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We’ve all heard about the microbiome and how important it is to human health. But have you thought about the microbiome of animals? Native Microbials is an innovative company that specializes in optimizing the gut bacteria of animals including cattle, chickens, and even your pets!
My guest today is Mallory Embree, Chief Science Officer at Native Microbials. She along with her co-founder, Mike Seely, started Native Microbials in 2015 to produce the next generation of feed supplements to improve the health, productivity, and sustainability of animals with microbes that are native to them.
Mallory’s love of microbes comes across as we chat about:
- How Native Microbials started
- What microbes can do for animals
- What the microbiome actual is
- Antibiotic resistance Native Microbials products can help
- How Native Microbials is different than just a probiotic
- The process for finding the best microbes
- The promising data on reduction in methane production
- How Native Microbials products may impact the cell-based meat industry
Resources:
Research Paper: The Western Diet–Microbiome-Host Interaction and Its Role in Metabolic Disease
Connect with Mallory:
Website: Native Microbials
Email: [email protected]
LinkedIn: Mallory Embree
Instagram: @arksusdaily and @galaxis_native
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Episode Credits:
Thank you to all who’ve made this show possible. Our hosts are Diana Rodgers and James Connelly. Our podcast producer is Emily Soape. And of course, we are grateful for our sponsors, Patreon supporters, and listeners.
This episode was brought to you by my new Sustainavore Course! Are you confused about which diet is best for your health and the planet? Are you feeling frustrated with quick-fix diets and conflicting nutrition information? Check out Sustainavore. You will learn how to feel confidant that the food you’re buying is the right choice for your health and the environment. The course includes over 7 hours of video instruction from me and 60 daily emails full of tips, tricks, and motivation to keep you going – plus lots of bonus material. For a limited time, I am offering special discount pricing so head over to The Sustainavore Course now!
Quotes:
“So I have this view that Mother Nature knows how to do it best. Right? So it’s just a matter of finding some of these subtle differences or characteristics, and figuring out how to harness them for the application that you want.” – Mallory Embree
“Essentially, if the entire process was optimized, and they never had any issues growing their cells, the cheapest that some of these cell-based technologies would get to, is about $17 per pound of fake ground beef, which is still extraordinarily expensive.” – Mallory Embree
Transcript:
(Intro) Diana Rodgers, RD
Welcome to the Sustainable Dish Podcast. I’m Diana Rodgers, a real food registered dietitian, author, and sustainability advocate. I co-host this podcast with James Connelly who was a producer on my film Sacred Cow. I also founded the Global Food Justice Alliance and initiative advocating for the inclusion of animal source foods like meat, dairy, and eggs for a more nutritious, sustainable, and equitable worldwide food system. You can check it out and join me at global food justice.org. Thanks again for listening. And now onto our show.
(Ad for The Sustainavore Course) Diana Rodgers, RD
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Diana Rodgers, RD
Welcome back to the podcast everyone. Today I have with me a really cool guest Mallory Embree is with a livestock microbiome company. Is that how you would describe your company, Mallory?
Mallory Embree
We’re a microbiome company trying to create products for all animals. So companion as well as livestock.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Okay, great. I didn’t know the pet as well, I feel like that’s probably, you know, maybe a little bit more relatable to most of our listeners. But I think that they’re also going to get something out of just learning more about what you’re doing for the livestock sector as well because we hear so much about antibiotic use, and you know, antibiotic resistance and how livestock is a big generator of that. So let’s dig in. How did you get involved with this company? How did it all start?
Mallory Embree
Yeah, so Native Microbials. We’re a startup that’s based out of San Diego, California. Mike Seeley and I founded the company in 2015. That’s been a few years now. My background is in complex microbial communities. So I did my PhD in bioengineering at UC San Diego. And while I was there, I spent my time researching and basically trying to understand the interactions between microbes and the environment. So basically, I studied everything besides animal microbiomes, right. So like the microbiomes of mice with liver disease, human skin microbiomes. I did some stuff with brewery wastewater digesters, and the methanogenic oil degraders, and so on, and so on. Basically, I love microbes. I think there’s super interesting and cool to study. And there’s so much to learn about them. Like they’re so important that literally, life would not exist without them. So I really wanted to continue working with them after I completed my Ph.D. So I decided pretty early on that I wanted to go into startups because I wanted to do and be involved in cutting-edge research. I was trying to get a startup going. And I was working on a couple different ideas I had trying to get together just some proof of concept. So I could either get grant money or some sort of seed money. And then I met Mike. So Mike Seeley is again, a co-founder as well, and he’s the CEO of Native Microbials. But he’s the one that really identified the animal space as a good area to work in because it was a space that could potentially leverage microbiome science, and the animals could really benefit from it. So if you look, just historically, many of the products in the animal space are chemistries or some sort of drug. And these sorts of products are really getting a lot of consumer backlash, especially when they’re overused. So if you look at Posilac, for example, which is recombinant bovine somatotropin, you probably see the little labels on milk jugs, right? Like no rBST used. This was really a blockbuster product and the animal space, and it had this really amazing effect on production, but it had a lot of consumer backlash. So it’s not really used as much today. And so when we started the company, we wanted to see if we could basically create a new type of product that just uses existing microbes in the microbiome, right, that could have a substantial impact, like Posilac. So our products, again, are just microbes with some sort of inert carrier like calcium carbonate. And from the beginning, we really wanted to focus on making something natural, as well. So I have this view that Mother Nature knows how to do it best. Right? So it’s just a matter of finding some of these like subtle differences or characteristics, and figuring out how to harness them for the application that you want. In our case, it’s figuring out what native microbes in the microbiome like help cows make more milk for example, or help chickens be more resistant to infection. So there’s a lot of modern tools that are available today like sequencing, lots of tools in microbiology and bioinformatics that basically enables this sort of development. What we’ve done basically would not have been possible 10 years ago.
Diana Rodgers, RD
And so let’s back up a little bit for those like 101. Because we don’t have PhDs from UCSD in the microbiome, let’s just back up and talk about what is the microbiome.
Mallory Embree
So the microbiome is the microbial community that occupies a particular habitat, and it has distinct properties. So this basically means it covers all of the microorganisms that live in the communities. So all of the bacteria, archaea, this includes eukaryotes like protozoa and fungi. It also includes all of their interactions and the different molecules and metabolites and proteins that they create that ultimately make this phenotype that influences even bigger ecosystems like their animal hosts. And basically, over the past 10 years or so we’ve learned a lot more about the microbiome than we’ve ever known just because of advancements in technology. So, specifically, sequencing technology and computational power have really opened up a lot of doors. And because of this, we’re really starting to understand how important the microbiome is and how intertwined it is with nutrition and health. So an animal we do a lot of work with ruminants. So the first product that we made, which is called Galaxis, it’s made for dairy cows. It’s pretty well established that the microbes that live in the rumen of the cow basically help her digest the food because cows don’t make the enzymes required to break down cellulose and other components of their feed. So they rely completely on their rumen microbiome. And this fact actually goes way, way back right over well over 100 years ago, when Robert Hungate, who is a scientist who really laid the groundwork for techniques to cultivate and study anaerobic microorganisms. Like he actually did a lot of his work in the rumen of cows. And since then, especially over the past few years, there’s been substantial evidence that suggests that the productivity of animals is linked to both genetics, as well as microbiome composition. And we feel like genetics has really been addressed really, really well. And it continues to make really awesome developments on the livestock side. And we feel like the microbiome aspect, however, has really been underserved. So we’re hoping to kind of fit that need.
Diana Rodgers, RD
So let’s talk a little bit about antibiotic resistance and livestocks’ role in that and how your company fits into this.
Mallory Embree
Absolutely. Like if you look at our chicken product, for example, right, like chickens historically have received a lot of antibiotics. And it turns out that the microbiome kind of has its own natural way of staving off different pathogens. And so if you feed the right microbes that combined along the GI tract, that’s a natural way to just exclude pathogens from even binding and causing infection in the animal. And so that’s certainly something that we’re trying to address. We have a very promising cocktail of microbes on the chicken side, that should be available next year. And so we’re hoping that this will be a viable alternative for producers.
Diana Rodgers, RD
And so if a producer were to use your products, would they be considered organic?
Mallory Embree
So it kind of depends? Yeah, it really depends. We’re finding the organic definition is very loose, and different people have different definitions of organic. Some people do consider our products organic because they are just live microbes. We do use a fat in our incapsulate, which I can talk about later that some people do not consider organic. So it really depends.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Interesting, okay, so it’s more than just a probiotic. How is this different than just giving them a probiotic? Or is that what you’re doing?
Mallory Embree
So this is totally different just because of the microbes that we’re using. And so this is kind of another reason why we wanted to get into this space. When Mike was looking at the animal industry, he realized that producers were already feeding a lot of microbes, but these tended to be the same microbes that you see on your yogurt cup, right? They’re called GRAS microbes generally recognized as safe. These are your Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Bacillus, subtilis, lactobacillus acidophilus, these are nice microbes, right? We kind of consider them as like a first-gen technology. The issue is, these microbes actually don’t do much when you feed them to the animals like sometimes they will have an effect, sometimes they won’t, so they can be inconsistent. If they do work, it tends to be a very minimal impact, right? Like in a dairy cow, some products claim like one to two pounds of milk. And it really boils down to the fact that these microbes, were not isolated from those systems. So how can you expect them to have a significant impact? It turns out these GRAS microbes are just very easy to grow. And there’s very little regulatory risk, right? Like you can just register the product and pretty much sell them. And so we really understand the appeal to use them on the business side. So our microbes are different because we actually go through this de novo campaign to actually pick out the microbes that we want to use. So we have this scientific platform that I created that basically leverages all these advanced tools that I talked about earlier, to actually pick up the microbes. And we use this approach to develop every single one of our products, right. Our dairy cow product has dairy cow microbes, the chicken product has chicken microbes, the dog product has dog microbes. Just because like this host specificity is very important. And so when we develop products, we basically start off with a large survey experiment. So in dairy, we wanted to figure out what rumen microbes could really help a cow make more milk and milk components. And so for our survey, we basically collected rumen samples from 1000s of animals across the United States and South America, and Mexico, to really get a better picture of just what the rumen microbiome looks like, under different conditions. And so if you look at this data set, the cows were eating a bunch of different diets, right, because cows even in the United States, have very different diets, depending on where they are. Some cows were on antibiotics, some were Jersey, some were Holstein. We actually induced milkfat depression in some cows, just to kind of better understand how the microbiome change during a challenge. And so basically, once we had all these are rumen samples, we also collected as much metadata about the animal as we could. So basically as many characteristics about the animal at that point in time, So we were looking at how much milk the cow was making when we took the rumen sample, we were looking at rumen pH, volatile fatty acids, everything. And so once we had those samples, we sequence them to identify which microbes were in each sample, we use transcriptomics, to figure out which ones were actually active. Because you can imagine the entire rumen microbial communities are not going to be active at the same time. They kind of turn on and off as different substrates are actually available. And then we also use flow cytometry to actually measure biomass changes over time. So once we had all of this data together, this is kind of where my background comes in. We leveraged all this cool bioinformatics to basically figure out which microbes are actually the most important.
Diana Rodgers, RD
And did you find certain like Jersey cattle did better with one type, versus Holsteins? Or Mexican cattle did better? Because of… I’m wondering also if it depends on is this a pasture-raised animal? Or if this is one that’s more in confinement? Does that make a big difference too?
Mallory Embree
Absolutely, so there’s definitely distinct microbiome subsets, and like Jersey cows or pasture-raised, but as a first past, we wanted to find microbes that worked in pretty much every single cow, despite like what sort of environment it actually was in. And this is actually called a core microbiome. It’s something that like, has been identified in people and it’s just the subset of microbes that shows up in the vast majority of the population. And so yeah, we ran all this analysis, we figured out what microbes in the core microbiome were the most important. And then next was the fun part. So it turns out most of the microbes that we’re interested in are actually novel species. And so it’s not like you can go to a culture collection, or to the store or Alibaba and just buy them right, we actually had to go into the rumen samples themselves and actually isolate out the microbes that we wanted. And this turned out to be very difficult. And it took a long time to do but eventually we got them. Yeah, that’s pretty much it. We apply the same methodology to every single animal. So in the case of broiler chickens, we actually surveyed a whole bunch of chickens and tried to figure out what microbes made them more resilient to infection. We did the same for the feedlot animals, we did the same for dog. Our goal is really to have products for pretty much every single animal.
Diana Rodgers, RD
That’s awesome. That’s, you know, I actually several years back did a… I worked for Merck and went over to Thailand to speak with Asian pork producers about why they need to stop using so many antibiotics, and how there is a market for pork raised without antibiotics. And then there were other producers there to talking about how might you do this, more ventilation, you know, less crowded spaces and everything. So this is also something that’s really interesting to me because this could have massive impacts.
Mallory Embree
Absolutely. And a really interesting point that I like to bring up to people is that we have isolated all of these microbes from these animals, right? Pretty much every single microbe we’ve isolated, has resistance to Monensin, even if the animals not actively consuming Monensin. So the usage of antibiotics, I feel anyways, at least from our datasets has already made this really big impact on the microbiome. And so anything we can do to start kind of steering it away from that would be helpful.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah, exactly. When did the application of antibiotics in livestock really take up? Do you know?
Mallory Embree
Oh geez. I couldn’t tell you the year but I know it was kind of I want to say like the 1970s or so
Diana Rodgers, RD
That’s what I was gonna guess but I thought maybe you might know more.
Mallory Embree
I know. I think that’s about when it was because there was this time little study in chickens, right? Like where they found that feeding antibiotics just improve the productivity like crazy, right? And then it became this prophylactic thing. Right? You get more chicken meat if you feed antibiotics. But since then, right, like, I think the FDA has really cracked down on it. And they’re really trying to limit it to just veterinary use. And I, at least the chicken producers that we’ve interacted with, are really starting to take that to heart, right? Like, a lot of them have really tried to cut back on antibiotic usage in their flocks, and they really only apply it if there is a severe outbreak of disease.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah, and from my understanding, that’s what made chicken so popular and so cheap, is because we figured out how… and it’s more than just keeping them healthy. Right? It’s when they alter the microbiome, they can put on more weight, right?
Mallory Embree
Absolutely. There’s definitely a distinct microbiome for birds that have the highest feed conversion. We’re finding though, that chickens, in particular, their genetics are insane. Like they’re so efficient at utilizing their feed that we found that any sort of, I guess, drawback, so any sort of removal of that efficiency is actually due to pathogens, right. So some sort of inefficiency in the gut, because it’s damaged by some sort of Gi microbe. So it really is pretty amazing.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah, I keep thinking too, about how I read this really cool paper about acellular carbohydrates in humans, and how that can alter our biome. So if we’re eating lots of processed foods that, you know, don’t have cell walls anymore, you know, our biome gets altered. And then I think about antibiotic use in livestock and how we’ve got this obesity epidemic in humans. And I wonder, I keep wondering, you know, taking this back to humans are there… Is there anyone out there that studying this with people? You know, because you just go to the store, you don’t know, it’s might say it has 2 billion acidophilus or whatever. And but you don’t really know what’s in there. And we don’t even know if it stays in there.
Mallory Embree
Right. No, that’s totally true, like human probiotics. It’s obviously in like a boom right now. Like, there’s so many different versions available. And as you’re right, like, they all kind of have this different Cfu level on the label. I would, I don’t want to make too many comments on that. But it’d be very careful about which ones are alive in which ones are not alive, it turns out that it can be very difficult to actually stabilize them. So if you just get a dry, I don’t know pill off of the regular shelves in the store. If you read the label, sometimes there’s an asterisk that says that the Cfu is were measured at the time of manufacture, it doesn’t actually mean anything for like, how many Cfus you’re buying at that time, right? Generally refrigerated is the better way to go.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Interesting. Okay, I’ll bring this back to animals. So have you found producers generally open to this? How are they hearing about you? Is it mostly you know, large companies like Tyson? Or is it the smaller guys who are more interested in making these changes?
Mallory Embree
Honestly, I think it’s everybody. Like we’ve talked to a lot of producers both on like the dairy and the chicken and the beef side. And everybody that I’ve personally talked to understands the importance of the microbiome and the microbes that live there. And I think some of them are a little skeptical at first, just because they’ve been sold this first-gen GRAS probiotic for a really long time. So their skepticism is understandable. But once they realize that we’re not just trying to sell them like another Saccharomyces cerevisiae, like everyone else, I think they’re all a lot more open to learning. And they realize that we’re trying to bring them something that we’ve specifically created for the animals that they’re trying to raise, right. Like we did all these survey experiments, we figured out what native microbes actually matter. We isolated them, we grew them up, we figured out how to deliver them alive, which is super challenging, actually. And besides that, we actually have the trials and research to back it up, right? Like we do all this cool science, but if it doesn’t actually do anything in the animal, like who cares, right? And so once they kind of see all this data and all this information, the majority of producers are willing to give us a shot, which is really cool.
Diana Rodgers, RD
That’s awesome. So what do you see like 10 years from now with the growth of your company and, and some of the other shifts, maybe that you’re seeing that that are or maybe just linked with this type of technology, or this type of movement using sort of this combination of nature and tech?
Mallory Embree
So I guess from here, first and foremost, we’re formally launching our four-strain dairy product at the end of the year. And so it’s just four native microbes. Again, we isolated them from the rumen content of a healthy Holstein cow. There’s a few people trialing this product on their farms now, but it’s going to be more widely available around Christmas and what we found in some of our trials of this product like we… they’ll have some more going on, right. But in our pivotal kind of flagship trial, where we fed this product to lactating dairy cows for 40 weeks, so basically the full lactation cycle, we found that it improved energy corrected milk by eight pounds per cow per day. And this response just continued to ramp over time. So by the end of the trial, the treatment cows are actually making 12 pounds more than the control. And so this is really huge. It’s like a huge efficiency bump in the animals, they’re using their feed more effectively. And so I think we kind of have achieved that Posilac-like response, which is really exciting, just because it is native microbes. And so yeah, that product is going to be coming out soon. So we’re certainly going to be busy helping get it rolled out and just helping our customers implement it on farm. We’re continuing to do more research on the product too just look at how it behaves on different diets. We’re actually doing some more research just on sustainability. So we have some preliminary data that shows that it reduces greenhouse gases by over 50%. So we’re going to be pursuing that more just to see if that’s something that manifests with, I guess, at the cow level, right? Like we’ve done it in vitro, can we do it in the cow now?
Diana Rodgers, RD
Can I stop you right there? And just ask you to expand on that more? Right? Because? Well, two things. One is, I think some of my listeners might, you know, as we talk about livestock efficiency, right, that’s an industry term. When I chat with my friends and industry and talk to them about how to talk about their product to consumers, I always try to suggest that they not use terms like efficiency, right? Because consumers are concerned about, you know, animals being seen as these, you know, robotic efficient, how can we improve the efficiency? What are the welfare implications with more efficiency? If any, right? Like, is this more stressful on the animal to be producing more milk? Or…
Mallory Embree
When we look at efficiency, right? It’s just basically how well is the animal using its feed? Like, is it getting all the nutrients it can from the food that is actually digesting? And in our case? Yes, it is. And even though of course, we’re focused on milk production, because producers, right, like they’re trying to get milk out of these animals, but we believe that it’s actually going to greatly help animal health as well. So we’re looking at its impacts on reproduction. For example, we’re looking at different impacts of the product on the transition phase. So basically, how well does the animal give birth and then transition into the milking herd, because giving birth is very stressful. And so we’re looking at all of these other impacts on health as well, just because more energy availability, right means that more energy is available to these different, like physiological processes that the animal naturally goes through.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Okay, that’s awesome. And the sustainability piece, too. So how does this impact the, you know, I was gonna ask you that. So I’m glad you brought it up. But the, you know, methane produced by burping, cattle, you know, from the rumen activity. How is this? Are you seeing just less methane?
Mallory Embree
Yeah, so right now, we have some in vitro data that suggests that these more efficient animals, like when they’re on our product, are making less methane. Like the rumen has these archaea, right? They’re called methanogens. Those are the primary microbes that are actually making methane. The main substrates that they actually use are hydrogen and carbon dioxide, which tend to be kind of at the bottom of the food chain, right? Like, these methanogens don’t know how to use glucose, right. And so what we’re finding is there’s these other populations of bacteria that can fight against them with antigens for the same co2 and hydrogen. And in more efficient animals, they tend to have bigger populations of these bacteria. And so that’s something that we’re kind of seeing in the dairy, it’s actually more relevant for our beef feedlot product. So they’re, we’re seeing tremendous improvements in average daily gain, as well as intakes. And we have some microbiome data that shows that, again, the methanogenic populations are lower, and we think it’s because these bacteria are starting to dominate the population. And so in both cases, we actually have these green feed experiments going on right now. It’s a pretty cool system, if you haven’t seen it, like basically like the cows are there doing their thing, eating their food, the green feed system is just kind of like this, almost like a bucket gate thing that they just stick their head into it like you give them some treats. And while they’re eating, it can actually measure their burps. So you can directly measure how much methane they’re giving off. And so it’s a great way to corroborate what we’re seeing in vitro in the microbiome population.
Diana Rodgers, RD
That’s cool. Yeah, actually, in the film, Sacred Cow. We visited the Lake City research at Michigan State and they’re doing a lot of trials I’m not sure if you’re familiar with what they’re doing up there, but they are testing different pastures and different forage types and then seeing if it makes a difference with the methane production. Yeah, that’s great.
Mallory Embree
Yeah, that’s great because certainly like forage degradation produces a lot of hydrogen. So that yeah, likes to go to methane. Um, no, that’s very, very cool.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Mm hmm. Awesome. And so how do you think this might protect livestock producers against some of the artificial, you know, plant-based proteins? Or, you know, not even plant-based, but these tech lab-derived proteins?
Mallory Embree
Yeah. So, I mean, first of all, I think it’s good to have options, so I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with cell-based meat. What I see us doing, though, is giving producers an option, right? Like, historically, they’ve had all these chemistries to use, like vaccine technology’s great, genetics is great. But then what else do they have to use? Right? Like, what we want to supply is just a natural alternative that they could potentially put into their system so that they can still get these efficiencies that they need to be competitive, but in a more green, like, sustainable way.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Right, exactly. So, you know, and when we talk about efficiencies, and, you know, appropriate use of energy, which is, at its very core solar, when we look at these, I mean, what’s your opinion of these, you know, converting cells in a lab out of, you know…versus cattle, right, who are, you know, in my mind, so perfect at converting solar energy through grass into protein and fat?
Mallory Embree
Absolutely. And I think that’s kind of the point that’s missed a lot too, right? Like cattle are converting feeds that would otherwise go to waste, right? Like, they would just go into whatever landfill and just sit there. If you look at these cell-based therapies, there’s actually a lot of kind of researchy articles that are coming out that basically look at the supply chain, and what sort of fermentation requirements are needed for it to become a viable option, right for the entire population. And there was a really, really good one that came out recently, I can’t remember the name, but I can send it to you later. And basically, he crunched all the numbers looked at like the number of tanks that would be needed. And essentially, if the entire process was optimized, right, and they never had any issues growing their cells, right, the cheapest that some of these cell-based technologies would get to, is about $17 per pound of like fake ground beef, right, which is still extraordinarily expensive. Whereas if you look at the other side, with cattle producers, right, like they’re taking some of these waste products, beating it to their animals, and making the delicious meat that we know today.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Right. And so when we look at the sustainability difference to me, not just the price, but the energy input, the mono-crop and fossil fuels required. Well, like if we were to look at a whole lifecycle assessment of that process, versus a cow on grass, or maybe getting hay or maybe even being finished on a feedlot on leftover brewers yeast, and corn stocks, and all that kind of stuff.
Mallory Embree
It’s certainly not as sustainable as everybody thinks some of those numbers tend to be left out of the calculations.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Exactly. And my concern, too, is also, you know, in these labs, it’s really, you know if they have it at the right temperature, a lot of really bad things could grow on the meat too. Like, my thought is that the amount of antibiotics that they would need in order to make sure the meat stays clean, and everything would be extraordinary. And I haven’t seen many people report on that.
Mallory Embree
Absolutely. Like, it’s kind of funny. So one of the reasons why I kind of went into these natural microbial communities because I had a little stint in algae. So I went into my PhD when algae was like a big thing with biofuels and everything. And so I rotated through an algae lab. And I had that exact same problem like I would grow a culture, right. It’d be like, rocking and awesome on its little plate, and then all of a sudden, a crazy fungus would grow on it. You’re absolutely right. You need so many antibiotics just to keep down the natural microbiome that’s around us, right? Like if you’re providing them this very, very rich substrate to grow on, like, bacteria and fungus love that.
Diana Rodgers, RD
And they’re everywhere.
Mallory Embree
And they’re ever they’re literally everywhere. Like I have some friends that are studying the microbiome of built communities. So those are microbes that live in like buildings, or like the carpet people like to look at the microbiomes and bathrooms, right? I know it’s gross, but somebody has to do it. But they are literally everywhere.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah, I don’t want to think about that. But yeah, I’m sure. Well, this is so cool. So if someone has a pet or I don’t know if you’re doing this for horses, people that are maybe they’re smaller scale listening to this, I have a lot of small scale producers that maybe you know, raise cattle on a small scale, usually pasture-based. How can they learn more about your company?
Mallory Embree
Sure, yeah, they can go to our website, it’s www.native microbials.com, or people can email me directly to so my email is just Mallory at native microbials.com. That’s m-a-l-l-o-r-y.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Wow, brave person to give out your personal email. That’s awesome. Anything else before we go?
Mallory Embree
No. I think that’s it.
Diana Rodgers, RD
It was really, really cool to chat with you. And this is very different than a lot of the podcasts that I’ve done. I hope people enjoyed it. And I certainly learned a ton. Thank you so much for the work you’re doing.
Mallory Embree
Thank you for hearing me out.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Have a great day.
(Closing) Diana Rodgers, RD
Thanks so much for joining us on the Sustainable Dish podcast. If you like the show, please leave us a review on iTunes, and don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter at Sacred Cow dot info. See you next time. Thanks for listening.
