The RegenNarration Podcast
The RegenNarration podcast features the stories of a generation that is changing the story, enabling the regeneration of life on this planet. It’s ad-free, freely available and entirely listener-supported. You'll hear from high profile and grass-roots leaders from around Australia and the world, on how they're changing the stories we live by, and the systems we create in their mold. Along with often very personal tales of how they themselves are changing, in the places they call home. With award-winning host, Anthony James.
The RegenNarration Podcast
217. Imagining a Society to Match the Scenery: Cole Mannix on founding Old Salt Co-op, Festival & food system revolution
Cole Mannix was featured in the New York Times a couple of months ago as part of a series called ‘Making It Work’, about ‘small-business owners striving to endure hard times’. The title read: Montana Has More Cows Than People. Why Are Locals Eating Beef From Brazil? The by-line followed: ‘Cole Mannix, [co-founder] of Old Salt Co-op, is trying to change local appetites and upend an industry controlled by multibillion-dollar meatpackers.’ And it seems local appetites are ready for it too – with both eaters and producers lining up for a taste of things, apparently just in need of a model that works.
It’s early days, but with a family legacy steeped in stewardship, some hard lessons from past efforts, and Cole’s personal journey from the ranch to theology and other revelations, the co-op is off to a rocking start. Literally. Soon after it formed in 2021, The Old Salt Outpost burger shop was set up in a famous old bar in downtown Helena. Though when I visited Cole, we started in the cruisier country vibes of the new restaurant and retail outlet across the street, called The Union. And we culminate back there with four of my favourite minutes ever on this podcast.
They happened to be prompted by Fred Provenza's presentation at the Old Salt Festival, a gathering to bring the whole lot together. So many essential aspects of systemic, regenerative change. Though as I was to learn, with one critical piece of the puzzle to come. And just the right sources of finance to make it happen.
This episode has chapter markers and a transcript, if you’d like to navigate the conversation that way (available on most apps now too).
Recorded 20 July 2024.
Title slide: Cole & AJ entering the Old Salt Outpost burger shop (pic: Olivia Cheng).
See more photos on the website, and for more from behind the scenes, become a member via the Patreon page.
Music:
Green Shoots, by The Nomadics.
Regeneration, by Amelia Barden, from Regenerating Australia.
The RegenNarration playlist, music chosen by guests (thanks to Josie Symons).
Find more:
Old Salt Co-op’s page on Steward
Hear Dan Miller from Steward on episode 161, Regenerating Investment in Food & Farming.
The RegenNarration podcast is independent, ad-free & freely available, thanks to the generous support of listeners like you. If you too value what you hear, please consider joining them by clicking the link above or heading to our website.
Become a subscribing member to connect with your host, other listeners & benefits, via our Patreon page.
Visit The RegenNarration shop to wave the flag. And please keep sharing the podcast with friends. It all helps. Thanks for your support!
I think a lot of people have the notion that if you could just get producers to adopt regenerative practices, you'd see massive change and now customers could choose the better product. But I think that if tomorrow you could make every producer the top of their craft just by fiat, they would be selling into an extractive food system that would ultimately bankrupt the soil. So you really have to build a food system whose intention starts out from the beginning at producing a nourishing product and taking care of soil and water and biodiversity for the long term.
AJ:Cole Mannix was featured in the New York Times a couple of months ago as part of a series called Making it Work about small business owners striving to endure hard times. The title read Montana has more cows than people. Why are locals eating beef from Brazil? The byline followed. Cole Mannix, co-founder of Old Salt Co-op, is trying to change local appetites and upend an industry controlled by multi-billion dollar meat packers. And it seems local appetites are ready for it too, with both eaters and producers lining up for a taste of things, apparently just in need of a model that works. It's early days, but with a family legacy steeped in stewardship, community and doing what's right, some hard lessons learned from past efforts and Cole's personal journey from the ranch to theology and other revelations, the co-op is off to a rocking start, and literally Soon after it formed in 2021, the old Salt Outpost burger shop was set up in a famous old bar in downtown Helena, though when I visited Cole, we started in the cruisier country vibes of the new restaurant and retail outlet across the street called the Union. G'day Anthony James here for The RegenNarration.
AJ:Ad-free, freely available media entirely supported by listeners like you. Thanks a lot Jason Watts, for notching up the second anniversary of your very generous subscription, and thanks too to Suzie Wells from the wonderful team at Boojum for touching up the website again in ways that remain beyond me. If you're finding value in this too, please join Jason and Suzie, part of a great community of supporting listeners. You can subscribe for as little as $3 a month and get exclusive access to behind-the-scenes stuff from me additional releases, news and more. Just head to the website via the show notes regennarration. com/ support and thanks again.
AJ:Funnily enough, just before our scheduled visits to Nicole Masters and Fred Provenza in Montana, my friend Kristy Stewart told me of the joy of seeing Nicole and Fred present at a festival nearby called Old Salt. Then, when another dear friend, Tanya Massy, sent a text from back in Australia suggesting the Old Salt Co-op was worth a visit, it dawned on me that all this was coming out of the same place. So many essential aspects of systemic regenerative change. Though, as I was to learn with one critical piece of the puzzle to come. And just the right sources of finance to make it happen. Soon after we pulled up at the restaurant, this fit young father of two rocked up on his bicycle in t-shirt and jeans, with backpack on, and we headed inside for a yarn culminating in a few of my favourite minutes ever on this podcast.
Cole:Can I offer a taste to these guys? Yeah, so this is what's this one called the round one? Yeah, the finocchiono. Do you want to try some of that? And coppa, Thank you. They're not spicy, no, but they definitely have a lot of herbs in them, but not hot.
Cole:So this one is this is dry cured, no smoking, but just pork shoulder. But Taylor in the back here is just a wizard with different curing and smoking and he showed up. He showed up in the dead of winter to Glendive, which is a town on the border of Montana, north Dakota, and it was a little bit too unpopulated and cold, and so he applied for a job here and he just turned out to be a really talented guy. Wow, what do you know? Makes wonderful vinegars and shrubs that are on the menu now.
AJ:Nice, thank you.
Cole:Thanks, Andrew. By the way, this is Andrew Mace hey.
AJ:AJ Olivia, Nice to meet you too.
Cole:And this whole place is his baby and brainchild. Okay, he's one of our board members of the whole Old Salt deal.
AJ:It's amazing to be here, Andrew. What a place. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that. Yeah, you bet.
Cole:All right, Come right in here. This is a little collaboration, all these babies of our brand, with this woman in Oregon who is sourcing the hides from producers from this region, doing the tanning and then building luggage everything from luggage to these journals.
AJ:Man, that's amazing, kind of cool. That is so cool. So we had a bunch of these made for the festival building lug luggage, everything from luggage to these journals.
Cole:Yeah, that's amazing, cool, that is so cool. So we had a bunch of these made for the festival.
AJ:I have to get one of these from you oh yeah, yeah yeah, oh perfect, that's outstanding. Wow, leather bound journal. It's incredible already the amount of off spins yeah, yeah, yeah.
Cole:So do you want to talk just up here, or do you want to?
AJ:let's, we can walk and talk, yeah, but certainly to start here, mate, it's great to meet you, it's nice to meet you. Thanks for meeting me here. And this is amazing. Everything about it like being at a restaurant, the gallery and almost museum, with what you showed me on the desk there. And then grasses down the wall Bring us in a bit. Hey, what are we looking at there? And then grasses down the wall, bring us in a bit. Hey, what are we looking at?
Cole:Well, this is a building that's been around Helena for a long time. It was Globe Clothing for many, many years, where people would get their Levi's, and it was kind of the blue collar store where the sheep herders would come in when they had some time off and they would put suits on layaway, because it was a thing back in the day that you needed to be buried in a suit and these guys would let them do layaways. So anyway, this was kind of a working man's clothing store for many, many years and then most recently it was 35 years, it was a restaurant in town and anyway we purchased it because we wanted to have kind of a flagship place to host the community of people around Old Salt and this community that believes land is kin together and wants to create a little regenerative economy for the meats that come from this landscape. And so it's been operating now for three months. We've been working on the project for a couple of years.
AJ:Just three months.
Cole:It's only been open for three months, yeah, and so it's. You know, it's both a wood-fired grill which opens in the evenings five days a week, and then it's also a butcher shop market which is open eight to six, and the market is how we can really showcase the meats that the company is really focused on building a market for and the restaurant is just really fun. We have a wood-fired grill here where we cook on cherry wood sometimes, apple orchard wood sometimes, and the menu is kind of unique to you know, in a lot of cases the restaurant sort of the point of the food system is sort of maximize optionality for the restaurant. But in this case we sort of built the restaurant to around the needs of a whole animal meat program. So the menu has placeholders on it where multiple cuts can go through each. So there'll be braised cut that might be made up of pork, shank or lamb neck or short ribs, and then there's the sort of a butcher steak category, premium steak category, and we move about maybe five beef carcasses, a couple hog carcasses, a couple lamb a week between this establishment and our place across the street which is a burger joint that you've seen.
Cole:Yeah, and that came first, that was first. It's about this fall. It'll be three years old.
AJ:Okay, so you started that at the same time. It started more or less.
Cole:Yeah, that was our first enterprise. We formed Old Soul in spring of 21. And by the fall, by October of 21, we had launched our first effort to gain some traction, some proof of concept, which was the Burger Joint. So we approached my friend, Joe and Sarah, who have this bar. I have kind of a hack country band in town and we would play at this bar.
AJ:You play. Yeah, what do you play?
Cole:I play a little banjo, a little guitar yes, nothing particularly well, but I love music. So I knew Joe and Sarah and they had had a little food establishment in there for a long time and I asked them and they said oh, I think Sandy's thinking about retirement so we leased it. We spent a little bit of money to renovate it. They run the alcohol and we just do a burger, a very simple, fast, casual burger concept that's based on animal fats, no seed oils, we cook all in our towel that we render, and it's man there's probably 1200 people in there a week moves six to eight hundred pounds of ground beef, sometimes a thousand pounds a week, and so it's been a great, just way for us to the community to be like oh, what's, what's old salt? Yeah, who are these people and what are they about?
Cole:And then also just one little enterprise that started off and was profitable and we moved some ground beef to give us just a little bit of something to live underneath as we work to build what is ultimately meant to be a meat company that moves a significant number of the ranch's livestock that are its members. So there are five ranch members right now and our mission is to. We have a small processing enterprise, a couple of restaurants, now an e-commerce meat brand, and our mission is to get outside of the commodity food system, have these ranchers gain access and relationships with their own customer base, diversify and ultimately return more value to support the stewardship of land, and so that Outpost Burger Joint was just a fun place to start. We're kind of lucky that we found something that was relatively easy to start with, because everything else has been incredibly hard really.
AJ:Yeah, that's interesting. Let's come back around to those things. Yeah, that is cool and funny that she happened to be retiring. Then I mean the amount of time I hear just those little moments, yeah, little windows that you can pass through if you're ready to, though. So, yeah, really interesting. Let's come back out of that of that trajectory and then loop back around to it to get a bit of the backstory. So we were with fred provenza yesterday and he mentioned he has known your folks for some time. Hey, so they go back a bit, yeah, and I gather then that this ethic, if you like that, that goes back a while. Then is there a time I mean in your five generations of ranching that there was a transition or transformation to more of this stewardship ethos, or was it always there?
Cole:well, I would say that, um, grandma and grandpa also had a notion about land and property, that was, they didn't take ownership too seriously. I mean, I think they thought that their job was to take care of things. Leave it better. You know, private property has some reasons why we have those rules and on the other hand, you know, we're going to die and the land is going to be here for a long time and we didn't create it and it's really the common goods, the commonwealth, and it really is.
Cole:You know, it was in probably the early 80s that my dad and his siblings and my mom and my aunts began taking over the ranch and then by the 90s they had really plugged into the holistic management international Helen Savory movement in this part of the world and a thing that was called ranching for profit. They would go to that school and then for years, like they dragged us kids along and for years they participated in executive link, which was where graduates of the ranching for profit program would sit on each other's. They'd form like a board of six businesses that would give each other feedback on their. You know, one from kansas and one from missouri, one from arizona, one from montana, and somebody would be cattle. Somebody else would be you know more, a little more crop orientedoriented or cattle-crop integrated, and they would just basically learn about how to be better business people. And that was not just business itself and business structures and profit and loss, but it was also ecology and how do you minimize inputs and how do you improve your output, and is the thing as a whole, because that's holistic management sort of is it healthy as an ecosystem? Are you healthy as a family? Is your ranch likely to be viable to pass down?
Cole:And that's, I think, how they probably first met Fred. And because of that, I mean I've been to a gazillion conferences where Fred has spoken. But he has a unique ability to blend the like. You know he's right down deep in the weeds of science and animal behavior and range, health and the importance of diversity, and yet he's cosmic. You know, he's such a deeply spiritual, mystic fellow. It makes you want to be a better person. Well, sid, he's something else. Yeah, such a deeply spiritual, mystic fellow, it makes you want to be a better person. Well said, he's something else.
AJ:Yeah, and I mean even in the short conversation we had before pressing record here, you mentioned you'd done a Master's of Theology as well, so clearly you've got a connection point there with him. But where did it come from for you and what was that journey about? Slash, what is it about still?
Cole:Well, I was the oldest of my generation, my siblings, my first cousins and one of the things the ranch had in place is you need to go away for at least five years, even if you thought you might want to come back. And I did grow up following Dad around and thinking I wanted to ranch. But I went off to school not really knowing what to study but just following what I caught an interest in and trying to get enough that would set me up to be able to be employable. But I actually ended up doing an undergrad in biology and then just feeling like I wanted to keep learning and I did an undergrad in philosophy along the way and then just decided I thought I might want to be a Jesuit priest and academic and so I went to Boston and anyway it was there that I really discovered a whole bunch of interest in the West and in agriculture and in livestock and in climate and sort of looking at my own context and growing up back in Montana as the only kid in my K-8 class it was this tiny little school. And growing up back in Montana as the only kid in my K-8 class it was this tiny little school and anyway, just looking at that a little bit differently and getting really interested. I was interested already in questions of social justice but beginning to realize how fundamental the use of land and the production of food is in social justice.
Cole:And if you're spoiling your nest constantly and needing to pick up and go somewhere else and needing to go exploit elsewhere this aspiration to learn how to not just go to Mars as the next place after Earth, right To become a nester, to be a. Wallace Degner called it being a sticker rather than a boomer His daddy described as a boomer who was always looking for the next shiny thing, the next get-rich-quick scheme. Grass is greener, and then his mother was a nester and so that's his sort of set of archetypes and in a lot of ways he paints American expansion into the West and American society as a young civilization, as having so much of the boomer mentality and trying to find those elements of being a sticker and maybe more indigenous value systems of how do you live in a place for a long time and endure.
AJ:I hear you In your journey. Has that meant connecting with the folk who were here before for however many thousands of years?
Cole:You know I can't say that I have like a lot of relationships in the indigenous community, not because I don't want that or don't desire that, but just I didn't.
Cole:You know, we're not near one of the reservations like the Salish Kootenai up in the Flathead, or not so near that, or the Blackfeet up near Glacier Park, even though our valley bears their name, and I'm aware that the Blackfoot Valley was really used very consistently as seasonal hunting grounds by both of those tribes.
Cole:And we had a fellow who lived on the ranch and worked on the ranch for many years, who would have been Métis, named Bill Doney, who I looked up to just because he was a really great guy and a good hand, and the Métis usually would have one white parent and one indigenous parent.
Cole:And so even right now I'm deep in a book called Strange Empire, which is about, you know, the settlement, like pre-United States, through Hudson Bay and on St Lawrence, and where these all kind of come together at the northern border of the United States and the southern like, if you look at, like Winnipeg and everything that surrounds that, this blending of French and Scotch and native, like Cree and Sioux, and cultures, and then these Metis who develop their own little culture and their own, but then in some ways were outcast from both societies. And so I'm just I didn't grow up with, I guess, being aware of an overt influence, but I sort of see some of the values that I've seen espoused in my grandparents and aunts and uncles. I think they are probably shared by maybe they learned them from, I'm not sure but shared by indigenous cultures that can be found across the globe.
AJ:Yeah, that's right, as I listen to you speak, I think, of situations and conversations I've had in Australia with similar overtones, and it does make me wonder, then you know you talked about that sort of outcast from both sides type of thing as well, that subculture, if that's the term. It does make me wonder if there's a road for all of us converging here with that shared ethos. That's a hope anyway. Yeah, I can see that happening and bubbling anyway. It could go either way, I suppose, but I can see the possibility for it as much in where we started this conversation, talking about the loose hold that idea of ownership has on what you guys are about. Yeah, so let's go from where you studied then. What led from there as a student to forming a co-op? I guess you've gone back to the ranch. But with this master's degree, what were you thinking at the time? Actually, I want a ranch or there's going to be something on the horizon more for me. What was it?
Cole:I was trying to decide what to do with my life and teaching. I came back and was adjunct teaching at the college I went to undergrad at. Here in town in Helena, which is called Carroll College, we have 1,200 students and I was trying to figure out the next and it turned out that for me, I think, being in Montana, coming back home and trying to find a way to get engaged here in a way that because I had learned and then still I had sort of it was emblazoned on my brain that justice is really about cleaning up your own act internally and at home.
Cole:Otherwise, if you go export your problems, you're not really going to help and that was emblazoned on your brain, you know while I was at school in Boston, we would make a couple of trips One was to El Salvador, one was to Honduras and I realized how much effect the US policy, US involvement, US priorities had on their lives and their economy. And it just, you know, we were a bunch of folks studying religion and it wasn't just our economy, but it was our religious ideas.
AJ:I used to live in Guatemala for a time. I visited El Salvador as well, but I saw it too.
Cole:I was, you know. I stayed with this family. I did our Salvador as well, but I saw it too. I stayed with this family I can't remember their names but this little campesino, very small little home. They had raised two or three doctors. Their kids all went to the UCA and there was no employment for doctors because nobody was going to be able to pay for that care and so they sent remittance payments home, having been living in the States, and it just was a sharp image of look, you could be a really hard worker, very talented, but the broader context is so important. So justice is you know.
Cole:Again, it felt like, okay, what am I going to do close to home? I've got all this extended family in Montana. My three sides, my mother's parents and grandparents and both sets of my dad's parents, all came from this Blackfoot Valley. I knew I wanted to be here somehow and it felt like the academia or the priesthood was kind of not the right fit. So my dad and a bunch of those same ranch partners through Holistic Management International, they knew each other through ranching for profit, they formed a cooperative called Salt of the Earth Ranchers Cooperative. They had the idea that they wanted to diversify this particular business model Idea was to become a low-cost, grass-fed producer, domestically and using coal cows and bulls. That's 15 to 20 percent of the supply chain. By default they're a pasture animal that has not had growth hormones.
Cole:And they just thought, hey, if, if we want to step outside of the commodity market, which is so carefully every part of it is just so carefully designed they leave the ranches.
Cole:And then there's a massive level of complexity that's been well solved in a certain way with the feedlot system and the importing of lean to mix with the mass production of fat here, and then the processing side and the distribution side, and they thought, well, maybe the low-hanging fruit is to sell to the Chipotles of the world aggregate cull cows process, build a brand, and if we can get good at moving trim and lean meats, then perhaps we can demonstrate to these ranches that are part of our cooperative that there's a future in diversifying. And perhaps we then grass finish at some scale or figure out our own method of grain finishing that we like better. So I went to work for that and it after we had got some traction. But after five years we failed and learned some really hard lessons, and so I got a bath in business and a bath in the meat industry I'm instantly curious what would you say were the key mistakes or learnings from it?
Cole:Well, there's really a million of them, but I mean one was that we owned nothing. We were a brand in a supply chain, but that meant that we would go to Greeley Colorado to process. We found a little packer to build a relationship with, but we needed them. He had a heart attack and died and overnight the grinding facility we depended on was gone. We found one buyer that was paying a good enough price and we were moving a semi-load at a time of trim. That was simple. She, the majority of her company, was purchased.
Cole:The new board kind of took things in a different direction and then Country of Origin Labeling like within a few months span was repealed and that meant we could not distinguish domestic from imported. When was that? I believe it was the fall of 16. It could have been early 17, but I think it was the fall of 16. So a few things happened. I tried to. I put together a group of investors and as sort of a last-ditch effort, I tried to buy a jerky plant, because we had built a supply chain for coal cows and there was a jerky plant in my backyard that was kind of struggling and we made a couple of offers. They turned us down twice and we couldn't offer more.
Cole:So I went to work for a thing called the Western Landowners Alliance. That was 17. And we worked on things like the Farm Bill and Endangered Species Act and state wildlife migration, and it was all about how do you manage land ecologically intact and how do you make it pay for itself. And so we did communication amongst landowners, we did a whole bunch of films and a whole bunch of resource toolkits and we worked on policy. And then we did a whole bunch of peer-to-peer learning. And I realized I think in that whole process, man, if you add up the progress that's made on the policy front let's say, take a five-year farm bill Could I add up five of those farm bills and feel like we were making enough headway? So I just in COVID I started writing a business plan that kind of harkened back to the old name of Salt of the Earth Ranchers Cooperative, but this time was built more on owning brick and mortar, much more local and more about.
Cole:We're not trying to put a shinier label on a package of meat that goes through the same channels, because that's not systemic change. I think what we really need to do is build a whole bunch of little circular exchanges between producer and customer, empower producers to have more access to the customer and customers to know the producers better. I'm not really looking to go create a brand to sell into some box store supply chain. I want to build a brand where producers own the upside of it, they don't just sell their animal to it, the upside of it, they don't just sell their animal to it, because ultimately, stewardship is just talent and passion and dedication applied over time. It's not magic, it's really just cultivating artists on the landscape and artists need to be that. Stewardship needs to be fed and we've treated it as such a commodity, like we've squeezed it to the bottom line. So I yeah, I definitely like if tomorrow.
Cole:I think a lot of people have the notion that if you could just get producers to adopt regenerative practices, you'd see massive change and now customers could choose the better product. But I think that if tomorrow you could make every producer the top of their craft just by fiat, they would be selling into an extractive food system that would ultimately bankrupt the soil. So you really have to build a food system whose intention starts out from the beginning at producing a nourishing product and taking care of soil and water and biodiversity for the long term. Our food system has been built on geopolitical stability, maintaining peace through free trade, consistency, mitigation of big risk and disaster like the Dust Bowl, and there's obviously some reasons for geopolitical security. There's some reasons for geopolitical security. There's some reasons for these things, but we don't have so many harvests left as we're on our current path and that's true even if we weren't disrupting the climate we're losing the fertile skin of the earth and all the life systems that support it.
Cole:And then, oh, by the way, we are disrupting things a lot. So how do we? It's not just about learning to work with nature on the production side, on the soil side of things, it's building a system that can replenish and refuel that.
AJ:Indeed, let's make our way down the stairs. While we continue, I'd love you to, just while we do that, point out a few things that we're going to walk past.
Cole:Yeah well, we're just walking down the stairs from kind of our larger party dining mezzanine. There's some big landscapes of different parts of Montana hanging there and then this is like a lot of my the Hibberds, who are one of the members. Ranches of Old Salt. Oh yeah, the Hibberds who are one of the members of Ranches of Old Salt. Oh yeah, so Henry Seban walked out as an orphan on the Oregon Trail in the 1860s, I believe.
AJ:So this would be Henry dressed in his dapper suit.
Cole:These settings are in Australia too, eh, Well, I mean the wealth that was being extracted. I don't mean that unkindly, but at the time, yeah, it was a whole, you know, the West was kind of a brand new thing to Europeans.
AJ:Yes.
Cole:My own family was part of that. This is my Grandma, louise, with her pet deer, which every time somebody had come into the house because it lived on the bed. So every time somebody had come into the house and slammed the door, the deer would jump through the window. Oh boy, we'd love that. And then this is my grandpa with a barn owl and his mother and sisters Grandpa operating a piece of equipment called a bull rink where we would just push loose hay into big piles and then they would be stacked on this beaver slide so the hay would be brought up to the top on forks and dumped over Ingenious.
AJ:And yeah, the grasses. It was the first thing you pointed out to me along the ceiling.
Cole:These native grasses were gathered from the Seabin Livestock Company, that's the Hibberds. So we were just looking at Henry Seabin. So they are both a sheep and a cattle operation about an hour and a half to the north of here.
AJ:And you're about an hour.
Cole:And we're about an hour to the west To the west.
AJ:Okay, the Mannix places.
Cole:Yeah, yeah.
AJ:All right, should we continue out onto the street and make our way over to the other, the opposite corner, where the outpost is? And it might be worth? I think listeners generally know, but it still boggles the mind when you actually hear how concentrated the food system is. I mean, certainly here. But Australia's not much different. Give us a sense of what you, by this stage, had learned about its concentration and what you were going to be, hey man, what you were going to be up against if that's the right terminology in trying again with something else.
Cole:Well, usually the statistic people cite is that three out of four of the cattle in our country are processed by four companies. But I think consolidation has happened in so many industries and not just in the US, right? No, that's right. And I think it's just as much on the side of well, yeah, cargill processes a lot of cattle, but they also sell the seed and they sell the inputs and you know, it's not just that side of the industry. But as soon as you get to the distributor, there's kind of a Cisco and FSA and then you've got kind of the Sodexos of the food service world. And when you get to the box stores, that's pretty consolidated too. And that's a little bit of why regenerating land, you know it, it has to do with restoring relationships of the, of the, all the different life systems. But I think, like regenerating Main Street is not even really that much different. But it's like when you suck all the opportunity out and you consolidate it, it just makes things less interesting.
Cole:And I think that back in the 80s in Montana well, in the whole US we went from carcass cutting. Groceries stores would receive carcasses and then we transitioned to this period where they would instead receive boxed beef, the carcasses had already been broken down in a central place. And I think there was more lost in that transition of knowledge, because the butchers and the visits that they would have with their customers in the grocery store, that's where the the knowledge of their craft and also the passion, where did this come from? But also, hey, we're cutting this a little bit different today. And have you tried the oyster which we cut like out of this part of the mountain? So the union, we named it, we bought. We purchased the old restaurant, uh, burton Ernie's from a guy whose family had owned the last operating butcher shop in the 80s.
Cole:Wow really, in Helena and it was called Union Market, so we named this the union as an homage, and that's the old sign you've got in there.
AJ:Yeah, yeah, yeah, hey, wow.
Cole:So we're trying to bring hey, how's it going? Bree? Hey, so we're trying to.
Cole:I think again like regenerative agriculture is a uh, not so much like a just a better way of how to choose land management practices, but it's a whole nother way of building community. It's a culture, it's a, it's a really a value set, I think, as much as it's a value set. That's that holds private property loosely, as you said earlier, that sees, you know, wealth as much more broadly defined than money and wreck, and that you can't eat money and and really just doesn't aspire to. Um, the, the version of the good life, is just a little bit richer vision. Yeah, because I don't.
Cole:I you know as many people as I find who think that they might become rich or wealthy by doing the next regenerative agriculture tech. I just think that misses a huge piece, which is that the value has got to be going back to the land and the art and it's not just about, hey, I'm going to build a better mousetrap. Regenerative agriculture is really just more about the right secret sauce and all of a sudden, magically, you have less inputs and more output. Yeah, that isn't it, you know the land has a metabolism.
Cole:It needs to be fed. It's fed with fertility. Fertility is created by life and death in that cycle, and it just doesn't come from nowhere. Yeah, so now we're walking into the first little thing we did, which is this Old Salt Outpost burger shop.
AJ:Yeah, so this is the bar, so you become a pod, yeah.
Cole:Hey, matt, let's see what's going on. So Matt runs all of our prep and Jelena has rotated between our meat processing facility across town and here. It's been an absolute ray of sunshine. So, yeah, this started when we had three members and now we're five. We hope we can get to like a maybe a seven to ten members here. The goal is to grow that, yeah, but I guess that's its own thing, right to maybe a seven to ten members.
AJ:here you do. The goal is to grow that. Yeah, but I guess that's its own thing. Right that the relationships are strong as a foundation. Have you got real protocols around that, or it's just sort of an emergent process?
Cole:I would say that the beginning stages was just people who had known and trusted each other's values and knew that they aligned on management. And as we grow we'll have to figure that out. And it also looks so different for cattle operations the newest member only raises hogs, and so you start to go okay, well, we have to rethink a little bit. Well, what are our standards? And the first it starts with values. Rethink a little bit, well, what are our standards? And the first it starts with values. And you know, are these people? Is their vision of a better world similar?
AJ:to ours. Yeah, it's interesting just on that front. I mean I wouldn't have necessarily thought that there was such fertile ground for this to work. So on either side of it like people being ready to eat it, value it that much, and necessarily with branches, that there was that much of a base here in Montana, that was really looking for a way, but it is there?
Cole:Oh, absolutely, and I think it's there on both sides. I get tons of inquiries from other producers that have an interest, but I've got to first demonstrate I can build a brand that moves product at scale. And we are still, in March, purchased a property that will allow us to build a USDA. We have a small meat processing plant but we don't have a slaughter facility, so we're very small and inefficient. Right now. We can only sell direct to consumer. We don't have a, we can't sell wholesale, so I can't go approach other restaurants about selling them meat from our members until I get USDA certified. So anyway, I've got to build out the old salt supply chain to be able to accommodate more producers. And then the other thing too is that we've found and the most important part in my opinion, we've found an appetite from the customer side. You really have, hey, just a passion for hey, something different than the kind of typical, you know, dollar store, box store thing. Yeah, so good. Well, it's rocking and I love it, but we probably should store box store thing.
AJ:Yeah, so good. Well, it's rocking and I love it, but we probably should get back on the street.
Cole:Yeah, because you probably can't hear Dan Pagan how you doing Dan.
AJ:Well, I guess we can go back upstairs. That was pretty cool.
Cole:Yep, certainly cooler in there. We can walk up the walking mall if you want ice cream or something.
AJ:All right. So I read the New York Times piece recently that led off with that startling fact that most of the Montana beef goes elsewhere. And for this state where I've seen cattle everywhere, but what is it?
Cole:one percent of meat is locally, yeah, of all the meat and animal foods that are eaten in Montana. Something less than two percent of it. What came from here, despite the fact that cattle outnumber people?
AJ:that's right that was almost two to one, I think was that was that right.
Cole:I can't quite remember where our cattle herd size is at the moment, but certainly we outnumber probably 1.5 million mother cows maybe 1.1 million people, and then that doesn't count yearlings and the other livestock. I think the stat I saw was there was like 460 million worth of animal products. Was there was like 460 million worth of animal products, so that's pork, beef, lamb, eggs, milk, and that was just grocery and retail, so it doesn't count a big swath of the additional food. So my guess would be that actually far less than 2%.
AJ:It's just not how we've built the system yeah, and in that sense there's so much you're approaching it from a food system angle, but it was he said before. It applies to everything, the way we've been doing everything. So it's really interesting that you found this much of a literally appetite for this sort of stuff. So let's get to where you kicked this thing off.
Cole:I would say the first thing was really just exploratory with my own family, because you know they operate the ranch. They have their own brand called Mannix Beef, so they sell probably of all that they raise. They sell about 25% to 30 percent throughout their own brand. Everything else goes commodity and they had. Also they had come up against this sort of ultimatum. That's built into the nature of business, which is okay.
Cole:We've gotten to this point where we're selling a million dollars of local product a year and yet it's taken time away from grazing management. And you know I'm we're just packing orders in the fridge all the time and we're still only selling 25 of what we raise. And if we were going to keep growing, well, we've. We're already out of custom processing. We can't get more slots and you know, yes, we're selling a few hundred animals a year locally but you've got to run a few thousand through a processing facility. So how do we know You've got to make a big jump from a few hundred to a few thousand if you're going to build processing. If you do that, where's the labor coming from? Are you confident you can sell 10x the product.
Cole:So we were having that kind of decision-making point and so I kind of came to the family and approached my brother runs the local, my family's brand and just said what would you think if we, rather than do it on our own, we threw in with some other producers and I had some ideas of who they might be and we'll raise capital together, build processing together, build a brand together.
Cole:So we started some conversations with a fellow named Cooper Hibbard, with Seban Livestock, and a fellow named Andrew Anderson and his wife, hillary Anderson, with the J Bar-El ranches, and they just we really shared an ethic of stewardship and wildlife habitat and also a sense that, even though right now these ranches are pretty large, they don't have debt. Two of them are family-owned. We don't come from money, but we have no big debt and the land has been in the family a long time. One of the others is they have capital, but it's a partnership between a landowner who also shares these values and a local couple who manages it. And across the board we were like look around the table. Do we think in a generation this will work?
AJ:The markets we're selling into today and everybody's like no, so it's end of the line if you don't do something different.
Cole:I think so it's not end of the line.
AJ:Like I think, each of the those core ranches are healthier today than they were 20 years ago ecologically yeah, very proud of the circumstances, but the rev, the costs, are increasing faster than the revenue yes, let alone the notion that from the outside, you sit here and think, well, where are your dues for having got the land back in good shape? But that's just sort of something we expect of you.
Cole:Yeah, you know so many of the ecosystem services markets. They're struggling to figure out how to sort of articulate a framework that makes sense. But if you've depleted land over time, now you may be able to buy it and fill the sink back up.
Cole:But, if it's not been depleted and it's in really good shape, where's the additionality? So it's a challenging deal and I think, despite all the opportunity that may exist in eco and agritourism and ecosystem service markets, whether they are voluntary or regulated, a lot of those are pretty nascent, frankly, and still two-thirds of the income, even for really recreational-geared ranches in the West are still ag and you know people are going to continue to need to eat. It's about as fundamental as it gets, let alone eat well.
Cole:Yeah, let alone eat well. So I don't want to just say, oh well, agriculture is sort of a thing of the past, right yeah? Plus, it's just really extractive. Maybe we just take that part of the pie chart out, right yeah. So I think they all just shared.
Cole:Hey, we're proud of what these livestock operationers are accomplishing with respect to soil, water, wildlife, and yet the system we're a part of is broken. It's not going to support our stewardship and, by the way, so many things about the global outlook are bleak. So I think we just felt that, no matter how risky it would be to start one more meat company the landscape around us is literally scattered with the dead carcasses of meat companies. They're hard, no matter how risky like the status quo is riskier, and so we decided we're going to do it. But then we had to figure out okay, how are we going to raise capital in a way that they're not going to risk their ranches against a risky meat company?
Cole:So how are we going to? If they're not guaranteeing the loans? How will we get funding? How will we get debt? The loans, how will we get funding? How will we get debt? Where is the private investment capital going to come from what's the brand look like? What is our target market all the core questions that you so. We had our first brainstorming meeting in the fall of 2020, in a snowstorm in.
AJ:Melville.
Cole:That's when ranchers can meet. I hear this yes, it makes sense. We were, and it snowed us in so we couldn't get out. So it was like figure it out, it's like cosmic message figure it out.
AJ:Yeah, that's right so it was.
Cole:That was kind of. At that meeting. We decided there was enough energy in the room like this is more than a business opportunity, it's more like a business necessity. Yeah, so we. More than a business opportunity, it's more like a business necessity. So we figured out how to. The most challenging thing, but also the thing I'm most proud of, is the business structure itself, beginning with the end in mind, and we tried to build in this principle of the user benefits so that we had a multi-stakeholder co-op. Producers were one of the stakeholders and workers were another. But it turned out we were doing too many enterprises to prevent the complexity mounting administratively with the cooperative structure. Because meat moves through our restaurants and it counts as patronage because it's something our members raise. But we don't raise the lettuce, we don't raise the potatoes we don't raise. In the same way, some of our workers can become members, owners of the business, but not all of them.
Cole:Plenty of them are temp restaurant workers, right they're going to college, and so some of the labor counted as patronage and some of it didn't, and it became unwieldy and so we reformed as Old Salt Co-op LLC. But we still built it and I still think it's the most important thing about us that we're 51% of the board seats are elected from among the ranch suppliers, and once we pay private capital back, we can now turn around and share half of the profits from the parent company. So each stage the restaurants, the processing with the producers, and what that requires is the investors have to be a certain type of person who says, okay, I want to lose my money and 10% would be nice, but I don't need 20 or 25 or what you might expect for a very risky investment. This is the world I want to see and I'm going to support it.
Cole:So we've found those individuals over time who have been willing to put in that riskiest, hardest money, and we were able to find a bank called Steward L dan miller yeah, that was that crowdfunded their loans and that was willing to accept a corporate guarantee rather than personal guarantees from the ranches and they underwrote the project based on the assets that we were buying and building. So we just kind of found little ways to scrape together what currently is still really a startup. But we're four years in and we have a lot better chance than we did last year. There we go, so we're getting some ground.
AJ:Yeah, yeah, put a bit of flesh on the bones for us in terms of what scale of capital did you need? Because I know people that would still hear you say 10% return and go go. How would I ever meet that? Trying to regenerate the land at the same time, or whatever, Even that's tough.
Cole:But we, you know, first of all we tiered it so that the investors themselves do not have a vote, they don't have governance in the company, but they get paid back first and they get all of our distributions until they get 6%. Then they fall down to not 100% of distributions, to something less than that, and then the rest can be shared with producers, and then, once they receive 10%, they fall all the way back down to fully diluted. They still own something, but there it basically was premised on. Both the investors and the founders had to be willing to take less than they would normally take, because we're trying to put more of that value to the production. Yeah, and then, of course, you know we also have to sell in premium. We also have to do a good job doing business, I mean exactly so.
AJ:It's the other piece, isn't it? Of course, we also have to sell at premium. We also have to do a good job doing business. Exactly so, it's the other piece, isn't it? It's reaching people, and geez, the amount of times I've seen efforts come along to that end still relying on other parties and ultimately finding themselves, as input costs increase and logistics costs increase, that the farmer ends up squeezed again. Right, so the fact that you've established this structure and it's so far, so good, but, yeah, reaching the other end. I guess it's why you went straight out with the outpost, yeah, and then, even though you're still establishing it, you felt like you'd be better off getting the restaurant going as well.
Cole:Yeah, I think we, just as soon as you decide to dive in, you kind of really just have to go, and the Outpost was a little bit of a gradual start where it worked right away. We didn't have a loan. It would cost us $40,000 to do the renovation and it did more than a million in its first year, and so it was like it worked well enough that we weren't under a ton of pressure. But the next thing was hey, we need meat processing.
AJ:That's hard so in 2022,.
Cole:We bought a little wild game plant. We started teaching ourselves, just with a few employees. We were what does it cost to cut an elk and a deer, and what does it cost to cut a cow?
AJ:And you know, we're still learning that we started from scratch.
Cole:You know what's our traceability system? Yeah, the regulatory environment.
Cole:It's not like we knew nothing, but we were really teaching ourselves as we went, and we still are. And so today we operate over there. Um, we probably are processing about 12 head a week very small without you. We have to bring animals two hours to get slaughtered at a usda plant. Those carcasses we pick up on a reefer truck, bring them back, age them, cut them, package them and ship them. And we ship online. We're about to absorb my family's direct-to-consumer brand, which will be a route system. We deliver, like each week we'll go once to the northwest part of the state, once to the southwest part of the state, meet people in parking lots, yeah, and then we will eventually, once we get, we also purchase the property 20 minutes north of town where we can have a slaughter facility and a more full USDA. So I'm busy building that out. It'll probably be August, september, october of 25.
AJ:That's still important. To do that Critical, yes, really.
Cole:And then what we have now will probably turn into more just smoked direct-to-consumer retail exempt products, probably turn into more just smoked direct-to-consumer retail exempt products. So we anyway you asked the scale we've had to so far raise about three million of private money. We've we've gotten about six hundred thousand of grants and that we've taken on about five million of debt with these three different properties and then the five enterprises. So we have the Old Salt Festival, we have Old Salt Outpost, we have the union by Old Salt, we have Old Salt Meat Processing and then the meat brand itself that we sell online and I'm about to just take on another three million dollars of debt. We got a big grant as well for our equity to build the new processing facility. So it just takes. It takes so much and I mean we're a very small company still we're on pace this year for about four or four and a half million in sales like we're tiny.
Cole:Yeah, so we're taking very big risks on just the brick and mortar type stuff. But there are assets, there are hard assets that back up those loans and it's not a company you could ever build with having the idea that you'd flip it. It's a business meant to live in it long term, and so that's how we're treating it.
AJ:That sounds like a critical place to meet. We talked about ownership again. I mean, that's another way to look at it, isn't it? Yeah what is this idea? You just flip companies out.
Cole:Yeah, yeah, you know I that's the kind of business I grew up in was the business where you really saw what you were making and it wasn't. Somebody you know saw what you were making and it wasn't somebody you know. People spend their lives figuring out how to be productive without spoiling the ecosystem. Not saying everybody does it, but, like, I really admired my parents and aunts and uncles, not because they knew everything. There's plenty of things that we continue to learn on. Okay, we can manage this stream better, you know. Or we can reintegrate prescribed fire, whatever it is. Yes, plenty of ways we can become better managers of land, but, um, just flipping that place would change the culture of the vow, change the way the little school and the fire department works, and, who knows, will those people think of it more as a private estate or do they think of it more as, hey, this is something it's our job to take care of and be part of this family that is land.
Cole:Long term, it's a different value set, and I think, too, if the founders of Old Salt would have approached it as, hey, there's got to be millions in this for us to be able to cash out if we're going to take on this risk, we never would have got off the ground. It was more like us seeing what kind of life do I want to have? Could I make a decent living doing something I think matters that I can be proud of in front of my kids? I can hold up my head in front of my kids as they are questioning man what are we doing on our planet right now? So it's more about hey, what kind of a business do we want to live in? And the exit strategy has been like a good death, and that's easy to say. Four years in, I mean, got a long ways to go, but it is truly like what's the business you, what's the, what's the work you want to die in? You know it's really well put.
AJ:it makes Marvel at the investors that meet that and move with how it pans out by hearing the details, the nuance in your structure that I guess part of it is allowing for, if things don't go well for a bit of time, that that doesn't have to be the end of it, where it might ordinarily be. But you can weather that together, not just you as the brancher, that's all part of it?
Cole:hey, absolutely, it's about finding people who share like the broader value set it's more than it is a return and I take that as seriously as any commitment that I've ever taken on, I mean. And yet it's so much more than a monetary, like we're trying to build a community we're proud of and that can last, and so we've found people who share those values. It seems to be a big one, and we've been fortunate because we've also said no, thank you, a lot you have, because sometimes just clearly not quite the right fit, there we go and we never barked up some trees because I'm not going to go to venture, because I know I can't ever meet their expectations Exactly.
AJ:That's interesting, though You've had to be selective, because I observe that it's harder for people with money to appreciate other forms of capital, let's say, even if they know the theory. When it comes to the crush, yeah, and I've seen others come at it too, so I've seen people like the ones you're you've managed to partner with. But, yes, there's a there's discernment clearly required there and a process required there, but brilliant when it can happen. And you've also got then on the consumer end, which I don't really even like that word, but we'll run with it. Consumer end, because I like to think we're all stewarding, yeah, playing our different roles, yeah, qualify with that, but there's a subscription aspect to that century. How does that work?
Cole:well, we we say we're like the one liner about old salt. As we say we're, we are a regenerative agriculture for damn fine montana meat, and what we mean by that is it's not just the producers with the cowboy hats and lariats, but it's like we're a culture of people, a community who wants to take care of this place, eat well, live well, and so people can go to our website and they we are in the middle of realizing how complex ecommerce is and how do you minimize clicks and what is customer acquisition cost and how much ad spend. And we've never spent ad dollars yet because we don't have the e-commerce infrastructure. You know, we had a New York Times article come out and we got more orders in three days than we'd gotten in 60 before it, and then it was a struggle of like, okay, operationally, how do we fulfill this? Yeah, so we have so much to learn. I mean, the e-commerce brand is about a year and a half old, still don't have USDA facility.
Cole:So we're, so we're setting so many things up, but ultimately, what I hope is there's 5,000 customers that's my five-year goal who decide with lamb and beef and pork and the things we raise. This is something I want to invest in these landscapes, that I have some familiarity with these people and their value set, because I share that value set and it's what I want to feed so that it grows. And so I hope people will treat that, whether it's a subscription or a one-time purchase, and whether they're getting it delivered on a route in their town, like if you live in Montana, whether they get delivered in the mail, I hope they will see it as their participation in agriculture, because they're just as much AG as the rancher is this comes to the's, the thing isn't it.
AJ:This comes to the broader connection piece and the festival, which I want to come back to. But just drawing on the subscription thing, I mean this is how this operates as a subscription thing largely. I mean people donate too, so there's just here a gift, there's just gift. But really most of the subscribers say the same thing. They're subscribing to keep the thing going and get the thing that I'm gifting in the first place. Yeah, yeah, but.
AJ:But it's an interesting way that I've observed not only things like mine, this podcast, but even even some worker-owned cooperative media outlets of some size, like the colorado sun we just passed by. Um, there's one out of New York too. I can't remember the name, but there's a bunch of them now around the states, let alone elsewhere. There's a bit coming on in Australia too, more nascent but more people just saying we've just got to do it ourselves and we can do it ourselves. And there are other people out there who are going to back it at all. In all facets, in different roles, play that stewarding in all different roles, whether it be agriculture, food or media or whatever. Culture change right there, all right. So come to this key part of your story piece, but please feel free to sort of wax out from there or give broader context. You decided a festival was one way, and an important way, to do it, and then landed the first one last year and you just finished the second one. Tell us about it.
Cole:Yeah well, I had wondered. It's so hard with agritourism, like these ranches are fairly large landscapes, there's hunting and stuff, but how do you hold enough like 20-person bus tours to make a?
AJ:difference, exactly To share something right, yes.
Cole:Not that we may not do a lot of bus tours, but I thought, you know, labels on a grocery store shelf are so shallow and it's like, how do you share with people the why in a little bit more powerful way? I can't do that that well in a video. Right, I can do it a little bit. It's, you know, videos worth maybe a thousand pictures in a picture, exactly pictures in the picture, but exactly but, and get people out together breaking bread and eating meat from the live fire for set for an extended period of time where there's no wi-fi. So we we decided it was going to be, if we're going to set it up at all, in a cow pasture in the middle of the blackfoot valley. And if people never been to the blackfoot, there's basically Canada to the north, glacier National Park, right below that, the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area, right below Glacier, and then the Blackfoot Valley is the first stretch of private land that you will hit from the Canadian border and it's surrounded by. You know, an hour to the west is Missoula, 80 to 100,000 people. An hour to the east is Helena, to 180 to 100,000 people. An hour to the east is Helena. To the south is Bozeman and Butte, and so Helmville is sort of a place out of time because it's rural, agricultural. There's 160 acres zoning to prevent development, there's conservation easements, it's a beautiful place but it's not far away from anything and so we thought it's a good place. Let's get people out.
Cole:There's three days of wood-fired cooking. The meat, the animals come from Old Salt, the chef teams we work closely with to curate other local items or regional items, I should say, and there's just kind of tapas-style bites that come out all day long from the fire. But there's also like a speaking tent For people who want to go deep. There's water and wildlife conservation topics, soil health, grazing, it's a multiple fisheries. There's a tent for artisans like that.
Cole:Are that, are that have a brand? Maybe they're doing silk scarves dyed with my sister-in-law dies, with plant dies that she gathers from the valley, and my sister Erica has a leather brand. And there's people that are doing, you know, beautiful paintings, people that are doing making knives, people that are doing awesome stuff with wool 18 bands and it's just, we have an anvil launch to balance out the high-minded conversation with some really good ranch fun. Anyway, it was just a way to say well, what do we mean by a regenerative agriculture with the underlying underculture, and I think it's a space where people they come and they leave with more energy than they came with and they might meet their next business partner or their next funder or their next project to fund, or you know it's like a nourishment of this energy surrounding the urgency to do better as a civilization.
Cole:Stegner has a line that says that imagines a society to match the scenery in the West. That's beautiful, which is a great line. It's a great line and that's really what the festival is about. It's like. Well, what would a culture, a society, to sort of live up to this beautiful living landscape that we find ourselves?
AJ:in. It's magnificent. It's such a conversation that's coming on back home, as I mentioned too, to have more of this piece around, and there's some experiments literally emerging as we speak. So I'm curious then for you, in going big, like you really tried again, if you're gonna do it, you're gonna do it is it something that you then just made? Ticketing and maybe some advertising or stalls cover the costs and break even? Like, how did you decide to do it? Well, the.
Cole:What gave me the courage to do it was that I could always imagine the food side of things but could have never executed it without Andrew Mace. So that's the other thing about Old Salt is we realized, man, we're ranchers, we don't have culinary expertise, we don't have marketing expertise, like today Old Salt has more than 50 people. Well, andrew Mace grew up here but he spent 15 years opening restaurants in Portland. He's very talented, wow. So he had a lot of connections in the wood fire cooking space and foraging. And once I met him and he came up with a menu for the Outpost, I felt like you know, this festival thing that's been brewing could be possible.
Cole:There's so many conversations, like with the Blackfoot Challenge is kind of a collaborative natural resource nonprofit in the valley that it's sort of a clearinghouse for all the questions about the river or wildlife or agriculture in the valley. And so I showed up and asked you know had my hat off and you know asked for what do you think if we hold a meat festival in bear country? And you know, I heard all the concerns and you know we talked about our bear management plans and what could? We talked about our bear management plans or what could we could do. And then you know we realized, okay, tickets, we only have so much room on tickets. This is gonna have to really rely on a lot of sponsors. So the first year we've honestly we paid for it with investor dollars really. And this year, and we lost our butts. We we had 1,800 people. It was an incredible experience, but it was hard financially. This year. We basically were still. It was last month, so we're still getting some bills rolling in, but I think we're gonna be really close to break even.
AJ:Yeah, I figured that would be a good outcome.
Cole:Yeah, for the magic that happens the piece it plays, that'll break even there, I'd rather I'd way rather treat that as a marketing spend than I would Google ads and Facebook ads.
AJ:Well, that's right, because it's marketing and connection.
Cole:Yeah, I mean authentic marketing is really just sharing genuinely what you care about. Why do you think it's valuable for others to care about? Yeah, Same.
AJ:Yeah, great way to do it and you know full circle it away from where we started and some of the uncanny stuff.
AJ:So I knew there was a festival that Fred Provenza and Nicole Masters who we just visited as well had spoken at and I was about to rock up to Nicole's place, having just missed the festival, and I was bummed enough about that. And then I get the message or I'd got the message about you guys from Tonya Massey, but hadn't looked it up until I got close to you in detail and then looked it up and look, that's the festival, it's you guys, man, all right, and then we were just with Fred yesterday. But so Fred delivered a talk at this one, and almost a legacy piece yeah, I mean you could say that of all his work probably, but this was in a real conscious fashion. In fact he said to me he's never written a speech before and this was the first and probably last time. But such was the intent between you both to make this one really count in a conscious way in Fred's words, to make every word be a conscious expression. And I believe it landed that way.
Cole:Oh man, it was worth the entire beast of organizing that festival just for that one moment, about 30 minutes. And afterwards, you know my dad, who you don't see cry, is in the back. Just, it's a standing ovation and everyone is just feeling like a moment of recognition of how hard it is, but of hope and connection and connection. And you know, fred, amongst many things he said in the talk, I mean the things that stand out to me were, you know, in all of his studies about nutrition and health. And you know there's components, whether you're talking about an animal or a human animal, you know there's components of genetics and there's components of, obviously, in the world of wild critters what species are we talking about here? And kind of, where do they land in their diet? And then there's the exercise component and there's other toxins in the environment and lifestyle.
Cole:And yet, just as important is the element he was talking about a community, salida, where he grew up of, just you know, smokers, drinkers, folks that may have had not some of the cleanest living and yet lived long, good lives, with a sense of connection and a sense of being part of something. So he was talking about first of all I almost think back to the holding loosely. We talked about holding private property loosely, but holding loosely our own notions of our own world views, our own presupposition that we understand things very accurately or that the frame that we've created or the way we've made meaning out of the world is exactly right. And holding that a little more loosely and basically recognizing that we're pretty imperfect, we're pretty small compared to our ability to really digest it all, and if we just sort of let go of our polarizations a little bit and recognize how much we have in common. And he said I believe we were put here to love, to learn how to love.
Cole:And God, that makes me cry even saying that Especially with his music playing, yeah right, how to love, and God, that makes me cry even saying especially this music. But you know, I believe we are put here to learn how to love. That is a very powerful and you really any of your listeners. He said, hey, share this talk, and I texted it to you. So I'll share this talk with your listeners because you have to not just take my word for it, but yeah, well hearing it talk, you know, and what food was saying about the smokers and the drinkers.
AJ:And I was just thinking imagine public health, if it's that went towards connection. Didn't worry about the substance. In that sense, connection, what would?
Cole:that do? I think you're right. That's a tremendous point. I think that's part of what I meant earlier by, or at least it reminds me of. You know, regenerative agriculture is about restoring relationships in the soil, yes, and in the broader ecosystem, yes, but that's also restoring relationships with humans, each other. We're part of that system, and our main street and the way our community works and whether or not we have connection with each other is just as much a part of regeneration, right, oh, and so that's why it feels like we've got to find as many ways to gather and connect. None of those, if there's real connection happening. None of them are bad ideas.
AJ:We'll see. I'm so glad the festival looks like it's going to actually work for you guys too, because, yeah, he's to it and it's a real inspiration point for us right now. Speaking of music, knowing that you play, I actually talk about a piece of music that's been significant for people before we sign off. But knowing that you play, I don't know, is your banjo close?
Cole:I don't have anything nearby, but I would say there's a couple that lives in Horsefly, british Columbia, just a tiny little town town, probably not that much different than the town I grew up in, in helmville jason and ferris romero, and they build banjos and they sing together and they write and that is about as amazing. They've got all kinds of little videos about their building. She does the inlay work, he does the pots and the necks and their kids are super engaged and then they write and they play beautifully and it's music that feels like community. And so we started.
Cole:On Thursday nights here at the Union we have an Irish session and the session is not a performance so much. It's not musicians pointed towards the audience and it's not them sort of on the clock, they're in a circle, they're playing music, they're having a drink, they're having some cracking conversation, and it's just one more example of music as community rather than as a product. AJ: Yeah, well said wow, I look forward to looking that up. CM: Yeah, yeah, Jason and Pharis Romero. AJ: done. Mate. Cole. CM: Aj. AJ: can't thank you enough, mate. CM: thanks for being here.
AJ:Terrific to be with you. Thanks for speaking with me too. CM: my pleasure. AJ: That was Cole Mannix, co-founder of the Old Salt Co-op from the heart of Helena Montana. See various links in the show notes and a few photos on the website, with more, as always, for subscribing members on Patreon. Yes, including Fred's talk. That's with great thanks to all you generous supporting listeners for making this episode possible. If you'd like to join us, just head to the website or the show notes and follow the prompts. Thanks, and thanks also for sharing the podcast, when you can, with friends and colleagues. The music you're hearing is Regeneration by Amelia Barden. My name's Anthony James. Thanks for listening.
