Episode Overview
Episode Topic
In this episode of Nutrapreneur, we dive into the world of regenerative agriculture with Tyler Dawley, the visionary CEO of Big Bluff Ranch. Tyler shares his journey of transforming a 4,000-acre ranch in Northern California into one of the largest pasture poultry operations on the West Coast. He emphasizes the importance of sustainable farming practices that not only benefit the environment but also enhance the nutritional quality of food. This episode explores the challenges and rewards of regenerative agriculture, offering valuable insights into how these practices can shape the future of farming and food production.
Lessons You’ll Learn
Listeners will gain a deep understanding of regenerative agriculture, its principles, and its impact on both the environment and food quality. Tyler discusses the transition from traditional ranching methods to a more sustainable approach, highlighting the importance of soil health, animal welfare, and ecosystem balance. You’ll also learn about the practical aspects of running a successful pasture poultry operation, the challenges of navigating USDA regulations, and the importance of business acumen in sustainable farming. Tyler’s insights provide a roadmap for anyone interested in starting or transitioning to sustainable agriculture.
About Our Guest
Tyler Dawley is the CEO of Big Bluff Ranch, a 4,000-acre regenerative ranch in Northern California specializing in large-scale pasture poultry. With a lifelong commitment to sustainable agriculture, Tyler has transformed Big Bluff Ranch into a model of regenerative farming, focusing on soil health, animal welfare, and ecosystem sustainability. Under his leadership, the ranch has achieved certifications for organic and regenerative practices, making it one of the largest pasture poultry operations on the West Coast. Tyler’s innovative approach to farming emphasizes the interconnectedness of soil, plants, animals, and human health, making him a leading voice in the regenerative agriculture movement.
Topics Covered
This episode covers a wide range of topics related to regenerative agriculture and sustainable farming. Tyler discusses the history and evolution of Big Bluff Ranch, the principles of regenerative agriculture, and the benefits of pasture-raised poultry. He also delves into the challenges of transitioning to USDA-certified processing, the importance of soil health in farming, and the impact of regenerative practices on the nutritional quality of food. Additionally, Tyler shares his advice for new farmers and ranchers interested in sustainable agriculture, emphasizing the importance of business planning and a deep connection to the land nutraceutical market.
Our Guest:Tyler Dawley, is the CEO of Big Bluff Ranch
Tyler Dawley is a third-generation rancher and the CEO of Big Bluff Ranch, a 4,000-acre family-owned operation located in Northern California’s Sacramento Valley. Tyler’s journey into regenerative agriculture began early in his life when his father embraced holistic management practices inspired by Allan Savory’s teachings in the 1980s. These principles, which focus on mimicking natural ecosystems, have since shaped the ranch’s operations and have been pivotal in transforming Big Bluff Ranch into a model of sustainable and regenerative farming. Tyler has built upon this legacy, expanding the ranch’s focus to include pasture-raised poultry, a decision driven by his commitment to environmental stewardship and the health of the ecosystem.
Under Tyler’s leadership, Big Bluff Ranch has gained recognition as one of the largest pasture poultry operations on the West Coast. His approach to farming goes beyond traditional methods, integrating innovative practices that enhance soil health, increase biodiversity, and improve the nutritional quality of the ranch’s products. Tyler’s work is guided by a philosophy that agriculture should regenerate the land, not deplete it. He has been instrumental in introducing sustainable practices such as cover cropping, rotational grazing, and organic certifications, which not only boost productivity but also contribute to the long-term resilience of the ranch’s ecosystem (Big Bluff Ranch)
In addition to his hands-on work at the ranch, Tyler is an advocate for the broader adoption of regenerative practices within the agricultural industry. He participates in programs like the Healthy Soils Program in California and engages in the carbon market, where Big Bluff Ranch has started selling carbon credits for the carbon sequestered through its farming methods. Tyler’s insights into the interconnectedness of soil health, plant growth, and animal welfare make him a leading voice in the regenerative agriculture movement. His passion for sustainable farming is evident in his dedication to improving not only the ranch but also the broader community and the environment.
Episode Transcript
Bethany Jolley: Welcome back to Nutrapreneur, the hub for unveiling groundbreaking insights into the nutraceutical industry. I’m your host, Bethany. Today, we’re excited to welcome Tyler Dolly the Phillipian to CEO of Big Bluff Ranch. Tyler is a regenerative rancher specializing in large scale pasture poultry with a lifelong commitment to sustainable agriculture, Tyler has transformed Big Bluff Ranch into one of the largest pasture poultry operations on the West Coast. His innovative approach to farming emphasizes nutrition, sustainability and ecosystem health. Welcome, Tyler, it’s so great to have you today.
Tyler Dawley: Thanks. I sound like a really smart, successful person. When he put it like that, I’m like, man, I want to talk to that guy.
Bethany Jolley: Well, first off, what inspired you to focus on regenerative agriculture and pasture poultry?
Tyler Dawley: Well, I mean, simply enough. I was born here, so that’s pretty much it. So grandpa bought the ranch in 1960. My parents moved up in 76 for a summer project, and they never left. So then I was. I was born here, and then my sisters were born here and raised here. Our ranch is not a traditional cowboy ranch like we’re not multi-generation, you know, sitting on a horse roping and riding and that stuff’s all cool, don’t get me wrong. But that’s not our background. My dad grew up sailing, my mom grew up in Berkeley, and so. And grandpa bought the ranch at the time as a well. At the time, he was kind of a rich-ish type dude, and he bought it as a kind of a weekend toy, you know? You know, a little vanity project. And so those kind of foundational formation aspects to the ranch kind of have led us to where we’re at now. So the fact that Grampa bought it as a, I don’t want to say vanity project because it’s not right. He was working really hard at it, but it was not designed to it was not purchased to be a productive commercial operation. And when my parents moved up and started taking over, that they oh, so it wasn’t designed to be a commercial operation. So we’re the ranch is 4000 acres. , but it’s not big enough, which I realize is kind of a mind blowing statement.
Tyler Dawley: 4000 acres. And it’s not big enough, but it’s true in our neck of the woods, if we wanted to be a commercial cow calf operation, we’d probably need to be 8 to 10,000 acres. So we’re, as I like to say, we’re a half time half size ranch, half income ranch, but a full time job ranch. So, you know, it’s it’s hard and make less money. And then the other thing that happened is when my dad kind of taking over my parents, my dad started taking more of the daily management because my dad was not tied to kind of the traditional ranching way of life, that he didn’t know how to make the ranch make money. So traditionally around here, we’re in Northern California, Sacramento Valley. And the way cowboys run around here is they truck their cows down here to the valley in the winter for green grass. And. And because they’re up in the mountains and the snows in the mountain, they come down to the green grass where there’s no snow. And then the snow melts. They truck them back up to the mountains for. Yeah, sub irrigated green grass. So their cows are on green grass year round. And we just didn’t want to do that lifestyle. Those guys live in their trucks, hundreds of thousands of miles on their trucks, and they’re only a couple years old.
Bethany Jolley: So, Tyler, I think it’s great that you have, you know, a personal family connection to the ranch and that you are able to kind of modify the business to fit the needs of the land itself, and then also kind of your family and your lifestyle. And so how has your commitment to sustainable farming practices shaped the nutritional quality of your products?
Tyler Dawley: So that’s kind of an interesting question that in that there’s a whole bunch of evidence that, for instance, our beef is one step back. So through all of our processes of figuring out what to grow and how to market it and sell it and what’s best for the land and the customers and all that sort of stuff. We’ve ended up with, , becoming certified organic, and we were also just got certified regenerative. And so we have kind of taken the A one. A part of our path has been getting third party audits to prove that we are walking the walk and talking the talk. And so we have those third party audits kind of talking about the quality of our products. Then there’s also a whole bunch of scientific literature out there talking about, for instance, grass fed beef, the correct ratio of omega three to omega six in your class. And every year or two, it seems like they’re coming out with either another micro or macro or nano nutrient. And to be honest, I can’t keep up with it. I’m not a scientist, dude. I’m not reading going into PubMed and digging it out. It’s just not me. And that to actually quantify our particular our own specific meat, you’d have to send it off to a lab and, you know, a whole bunch of big results.
Tyler Dawley: And again, we’ve actually done it. And I get back gobbledygook. I’m sure it means something to intelligent people who read those numbers often. But I’m like, okay, cool. That’s a number. So you know that that’s not a super resounding, like, that’s a great answer. So but what I would say is that I don’t actually feel the need to really quantify the health and health nutrient density of our product, because I know that kind of the inescapable logic of Mother Nature, if you have healthy soils, which you can see from native perennials, you can see from water infiltration rates, you can see wildlife. You know, you can tell if you have a healthy landscape and if you have healthy animals, you can tell through fertility rates, through growth rates. And the more, even more nebulous like you can just tell if your animals are happy, like you spend enough time with them, you’re just like, oh, they’re like literally like five minutes before I got on this call, one of our management practices is to move our cows at least daily, if not multiple times a day, across our rangeland, which is relatively unusual. But we do it because it’s cool and it’s smart. And the cows broke out of their fence, their temporary electric fence. And so I’m like, oh, hey, I don’t need to be a genius.
Tyler Dawley: But they’re unhappy. There’s a reason why they went through an electric fence that they, you know, shocked the crap out of them, you know? So there was a reason that they did that. They are not mindless automatons. They are feeling, thinking smart animals that understand their their nutritional needs and their, you know, all this sort of stuff. So my job as a animal steward at this point is to be like, oh, okay, the cows broke out. What did I do wrong? This was not that the cows were doing wrong. I set up a situation and that the cows have given me feedback to what I’ve set up for them. And so. So anyways, as far as quantifying the quality of our meat, that healthy land, healthy animals, we can tell healthy animals because you just know them after a time. Like there’s kind of an inescapable logic if you have healthy soils and healthy animals, how can you not have healthy meat? Right? And if you yourself as a han, are eating nutrient dense products, you know, either your veggies or your meats that we know? I mean, assing that the people are listening to this, understand that the better food you eat, the better supplements you put into your body, the better healthier you’re going to be.
Tyler Dawley: Right? So there’s this, this kind of this knock on effect where my health, your health will trace all the way back to the health of the soil. And the funny thing about that is the health of the soil actually is the microbiome of the soil itself. So there’s nematodes and mycorrhizal fungi and a whole bunch of other stuff in there, and slight rabbit trail that is basically a microbiome, just like you have a gut biome. The cows have a very active gut biome, and the soil actually has a gut biome. And that if you think I don’t know if you’ve ever seen. But if a cow eats, she actually slobbers and she drops saliva behind, that saliva will actually stimulate the plant to grow regrow in a different manner than if you mow it with like a lawn mower. So that’s why if you’ve ever kind of done this, you look at a lawn that’s regrowing versus a pasture that’s regrowing kind of side by side or like pasture grows back quicker. And then the cows picking up the microbiome from the soil and the plants, and she’s getting it into her gut, and then she’s recycling it through her dung and urine. And then as the han is actually out here, like I’m breathing in all this stuff, I don’t, you know, I’m not picking it up on purpose in my hands, but it’s getting on my hands, you know? So it turns out that the microbiome of the soil of the animal and my gut sitting right here have this crazy overlap.
Tyler Dawley: And so that’s a cool thought, right? You’re like, not only because we have this, you know, our culture, our society is kind of developed, this sense of where we are other there is nature and then there is us. And that we kind of, through our industrial revolution, is kind of feel like we are separate from nature. But the reality is, is that is like 100% wrong. There is no separation. We are just an animal. Just like a cow, just like a cat, just like a dog, just like a plant. Just like a nematode in the soil. We’re all interconnected. And that the more you dive into this regenerative air culture, the more you kind of realize that is absolutely the case, you know? So the microbiome that we all share, you know, is like one example of it. I’m sorry, I have like all these like cool or like stories like I’m like, oh, I gotta tell you this story. And like, yeah, there’s this story like, ah, I don’t know, I don’t even remember the question at this point, but oh, that’s great.
Bethany Jolley: I think observing that and notating how everything really is connected, even if we don’t always see it that way. And, you know, I think a lot of people base everything off of lab results. But like you said, I think through observing the soil, the animals, quality of life, all of those things in the end is going to produce nutrient dense products. And so I think that that was a really interesting way to describe it, and a really effective and valid way to describe it. And can you also discuss with us the transition from on farm processing to working with a USDA processor and its impact on your product quality and your conser trust?
Tyler Dawley: So this is so we’ve been doing direct marketing for years in 2024. So we’ve been direct marketing for 25 years. At this point I’m not old enough to be that old. Excuse me. So when you start getting into this regenerative agricultural world, you know, the first thing that most of the gurus will talk about and gurus in a good sense, not like the fake gurus, is that they’ll say, hey, get into chickens. That they’re small, they’re quick to grow, easy to manage. You don’t need a lot of infrastructure and that you can process them on farm, and that there is a relatively large amount of fear mongering around USDA inspection, and that a lot of people start off with this, , fear mongering distrust of the government and the USDA inspection process, and that is actually one of their selling points is like, hey, this is not USDA inspected. We process this ourselves. And we started that. We started off on that route, not so much from the distrust of the USDA, necessarily, but certainly from kind of the practicalities of interfacing with USDA plants in that, , even the smallest plant is processing thousands of birds a day. And when we first started off, we were doing like a thousand birds a year. Right. There’s just the scale of the operation makes it hard to get into USDA when you’re just starting out.
Tyler Dawley: But, , we grew and we’ve processed on farm. We probably did over 3 or 4 years. We probably did probably 6000 birds total processed on farm. I am weirdly good at gutting a chicken and random fact. It’s kind of like riding a bike that through a weird set of circstances, I ended up on someone else’s farm and they didn’t know how to get a chicken. And processing these chickens. And I was there. And there. I wasn’t supposed to help. But you guys are need help. And I’m like, this is how you do it. I’m like, oh my God, I’m gutting chickens again. Who knew that it was a skill like riding a bike? I haven’t done it for ten years. 15 years. Just yeah, took about three. And I was like, oh God, this is exactly how you do it. This sucks. , so anyways, we grew. And so the thing with, , USDA inspection is that there are tons of problems with the USDA inspection. I am not trying to say, hey, that is a perfect system at all. Clearly there are big issues there. But having processed our own chickens, having seen how other people process chickens that I as a personal person feel way better buying a USDA inspected chicken than someone butchered in the backyard. Because even though USDA has all the laws like there are at least talking about microbial accounts, they’re talking about this.
Tyler Dawley: They’re talking about that. They’re building in traceability. You know, there’s a lot of benefits to being USDA processed. So we are now USDA processed. And the transition happened in that we grew to the point. So on farm exemption happens under a USDA exemption like PL 4092 something like that. And what that does is the USDA says, hey, individual states, any operation under 20,000 birds a year, you guys regulate. We don’t care what you do under 20,000 birds a year. State by state basis. You figure out your own rules and regulations. Some states are 20,000 a year, some states are ten. Some states you have to have a inspected facility, some states not. It’s it’s individual. But the reality of chickens is that it’s a vole game that you just make pennies per chicken. And so you realize that if you start playing with the spreadsheets that 20,000 birds a year, generally speaking, is not enough vole to make you a full time living, and you’re going to be working your butt off to get 20,000 birds a year done. And so we kind of hit that breaking point where we were processing about 2000 Birds Farm. We didn’t hire employees. And when I started processing birds, I called friends and family like, hey, we got chickens in a couple weeks.
Tyler Dawley: You good to go? You know, they stopped returning my calls. I don’t know what happened. It was like, it’s cool. It’s getting chicken. Don’t you like it? And so we couldn’t hire anyone for the avowed amount of chickens we were processing. We burnt out all of our friends and family, and we were literally at a crossroads. Like, what do we do with this chicken operation? Do we grow it? Do we shut it down? We didn’t know. I met a guy at a conference, and the classic story of he could sell more than he could raise, and I could raise more than I could sell. And so as soon as you go into that sort of wholesale distribution aspect, you have to be USDA. And he had a USDA processing facility contact, and we went from like 1800 head a year to 600 head a week. That was our big jp like 11, 12 years ago at this point. And so we’ve been inspected, USDA inspected for at the same USDA plant now for eight years, nine years. So I am in favor of USDA inspection. It’s not perfect, but I think it’s a hell of a lot better than not being inspected. Yes, I don’t know. Was that was that even, like 80% of the question you were asking? I don’t know. Yeah. And I think.
Bethany Jolley: I think you’re right. I think the good definitely outweighs the bad with USDA. And, you know, being in the USDA processing facilities versus not being in them. And so I think, yes, you explained that really well for us. And we talked about regenerative practices. So how do these regenerative practices enhance the nutritional profile of your pasture raised chickens.
Tyler Dawley: Okay. So regenerative agriculture is I’ve been around long enough. I’m starting to feel old. I’m not. But I’ve been around long enough. When we first started doing this direct marketing stuff, we were local was a buzzword. And then it kind of morphed into sustainable, and then it kind of morphed into grass fed. And now to the buzzword these days is regenerative. And to some degree, we want to be careful. The fact that regenerative is a current buzzword where everyone’s just talking about it. But I would also say that regenerative, local, sustainable, organic, those are all buzzwords that are circling around the theme of agriculture should make our environment better. It should not degrade our environment. So regenerative actually specifically calls it out. It wants to regenerate our environment. So as far as a buzzword, it’s kind of the the IT word now. But as far as a kind of production philosophy, it’s been around ever since, you know, kind of the organic revolution of the 70s and 80s. The specifics of regenerative agriculture have changed, not changed so much, but they’ve been trying to get my train of thought going here. So regenerative agriculture is trying to take away the why am I trying tongue-tied. So current agriculture right now conventional agriculture will start this way is to some degree an extractive process where you are kind of taking fertility out of the soil, putting it into a product, you know, some sort of a meat, a veggie, a cash crop, and you’re selling it, you’re making some money and you’re kind of drawing out the fertility in the soil.
Tyler Dawley: And that these are very effective ways of getting nutrition, not nutrition, getting product out of the ground, but they are quite literally extractive and that you can kind of look at the amount of the literal tons of topsoil that is being lost. Megatons. I think of topsoil that’s being lost every year out of the Midwest, the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, where all the pesticides and fertilizers flow down the rivers and just kill everything. You can look at the density, the nutrient density. There’s some studies out there. I mean, I think they’re a little bit on the fringe, but I don’t know that show that the density of veggies have dramatically decreased over the past 50 years. And so that’s kind of conventional agriculture right now. And the the actually went to a soil health academy recently and this guy said this really cool thing. He’s like, you know, all the problems that we’re facing now, what did we do to get here? Okay. Well this, that and the other thing is like, oh, well then if you if those things made bad results, shouldn’t the exact opposite things make good results? Because that’s the opposite of bad is good. It’s like oh wow, that’s really cool.
Tyler Dawley: So regenerative agriculture is thinking about the soil first to get to plants, to get to animals, to get to you. Whereas conventional agriculture is kind of you to plants the animals to like the bank account and maybe the soil, the soil is just a thing. So practices regeneration. Regenerative agriculture is the thought process of and I talked about it a little bit earlier, like the soil microbes, the soil biome, growing better plants to make healthier animals to make healthier you. That is the general story of regenerative agriculture. Regenerative agriculture is also trying to model production practices much, closely, much more closely to Mother Nature than what’s currently used. So Mother Nature has some things like she never, never does a monocrop right? You don’t go out and see just a field of corn in Mother Nature, right? It’s going to have a diverse mix. She’s never going to farm without animals. Right. So regenerative. And that’s super high level. So that’s regenerative practices where you’re bringing in, you know all the sort of stuff manage like what we’re doing with our cows. Like I said, the cows broke out because we’re moving them daily. Well that was trying to mimic how the her that is mimicking how herds of elk that were here before white man showed up, uh, were herded by the wolves that were around here in California. Right there. The elk were herded together by the wolves.
Tyler Dawley: They ate down an area. They’re like, well, there’s nothing left here. We’re all going to move together to protect each others from the wolves to the next spot that we’re going to eat down, and we’re not going to come back to this spot for a long time because there’s a whole bunch of dung and urine and the plants need to regrow. So long story. I’m getting to the answer, I think. So those are some of like high level regenerative thoughts, you know, manage your animals in the image of Mother Nature, farm your ground in the image of Mother Nature. So if you’re in a farming context, you’re thinking a lot more about no till agriculture. You’re thinking a lot more about cover crops. You’re thinking a lot more about rotating your crops. Not always doing corn and soy, corn and soy, corn and soy, but putting in wheat, putting in this, you know, whatever. There’s a whole I’m not a farmer necessarily, not like those guys. So I don’t know the specifics, but there is a ton of very fascinating things that they’re doing where you can still farm a conventional cash crop and make a ton of money, but actually improve your soil health, not degrade it. And so trying to get to the chickens. So what we do for our chickens is that we raise chickens on pasture.
Tyler Dawley: So the majority of chickens are grown in barns. That’s what they’re convention. That’s what they call them. Their barns are like 50ft long, 400ft or 50ft wide, 400ft long. And they’re going to pack 20 or 30,000 birds in there. Uh, they’re might have a window. Probably not. They’re going to have their climate’s going to be controlled. Their light cycles are going to be controlled, their temperatures are going to be controlled. They’re going to be fed, you know, they’re they have their basically it is a factory to create chicken meat. And it’s very effective. It’s very efficient. There’s a reason why chicken costs whatever I don’t buy chicken anymore because we grow our own. I don’t actually know how much it costs. But let’s just for the purposes of this, say it costs a buck 99 a pound to buy a whole chicken at the grocery store. That’s absurdly cheap, all sorts of externalized costs that are not going into that price. But what we do is we raise. So you have these birds in a barn, like you can just kind of intuitively tell that, like, that’s not really how a chicken wants to be raised. Grazed, right? I know, like you stick him in a big old barn. You’re like, I think a chicken wants to be outside and scratch and see the sun and chase some bugs and, you know, do some chickadee type stuff.
Tyler Dawley: I think that seems like an intuitive sense. Like, makes sense. Right? So that’s what we do. So we raise our chickens on pasture so they have access to grass. They have access to bugs. They have the sun, they have the moon, they have the wind, they have the heat, they have the cold. And they experience kind of the full range of nature. And the chickens are not rocket, scientists believe it or not, there really are pretty much as db as people say they are. But what they do have is they have a pretty darn good set of instincts. Like something flies over my head. Oh my God, it’s a hawk. I should hide under something. And so what? My job as a chicken producer on pasture is to create an environment where those instincts work. So. Okay, if a hawk flies over, they want to hide under something. Well, then it’s my job to give them a shelter to hide under. They only prefer to graze early in the morning and late in the evening, and they hang out for the rest of the day. Well, then I need to give them a hangout location. I need to give them supplemental feed. You know, I need to take care of their water, all this sort of stuff. And so by creating an environment that their instincts work properly in, they’re happy chickens. And that part of the things that we find is that our chickens grow 1 to 2 weeks slower than a conventional bird, which you think that doesn’t make a huge difference, but that’s like a conventional bird usually is, giving her harvested at six weeks or less of age.
Tyler Dawley: And, you know, we’re harvesting 7 to 8 weeks. Uh, you know, there’s a truism age equals flavor, right? So that extra week or two, if I can’t do the percentages that quickly in my head, but, you know, it’s what, 20% longer like that actually changes, right? Changes the flavor profile, changes the nutrient density of the meat. Our birds are getting exercised. They’re running around. So when you get around to eating them like their meat is, uh, it’s not mush. The few times I eat grocery store chicken, it’s like mush. Our chicken actually has some bite to it, some texture. And so that’s how we’re kind of taking care of the animals to make them healthy. Access to good pasture with these kind of this environment that we’ve set up for them. And then to take care of the soil is that those chickens are only there one time a year. So they’re going to impact, they’re going to poop on it, they’re going to scratch it. They’re going to kind of hammer it down. And then we’re just gone for a whole year, at least 12 months, sometimes 16 months.
Tyler Dawley: And so what happens is that that soil microbiome that I keep talking about, they’re like, oh, look at all these nutrients. I got chicken poop, I got this, I’ve got that. We’re going to be like, oh, yummy, chomp, chomp, chomp chomp. And they eat all that good stuff. The plants are going to take all those nutrients, put it down into the soil for the microbiome. And like all this good stuff happens and that we will end up the next year. You will see a very dark strip where the chickens were raised, and then out of the grass, and then right next to it, there’s going to be a lighter green strip, and that’s just showing you how much fertility we’re bringing back to the soil by raising chickens on pasture the way we are. That’s that’s kind of the another long, rambling answer of how we take care of the chickens and take care of the soil. What regenerative agriculture is taking. You know everything we do, we’re thinking about the soil and the soil microbiome, and then how do we manage our animals to improve that? Because it’s not the better. We take care of the soil. So like kind of it’s this synergistic thing where the better we take care of the soil, the more grass it’s going to grow. Well, hey, we get to grow more animals to take care of, more grass to take care of more soil.
Tyler Dawley: But once you start growing more animals, that’s called production. That’s something you can sell that actually makes you more money. That’s the thing about regenerative agriculture is that there is a little bit of a transition period, but ultimately you get to the point where you are making more money in this style, that your production will stay about the same, by all accounts. But your inputs go down to nothing, right? You’re not inputting anything. Dow chemicals isn’t going to get your money. Monsanto is not going to get your money. You know, buyer Bear’s not going to get your money like they you don’t need that crap that there’s this whole like kind of industrial inertia inputs into agriculture that are really only designed to solve symptoms of a bad production practice. You used to have a good production practice and you don’t need as many dewormers. You don’t need growth hormones, you don’t need fertilizers. You know you don’t need it. Yes, but it’s a multi-billion dollar company. And there’s like, you know, regenerative agriculture is not going to be going to, uh, Congress with, you know, $10,000 in a pocket to bribe a congressman, right? So, yeah, I guess that’s me going off my slightly onto my soapbox there is like don’t need it. Probably gonna stick around because they got a lot of money, but you don’t need it.
Bethany Jolley: Right I know, I mean I think what you’re explaining is just it makes so much sense and it seems like it’s a simple, natural process. And it’s effective, it works. And it is different from what you typically think of, because I know when I’m envisioning like chicken, you know, like, I don’t want to say manufacturing, but chickens, I’m thinking of them in the barn you described. I’m not thinking of them out in the pasture, just free range. And, , so thank you for explaining that. That was great. That was very insightful and helpful. And it makes sense to me. Absolutely.
Tyler Dawley: No problem. I mean, I love this sort of stuff and that I have a pretty firm belief that I can’t really prove scientifically. But agriculture is going to be a huge component going forward in any sort of climate mitigation change, that the amount of carbon that good regenerative agriculture can sequester is insane. You know, changing how much fossil fuels we burn is probably the number one thing to take care of. But number two or number three is going to be agriculture. And it touches everything. It touches climate change, it touches social justice. It touches health care, it touches schools, it touches, you know, hospitals, jails, like our food is like it’s the throughput right through everything we all eat. And that’s every time we eat something that is a dollar that is going to the to voting towards the scale of what sort of food system we are literally buying. Right. So when you go and buy that piece of junk at the gas station, although it’s very delicious, don’t get me wrong, I am not pure by any means, but you’re voting for that, right? And so this is kind of the groundswell. I mean, so we’ve been doing this, you know, for 25 ish years. I remember when grass fed beef was like a fringe thing.
Tyler Dawley: And now you can get it at Whole Foods. Mcdonald’s had a grass fed beef burger, I think it was McDonald’s had a grass fed beef burger you can buy for a while. I mean, that is a huge change. You can still get it at every Trader Joe’s. You know, it’s almost gotten to a commodity. And so and and organics. Oh I’m gonna get this statistic a little bit wrong, but certified organic production has grown by like 20 or 30% a year for decades. But it’s still going from like 1% like a 20% growth of 1% is like to what, 1.2? Like it’s it’s better than nothing. I think organic is more than that. But you see what I’m saying, that it’s a even though it is growing fast, it is still a small percentage of production in general. Uh, but it is growing and is accelerating. And it really excites me that things are starting to change. More people are talking about it, you know, it’s starting to show up. Well, I can’t I’ll go excited again. I’ll go excited again. But just one little bit of excitement. So as far as thinking about how this might get starting embedded into our culture, into our society, into our government, there is this program here in California called the Healthy Soils Program, and there’s this one.
Tyler Dawley: I got this story a little bit wrong, but close enough for the point of the story. There’s this one restaurant tour who had a really awesome restaurant and was like a carbon neutral restaurant, and then I got really good at it and it was like, you know, I can’t make enough of an impact with just a restaurant. I want to impact more. I can only buy from so many farmers. So I don’t know then things happen that I don’t know so much about. But he got involved in policy and they passed some bill, they got funding and they are now running this healthy soils program and they’re granting out millions of dollars a year to producers like us. We’re part of we’re participating in the program to spread rangeland compost, which does all sorts of amazing things to do cover crops. Let’s do all sorts of things. So there is actual policy at state level that is enacting this regenerative agriculture change the USDA through the NRCS, You know, government people are always up in arms about the farm bill, at least in agriculture. And it’s definitely got some massive issues. But every now and then it’s so big that you can slide in us a little like, good idea every now and then and just kind of like gets snuck in by accident almost.
Tyler Dawley: Nrcs Natural Resource Conservation District, which is the kind of the government arm that farmers and ranchers deal with the most. They have grant programs. The most notable one is called the Eqip program, Environmental Quality Incentive Program. And in that program they have a list of practices, hundreds of them. But in those practices they have cover crops, they have hedgerows, they have compost application, they have managed grazing. So this is the government paying farmers to create change, to do things better, and that it’s not 100% right, you know, but just as far as a indication of future trends, it’s like, whoa, we’ve got that through the USDA. You know, that’s pretty cool. Like 20 years ago. No, uh, that wouldn’t have been around 20 years ago. So as far as, like, being hopeful about where all of this stuff is going to end up, I am a farmer. I’m a rancher, so kind of by nature I have to be optimistic. Otherwise I would be smart and get a city job. But it feels like things are changing and it’s changing. The pace of change is increasing, which is pretty hopeful and pretty exciting.
Bethany Jolley: Yes.
Bethany Jolley: And what advice do you have for new farmers and ranchers that are interested in sustainable agriculture?
Tyler Dawley: Don’t do it. No no no no. Sorry. That was oh, there’s a quote. It was either JFK or someone earlier there. Agriculture is the only industry where you buy at retail. You sell it wholesale and you pay freight both ways. So it’s or here’s a funnier way of saying roughly the same thing. You know, here’s a question. It’s a joke. You’re gonna laugh so much. How do you make a small fortune in agriculture?
Bethany Jolley: I don’t know.
Tyler Dawley: You start with the big one. See, I told you you were gonna laugh. So, look, agriculture is is my life calling? I think more people should be doing it. But don’t. It is not. It is a business first. Like you need to go. It’s a business first. Like you need to go into it. You need to like have you don’t have to do a business plan like not a 40 or 50 page business plan. But don’t just get some acreage and start growing some product and hope someone’s going to buy it. It’s not going to work out very well for you that this really works. Who do you want to be when you grow up? Which is a question I always ask myself. What does your local food community need? What does your local landscape need? And they know there’s that Venn diagram. Once you kind of start laying all those pieces out, that little overlap is what you should be doing. And maybe it’s veggies, maybe it’s row crops, maybe it’s animal production, maybe it’s poultry. I don’t, you know, there’s it can be a whole bunch of things, but it’s not row I mean, it is romantic. It’s pretty awesome really. But it doesn’t just fall into your lap, right? There’s a lot of work, so you should be thinking about educating yourself ahead of time. You should be thinking about the business aspect of it, that it’ll be incredibly alluring. And I fall into it all the time of like, learning about new production practices. Like, I’m really kind of digging into compost teas right now.
Tyler Dawley: There’s no business until you’re selling something, so you need to be thinking about how you’re going to sell, how much money you need to make as a family, as an individual, how much you have to sell. Like, man, I’m making this sound way too dire. I just want people to go into it, you know, relatively aware that you don’t. It just doesn’t happen. You really have to want it, you know? It’s just like it’s an entrepreneurial journey that’s get tied into Mother Nature. So that’s kind of the trickiest thing about agriculture is that I don’t even know what to, you know, 40, 50, 60% of it. You’re not in charge of it. I have no way of controlling if it rains or not. So luckily we had a whole bunch of rain this year. We have more grass and we have cows. I’m trying to, you know, turn our grass into value and everyone else is like, ah, we don’t need grass. We got plenty of everyone around here got rain, right? No one. The grass is not valuable. But then a couple of years ago, we had no rain and there was no grass, right? So our production had to go down. So every year, every season, you are balancing kind of the economic realities of being a business, which is a lot of that is built on regularity, consistency and vole and, you know, making small margin but high vole. And then on the other hand, you’re over here dealing with the Mother nature, where sometimes it rains, sometimes it doesn’t. It gets hot, it gets cold.
Tyler Dawley: A skunk gets into your brooder and kills a whole bunch of chickens. You know, it’s actually it’s totally fun because you have so many things you’re balancing at all times. Like if you’re someone who really likes all this sort of stuff, it’s awesome. There is something very soul satisfying about get to use every aspect of you. You get to use your brain to figure all this out. You get to use your hands to build stuff. You get to look out, and you get to see the things you built right away. You get to see the change over time. Right? So I’ve been here my whole life. Essentially I am my kids are 12 ish, ten, 1012 and they are playing in the creek that I played in the creek as a kid. But I remember as a kid there wasn’t very much riparian jungle, cottonwoods, willows, trees like that. Now there’s a ton of it because of the stuff we’ve done. Right. So that means that between my dad’s work and my work, that we, through the sweat of our brow and the, you know, might of our hands, we have created change. And we can see that over a long term like we did that. Right. So that’s just really cool. And then you get to like you get into the whole heart and soul thing, like, you know, this is what I want to do. People always ask, like, have you ever had this thought experiment or been asked this question like, if you had $1 million tomorrow, what would you do? Right.
Bethany Jolley: Yeah.
Tyler Dawley: Would you be doing this? I don’t know, most probably not. Right. Most people say probably not. Most people be like, I wouldn’t be doing this. I’d be hunting every day. Like, that’s such a weird answer. But for me, if I had $1 million, I’d be doing this exact same thing, right? So this is me. This is all I want to do. So I guess as far as a practical step to if you want to become a farmer, get excited, learn practices. But before you actually go into business, learn some business stuff first, right? Sorry, that was a long rambling. You should do it. But we need more people in agriculture. Just go into it with your eyes wide open. It’s not easy.
Bethany Jolley: Yes.
Bethany Jolley: No, I mean, I think it sounds like, of course, there’s a lot of challenges and hard work along the way, but overall, it sounds like it’s a rewarding journey for sure.
Bethany Jolley: So.
Bethany Jolley: You know.
Tyler Dawley: If I just said that, I could have taken that whole four minute answer down to, like, four seconds. I gotta I gotta be a little more succinct with my answers here.
Bethany Jolley: I like your.
Bethany Jolley: Passion and your story, so it’s great. And thank you, Tyler, once again for just sharing all about your remarkable journey and your insights into regenerative practices and sustainable agriculture. For our listeners that are eager to learn more about Big Bluff Ranch or explore their organic, pasture raised chicken, we provided the necessary links. Do subscribe, share your thoughts, and join us in spotlighting the nutraceutical world on social media until our next episode. Stay informed and inspired by the innovations of nutraceutical