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Brandon Howley of Happy Hollow Ranch is back on the podcast to chat with my co-host, James Connolly. Check out Sustainable Dish Episode 111 to listen to Brandon’s first show appearance. 

Brandon has been working hard to transition his family ranch into a 100% grass-fed operation and facing setbacks, including a global pandemic, in the process. Happy Hollow Ranch was started in 1977 by his grandfather, Chuck Howley, famed Dallas Cowboy as a traditional calf-cow operation. In the wake of his grandfather’s retirement, Brandon took over and quickly realized the benefits both to his family and the consumer in becoming a 100% grass-fed ranch.

Under Brandon’s management and with the help of his hardworking team, Happy Hollow Ranch is living his grandfather’s philosophy of “reaching for greatness in every endeavor.” Brandon’s primary focus is on direct-to-consumer efforts with the goal of changing the narrative of misinformation that surrounds the beef industry. 

During this episode Brandon shares:

• The history and transition of the ranch
• The pros and cons of going grass-fed
• The systematic failures of the beef industry and how they were amplified by the pandemic
• The creative solutions for Happy Hollow Ranch to succeed on the business side
• The challenges with nutrition in schools and the current push for Vegan Fridays in NYC
• How animals fit into the life cycle and the often-ignored role of the dung beetle
• Happy Hollow’s Four-pronged approach to thriving in the pandemic
• The Texas Icestorm Story

Resources:

Sustainable Dish Episode 111: Happy Hollow Ranch

Farmer Veteran Coalition

Global Animal Partnership 5-Step Animal Welfare Program

American Grassfed Association (AGA)

Go Texan

Sacred Cow

NYC’s Vegan Fridays

Biggest Little Farm 

Happy Hollow’s Annual Round-up

Long Branch Farms

Connect with Brandon:

Website: Happy Hollow Ranch

Instagram: @happyhollow.beef

Episode Credits:

Thank you to all who’ve made this show possible. Our hosts are Diana Rodgers and James Connelly. Our producer is Emily Soape. And of course, we are grateful for our sponsors, Patreon supporters, and listeners.

A big thanks to  Microbiome Plus+ for sponsoring the podcast. As many of you know, I’m celiac and have very sensitive guts. And I recently tried their pro and prebiotic combo and have consistently felt amazing since taking it. I now highly recommend it to my nutrition clients who need probiotic support. And there’s also some pretty solid scientific papers showing how Microbiome Plus can help with Vitamin D absorption and for improving cholesterol levels. So if you’re looking for a new probiotic, give it a try for yourself. You can visit sustainable dish.com/biome  and use code DIANA for 15% off sitewide. 

Quotes:

“Currently, we are in one of those situations where we are dealing with an almost systematic failure of our industry, right from the producer all the way to the packer, to the trucker – all these things.” – Brandon Howley

“I just called three or four of the USDA suppliers or packers in our area and they’re not even taking anything until 2023. That is a huge problem, especially for these super small producers that are just getting their start. You know, being faced with a global pandemic, not knowing how to navigate the market, and then having all of this compounded on top of that. That’s gonna wipe ‘em out.” – Brandon Howley

“Anything that nature can do, we think we can do better. So I’m gonna take what it was naturally already doing and then 10 fold it, and make it into a concentrate to sell at a premium price to all these ranchers struggling to figure out how to get into this rotational grazing.” – Brandon Howley

Transcript:

Diana Rodgers, RD  0:01  

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 Connolly who was a producer on my film Sacred Cow. I also founded the Global Food Justice Alliance, an 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 globalfoodjustice.org. Thanks again for listening. And now onto our show. 

Diana Rodgers, RD  0:39  

I’d like to take a minute to thank Microbiome Plus+ for their support of today’s podcast. As many of you know, I’m celiac and have very sensitive guts. And I recently tried their pro and prebiotic combo and have consistently felt amazing since taking it. I now highly recommend it to my nutrition clients who need probiotic support. And there’s also some pretty solid scientific papers showing how Microbiome Plus+ can help with vitamin D absorption and for improving cholesterol levels. So if you’re looking for a new probiotic, give it a try for yourself, you can visit sustainabledish.com/biome that’s B I O M E and use code Diana – D I A N A for 15% off sitewide.

James Connolly  1:22  

This is James Connolly for Sustainable Dish Podcast. So I met Brandon actually through a friend’s… So my Instagram is run by somebody who does all of the background work for all of my Instagram. So most of my answers are all me everything that’s associated with like, what I’m posting is all about, like what, you know, the things in topics that I care about what sustainability environmentalism and all that stuff. But Meg was one of my favorite people on the planet actually posts that stuff for me, so don’t actually have to think about like, a prime time to post things and all of the stuff associated with that. So Meg sent me a video that was coming from Brandon over at Happy Hollow Ranch that was associated with the rising beef prices in the US and globally, really. And Brandon had some insight into it and wisdom on it. And you know, we just had a phone conversation, we want to kind of talk about it, what’s happening in real-time. But I want to kind of go into Brandon’s history because I think his ranch is actually really special. And kind of go into some of the aspects of how he got into this because this is sort of a family legacy that has a really rich and interesting story to it. So welcome, Brandon.

Brandon Howley  2:38  

Hey, how’s it going? Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate it.

James Connolly  2:41  

So tell us where the ranch is. And some of the history, like how you got into it and some of the family stuff, because it’s really interesting.

Brandon Howley  2:49  

Absolutely. Yeah. My pleasure. Thanks so much. So my grandfather started this ranch, after he got done playing with the Dallas Cowboys, it was actually he and Leroy Jordan who kind of created this joint venture together. And I think for them, it started as something that carried out their kind of dream of being a cowboy, a true cowboy, in essence. Like they were cowboys on the field, but they wanted to, you know, go the full 360. So they started this ranch as a typical, you know, cow-calf operation, Leroy had one side, I-20 over in Wills Point. And then we had the closer into Canton side of it. And you know, it was a prototypical one, you know, they were finding the genetics, they needed to get the biggest animal out there for the quickest weight gain, and then go to the sale barn. And that would be pretty much their nut for the year. It’s a hobby ranch or something that you have the means to kind of sustain without really running it as a true business. But what we came to realize, as the years kind of went on, and then Leroy ended up selling his half is that that model in itself is flawed because it commoditizes everything so heavily that you know you’re at the whims of any type of market fluctuations, whether that be, you know, commodities in itself, or feedstuff, or, you know, a market crash on the financial systems. I mean, there’s so many variables and inputs that go into raising one particular unit in a cow-calf operation. So we kind of plodded along made ends meet. In 2013 I went off to the military. So that was kind of my pause, if you will, from living that ranch life and going out there with my grandfather in running the day-to-day with him. Shortly after I left for the military. My grandfather, Chuck Howley, was diagnosed with Lewy Body dementia. So he started kind of preparing and best as he could or knew how to allow that ranch to self sustain till somebody in the family could you know, address it and take it on. So nobody in our family really did that. Basically, it sat vacant for five years dwindling down to the skeleton crew, you know, the ranch and the cattle, the horses. We had a quarter horse program back in the day as well, that was really big in the cutting and reining. And so all of this starts contracting on us. And we’re looking at this very bleak future for the ranch. And I’m now coming back. This is, you know, five years later. So now I’m coming back into 2017. And I’m getting out of the military, and I’m myself kind of searching for purpose and transitioning from the military back into the civilian side of it. And, you know, the ranch has always been an ambition of mine, and something that I saw myself growing and carrying on a very proud legacy, really building out my grandfather’s dream in a way that either he didn’t have the vision for, or that he didn’t really have the energy to do, because… well, I’m getting ahead of myself on that part.

James Connolly  5:52  

So the ranch was started in the late 70s?

Brandon Howley  5:55  

Yeah, so the ranch was started in 1977, cow-calf operation all the way up until, you know, the 2013 timeframe, I got out of the military in 17. I went to a family meeting. And, you know, we have a table and we said, okay, who’s gonna run the ranch, really, the means who has the time who has all this right? And so nobody in the family raised their hand, and you know, me being out of the military, I raised mine and said, Hey, I’m going to take this on and initial outset from this was the intention to retrofit the ranch into something that was going to go direct-to-market. We knew that we wanted to go direct-to-retail, but we really were trying to figure out, okay, what are the differentiating factors that are gonna really translate well to that market. And that is, we were going to go grass-finished. By far we thought that was the most important thing was, you know, because that feeds into the biodynamics of the land and so many different factors. And then, you know, you rotate that around, and you start looking at, you know, your branding and marketing. And so we had to retrofit all of that. So we basically rebuilt ourselves in 2017, from the ground up, and really, you know, went to market with this idea, late 2018, early 2019. So, since then, and stop me if that’s getting a little too far ahead of the conversation.

James Connolly  7:12  

No, I mean, I want to know, like, who are you looking at? Like you were functionally trying to change this to a grass-fed grass-finished operation. You saw some of the challenges associated with that, but were you going to conferences? This kind of early on in some of the aspects of that is really sort of reaching… go ahead.? 

Brandon Howley  7:33  

Yeah, yeah. So, I was going to some conferences, there was a Veteran’s Farmers Coalition that I went to, and they talked a little bit about the USDA and the role they play and the different, you know, certifications that some of these veteran farmers and ranchers carry. But as far as just the background knowledge on the certification, there wasn’t a whole lot of easily accessible information to say, Hey, we’ve done market research on this certification. This is something that you have to go out as an individual rancher and kind of research yourself, it’s, there’s no one-stop-shop. So you know, going through these different conferences, and kind of hearing the troubles of the ranchers and you know, the missed opportunities with the consumers, we thought that if we went the grass-fed and finished route, that we could address both of those at the same time, and then kind of build a better foundation with it with other certifications that kind of bolster it with like the Farmers Veterans Coalition, and the Gap Step 4, you know, talking about health and wellness, and then you got your AGA. And then your Go Texan, which really speaks a lot to the Texas consumer, knowing that they are buying local that they’re, you know, supporting some type of usually family situation by buying those products. And it was one of those things where it was like, We got to just take the leap and see how it works out. You know, we did a small amount of market research on just the grass-fed industry overall, and realize that the price points were higher, the marketability was better, even the box beef pricing, because if you go on the USDA, they have two separate conventional and grass-fed. So that was just the couple of indicators that were like, okay, yeah, we’re definitely pushing in the right direction on this one. So you can compare these, you know, side by side and just truly see the difference in price breaks and different volumes and things like that. So it gives you a pretty good idea that even if we were selling at like half capacity with the grass-fed and finished model, we were almost making as much as we would running at full capacity under a conventional model.

James Connolly  9:33  

Yeah, you were finding that because of the external inputs that had to be put into the finish conventionally. So the commodities and the fluctuating prices and all of the pressures that are put on the producer now, because he’s essentially just beholden to that market?

Brandon Howley  9:49  

Correct. Yeah, it was more of like a risk mitigation. We were taking a large view and saying, Okay, where do we see the fluff, you know, where can we cut out these middlemen? What can we reasonably vertically integrate into the operation that builds margin back into this, you know, process, because it’s very easy to theoretically say, hey, it’s great if we go out here, we market and create a brand, and we go and push really hard on the retail side of the things? But with anything, it’s all about what you’re putting behind that, that’s gonna make you successful or not. If you’re gonna go into it thinking, okay, you know, I did great on the conventional side markets are down, you know, I can just transition over into this new segment, and do about the same, that’s just not the case anymore. You know, you can’t go to the sale barn, and there’s no like quick ditch kind of solution. If you get into trouble going the grass-fed and finished route for two reasons. So the first reason is that grass-fed and finished beef is not graded by the USDA, it’s just inspected. So there’s that marketing loss right there. And then the second thing is that with these conventional commodities and things like that, we are gaining the benefit on making sure that we don’t have that high overhead, we don’t have that cost of production that these conventional guys have. So that’s kind of where we were caught in the middle of saying, okay, the conventional side’s got a lot of evil to it, but it also has the positives, excels and knowing exactly what about to get, you know, hitting certain target frames, right. Whereas the grass-fed, it’s like, people might buy the, you know, a couple of half steers this month, we hope so, you know, or like, hey, we can go out every Sunday and sell at the farmers market and make a couple of bucks here and there. But really, it’s trying to reconnect with the community that we found a lot of success. And that’s actually how we bridge the gap with DISD and a couple of these other channel partners that we’ve incorporated into our operation and kind of pivoted during that whole COVID time. I don’t know if that answered the question for you. But I felt like it did.

James Connolly  11:46  

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think… well, so I find one of the more interesting aspects of it is the external inputs that are required in order to get to production weight, right, and for slaughter weight, and then I want you to also go into the level of pressures that are kind of put on because of the slaughterhouse aspect of it, right. So there’s sort of, you know, the initial intrinsic inputs and maybe you could in and then the sort of after effects of what is a consolidation of the meatpacking and processing industry that also puts pressures on the middleman being yourself?

Brandon Howley  12:26  

So I feel like that’s almost like a two-part question. So historically, I think that the commodities and these external inputs that you’re talking about have always had a significant influence over what the producers are able to take home at the end of the day. And I think that has a lot to do with the contraction that you see periodically through the industry with independent ranchers and farmers is that commodities go up, diesel goes up, inflation goes up, you know, there’s so many factors that go into it, that if you have all fail down the line, I mean, currently, we are in one of those situations where we are dealing with an almost systematic failure of our industry, right from the producer all the way to the packer from the trucker, you know, all these things. So just to give it an easy example, right now, we’re living in this time where truckers aren’t driving and supplying warehouses or grocery stores or, you know, logistic chains in a timely manner. And it’s slowing down production, it’s hurting the producer because they can’t move their product. They’re holding animals longer so that means more inputs, external inputs, like commodities, and diesel to maintain those animals until they can move them right. So you’ve got this kind of whirlwind that is going to crush these guys that weren’t prepared for it. So luckily, in 2017, and this kind of leading I think into your second question here is that we were positioning ourselves to kind of get out of that rat race and say, alright, we are going to dictate market price, we are going to decide what inputs that we put in here. Because in the grass-fed and finished side of it, really you become a grass farmer, right? You’re not really going out there and trying to hunt up the best deal on commodities anymore, because 75% to 80% of your operation no longer relies on it. So by taking out those externals, all we really have to worry about is what consumer preferences are, what the… and even we’re not even really affected by the market variability in price because we’re no longer going to the packers, we’re no longer going to the sale barns, we’re going straight to Brookshires and we’re saying, Hey, this is where we’re at with our pricing. If you love us, we love you. So, you know, and that’s one of those big things that I think that we need to look at as an entire industry in saying that okay, we have now lived through a time where a nationalized supply chain has failed us utterly from the smallest lowest level person all the way to the top right, so what does that really kind of mean for everybody, as an independent rancher trying to figure their way out through the market? Well, really, it means that you need to consolidate what you have. And make sure that you can shift those assets into a model that allows you to have more control over that end price. So in a shorter version of it, you need to either find somebody that has the means or the know-how to market and brand, or you need to start taking that under your wing and building out an online storefront and taking those steps to be customer-facing and really putting yourself and your brand out there to carry that load through this time.

James Connolly  15:44  

I find one of the more interesting aspects of it is, and this has happened simultaneously with Sacred Cow, I think it’s also kind of one of the things that can happen with you, as you move that pivot. You know, we have COVID,  we get all of this *bleep* going on, right? But what so what I find actually really interesting is, so first time in a generation, supermarkets shelves are bare, right? You see endemic failure across supply lines, you see this sort of consolidation of the fertilizer industries, the John Deere, and all of the stuff that’s kind of happened with them. You see, Monsanto, even just up until a few years ago, decade ago, was saying the industry wasn’t consolidated enough. What they wanted to do was essentially, like take farmers and make them innocent sharecroppers, right. They would tell you when to plant, they would tell you what fertilizers, what percentages what the weather was like. They were buying weather satellite data, they were buying all of this stuff. You were essentially a tenant farmer living on this land and Monsanto and you know, huge aspects of this. And then you have the collusion that kind of happens within the commodities world. That is quote, unquote, competition, but really, it is collusion in many different ways.

Brandon Howley  17:02  

Thank you for teeing this up for me, because this is actually really what I wanted to talk about. So we decided as a whole as a nation that we needed to consolidate this, but we like doubled down in the wrong direction, right? We consolidated on a national scale, and we consolidated with commodities suppliers that weren’t really in the national interest for us in the long run, right? Because anytime that we have any type of conflict now, guess what, corn goes up, wheat goes up, price goes up, everything’s going up, right, because of where we’re sourcing these regionally grown commodities. Like most of what we’re getting from now is from China, you know, most of what we’re, you know, rice products, it’s either India or the Philippines or somewhere like that, right. Now, those are all in tumultuous areas and compounded by supply chain inflow outflow. So what we’re really now is like double-taking on 2008, right, we’re looking at, okay, we decided to go the wrong direction after 2008. We’re now in 2022, looking at almost at the exact same problem that we were in in 2008. But now we’ve got more consumers knowledgeable about where their foods being sourced from, you know, the transparency and the accessibility of the local rancher being a more prevalent thing in the market today, to where there’s really no longer a need for a nationalized packers system – packers supply chain system, right. You can even you can consolidate it, but consolidated down to the region, right, give these people a means, rather than one specific place within that region. A couple of independent producers could build out their own kill floor, build out their own value-added side to offset some of that supply-demand issue right now. Because right now I just called like three or four of the USDA suppliers or packers in our area. And they’re not even taking anything until 2023. That’s a problem that is a huge problem, especially for these super micro ranches, these super-small producers that are starting to get their start right out of high school or college, you know, being faced with a global pandemic, not knowing how to navigate the market, and then having all of this kind of compounded on top of that. That’s gonna wipe him out, right? So if we were to say, All right, let’s create a book of business for all of our big cities like Houston, Dallas, things like that. And we’re going to go in hand this book of business over the Dallas Independent School District or, you know, these other big government agencies, assisted lunches and things like that, to where they can go out not having to do any guesswork. Having the prices break down with price breaks, all that together, and then be able to call and say, Hey, I need like 5000 pounds of veggies. I need 6000 pounds of ribeye or whatever the case may be, and then it’s directly sourced from that ranch to the agency, instead of from that agency,  from the packer, from the producer. 

James Connolly  20:03  

Yeah. I mean, I worked for close to a decade in mostly inner-city schools, teaching like food and nutrition education in schools. And one of the interesting aspects of that was that there was an allowance within the school programs for, you know, regional foods that could be prepared on-site. And the biggest barrier for change was, was not whether or not there was, you know, somebody with 150 miles from New York City, who could bring in all of that stuff. The real problem was the institutions didn’t really understand why anybody would do that. Right. They had spent, you know, cafeteria workers had spent the last, you know, 15-20 years, essentially just reheating food that had already been massively prepared. You know, so you saw institutional sort of laziness across the board. But the problem was never really the kids, the kids were easy to teach, easy to get them involved in trying new foods. And, you know, they were hungry. Hungry kids. You know, some of the administration was really on board. I mean, they actually saw the link between education and proper nutrition. And it wasn’t a hard sell to get people to spend a little bit more on an in-house chef, stuff prepared on-site that was talked about within the schools so that people understood where their food was coming from. Every aspect of that was easy. But as you’ve kind of moved up the food chain to what I would call like the bean counters, you started to see like the sort of eyes glaze over. But New York was trying to pivot, you know. And so from my perspective, the weirdest part is like we now have… I’m going to diverge for a second from where you were talking. We now have a vegan mayor, right? The reason why I’ve been following him for a very long time was because he was part of a program in inner-city schools called Meatless Mondays. And it was an ad agency executive who kind of gotten into this whole thing where he was like, I’m going to do something with my skills, and he just decided that this was going to be a big thing. And it’s a lever for change. And so the lever was Meatless Mondays, then becomes Meatless Tuesdays and then Wednesdays, and before you know it, you have the sort of vegetarian meals that are fed to kids. And so there was this pivot, even within my nonprofit, saying that like plant-based was the only option. I’m like, kind of, we’re in New York State, like, this is dairy. This is like this, you know, these are… this… You’re not growing arugula, like 12 months out of the year. This is absolutely ridiculous. Like, we want to have some degree of food sovereignty, we’re feeding a million kids a day in New York City. 60% of those meals are coming from the DOE. And those meals can be amazing. Or they can just be junk. You know, and really when it was plant-based, it was junk. Right, it was, you know, like bagels with jelly, or just really low, low nutrient value, but cheap commodity foods. And so I saw this paradigm shift happening within schools, a simultaneous again, with the notion that like people are really focused on where their food is coming from, their focus on cleanliness, they want to know that these food ingredients don’t have like 37 added emulsifiers and dyes and colorings and all this other stuff. And so it became kind of a big button issue for me. And Sacred Cow was like a methodology for us to kind of talk about like this plant-based movement, which is really been co-opted by the large manufacturing companies that are also responsible for the ultra-processed foods that we eat nowadays. Now I’m going to pivot coming back to you. The thing that I have actually found kind of interesting is that those same commodities companies have said, alright, well, what we need to do is take out the middleman of the protein producer, the chicken farmer, the beef farmer, and we’re just going to feed people these commodities. Right? And so they call it like upcycling now, right? They say like, we’re going to reuse these foods. And it’s plant-based proteins. And in essence, they’ve just cut out what is probably some of the most nutrient-dense food, you’re going to feed children and people and saying, in the name of efficiency, the best thing we can do is now feed these commodity grains to humans. And I’m like, Whoa, what the hell just happened?

Brandon Howley  24:37  

Yeah. Isn’t that crazy? I mean, honestly, I don’t… Yeah, that’s a tough one. Because I feel like there’s just a like you were saying it’s just a vast ocean of misinformation and misinterpretation, I think of what realistically a vegan/vegetarian diet could realistically do compared to a meat diet or just like some type of balanced diet, right? I think we’ve strayed so far off that map of, you know, balanced plates and things like that, that you’re starting to see nutrition deficiencies in these kids growing up and, you know, developmental issues. And, you know, we’re not really addressing the root cause of the problem, you know, we’re still wrestling with obesity and, you know, healthy living. So at the same time, you know, you’re saying, Hey, eat veggies, eat meatless diets, yada, yada, yada. But then you flip over the packaging, you look at the labels, and you see, like you’re saying 30-40 Different ingredients that are chemical-based, they’re not even natural. You know, they’re either a preservative, or a bonding agent, or some type of medium that’s outside of the vegetable itself that was making that product. Whereas if you turn over a piece of beef, or lamb or chicken or anything like that, it’s meat. But then you’re talking about, okay, going further back from the producer in the commodity. So what are these animals eating themselves? Right? Are they eating a vegetarian diet? Are they eating byproducts? Are they eating grass-fed, you know, it’s all these different spectrum of quality in my opinion. You know, when you look at beef, there’s not like, this is better than this one, this is just a matter of efficiency. And when you look at its efficiency from a beef producer side, you’re talking about consolidating your commodities not using as much, and getting away from that model. So I think that is where… I mean, we’re kind of low on the totem pole for the commodities guys, if they’re going to push products like that, then we got to figure out something on the fly for us cattle ranchers and producers to get going on that. I don’t know I disagree with making it a vegetarian or forcing that lever to be toward a vegetarian diet. I mean, I don’t know what do you think?

James Connolly  27:00  

Oh, 100%. I mean, I find the push back against regenerative agriculture and putting the animals back on the land. The aspects of that, the genuine pushback from people who are vegan and vegetarian identified, I find actually kind of interesting, because now you’re tagging on to the raising of animals that actually provides ecosystem function that can bring back biodiversity onto the landscape, that is part of a holistic sort of management of the land, that can hold on to water, they can do all of those things. And I think that, as the industry had pivoted, the beef industry have started to pivot, I think they started to actually find that there were huge benefits independent of what is the steak that’s going to end up on your plate or the food that’s going to end up on your plate, you can then start to market these things as, as everybody’s focused on the environments and holding water. And what is desertification look like? How does that happen? And the benefits that ruminant animals especially can provide, or even just the Biggest Little Farm had, just a really beautiful visual montage of like, putting cows on pasture, cow patties on the ground, putting chickens after them. They eat the larvae, you know, so that you’re not overrun by flies, you have this whole sort of ecosystem, that actually makes a lot of sense, that can be a visual interpretation for people who live in cities, who don’t have a relationship where their food is coming from, even understand why an integrated farm actually makes a lot more sense, and how far we’ve moved away from that, in this sort of efficiency landscape. 

Brandon Howley  28:41  

Yeah, I think that the integrated farm is really the key to the success of bringing back everything to a regional standpoint. You know, if you want a historical representation of what it would look like, if you tried to transition just to a commodities crop and forget about the raising ruminant animal side of the equation, go look at the Dust Bowl, and what happened there. I mean, that was a little bit more involved with the no-till or the till on the topsoil aspect of that, but, you know, they were going hard on that land and they weren’t putting anything back on it. You know, there weren’t any cross crops, there wasn’t any type of animals going on and putting, you know, manure fertilizer back down on that. They were overgrazing, they had no rotational you know, the ground and the nutrients are depleted, affecting the animals, and then it’s just a downhill effect. And what you’re saying about biodiversity is so true. If you don’t have an actual living animal that is consuming and then putting back down that nutrients, then you’re not getting that full cycle. You’re not getting that carbon sequestration, you’re not getting, you know, the nitrogen putting back into the ground. You’re not retaining water. I mean, there’s so many tiers, and we could go on for hours about that. And I’m so glad you’re teeing these questions up because you know, for me, it’s like that kind of stuff and that kind of thinking is like daily, like, I feel like that’s a common knowledge thing. But when I go into Dallas and I talk to the DISD. Or I go and I talk to these students or I go and talk to other ranchers that are conditioned on this, this conventional system, they’re about the ability to have peripherals of any other opportunity that might be… that might come up of making these small shifts, is something that they’re not willing to realistically entertain, because it’s a very scary, technical thing…. that they seemingly think it’s a very technical thing to get involved with. And that’s why they avoided it in the first place. But I think that that’s the root problem is that we lack the education, we lack the transparency. And there’s a campaign against meat that is currently going on right now that is so… it usurps everything that sustainable agriculture is working towards. When you try and just wholesale off an entire segment of the agricultural industry, and say that’s an irrelevant piece. And they’re the damaging piece. Well, like any good ecosystem, you need each input to work in symbio…. What’s the word? In a symbiotic relationship. I was gonna say symbyism. It’s a circle.

 

James Connolly  31:27  

Yeah, I remember, as Korea was a he’s one of the guys that we interviewed down in Chihuahua, Mexico. And the level of enthusiasm that man had for a dung beetle was like off the charts. Right? 

Brandon Howley 31:43

They are like so important. Oh, my God. 

James Connolly 31:45

Oh my god. Yeah. I mean, keystone species, right. I mean, dung beetles are the only ones who are breaking into these cow patties to provide ecosystem function for all of the other animals that are going to feed off that as well. They carve tunnels through that dung. And it’s so weird, like, yeah, like kid from Queens, like grew up in New York City, to get that enthusiastic about dung beetles? It’s like, you got to understand that there’s just so many elements of this that are so important for us to understand. Yeah, and, you know, I think it’s been sort of interesting, the degree to which I sort of follow a lot of things that are kind of tangential to the beef industry, the level of scrutiny that is on the beef industry, if you actually took that and transferred it to anything else, you would find all of the same problems, right. But there seems to be this one thing, where it’s like the beef industry is out… the level of damage that it does is… outperforms anything else? Right. And so like, sometimes a meme actually does so much more to get people to understand this, like, you have this hugely crowded city, smog everywhere, cars, and aluminum and concrete, and glass and all of this other stuff. And then you say these people are saying that these cows living on pasture are the reason why climate change is happening. You know, and so it’s like, it’s the level of ridiculousness that you get to, which is why I focused on like… I’ll focus on cashew production, which is horrific, right? Human rights abuses across the entire chain. If you focused on almond production in California if you focus on rice production globally if you focus on chocolate

Brandon Howley 33:30

Palm oil

James Connolly 33:31

Palm oil, like second leading cause of deforestation on the planet, but nobody ever talks about it. And it’s also like, the thing about palm oil I find really interesting is that when we had to get rid of hydrogenated vegetable oils, the industry like had to pivot very quickly. And they needed something that was going to stand at room temperature, but also could bake in the same way that hydrogenated oils were. And they didn’t want to use butter, because butter is too expensive. And you know, it’s not plant-based. So they pivoted heavily and strongly towards palm oil. Well, palm oil is, I mean, the level of destruction in Indonesia, and across the Southeast Asia is unbelievable. And the people who have benefited the most from it, are these one-percenters who live in these countries. They made billions off of it. And so it was sold as a way to kind of help with the developing world. But really what it did was it consolidated an entire industry that then became the darling of the ultra-processed food industry. And so now palm oil is in cosmetics, and it’s in over 70 to 80% of ultra-processed foods. Right? Yeah. And so like, why can’t we talk about all of the stuff that’s associated with that? But no, we just focus on beef, and every single day, there’s a new article, you know, and I don’t understand it.

Brandon Howley  34:53  

Right. Well, I think it goes so much farther back than then our lives. Well, yeah. Our lifetime. I think going back to the old Chicago days when you know, the meatpackers weren’t spun up on health and safety and people were getting like, getting wicked sick from eating beef, and you know all these problems, right? And then the government had to go in there and basically be like, Look, guys, you gotta up your standards, like you can’t have just like a half a beef laying on the ground and then think you can cut it and package it. But things like that, in our early history as an industry really didn’t set us up for success trying to relay that back to the consumer. So right, we’ve been fighting that since even like, oh, gosh, what was that, like the 1930s going into the 40s. And then, you know, since then, we’ve been trying to fight this conventional, we’re not a feedlot type of mentality. Because what else are people seeing, you know, they’re driving down Highway 20, they’re driving down I10, they’re seeing these massive feedlots with 1000s of cattle spread out on a barren land. And then you got like these dust clouds of just poop hanging over them, right, just because it’s just not well maintained. It’s not sprayed down, yada, yada. So you get all these, you know, human rights activists going out there and capturing these horrific, you know, pictures and videos of the treatment of these animals. And that is something that also needs to change. Like, yes, we’ve come a long way since the packers of Chicago, we’ve put some stop gaps in to help us out with that. But at the same time, we as producers need to put ourselves forward and say, and this is really what I’m getting at with saying you need to be customer-facing as a producer. You need to go out and change that narrative, right? Because that is their bread and butter ammo against us when you go and you try and talk to somebody selling an Impossible Burger or, you know, anything like that. You don’t have that guilty conscience or that dirtiness of the processing and all that. It’s a vegetable and we package it and then you eat it. And it’s as simple as that right? No harm, no foul. But what they’re negating is all of those facts that we were just talking about the land health, the dung beetles, the, you know, overall health of the animal themselves, you know. When you pack them into a feedlot like that they’re getting dosed with antibiotics. They’re getting and in this is all preemptive vaccines and antibiotics. This isn’t as needed. So those are the things that are really working against us as an industry. And when we as producers go out and say, Hey, we’re going to build in that transparency into our own operation, we’re going to take responsibility for how we raise our animals, that speaks volumes, volumes for people that are coming out and buying and don’t really trust the supply chain that’s out there because they have no background knowledge on where they’re buying their beef or where it was sourced from because, I mean, we’re even talking now about mislabeling, country of origins, things like that. This could say, Made in the US, but it was imported from Australia and then repackage the US and sold. So I mean, there’s different things that marketing-wise we’re trying to fix for producers. But I think consumer transparency is probably the biggest issue or uphill battle that we face in the re-education of, you know, how the environment works together with the animal and not the animal, just utilizing the environment to sustain is a flawed thinking, in my opinion, for right now where we’re at in the industry.

James Connolly  38:17  

I mean, I guess one of the things that I find most interesting is like the level of perversion that’s happened that takes something like manure, which is so amazing, you know, nitrogen and phosphorus and all of this stuff, that the consolidation of the animal industry has turned that into a toxic sludge, which is like, unbelievably wrong.

Brandon Howley  38:44  

It’s nuts, dude. Yeah. But it’s like any business, right? Anything that nature can do, we think we can do better. So I’m gonna take what it was naturally already doing. And then 10, fold it, and make it into a concentrate to sell at a premium price to all these ranchers struggling to figure out how to, you know, get into this rotational grazing. And I think that’s where a lot of this comes from, is that these old school ranchers shifting over to this regenerative agriculture still carry with them in those early years of that transition a lot of their old habits, right. They’re carrying those concentrated fertilizers with them. They’re carrying those herbicides and pesticides with them. And then they’re wondering, year three, like, hey, what, why isn’t all this working for me? Why isn’t my grass growing the way it needs to be growing? Why aren’t my cows gaining the way they need to be gaining? And then you go out there and look, and then there’s just cow patties, cow patties, cow patties everywhere, right? And there’s three-inch grass. So you know that they’re overgrazing – 2 to 3-inch grass, overgrazing. They’re not rotating. You got the patties out there, you obviously know there’s no dung beetles because nothing has been broken down in, you know, seven, eight days, and then you’re left telling them look, you know, this is what we agreed to do. These are the steps that you needed to take. And because you chose to carry some of that those old habits with you, you’re a little bit behind the eight ball on trying to recoup your land because it’s not like your land has this automatic reset button, you know, you need to titrate those out of the soil. You need it… you like the… any type of byproducts or any type of liquid fertilizer you got in there, that land needs time to re heal itself or to rebalance itself, I think is a better word. Instead of trying to inject whatever’s necessary in those, you know, six months into that ground to make it work. Let it do its thing. Go and cross-crop it. Get your summer and winter seeds. Do all that stuff, let your cattle manage it properly. There shouldn’t be a whole lot of guesswork in this, it’s a very straightforward process once you get into it. 

James Connolly  40:46  

So I want to pivot in like 70 different directions here. But I kinda want to talk about the ranch a little bit. So a part of your strategy, as you were kind of taking over and pivoting during COVID was to bring people to the ranch to have these dinners to sort of pull people from Dallas. And I remember actually hearing about… this as kind of a huge thing in Italy, where they were taking people out of the cities, bringing them to farms, people were picking their own vegetables, they were cooking, they were seeing where their stuff… in Italy is kind of a much different entity because it has like a really strong food culture. And so there’s an appreciation and talk about food in a way that’s like very different from that’s an American ethos. But even then they still needed to bring people out of the state. Think about where your food is coming to think of the farmer, think of what that land looks like, what is this dirt? You know, this deep, dark soils that you’re picking your tomatoes from? Like, what does that actually look like? What are you smelling when you’re smelling the terroir of stuff? So you decided to kind of build that into your business model and tell me how that’s going and the original impulse behind that.

Brandon Howley  41:55  

Okay, so it’s a four-prong thing not to make anything more complicated than it already is. We’ve diversified it in four very distinct areas. So first, we were approached by the DISD. And so we started cultivating the transparency with them by buying and selling our own cattle to the DISD, going in consulting and educating them on how to do regenerative agriculture for their Wayne Phillips Agriculture Center out in Seagoville. And then working with the students to find out hey, what are you interested in? How can we best serve you? Things like that to where we can almost guide very specific, very strategic curriculum towards those students.

James Connolly  42:36  

Tell me what DISD is.

Brandon Howley  42:38  

I’m sorry, that’s the Dallas Independent School District. 

James Connolly  42:41  

Got it. 

Brandon Howley  42:42  

So they have an Ag Center out in Seagoville – Wayne Phillips Agricultural Center. They approached me to come and help consult with them. And they wanted to start up a grass-fed program, and basically trying to take what A&M did with their storefront, their main Science Center, and implement that at the Seagoville location for these kids so that they can take not only from step one, you know, raising the animal from cow to weight. But taking that steer whatever to processing, dealing with those contracts, and then bringing it full circle back to the storefront on-site so that they can sell and continue the proliferation of their program without having to worry about budgetary constraints or what the DISD is able to allocate for them that year. So that was one piece that was our first piece. That got cultivated through talking at the farmers market with Career Technical Education Director. And that blossomed into something really quite amazing that we hope to push nationwide. The second piece is when COVID hit very much like the DISD, they were trying to see where they can go and how they can capitalize it was the chefs. So when COVID hit obviously, all the restaurants in Dallas closed down, but we were essential workers. So we continued on. And you know, one of the kind of aha moments that I had is that we had contracts or existing contracts with these restaurants. So they knew about us, they’ve used us before they felt comfortable with us. And I suggested to you know, a handful of them at first to come out to the ranch and I would basically curate a crowd of about 30 people to be bussed out to the ranch and connect with the chef and watch them kind of cultivate the meal in front of everybody and, you know, you have your cocktail hour and everybody kind of meets and you know, I’m there answering beef questions or, you know, giving history about the ranch. And they’re sitting out there in a pasture among the cows literally, you know, they’re watching, as sick as it sounds, they’re watching what they’re eating. You know, and it’s a really cool experience for these cats and I know a lot of ranches are probably doing this now because of the necessity of it. But you know the chefs out there in this beautiful serene outdoor kitchen cooking, in the sunsets. I mean people are walking around just interacting with the land and feeling what it is to be a ranch or a working ranch. I think people had this misinterpretation of what when somebody says a ranch, what it actually looks like most people are thinking like a piece of barren land with a trailer on it. Compared to what a working ranch really is, you know where you have functionality to it. So that was the second piece. The third piece was that we knew on our retail said that we needed to do more to put ourselves in front of the customer. So we cultivated a program called “Meet your Meat.” And what that essentially is, is for all of our customers that wanted to do a half or a whole, we invite them out and we get in what I call the cowmobile. It’s just my ‘84 Bronco, you know on super swampers, so it looks really sick. But we take him out there, we’re having some beers, having a good time, you know, it’s a very laid-back experience. We drive around the pasture and you know, I give them the highlights of kind of each steer. And this one’s gonna have a great brisket. This is looking good on the ribeye, you know, and I have like a fact sheet in front of me. And then they’re able to say, Okay, I want your tag 25, right. And then we take your tag 25. On the next round, we track it all the way through, we go over a custom cut sheet with them. And then at the end of that experience, they get to come back with everybody else that’s about a half or a whole and then basically have like a wine pickup party or what it would be like a wine pick a party, but you’d pick it up a ton of beef. So you know, I have like little snacks out there, we’ll cook hamburgers for everybody. We’ll have some wine, we’ll have some beer again. You know, with us, it’s always a happy hour.

Brandon Howley  46:25  

And then you get that experience. And you get to network with other people that are interested in that industry in buying and doing those types of things. And then our annual Roundup. So this is the last piece our annual Roundup is something that we’ve had every year just to make sure that we take an accounting of what we dropped for that year. But where we really found an opportunity as partnering up with a veteran rehabilitation program called “Heroes and Horses,” and they’re based out of Montana. They take these transitioning military members up to the Montana mountains for about six weeks. And you know, they beat them up and love on them. And then they come back, you know, with a solid mentorship network group. They got looped in with us. And what we do is we invite the public out to the ranch for two-day event, you get to watch us do the old cowboy style of roping, riding, and dragging them to the branding iron and you know, doing that piece of it. But what we’ve added on to is, you know, invited channel partners out there to come and set up their booths and talk about their piece of their involvement with the ranch and, you know, their future projections of what they’re trying to do. And I mean, we even invited competing ranches. I think Longbranch Farms is one that’s going to come out this year. And they have grass, beef, grass-fed beef, and they have chickens and pigs and stuff. It’s giving everybody an equal footing of transparency and ability to market themselves. And then we wrap everything up with a concert on Saturday night and everybody goes home happy.

James Connolly  47:46  

Do you have a date set for that?

Brandon Howley  47:48  

Yeah, so this year, it’ll be March 18 and 19th. Okay, and it’ll be at the ranch. So our landing page for that should be up on our website as of two days ago, I believe.

James Connolly  47:59  

And are you doing also camping on the land as well?

Brandon Howley  48:03  

We’re not doing camping. We are talking to Stout tents right now about setting up some type of glamping experience. But for right now what we’re doing… Our plates are pretty full.

James Connolly  48:17  

Okay. Cool. Yeah. I mean, it sounds amazing. And the photos I’ve seen in the ranch, it’s absolutely beautiful. Yeah.

Brandon Howley  48:25  

Thank you. Thank you. You gotta come down, man. Let’s get a drink. 

James Connolly  48:28  

So, yeah. We could totally talk about this all day. I do want to get into this…. the ice storm story. 

Brandon Howley  48:34  

Oh my gosh. Yeah. 

James Connolly  48:38  

So I found an article online. I was looking up your ranch and I think was called the examiner or one of these articles that came out. 

Brandon Howley  48:45  

Dallas Observer. 

James Connolly  48:46  

Yeah. And so tell me like, alright, so Texas got this ice storm once in a decade, right? At this point.

Brandon Howley  48:54  

So for those that don’t know Texas weather very well, we are not culturally adept to anything below 60 degrees. You’ll see walking around with puffies and beanies on at like 59. So I believe it was last year actually that the storm blew through and that was last February specifically. So we always have these kind of crazy winters where it’s very mild, like 70-80 degrees all the way up. And then February for some reason, February has just been popping off in these past couple of years. And that was probably the worst. I’m gonna call it a Texas blizzard that we’ve ever had. I’ve never seen in my life, but we were without water. We were without electricity for like six to seven days straight. We have to go out every morning, break up the lakes with ice, you know, going out there and roping calves off of it because what would happen is that these little calves would them wander out on this ice. They’ve never seen ice before and they’ve always seen like being out there so they will wander out onto this lake. Course everybody in the north knows Hey, The further out you go the thinner the ice gets. So what would happen is they would start slipping around and they fall in. So I mean, we were literally on horseback from like sunup to sundown on those, like super, I mean, it was probably zero to maybe like five degrees on a couple of these days, in the early mornings, and then in the late night. So, you know, we would go out there we’d see a calf on the lake, we’d have to ride up, you know, we do the old cowboy style where you just tie or you dolly off to the saddle and you go throw the rope to the calf, and hopefully, you catch it around the head or the butt somehow, and we drag him off the leg. But with that with the monitoring of the water and making sure the calves are getting off. We were riding in the back 40. And we saw one of our cows down and we couldn’t figure it out. We’ve always had this problem with our animals getting attacked. So we ran over there and literally a whole front leg is missing from this cow. And I mean, it is a gnarly scene we were in. And it’s relatively fresh, we’re thinking it was probably within the last 12 hours that got mauled. So we call Texas Parks and Wildlife. They come out there and they look at this. I’m like, what is going on? I was like, Is this a lion? Because crazy enough, we had an exotic game ranch across the street that owned a lion. And that thing got out twice, not once, twice. Okay, like walk up and down the county road. It was a spooky, spooky event. Not a cool thing. So they’re like Texas Parks and Wildlife came up to me and they’re saying, you know, we’ve been having problems with the panthers and cougars. I’m like, Are you kidding me in East Texas and I’ve never in my entire life seen a panther or a cougar out there. And they say kind of what we were talking about the deforestation in Mexico. And you know, all the industrialization that’s happening there is pushing these jungle animals, these secluded animals kind of up towards the north, and they’re migrating from Mexico to the east side of Texas. And apparently, we had one ducking out in one of our old dead trees that we call it the boneyard now but yeah. We got it on trail cam one time and it at night, it looks like a black panther, to be honest with you. I mean, it’s a big cat. It’s a very big cat. Yeah, just trying to live through that and know and being recognized for living through that was awesome. Thank you, Dallas Observer. But you know, the good team, it’s all about team and family. Right? If you don’t have a good team behind you, you’re not going to get things done in the hard times. You know, I really have everything to thank for, you know, those guys that would take over shifts. And you know, it wasn’t like me ride down there from sunup to sundown, it was, you know, I would work for six hours, then the next guy would come on and he’d ride. You know, we weren’t able to really drive anywhere because everything was frozen. It doesn’t like snow, like it does for you guys up there. I mean, it packs down, and then it just ice and then you’re done for like three or four days until it thaws out. So pretty much we’re on horseback getting blasted by the wind and snow this whole time. And yeah, if I didn’t have those guys to rotate out with, I don’t know if I could pull that off. Because I mean, I already got frostbite in the tips of my fingers. So that’s not an easy day,

James Connolly  53:21  

We had… when Sacred Cow first was first released, we had to do it during COVID as well. And so all the festival circuit – film festival circuits were closed. They weren’t really taking submissions anymore, or anything like that. So we ended up kind of like creating a platform to get people to watch it because we had within our group we had close to 2 million subscribers through different people we had reached out to who were in the health and wellness spectrum, regenerative ranchers, people, you know, environmentalists and all this other stuff. But we had gotten an invite to go on Joe Rogan. He just moved down to Texas. So Diana, goes down there. And she’s gonna meet up with Robb Wolf. And they’re just going to go on Joe Rogan. And they’re going to talk about the film and do all this other stuff. She gets down there. And then ice storm comes in. So like, everything gets shut down. No electricity, no filming no podcast with Joe Rogan, knowing she’s trapped in a hotel for like three or four days. Everything gets postponed and all of that stuff. She’s like, calling me every, like, 48 hours just being like, hey, you know, like, I don’t think this is happening. Yeah, I mean, it was just like COVID and then ice storm, and then all of that stuff. We were just like, what is up with this getting this film out to people? 

Brandon Howley  54:46  

Yeah, yeah. Oh, my gosh, but it was I mean, that is such a fantastic mission that you guys set off on with that. I mean, that I think really reestablished a new narrative for the industry and kind of gave perspective on a very convoluted issue.

James Connolly  55:03  

Thank you. So it’s a happy Hollow Ranch. Chuck Howley started it. This Brandon Howley, he’s taking over. Tell me how many head of cattle you have right now.

Brandon Howley  55:13  

So right now, between us in the Waxahachie division, we’re at 637 head. Yeah. So back in the day, when we were first getting, you know, scrappy and lean with everything, we were probably at about 225 for our total herd population. So we were like, bare-bones, starting to have to think about maybe selling the whole thing off, because really trying to spin that up from the ground up is not very profitable when you break it all down.

James Connolly  55:44  

Yeah, I mean, I think it’s a wonderful operation. And I really appreciate your time coming on, and we’ll get it out there. We’ll promote it. And then any links that you have to your annual celebration coming up or anything like that, please let me know. And we’ll put that out there as well. But thank you so much for the podcast is great.

Brandon Howley  56:04  

Absolutely. Thanks, James. I appreciate it a bunch man. Thank you for having me on. If you guys want to check us out. Check us out at Happy hollow beef.com or on Instagram at Happy hollow.beef.

Diana Rodgers, RD  56:15  

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