Podcast (sustainable-dish-podcast): Play in new window | Download
If you ever get the chance, go to the Old Salt Festival in Montana. It’s a celebration of people coming together to support land stewardship in Montana. This year I was fortunate to be one of the speakers along with others in the regenerative space, plus regional authors, poets, and musicians.
Now that I’ve returned and things have settled a bit, I have Cole Mannix, president and founder of Old Salt Co-op, on the show to talk about his experience with ranching and growing his business.
Cole grew up in a ranching family but spent a brief time in Boston pursuing a master’s in theology before returning to his ranching roots in Montana. When he returned, he started working for a startup beef cooperative and then became the Associate Director at Western Landowners Alliance. Ultimately, in 2020 he left to begin forming Old Salt Co-op.
Cole’s vision for Old Salt is to be “more than a meat company.” It is a regional meat economy with vertically integrated enterprises. The goal is not to produce meat for a national market or to grow big enough to be sold to a larger company. Functioning as a co-op allows for the direct involvement of producers and employees while fostering lasting relationships with customers.
This episode includes:
- What it was like for Cole growing up in Montana
- How US policies affect farmers and ranchers
- Misguided attempts to provide aid to other countries
- Why we need to create more inefficiencies in the food system
- Cole’s goals for Old Salt Co-op
Rather watch this episode on YouTube? Check it out here: Episode 259: Cole Mannix
Resources:
COOL – Country of Origin Labeling
Connect with Cole & Old Salt:
Website: Old Salt Co-Op
Facebook: Old Salt Co-Op
Instagram: @oldsaltcoop
LinkedIn: Old Salt Co-Op
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.
A big thanks to the sponsor of today’s show, LMNT. Do you often suffer from headaches, muscle cramps, fatigue, or sleeplessness? It could be from an electrolyte deficiency, and drinking plain water may not be enough to replenish lost electrolytes. LMNT is a drink mix that has everything you need and nothing you don’t – no artificial ingredients, food coloring, gluten, fillers, or sugar!
LMNT comes in lots of great flavors, and when you go to sustainabledish.com/LMNT, you’ll get a free sample pack with your purchase. Plus, they have a convenient subscription program that makes it easy for you to keep your favorite flavors fully supplied. Head over to sustainabledish.com/LMNT to give it a try.
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.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Welcome back, everyone. Today I have with me Cole Mannix, he is from the Old Salt Co-Op. I just got back from Montana from a really cool event that he hosted there that he invited me to speak at, which was so cool. So fun. Welcome.
Cole Mannix
Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah, so first off, maybe you could just kind of talk a little bit about how you came up with the idea of the event – kind of set the stage, give people an idea of what it looked like there. And I should mention for you know, for everyone who’s never been out to Montana, I remember there were bear signs like it was… what was it? Bear smart event or a bear? What? What were the signs?
Cole Mannix
Well, it’s bear aware. So you’re aware, quite a few, quite a population of grizzly bears in the valley bottom. So cooking a whole bunch of meat, we needed to be careful.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah. As I was driving out, all I could think about when I was looking around was there must be bears, like hiding in those trees. There’s kind of these like, low mountains. They’re like hills. What do you call them?
Cole Mannix
In that little valley there with there’s kind of it’s the coming together of kind of glacial sharp mountains at the north end, where it’s basically the Glacier Park National Park and Bob Marshall Wilderness. And then at the south end, where the festival was, it’s like volcanic, more rounded mountains. So and then, you know, the valley bottom in between, which is very green, lots of willows and brush. And so usually by about, you know, by the time may hits, the Grizzlies have come out of hibernation, found some food, and they’re starting to move to the higher country. And then they move back down as the fall hits. And they’re kind of preparing to go back into hibernation. But usually, that sweet spot where we held the festival, the last almost the last week of June, it’s usually a sweet spot where there’s not quite as much presence, but I did see one just a couple days before the festival. And so they were still around.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Wow. Well, I I remember one time when I was visiting Robb, in Kalispell, I offered to take their dog for a walk. And they were like, you kind of don’t want to do that unless you have protection. And I don’t know how much bear spray is really going to protect you against a grizzly bear. So you might just want to not go for a walk out where they live, because they’re kind of like outside of Kalispell. And in the more kind of woods area. I have to also mention the drive from Helena to where the event was on that ranch was one of the most beautiful, beautiful drives I’ve ever done in my life. It was my son, who’s 19 who came with me. His mind was blown. Like we had the music pumping, there was a beautiful fog that was lifting off the mountains that we were kind of driving through on the way there. And it was the most, just the one of the nicest one hour drives I’ve ever had. So that really made us so excited to come. But yeah, could you set the stage a little bit? I’m sorry. Just talk about I mean, you guys have like glamping tents set up. You had whole animals being grilled? All kinds of music.
Cole Mannix
Yeah. So we held this event on my family’s ranch, where I grew up, and my mom and dad and my aunts and uncles and my siblings and and several of my cousins all manage it together. So it’s a cattle ranch. And it was called Old Salt Festival. And we I think we had about 1600 people there over the course of the three days. And it was this kind of combination of like you said the live fire cooking I think we did 10 lamb and 20 goats and two beef and eight hogs by the time it was all said and done. These three chef teams kind of work together to prepare these meals each day, so Friday through Sunday. And then we had some wonderful speakers such as yourself, not only on the kind of, you know, topics surrounding livestock and meat and conservation, but also some poets who were talking about the river in the Blackfoot Valley and who we’re talking about. There’s a guy named David James Duncan, who’s just a wonderful author kind of, he’s got a book coming out where all these kind of disparate characters across the US move back to a Montana ranch out there trying to start a more regenerative community. And so we there was those elements. There’s 14 bands, who were kind of a lot of them were not huge headliner names, but they were just good solid music. We had a pasture walk and a little side stage about on this little peak, that’s about a third of a mile above the festival grounds. So about 150 people and that little experience on Saturday morning. So it was really… it was trying to be a celebration of community and of land. And in Montana, you kind of have a fairly big divide, still, I would say, between traditional agriculture. And between sort of the more left-leaning, you know, wilderness groups and land trust’s and wildlife interests and hunting and interests. And we have a fairly large influx into the state of folks that are moving here for the outdoors, and yet are not super plugged in, as you know, like our agricultural system is pretty commoditized. And so they’re not really plugged into the agricultural production in the States. So this event was really trying to, you know, get those people in the same space and celebrate together.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Well, it was, it was just so fun. And I ran into a bunch of people I knew, which was also really fun. So we got to hang out with John and Brittany from roam free. And then I got to meet Kate Kavanaugh, who I knew but didn’t even know she was going to be there until she and I were on a separate call about some other projects we were working on. So we ended up hanging out for quite some time afterwards. And it was funny because I had been emailing with you. And I didn’t know which one you weren’t because I had just sort of talked to the women that were like running the stage. And I asked them what you look like. And they said, he’s got really smiley eyes and great genetics.
Cole Mannix
He’s the one that doesn’t know what the up from down. I was just running around all over the place with the first year logistics of an event like this. I wish we’d had the talk. Yeah.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah. But I just thought that was a funny way to describe somebody from people who like, obviously are in livestock, you know, good genetics anyway. So we’ll talk a little bit about, you know, growing up there, like, Anson and I, as we were driving out, we were wondering, like, did you have to take a bus like for an hour all the way to your high school? And like what was it you know, how many kids were in your school? What was it like growing up pretty out there in the middle of almost nowhere ish, to me, anyway, Montana?
Cole Mannix
I mean, it was a wonderful growing up. And of course, I didn’t have a lot of context for what other growing is growing up might look like around the world that was the only kid in my class most of kindergarten through eighth grade. So we did have a little K through eight school in town about 33 kids or so at that time, were spread out between those grades. And then for high school, we would drive about 30 minutes west to a little town called Drummond. And so there was a bus that ran but if you’re in sports, then you’re going to be traveling on the early in the late edges of the day. And so that’s kind of what that looks like. And then I went to undergrad not too far away, right in Helena. And it was a small little liberal arts school called Carroll that I think we had about 1300 in that school, and then from there, I went to Boston and did a short graduate degree there. And then kind of came back to Montana after that. But my like the day to day growing up in the Blackfoot, I worked on the ranch, I was the oldest of my kind of generation and so I followed dad and my aunts and uncles around and, and did ranch work. I’ve never managed the ranch, but I did a lot of you know, ranch work growing up and that was that was our life. You know, I think we a lot of us joke that we don’t know Montana as a whole, nearly as well as folks who move here later and really explore it. And because we were pretty much oriented in that little, the little valley that was you know, the cycle of the season from calving in the spring and all the irrigating that happens in the preparation for hang in the AI-ing if you do artificial insemination for breeding program and then moving into hang season and then in the fall as you bring… as the cattle begin coming out of the mountains and your fall projects built… usually construction projects, water development starts happening so that you’re preparing for shipping. And then later… we’ve had a meat program just for my family’s ranch called Mannix beef for about 17 or 18 years. So beginning to engage with the farmers market and keeping that part of the herd separate. And, you know, pack… learning to pack orders in the freezer and learning the marketing side and in kind of in… I think it wasn’t until that little meat program that we started in the early 2000s that we really thought of ourselves as food producers. I mean growing up I thought of ourselves as ranchers, you know, we but we were not connected to the food system. And so that project which my aunts and uncles and parents started, it really drew my generations interests because all of a sudden, this interaction with customers made us aware of, oh, people give a damn about these resources, they give a damn about what we’re doing. It gave some more meaning to the life. And certainly the process of going away to, especially to Boston. It gave me context for what this little what Montana is, what this little valley is, what other places in the world looks like. And I was interacting with all these people that were saying, Well, you know, didn’t What do you guys do with livestock futures? And that was the first time I’d even heard about futures. And, and since then, we’ve been using those, you know, to, you know, mitigate some of the risks in the market. And didn’t you know, that livestock are bad for the environment? And didn’t you know, that meat’s bad for health? And so I started to engage in those questions deeply in a way I never had before. And then made me passionate about okay, I think I want to come back and plug into this somehow.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Well, you know, that’s where I live in the Boston area. And so I engage on a regular basis with folks who, you know, I’ve mentioned many times on this podcast, I live in Concord, Massachusetts. So people are really concerned about the environment, they’re, you know, very educated, very health conscious. And meat is something that is not commonly on the table, you know, or at the very least, they’re flexitarians, and trying to eat less meat. And the local bookstore will not stock Sacred Cow. There’s a local movie place here in town. I haven’t even asked them to screen my film. But what was it like? Like, what did you… what was the program you did? Just out of curiosity? And then like, what did you think when you came here?
Cole Mannix
I mean, I loved every bit of it. I love music. And so I was constantly, you know, and I love food. And so it was really fun to just explore such a huge place with such long history. And I was actually my undergrad had been in biology, I didn’t have a career in mind, I was just pursuing things I was interested in. The ranch had a policy that basically couldn’t come back right away, you needed to go explore, see other things? And which I think it sort of cuts both ways. But it was… there was some wisdom behind that.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Did you think though, in the back of your head, that you come back home?
Cole Mannix
I have such deep roots just in terms of so much extended family. But I actually at that time, I mean, I had done the undergrad and biologic biology, did another undergrad and philosophy and ended up in a theology program thinking I might become a Jesuit priest. And so that was my masters, which started at this little place in Cambridge called the Western Jesuit that then merged with Boston College before, right, and so that I graduated from BC. And I had begun to realize, okay, if I take this path, it’s going to take me far away from Montana, and more and more of an academic life. And we had spent some time in El Salvador and Honduras. And I was seeing because I was very interested in social justice, but I was seeing how US food policy had affected farmers there. And basically, was coming to an awareness that social justice especially means cleaning up your own act at home. And so it had it I was reflecting on, you know, wow, this ranch in context that came from as part of a food system, which is it’s pretty fundamental to how our economy operates. And it’s a question of, you know, human health is, you know, what makes people healthy and happy, is not so different than land health. And taking good care of soil and water and wildlife habitat is the same thing as taking good care of human beings. And so it made me just realize all these kind of systemic forces that we are fighting if we’re going to take better care of land and better care of each other. And ultimately, that led to starting I went to work right out of grad school from a meat company, some ranches had started to try to be more resilient in the marketplace, try to define their product, try to better support land stewardship, and I got a bath in business at that time. So that was I ended up running it but it was just a two person shop. There was 120 ranches that formed the cooperatives that was kind of a big we process cattle in Greeley, Colorado that was closest we could find. We sold them semi-loads of grass-finished trim to a company out of Kansas called Hilary’s Eat Well. It was a veggie burger company that started blending grass fed beef with lentils and sweet potatoes and flax. And then we were you know, we were trying to sell… we were trying to be a low cost grass fed producer of lean meats domestically. So our value proposition was this is US raised and it’s grass fed, and it was based on taking culled cows and bulls, that ended up making up about 20% of the US supply chain of for beef. And finding destinations for that lean meat – whether that’s ground beef or jerky products. And so we were finding those buyers. And then in about 2015, there was kind of a perfect storm where COOL, which is Country of Origin Labeling was repealed in Congress. And so that meant that a big part of our value proposition domestic kind of became meaningless pretty quickly. Same time, our the packer that we had found, had a heart attack died, had to his his family sold the grinding infrastructure that they had had. And so that was a big blow. And then our major buyer lost the majority control of her company, and that new group of management came in and discontinued that product line. And so really quickly, we were just scrambling, ended up having to close it. And that was, so I was working for a group that had their own business plan, and I was implementing their business plan. And now what I do with Old Salt Co-Op, is sort of my next try at something that’s built much closer to home. The former business was, it was just a brand, right, we were using every book, we were co packing. And we were, we were just a utterly remote brand. And in this case, with Old Salt Co-Op, we’ve created this vertically integrated meat company where we own processing, we own restaurants, we’re operating a festival, we’re doing catering, and it’s all built much closer to home trying to be more resilient than that last one.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Wow, that was a lot that you… Wow, I want to revisit a couple things you said one was the US Food Policy, you know, destroying other countries. And that’s something that you know, they I don’t know, have you seen the film Poverty Inc?
Cole Mannix
No.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Oh, you would really love it. Michael Matheson Miller became a director became a friend of mine. And he’s actually a theologian and philosophy professor in Michigan, and a huge advocate for grass fed beef, he’s got a little homestead. And he’s working on a new film on poverty in the US that he just interviewed me for, came out here. But he dives into that and many other topics around how people are trying to solve the issue of poverty, but really profiting off it at the same time and destroying local economies, and just have no regard for what, you know, boots on the ground. Like, what people actually need. And he gave an example, he gave several examples. One was in Haiti, you know, the US sending rice into Haiti destroys local agriculture. But it’s also destroying their health, you know, getting they didn’t used to eat so much rice and you know, is destroying their metabolisms, as well, as you know, they don’t they don’t need, you know, there’s a difference between emergency aid and long term dependence. And it’s a way that we can actually control governments. And he gave another example of a small church in, I believe it was in Georgia that decided they wanted to ship eggs to a little town, I think it was in Ghana. And so, and there was a guy that had just started an egg business. And you know, it’s such a huge risk, because it’s harder to get loans, it’s harder to own land, it’s there’s so many more hurdles you have to go through in other countries to start your own business, and you’ve finally done it. And then he got decimated by this egg donation scheme. And after a year or two, the church decided we should give eggs to a different town now, you know, they’ve had, you know, so now the town is completely has no eggs. And they ruin this guy’s business at the same time. And so what can look like aid is actually not aid. And there’s some there’s some deep, sinister forces behind it that many people don’t know about. I don’t know, if you have anything you want to add to that from your travels or your experiences?
Cole Mannix
Well, basically, it’s more of the same. You know, in this case, you know, we have designed our food system to create volume. And it’s been very oriented around what we’ve interpreted food security to mean, lots of basic commodities, especially grain. And we subsidize that grain industry really very heavily to allow it to produce in that way, 20 plus billion per year through crop insurance, and other commodities program that promote the trade of those same cereal crops. And so we’ve been oriented to low, low price and high production, that’s what food security kind of has meant to us. And when we, you know, when we overproduce that grain and then put it on other people’s markets and call it aid, what do we expect that those farmers are going to be able to do in their markets? How do you compete with free and so you know, sometimes I think the aid it may be well intended, but without an intimate knowledge of the place, it’s very difficult to understand what the real impacts are going to be. And the other times, maybe there’s a little bit more profit motive, or sinister nature behind it. But even if there’s not a malintent, it’s very difficult to know how what you’re doing in your country is gonna affect other places. And so that’s just this kind of cautionary principle of, if you building back more regional infrastructure, trying to take care of things in your own backyard, that sort of allows people to do the same thing in their own place. A little bit more of a humble approach, maybe,
Diana Rodgers, RD
Which is, you know, in the back of Sacred Cow when we talk about what needs to happen for a more resilient food system that’s like at the top, so which is what I love about what you’re doing there. So I want to talk about that more in a minute. But I don’t know how many people I know that COOL… I’ve mentioned COOL before, and it was making headlines a while back, but there might be some new listeners, and I just thought you could explain what COOL is. And I don’t understand why it’s happening. Maybe do you have ideas? I mean, why is it a thing?
Cole Mannix
Yeah. I shouldn’t speak too much to something that I’ve not been plugged into for several years. Yeah, it’s been a while. But basically, you know, the packers in the US, they have an interest in decreasing friction, in terms of how easy is it to put Canadian cattle into the system. How much are we going to put friction in our relationships with trade partners, if people are importing, you know, beef into the US, and then they’re doing one simple step to process it further, and then calling it a US product. You know, if you’re basically looking for maximum efficiency and no drags on the system, you know, transparency is kind of a drag, it’s additional data, you have to gather, it’s scheduling cattle according to origin. And those things just become, if your goal is just output, and your goal is cost price alone, then anything that tries to mess with this system of free trade that we’ve, you know, we it was set up July 1, 1944, Bretton Woods, everybody kind of knows the story post World War II reconstruction was, here’s the US. And we’ve got the world’s biggest Navy now. And we’re going to guarantee basically, the safety of shipping. And we’re going to make all these alliances with partners to try to insulate ourselves against what was a big concern about Russia. And we set a system in motion that is still in place today, which is kind of trying to decrease any drags on a free market. And that just kind of when you when you take that whole system, and now you just look at one part like beef, you can see in a microcosm, that system trying to sustain itself and resisting anything that creates drags. So I often compare, you know, like, the food system we’ve created is a little bit like a canal, like it’s really efficient at getting water from point A to point B, we’re really efficient at just getting a volume of food from point A to point B. But like, all life exists in the inefficiency, you know, if in a stream, you know all the fish habitat, and habitat for all those little organisms that exist on the river bottom, you think of logs and rocks and riffles and turns and if you think of the food system, like farm families, ranch families, they are an inefficiency, there are costs to be eliminated. And when you think of wildlife habitat and diversity of plants in your system, and really spongy soil, those things are not factored into the price of products. And so when it really just about volume and price, it drives those inefficiencies gradually out. And so I know that this is a bit of a winding explanation because we’re talking about…
Diana Rodgers, RD
No, I think it’s awesome.
Cole Mannix
Talking about COOL, you know. But yeah, I certainly think that what whether it’s top down policy, or whether it’s just trying to incentivize a more regionalized food system, or whether the system kind of breaks and we have to build back a much more regionalized more medium-sized businesses that have a connection to their place so that the producers and the customers have more context with each other. That really matters. You know, another example of this, it’s like cool, was the transition from boxed beef. Well, from basically grocery stores used to buy swing and carcasses, you know, halves that would come in or quarters, that would come in to the grocery store. They’d have their own butcher department, and those and so that each grocery store hires those butchers. Each grocery store supports their own set of equipment and processes, and the customers have all this interaction with the butcher at the counter. And then we moved to this box beef system in the 80s, where these grocery stores become more receptacles. They receive stuff that’s already cut. And they mostly just place it out on the shelf. And there are some efficiencies gained in that system. But the problem is that you lost all the knowledge, all that exists in the butchers that exists in the customers who interacted with those butchers, all the intimacy that allows people to ask good questions about where their food comes from. And I think some of those inefficiencies, we want to recover. And so you know, if you have in one way, like these big packers, they’re really good at using every piece of the animal. Everything from you know, what goes into the cosmetics industry and being able to merchandise all the hides and being able to sell tripe for $8 a pound, which I don’t have any market for tripe locally, right. So in one sense, that’s very efficient. And it’s something that a more regionalized meat industry should aspire to, to not waste anything. But on the other hand, when COVID breaks it, you have people that, okay, what am I going to do with the 1000 hogs that are ready for processing, but I can’t get them into the packer because we had COVID in the plant. And that packer doesn’t have capacity, it’s more efficient for me to kill and bury those animals in a hole than it is to keep feeding them. And I would rather see a system that had a little more price, but a lot more redundancy and resiliency in our processing infrastructure so that we don’t waste 1000s of animals when all of a sudden there’s one interruption in the system. So COOL is cool. And the resistance of our commodity industry to it. And the direction we’ve gone with box beef instead of lots of smaller, you know, butcher departments, I think we need to sort of recover some of that inefficiency.
Diana Rodgers, RD (LMNT Ad)
Did you know that by the time you’re thirsty, you’re likely dehydrated? In fact, about 75% of Americans are chronically dehydrated. And even mild dehydration has shown to impact concentration and memory in adults and in kids. Simply drinking plain water is not enough. You need to be adding electrolytes – sodium, potassium, and magnesium – which help your body absorb water and function at its best. My favorite brand is LMNT, started by my co-author and good friend, Robb Wolf. I really love the citrus flavor but you can get a sample pack of flavors with any purchase when you go to sustainabledish.com/LMNT. LMNT has no sugar or dodgy ingredients and makes regular water taste amazing. It’s the perfect way to keep you hydrated and on your game both physically and mentally. I drink it every day. So check out sustainabledish.com/LMNT for your free sample pack of flavors today.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah, totally. I mean, there’s hardly any grocery stores now that still have, I can’t even think of one that still has, you know, folks in the back that are actually cutting sides of beef anymore. And for many years, I worked for Whole Foods Market way back before… I left when my daughter who’s now 17 was born. So this was a long time ago that I worked there, when there actually were butchers in the back. And you could request certain cuts and get them and now there’s only they I know that Whole Foods has shrunk the butcher cases, the meat cases, that and they’re moving, a lot of grocery stores are moving completely away from meat cases altogether. And but even still, there’s only like four cuts of beef that you can even get at a grocery store anymore. It’s too bad. And it’s really difficult because I believe that capitalism is a good thing. And that free markets are a good thing. But globalism makes that all so complicated, because you’re just dealing with completely different rules on the other sides, different labor rules, different pay scales, different costs of living, you know, and I do work with other countries that you know, and I help them with their beef production, too. I work a lot with Australia. But Australian beef, the groups that I work with are very clear that it’s labeled as Australian or New Zealand beef. I’m going to be going down to Uruguay in September. And I know they’re huge importers to the US or whatever, they export their beef to the US. And a lot of the grass-fed beef that we have here that’s inexpensive is originates from Uruguay. And I don’t necessarily think you know, the ranchers in Uruguay are bad, right. But it does compete with US ranchers, for sure. And you know, my goal is just more grass-fed beef. Right? I want good, good practices globally. But I do see how it really harms US-based ranchers when they can’t compete with the weather and other countries, the again, the pay scales, the cost of production, all that stuff.
Cole Mannix
Yeah, and I don’t think that any of us really want to see no trade, right? I mean, that’s not the goal. The goal is more about the freedom to invent our own value proposition. And when you can’t, you kind of literally can’t distinguish, you know, build enough traceability into the system to set your value proposition apart. Really limit your options. And so, yeah, we want other people in their places to make a living as well and trade in many places makes sense.
Diana Rodgers, RD
And yeah, there’s a very large box beef share company in the US that many years ago was not being transparent about where their beef was coming from. And it was actually I think they had released one little piece on their website that they buried pretty deep about the fact that it was not US based. And but they never really changed any of they never really let people know. And I had a huge issue with that and actually called them out like publicly about that. Because, again, I have no… I have no issue with Australian beef, but it should be labeled as Australian beef. And the customer should know it’s Australian beef, and then they should be able to make their decision based on on that. So…
Cole Mannix
Yeah. So that’s sort of more of those sins of omission. You know, that might be the truth, but maybe not the whole truth. You know, but really being straightforward. I think that’s all we can really, for people to be truly about the model.
Diana Rodgers, RD
A couple of years ago, actually, the Governor’s Office of Montana reached out to me because they were looking to start a brand of Montana beef. Just like there’s Black Angus, or the Idaho potato, right? So like, potatoes grown in Idaho, it’s like not better or worse than a potato grown in Massachusetts, right? Or a Black Angus cow is like seen as this mark of quality, because it’s Black Angus. And you and I both know that it doesn’t mean that it’s a better tasting animal or, you know, any sign of quality because it was the Black Angus breed, right. There’s lots of other great breeds of cattle. But Montana was looking to have a Montana-branded beef. And I’m wondering where that went; that was something I was chatting with them about.
Cole Mannix
It’s still a big discussion in the state. And I’ve been a part of like, these kinds of discussions all over the West. You know, Wyoming has a lot of pride in its place. And they think, well, our mountains are gorgeous. And, you know, Wyoming is the best beef in the world. And that just, it’s happening in every little place. And there’s so many, I don’t have a lot of interest in those discussions. Because it permeates down to this question of certain third party certifications, and label claims and blockchain traceability, and it’s all kind of an effort to, for the, it’s all kind of an effort to distinguish products that are kind of the same products, and people still have an anonymous relationship with the production. And they still buy the same way they always bought through the same kind of box store channels. And nothing really has to change. And the only way, the only tools we have for differentiating are, how good is your design team, and how good is your social media marketing team, and I’m just more interested in more connected neighborhoods. And, like for Old Salt, we’re trying to say purchase meats from landscapes you know, and drive through and recreate in and care about. And that’s a little bit that might be a little bit pie in the sky. I mean, I understand that. In Montana, we might have, it’s just a smaller place. And people do kind of know the landscapes, but I think it works for here for our context. And I would rather sell to a much like, if our meat company aspires to grow from like, I think if we’re successful in eight years, we might be a $20 million company. And at that rate, we can pay back our bank loans on all the brick and mortar processing facility. And I think we can still be small enough that we have an intimacy with our customer. But if we face at that point, this growth question of well do now do we want to… Montana raises far more livestock than we have a market for? And so do we continue to grow the company? It really has a lot to do with your business model. I don’t want to grow Old Salt beyond a $20 million business, because I think the things that will make us that make us special now will go away. If we just tried to become the big system, I’d much rather if we can get to stability. You know, we’re a startup. If we can get to stability, I’d much rather help lots of other little businesses start up. And I think that’s better for everybody. It’s better for the people because they’ll have ownership in their own set of infrastructure. Those ranchers and you know, that company will have its own ownership of and be able to design their system to really fit their area. And they you know, so I guess where I’m going with that is back to the idea of butchers in retail establishments having a real relationship with their customer. That’s how knowledge really is transferred with human beings. I think, more so than, you know, Montana investing in its own, you know, the Montana brand of beef or the Idaho potato. I mean, those things are just pretty surface level, I think.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah. When I was in England with James Rubank shooting for the film, he was complaining… so he was complaining about New Zealand or Montana lamb actually competing with the lamb from his area because it was cheaper and They would actually cull sheep that had twins because their land couldn’t support twins, just because it’s just doesn’t grow that much. It’s so cloudy and rainy all the time. And, you know, he was talking about how people want to come to the English countryside because it’s so quaint and and how it is right now, but then they don’t want to actually support, you know, pay that extra money. And I was trying to suggest that he come up with a Lake District lamb kind of grew that people could, you know, know that this not only supports the families that grow it, but also the landscape, like you said, the landscape of the Lake District, which is so beautiful, the small towns that are there so that they’re not just tourist towns that they’re actual working towns with people that need to be in that place instead of could be anywhere, right? Because I see that happening in Montana a lot too. There’s the price of real estate is going up. There’s McMansion developments everywhere, you know, sure, as someone who grew up there, it’s pretty hard to see everyone moving in. Are you seeing people moving back? Like, like leaving now that now that the COVID tide is is over a little bit?
Cole Mannix
Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of influx into places like Bozeman and Whitefish. And so there’s plenty of those folks that, you know, that this is their first time in Montana, and they’re coming to Montana, because it’s relatively, you know, it’s still a relatively small population and such a bigger open landscape, but also a lot of folks returning because, you know, they realize sort of what they had in, you know, they have just more context for oh, wow, how does this compare to the rest of the world? So certainly, we face a plenty of development pressures, you know, a lot of people talk about how the Bozeman area is under, it’s in the same circumstance Denver was, and you know, the whole Fort Collins and Boulder area 20-25 years ago. So definitely very strong development forces. But yeah, but kind of back to this thing about how do you build a business with the end in mind. If you, for example, if I was to accept a bunch of venture and angel capital, then I wouldn’t have the luxury of deciding about growth, when we hit a $20 million company, you know, so many, so much of us are sort of geared in the entrepreneurial world to think about your exit strategy, to think about how you flip this, how does that capital get what it came for. And if you can find alternative ways to raise capital, that do not demand that constant growth, and will accept a lower rate of return, but still a rate of return, it’s not a nonprofit, not a charity, then you have a little bit more freedom to say what size is appropriate for what for the goals we’re trying to accomplish. And I tell people, alright my exit strategy is a good death. And that means that we’re building a business we want to live and die in and a bit business that the employees and the community really wants around for a long time. It’s… that’s a bit of a different way of thinking, instead of I’m going to build a brand that just can grow to the moon. And someday, it’ll make me wealthy, comfortable and won’t have to work. That’s a different set of values. And, you know, I think what we’re going for is more vibrant main streets and, you know, more people back on the land able to make more… I talked about more eyes, like human eyes per acre, because so much of regenerative agriculture, it’s not a fix to sort of, here’s the practices, and you just apply them everywhere. There’s a lot of principles that can be applied everywhere, but it really takes talent, people who are knowledgeable, committed over the long term who can implement a management regime, and then tweak it constantly observe, tweak, observe, tweak, and assist. This takes a long time, we had one project on our ranch where we were really struggling on this 6000 acres of dryland sagebrush, native pasture with encroachment from knapweed, which is kind of the legacy of our timber industry. And so this is a European invasive weed that we check… we are challenged with. And so we brought… we started bringing in sheep. We used to be a sheep ranch, but we’ve not had sheep on the ranch for a long time. Well, 20 years ago, we began bringing in sheep about 1500 sheep every summer from July 1 until September 1 and those sheep would, we would target them on eating the seed heads so that it wouldn’t go to seed. But we did this for 13 years before we saw any appreciable impact. And that’s because the seed bed, it was deep, and you really had to let that seed bed deplete itself. And now 18 years into that experience, experiment, 20 years there’s like nap which is just a random plant that you may find that didn’t, it didn’t take any toward on any chemical. It was just sticking with it. And so that takes people that with stability. It takes people with commitment to a place long term. And eventually if we can now find a market for that meat, we could are owning that lamb herd again, and that brings more jobs back to our little community and more kids in our little school. And it’s those kinds of good cycles that we’re trying to perpetuate by having more control over meat processing infrastructure and a market to sell that meat to.
Diana Rodgers, RD
So can you talk a little bit, just give people kind of a sense of Old Salt and the number of farms or ranches that you’re involved with? How the processing works? And you know, who you service?
Cole Mannix
Yeah, well, the simplest thing way to explain Old Salt is that Old Salt is a meat company. And what we really were was, during COVID, I started writing the business plan, and I’m sick of remote life for a policy organization. And I was like, Okay, I want to just try this again. And so I started approaching my own family and other ranches that I knew had similar production models and also similar value. So we basically just started with a, we believe that land is kin, what happened, what we do, the land we do to ourselves, and enhancing soil and habitat is not different than enhancing Main Street. And we wanted to, we happened I would say, like to believe that meat and livestock both for our region, and we believed in in livestock and its ability to enhance land, at least maintain and, in the best cases, enhance habitat and productivity over time. And we believed in meat as a nourishing source of food, not a panacea, but just a really solid source of nourishment for people. And I would say like our group, some of us came to that, like, my family’s been in ranching forever. So we have a lot of, I mean, since the late 1800s. And we have a built in bias, right, obviously, to livestock and meat. But some of the folks in our ranching group, they came to ranching because the one woman, Hillary, she was a wildlife biologist. And what she was really interested in was wildlife habitat. And she found ranching as a way to curate that. Two thirds of Montana is private land. And it’s where the best wildlife habitat is, we settled the valleys where the water in the soils were richest. And so wildlife really depend on that for winter ground. And so for her becoming a rancher was really more about her environmental ethic. And then other folks had come to, you know, they became part of Old Salt after having believed that meat was a real problem and tried to eliminate that from their diet. And over time, that was not working. And so we’re kind of a disparate group of investors, customers, butchers, ranchers, who decided the current system for selling meat is not serving land stewardship, and it’s not serving our main streets. And so we need to rebuild a little system in microcosm. And so instead of being a meat company, we’re really trying to build a regional meat economy. And so we decided that if we just tried to build a meat company, there’s not the ecosystem of businesses around it to support it. There’s not… we don’t have any retail establishments, we’re just going to become a brand that is placed out in the middle of nowhere trying to argue for its value proposition. And so we there was not enough availability of custom processing. And so we decided to invest in it. And so last July, we bought a little plant, we started processing for each animals and wild game. As we get that plant ready for USDA inspection. We’re building a slaughter facility to support its cutting wrap capacity. We the first thing we did actually was we started a little burger joint in a leased space downtown Helena, where we’re based, and we it was all our beef. And then we bought local potatoes, and we cooked them in beef fat instead of seed oils. And we sourced the bread from Wheat Montana Bakery, and we got the greens from the Pacific Pacific Northwest. And people in Helena showed up in force. And now that little place is about two years old. And it was it just cranks. And it’s been a little engine, little profit engine at the same time as being a way to engage the community and engage our customers. Just right now we’re in the process, we closed on a building and we’re renovating it now to be a butcher shop and a charcoal fired grill downtown to really be our own place where we can host people and just be a hub in the community. And then this festival that you were so kind to join us for. I mean, that’s another way where it’s like how once a year, can we treat our community, our customers, our employees, our investors, anybody that might have an interest in putting the culture back in agriculture. How can we have an experience once a year where people can actually just… it’s not a label, it’s not a certification, it’s a place you go and connect with people. And so that’s us beginning to try to rebuild a little regional meat economy with these vertically integrated enterprises and well. It’s all co-op as an LLC, but we built in co-op principles. So we’re not a brand that just buys from ranchers and farmers because if we were we’d have an interest in it, paying as little as we can for livestock. We’re majority owned by the producers. Right now there’s four, those four producers manage about… they’re pretty large, they manage about 500,000 acres, amongst the four of them’s 1000s of head of livestock. But we’re set up to where if we can grow the demand for meat, we can add more of those Class A owners producers who elect the board and who are elected to the board. So our board is controlled majority by producers and then minority by workers. So we have another class of ownership that those you know, whether it’s a marketer or a butcher, if they get it, what they have the capacity to do it, they have a commitment to the company, they can purchase this small amount of Class B ownership, but they can then be elected to the board, they can share in the company’s profits via a patronage concept that is part of the way most co-ops function, but we had to build that into an LLC, for various reasons of co-op structure did not end up working for us, we needed to be more flexible in that. So anyway, that’s how we’re this vertically integrated meat company that’s trying to build a little ecosystem that we can survive in, in this region. And we’re, it’s all Montana, live, beef, lamb, pork, eventually bison, maybe eventually poultry and eggs. But that’s kind of a small part of what Montana does right now. And we’re trying mostly to sell to… we’re trying to go direct to consumer. So the goal of all these enterprises is if I can sell to 5000 families, I can reach that 20 million in sales, which is sort of the sweet spot. We will do some wholesale, but stability and resiliency kind of comes from separating ourselves from the commodity market as much as possible and having direct relationships with customers. So that’s how we’re built.
Cole Mannix
Well, like, we’re a startup, so we, you know, we can’t celebrate it as this great success. But we have some good traction. And we’ve been fortunate so far. And we’re got… we’re at a pretty steep part of the climb from the perspective of all the capital it takes, you know, we’ve I think we’ve raised about 2.3 million of our own. And we’re putting that together with six and a half million of debt, we found an alternative bank that would was really interested in supporting this kind of agriculture. And I might be in debt until I’m 90. But I think this, I think it’s a little model that can work. I’m not sure how scalable it is. You can’t just cookie cutter replicate it. But I do think like in each of these little areas across the country, the producers having a stake, some ownership rather than just being just selling into the system kind of matters, I think the workers having a stake, finding ways to meet your region’s needs in a way that you can have some intimacy with those customers. And they have more reasons than just to label it or a certification to be engaged with the brand. I think those some of those elements, some of those principles might be replicable.
Diana Rodgers, RD
And so for my listeners who are now like sold, and they want to join up, they want to get some of your meat, who do you where do you ship to?
Cole Mannix
We ship work anywhere in the lower 48. You know, again, I’m not sure that that mail order model will be what we really focus on. But we do offer that now. And we will I think again, like it’s going to take time to learn really who is our customer, and what channels allow the meat company to reach volume. And in the meantime, that’s something that’s part of the reason for having a couple of restaurants and having a processing facility is you you’re taking what were very thin margins in any of those one enterprises, and you’re stacking the margins together to try to get to some place where the thing can support itself. And so those having those enterprises will hopefully buy us a little time to allow the meat company to grow thoughtfully, and gradually. But you can buy it right now at Old Salt co op.com.
Diana Rodgers, RD
That’s awesome. And I did notice I started I stayed in Airbnb and went to a little natural food store in Helena. That was really great. And I’m sure you know the one I’m talking about. I can’t remember the name of it.
Cole Mannix
Yeah. The Real Food Store. Yeah.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah. Just Real Food Store. Which is also fantastic. Although it was hard to stick that in my memory, but all the beef that they had in their freezer was Mannix. So I enjoyed it at your festival. And then I also had it for breakfast next day, too. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time for sharing your story which I didn’t really know much about because I was sort of like in and out really fast and you’re busy running that event, which, you know, I love the idea of events. I get really stressed out on the day of the event, just trying to make sure everyone’s happy and worried that everyone’s not happy and I know how hard it is to run an event and I’ve never even attempted something as hard as that. But it’s you know, as an attendee, and a speaker, it was flawless and fun and warm and friendly. And just, you know, something that I would love to come back to and I would love to, you know, really promote heavily to everyone who listens to this podcast to check out. So it was when do you get to be in the middle of Montana on a beautiful ranch with potential grizzly bears running through you just don’t know.
Cole Mannix
Well, I’m grateful you came. It was an honor to have you. And I think that the really balanced message that you’re bringing in all the different parts of the world that you traveled to where you speak is so needed. And so thank you for the work.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Amazing. That is… that is a lot of work. It’s very impressive.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Aw, thank you very much. So it’s Old Salt co op.com.
Cole Mannix
That’s right.
Diana Rodgers, RD
All right. So everyone who’s listening and who enjoyed this podcast, please go support these guys. Their beef is amazing. And so is the story, so thank you so much again.
Cole Mannix
Thanks, Diana.
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.
