93: The Magic of Regenerative Agriculture with John Arbuckle
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[00:00:00] Welcome to Therapy in the Great Outdoors, the podcast where we explore the business and practice of nature based pediatric therapy of all kinds. If you're an outdoor loving pediatric practitioner in the fields of occupational, physical, or speech therapy, social work, or mental health, this podcast will help you start and grow a successful nature based practice or program.
I am the ever honest, always a hundred percent real. You'll hear it all on this podcast. Dr. Laura Park Figueroa. I'm a pediatric OT with over 20 years of experience and I run a thriving nature based practice with profitable locations in two different states and multi six figures in revenue. I also host the free online community at therapyinthegreatoutdoors.
com to help you pursue your nature based therapy dreams too. Are you ready to take action on those dreams? Let's jump in.
Hi, [00:01:00] everyone. Welcome back to therapy in the great outdoors. In this episode, I speak with John Arbuckle, who is a farmer. I've never had a farmer on the podcast before. He is a farmer who uses regenerative agriculture practices in all of his work on his land. And you are going to learn a lot of things about how you can make choices in your own life and maybe integrate some of these things into your work with children. That will actually impact and heal the earth as a result of the food choices that we make.
Let's dive in to my episode with John and hear what he has to share with us.
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Hello, John.
John Arbuckle: Hey, how are you?
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Good. .
John Arbuckle: Laura, I just
Laura Park Figueroa (2): to meet you.
John Arbuckle: Yeah, you too. I just wanted to start out by saying, I really respect what you do. The therapy in the outdoors. It's such a wonderful thing. And well, I've never actually done the exact same protocols that you do. I just had so [00:02:00] many, experiences as a wilderness guide and a farmer that have just helped my heart stay balanced,
Laura Park Figueroa (2): yep. Well, that's what I think we should, I think we should just kick off the whole conversation with having you introduce yourself because this is a very interesting, so I'll frame this for everyone , who will be listening. So John reached out to me through like the contact you support thing on the TGO community and or on my website.
I don't even really know how you found me, but it's just interesting because I've never had a farmer reach out. It's always like therapists or other people. And his initial message to me was, Hey, would you be interested in having a conversation about the therapeutic benefits of the outdoors on your podcast with me?
I'm a farmer and I love wilderness adventures and used to be a wilderness guide, I think, and have done a bunch of wilderness things outside. And I said, well, I don't think my audience really needs convincing, about the nature being transformational, but I looked up your website [00:03:00] and realized that you were a farmer.
And I was like, I know a conversation I want to have because my life has been completely transformed. By the addition of meat to my diet over the last several years, I was a long term, mostly vegetarian. I wasn't strict about it, like I would occasionally eat meat, it was no big deal. But I had this false belief, as I think many people do, that veganism and vegetarianism is best for the environment.
And I have never spoken about this on the podcast because I think I, even though I'm a very outspoken person, I live in this fear of offending people. I grew up in the Midwest, so, we're just nice. And I think I'm like, I have this platform. I have this podcast and I'm allowed to share my views on this podcast.
I spend a lot of time doing this podcast. So I was like, John, come on the show. Let's talk about regenerative agriculture. So please introduce yourself. We can talk. I'm [00:04:00] sure you have many thoughts after I share that, but introduce yourself and tell people who you are and kind of what your experience has been.
And then we'll dive into like how you farm and all of the things.
John Arbuckle: Yeah, well, thanks for that. Thanks for that, Laura. So my name's John Arbuckle. I am married to a wonderful woman named Holly, and together we are the co founders of Singing Pastures Farm. Singing Pastures Farm has been many things over the years. We have described it as a learning laboratory of the regenerative movement.
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Cool.
John Arbuckle: We have been a brand, we've been a farmer's market, farmer, we've sold in grocery stores. We've kind of explored a lot, in that world. But I grew up on a large scale conventional farm. Interesting. Yeah, we did everything exactly opposite of how I do it now. We did everything in a very conventional way up until I must have been in late high school or maybe I was in college, but my sweet father [00:05:00] who farmed conventionally, which involved the use of synthetics and chemicals and that sort of thing unfortunately he was diagnosed with Parkinson's and guess how old he was?
He was 47, right?
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Wow.
John Arbuckle: Since then
Laura Park Figueroa (2): young.
John Arbuckle: that is very young for I am 48, right?
Laura Park Figueroa (2): 49. Oh
John Arbuckle: Yeah. Yeah. You know what? You're old for it. Parkinson's at 47. And so. You know how there are food deserts out there in the world? There are also information deserts. And there are wonderful farmers all across the Midwest who are doing their very best to be good stewards of their families and their communities and are receiving the majority of their information from the chemical dealers.
In our case, Monsanto's not really A thing they sold to bear, the Bear Corporation from Europe. But at the time, they were a thing and all of the Monsanto reps were, [00:06:00] very nice members of the community. They'd be sharing scientific information and that's what I call, it's either an echo chamber where you're just bouncing the same ideas around the same room.
Or it's an information desert where outside ideas were having a very hard time getting in. That, I love my father dearly. He has since passed away. We have gone on to see that there are something like a hundred and fifty independent studies that correlate the use of herbicides and pesticides to Parkinson's and various other things that you don't want to
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Interesting.
John Arbuckle: A hundred and
Laura Park Figueroa (2): surprising, but it is interesting. Yeah.
John Arbuckle: not, it's a real disruptor of the biological world. And we have to guess that those disruptors are going to have downstream effects or side effects beyond their target.
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Yep.
John Arbuckle: Yeah, so that was a big course, correct for me. And I essentially began dismantling [00:07:00] our conventional model.
And at the same time, there was this thing I had never heard the word regenerative. I think I might have heard the word sustainable, but I had no cultural reference, but I had, strong beliefs and strong conviction that there has to be a better way. And we just started inching our way and messing stuff up and making mistakes and breaking through the ice.
And little by little, creating something that is life giving in every sense of the word. It's life giving to the wildlife. This may sound strange but it's life giving. The animals have this wonderful spa like experience. While they're in my care the carbon drawdown that we're able to achieve is superior to Any other form of farming, we can sequester more carbon and heal more ecosystems with livestock than anybody ever will.
The [00:08:00] impossible meat, they will not ever make that claim, well, I have respect for the plant based movement the plant based food movement. It's still, I mean, unless you grow your own garden, the plant based movement is going to be exclusively based on gigantic tractors burning petroleum and tilling up, what could be grassland and
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Yes. And I think that is the thing that people do not think about. And I think we can, I'm sure we'll get into a lot of these topics as we chat over the next 20 or 30 minutes, but I think a lot of times people don't realize the environmental cost of growing All of that plant matter, if you're going to eat like for Impossible Burgers, for example, which I've heard their stock is like plummeting, like that it's going like way down, right?
Because I think people are hopefully that the message of regenerative agriculture and responsible [00:09:00] farming of land that includes is. of animals to break up the soil. And I'm sure you can give us the I want to hear more about your farm and how it all works. I think that would be really interesting for people.
But I think people don't think about the cost of a plant based diet. All that soy has to be grown. And it's not Yes, you're not killing a I don't even know how much a cow weighs a multi thousand pound animal or a multi thousand pound 900 pound pig. I don't know. You're not killing a giant animal, but you're killing Thousands of small animals in that land that is being farmed for the soybeans, right?
Or whatever other cover crop or small plant crop that you're growing. So I think there's this myth that a lot of people subscribe to, and I did myself at one point in time, because I don't know if you don't think about it too deeply. It just kind of makes sense. Don't eat animals. It's horrible to eat animals.
Like it's better for the earth if we just eat plants, but it's just not true. [00:10:00] So talk to us a little bit for those of us who people who are listening, who this may be like, what in the world are they talking about? I don't know how many of them there will be. It'll be interesting.
This is the first kind of semi. I don't know if it's controversial. I don't think it is. But it'll be interesting to see the response to this episode because I'll be interested if people knew about this or if this is something new. Talk to us about how your farm works and how it's different than I got goosebumps when you said that part about it's wonderful for the animals and it feeds the environment in so many ways and the animals have this spa like experience when they're cared for by you.
I got, I literally got goosebumps. I felt goosebumps go down my arm because it is like the way it should be to me when I think about regenerative agriculture and the farmers that are farming the way that you are farming your land. So tell us a little bit about how it works for people who may not know.
John Arbuckle: How does our farm work? Our farm works the same way the earth works. We like to say we've got 500 million years of research and development. Thanks. [00:11:00] Thanks.
Laura Park Figueroa (2): That's awesome.
John Arbuckle: So our farm works in an ecological, it is not mechanical, it's not chemistry, it's not large scale machinery, it's all outdoors, I work within a biological , system, and the important thing to think of is that we don't view the world through a reductionist lens, We view the world through a holistic lens.
So when I look at my farm, I am looking at a single living thing that I am standing on the back of. My entire watershed is one beautiful and giant organism, and every plant and animal is a cell of that organism. And every plant group or animal group is an organ of that ecosystem. And the various pathways that water flows through it are the veins, air moving around, [00:12:00] very close correlation with breath.
There's summer and winter, it's awake, it's asleep, it's reproducing, it's breathing, it creates waste, the waste goes back into the system, there's extreme amounts of diversity. So, I start out with a quote from another farmer that says if you want to make very small changes, then change the way you do things.
If you want to make huge, oceanic, meaningful change, then you have to change the way you see things, right? So, if I were to change the way I do things, I would switch from conventional to organic, right? That's, which is good. I'm not saying that these, changing the way you do things, we can't ignore that completely, but it will always have a low ceiling for how much good you can accomplish.
If you change the way you see things, Then we're ceasing to see the earth as a resource and starting to see the earth as a partner And when you have that [00:13:00] cultural foundation of seeing the earth as a partner with likes and dislikes and good time to ask for something, bad time to ask for something, it's a person that you're in relationship with.
Then, gratitude follows and from gratitude comes meaningful change.
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Yeah, this is, there's actually some interesting listening to you speak about it. There's some interesting correlations with some of the work I do with nature based therapists, where we talk about nature being a partner in the process of what we're doing with children and nature being the research I did for my PhD.
Like all of these occupational therapists that I interviewed were saying that nature is a co facilitator. of the session with them. And it is. It's like being in a relationship with someone. They used a lot of human words, to describe nature. In fact, one of my dissertation, like people on my committee wrote something like personification question mark or something like, like you're making nature like a person.
[00:14:00] I'm like, Hey, this was their words, not mine. I'm not trying to not be a good researcher, I'm actually just reporting what they said. So there's some interesting the way you're speaking is also the way I hear people who do nature based work speak about being in partnership with nature and in a relationship with nature that actually, influences the therapy process the same way it may influence the farming process, where it's not this formulaic two plus two equals four kind of equation.
It's like you're really having to dance. In my research, I called it dancing with nature. You're giving, nature's giving, we're kind of give and taking together. So I love that. I love that there's some correlations there. I'm wondering when you first started doing this, so I'm familiar with Joel Salatin's work.
I'm assuming that he was probably a piece of
John Arbuckle: Big inspiration.
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Yeah, big inspiration, right? Because he kind of is a speaker and leader and has kind of, you can go to his farm and in Virginia and tour what a regenerative [00:15:00] agriculture farm looks like. But I think My questions for you would be like how, I know on his farm, he does a lot of the chickens are in a coop that's kind of rolled around to, to let their manure kind of, not their manure, their Their droppings go into the ground, they eat the manure of the cow, and then the cows are moved from like pasture to pasture after or before the chickens.
I don't, clearly I'm not a regenerative agriculture farmer, but I love when he describes it because it's showing how you can have multiple animals. Moving through the same environment in a way that actually is healthy for the grass gets eaten by the cows. And then the cows are moved to another pasture and that grass has a chance to regenerate.
That's the regenerative word there. And then the cows are kind of moved around and it just kind of works. Everything works in symbiosis, like that holistic word that you used. And it's. It's in my understanding of it, my very limited understanding, [00:16:00] industrial agriculture is kind of the opposite, right?
Like I live in Wisconsin and when I see these fields of corn and soybeans all around me, I'm like, there's no regeneration here. Like they actually can only plant them for a few years and then it has to lay fallow for a while because the ground is so there's no nutrients left, for the corn to grow back up.
So is that accurate or am I missing kind of key?
John Arbuckle: No you're right on. And so one of my life philosophies is I think everybody is doing the best they can. You know what I mean? I
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Sure. Yeah. Yeah. That's a
John Arbuckle: In that mix. He was doing the best he could. He just didn't have access to all the information, and if he had, maybe he would have made different decisions.
Maybe not. I don't You know, transformation is one of the my favorite qualities of human beings, imagining that, where we start out life. And then one of our fundamental [00:17:00] potentialities is that we extract ourselves from. From something that we don't like, and then we create something that we do that's what transformation for me.
So, when I took over, our family farm I took all the pigs, I'm kind of a pig guy. It sounds funny to say, how all teachers have a grade that they really do the
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Right.
John Arbuckle: All farmers like cow farmers and apple growers, they almost can't talk to each other.
You
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Because they have their thing.
John Arbuckle: Yeah, they're just like, it's like kindergarten teachers and college professors, like they're all talented, but they might not have a lot, as much to talk about as you might
Laura Park Figueroa (2): That's so funny.
John Arbuckle: So, how did we start our transformation from going from conventional to regenerative and why did we do it, and what did we see when we did it?
Well, first thing we did was we took all the pigs out of the pig barns. We had this very factory kind of set up. I changed the genetics. We had all these modern white pigs that all looked like clones of each other. For all I knew, they were clones of each other. And we [00:18:00] started using the old fashioned pigs and then we put them outside and they would build nests for themselves and they love to graze and they knew how to find worms and acorns and, blackberries.
They just had it in their head. They already knew. Nobody had to teach them. And we took out all the antibiotics and we took out all the genetically modified feed ingredients. And then once we had taken out, we'd found a list of no nos that we wanted to delete. Then we started a list of what is it that we want to create, and in that, we came across the concept of biomimicry, like we farm the same way that the bison, managed the grassland a thousand years ago. It's going to be a group of animals tightly bunched. and continuously moving. Imagine the bison in enormous herds, trampling, manuring, grazing, and then they would [00:19:00] go on, on to the next spot where the grass was growing, and they wouldn't come back until the grass had a very long and adequate recovery period.
It wasn't like they just walked around in small circles, nipping off the bud every time it, stuck out an inch or two. Growth, that's very destructive, that's a form of mining, continuous grazing, so tightly bunched and, traditionally there were timber wolves, keeping the bison in a big super organism, this big pack, like the penguins on the South Pole,
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Yep. Yeah.
Or the wildebeest swimming across a river
John Arbuckle: that's full of alligators in Africa.
Tightly bunched by timber wolves. I would love it if we had timber wolves. We don't. So we use electric fence our electric fence keeps them tightly bunched. Continuously moving when the animals have eaten roughly 50% of the available biomass. Our, we have about 35 2 acre paddocks.
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Okay. Yeah.
John Arbuckle: There's a lot more land here. We're about [00:20:00] 200 acres, but there's a lot of wild stuff that we don't send animals into. It's really the sanctuary of the wild. We just want it for wild species. So 35, 1. 8, two acre paddocks, the animals, depending on the weather, if it's raining, the regrowth is faster.
If it's later in the year, the animals are bigger and their impact is heavier. So. It's somewhat non formulaic. It's non linear. It's very fluid, but roughly for the sake of conversation. Once the animals have consumed 50 percent of the available biomass of a two acre paddock, the next paddock is already built.
The electric fence is already up. We just open a gate and they literally run through it.
Laura Park Figueroa (2): They're like, yippee, new food.
John Arbuckle: They're like waiting for me at the gate latch. And as soon as I open it, it's like a stampede.
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Yeah. Yeah.
John Arbuckle: the beautiful thing to me is While we've got 200 acres, we're [00:21:00] only going to have animals on about three or four at any given moment.
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Wow. Yeah.
John Arbuckle: I mean, what percentage is that? That is a very high percentage of our available land that is open to wild turkeys and coyotes and badgers and deer and all sorts of stuff, and they're going to be doing whatever their business is.
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Right.
John Arbuckle: 97 percent of our farm, which is open to them, which as much as I love, the beauty of a big cornfield, there is no wildlife
Laura Park Figueroa (2): No.
John Arbuckle: in whatever was not killed was displaced.
And I'd have a hard time explaining the difference to a five year old, there are no, no vacant spaces out there just waiting for someone to leave their niche and go to another one. If it's either killed or displaced, in a monoculture, whereas we're the opposite of a monoculture.
We want maximum [00:22:00] diversity, max diversity of wildlife, maximum diversity of farm animals, forage animals that the animals are consuming.
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Yep.
John Arbuckle: And I guess that's how we farm. We farm the way nature, I shouldn't say it that way, because farming implies human beings as like the top tier, and we're really more, we're not the top tier, we're not making the music.
But we do play a small leadership role in being the conductor of the orchestra
That helps the music to be made. We're not the source of the music,
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Right. Right.
John Arbuckle: but we are playing a part, we
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Yeah. You're like working in partnership with nature to produce food the way that it has been for eons, right?
John Arbuckle: long as people have been eating.
Laura Park Figueroa (2): yeah, exactly. Oh, I was going to ask you something. Are you familiar with the the book and the documentary Sacred Cow?
John Arbuckle: Oh, I'm familiar with it, I haven't seen it.
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Okay, so that was something I [00:23:00] was going to put in the show notes for everyone listening, because that was the book that completely, I knew about Joel Salatin's work forever ago, because I lived in Berkeley, California, and he came and spoke there one time, and it's like the hub of, You should do everything organic, everything regenerative everything in tune with the earth if you live in Berkeley.
So he came and spoke, and I heard him years and years ago, probably almost 20 years ago now, but still was mostly vegetarian, and then, I want to say it was like four years ago, maybe Diana Rogers. So she is she runs a business called sustainable dish and she used to have a podcast. It's probably still out there.
She doesn't publish it anymore. It's she decided it wasn't worth the time and energy she was putting into it, which I can relate to. It's like nobody realizes how much time goes into a producing a podcast, but she and Rob Wolf, who is a he has written books about the paleo diet, like basically meat and vegetables, are what are healthy for you.
[00:24:00] That would be his perspective. But they made this documentary called Sacred Cow, the case for better meat. I think my husband maybe found out about it and said maybe we should watch this or whatever, because he's always eaten meat. He loves meat. My kids love meat. And I watched it and was just blown away because it, it showed me how misled I was, or how I just didn't know.
I just wasn't educated on understanding the impact Or just how important it is that we have hoofed animals, like animals with hooves to break up the earth, to make the soil healthy. Like it's so important and their manure and all the things like, and it just kind of was a light bulb moment for me.
And from then on, like I've been, and then I started doing more research about my protein needs as I get older. And it's really hard to do that on a plant based diet. So I just feel like a different person. And there's a big joke in our house that. If my older two children would have gotten to eat meat as much as my [00:25:00] youngest child, then they would be like three inches taller or something. They're like, Ray gets all the meat. You feed him meat all the time. It's so
John Arbuckle: That's great.
Laura Park Figueroa (2): he's 14 and he's taller than me. So, something's working with him eating this much meat. But and I know, I guess sometimes, what would you say to, I know sometimes people and I resonate with this.
People bring up the idea that like, yeah, regenerative agriculture is great and it's. all good and well if you can afford it, right? If you can afford to buy your organic free range pork and ground beef or whatever. But I'm interested what you would say to the people who would say that it's kind of an elitist thing to be able to afford that.
Is it better to buy just the regular ground beef for nutrition because we need that as humans? Or what would you say to that kind of topic or that question?
John Arbuckle: I think that food choices, whatever we consume is kind of a personal question, and I leave that for everyone to work out with my [00:26:00] respect. Just on, their own. I'll say, I'll, I can describe my chain of thinking.
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Would love it.
John Arbuckle: if other people relate to that, then hooray, but I feel really good when I'm not eating a lot of carbs, and if I get away from a meat and vegetable diet, my carb count usually goes up, my weight goes up, my mood goes up.
fluctuates with my glycemic level in my bloodstream, you don't get your best John, on a high
carb diet. My name's John for everybody, so you don't get your best John Arbuckle. I won't be my best self on a high carb diet. And I really do in my You know, belief system.
I really believe that we require, in order to be a creative influence on the earth, we require animals. I'm not familiar with any ecosystems other than big monocultures of grain that are [00:27:00] void. of animals, in fact, all of the grassland ecosystems and forests on earth, literally over the course of hundreds of millions of years, co evolved under the evolutionary pressure of large grazing animals and a whole bunch of little other ones.
Grazing animals were something like the glaciers, pushing their way through changing things. And the two created a symbiosis, if we take on this reductionist thinking that we're looking at separate entities, then we can start to dissect it, which I'm not quite as into if we're looking at an ecosystem as one thing, not a reductionist way of thinking, but a holistic way of thinking.
We just see, that the large grazing animals are a part of the digestive system of the ecosystem, which is taking high fiber, very coarse roughage and leaves and blades of grass and stems and is [00:28:00] digesting that and then their manure goes back out onto the ground as something that is pre digested.
The cow is literally the stomach of the watershed, or the bison, or the zebra, or the caribou. All of these things is having a very beautiful, kind of, designed into the system if you want to think of it that way or not. It's really a requirement and do you mind if I just take a moment and I'm going to kind of go do a deep dive into being a nerd
Laura Park Figueroa (2): I love it.
John Arbuckle: explain why that is, why, just from a mechanical chemical perspective.
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Yeah,
John Arbuckle: Photosynthesis, what is photosynthesis and why is it the coolest thing you've ever heard of? So photosynthesis, I'm just gonna, here I'm sharing my inner nerd. I'm gonna show the chemical equation of photosynthesis and then we'll get into why that's important.
Photosynthesis is six Carbon [00:29:00] dioxide molecules combine with six water molecules, carbon dioxide, water, put them together, run them through the machinery of a plant, and what drops out the other side? It's going to create one giant molecule of sugar. Which scientifically would be described as C6H12O6, giant complicated basketball of sugar.
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Okay.
John Arbuckle: More than half of that sugar leaks out the roots of the plant. into the ground. So, C6, that is six molecules of carbon going from the atmosphere into the ground. Okay, this is carbon drawdown. If it stays, and with one little exhale, it exhales six molecules of oxygen. So, we see a beautiful example of [00:30:00] simplicity and elegance in action.
It's almost poetry. When the plants breathe out, The animals breathe in, and how does this happen? This happens historically, and I'm saying historically over the millions of years kind of time. Large groups of grazing mammals trample the grassland to smithereens,
Basically what we do is we wait until the grasses, Are starting to develop their seed header, are almost just right before they put on their seed head.
They have the most biomass, the most carbs, the most protein, the most availability of nutrition. As soon as it's got its seed head on, I don't know if you've ever eaten bolted lettuce.
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Yes.
John Arbuckle: Maybe it tastes
Laura Park Figueroa (2): doesn't taste good.
John Arbuckle: Cow and grass in the pasture are the same way. Once the grass bolts, you just look at the [00:31:00] graph.
The protein, the digestibility, the flavor is just going down the drain. So, what we want to do is we want all of our grazing animals to stampede it, just like the bison, right? That's my role model here. We want them to trample it. Significantly, intensely, just like the bison would have. And then just like the bison, we need our animals to leave and not come back until the circle is back to the starting point.
seed head is starting to come again. We call that hitting the reset button, right? If the grasses in a cow pasture are allowed to create a seed head, and then the plant has wrapped up its life cycle, it thinks it's done, it made seeds, that's the end of the story, right? Then it turns brown, the decomposition process releases all of that, Carbon back into the atmosphere, [00:32:00] very little progress is made.
And if you take animals out of the system completely and you do that year over year for a hundred years, you've lost more than you gain.
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Yeah.
John Arbuckle: Alternatively, we're going to be grazing our paddocks about every 35 days. In the springtime, it's closer to 21. If there's a terrible drought in August, it's closer to 60.
We're just kind of rolling with what nature tells us to do. Nature is a boss, right? So, if we can hit the reset button four times in a growing season, I guarantee without any reservation, I 100 percent promise that any farmer that's doing that is sequestering more carbon than they are realeasing
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Yes.
John Arbuckle: Yes, the cow creates methane, right?
If you put it all together into a holistic equation of goodness being done [00:33:00] relative to damage being done,
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Right.
John Arbuckle: I mean, there were 40 million bison in America, in 1491. There were always tens of millions of large grazing mammals out grazing and farting, creating methane.
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Right.
John Arbuckle: It was not new, but the trouble is now we do it in an industrial way.
And what I would really like to see farmers doing for the greatest human health, animal health, planetary health, is they just keep hitting the reset button. They let the grass get big, they chomp it down, they don't come back for a month and a half. They do that over and over again, and you will literally increase the altitude of your property with carbon, right?
You'll be drawing it down, you are building soil, and your property is getting taller. I mean, very incrementally, very slowly. But that's what's happening, [00:34:00] and that's why I am so excited about healing the earth and healing human health with animals. I'm probably not going to do it with a tractor, I'm not going to do it with soybeans, I'm not going to do it with a thousand acres of corn.
I mean, that's why the Mississippi River is brown,
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Yeah.
John Arbuckle: right? It's brown because the, so much of the ecosystems, the soil within, the Mississippi watershed is so damaged,
Laura Park Figueroa (2): destroyed.
John Arbuckle: is a wounded organism, is a wound, it is an organism that needs to go to the hospital, right?
Neglect and ignoring it is not the way to rewild, we have to apply tender loving care and thought. I mean, we could rewild a system that had all the original components, like timber wolves and grizzly bears and bison. If those were present in Iowa and we left something alone, it might rewild.
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Yeah. Yeah.
John Arbuckle: [00:35:00] in the absence of those things where it's just there's a sweet loved family pet that's hungry and we're not feeding it.
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Yeah. Yep.
John Arbuckle: That's what neglect is. And we just need to feed our loved and trusted pet.
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Yeah, I do feel like there is a, I'm encouraged by the movement of people who, are following the work you do and following Joel Salatin and Rob Wolf and Diana Rogers and all these people who are kind of bringing to the forefront the understanding of how can we If we're not farmers eat in a way that can support people like you, who are farmers, who are doing things correctly.
And I do think this is like something that I personally feel very passionately about is looking for the opportunities in your local community to support. Even if it's in a small way, if you don't have a lot of money, you still can in small ways, support the local farmers that are near [00:36:00] you who are doing this.
And I always say that. If we ever leave Wisconsin, one of the saddest things to me will be that we will no longer get to be the drop off site for the regenerative agriculture farm that does like raw milk and pasture raised meat and all this. We have seven coolers on the side of our house.
Sometimes neighbors are like, why do you have all those coolers? It's oh, there's a farm that drops off here on Friday. Here's the info if you want to join the co op. So we get like all of our eggs and meat and well, not all of our meat. We do still buy meat at Costco sometimes because. When we have three kids here, it's a lot, but they don't all live at home anymore, but when they are home, wow, it's they eat a lot.
I remember this whenever they come home. So, so we do still, we do a mix, but I do think that all of us can do our part to know if there are farmers locally that we could support, even if you can't afford to get all of your meat from them, at least to know they're there, at least, somehow support them because it is a way that we can care about the earth by supporting [00:37:00] farmers that are doing the kind of work that you're doing.
So I'm just very thankful for the work you've done over the years and for sharing all of this with us. It's so interesting. Tell people where they can find you. Let's like wrap up and. Give them their website and where they can find you. And I gotta order some of those. I want some, they have pineapple like meat sticks and I'm about to go on an international trip where I need snacks so I'm about to go order some today, John.
But tell people what you have available and stuff.
John Arbuckle: yeah that, that was actually the most complicated part of becoming a regenerative farmer is figuring out once we weren't selling at the sale barn or taking our grain to the elevator, what do we do? So, this is something that I'm sure my father would respect, but have a hard time relating to it.
We built this really amazing website. He put a lot of. investment into like tractors and machinery. I have put a lot of, investment into like things like search engine optimization,
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Right.
John Arbuckle: things that I think my father and grandfather [00:38:00] would have a hard time really grasping.
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Yeah. That's funny.
John Arbuckle: But yeah, I mean, the name of our farm is Singing Pastures. You can find us at singingpastures. com. We are predominantly a meat snack business now. So, we raise our animals I say at the end of their life we wave a magic wand over them and they turn into smoked sausages and salami. We have three flavors of craft meat sticks.
We say they're kind of like a fancy version of a Slim Jim. so there's one that's made with little pieces of bacon. There's one that's made with little chunks of dehydrated pineapple, which is really, that's kind of my favorite. And then there's a spicy one that's made with little chunks of jalapeno.
And then there's also two kinds of salami. There's one that's kind of a zany and decadent flavor. It's a bourbon and bacon. And then another one is kind of an old standby, which is red wine and garlic. And
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Oh yeah. Those sound good too.[00:39:00]
John Arbuckle: yeah, that's what we make.
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Yum. I love it. Well, I'm about to, I'm about to get some of those pineapple ones because my middle child and I are going to Nepal and Indonesia. So I've traveled very minimally outside the U S so this is like a huge trip for us. He has a friend whose mom has worked in Nepal for many years, so they invited us to come because they're going to be there.
And I'm a little nervous, I admit, about going without meat for as long as we're going to be staying there. So I thought I would pack some Slim Jims from your company in my bag to have to eat in secret if I need to, because it's a lot. I mean, I'm sure it'll be delicious. It's like a lot of lentils and stuff, but but yeah, I'm already thinking about needing my meat stash while I'm there for a few weeks.
So.
John Arbuckle: That was actually one of my hiatuses from farming is I worked as a wilderness like an adventure travel guide in Nepal.
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Oh, wow.
John Arbuckle: yeah, I worked, I did the Annapurna circuit. This is why, this is part of [00:40:00] why I like to reach out, and just learn about nature therapy is because it was so therapeutic.
For me to just be walking along and like looking up at these 20, 000 foot mountains or hiking the Annapurna circuit or running, all these rivers on the Tibetan border, if you get to Nepal say you can find one of the local people and say, Tepailai Kasta Cha,
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Okay.
John Arbuckle: which means how are you in Nepali?
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Great. I'll practice that
John Arbuckle: Yeah.
Laura Park Figueroa (2): a bunch of times and repeat that three second segment you just said. So his mom, her name's Karen. Karen speaks Nepali. She. actually learned it like 30 years ago. She has been going back and forth over the years to work at a young kid, I don't know if they call it an elementary school there, but like a young kid's school, like a primary school.
So, she's going to be in Namche Bazaar. So we're staying there for a few weeks. We're probably going to be actually in Namche for about a week. Because, it takes It's probably going to take a total of five days. I want to say from like, when [00:41:00] we leave from California, we're leaving. It's probably going to take five days by the time we get there.
Right. It's pretty remote. And then I don't know, we might do some trekking up towards ever space camp. I don't think we have time to go the whole. The whole way there, but she sent a photo the other day to our little WhatsApp thread that we have going, my son is surprising his friend. So their son, my son's best friend does not know that my son is coming.
John Arbuckle: Oh, yeah!
Laura Park Figueroa (2): we're just going to show up in Kathmandu and be like, Hey, hi, how you doing?
We can't wait. I'm sure my son is really good at planning surprises. So I think he's going to come up with some crazy scheme to surprise him somehow. So we'll see what he comes up with. But but yeah, so she, she actually speaks the language and I feel like it's comforting to go knowing that we'll have her with us.
Cause she knows people there, like it's her friends, cause she's gone for many years. So anyway,
John Arbuckle: You have a great time. Wow!
Laura Park Figueroa (2): it's like a trip of a lifetime. I can't believe my son would even want to go with [00:42:00] me. He was telling me they invited him, and I was like, Lucas, that's where Everest is.
You're gonna, I am so, I can't believe you're gonna get to see Everest. And he was like, you should come with me.
John Arbuckle: What
Laura Park Figueroa (2): then I
John Arbuckle: invitation!
Laura Park Figueroa (2): are you kidding me? You really want me to come with, are you sure? Like I could come with you?
John Arbuckle: Yeah. Oh, how wonderful. That's heartwarming to hear.
Laura Park Figueroa (2): yeah. So then it's all happening. And then we're going to go to Indonesia after that to Raja Ampat, which is like this very remote where there's some of the only healthy coral reefs in the world.
Speaking of like keeping the world healthy. And then on the way home, we have an 11 and a half hour layover in Tokyo. So we're going to leave the airport and go into Tokyo, Japan. So I'm going to get three new places on my little passport this trip. I'm really excited.
John Arbuckle: Oh, I'm so excited for you. That sounds like a delightful trip.
Laura Park Figueroa (2): yeah, it's going to be great.
Thank you so much, John. This was such a great conversation. I just appreciate you and your philosophy and it was just delightful. So thank you for the work you do.
John Arbuckle: Yeah. Thanks [00:43:00] so much. If I had one concluding idea for everybody listening, it would be that transformation is very possible. We already know the why, we just have to work out the how.
Laura Park Figueroa (2): Yeah, I love that. Great note to end on. Thank you, John.
John Arbuckle: Yeah. Thanks everybody.
So after we recorded, John sent me an email with a discount code for all of you. If you want to buy some of the meat sticks that his company makes, they are made the slow way, the right way. And they do not use all of the additives and things that you find in meat sticks that you get at the grocery store. You can go to singing pastures.com. And you can get 20% off with the discount code wilderness 20. Okay. That's it. See you next time.
Hey, before you go, if this podcast has helped you in your nature based work, will you take one minute to leave a five star review for the podcast, wherever you're listening right [00:44:00] now? It helps me keep producing free content for you when I see that it is actually having an impact in the world. So thank you.
Thank you. Thank you so much for doing that. And now go get outside and enjoy therapy in the great outdoors. See you next week.
