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Thomas Locke is part of the recent movement of office workers turned farmers. Before becoming a farmer, Thomas followed a path most of us are familiar with: go to college, take classes you find interesting, then move to a city where you can successfully join the workforce. The end.
But for Thomas, it didn’t stop there. After some moving around both geographically and within careers, he found his calling as a farmer and has never looked back. The Bois d’Arc Meat Co was born.
This is not to say there weren’t problems along the way. And Thomas was fortunate enough to have family land, which he acknowledges is a huge barrier when it comes to starting a farm.
In his interview with my co-host, James Connolly, Thomas describes
- How he found farming and got his wife, Gillian on board
- His passion for biodiversity and healthy soil
- The problems with tax exemptions for agricultural land
- Why rewilding is unlikely in the US
- The importance of the dung beetle
- Why it’s necessary to change the mindsets of farmers and consumers
- How healthy soil is like a savings account
- The improvements Thomas has seen in his farm over the years
Whether you are a farmer, an aspiring farmer, or enjoy the work of farmers, this is a great episode to check out!
Rather watch this episode on YouTube? Check it out here: Episode 250: Thomas Locke.
Resources:
Sustainable Dish Episode 186: Brandon Howley
Sustainable Dish Episode 230: Oliver Milman
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
For the Love of Soil by Nichole Masters
The Power Broker by Robert Caro
The Devil’s Element by Dan Egan
Water in Plain Sight by Judith Schwartz
Connect with Thomas:
Facebook: Bois d’Arc Meat Co
Instagram: @boisdarcmeatco
Episode Credits:
Thank you to all who’ve made this show possible. Our hosts are Diana Rodgers and James Connolly. Our producer is Emily Soape. And, of course, we are grateful for our sponsors, Global Food Justice Alliance members, and listeners.
If you believe in making sure that people all over the world should have access to nutritious food, please join my mission through my non-profit, the Global Food Justice Alliance. All sustaining members get early access to ad-free podcasts plus free downloads, and you’ll be helping get healthy protein like meat, fish, and eggs to food-insecure kids. That’s sustainabledish.com/join.
This podcast was made possible by LMNT, my favorite electrolyte company. The all-natural sugar-free powder tastes great and gives you the perfect amount of sodium, potassium, and magnesium to keep you perfectly hydrated.
Check out my Salty Grapefruit Limeade made with their limited-time grapefruit flavor. Plus, you can get a free flavor sample pack with any purchase using my link: sustainabledish.com/LMNT
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 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 global food justice.org. Thanks again for listening. And now, on to our show.
James Connolly
This is James Connolly for Sustainable Dish’s podcast. I had through just a great sort of small and growing network of people, I had somebody sort of reach out to kind of introduce you and I together, Thomas. Thomas Locke is on today. And we’ve had some like small chats sort of back and forth. I really wanted to bring him on the podcast for multitude of different reasons, is cattle rancher, actually you, you have an integrated farm, right? You have pigs, your chickens, and you have cattle. And I’ve been trying to dive more and more into kind of younger families, a younger generation of people who are going into this for myriad different reasons, but also because of its ecological function. Animals ecological function, if we actually put them back onto the land, what they can do for soil, and people who are kind of coming at this from a very different space because most of farming is multigenerational. Most of it sort of gets passed on. And it doesn’t have to be sort of nuclear families. But it is sort of like, it kind of falls into a very specific niche. And so we wanted to kind of like just dive into sort of basic background story where you came from, how you ended up kind of in a space where this is what you chose. And so welcome, Thomas, thank you so much.
Thomas Locke
Yeah, well, James, thanks for having me. We met through a mutual friend. And I’ve really enjoyed talking to you these last few days as well. But my story is not, I guess, a traditional story for farming. In fact, everyone that I meet out here when they learned that I’m a farmer, not just out here, but really anywhere they say it’s just a family business. And it’s not. We’ve had this land since about 1850. My family moved from Tennessee to northeast Texas. And the land that we’re on is was a perennial grasslands. It’s up on the hill. We’re just south of Bois d’Arc Creek. And that’s the name of the farm is Bois d’Arc Meat Company. And the first thing that my ancestors did when they moved out here like everyone else was they got a plow, and they started cultivating the land for crops. And being on a hill, this land really isn’t suited for vegetable production, or cotton production or peanuts or whatever they’ll say we’re growing. And anytime there wasn’t a living root system in the ground, keeping the soil together, it just washed away and blew away. And so fast forward 100 years, which to Mother Nature is a blip of time, my grandfather came back from World War Two. And we literally were not able to grow anything on the farm anymore because all of our topsoil had washed away. And so his only solution in his mind was to start raising cattle. But of course, in that post World War Two, ammonium nitrate was abundant. Everyone… the Green Revolution had started. And so he really adopted that industrial model, started seeding Bermuda out here, wanted to go for a monoculture and fertilize the land. And so in the, what would it be? Until about 2005 when my uncle moved up here, you know, the soil continued to be degraded. And really we were farming a sub level are not topsoil, but you know, compacted subsoil, at that point, my uncle started intensive mob grazing, and, you know, stopped using chemicals. And then when my wife and I moved out here in 2014, we really started adopting a regenerative, diverse soil building practice. Because we recognize the fact that this was really degraded land, and we wanted to rebuild it. So but that didn’t actually answer your question at all.
James Connolly
I was gonna stop you there. Yeah.
Thomas Locke
We… I went to school at Austin College, which is a small liberal arts school in North Texas, and was a sociology major, and an anthropology major. And I was… I took those classes because they were the most interesting classes. You know, I had long hair and earrings. And, you know, I was extremely progressive. And so my first job out of college was to move to Massachusetts, and I was a campus organizer, and then from there, lived in New York City for a little while, as a canvas director, and then felt, you know, I guess I was 25, 26 years old and felt well, now I need to figure out what I’m gonna actually do with my life. And so I moved that to Georgetown, Texas, which is where I’m from and I started fundraising. And it just wasn’t, wasn’t for me. So I met my wife Gillian. We went to Durham, North Carolina so she could go to Duke for graduate school. And I fell in love with sustainable agriculture out there. Their farms like Cane Creek Farm and Braeburn farm and Nickel Creek Farm and Little Tree Farm and all these wonderful places where the farmers were educated, they had these lifestyles that were extremely attractive, I could see how they were solving problems, by the way that they were treating animals and raising animals and healing their land. And I realized that we had this land in northeast Texas that wasn’t really being used. So it occurred to me that’s what I could do with my life. And it was the strongest calling that I’d ever felt before was that I needed to stop doing what I was doing and move back to Texas and start farming. And so we did that.
James Connolly
Yeah, you’re like the fourth anthropology major who’s gone into ranching – even just recently. Do you think there’s a correlation between those studies and kind of moving on to? And, you know, I mean, I’m sure, it obviously has an environmental footprint when you’re studying anthropology. But I do feel like it pulls you out of our civilizational culture in a way that gets you to kind of look at things very with a very unique lens.
Thomas Locke
Yeah, I don’t know, I would guess that more has to do with just the type of person that would choose to study anthropology as opposed to, or at least for me what I learned in those classes. But yeah, I mean, it was in college, that I really started to recognize the fact that our, in my opinion, our way of life, our system of living is just fundamentally broken. And that were really on a path to nowhere. And I just didn’t agree with that at all. And I didn’t have any solutions for what I wanted to do to fix it. But yeah, that’s when I started to recognize that, you know, the assumptions that I’d made as a child that you know, you had to get married, you had to wear a tie to work, you had to blah, blah, blah, wear certain type of shoe and have a certain kind of house and have your yard look a certain way that those were just kind of meaningless. And it began to occur to me that, you know, the resources that we were consuming, were not endless, either. And so I really credit my education at Austin College with that. But at the same time, I never ever thought that I was going to be a farmer. Like ever. I would have just laughed at you if you had told me that. But it was like I said it was the strongest calling I’ve ever had to do something.
James Connolly
Yeah. And your wife was on board.
Thomas Locke
She is, yeah. So we have a it’s kind of a funny story. When we started dating, I brought her to the farm. My grandparents were still alive. And there’s the old farmhouse, it’s still here, we built a house, which is where I am now. But the old farmhouse was literally built around the log cabin that my ancestors built in 1850. And, you know, there’s no central heat or air and there’s one tiny bathroom and just not a very comfortable place. And my grandparents were very interested in us not sleeping in the same room, you know, even though we were adults and blah, blah, blah. So, you know, we went to bed and separate rooms. The East room and the West room. But of course, I just walked across the hallway at night, to get in bed with Gillian, but my grandfather had this habit of walking up the stairs to check on people, so I shut the door. You know, but the heat source is from downstairs. And so we woke up and it was December, I think she visited over Christmas, and like the room was literally 30 degrees. And she was just painted to my body, you know, freezing to death. And so when I told her that I wanted to move to the farm to become a farmer, I think her words were, I would rather live in a car for the rest of my life than move to the farmhouse. And so that was her first impression. But yeah, she’s down. I really credit Gillian a lot. I mean, I just wouldn’t be doing this without her. Yeah, she actually works at Austin College now where we both went and yeah, we have a good life out here. We love it.
James Connolly
Yeah. So tell me about your farm. So acreage, what you’re growing, you know, all of it. Let’s go to town on the details.
Thomas Locke
So, you know, when we settled the land a long time ago, you know, the family grew and obviously they broke up and land was, you know, owned by other family members. My great-grandmother kind of brought the farm back together. And that’s 160 acres. So what we own is 160 acres. And then I lease another approximately 160 acres so and on that land, we raised cattle 100% grass-fed beef, chickens for eggs, chickens for meat, turkeys at Thanksgiving. And pasture raised pigs, although we’re getting out of the pig business and just focusing mostly on cattle and chickens right now. And diversity is extremely important to me, I want a diverse grassland because that’s what this land was. It was a grassland. It should be a grassland. So you know this fall I seed 10 different cover crops – thatch and clovers and rye grass and weeds and various other things. And that’s really what we focus on ecological diversity on the farm. We have wild turkeys, bobcats, eagles, hawks, snakes. We have a whole bunch of wild pigs, which you know are a pain but they’re here. We saw mountain lion last year up here for the first time, just a lot of ecological diversity, which I welcome. And we practice high-density grazing on certain pastures. So we use poly wire and electric wire to move our cattle and then on the land that is still unfortunately kind of in a Bermuda monoculture. We manage that land a little bit differently with our cattle, but we have a 100% grass-fed beef business. We are organic but not certified. So we have completely moved away from any kind of dewormer. We don’t use any chemical fertilizers, we don’t use any herbicides or pesticides. If a cow is about to die, we will give it antibiotics. But we’re going to take it out of production and sell it at the sale barn. Really just working on the genetics of the animals. My grandfather had large-framed animals up here, because that’s what feedlots want. They want to be able to put on a bunch of muscle in a feedlot but we want short, stocky, thrifty animals – cows, so that can marble well on grass. And we take our time with that. That was the biggest mistake that I made when I first started was that, you know, I had been to grazing workshops and they said, Oh, you can finish an animal in 18 months or you know, certainly 24 months a cow will be finished. And in my opinion, the best grass-fed beef is really 36 months old or more.
James Connolly
Yeah, tell me why. Why do you think?
Thomas Locke
Well, it just takes longer for cows to put on fat. And it was described to me once as you know, cows are kind of like children. When they’re young, they’re super sweet and tender. And then they go through this, you know, really rough, terrible teenage phase where they’re tough and terrible. And then they get older, they get a little, you know, fatter, and they mellow out a lot. And you know, we really want those cows to get to that mellowing out, gaining weight, chilling out phase before we process them. And that’s just you know, there’s good quality grass-fed beef, and there’s really, really bad grass-fed beef. And we’ve produced both of them on this farm.
James Connolly
Yeah. There’s there’s a guy in Spain, and I’m sure he just did specialty restaurants and stuff like that. He was raising his cattle for somewhere upwards of like 12 to 14 years. And they just said the taste difference is just and you wouldn’t be able to even just compare the two. We have seen when we’re filming Sacred Cow, we went to Dierendonck which is a butcher in Belgium, sort of a superstar like we were going through the airport. And so it’s like, you know, 24 foot poster of him is like ex-skater kid kind of punk scene then got into butchery. His father was a butcher. He was doing a lot of stuff with dairy cattle, you know, absolutely delicious marbling, dry aged, but like you could actually really tell the difference. He was using sort of… because we’ve divided so many of these sort of aspects of even just cattle production. He said, we’ve sort of lost a lot of the flavoring aspects of what we could do with these animals. He had a small farm as well. He’s raising, I don’t know, maybe about 30 head of cattle. But he was also doing something with pigs where he was trying to go back to what was the original Roman pig that would sort of travel with, you know, with the armies – so smaller, more mobile kind of eat anything, just go anywhere.
Thomas Locke
It reminds me of if you’ve ever seen or read Lonesome Dove, but there’s two pigs – remember the cattle drive from… the pigs follow them on their cattle drive from South Texas all the way up to Montana?
James Connolly
Yeah, they used to have pig drives in North Carolina. They would say there was a book that came out years ago that would talk about like, you would see these pig drives of like 1000s of pigs just go into market. It’s wild. Imagine seeing that. Absolutely stunning. Yeah. So I mean, so tell me like you… how long did it take you to get to where you are in terms of numbers? And yeah, tell me about the experience.
Thomas Locke
Well, it’s every year has been a little bit different out here. And the only reason that we you know that I’m able to farm we’d probably still be in North Carolina if we didn’t own the land. Because, you know, land out here, they just actually dammed up Bois d’Arc creek and Bois d’Arc Lake is just north of our farm. So the land prices have gone from about $4,000 an acre to about $25,000 an acre. But agricultural land around here, you know, you’ll be lucky if you get it for $4,000 an acre. So, you know, to raise cattle, you need land, and so 100 acres, 4000 acres $400,000. And if you’re going to be farming and not making any money for two or three years, that’s impossible. So you know, that’s obviously a huge deterrent, but the number of animals has changed a lot. I’ve started focusing more on building soil and lowering the amount of cattle that I have on the farm, and Gillian’s income at Austin College has helped me do that. But, you know, if we didn’t have that, if we were just farming for an income, you know, I’d be a little bit more diverse with the number of animals that we have out here. And I’d really have to hustle a lot more with direct marketing to folks, and trying to just maximize sales as much as possible, as opposed to spending most of my time on the farm, which is what I like to do, building soil. So long story short, we finished about 20 cows a year, now here, and if they’re three years old, you know, we’ve got 20, 40, 60. And then we have about 30 mama cows. So you know, we have about 90 cows out here, and to make the amount of money that I need to make, and also build soil the way that I want. That’s a good number, I kind of like to lower the number even a little bit more. Last summer was the second hottest and dry summer in the last 50 years out here. So that kind of helped me want to decrease the size of our herd a little bit more, but we didn’t have to sell any animals during that time. And, you know, stock trailers were lined up for miles in both directions that sale barns across the state last summer, because it was 108 degrees in June. And it didn’t rain from pretty much July until October. And so if your soil isn’t healthy, if it you know, doesn’t have high levels of organic matter and isn’t able to hold water, it’s just gonna die very, very quickly. And my grandfather’s old hay meadow, which you fertilized all the time, if it gets above 90 degrees, and it doesn’t rain for a week that grass dies, because the soil is still so unhealthy out there.
James Connolly
Yeah. So most of most of your businesses, direct consumer and farmers markets in and around Dallas, is that true? Or?
Thomas Locke
Yeah, I was going to the Dallas farmers market for what it was seven years. And we had a child and so I wanted to spend more time with him at home on the weekend. So I started selling wholesale to Whole Foods for a little while and now sell to other folks in the area that then direct market to folks. And I still have customers that I sell to as well. So at first, it was very much direct marketing, and a lot of hustling, promoting the business, getting press and just building relationships with people. But probably the biggest mistake that I made at the beginning was the fact that I didn’t really know what I was doing as far as quality is concerned. So the pork was good, but the beef wasn’t that good. And so, you know, I lost customers, because they would go home with a New York strip that was just tough, just wasn’t very good. You know, so if someone wants to get into grass-fed beef, I would really just encourage them to understand how to put marbling on a cow understand the land that they’re going to be raising beef on, and figure out how to do it in a good way and just don’t cut any corners.
James Connolly
Yeah, I mean, I think that that’s one of the things that has been a struggle, in some ways with regenerative ag is to sort of teach a methodology of thinking and problem solving that is based on the land that you’re with, like a farmer in Arizona is going to deal with way different issues than somebody from Texas or even in the Northeast. So it’s hard to kind of like systematize, and sort of figure out a way to kind of teach that, right?
Thomas Locke
Yeah. So many people will say, well, how many cows do you raise per acre? And I say, Well, it depends. What are you going to do this summer? Well, it depends. It just, there’s no… there are no black-and-white answers out here. You know, if the grass is growing really, really well. We might, you know, move the cows three times a day. If I have a pasture, such as what we call our Dutton pasture, which is on the highway. A highway – it’s a county road that was plowed up incessantly, I might just leave that for a year. So it just depends. That’s the answer to regenerative farming. And that’s in such a stark contrast to an industrial model, which seeks to control everything, and really has no reverence for nature, or for the natural laws and practices of nature. It’s just strong arming things. And my philosophy is more to have a very, very healthy respect for nature, and try to not control things as much as I want to, because ultimately, we can’t, we can’t control things. We can manipulate soil and nature for a little while. But ultimately, you know, it’s not a sustainable venture.
James Connolly
Yeah. How was the view hit hard by the snowstorms?
Thomas Locke
Yeah, I mean, the last three years, actually, the weather in Texas, northeast Texas for last three years has been extreme. We had a thunderstorm come through that had 100 mile an hour winds last year. That blew over. Actually, I built a greenhouse for my garden and blew it about 100 yards, we had this thing called a polar vortex. I mean, Texas got national news because our power grid failed. And that was a week of, you know, breaking ice in the ponds for the cows and the pigs. And we’re not set up for winter weather out here. So I mean, the the fuel in our tractor froze. So luckily I put up a whole bunch of hay as a wind block for the cows, like old hay, and they ended up just eating that. So yeah, it posed a lot of a lot of problems for us, but that’s fine.
James Connolly
I did an interview with Chuck Howley’s ranch. Not too far away from you. But he was… they were lucky they had horses because they couldn’t use any of the equipment to kind of get around. They’ve got the ponds and all of that stuff. He said one of his calves was eaten by a mountain lion. You know, rip the leg off of it. This is all happening… I think he was… I don’t know. Was he a year into taking over the ranch?
Thomas Locke
Yeah, I actually sold next to him once at the farmers market in Dallas, I think yeah. Yeah, he’s great. Yeah, he’s got a lot more land than I do. I mean, I am a very, very small, regenerative cattle ranch. And, you know, he’s got a lot more land. And, you know, I think about that him and you know, other farmers in our area that have 1000s and 1000s of acres, I think he might have about 1000 acres, I’m not sure that they’re not doing anything with, you know, it’s just land. And they might have a few cows out there to get their ag exemption. But there is an enormous amount of potential to raise grass-fed regenerative beef, and other animals on land just in northeast Texas. So when people say that it’s not a scalable enterprise, I really do think that it is scalable. And if we were able to take desecrated land, and regenerate that soil, start growing diverse grass species out there with grazing animals, which is what nature did for 1000s and 1000s of years, that we could actually produce a lot of beef and a lot of food for people by just using land differently.
James Connolly
Yeah, isn’t there… I don’t remember the statistics on this. But the the tax exemptions for agricultural land are… there’s a huge percentage of people who actually just live in cities, and on this land as a tax break. And so a lot of it just sort of sits there. I’ve been doing a lot of research, even just over the past few years, and I wanted to get your perspective on it. After 2008, I think what ended up happening with a lot of college endowments, a lot of retirement funds, a lot of insurance agencies was that they had always been okay with the sense of agricultural outputs, they would stop at the fence post, right. So if you go through the 70s, and 80s, you would kind of stop at the fence post. 2008 kind of opened up the agricultural landscape to all of these institutions that are kind of starting to buy up land, they tried it in the 70s, late 70s. But there was such a blowback from a farming community. Because you don’t want these absentee landlords around, right? People were kind of trying to take over this agricultural space. And some of it is getting at the water underneath. Some of it is specialty crops like almond production, and wine and all this other stuff. But I think the inflation in agricultural land prices is at least part to do with what happened in 2008. And so I think there is a lot of kind of, and you’re getting also urban sprawl, right? So you’re getting a lot of people kind of wanting more space outside of the cities, and they’re kind of coming in on agricultural land. So I don’t know if you’ve experienced that, or you have any opinion on that or anything like that?
Thomas Locke
No, I don’t have a lot of knowledge on that. I mean, actually, I was wish Gillian was here, she worked for Goldman Sachs right out of college. And part of her job was valuing these massive farms in the Midwest that the bank was going to buy and use as an investment. But land prices, you know, have gone up significantly. And, you know, my grandfather would be completely shocked to know that our land is worth more now than the lands near board are creek or bottom land that has more fertile soil, because people would want to buy our land for the view. Because they want to, you know, just have land and actually leased land from a couple of people who don’t live out here, but they have the land and, you know, they used to cut hay on it, or they put a few cows on it. And they would get their tax exemption that way. So, but the value of land is is not based on growing things anymore is at least out here. It’s based on people from Dallas or Fort Worth wanting to have a second home and, you know, get out of the city. And, you know, I don’t know the stats on this, but I think we have 895 million acres of farmland and that’s been going down every single year just because of development. So if we were to say all this land, there is no way that anybody would ever farm out here. I mean, they would build a community subdivision, or someone with a lot of money would just come on here and hang out.
James Connolly
Yeah, so that’s insane.
Thomas Locke
Yeah and part of the problem with that is that, you know, you know, I think about soil all the time, but soil healthy soil is the largest carbon bank on Earth. And we learned about it in seventh grade science or before, you know, plants, through the process of photosynthesis, take carbon dioxide and convert it into an organic, you know, carbon, but they don’t exchange with soil micro organisms that rely on that carbon. And then the soil microorganisms give them the essential nutrients that plant needs to survive. So, you know, without that carbon exchange, we would live on the moon, there would be nothing growing here. And so, you know, soil, sequesters carbon, when we tilled soil, we release that carbon, and then we don’t give the soil anything, any tools to sequester more carbon. And so, you know, from a climate change perspective, the more healthy grasslands and woodlands that we have, the more carbon can be sequestered. And we have this mother lode of carbon already in our atmosphere. It’s not just about, you know, having solar panels and driving electric vehicles. It’s about what are we going to do with all the carbon that’s already here? How are we going to sequester that? And I don’t hear anybody talking about soil. I mean, I hear some people, but on larger national media, I just never hear that. And that seems like a huge missed opportunity.
James Connolly
Well, I think they are moving into trying to create a market for that. And you can see it in places, especially Sub Saharan Africa, places like Cabon, places like in Kenya, there was a news report that came out where they say Netflix, which its streaming services, or the carbon footprint for streaming, the data banks just required for you to be able to watch, you know, 100 years of 1000s of movies requires enormous amount of energy. And so they’ve started to do these kinds of carbon offset programs. And it’s mostly going to agricultural – it’s going to older forest, denser forest and you’re not really sequestering carbon, what you’re doing is you’re holding on to the carbon that’s already there. You’re saying that this is being hauled off for development, I have the I actually genuinely have a problem with the notion of these like single solution, things that you know, to climate change. It’s like we’ve pumped all this carbon into the atmosphere, and now we have to take it down. And the only way to do that is that because I think the thing that I fell in love with regenerative agriculture was the it got rid of some of the myopia around carbon. It started to talk about water holding on land, it started to talk about like, building structures within the soil that actually look towards biodiversity that bring in you know, all of the different aspects of, you know, I mean, we used to have pastoralists culture, cultures, like the transhumance culture, say, in Spain, that would deliver seeds through the seed coat of sheep as they move like hundreds and hundreds of miles to go, you know, down land and winter and upland in the summertime. So for me, like regenerative agriculture goes into the sort of multi-formed idea of like, what the purpose of agriculture should be going forward. The carbon thing I just like, as soon as you can make a market out of it, I know it’s America. So you gotta make a market out of something.
Thomas Locke
Well, money is the one thing that everybody believes in. I mean, you and I talked about the book Sapiens, you’re I mean, it he mentioned that Osama bin Laden didn’t love one thing about America, but he loved American money. You know, it’s that one myth that we all believe in. And so yeah, I mean, it’s not when people talk about rewilding areas, you know, especially folks who are vegan, you know, we need to stop eating meat so that we can re-wild these areas to hold on to and sequester carbon. If we’re not going to be making any money on that land. There’s no way we’re going to be rewilding it like that just doesn’t… that goes against the entire ethos of the United States of America. We’re not just going to have 1000 acres and just let trees grow there and have the land not make any money.
James Connolly
Yeah, so well, I mean, we do have large form, you know, billionaires who are actually doing that we call it sort of fortress colonialism. They’re not taking American land, per se, but they are a, you know, in all honesty, they’re taking parts of Scotland, taking parts of Ireland and buying them for, you know, for rewilding schemes. You know, I do think that we have started to see that more and more, but definitely places within South America are being bought out by large nonprofits and billionaires to sort of hold on to these places that would be sort of biodiversity hotspots all over the world. In the same way that we talked about the Amazon, the problem that I have with it is that we keep on thinking these ecosystems can survive on their own, independent of the world that surrounds them. And so I interviewed a guy on insect decline. And he was talking specifically about that. And he said, El Yunque National Forest in Puerto Rico has not recovered. Its insect species, even though it was considered, you know, a biological hotspot zone saw a massive and significant insect decline. And that insect could decline your regenerative agriculture you like, you know, about trophic cascades, like, if you’re not bringing insects in, then that means the biodiversity of the soil is, you know, close to nonexistent, then you have all the bird species, nobody’s passing seeds, you know, through birds, like you, everything kind of really depends upon insects. And so like, for me, the conversation behind regenerative agriculture is sort of multi forms. You know, we’re doing soil, but only because soil, it means so much more to everything else. That’s around…
Thomas Locke
Right. Yeah, sorry. No, no, that’s so true. And, and I think, you know, we’re increasingly as a culture, just looking for black-and-white answers to really complex questions. And I think people actually listen for that. So when they’re listening to maybe me speak or somebody else speak, they’re looking for that black-and-white answer. But it goes back to the independence thing, like, we just, it’s so connected, and we really don’t understand it. You know, people understand how soil functions a little bit like Ray Archuleta and Nicole Masters and other soil experts, but they will be the first to admit that they really don’t understand how soil functions. We just don’t quite get it yet. And it’s that being comfortable with not understanding but being curious and wanting to continue to understand. That’s so fascinating to me. It’s why I love my job so much. I mean, when we stopped using ivermectin to de-worm our cattle. I remember the next summer, I was with the cows under a group of persimmon trees. And all of these bugs were flying around. And they were dung beetles, which are, you know, vital to a regenerative cattle ranch. And I was like, Oh, my gosh, the dung beetles have returned. And it’s because we weren’t using chemical.
James Connolly
Wow. That’s amazing.
Thomas Locke
Yeah, it was a kind of a, I don’t know, an epiphany for me, like this is actually working. So I did this for this reason. And here it is. Yeah. So it’s all connected. And we’re connected. You know, humans are connected to nature to going back to Sapiens, like he talks about 70,000 years ago, humans had a cognitive revolution. And we were the first creatures that we’re aware of, that stopped just living in an objective reality. And we started, you know, living in an imagined reality. And that allowed us to believe that we could control nature even more than we already did. And humans, you know, fast forward 70,000 years, we really do not feel like we are part of nature, we feel like we are separate from nature, completely separate. And that’s one of the most dangerous and destructive aspects of humans. I think it’s just a fact that we think that we’re separate from what’s going on, but we’re not, we’re all connected.
James Connolly
Yeah. I remember somebody making the argument that, in fact, like dung beetles are a keystone species. Because it you know, they’re the first ones who can break into cow patties, that allow all the other insects to sort of like begin the process of breaking all that stuff down. They’re just absolutely integral to the environment. Yeah. Sapiens is a really interesting book, I think we kind of like shortly talked about it, I’d love to get a sense of where he’s gone with a lot of his work since then. Because he wrote a book called, as he kind of talked about the birth of AI, he seems to have moved into a space where I think he thinks of this sort of, I think he’s starting to think a lot more mechanistically about this idea of like technology and human beings sort of starting to meld together. And I don’t understand how the person who wrote Sapiens, like one became vegan, but also lives in like, you know, Israel has become a hub of veganism in many different ways. And he’s been one of the larger proponents of it. And I just don’t understand how you studied that much anthropology and sort of ignore some of all of the costs of actually taking that food out of your diet. Love to have a conversation with him about that.
Thomas Locke
Yeah, it would be great. I mean, I thought it was a brilliant book. I just read it, which is why I’m you know, mentioning it, but, you know, and I think that it was brilliant, just because it was very accessible. When my brother-in-law told me about it, I thought this is going to be dense. I’m not gonna like reading it. But he’s a great writer who was easy to read and it just provided this unique history of how we got to where we are as human beings. But yeah, I mean, he’s clearly taken the route of technology is going to take over. And my perspective on life is really not to always be looking forward but to look backwards. I mean, I think that we need to embrace so many of the things that we used to do, as opposed to just forgetting about them. And just moving forward. I mean, that’s what my model of regenerative agriculture is all about. It’s not about embracing new technology or new science. It’s about observing humbly, you know how nature functions. And Wendell Berry is another great author for understanding that, you know, a little bit more dated, as far as his writing is concerned. But one of my favorite quotes from him was, there are no sacred and unsafe places there are just sacred and desecrated places. And, you know, our farm was a desecrated place, and in many ways, still is a desecrated place, because we haven’t been able to rebuild the soil and the ecological diversity like it was before humans mess with it. I consider a feedlot a desecrated place, I consider a mono culture soy field that’s dependent on chemical fertilizer and herbicides and pesticides to be a desecrated place. But you know, that field, sacredness hasn’t left it; it’s still there, we just have to allow it to come back. And so to me, it’s not the soybean that’s the problem or the cow. That’s the problem is the system of agriculture that we’re practicing. That’s the problem. And in everything that we do, raising cattle, pigs, chickens, corn, soy, spinach, whatever, we need to be practicing soil building regenerative practices on that land. If we have, I think, in my opinion, any hope of continuing to feed people in the next couple of 100 years, without replicating cells in the lab.
James Connolly
Yeah, yeah, it’s so abhorrent to me. The thing that I find, one of the quotes that I absolutely love is you plant the seed of a tree, that under which shade you’ll never sit under. And I think that farming can sort of start to move into that mind space. And, you know, yeah, look, I remember when we interviewed Joel Salatin, you know, his grandfather, or even think it was his grandfather, had bought the cheapest land that he could buy, at the time, the most degraded land, they were able to build, you know, somewhere around 12 inches of topsoil over the years, by being a grass farmer, by looking at all of these different inputs. And I think his structure is very different from most farms. But I think that you’re standing on this spongy, like beautiful, like, as you’re walking through that space, and you’re just like, you can barely imagine what it looked like before. He’s such an evocative teacher in so many different ways that you can kind of get it into your imagination. But it’s such a proud moment, I think, to sort of see over the course of this man’s lifetime, how much can be built?
Thomas Locke
Well, he’s kind of a the prophet of, I’m 40 years old. So many farmers like me, a sociology major at a liberal arts college thought I was going to wear a tie to work every day decided to start farming. I mean, that’s in large part because of, you know, watching a Joel Salatin YouTube video, and being inspired by him, and he has his qualities and you know, his challenges, but clearly a very provocative, inspiring person in many ways. And yeah, I would almost think that almost everybody my age that’s in regenerative agriculture, especially raising animals has been inspired by Joel Salatin at some point.
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James Connolly
I like James Rebanks. Are you familiar with him?
Thomas Locke
Not really. No.
James Connolly
James is… he’s an English farmer, sheep farmer. And his story is sort of… I hate to para… he would hate that I paraphrase it this way: multi-generational family, sheep farmers, sheepherders, and they were like, well, you’re too smart to sit on our farm.
Thomas Locke
I’ve had that exact same quote said about me by somebody, and I’m not a very smart person, but the bars in people’s minds so low. You have to be this yokels sitting on a tractor all day that you know, yeah. And Joel Salatin has a quote about that. He’s like, there’s four mothers standing around at a soccer game. And you know, they’re talking about their kids, and they’re like, well, Jimmy wants to be a doctor. Stephen wants to be a lawyer. And nobody’s ever gonna say, well, Thomas wants to be a farmer. You know? Because this mindset.
James Connolly
So James went to Oxford, he studied there, he, you know, graduated, and then he went back to farming. You know, and he’s very honest about it. It’s a tough life. You know, it is… there’s a lot of anger and resentment I think in some aspect of the competition that kind of happens between these like groups that then are kind of like outside of society. So they… there’s a lot of infighting within families and any number of different things. It’s really wonderful book though, because it really, like we had, like people like Wendell Berry, philosophers, scientists that I have taught me more about the world, who are also like, dedicated to farming, dedicated to bringing nourishment to the system that’s around them. So I kind of want to, like, ask – talk about the inputs to the farm, and like, how have you? I don’t even know how to necessarily phrase this question because I think what ends up happening with farmers in general, when they’re kind of working through that, that the industrial model is that the key drivers of that sort of play in between inputs in fertilizers, pesticides, any number of different, you know, mortgages on tractors and any number of different inputs, in order to grow this stuff, there seems to be a sort of play back and forth between these companies to see who can extract as much money from this farmer while he’s like working the land. And so the removal of a lot of that stuff can be really scary, can be really, you know, you’re kind of removing yourself from an entire system that is set up in a very specific way that allows you to one get USDA grants, loans, you know, any number of different things. So you coming on the farm, wanting to not necessarily even have these inputs, but like or even just slowly weaning off of them. As you’re kind of moving forward. Can you kind of talk about that process a little bit?
Thomas Locke
Yeah, well, you just touched on stuff that I could talk about for the next hour and a half. I mean, I’m such an idealist or you know, I’ve lost some of that idealism, but actually a lot of it. But when I first started farming, I mean, the idealism was extremely high. So I never used any chemical inputs, except for some ivermectin to de-worm the cattle, but I mean, we never sprayed anything on the farm. And, you know, the farm would have benefited quickly from that, but it wouldn’t have lasted. And so when we started, I bought a sprayer and I buy, you know, calcium, and microbes and molasses and various things to supplement the soil with what the soil is lacking, which our soil was lacking everything when we took a soil test in 2014, except for sodium, which was really high. And we’ve seen enormous improvements by simply giving the soil what it needs, having diverse grasses growing all year. And using grazing animals. I mean, our pH has gone from five and a half to six and a half, organic matter has increased 1%, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it allows each acre of land to hold in additional 20,000 gallons of water. And but if you go to Honey Grove, which is my neighboring town, and you go to the Honey Grove Grain and Peanut, where you can buy seeds and whatnot. Every morning, there’s a circle of farmers, and they’re all eating donuts, smoking cigarettes, and drinking coffee, and not one of them wants to be the black sheep. You know, Ian Mitchell Innes once said, farmers would rather fail together and succeed alone. And I found that to be very, very true. And that’s partially because, you know, they probably did grew up on that farm and their father grew up on that farm. And they embrace like everybody else’s chemically dependent mindset, because corporations were promising them, you know, these increased yields, and this wealth that would come with it, and the wealth never did come with it. They’ve been exploited for generations, and they don’t want to take the risk of not doing that anymore. So I mean, it’d be really scary for them to do it, not to mention that they have no idea how to do that, you know, they don’t know how soil functions, they really are just focused on what’s going above the ground. And they have no idea. And they really don’t care about what’s going on underground. So it’s a big topic. And you know, the industrial chemical mindset. You know, their big slogan always is what we’re feeding the world. The day that I wrote this op-ed for the Dallas Morning News about the health of soil, their front page article that day was the drought in Texas. And they interviewed farmers across Texas. And the very last line of that article was, you know, it’s okay, we’re feeding the world. And the truth is that they’re not feeding the world. I mean, we are feeding more people than we have. But you know, there are still plenty of people that are starving and 30% of the people in my neighboring town of Honey Grove use the food bank. Even though the town is literally surrounded by farms. It’s not the goal of industrial agriculture to feed the world. It’s the goal of industrial agriculture to make money. And they’re very, very good at that. And farmers have been exploited for generations in order for other people to make money. And that’s… there’s a lot of fear from farmers about that.
James Connolly
Yeah, I mean, even just right to repair. I don’t know if you followed any of that stuff. John Deere tractors. Yeah. Absolutely insane. And can you talk about that to the audience a little bit.
Thomas Locke
Yeah, so I have a John Deere tractor, but it’s not a $200,000 tractor that has that. Actually, I’m not sure if I have the right to repair it or not. But they can turn off your tractor. I mean, if they want, so if you like… they can remote turn it off. But there are, yeah. I mean, there are rules that you cannot repair your own tractor, you have to take it to a John Deere facility to do that. And, you know, I think almost everybody knows, you know, with GMO seeds, farmers can’t save their own seeds, and they’re, you know, locked into these horrible contracts. Once they, you know, the genie comes out of the bottle, they can’t put it back in. So yeah, I mean, you know, when I told people I wanted to be a farmer, that I was going to be a farmer, I think that almost everybody thought of the people sitting around in a circle at the Honey Grove Grain and Peanut, and the way that farmers had been exploited for years, and it scared them. Like my father, when I remember I called him and I told him, I was going to stop fundraising and leave my career and start being a farmer. And his voice drops. And he said, so you’re going to be a day laborer. And I was like, Well, I’m not going to wait, well, you know, sit in a parking lot and wait for somebody to pick me up and take me to work every day. I mean, and I, you know, explained to him regenerative agriculture, and, you know, his mindset is different now. But yeah, the idea of being a farmer is just scary to people. And just because, you know, they think of these people that have been exploited for so long that don’t have control over their land that don’t have control over their tractor to fix their own tractor, like you said, and it’s a, you know, it’s kind of a vulnerable place to be.
James Connolly
Before Bayer was, before Monsanto was bought out by Bayer, the CEO had given a speech where he said, you know, the problem is with the agricultural system, it’s not consolidated enough. And so you… so insane to me, but he, you know, is we have about four companies in the world that do most of the fertilizers, that produce most of the fertilizers, we same thing with pesticide companies. And, you know, what I think he was talking about was sort of a subscription model for farmers. And this came up yesterday, so sort of fresh in my head, but he was saying, like, we want to be able to tell farmers exactly, like, through satellite data and weather data, when to plants, you know, when to harvest, when to apply pesticides, when to apply herbicides, we want to have essentially, like, you bought a subscription to their industrial model, and then you follow every single aspect of that. And so, like, to me, that’s one, even if you signed up for that, the second you didn’t follow that, you know, you’re immediately liable for whatever, right. But it’s, uh, you know, I think that’s the mindset. I think that’s what people need to understand about the way that they think about those things. And, you know, for Vilsack, who is the next Secretary, yeah, Ag Secretary, I listened to him on a podcast and he was, you know, going forward, he was talking, he said, we want the market to develop whatever is supposed to be going forward for our agricultural system. So this market seems to have, you know, sort of a very Sapiens esque you know, idea of the world and objectification of the world like we the market will determine what is the best path forward? And I find that enormously dangerous.
Thomas Locke
Yeah, well, it’s not surprising, though. I mean, it’s all about money. We’re not, we don’t grow food in this country, to feed people, we grow food in this country for people to make money. And that’s the entire mindset. And so it totally makes sense that he would say that. And, you know, Nicole Masters in her book For the Love of Soil, talks about the unintended consequences of the Green Revolution, there may have actually been some people that believed in it, that thought that this was actually going to feed the world and change the way that farmers make money and whatnot. But it didn’t. And the unintended consequences are that we have, you know, in the Midwest alone lost something like 580 billion tons of topsoil. We have a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, the size of New Jersey, because of excess nitrate runoff, that our rural communities are degraded, you know, I could go on and on. And you already know all of these things. But I was actually thinking a little bit earlier about the book, The Power Broker, which is about written by Robert Cairo, about Robert Moses in New York City, who was the parks director for decades, and controlled all the money from the toll roads that went directly to his, you know, his coffers. And he believed in the power of roads and highways and the automobile. And so he wanted to transform and he did transform Manhattan into this, you know, city that had cars in it. He wanted to build three bridges across Manhattan, one on the you know, through the village, one through Midtown, and then one through the upper east and west side. And that was stopped, but he did he was able to build the Cross Bronx Expressway, and, you know, several bridges across the East River. And anytime there was a lot of congestion, you know, it’s like well We need to build more roads. So they built another bridge. And that just led to more congestion. And the same is true with industrial agriculture. It’s, you know, well, we’re going to develop these, you know, new technologies to spray on our land so that we can feed more people. And that’s going to solve it. But instead, it just creates new problems every single time we do that, because we’re just not moving, you know, in harmony. with nature. I shouldn’t say in harmony with nature, that sounds, you know, cheesy and cliche, but we’re trying to strong arm nature. And the more we tried to do that the more problems present themselves.
James Connolly
Bill Bryson said this once about the National Forestry Service, he said that they will look at an entire expanse of woods. And they’ll say this would look great with a road right through it.
Thomas Locke
Yeah, sounds about right. Yeah. The way that I think about it, James, before I forget, it’s like soil, healthy soil is like a savings account. And, you know, if you have a million dollars in a savings account, you’re gonna be earning more than if you have $1 in a savings account. And rain is kind of like your paycheck, but you don’t know when you’re ever gonna get paid. So you want to have enough money built up in your savings account, that you can earn interest, and you don’t have to have a paycheck all the time. And then, you know, the industrial chemical mindset is kind of like a payday loan. So if I was to spray a bunch of chemical fertilizer on my land, it would get really green really quickly out here. Or greener than it already is. But the interest on that would be so high, that it would be hard to repay that. And then, you know, rebuild that soil functionality, after you know, years of taking out payday loans. And so the goal is to have a lot of money in your investment portfolio or your savings account, not be taking out payday loans all the time. And the other way I think about it is kind of like, you know, post 1940, we began a drug addiction with how we grow food. In this country. I mean, chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides essentially, are like drugs. And I don’t think that you have to have taken drugs, to understand that, you know, if you do cocaine, or start drinking alcohol or whatever, at first, it feels great, like you love it. But then you have to take more of it and more of it and more of it to get the same result. And ultimately, it comes down to two options, you can either quit doing it, or you can die. I mean, that’s like the ultimate result, if you become completely dependent upon those things, and you know, our industrial model, if we don’t start adopting more regenerative soil building practices, and we continue just to be completely chemically dependent, the solutions that we created after World War Two are eventually going to play themselves out. And we’re just going to be stuck with this desecrated land that can’t produce anything.
James Connolly
I just picked up a book called The Devil’s Element. And it’s specifically it said, it’s a writer who was mainly focused on the Great Lakes is a really interesting guy, I think the book, the book that he had written prior to this, but it’s sort of about the history of phosphorus. And it’s a really wonderful book. It has a sort of Sapiens s quality to it, because he’s a great storyteller. And he talks a lot about the utilization of phosphorus as a chemical weapon that was like in the bombing of Hamburg is one of the stories that he used. And so you would have this stuff called like elemental phosphorus, and they would drop it from planes. And once it lit up, you couldn’t get it out. Right. So you can jump into the water if you had it on you. But as soon as you came out of the water, and the temperature raised enough, it would just spark up again.
Thomas Locke
Absolutely. Yeah. Here’s a family story. I had a cousin, uh, you know, several generations ago, that was a crop duster. And he saw that another friend was crop dusting. And he started, he got like some bags that were in the back or somebody else was flying the plane and he was in the back and he lit up these fertilizer bags on fire to get the attention of the other plane and he caught on fire while the plane was flying. And yeah, was able to they were able to land the plane in the field pretty quickly and get the fire out. But not stuff you want to light on fire. Long story.
James Connolly
Yeah. And that is always that sort of weird paradox, right, between nitrogen and phosphorus is that you have these elements that can really bring fertility to the soil. It can make any bring life to any environment. Well, not necessarily – too much nitrogen in our forest is actually killing a lot of biodiversity. But yeah, it sort of follows along the same sort of laws, but it’s also just an incredible chemical weapon. And we utilize that sort of methodology, I think in the way that we’re thinking about things right because we took that sort of mindset of war with nature. That was the sort of war to end all wars sort of World War Two continue ratio of one to two. We took that mindset and we applied it to the way that we’re going to grow food going forward.
Thomas Locke
Yeah, which is about 1% of the time. You know, we’ve been growing food for 10,000 years. And our current chemical industrial mindset, as represented about 1% of that time. And so, you know, on a football field, we’re on the one yard line. And 10,000 years isn’t a long amount of time. It’s either, you know, Homo sapiens have been around for 300,000 years. And so when people this is the most frustrating part about the black and white argument on should we be entirely plant-based, or completely accept this industrial model of meat production, as if, you know, God decided that those were the two things that we could do. And there are no other options for how we grow food in this country and how we feed ourselves. Like the director of Cowspiracy, like he just couldn’t quite or maybe you never tried to understand that. It’s, you know, it’s disingenuous to say that you can either be entirely plant-based or completely supported an industrial model of meat production. There are other ways to do it. But we’re just so… we just can’t imagine that almost like this. We’re living in this industrial mindset. And so we think, Well, that’s the only option. But it’s not, and we can build new food systems. I mean, think about what we can do. And people say, well, we can’t farm differently. We can’t produce food differently. That’s just disingenuous. I mean, clearly we can. It’s just about doing it.
James Connolly
Yeah. So the renewables aspect of it as well, the renewables aspect of industrial agriculture, I’ve been trying to get my mind sort of wrapped around. So we take about 40% of the corn that reduce and turn it into biofuels. I mean, it’s just such a strange set of elements.
Thomas Locke
Yes. Well, we live in a pretty strange world, we don’t realize that because it’s the water that we swim in. But it’s Yeah, I mean, our, you know, ascent to the very, very top of the food chain, so quickly, in an evolutionary sense. And then just our complete world domination and all of the things that we do to make money and support our economy, it’s just, we live in a bizarro world, if you just look, look at it from 30,000 feet, compared to any other living creature on earth.
James Connolly
Yeah, one of the things so Sapiens actually talks about this, and I thought it was actually a really interesting aspect. He said that if you would have gone back to say, even medieval times, when you had a famine, you would lose somewhere around 15 to 20% of the population, say, France at the time. Yeah, we’ve gotten that down. When we see a famine, we will lose maybe 1%. And we actually still consider that abhorrent. And when we look at that level of progress, it’s actually kind of in… it’s an interesting aspect of the way I was trying to see it from the perspective of people kind of with that, like that mindset. And it is sort of interesting. I wanted to kind of like go into some of the water elements so that I don’t know how much you’ve been studying that because I think for me, it’s like, my enthusiasm for water has gotten like, it’s kind of amazing how much we’d sort of terraforming certain aspects of even just our waterways, you were talking about the damming up of was a creek kind of coming through your area. We have simultaneously people trying to remove dams in certain parts of the world because realize the ecological cost of damning water. And so wonder if you will kind of want to talk about that a little bit. Even just on the farm, you know.
Thomas Locke
Yeah. Well, I’m not. I’m certainly not a scientist. I heard Nicole Nimen talking about water cycling and the importance of healthy soil and grasslands in our ability to recycle water. And clearly, you know, I think most listeners of this podcast and in you and I understand the destructive role of industrial agriculture, in not just feeding animals in confinement, but also growing soy and corn and you know, other crops and depleting our water resources. The Colorado River, the Ogallala reservoir is almost gone. I mean, if you fly over the panhandle of Texas, you just see these crop circles that shouldn’t be growing there because of Ogallala reservoir water that they’re just pumping out of the ground. And on our farm. I mean, we have several ponds that we’ve dug, that collect rainwater, and that’s where our cows drink from. Every summer I’ll irrigate some of our land with those ponds, and then they’ll fill back up in the winter. And then that runoff goes used to go down into board art creek that would then flow into the Red River and then ultimately the Gulf of Mexico. And now it’s going into board arc lake which is owned by the North Texas Municipal Utility District that will ultimately fill up people’s swimming pools in Frisco and McKinney which are north of Dallas and water their lawns and of course all So, you know, they’ll drink that water, but that water is not being used for any purpose other than just to kind of fuel this urban expansion. And there are, there are three things that we need in this world that we forget about that we take for granted, because they’re in such you know, seeming abundance is that’s water, clean air, and food. We also need shelter. And some would argue that we need relationships and etc, and love but food, water and air, and, you know, food is so devalued. Now, because there’s such an abundance of it, we just don’t care about that. But water, you know, is getting to the point where, you know, you’ll turn on the national media, and you’ll see stories on on the Colorado river or Lake Mead, or, you know, these reservoirs and, you know, when we start running out of water, it’s gonna hit the fan. And that won’t be a good day, for sure.
James Connolly
Judith Schwartz wrote a wonderful book on water, I would recommend anybody read it, the one of the things that she says, she sent, I think it was Johannesburg and London received the same amount of water per year. Just think about the two is like, you know, very, very different one. Johannesburg obviously gets huge. Like, you know, downpours of water, where London if you’ve ever spent any time there, that you’re just wet all the time. And it’s really about the sort of capacity of the… to hold a lot of that water we have water in our atmosphere, we have fresh water in our atmosphere, and we can pull water from the ground, we can pull deeper and deeper into these aquifers, but we’re not recharging them. And recharging them means you have to have cover crops. You have to have green on that land, so that the soil can do what it would normally do. Right? Yeah. And that’s the story. Yeah.
Thomas Locke
But I mean, it’s not again, it’s not about the way that we grow food and raise animals in this country. And the industrial model isn’t about sustainability. It’s about shareholder value, and short term profits, and regenerative cattle ranching and regenerative farming is in large part about building healthy soil so that you can hold water, you know, people think, well, you need to irrigate more, or you need to fertilize more, as opposed to you need to increase the organic matter in your soil. So that your soil can hold more water so that it can be more resistant to droughts, which is what we’re trying to do out here. When it rains, you know, regenerative farmers like to say, when somebody asked how much rain they got, they say all of it, because it’s soaked into their soil, you know, it didn’t run it’s great to another person’s soil or into a waterway. But yeah, and that’s, and that takes a long time, you know, you really have to be intentional about building soil. And you have to be patient, which is one of the challenges of regenerative agriculture is that there are these solutions that could go into town and buy all of these very quick solutions. But they’re not ultimately going to do what I want, or achieve what I want to achieve out here, which is, you know, hopefully, many years from now, when I die, the soil will have an organic matter of three or 4%, which is a huge improvement from where it was, and we’ll just have a more sustainable farm.
James Connolly
I wonder if you can talk a little bit about because it’s not even something that you have talked about a little bit before, but this false dichotomy is animal versus meat consumption versus plant consumption is because that’s what for me, that’s where, why I started to get into Sacred Cow and started to produce the film is because I what I saw it actually happening was this move in industrial food production, to sort of like, create this idea of plant-based. Everything is plant-based, you know, well, yeah. That kind of extra lag, like all of that stuff. Yeah.
Thomas Locke
Well, that goes back to that. That black and white, this or that solution to problems that people see in agriculture. And it really I think the solution is how I eat plants and animals. I’m very proud of the fact that I’m an omnivore. I have no desire to be plant-based, or you know, an entirely carnivore either. But, yeah, I mean, we have a garden behind me, that is huge. And, you know, the quality of the food that comes out of that is phenomenal, and we work hard at it. But it’s not an either or. And that’s, you know, the frustrating part about so many vegan documentaries and people who advocate for plant-based is that they think that it has to be entirely one way or another. And, you know, if you live in a rural community, like I do, I mean, I was talking to the woman that delivers my mail yesterday, and we’re gonna have a couple of vegans over for dinner soon when they come to the farm. And she was like, what you need to do is go to Sam’s and you need to get some barbecue, you need to get some paper plates, and you just need to put it out for them, you know? And she was like, they don’t eat beef. And I said, No, they don’t eat any animals, you know, and she was like, Okay, we’ll just make them some spaghetti. or something, I was like, well, those, they’re actually vegan so that you know, the egg in the noodle, you can’t, you know, and she was like, just blown away by that concept. And, you know, that’s not to insult her intelligence or anyone else out here. But like, meat is such a fundamental part of so many people’s identity, that to think that everyone’s gonna stop eating meat is insane. To me, it’s just crazy. And there’s not one politician in the country, well, there are a few politicians, but there’s not one party that’s going to come anywhere close to ever passing public policy, that will make it harder for people to eat meat, it’s just not going to happen. So to build a more regenerative model, and not just say, you have to eat this Impossible Burger, or you have to eat this burger from McDonald’s, it’s going to be a consumer driven movement, we have to have consumers buy into that literally. And figuratively, people need to spend money, buying food from regenerative farms and ranches. And that’s going to be the way that it grows. And hopefully solves a lot of our, our problems. But yeah, to think that, like you said, false dichotomy to think that we have, I can either go eat, you know, a fast food burger or adopt an entirely vegan lifestyle is just simply not true.
James Connolly
Yeah, I’ll tell you a funny story. I was dating a girl who was vegan when I was living in England, and we went to Morocco. And she had somebody write up, like a note, it was on a piece of paper in French, I do not eat the meat of the animal, nor do I eat the, you know, the dairy of an animal. And I don’t need any eggs or anything like that. And so we went to the street vendor, and he had this stew that is he was making. And she showed it to him. And it was a beautiful student, tons of vegetables really smelled aromatic. Moroccan food is absolutely delicious. And the guy reads it and he looks at her and he reads it and he’s like, not even lamb. Actually not laugh. He’s like, okay, and so he started, he takes his hand, he starts pulling out the lamb whatever’s left over, and she’s just like, I mean, she spent we spent four days there, barely anything, because half of the world doesn’t understand what do you even the vegan is. So I can definitely relate.
Thomas Locke
And James, I don’t have any, I have no problems with somebody who wants to be a vegan or vegetarian, or, you know, just eat Skittles for the rest of their life. That’s their choice. But it is it is frustrating to me, for people to say that this solution exists kind of like a conservative Christian evangelists. Like you have to believe this are you going to go to hell, the solution exists and only eating plants even when those plants are grown. And monocultures that are completely chemical dependence that are, you know, causing the loss of topsoil that are contributing to climate change, that are poisoning our water that’s leading to loss of ecological diversity. I mean, there’s no ecological diversity on a monoculture Sawyer cornfield. They talked about habitat destruction with animals, and that does occur in an industrial system, but there’s plenty of habitat destruction going on with the ingredients that people use to, you know, make an Impossible Burger as well. And so it’s just, it’s not eating, it’s not really what the food that you’re eating, that’s as important to me, it’s how that food is produced. And, you know, there are plenty of people that are never going to adopt a plant-based lifestyle anyways. So we have to have a diverse approach to a sustainable food system to a regenerative food system. And I think that that includes eating plants and animals for a large segment of the population. But if you want to do one or the other, go for it. But I don’t think the solution exists in just eating plants. It’s the how those animals and those crops are grown and produced.
James Connolly
Yeah, it’s a shame like I’m 49 So like, I remember my teenage years there was one tomato was red. Right? We had three different types of apples, one banana, we… so genetically like through just breeding have modified most of our world that kind of like, you know your when you were talking about going to 11 Madison Park, and trying what everything was plant based there is absolutely delicious. For me, vegetables are absolutely delicious. Like, like arugula like certain ones that have these bitter compounds. And like in Italy, they have radicchio festivals, where people, like, just absolutely love the bitter compounds of it, and they feed it to the kids, and we should be celebrating all of this diversity more. And, again, it comes down to this false dichotomy. We’re growing up in these monocultures of both, right, so chickens, you know, one breed, maybe two that we’re growing. And then we have all of these sort of heritage breeds. That’s, that’s the thing that I’m looking for. I’m looking for a difference in taste, and I want things to look different. You know, we were talking yesterday about all in horror. And I was like, So what do you experience when you walk into a supermarket? And we were laughing about it, because it is awe inspiring, but it’s also kind of weirdly horrible.
Thomas Locke
Yeah, and that’s the water that we swim in. That’s so normal for people. I mean, when I first started farming, I, you know, I had processed, you know, these red wattle, Gloucester old spot heritage pigs, and the pork was red and marbled and beautiful. And, you know, my mother, like so many others, you know, and Easter makes a ham and I had ham. And, you know, she just was like, you don’t need to bring one home, I’ll just go to HEB, which is a local grocery store in Central Texas and buy one. And it really took my family a long time. And friends. And you know, to this day, there’s a ton of people that just, they don’t buy food from local farms. They buy food at the grocery store, because that’s just where you buy food, right. And it’s just a completely different mindset to say, oh, I can actually go to this farm or go to this farmers market and buy food from a farmer, you know. So I think that, you know, a huge area of growth in the regenerative local food system are the middlemen, the aggregation distribution facilities, or the food hubs that work with a collection of local farmers that aggregate that food, and then just put it in front of consumers at grocery stores. So they don’t have to think about it when they’re buying ground beef, they just grab it, and they buy it. And I think that that would really encourage a lot more people to transition their land to a regenerative model, especially young people. I mean, a lot of folks, they want to live on a farm. But they don’t want to have to go to a farmers market or multiple farmers market every weekend. They don’t want to have to hustle and you know, work to get people to buy their food and haven’t complained about the prices. And you know, we need systems in the middle to be able to make that food more accessible to people and more convenient for people to buy. So that’s a huge area of growth, in my opinion.
James Connolly
Yeah. Cool. Is there anything else you want to kind of talk about, like, you want to dive into?
Thomas Locke
Well, you know, people’s identities, what I wrote the when I ate it 11 Madison Park. Last year for my 40th birthday, I sat next to these two women. And we on a total introvert, so is not like me to strike up a conversation. But they were about to eat this bread course. And I looked at one of them. I said, you’re going to really enjoy that. And we struck up a conversation and they said, Well, what do you what do you do? Of course, and I said, Well, actually, I’m a cattle rancher in Texas and sitting at the, you know, three star Michelin vegan restaurant in New York City that, you know, their ears really perked up. And the one across the table, who I’m now friends with her name is Alex Reid. She said, Well, what do you think about what Bill Gates is doing? And I said, Well, I think that he believes in what he’s trying to achieve. And that’s admirable, but you know, the idea that we’re going to stop eating meat in this country is just not realistic. And partially, it’s not realistic, because our identities are so tied up in who we have been, and what we eat and what our family system is that, you know, people just aren’t willing to question that. But with regards to changing the way we eat, from an industrial to or a generative model, I would just encourage people to simply begin again, as Sam Harris talks about, just to begin, again, to challenge your preconceived notions of where you buy your food, and how you eat and why you eat, you know, to not just simply try to get that dopamine response from food, but actually try to support your local economy and have a healthy lifestyle and enjoy cooking and you know, find some spirituality in the food that you eat. Because again, as Sam Harris says, your only opportunity to engage with your life is in the present moment. But we are so tied to the idea of who we were being who we are and that we can’t change that and so you know, in all facets, facets of life and aspects of life, how to encourage people just to you know, embrace the present and challenge preconceived notions and begin again.
James Connolly
Yeah, that’s awesome. Really cool.
Thomas Locke
That’s my sermon.
James Connolly
So how do people find you they’re reaching out? Can you will put in the show notes, your farm and any of the social media, but it’s always good to say it as well.
Thomas Locke
Yeah, so it’s more dark meat company that’s spelled. I had to get really clever with the name of the farm. So instead of long family farm, we named it Bois d’Arc Company. And that’s Bois d’Arc Meat Company. And the Instagram pages is Instagram/boisdarcmeatco and then you can get in touch with me through that source. That’s really honestly what I use the most just because I think pictures are a great way to show folks what we’re doing. We’re local, we’re intentionally local, we don’t ship food anywhere. And so if you live in the North Texas area, we’ll be happy to sell you really delicious, regenerative source of beef and chicken and turkey at Thanksgiving.
James Connolly
Awesome. Yeah. All right. Well, thanks, Thomas. I really appreciate it.
Thomas Locke
Yeah. Thank you, James. This was fun, and we’ll be in touch.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Thanks so much for listening today and for following my work. If you believe in making sure that people all over the world should have access to nutritious food, please join my mission through my non-profit, the Global Food Justice Alliance. Visit sustainabledish.com/join and become a sustaining member today. All sustaining members get early access to ad-free podcasts plus free downloads, and you’ll be helping get healthy protein like meat, fish, and eggs to food-insecure kids. That’s sustainabledish.com/join. And thank you.
