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Have you ever dreamed of leaving your office job to start a ranch? That’s what Matt Skoglund did. Matt started his career as a lawyer in Chicago, then moved to Montana to work for National Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Even though Matt found working for the NRDC to be interesting and fulfilling, he felt like something was missing.
That “something” turned out to be bison. In 2018 Matt and his wife Sarah started North Bridger Bison Ranch and haven’t looked back since. The Skoglunds have almost doubled the size of their herd and take pride in the quality of their products and their humane practices. But that’s not all; Matt is driven by his desire to leave an environment he wants his kids to live in. The regenerative practices at North Bridger Bison Ranch create rich soil, biodiversity, and beautiful landscapes.
On this episode, Matt sits down with my co-host, James Connolly, to chat about:
- What it takes to start a bison ranch
- Bison vs. Cattle
- The flawed argument of eating plant-based for the environment
- The story of the first bison harvested from the ranch
- Lack of emphasis on the benefits of regenerative ranching on the ecosystem
- The rural/urban divide
- Raising kids on a bison ranch
Resources:
Buffalo for the Broken Heart by Dan O’Brien
Establishing a New Home for Bison to Rome
Sustainable Dish Episode 230: Oliver Milman
Raw Deal by Chloe Sorvino
Dirt: The Erosion of Civilization by David R. Montgomery
Nourishment by Fred Provenza
Connect with North Bridger Bison:
Website: North Bridger Bison
Instagram: @northbridgerbison
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.
If you’re ready to take your support for a nutritious, sustainable, and equitable food system to the next level, join my Global Food Justice Alliance community on Patreon. You will have access to ad-free podcasts, exclusive videos, a discussion community, and much more. Go to sustainabledish.com/join to support my work.
For the month of February, running a free community blood sugar challenge. You’ll learn how to use a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) to guide your food choices, plus a free ebook and access to live Zoom calls.
I’m also partnering with Levels to offer two free months when you sign up as a member to get the CGM without a prescription. Just visit sustainabledish.com/bloodsugar to sign up.
And if you are listening to this after our challenge has ended, you can still get access to my blood sugar challenge ebook and the recorded Zoom calls, plus the special offer from Levels.
Transcript:
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, 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 global food justice.org. Thanks again for listening. And now, on to our show.
(Blood Sugar Challenge Ad) Diana Rodgers, RD
Hey Everyone. I’m really excited to let you know about the free community blood sugar challenge that I am running for the month of February for my followers. You’ll learn how to use a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) to find out how food impacts your individual body so that you can make the best choices when it comes to your diet. It was a complete game changer for me, and I recommend CGMs to all of my nutrition clients. I’m partnering with Levels to offer two free months when you sign up as a member to get the CGM without a prescription. You just need to visit sustainabledish.com/bloodsugar – all one word – and enter your email to get the free ebook, access to the live Zoom calls, and this special offer from Levels. And if you are listening to this after our challenge has ended, you can still get access to my blood sugar challenge ebook and the recorded Zoom calls, plus the special offer from Levels. Learning about how food impacts your blood sugar is valuable information we all should know. Visit sustainabledish.com/bloodsugar to sign up.
James Connolly
So this is James Connolly for Sustainable Dishe’s podcast. Matt’s actually kind of been following me for a little bit. We’ve sort of touched base a couple of times, you know, we sort of live in two different worlds. I’m in New York City. And Matt is outside of Bozeman, Montana, but I’ve kind of wanted to bring him on. His name is Matt Skoglund. Him and his wife, Sarah, are first-generation bison ranchers. And we’ll kind of go into some of the origin story because I actually find it enormously fascinating. I do think that there is a generation of kids who don’t want to spend their lives going from cubicle to cubicle; as one of my best friends says, you know, they put you into crib, and then they put you into a school room. And then they put you into a cubicle, and they put you into a casket. And so you didn’t spend your life in a box. And so that so I’m having this conversation in my head with Matt because I’ve listened to you interviewed a bunch of times on a number of different podcasts. And I get the sense that you’ve always had that in the back of your mind. Like, I can’t live a life going from box to box. And so I’m wondering if you can kind of like introduce yourself with the name of your ranch, and then kind of talk about your origin story because I do find it endlessly fascinating.
Matt Skoglund
Sure. Well, first, you know, thank you so much for having me on. I’m a big fan of what you do and thrilled to be here. So yeah, so my name is Matt Skoglund. And my wife Sarah and I, we have two kids, Otto and Greta. And they’re five and nine. And we started North Bridger Bison, our Bison Ranch. We started it from scratch in 2018. And it’s located – we’re up here in the Shield’s Valley, which is about 30 miles northeast of Bozeman, Montana, really beautiful area, really, you know, still very much a ranching agricultural valley, got the Bridger mountains on one side and the Crazy Mountains on the other. But yeah, it was a long, winding, very nonlinear path and getting here. So I was born and raised in suburban Chicago, zero background in farming or agriculture, ranching whatsoever. And, you know, without getting too deep into the weeds, I fell in love with fly fishing in high school. And that was kind of my entrance into conservation. And, you know, becoming a passionate environmentalist, went to college in the Northeast, and was introduced to hunting in college by this amazing guy in Montgomery in Vermont. And that just totally, you know, that was a huge, huge had a huge impact on me and how I looked at the world and food, and absolutely loved living in Vermont and a more rural lifestyle, and then have this huge passion for conservation and environmental work, or for this interest in environmental work. And so I ended up I went to law school and graduated from law school in 2005, clerked for a federal magistrate judge in Chicago, joined a large law firm in Chicago, spent a couple of years there. I knew it wasn’t for me long term, but it’s a good place to start. So Sarah and I had fallen in love with the West and Montana, you know, the Weston High School, Montana, and college. And then just a variety of things in both my life and Sarah’s life made it clear that you know, life is short. And you know, the cubicle, you know, story is yeah, I connected with I connect with that big time. I just did not want to, you know, that’s not the life I wanted to live. And so we moved to Bozeman in the fall of ’08, a month after we got married, and I ultimately got a job with the Natural Resources Defense Council, the NRDC doing non-litigation policy work there, and I spent 10 years there, ultimately becoming the director of the Northern Rockies office and worked on various issues from multiple wildlife issues, also worked on the campaign to the working against the proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska. And but the big issue I worked on was bison. And over that time, we had two kids. And as much as I liked NRDC and respect the work that they do, I was really craving to do something tangible, land-based conservation based on my own. And I guess the example I give with environmental policy work is, you know, I’d have like a coffee meeting with a state agency official, and a federal agency official and say, you know, you guys really need to do X., And they’d say, Matt, we couldn’t agree more with you. But politically, that’s a non-starter. And then you go back to your office; you’re like, what are we doing here? Like, I have no, I have no control over this process. So much of it is it’s political in nature. And so you, it’s just, it’s, you know, it’s important work. But it becomes a slog and becomes frustrating. And so I, you know, the idea of doing something on a much smaller scale, but something that’s tangible that you can see, touch feel that just like really appealed to me. And I literally read an article in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle about the National Bison Association having their 2017 conference in Big Sky, and the device industry was growing. And they were looking for producers, and I read it, and I’m not kidding at all. Like I read it, I was like, wow, like, that’d be so cool for someone to do that. But I’m from suburban Chicago. Clearly, that’s not me. And that went on with my day. And then months later, it just like, was still kicking around my brain. And then I read this book, Buffalo for the Broken Heart by Dan O’Brien. And he started Wild Idea Buffalo in South Dakota is a hero of mine. And he pioneered with the modern, what they call field harvesting bison. So instead of trucking into a slaughterhouse, which is super high stress for bison, you just drive out in the pasture, wherever they are that day, and kill a bison with a headshot with a rifle. It as ethical and humane as it gets, leads to incredible meat quality. And so that was like an instant light bulb moment. And that’s where we said, All right, let’s take a closer look at this. And we got serious about it. And I met with a holistic management consultant, and went to his… he had a four-day workshop on a Bison Ranch, and just kept, you know, just getting more and more excited as we dug deeper into the details and put a business plan together. And yeah, and then we ultimately found this piece of ground out here and started from scratch in 2018.
James Connolly
Yeah, I mean, I kind of it’s like some part of me says, you could easily convince a, you know, somebody like me to go and do what you did. I think it sounds absolutely wonderful. How on earth did you get your wife on board?
Matt Skoglund
You know, see, you know, as Sarah is amazing. And she… yeah, she was totally on board. You know, it was interesting when we, when we got really serious about it. You know, we’d lived in Montana for almost 10 years. And we lived right in the heart of Bozeman. And we had two kids in this amazing, you know, community of friends. And Sarah, you know, I think we’re both like, I guess you’re dreamers. Like, we like to dream and think big, and we, you know, talk about that stuff and support one another. And she loved it. She was excited about it. However, she was very clear. She said, Look, I’m all in. But it’s got to be within an hour of Bozeman like I am not we’re not moving seven hours away and starting over, like our communities here. And so So that was her… that was her only, you know, those the only sideboards that she put on it. And we both I mean, I guess it kind of goes without saying, I hope that like, when we got serious about it, we just we went back and forth, playing devil’s advocate with one another. Like, I always tell people, like, you know, like, like, the appeal of this is so obvious, right? It’s just, you know, Google ranching in Montana, and you see, mountains and animals and grass and beautiful sunsets and sunrises. Like, that’s the easy part. But we were really like, Okay, what’s what are the hard days look like? And what are the trade-offs? And what are we giving up and we knew it’d be a massive, massive lifestyle change. And so we really tried to like, just put ourselves in every scenario imaginable, not to talk ourselves out of it, but just to make sure that you know, kind of that gut check, like are, you know, are we really going to do this? Are we prepared for this? Because this is a huge change. And we ultimately decided, yes, we, you know, we always say, I mean, this is the absolute truth that we put so much into this in 20, late 2017, early 2018 and got so excited about If that at some point, the risk of not doing it became greater than we were like, we might crash and burn, or we might decide this was a horrible decision. But we have to try, like at this point. So that’s where we got to.
James Connolly
That’s great. Yeah, I mean, I do think, I mean, I kind of want to dive in a little bit into how you got into holistic management,-wide bison, and just some of the aspects of because you kind of set yourself up into a niche that may work well on paper, you know, just in terms of onsight slaughter, and any number of different issues that are not part of that sort of narrative for cattle ranching or just ranching in general, anything dealing with room and animals in the United States. Now it is, so I wonder if you can dive a little bit into some of the thought processes and the things that you weren’t willing to compromise on?
Matt Skoglund
Sure. You know, so, as I said, you know, I worked for years on bison issues at NRDC. So I had totally fallen in love with the species knew a lot about it, tracked, you know, news articles and just bison were played a prominent role in my world for many, many years. And that article in the Chronicle about bison ranching is what put it on my radar. So, bison just, it just made sense to me. But I should say, like, you know, it’s funny because I think some people think, you know, because you raised bison, you must not like cattle, when like nothing could be further from truth. I love cattle. And I think it’s just totally, you know, it’s the saying it’s not the cow is the how is totally depends on, you know, what, you know, there are definitely trade-offs between the two species. And it just like anything, it comes down to what you’re interested in, personally, and so for me with bison, like I said, I love the animal, and then, you know, the fact that they are, you know, very hardy. They’ve been on this landscape for 1000s of years. So, like, when it’s 40, below, they don’t care; they breed on their own, they calf on their own, defend themselves against carnivores very well. And then, you know, they also have, you know, from a business standpoint, which this is a business, you know, we’re not a nature reserve, or, you know, a nonprofit, like we’re a working ranch with a meat business in bison, because they’re so such a, it’s so much more of a niche industry, and there’s still fewer, so many fewer bison, they fetch a higher price per pound than other species. So yeah, so for all those reasons, it just, it was kind of always bison, we didn’t really consider anything else. It just was like an open… felt like a natural progression for us.
James Connolly
Yeah, and, you know, I think that, I’d love for you to kind of talk about some of the aspects of what bison do that, that maybe cattle don’t, and how they operate very differently from animals, I mean, even just in your ecosystem, but in general, because we used to have the sort of range land for bison was you say, mid-Canada, all the way down to Florida, into certain parts of Mexico for 1000s of years. And so some of the aspects that I find really interesting about them is that they would kind of create this wave as they moved, you know, moving seeds and bringing fertility as they went, you know, there’s so many aspects of the sort of building of topsoil that is really heavily dependent upon them. You know, it’s just such an interesting story. So I wonder if you want to kind of talk a little bit about, you know, what you’ve learned and stuff like that?
Matt Skoglund
Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s a, obviously, it’s an extraordinary story that there used to be, say, 30 to 60 million bison, covering this massive area that you just outlined. And then, you know, we push them literally to the right to the edge of extinction. And at one point, we thought they’re going extinct. Like in the late 1800s, the Smithsonian sent William Hornaday, a scientist to eastern Montana to kill a couple bison, because at that point, they said, bison are about to go extinct. We need to kill a couple and bring them back to the Smithsonian so we can show future generations. This animal once roamed this country. So it’s yeah, it’s a wild story. But I think you know, what we’ve… let me run I think, with bison and cattle, I think they have a lot more in common than there are differences. You know, they’re both, as you said, both ruminant grazing animals, which I always say, and I believe this, they have these magical stomachs where they don’t just survive, but they thrive on grass. And grass is very simple. If sunlight, water, soil, grows grass, and these animals thrive on. And so I think you know, and I should also say that we’re very clear that you know, we are a ranch we are… this is a managed landscape. We have fences. So these are not wild bison. They don’t have the ability to migrate hundreds and hundreds of miles. But that historical context is super important because the entire, you know, particularly the Great Plains in the western US, it co-evolved for millennia, with grazing animals, most notably bison, but also elk, pronghorn, mule deer, all sorts of these animals. And as you know, they come into an area, and they would have tremendously high impact. They would graze, poop, pee, wallow, trample, you know, really rough the place up, if you will, but then they end so over a short amount of time, and then they leave for a long time. So in this entire landscape, and all of it, the grass is birds, creeks, rivers, evolved with this short duration, high intensity, impact, and then a long recovery. And so now in the world of ranching out here, with Holistic Management and regenerative ranching, folks are essentially trying to mimic that behavior, you know, biomimicry. They’re trying to mimic the way this landscape was historically grazed. And you can do it with Bison, and you can do it with cattle, a lot of the most progressive stuff being done with cattle. So here, we’re doing it with bison. And, you know, I think some of the things we I’ve noticed is that one, the herd instinct, and bison is just unbelievably strong, that they want to stay together. So a friend of mine said, they’re almost like their own little, you know, the type of mob grazing, they’re their own little mob grazing group. They just, they like to stay together, that it’s all about strength and security with the herd. And that’s very helpful for us. And, and for the landscape. They also, they seem to prefer, and I’ve heard this from a lot of folks that raised bison, they like higher ground. And the assumption is that it’s just in their DNA, to want to be able to look out over the landscape and see wolves and whatever else might be out there. So they seem to really like to bed down in higher areas. So you know, away from creeks, they walk farther to water. And then as I said, you know, they breed on their own. They calf on their own, they’re built for this landscape, they tolerate cold, like apparently they don’t feel cold, like it doesn’t register until forty below. And then they tolerate heat just fine. They defend themselves know that herd instinct, they defend themselves very well against carnivores. Oh, and then from a biodiversity standpoint, they, you know, they wallow. They, which is they aggressively roll on the ground, and create these little micro depressions, you know, on the landscape that both that help other species of both plants and animals, and then they shed their coat every spring. So all this luxurious bison hair just falls all over the landscape. And all these other critters, and particularly birds use that hair. I was just reading this morning, in the article you sent me you know that, you know, that said essentially wherever bison are, ground-nesting birds are using their hair to line their nests, and you have much higher nest success, chick recruitment, chick survival. So there’s yeah, there’s just you know, a lot of great things that come with bison.
James Connolly
Yeah, I sent that to you just because it was a… it’s a Sunday Times, New York Times who, for the most part, have not had anything good to say about meat for a very long time. But the science section that the name of the article is: Establishing a New Home for Bison to Rome. So I always love this sort of weird synchronicities that kind of happen when you’re just like, you’re sitting there, you’re like, alright, well, meat is bad for you. But we’re going to put these animals back on the landscape. But what are we… we’re never going to touch them. We can’t eat them. You know, we can talk about all of the… but the biodiversity advantages of having animals back on the land. But we have to make sure that we just don’t eat meat anymore. You know, it’s so weird to me, like how it’s an interesting conversation to have somebody who grew up in an urban environment as yourself and myself to… my first job was in a butcher shop. So I didn’t, you know, I worked for four years in a butcher shop. And then in my late 30s, I was able to do that again, and work for a number of Irish butchers in London. So I had a different experience than the normal suburban dweller. But you kind of talk about over and over again, the disparity that kind of happens between these sort of monoculture landscapes cities, right. And then you have the reality of that farming investment. In the ranching environment that is feeding those cities and the divide between the two. It’s just so absolute. Right. It’s just… it’s such an interesting thing. And from your perspective, that has to be like even more galling, to kind of come at it from the urban part in the first part of your life. And then now this other side.
Matt Skoglund
Yeah, no, I mean, I find it… it’s maddening. You know, candidly, it drives me. At times, you just want to pull your hair out, you know, you’re, like you said, and I’m an avid New York Times reader, and they seem just repeatedly to paint with the broadest brush possible, and do ultimately a tremendous disservice to science, to the planet, to their readers, by not telling the actual story – nuanced story of farming, ranching, fiber, food, and that it’s not all made in the same way. And, yeah, it’s just, and also, I think, one of the most maddening things for me, is just the some of the messaging that is 100%, black and white in direct conflict with itself, you know, and we actually, it was a passion project a few years ago, but you know, I work for this big environmental group. And they have a, as you know, bees and butterflies are tanking, they are not doing well, globally. And the cause of that is loss of habitat, from bad farming practices and the use of pesticides on these farms. And, so you’ll get an email that says, you know, eat plant-based for the environment, Meatless Monday, on and on and on. And then the next day, you get an email that says, you know, send us $50 to save the bees and the butterflies. And knowing that when that general messaging eat plant-based for the environment, the reality is for, you know, the majority of the people that are getting those emails live in urban environments, and what happens they go into a Whole Foods they buy Beyond beef burger or an Impossible Burger. And they… I don’t… like, I feel bad for those people, because they’re trying to do the right thing. You know, their intentions are absolutely dead on. But they’ve been told that anything plant-based, it’s good. It’s just, you know, it’s… nothing was injured or harmed. It’s wonderful for the planet, you know, unicorn dust and rainbows, you know, emanate from the packaging. And so when we both know that those, you know, those products, the foundation for those products are, you know, industrial monoculture farms that are ecological wastelands. And your colleague, Diana, who’s amazing, you know, it was, you know, says there’s no such thing as a bloodless diet. And that when the, you know, when the combine goes out, to harvest those crops, like whatever bunnies and rabbits and chipmunks are in the field, like they’re not dodging them. So we’re all killing stuff. It’s just a question of who’s doing it and how they’re doing it. And so that’s this, you know, so there’s plant-based messaging around, you know, that ultimately, is detrimental to the bees, and the butterflies they’re trying to save. And then we’re out here on our ranch, and looking at our ranch and our neighbor’s ranches. And there are bees and butterflies everywhere in the summer, in all sorts of different colors and species and all this different stuff. And it would drive me nuts, you know. And so we made T-shirts with our bison logo, and we switched it. So inside the logo, it’s bumblebees and monarch butterflies, and it just says save bees, and butterflies eat grass-fed meat. And so anyway, that’s just one example of the, you know, totally conflicting information that again, well-intentioned people are, you know, unfortunately, getting this information. And yeah, it just seems to only be increasing.
James Connolly
Yeah. And I think for us… I just interviewed a guy who, he’s a Guardian reporter. He wrote a book on the insect crisis. And two of the main points that kind of came out of that was things that I hadn’t known before was that we have the sort of characteristic pollinator species, the ones that we like on posters and all the stuff. He said that flies are actually huge pollinators. That they’re larger body messes. They’re actually more tolerant to different conditions. So too hot or too cold. They’re actually more tolerant to it. But we don’t consider them charismatic enough to kind of put on to like T-shirts or anything like that. But he was talking about how in certain countries like Finland and Germany we’ve seen close to it, like in Finland, I think it was upwards of 90% of insect species are, like just gone. And we’ve seen that over the course of the last 30 years. Now, if you walk into a supermarket, you’re, you know, you walk through the fresh fruits and vegetables aisles, and you go to your get your almond flour or anything like that you just see, a huge percentage of all of that stuff is so heavily dependent upon wild pollinators and domesticated pollinators. And we’re seeing a total war against them, you know, in order to build the produce, right. The almond farms, the ones that we see, like we do… we just did a drone flyover for our next film. And it’s just miles and miles of almond farms and pistachio farms, every single one of those are so heavily dependent upon just, you know, taking everything out of that environment, groundwater depletion, which then kind of poisons the community because all of these different heavy metals that have been sitting in the water, because the water levels have drained so much now that water in essence becomes kind of toxic for consumption. But then you see groundwater depletion, and you see pesticide exposure. And you see any number of different things, you see this blank landscape, and if somehow convincing people that this is the alternative – the future that we want to look to, you know, and so I see a lot of these ranches and they’re like, well, we don’t use pesticides. We don’t use any of these chemicals on our environment. And we’re producing highly nutritive food, which is taken us like, you know, many of the people who have kind of advocated for meat consumption for a very long time, are still trying to convince people that need is a healthy food, right? That dairy products are health food, you know, so it’s such an uphill climb. And to Diana’s credit, like she was able to kind of distill huge amounts of information, and, you know, down to a 90-minute, you know, argument against this worldview. And she’s continuing to do the hard work. But she’s equally frustrated by a lot of the policymakers who will sit down with her and say that this is something that’s really important, but we have to continue business as usual. You know, so I can definitely see the frustration, especially with people who are advocating for regenerative agriculture, for putting animals back on the land, you know, to producing food that actually is in harmony with the environment that tries to biodynamic evolution, and all of those different things.
Matt Skoglund
Yeah, no, it’s so well said, and, you know, for us, it’s like, I was just having this conversation with someone yesterday that, as I said, we’re you know, we have no background in agriculture whatsoever. And so we’re, you know, it’s not like we, our family has been doing this for generations in a conventional way. And then one day, we were like, Hey, what’s this regenerative thing? Or maybe we could, maybe we should change for this reason or that reason, like, we came to ranching because of the environmental benefits that come with it. And you know, regenerative agriculture, obviously, a very hot term and issue right now, which is great. But I would, it’s so clear to me that within the world of regenerative agriculture, that raising animals regeneratively, for me, is the easiest and most efficient way to achieve regenerative goals. Like I think, you know, if you’re like exempt, you know, if you’re trying to have regenerative arguments like that, just to me seems very, very difficult. And even an average field of spinach would seem, you know, you’re raising spinach, you’re at war with anything that wants to eat your spinach. And then, whereas, like on a ranch, the science is clear that the more biodiverse our ranches, so the more species of grasses, wildflowers, forbs, bees, butterflies, birds, etc. The more resilient the land is, the healthier our animals are. And then the healthier their meat is. And then the healthier the people that eat their meat are. And this great scientist, Fred Provenza, does an amazing job writing and talking about it. And so, for us, you know, we ultimately, when we talk about our… when people ask us about our management practices, we manage for biodiversity. All stop. We do it for two reasons. We do it one for biodiversity, because biota, you know, we love biodiversity, we want this place to be teeming with biodiversity. And then to we do it because that’s in the best economic interest for our ranch. Our ranch will be the most productive, the more biodiversity it is. And then kind of going back we were saying earlier, whether it’s a Black Angus cattle or a bison, there happen to be these magical animals that have these magical stomachs that can walk around and graze the grass and thrive on it, get very big and provide hundreds of pounds of unbelievably healthy meat. And we’re obviously… we’re not plowing. We’re sucking carbon out the atmosphere, we’re storing carbon in the soil, I mean, all these different things that come along with it. And so I just, if I’m …when I look at the regenerative agriculture movement or space, like regenerative ranching is, again, I’ll just say the easiest, most effective way to achieve regenerative goals. And I wish I… you know, I think that message will slowly but it’s getting out there slowly but surely, when we see it with our customers, people who weren’t aware of it, and now are and but yeah, it’s a that’s why I’m so grateful for the work that you and Diana do, because it’s just, it’s gonna take a while.
James Connolly
Yeah, I mean, I do think like, I recently went to a book publishing opening. It was for Chloe Sorvino, who is a food and agriculture writer for Forbes. And it’s primarily about the book is actually really profound. I did a podcast with her about a month and a half ago. But it goes into the sort of total corporate takeover of food production, primarily meat production. So you were talking about it specifically in terms of COVID. But we knew we were creating a problem a long time ago with Tyson and Perdue and JBS in essence, kind of taking over the whole sort of production side of meat from slaughter to sale. And so she wrote a book about it. And so I ended up going to the opening. There were so many people there. There were so many people, and they were like young, they were hip kids. Like, they were not the demographic of what I thought would be sitting at a bookstore for a book opening on meat. And they’re all asking the same question. They’re saying, like, how do we support the food that we eat in a way that makes us feel like we’re contributing with our dollar to something that actually feels right? And they knew a lot more than I ever would have expected. The only point that they had, if I can kind of digress for a moment, the only point that they had was the sort of less meat better meat argument, which I just find highly problematic because what we’re seeing in New York City, specifically, is we have a mayor who is quote-unquote, vegan. He eats fish, but and eggs and whatever else. So he’s… when he’s, you know, writing his cookbooks or telling other people what to do, he’s telling everybody to move towards plant-based, but he’s also taking away from kids in public schools. And so Meatless Mondays was the beginning. Vegan Fridays is his new sort of push for that. And so what you see is a sort of hardline move to kind of take away foods from kids who are getting anywhere from 60% of their meals from the Department of Education. And that stuff can be total junk, right? Yeah, Impossible Foods lobbied really hard for GRAS status, which is generally recognized as safe foods, so that they could actually start to get into DOE food. And so what we see is overall, sort of switch over to getting kids, you know, you see, think of the downstream effects of taking away meat from children. And then the educational like outcomes that will kind of happen with that when you’re not getting this highly nutritive food, nutrient-dense food. And then you’re filling it with whatever plant-based junk food is the new like, junk food. Does your, you know, whether it’s meatless burgers, or, you know, what… a margarine is plant-based butter now. You know, yeah, so, like, let’s kind of go back a little bit. So you started… you found this plot of land? Had you had access to getting an initial herd? Like, what was your herd size? And like, where are you now in terms of that, and then, like, give me some kind of like, origin story of like, the first day when you close your fences, and you had like, animals on the land?
Matt Skoglund
Yeah, yeah. So. So, you know, I’ll start slightly earlier because, and I think, you know, we talked about this before we started recording about, like, you know, younger, you know, like, people in the 20s and 30s, that are interested in say, leaving the city and trying their hand at farming or ranching or something. And as first-generation ranchers like, we’re very passionate about sharing our story and helping others. And so for me, you know, I had other different entrepreneurial ideas and some, they were either bad ideas or I chickened out. And so through the Bison Ranch process, like I knew that we weren’t going to have every single detail ironed out ahead of time, but I knew I… but like fencing, for example, it’s like, I knew that there are other bison ranches that exists, and they had figured out fencing and I could talk to them and that there were you know, we could if we could find bison there, we could acquire bison, you know, some of those like, nuts and bolts piece of it, I kind of saved those for later and it was the bigger like business plan, lifestyle, all those things that were like I felt were the gut check piece were the most important part of it. And then we found this land. And this was literally the only land we looked at in person, we kept looking online, but nothing else came close in location price like it was this or nothing. And we got under contract with as long a closing date as possible. And then we really went into what I call, you know, sponge mode where we just tried to absorb as much as possible. And we were very lucky in the sense that the folks in the bison ranching community in Montana, were incredibly welcoming, and incredibly generous with their time. And we got to tour a couple of ranches, and I got to develop a couple mentors along the way. And each time, it just kept demystifying it, and it was like, Okay, I think, you know, we can do this, we can do this. It just kept like, you know, it was interesting, we… I always had this insecurity of like, if you didn’t grow up ranching, you can’t be a rancher, and even when it was under contract, I was like, Man, I just feel like every, a lot of this is falling into the like, these pieces are falling into the right places. But sure, I’m like, I just, I’m, there must be something someone’s not telling us. Like, I was waiting for someone to be like, did they tell you about, you know, XYZ? And like, ah, that’s why we can Yes, and but they never did. And we just kept, you know, we said, well, we’ll just keep putting one foot for the other, until someone tells us to stop. Anyways. But yeah, we got that… we ultimately got the land under contract, got through closing, worked with this great guy on fencing where he had to pull out miles that…
James Connolly
Was it a ranch before?
Matt Skoglund
It, um, at one point it was, and then it was owned by a few out-of-state real estate developers who ultimately, I think at one point, thought about, you know, developing and doing something with it, and then just ended up one of them died, there was a state attorney involved, and they decided they just wanted to get rid of it. And neighbors were grazing it seasonally with their cattle. But that was the… that’s how things were here. But for bison, you know, we had to, Forrest, the person we worked with, and he had to, you know, tear out miles of barbed wire fencing put in new fencing, and we use high tensile wildlife-friendly fencing – the middle wire is hot or electrified. And it’s, it’s great, we really like it. And so anyway, so fencing in the fall, and then we had to find our bison. And the advice was, you know, there’s certain areas where you can save a little money in certain areas, we needed to spend a little money and getting your animals was an area to spend money. You wanted to make sure that you were starting with great animals, and also importantly, animals nearby, you know, animals that had, you know, over, I guess modern times are used to your climate, landscape, plants, etc. So like, if we found a deal on bison that were in, say, Missouri, like, that’d be a horrible idea. Like we wanted to get animals were used to life in Montana. And so there are these two great ranches, like 150 miles northwest of here along Rocky Mountain Front. And we that’s ultimately where the bison came from. And yeah, so the day they arrived, it was, needless to say, very stressful, extremely exciting. But very stressful. And, you know, people were our native people in the community and heard about it, and we’re interested, you know, watch kind of, how’s this all gonna work out with these Skoglund people that are going to try to raise bison out here. And I always it’s like, it turned out, you know, it was pretty controversial, which I I knew a little bit at the time, but not as much as I know now. And I totally get it like, we’re surrounded by multi-generational cattle ranches. And our neighbors are, first and foremost, wonderful people and incredible, incredible ranches. Ranchers that have been doing this, you know, a hell of a lot longer than we have – for generations. And if you put yourself in their shoes, you know, you’ve got multi-generation cattle ranches, and then you hear this young family from Bozeman, who’s really from Chicago are showing up with no ranching experience, and they’re gonna run by like, how could you not be a little nervous and like, how’s it… but they’re open-minded, and they gave us a chance and have now become good friends and trusted, you know, colleagues, and so yeah, so in the bison showed up. There was definitely a little excitement in the valley about it. happening and yeah, watching them run off the truck onto the land that we’d been, you know, dreaming of, and then working our asses off, you know, getting all this ready. It was an extraordinary feeling, you know, like it was both watch them run off the truck onto the land. And it was like, it just was like, alright, they’re here. This is real-time to get to work. And so yeah, it was, it was a really great day.
James Connolly
Yeah. So how many did you start out with? And where are you at now?
Matt Skoglund
So we started out with, we took some… we started out with 95 with an asterisk, which is when we were getting this going, we had a hard time getting financing. And we ultimately got it done. But the bank was they said, We’re clear. Like, we’ll give you the land loan, but you cannot come back to us for anything like a line of credit, operating capital, like we need to see that you know what you’re doing, you have a viable business. And so, along the way, I met this guy in Big Sky, really nice guy who was interested in getting into the bison industry. And I joke, kind of joke but not joke, all of a sudden, we had a lot of land and no money. And he had a lot of money and no land. So we talked about doing a custom grazing lease. And it was a way for us to grow the herd a little faster. And so we ended up putting a three-year custom grazing lease together, where of those 95 animals that came from those two ranches. 30 were his 65 were ours. It was all run as one herd. I was in charge. And then he also gave us a loan so we could buy our own animals by those the 60 animals that we had coming. So we start that’s now over, and he found his own ranch somewhere else in Montana. I just saw him; he’s doing great. So anyway, so started with 95. They weren’t all our animals. And but now we’re up to somewhere around 170-175 animals of all ages. Oh, yeah. So it’s a pretty good size herd.
James Connolly
That’s amazing. And you were saying on another podcast that you’ll age them for two years? Or do you go? Do you try to go by some degree of like a visual interpretation of weight? Like, I was trying to get a sense of that.
Matt Skoglund
Good question. So we do a cut… we do a couple of days. So for, for the animals born here on the ranch. Any bull born on the ranch is a meat animal. And we wait until, with rare exceptions, we wait until they’re at least two. So we long story short,bulls born in the ranch, we kill between two and three. And in the ages of two and three and you know, just bison develop a little more slowly. And as we were a grass-based operation. And the butcher meat processor we work with are… we, you know, they’re complete meat geeks, just like I am. We spend a lot of time talking about meat, meat quality, taste, flavor, etc. And so, you know, one, I guess mentor said, you know, taste comes in at two, like you want to wait till at least two. And then even within that, you know, between two and three, we’re definitely looking at Alright, that one there, that bull, they’re clearly bigger and more developed than the one there. So we’re going to kill that one. And then each year, we’ve got such a good relationship with those two ranches. Their breeding operations, so they don’t do what we do. They raise animals, they raise breeding stock. And so when they work their animals once a year, any open cows, non-bred cows, they sell as cull animals. So they’re perfect meat animals for us. So each year, we supplement our herd with some open cow meat animals from them. And those are usually now like I’d say, for our prime meat animals, they’re like for the open cows, they’re like two and a half to six. And then we’ll do some older open cows purely as ground bison. And then we have to work our animals once a year. And then same thing when we work our animals. Any open cow here immediately becomes a meat animal. So to sum up, our meat herd is fed by bulls barn, the ranch that are killed between two and three, and then open cows here on the ranch between you know, say three to six, and then some open cows from the two other ranches that we bring in in the winter. And that again with a few other exceptions, that compromises, you know, or comprises 90 95% of our meat herd.
James Connolly
There’s a guy in Spain who he slaughters his cows at 14 years. He said the taste is like off the charts. I wonder what it would taste like, actually.
Matt Skoglund
You know, it’s so interesting that you say that because, yeah, I mean, it’s like, you know, I love to hunt – a big meat hunter. And in the hunting world, you know, there’s all these, like, kind of urban myths are hunting this, if you will, about like, well, you’d never want to eat this animal because it’s not going to taste good. And this animal always tastes good. But so much of it’s not backed up by science like in any way, shape, or form. And I feel like it’s the same in the livestock world because I’ve heard that about, like, in Europe, and I know, it’s now happening in the US where, like, some high-end restaurants are experimenting with much older animals, because the flavor is just off the charts. It’s so so more pronounced. And we’ve done a couple of experiments, we had, like this school group, they’re like college kids that through this program, where they bought a bison and they were going to process it themselves. And we sold it to them, and it was an… it was like 10 or 11. And I gave I said here, our price is X amount of dollars. But I’d also like to keep a chunk of backstrap and a chunk of tenderloin. Because I’m just curious, like, what is this? Let’s just say it was 11. What is this? 11? You know, and we cooked up those steaks and same thing. They were like, just unbelievably delicious. So I think from a… yeah, I think the livestock slash food industry, there’s a lot more that could be done with older animals. So ya know, I’ve heard the same thing.
James Connolly
Yeah. When you hunt, how long do you hang your animals before you process them?
Matt Skoglund
I’d say one to two weeks. Okay. So I listened to a, there was a Meateater podcast that Steve asked, and they had a meat scientist. I believe he was from the University of Nebraska. And they broke like really breaking down the details of meat. And most of his research, I think, was with cattle. But you know, there’s a lot of similarities. And his as I recall, his thing was that you want to age any grazing animal, like whether it’s a deer and elk bison of Black Angus cattle, at least a week that over the course of that week, you know, the enzymes and the meat and it’s tenderizing the meat and you kill an animal 24 hours it goes into rigor mortis where it’s stiff as a board, and then it slowly, slowly, slowly as is being tenderized and loosened and he was saying that I think like the majority of the magic happens over the first week. And then, you know, over time, it just kind of falls off from there. So if we kind of average, for animals, you know, hanging animals one to two weeks is about what I do.
James Connolly
Yeah, it’s it’s definitely really interesting. Was the restaurant, I think, in Scandinavian restaurant called Fabricans?
Matt Skoglund
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
James Connolly
He was talking… didn’t he have like some sort of six-month-aged meat on his plate at one point? He’s sort of a nut. He lost…
Matt Skoglund
Yeah, no I know. I haven’t booked… I’ve seen on TV. I like, he’s… Yeah, I love his whole, he’s crazy in a great in the best way. And yeah, he was like, I think same thing. I think he was I think they were killing some like old dairy cows and doing…
James Connolly
Oh, yeah.
Matt Skoglund
Wild stuff.
James Connolly
Yeah. Yeah, the butcher shop that we went to when we were in Belgium is sort of a superstar. We were in the airport. That’s like a huge 30-foot poster of him, just in the airport alone. Dierendonck, but he has this really wonderful… it’s one of the best butcher shops I’ve ever walked into. Just the sheer varieties is all of the animal in myriad different ways. But he also has like a two Michelin star restaurant attached to it. And so we got to taste a dairy cow who actually don’t remember how old it was, but the marbling was so… it was so beautiful, and so tasty, just in comparison to even just most of the… any of the other steaks that we tried. The marbling was just completely different. Just to like throughout all of the muscle tissue that had all of this really wonderful like yellowish like whitish marble. Absolutely delicious.
Matt Skoglund
Yeah, I’ve experienced it, you know, the first bison I killed – long story short, was a friend as… and got an employee harvest tag at this. And it was a much younger animal, and we probably sustain ourselves, and then and then we killed our first bison here on the ranch. It’s kind of a funny story because, you know, we did all this work. We started the ranch and all the stuff we’ve already talked about. But we did not feel comfortable selling our meat until we’d gone through the entire process ourselves. We want to be able to stand behind our product and know exactly, you know, so we want… so the first animal we called it the r&d animal, we live field harvested the bison and you know, we got eventually got it back. And I was like, Hey, let’s just cook. You know, let’s take a ribeye and cook it like you would any old ribeye. And you know, we’re all excited. And we throw it on the grill and having a beer, and then I put it on the cutting board. And all of a sudden I had this like, panic attack of like, oh my god, I’m like, what if it doesn’t taste good? Like we did all this stuff – all this to deal with it. No point could we have said, Hey, can we put a bison on this property for a year and then kill it and eat it and see what it tastes like? And I was like, what if like, our combination of grasses and water and all this stuff, it just doesn’t taste good. It’s like, you know, anyways, we cut into it. And it was… my eyes rolled back. It was so good. And it was really exciting. And then it was interesting, though, because a few months later, I stumbled upon a couple steaks from that younger animal. And we cooked it and in the hunting world, like without doubt, it’s the conventional wisdom is like a younger animal is more tender. It’s delicious. And that younger animal was so inferior in quality to our older and to the older animal that we were eating. Like it was a lighter red in color and it just was like, kinda flavorless. Where the older animal was like deep, rich, red, intense flavor. So I just think yeah, I just think there’s a lot of misinformation out there around this kind of like, younger animals taste better, older animals don’t taste good. Like, clearly that’s not the case. Like anything. There’s lots of nuances, right? Like, it all comes down to like, what did that animal eat? How did it live? How was it killed? How is it aged? You know, all those from, you know, all those different things translate to the steak on your plate. So anyways,
James Connolly
Yeah, I was looking at your website, and a lot of your steaks, man, it’s like they’re purple on the inside. There’s so much color in there. And I recently picked up a book. It was something I was listening to. And it said, Do you know David Montgomery? He wrote a book called – I think it’s called Dirt: The Erosion of Civilization. It’s a really… he’s a geologist. He’s written for a long time. It’s a seminal book. It’s like you read that book, and you just kind of realize, like how much topsoil we’ve degraded or lost over the past, you know, whatever, since the dawn of agriculture. His argument is that civilization is based upon the soil, and nothing else matters except for that. And it seems to be the sort of the thing that we think about least, especially within the civilization itself, and it’s an exhaustive study… goes through Roman, sort of Egyptian bread baskets, when you think of Egypt, now, you don’t think of necessarily like a great agricultural landscape. But for the most part that was that that’s what fed the Roman Empire. And you see, in the Ukraine, you see what happened there that all of these… the end this sort of Midwest as the sort of agricultural landscapes built on soil, and soil vampire in many different ways. But he recently came out with a book him and his wife. She’s a biologist, he’s a geologist, and they’re talking about the degradation of our food because our soil is so depleted nowadays. And they were just talking about iron content, and you know, any number of different vital nutrients, not just macronutrients that are depleted because we’re essentially feeding our animals on our plants and vegetables on nothing anymore. The absolute minimum to make them look like they’re supposed to be so that was what I was thinking about when I was looking at the cutting into your steak was like, oh my god, like how much iron is in this? You know, how much nutrition is part of this? It’s like I wouldn’t have to eat for a week.
Matt Skoglund
Totally Yeah, no, I Yeah, no, I’ve read similar things that like don’t have the like hard data but that like, like your average carrot in the grocery store today compared to say 100 years ago like you’d have to eat 14 carrots today to get the same nutritional benefits from like one carrot. I mean, it’s depleted soil chemical farming. It’s not, you know, doesn’t lead to healthy nutritional nor delicious products.
James Connolly
Yeah, it’s so weird because I think, you know, for the first time… You and I are probably about the same age. But, you know, we have seen the growth of such a spotlight on food over the past, like 20 years, like I think even before the year 2000, you wouldn’t have heard about farming and agriculture in the way that you hear about it now, like people are looking into this stuff, even if you go into the absolute extremes of like LA where people are, you know, heavily focused on detox foods, or juicing or any number of different things, people are highly focused on that unclean eating, I guess, is what they’re calling it. But what we’re seeing I think, is what we’re seeing is these foods that mimic the outside textures of what food would have tasted like 100 years ago, but they have none of the deep nutrition of that, you know, and we are learning more about the sort of the Dark Matter of nutrition, right? The stuff that we don’t know, we know that we measured certain things because we could measure them. And now we’re starting to find out that most of that stuff actually works synergistically. And so you can’t just take all of these constituent ingredients, put them into a supplement, and then feed your body with those supplements. And so we’re seeing this symbiotic relationship between the food that we’re eating that has nothing left in it, and the soil that has nothing left in it, and this sort of total extraction atmosphere. And I think that’s what regenerative agriculture is trying to sort of battle against saying, we have to start to think of this holistically. Like when you go to the doctor’s office, you shouldn’t really be talking to the doctor, you should be talking to the farmer type of situation, right?
Matt Skoglund
Oh, my God, I couldn’t agree more like strongly, and I’m sure you have no shortage of potential podcast guests. But this guy, Fred Provenza, who’s a retired professor from Utah State, now lives in Montana. He wrote this book, Nourishment, and he was… I haven’t finished, but he’s been to the ranch and just an incredible guy. And you guys, you’d have a total mind meld on that exact subject. And he’s… and he…, you know? Yeah. Yeah, I just… I couldn’t agree more.
James Connolly
Yeah, I mean, I do think that there’s, in order to sort of put pressure on the level to which people are kind of talking about this need to move over to plant-based. We need as many people from disparate fields to kind of talk about this stuff. Because the what Diana calls carbon tunnel vision, like, you know, the methane from cattle, methane from cattle, methane from cattle like that is all that we hear. And it’s just… it’s such a disservice to what these animals do, like total ecosystem engineers, and we’ve reduced them down to one basic component that we just hammer home to people. And it’s just said it’s so like, disconcerting.
Matt Skoglund
Yeah, no. I love that because, trust me, as I said it multiple times. I mean, our family you know, we just love nature. We, you know, like, yes, was it yesterday… the other day I saw an ermine run by which are these little… these cool little, you know, it’s a like a long-tailed weasel. And in the winter, they’re all white with a little black tail. And it just like I said, let’s just say I spent way too much time staring out the window that day. Trying to see again, and then that night, like staring. The kids came home, I was like, You’re not gonna believe what I saw today. I was like, I saw an ermine or like, what? So we just love biodiversity. Whenever we see a new bird species, or, you know, any kind of big critter on the ranch, we get so excited. And so I couldn’t agree more about the carbon tunnel vision. And it’s something that I bring up a lot because there’s just such a focus on carbon, carbon credits, carbon markets, paying ranchers for carbon offsets and carbon in the soil, carbon test – carbon, carbon, carbon, carbon, carbon. And exactly, it’s like, well, what about, you know, as I look out at our ranch and our neighbor’s ranches, and these places are teeming with life bursting with biodiversity city, and there’s just yeah, there’s not enough emphasis on all of the biodiversity benefits that come with regenerative ranching.
James Connolly
Yeah, and, you know, one of the, I don’t want to keep you too long. And one of the things that I found was when you create markets like this, that actually don’t bring people into, like a holistic concept of, you know, a building by the diversity or building something that matters to future generations, sort of like, you know, what is the term? It’s a planting a seed of a tree, the shade of which you’ll never sit under. So you’re building something that like future generations, will have the shade of. One of the things about the carbon markets is that they tried to institute in a forestation process in Mexico. And so they took all of these poor communities, and they said, listen, like, we want to, we’re going to Hey, you to go and plant these trees. And so what the community did, which kind of makes sense, like, in retrospect, and I think anybody who actually thought about it holistically would have been like, yeah, that’s ridiculous. What they did was they chopped down a bunch of trees, and sold the wood, and then planted, you know, seeds in the places where they just shut down the trees. And it’s like, I mean, it’s sad. And it’s kind of a joke, but it’s like, when people are living in poverty, just giving them say, Hey, we’re gonna do this, and we’re gonna force you to plant something. It’s like, you can’t think about this stuff in the way that we’re thinking about carbon markets.
Matt Skoglund
Yeah. Oh, no, no, I, it totally. And it’s like, if you really play it out, you know, these carbon markets, like, a lot of it, are some of these bigger companies, you know, they want to buy carbon offsets. So they can say, you know, legitimate way that our, our supply chain is carbon neutral. And they all have their own reasons, whether it’s, you know, it’s because they want it because they care about climate change, or it’s marketing or some combination thereof. But you know, there’s definitely, there’s that part of it. And there’s just so much emphasis on carbon that I always think of, and it was just in the paper, the longtime lead wolf biologists in Yellowstone National Park is this guy does. Doug Smith amazing guy. And in a documentary that we did it NRDC, he was in it. And he ends it with this, like, he does this amazing job, where he says something to the effect of he’s like, at the end of the day, what kind of world do we want to live in? And he’s like, is it all for us to just take? Or do we want to share it? And I think about that his quote a lot, because I’m like, what kind of world do we want to live in? Like, what if we invent carbon-sucking machines? Like, if it’s all about carbon? Are we okay? With a world that we, where we suck… we have these carbon-sucking machines, we produce food in factories that tastes like crap, and but has some sort of nutrient profile. The bees are gone, the butterflies are gone, lots of birds are gone, lots of wildlife are gone. But carbon is down. And it’s like that to me, if you know, that’d be a win on carbon. But it’d be a loss on every other piece of the world. And ultimately, like Doug talks about, and others talk about, it’s like, what makes this place magical. And so yeah, the carbon piece strikes a nerve with me, you know, particularly being out here, you know, working on the land, being on a ranch, and, you know, constantly being inspired and touched by the landscape, the birds, the bees, it’s just an important piece of it. That doesn’t, as we’ve talked about, doesn’t get enough focus.
James Connolly
Yeah, and that’s a good segue for me like to… how did your kids acclimate to the changes?
Matt Skoglund
It’s funny, they… great. One of the reasons, you know, so, as I said, I had other, you know, entrepreneurial ideas that were either bad, or I chickened out on. And after we had our daughter, Greta. She was born in February of 2017. And we knew we weren’t gonna have any more kids. And it really this particular conversation with a friend about something. At some point, you can’t keep pushing this off forever, like it aged out. And it lit a fire under my ass where I was like, You know what, like, right? Our kids right now, or like, less than one, and I guess in… Otto was four. And so we’re like, this is a huge change for us. And then ended up that spurred us to do it now. Because I joke – kind of joke, not joke. Like, if we did this when they were in like eighth grade and sophomore year in high school, they’d be like, Hey, Mom and Dad, like, good luck with your Bison Ranch. That sounds fun. But like we’re staying here, and you guys go have fun out there. So it was almost like we had to do it when they were so young that they, so now they love it. And our you know, our nine-year-old obviously older, so he’s a little more aware of things, but it’s been cool. Over the past year, he’s starting to really get it. And I think, and then the coolest part, like by far is just seeing 100% what they’re absorbing through osmosis, just growing up like this. Like, I hear them when we’re driving, pointing out things, talking about things, and like, there are words in their vocabulary around nature and ranching and food and the environment that like 100% were not in my vocabulary before the age of 30 You know, so that’s… and Sarah and I, we’ve made a conscious decision like we don’t shield them from any part of the ranch. Like, they are… they’re like… they see a dead bison, you know, they see blood on the driveway. Like they know exactly what we do, how we do it, why we do it. And particularly with the nine-year-old, I’ve seen he’s developing like pride in it, like he proud that we do what we do. And so yeah, from their standpoint, it’s been really cool to see.
James Connolly
Yeah, I was over the holidays I was making a porchetta, which is a pork roast surrounded by pork belly. And so breaking it down. And my nine-year-old, she just took a mallet to it, she was trying to tenderize the meat. But she had noticed that there were still hair follicles on the belly, and there was a nipple, and so immediately kind of connected with her. She was like, oh, you know, like this will kind of happen every once in a while. Because I’ll get from local ranches, I’ll get a pig’s head every once in a while, I’ll boil it down, I make a lot of sort of jellies from it and stuff like that kids won’t go anywhere near it at this point. But it’s so important that they see that this was an animal, and that this is providing nourishment for us. And they get this sort of like moments, they get the small moments so over the course of their life because I do think that there is something weird about city life, you’re in Chicago, I was in New York, there is some sort of like strange phenomenon where people genuinely think that they’re not dependent upon the death that kind of occurs outside of the landscape of that zoo that they kind of live in. And they can live forever, or, you know, you can kind of convince them of any number of things. Like New York is primarily finance and advertising. And so it’s a lot of people kind of, you know, sort of making up *beep*. Right, and so when you think about it’s like, to get her to see elements of that to see, you know, to death around her and all of that stuff. It’s just such an important ingredient to their development. Because it’s required, you know, it’s required for us to eat. And I think the narrative going into that sort of 21st century, the way that we thought about what food would look like, would be this sort of, you know, plant-based meaning like, factories, right? Like when people say plant-based, to me, that doesn’t mean nature anymore. It means aluminum, and, you know, like, antibiotic, you know, like, washes and you know, sterile environments and lab coats and all of this stuff. And it brings me absolutely no joy.
Matt Skoglund
I couldn’t agree more. I wouldn’t be, yeah, to me, I same when I hear plant-based – the same thing. I think, factory like and I think about all the time, it’s obviously, you know, we’re both passionate about it, but like I’ll see, like last winter I saw on our ranch we there was a herd of over 100 pronghorn antelope and all bedded down in the snow. It’s just so beautiful. And I remember, whenever I see something like that, I’ll often just involuntarily think to myself, like, I wonder what the pronghorn habitat inside the Impossible Burger factories. You know, it’s just like, but it’s like a joke. But it’s also like, not, you know, it’s like, you care about pronghorn antelope. Like, they need a lot of room. They need big landscapes if that you know to survive and do what they need to do to survive, you know, and have a big enough population and blah, blah, blah. And in Montana, like that’s a combination of public land and private ranches that provide that.
James Connolly
Yeah, and that’s, you know, part of the reason why we’ve been so heavily focused on this, the 30 by 30 movement 30% of the earth kind of being like made into these nature preserves, because it really considers business as usual, right. So everything else can continue, we can just continue to, you know, pollute waterways, or do any number of different things to build some sort of like vision of civilization, and then we’re just going to have these like geodesic domes of wildlife that will continue to survive. On our… if you’re familiar with George Monbiot. He’s a British sort of thought leader, Guardian writer.
Matt Skoglund
I’ve definitely seen his name. Yeah.
James Connolly
And it the biggest problem that have with that is that like, you can’t hold this stuff off, right from the, from the rest of the environment, right? Like you can build some sort of ecosystem that won’t have outside inputs. And so if the air is polluted, or if there’s acidification going on, or any number of different things, we have to build an environment we want our children to live in which requires, you know us to redevelop in some ways civilization so that we actually… we value that and I love what you said about you know, we became bison ranchers because we were environmentalists because you will see on those placards every single time you see an environmental protest you can’t be a meat eater and being environmentalists and like, well…
Matt Skoglund
Because like and same thing with hunting like you know, the like, you know, the most passionate environmental… so I know yes, our hunters know, like, they are so connected to the land, and animals. And you know, if there was some bad development project somewhere in Elk habitat, like, hunters are gonna be the first ones. They’re opposing it. And then, you know, and similarly kind of back to our kids, like for urban listeners, I wonder if you know, people are like, oh, boy, like, if these kids are growing up around like dead bison and blood and all this stuff, like, are they going to be? Are they like, sociopaths? And it’s like, what? I’m fine. It’s like the opposite. Like, yeah, our kids are so connected. I guess what I’m seeing is that, like, they care so much about the natural world and they care so much about animals. They’re very aware like we eat bison, elk, deer multiple times a week, like they and then they know what we’re eating, they all that stuff. But they, like with all the development, Bozeman our son, like, continued, like, he constantly will say, like, Oh, my God, there they go again, destroying more nature, you know, like, they’re just keyed in, on a different level by being closer to the natural world. And, yeah, it’s just, yeah, it’s just an interesting, there’s a little… yeah, a lot of confusion around these things.
James Connolly
Yeah, I, you know, and the thing about it is, and one of the things that worries me most is the average for most farmers in the states is over 50. You know, like, we have to build an ecosystem environment so that kids can grow up in a place where they can take over those jobs that, you know, there’s so many farmers who can’t pass on the land to their children, because it’s not that they can’t afford the income from two separate households. We have to do something better.
Matt Skoglund
Yep, no, we’ve got to find a way to change the system to put more money in farmers and ranchers pockets to make farming and ranching more viable, long term for the exact, you know, we… yeah, I think about all the time that you know, what’s going to happen is all these… yeah, it’s a huge question. Yeah,
James Connolly
Well, I mean, maybe we do a reverse as Chicago slaughterhouse where all of the Chicagoans move out and start up their own bison ranches. It like it, I get it, we somehow get this sort of urban, like rural divide to sort of have a real conversation.
Matt Skoglund
No, no. And I think I mean, one of the things that, you know, living out here and getting our neighbors, the incredible people that it’s like, it’s important that like, you know, on that point, like farmers and ranchers are already here. So, it’s not getting people from cities out here, it’s putting systems in place that make it work for the people that are already here, and have been here for generations stewarding this land. But, you know, due to the farm bill, and the Big Four meat packers, and the different systems that are coming out of Washington, DC, are unfair, and not helping the current farmers and ranchers. So to me, it’s not, you know, bringing people from Chicago out here, it’s let’s fix the system for the people that are already here, and have been working their asses off for generations. Let’s fix the system for those folks first.
James Connolly
Yeah, I mean, John Maynard Keynes, who was an economist at the beginning of the 20th… 21st… 20th century, he has an old quote, it said something that, you know, societies can afford to pay for what they want to pay for. And, you know, for me that that’s like a GuideStar. For me, like a North pole, it’s like, would we… if we want to build an environment that is conducive to human health, that values human health, and values, the environment around them, then we need to build up a farming structure that isn’t so extractive that builds, you know, all of these different key factors, and then you pay for it, you know, you pay for it in a way that actually makes it work. You know, and I think that that is what Diana has been working on, you know, this is getting a collective together to really talk about regenerative agriculture in a way before it gets co-opted by say Kellogg’s or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. But thank you so much, and how will people reach out to you? Give me your contact details and all of that stuff, and we’ll get this up as soon as possible.
Matt Skoglund
You know, so the easiest thing is just our website North Bridger Bison.com And that has an email address and a phone number on there. And then the only social media we do is Instagram and it’s just our – North Bridger Bison. So yeah, North Bridger Bison on Instagram, and our website north bridger bison.com. You know, folks should feel free to reach out with questions or anything. Cool, but ya know, James, I can’t thank you enough. This has been awesome. I could do… gone for two more hours with you.
James Connolly
So, do you still have that guest house that might come up there?
Matt Skoglund
Well, we ultimately moved into it. So when we got it, yeah, so when we started it, we commuted, we commuted back and forth from Bozeman, operated it as an Airbnb, and then ultimately moved into it a year and a half ago. And so that’s where we now live. And we sold our house in Bozeman and put a little bit of put an addition on it. But ya know, if you’re ever out in the Bozeman area, obviously, you know, let me know. Cool, awesome. And keep up the awesome work; I so appreciate it. You know, what you and Diana do, and I learned a lot from it. So thank you.
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Diana Rodgers, RD
Thanks so much for listening to the Sustainable Dish Podcast. If you liked the show, please leave a review on iTunes. And if you’d like to support the work I’m doing on Patreon, please visit sustainabledish.com/join. As a Patreon subscriber, you’ll get access to ad-free podcasts, plus exclusive video podcasts, never before seen interviews, and a discussion community. Go to sustainabledish.com/join, and thank you for your support.
