a lot of work to build this back and to let it slip any, it just feels kind of sad.
Matt Maier: Well, it is kind of emotional when you’re the one that really worked on it. And I think sometimes I make poor financial decisions because of the emotional attachment I have to the land.
Neil Dudley: I absolutely know I do, 100%.
Matt Maier: Yeah.
Neil Dudley: I mean, I’ve got like 13 horses and why? I just enjoy them. I like to look at them. There’s no good sense other than that.
Matt Maier: Yeah, no, it’s amazing, these landowners that I work with, I still have to compete against grain croppers, GMO, monoculture, and sometimes it gets expensive to retain the land that I’m leasing, but I have trouble quitting.
Neil Dudley: I think the CPG space is pretty cluttered with propaganda. And how do you think a consumer can wade through that or sift through that, coming from your marketing kind of education or experience, is there any way a consumer can follow the, I don’t know, follow these companies and understand what’s BS and what’s real?
Matt Maier: That’s such a deep, rich question. I could talk about that for an hour straight and we still wouldn’t be clear. But I will, I am somewhat of a contrarian. So, I’m going to throw out a few things that you always hear that I’m going to contrast. So as a consumer, when you want to know, we’ll zero in on grass fed beef because I know that best, but say, okay, I’m going to buy grass fed beef, how can I tell what I’m buying? Or how can I read on the label what I’m buying? Okay, the number one pad answer is know your farmer. And I always have trouble with that because I’m a farmer and I know farmers, and as a consumer, you’re not going to be able to tell what my practices are. You could come and visit my farm and unless you have a trained eye, you’re not going to know what to look for. You’re not even going to know, and I’m not, I mean, this is just knowing what I know. You can’t even come up with the questions generally to ask the farmer to answer to even know if the practices are right.
Neil Dudley: I mean, consumers just don’t know where chocolate milk comes from – they think it might come from a brown cow. That’s the kind of education gap we have that we need to try to figure out how to- Anyways, I cut you off. Go ahead.
Matt Maier: No, that’s okay. So, okay, if you’re really educated, you could probably come up with some questions to ask a farmer, but then you got to find a farmer to ask, and then that farmer’s got to be willing to sell you the product that they’re making. So, it’s really a long shot. And I think it’s an over- The reason why I bring it up is I think it’s an over simplification of the process of learning about your food is just to throw three words out, know your farmer. Okay so put that to the side. Now, as far as labeling goes, another problem is there’s a lot of greenwashing. There’s a lot of words thrown out that don’t mean a whole heck of a lot. So, in grass fed beef, the words to watch out for are pasture raised, are free range, are grass fed beef without the numbers a hundred percent in front of it. Because all of those don’t really have any regulation in grass fed beef. Anybody can say that about any beef at all. So, you throw in a hundred percent grass fed beef-
Neil Dudley: See, it all just made me think, wow, that’s awesome. I was sitting here thinking those were the words you want to look for. And you’re saying no, watch out for those, those are dangerous. So, listen up, everybody, he’s telling you some really inside thoughtful insight.
Matt Maier: Yep. So, you want to look for any word that like pasture raised because truth of the matter is almost all cattle are pasture-raised, spend the first third of their life on pasture with their mama cow. This is the way it is. Free range, anything that applies, that grass fed beef without that hundred percent. Now, when you put a hundred percent in front of it, then now you’ve got a little bit of regulation coming from the government about what qualifies as a hundred percent grass fed beef. So, that’s the first step to really look for. Now, the challenge within a hundred percent grass fed beef is that it still doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re out grazing cattle. What that means is that the forage they’re eating meets the definition that the USDA sets for forage and that they’ve consumed that their entire life. So unfortunately, but from a scientific standpoint, this makes sense, unfortunately grain byproducts that come out of like ethanol plants or distilleries or breweries qualify as forage, because technically they are. The starch has been removed and you’ve got fiber left, and that is, from a scientific standpoint, that is forage. But I don’t think that’s what people think of when they see something on the label that says grass fed beef. They think of something that’s over my shoulder here that’s cattle out grazing on the land. So, the next step is to figure out, okay, are these cattle grazed or are they not? And the best way that I’ve been able to tell people, and for our own brand ensure that we are grazed for their lifetime is, number one, we added it to our name. So, we’re a Thousand Hills Lifetime Graze. And number two is to have third party certified with an organization that does not allow confinement feeding. So, then they need to be on the land. And the reason why I’m so adamant about being cattle on the land is that we’ve learned specifically for that animal, they need to be on the land to rebuild our soil. So, it goes back to the soil. And that’s part of that regenerative practice is that they’re on the land for their entire lifetime, improving the soil. So, we chose as a third party American Grassfed Association. And I resisted that for years because there’s an additional cost and there’s an additional visit to every producer every year, but I finally gave into it because their protocol became stringent enough that they would meet the regenerative requirements. So, I’m a big fan of American Grassfed Association. I’m a big fan of our domestic food supply here in the US and that it should be decentralized and it should be regional and it should be product that we raise on our land, again, to improve our food system. I’m sure other countries can raise great grass-fed beef, and that’s great, but we’re here to improve our soil. And to improve our soil, we have to have the cattle on the land in our country, and then that’ll improve our health and our food system. So American Grassfed Association, and then we’re also working with the Savory Institute, which if you want to learn something fascinating and you’re listening to this, listen to Allan Savory’s Ted Talk, just Google that, he’s got like 5 million views, and he’ll talk about how animals can reverse desertification and improve our soils, but it’s a fascinating talk. Anyway, they have a third-party certification that actually we go on the land, and we take over two dozen measurements on everything from what’s in the soil to what types of plants are there to what kind of wildlife is there to what the treatment of the water is in the watershed that’s going on. And we prove out over time that we’re improving those things. And it’s the first certification that I know of that looks at things over the long term and isn’t just a list of nos, like no antibiotics, no hormones, no GMOs, no, no, no, that’s fine. But the next step now, I firmly believe, is that we prove out – are we doing what we say we’re doing? Or are we just another term like pasture raised? We better damn well, we better damn well better be doing what we say we’re doing, otherwise I have no credibility.
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Just really quick, I want to say thank you to Johnny over at Straight Up Podcasts. He is helping me improve this podcast in so many ways with regards to sound quality, interviews, organization, all that stuff. So, Johnny, I just want to tell the world that I appreciate what you’re doing here helping the Cowboy Perspective be the best it can be. Okay, back to editing my man.
Isn’t that such a credibility? At the end of the day, I get sad when I see people operating a little below what I think is transparency and credibility, and it kind of makes the hill a little bit taller for somebody who wants to stay that way in the consumer’s mind. I mean, I don’t even worry about, I mean, I think there’s a move, it kind of feels like a group out there that’s doing this carnivore diet and they’re very anti-vegan and anti-PETA and all this kind of thing.
Matt Maier: They’re anti-cow.
Neil Dudley: Right, all of those things. I just want to be kind of transparent and completely understand if I don’t necessarily agree with those people, they have the same right to not necessarily agree with me. And I think the things you’re doing over time will be undisputable. It’s like, just come out, step on this ground with me. There’s a documentary out called maybe Small Farm, Big Farm or Big Farm, Small Farm. It was a really cool, I thought, look at what can be done. I mean, I think it’s still commercialized a little bit. I’m a little bit skeptical on pieces of it, but as a whole, I thought it was a great educational thing for me and my kids to watch. My kids watched every bit of it. They were really into it. Now they want to have a pig; we don’t have a pig on the farm. So, it was fun.
Matt Maier: That’s a very, I think it’s well done. I mean, if nothing else, I admire the fact that they stuck with both the project and the filming of the project for what was it? Like a 12-year time period or something that I couldn’t even get my head around to be patient enough to film that long, but they did some incredible work. It’s a great story. I’d have to now plug our film. We have a film called Regenerative Renegades. Yeah, that actually a retail chain collaborated with us to tell the story, Natural Grocers out of Denver. But it’s still available for anybody to see.
Neil Dudley: Where would you go find it? Can they get it through- Is there a link on your website?
Matt Maier: Yes. There’s a link on our website. It’s on YouTube or Vimeo, but if you just Google Regenerative Renegades, I think it would come up, but you can get there through our website.
Neil Dudley: Go Google it, folks. Regenerative Renegades. I mean, I researched the man, and I didn’t watch the show. So now I feel kind of like a bad host.
Matt Maier: Well, it’s fairly new.
Neil Dudley: Well, it doesn’t matter. I’m bad at a lot of stuff, but I just keep trying. Tell us a little more about, in my research, are you a cancer survivor? Is that something you’re willing and able, or is that a topic we can broach and how that affected maybe your perspective?
Matt Maier: Yeah. I am a cancer survivor, two time actually now, prostate cancer. But even bigger than that, cancer has run deep in my family, grandparents, my parents, taken a few lives, and there is a pretty common agricultural theme that runs through our family. I think there’s a link there, especially in my grandparents’ side, both sides of the family. And I think the biggest thing is, and everybody can relate to this because everybody knows someone who’s had cancer or they’ve had it themselves, is that when you hear the C word, it gets your attention. And while I was already on the path of grass-fed beef and I was raising grass fed beef, and I was improving my diet, it opened my eyes to a whole other level of research about what kind of food and what food is medicine and what isn’t. So, it changed my life, and it also deepened my commitment and passion for really changing our food system. It really opened my eyes to some of the foods that we eat that are highly processed or downright dangerous for us. And that we’ve been educated on this. I mean, starting with my parents’ generation where they really kind of made the shift from farm to processed foods, we’ve all been educated on what is food, and we need to change that. We need to change that. And now, with COVID going on, to bring that to light, I think people now are questioning, okay, how healthy am I? Where does my food come from? Again, what’s being imported? How safe and resilient is our food system? I had no idea. So I stated what our mission is, our vision I changed after I heard Dr. Zach Bush speak a couple of years ago. He has this movement called Farmer’s Footprint. And I was so fired up after I heard him speak because he talked about how modest us farmers and us marketers are in this space, and that ultimately, it’s up to us to really change the food system. I went home and I changed our vision that day that we would rescue the US food system from collapse through regenerative agriculture. Two years ago. And now I realized last week, I thought I’m going to add to our vision. It’s going to be to save our US food system from collapse through regenerative agriculture, but also by being a decentralized supply chain. I don’t have the words figured out yet. But I realized that because we source and process regionally and keep our products near people and population and regions, that we’ve decentralized. So, we’re a small company, but we’re working with five processing facilities scattered throughout the country. And thank God we’ve been able to keep operational during this whole time. And our fulfill rates have been over 95% because we’ve been able to rely on these wonderful midsize, decentralized processing facilities. And I think that’s a key to the future, that we really don’t want everything consolidated into four big plants throughout the country by protein. I’m sure you’ve experienced very similar-
Neil Dudley: I think isn’t there room for a little bit of excess capacity? I mean this free-market system and capitalism, it drives excess capacity out. And I think in this time, if we’d of had even a little excess capacity, which maybe by decentralizing, we actually create some of that. We’re lucky because we have a lot of the same model, and you’re right, for us, it’s worked out pretty well in this COVID time of craziness and unrest and uncertainty about our food system and kind of rushes on the retail market. We’ve been able to, I think, perform a little better. I also think it’s being smaller. So, we’re kind of used to change. We’re really not as adverse to change. So that helped us a little bit, too.
Matt Maier: Yeah. I think decentralized, I think you will automatically build in some of that capacity because if everybody has ability to go 10, 15, 20% more, if they need to over a short period of time, they can do it. And then, you take all facilities together and multiply that out or if one has to dropout because workers are ill, they can drop out and others can fill in. But when you take a giant plant out, they can’t just drop out without having a dramatic effect. So, I firmly believe in that model. But it’s part of our, it’s part of our resiliency. I mean, I think we share that. We have some resiliency. We don’t know what tomorrow holds. God willing, we can operate again tomorrow, but at least for now, it’s holding up.
Neil Dudley: And painful as it may be, it’s fun, I mean, I enjoy the idea of there’s opportunity out here right now for somebody who’s- So I came along maybe 20 years ago, first five years of my career, where it was, there was just opportunity everywhere because we were getting laughed out of the room and y’all are crazy. So that just meant we knew we had something with the consumer that was going to be prolific. Now we’ve kind of been through about 10 years of well, you guys are kind of now somebody we’re keeping our eyes on lot closer, and when I say we, the bigger companies and competitors. Now, I think we’re in an age of, hey baby, put on the willing to mold ourselves into a different thing that’s going to play in this environment better. Virtual is coming. I mean, we’re doing this on Zoom, and I haven’t really been out of my office or my home in over a month. And I’m getting real comfortable with this interface. I think people all over the country are getting comfortable with this interface. So that’s going to change things a lot. Although being kind of an extroverted person, I like the people, I like to get in a room with people and bump elbows and laugh and have a beer, all those things I really enjoy a lot. But I don’t know how much good it really does other than just make me feel good. So, we got to keep doing good for everybody else. A couple of questions I always ask everybody that comes on the podcast right here before we end up talking for five hours – tell me a favorite book or podcast that you like to pay attention to if you have one.
Matt Maier: Well, it kind of depends on the topic. I would say from a book standpoint, well, I’m completely fascinated by Zach Bush’s research and his approach. So, his materials online I think are great. Another one, Gabe Brown, his name is out there a lot in regenerative circles. I just finished his book. I thought it’s a great story on top of learning a lot about the regenerative space. Those two come to mind.
Neil Dudley: Well, what about marketing? Do you have anything that you kind of keep an eye on and your ear to the ground with regards to marketing? I kind of say that because I listen to a lot of podcasts. I’ve got about an hour worth of driving every day, or I even listened while I was shredding the pastures the other day. You spend enough time on a tractor, you have just to get to-. And for the first part of my life, I just missed every bit of that. I was totally just listening to country music or something, which entertained me, but I wasn’t adding value to the old noodle. And most recently, over the last year and a half, I’ve been I feel like adding education to my, I guess, just understanding, educating myself more. I’m not really, I don’t have a tendency to dig deep in science. I mean, I just don’t, I don’t get I guess fulfillment from that, or it doesn’t excite me, but I love the stories and I love the people and I love the successes. I love the failures really. I love to hear about somebody that just bombed it and stood back up and kept going.
Matt Maier: I agree. I love the stories too. And I’ve got to realize – I’m looking up that podcast now. My old eyes are here. Regenerative Agriculture Podcast by John Kempf.
Neil Dudley: That’s all right. We’ll listen to a little bit.
Matt Maier: John Kempf -K E M P F. Yeah, that’s if there’s someone out there who wants to geek more of the scientific side. Now I forgot where you were going.
Neil Dudley: Marketing. Do you pay attention to any marketing?
Matt Maier: Yeah, I do. And it’s going to surprise you probably. I see so much of the marketing on the shelves and in our category and kind of just intuitively follow all that. I like going way outside of our category. And I like exposing myself to movements that are technology and what kind of marketing or products or innovation is happening in technology. And like I’m fascinated by Tesla, the car company, because he’s completely recreating an industry.
Neil Dudley: Do you think one of those pickups is going to be able to haul anything?
Matt Maier: They scare the hell out of me. I mean, I think that’s- I try to be open-minded. My boys think they’re pretty cool. I can’t say I love them. I admire the courage of launching that, I will say that.
Neil Dudley: I think he’s a great example of an entrepreneur or somebody who’s just brave, going to go. I mean, throwing that bb through the windshield in the launch of this thing, turned out to be the greatest marketing- I have a feeling he thought let’s do this. Let’s actually, we need the window to shatter because that turned out way better than if it hadn’t.
Matt Maier: And he seems to have a knack for that. So those, I mean, Steve Jobs, when he was alive for Apple, I loved to read about and follow. And because the types of people that are innovating and creating an entire new category, that’s what we’re doing. And I want to be able to learn and model in any way I can from those types of people. So, that’s more where I go instead of inside the industry and talking to ourselves.
Neil Dudley: I listened to a podcast, I’ll plug it because I enjoy it, I feel like I get a lot of value from it. It’s the Marketing Book Podcast, a guy named Douglas Burdett does it. And he just interviews authors that talk about sales, marketing, that’ve written books about sales and marketing. I recently listened to an episode of that that talked about that topic. So, you get all kinds of great topics on there.
Matt Maier: Yeah, I’m a fan of any, and I’ve always, every time since I was in high school, I read the Wall Street Journal, I searched out articles about entrepreneurs and different stories around their successes and failures. I think it’s great to be around that because we all have our challenges, but to me, it’s about, okay, what did I learn? Pick myself up, go ahead again. And if I have to course correct, I’ll of course correct. But let’s go and let’s not let fear stop us from taking that next step.
Neil Dudley: Well, I was going to ask you, do you know about the Rivian? See, I drive a Chevy Volt right now, so my commute is almost exactly 40 miles one way. So, I’ll charge my Chevy Volt at my house. Then I’ll drive to the office, and it’s about out of battery. So, I’m almost burning no gasoline when I’m in my like closed loop commute from my house to the office and back. But I have a little bit of trouble just driving this little hatchback car. So, these electric pickups have my attention right now because I’m thinking, wow, if I could trade this, have the benefits of a truck in my rural life as well as the kind of fuel savings and earth-friendly electric piece-
Matt Maier: And you’re not just rural, you’re in Texas. I mean, they’re probably laughing at you, you poor guy.
Neil Dudley: They call me the electric cowboy, but I kind of embrace it. I think it’s part of the fun, maybe start a conversation. And I guess I’ve got feelings as much as anybody, but really you can make about as much fun of me as you want, and it’s not going to affect me much because I think I’m a good person. I work with a lot of good people and yeah, I’m a little different, okay, cool, so is everybody.
Matt Maier: Right. Well, it’s like I tell my kids the worst thing that another person could call you is normal. Don’t be called normal. Please don’t; don’t strive for that. Strive to be extraordinary, strive to be abnormal.
Neil Dudley: I’ve got three daughters and was watching those 30 for 30s. And one of the episodes was about a lady and she was telling a story and she was talking to her dad one time. She ended up being an exceptional person in some way. I can’t remember anything much more than this statement. I thought it was so great of her dad to say that. She said, “Dad, I’m going to, I want to be a cheerleader. I’m going to try out for cheerleader.” And he said, “You don’t want to be a cheerleader. You want to be in the game.” And I thought that was so cool, and I hope to kind of pass that along to my kids. And cheerleading is fine and it’s competitive, but it’s just the concept of don’t take this approach to life as you’re cheering on, get in the game.
Matt Maier: Yup. Don’t be on the sidelines.
Neil Dudley: Yeah. Matt, thanks for your time. Wow, it was a fun conversation. I learned a lot. I look forward to someday getting to meet face to face, shake a hand. And everybody, go check out Thousand Hills up here. I’m going to click on the website again real quick. You can learn all kinds of things from Matt and this Regenerative Renegades. Just go check it out and get educated. Maybe a thing that you find is really valuable to you and helps you improve the food you’re bringing to the table for your family, at least your insight and knowledge on the topic. So, enjoy the rest of your day there, Matt. And thanks again.
Matt Maier: Thank you for having me on. I really enjoyed the conversation as well. And I just want to emphasize we’re all learning, we’re learning together, and we don’t have all the answers, but we’re striving to be attached to something that’s bigger than ourselves and everybody can participate in that.
Neil Dudley: Absolutely. Well, God bless you. Take care. And give ol’ Pete Bassett a shot in the ribs when you see him for me.
Matt Maier: I will. Take care.
Neil Dudley: I got to say thank you so much for listening. We’ve made it this far, congratulations. I think there was a lot of good kind of conversation and insight there. Just listening to Matt tell his story, and I hope you could hear the passion that he has for what he’s up to and what they’re doing at Thousand Hills. I want you guys and gals that listen to the Cowboy Perspective to critique me. I need that. I want the podcast to be better and better. So, if you have comments, please leave them. If you liked it, leave me a review. If you liked it a lot, tell somebody else to go listen to it. Thank you again. This has been another trip around the beautiful Zoom meeting with Matt Maier from Thousand Hills Lifetime Grazed. Everybody be cool.
The Cowboy Perspective is produced by Neil Dudley and Straight Up Podcasts. Graphics are done by Root & Roam Creative Studio, and the music is by Byron Hill Music.