S8 Ep24: Regenerative Ranches: How Sustainable Livestock Farming Can Help Solve Climate Change with Marshall Bartlett
“This isn't just a purchasing decision. This has huge and sweeping ramifications. As consumers, we dictate the food system; our choices pull a lever that directly dictates how all this works.” —Marshall Bartlett
Sustainable meat production is about more than just the end product— it's also about supporting a holistic farming system that nourishes both people and the land. When consumers make the conscientious choice to purchase meat from farms practicing this kind of care, it solidifies a food system that will continue nourishing communities for many years to come.
This week, Justine sits down with Marshall Bartlett, the co-founder and CEO of Home Place Pastures, a fifth-generation family farm in Mississippi that has transformed over the past decade to practice regenerative agriculture through rotational grazing of grass-fed beef and pastured pork. Marshall aims to improve soil health, support ethical animal welfare, and make locally grown, sustainable meat accessible in his community.
Tune in as Justine and Marshall talk about the challenges of conventional agriculture, how regenerative practices like rotational grazing can improve soil health and sequester carbon long-term, and the importance of education and storytelling to help consumers understand labels and make informed choices that support small, local producers.
Connect with Marshall:
Marshall grew up in the Home Place and fell in love with the farm and his hometown throughout his childhood. After graduating from the Mississippi School of Math and Science, Marshall left the South to attend Dartmouth College for undergrad. After college, he spent time in Montana, completed an AmeriCorps term in New Orleans rebuilding houses destroyed in Katrina, and eventually ran operations for a small business specializing in sourcing local meat for New Orleans chefs.
In 2014, at the age of 24, Marshall returned to the Home Place with a new vision for the family farm and has worked for the last 10 years to bring this vision to reality. You can usually find him on the Home Place Monday through Saturday somewhere between the meat plant, the farming operation, and the Farm Store. He often gives farm tours and butcher classes at the Home Place. He spends his off-farm time with his wife Katie and daughter Joan or traveling to help learn from other farmers and meat processors.
Episode Highlights:
02:33 Farming Challenges and Opportunities for Sustainable Practices
12:44 Financial Viability Concern
16:13 Connecting Food with Health and Planet
21:56 Manipulated Label Claim in the Meat Industry
25:17 Local and Sustainable Meat Production
28:44 Local Foods and Consumer Impact
34:05 Animal Welfare and Regenerative Agriculture
36:46 Supporting Local Agriculture
Tweets:
Make an impact beyond your plate! Join @jreichman and Home Place Pastures CEO, Marshall Bartlett as they prove that supporting regenerative practices can be part of the climate solution. #podcast #entrepreneurship #socialgood #inspiration #impactmatters #NextGenChef #EssentialIngredients #Season8 #HomePlacePastures #sustainablemeatproduction #localfarmers #consciousconsumers #regenerativefarming
Inspirational Quotes:
05:51 “The land is a huge privilege and asset, but you're constantly having to leverage it to keep going.” —Marshall Bartlett
11:12 “So you have this supply and this demand, and in the middle of it, you have a tremendous amount of pain and problems and complications. But in that lies the opportunity.” —Marshall Bartlett
16:24 “Everybody wants their children to be able to follow their passions, integrate tradition into it, but equally be their own person.” —Justine Reichman
19:39 “Step number one is improving our farm to where we can leave it better than we found it for future generations.” —Marshall Bartlett
20:21 “Just by allowing the animals to exhibit their natural behaviors, you're using them to build healthier soils.” —Marshall Bartlett
26:00 “There's all these misconceptions about the labels on these other meats that are coming from overseas.” —Justine Reichman
28:18 “This isn't just a purchasing decision. This has huge and sweeping ramifications. As consumers, we dictate the food system; our choices pull a lever that directly dictates how all this works.” —Marshall Bartlett
34:09 “Sourcing food from a regenerative farm is the only way you can become a net carbon sink through your food purchasing decisions.” —Marshall Bartlett
35:31 “Your dollar is having a bigger impact in the community when you shop locally.” —Marshall Bartlett
36:56 “Family plays a large role in farming.” —Justine Reichman
Transcriptions:
Justine Reichman: Good morning, and welcome to Essential Ingredients. I'm your host, Justine Reichman. With me today is Marshall Bartlett. He is the Co Founder and CEO of Home Place Pastures.
Welcome, Marshall.
Marshall Bartlett: Thank you, glad to be here. Appreciate you having me.
Justine Reichman: Yeah. I'm super excited to have you here to learn more about what you're doing and the impact you're having on food and agriculture. So if you would, for those that are not familiar with Home Place Pastures, can you introduce yourself and what it is you do at Home Place Pastures?
Marshall Bartlett: Yeah, I'd love to. So my name is Marshall Bartlett, as you mentioned. I'm in Como Mississippi, which is in Northwest Mississippi, it's a really small town that not a lot of folks have been to, unfortunately. But I'm a fifth generation farmer here on my family farm. So we've been doing this for a living for five generations. I moved home almost exactly 10 years ago to found Home Place Pastures, which is a vertically integrated, regenerative farm producing grass fed beef and pastured pork. So there are a lot of buzzwords in there. But basically, we raise high quality protein and try to make it as available as possible to our community in our region.
Justine Reichman: Thank you. Thank you, Marshall. So I do want to talk about those buzzwords, and maybe just take a minute to break them down. We had regenerative, we had a few different things. So if you could walk us through those words and what they mean to you.
Marshall Bartlett: Well, buckle up, because here we go. But I'll try to make it mercifully brief. But regenerative agriculture has kind of come along recently as a new buzzword for describing a style of agriculture that focuses on soil health. So there's a lot of other things that go into it. But sustainability was the big word when I started about a decade ago. I feel like the innovators in the space didn't think that that word encapsulated what we were doing well enough, because sustaining has the static connotation that things are not getting better or getting worse. They're just sort of staying the same where's the rigidity, when we really start to wake up the cycles of nature and focus on soil health through managing different species of animals on a farm and moving them around a lot, we really start to do things with that ecosystem in our soils that are pretty amazing. And we actually build soil health over time. So things are getting better. So regenerative farming in my mind involves animal production.
Now, some may disagree with that. But you're basically producing livestock on grasslands in a way that enhances the soil by using natural systems and kind of an ecosystem approach to that so we can get in the weeds with that, so to speak. V integrated is another buzzword that is equally fascinating. But there's not a lot of people that are producing food, or farmers that are growing food that have access directly to the end market or the end consumer. And in the meat world, that involves converting your agricultural practices via your livestock into marketable products like ground beef and steaks. People don't want to come out to your farm to buy a cow, they want to buy something they can take to eat. So there's a lot that has to happen between the cow and the steak. And in the meat world, that is basically,a federally inspected processing facility. So we're one of the only farms in the country that raises and finishes livestock for harvest that also runs its own USDA inspected, slaughter and processing facility in the middle of the farm, which is where I'm sitting. So we are around plants, which probably created as many problems or more problems than it solves. But we are very proud to be in direct control of each one of those processes. And from this little meat plant here in our farm, we distribute throughout our entire region to food service like restaurant customers and shipped directly to people's households. And we run a little restaurant and a butcher shop here on the farm as well.
Justine Reichman: So much to dig into. But I do want to just start with, if we go back to the beginning, what was your farm like as you were growing up versus how it is today? I'm sure that over these five generations, we've seen things progress as opposed to staying stagnant and integrated into these new lessons. We're learning new ways to do things that are more progressive, innovative. Notice,I stayed away from the word sustainable. Sustaining means staying the same. So as a result, I'm wondering, what does that journey look like?
“The land is a huge privilege and asset, but you're constantly having to leverage it to keep going.” —Marshall Bartlett
Marshall Bartlett: I obviously didn't have the pleasure of witnessing, I guess three of those generations, but I can definitely speak to the way that kind of commodity industrial agriculture shifted during my dad's career, his 45 year career, and why I didn't want to farm for a while, and what ultimately kind of brought me back. I think for a lot of listeners, understanding the way that agriculture, like 99% of agriculture and food production works in this country is pretty foreign to them. I can just give a brief background of how that worked here on our commodity real crop farm and then maybe talk about why. So determined to deviate from that, I grew up here on the farm. I love the land. But the practices were something that I think my father, especially me and my siblings became kind of increasingly disenchanted with,but we would basically, my dad would go to the bank every January, February, loan season, as we call it, and he would ask, basically borrow money against our land is our asset to make his crop. And so most farmers in the South that are involved in row crop farming are asset rich because they have land and equipment, but they're cash poor. He can't come up with any money ever, it's a very interesting way to live. But the land is a huge privilege and asset, but you're constantly having to leverage it to keep going.
So he would borrow money against the land. That's what you call a production loan. And with that money, you would purchase your seed, which is often patented like GMO seed. Starting in the late 90's through my entire childhood, you would have to buy all your synthetic fertilizers, your herbicides and your insecticides. And we would plant cotton, corn, soybeans, commodity row crops, very input intensive,.Dad would use that loan to pay for those inputs, pay his labor. You have to deal with the weather throughout the entire production season, which you have no control over. You also have no control over the cost of those inputs, they're being dictated by large chemical ag companies that aren't really interested in your well being as much as they are their bottom line. And then when you harvest the crop in the fall, if you know the weather is gone well and you've made some type of yield, the value of that commodity is dictated by the Board of Trade in Chicago. You have no price setting or autonomy in that way at all. It's just a commodity, it's margin with every other bit of that crop in the country. And so you can start to kind of get a picture of no matter how hard working, or talented, or dedicated to producing this crop, you're really using a playbook that's not yours, you're being handed the rules by other people, and you have no control over any part of the process. And then when you sell the crop, you just hope to hell that you can go pay the bank back and have a little bit left over. Because in a couple months, you gotta go re-up. And if you lose money, you have to go to the bank and borrow money again to try to make it again the next year. So it's this vicious cycle. And that really changed a lot during my dad's career.
My dad started farming when he's about 20. He took over our farm, he grew up on the farm. But in the early 60's, he was born in 1942. So a lot of these synthetic inputs and commercial fertilizers were developed during World War II. After that, things really became focused on these synthetic inputs, then the GMO stuff came around in the mid to late 90's, and everything kind of shifted over to those seeds. So very chemical intensive and you became so hooked on that. You couldn't keep your own seed, you had to buy these patented seeds. So dad just saw that that thing that I just laid out became even more intense over time. So he pushed us all away from farming. And when I say WE, I mean my two older siblings and I worked really hard to get us off the farm and to give us opportunities to do literally anything else. So we were smart and fairly focused in school and got the opportunity to go to good schools. I ended up at Dartmouth College in New England. So straight off the farm to an Ivy League school's pretty wild journey, but basically had the opportunity to get as far away from Mississippi and the farm, and this occupation as one could get. But here I am raising pigs.
Justine Reichman: You go back a decade later.
Marshall Bartlett: That's a great question. So I think the situation that just laid out was one that I was not very interested in becoming a part of. So I thought about farming, I thought that if you were going to try to make a living, and if I was going to come back to this place, farm this place and try to provide for your family, that's what I had to do. And so I wasn't going to farm. But when you grow up like this in a place like this, it's been your family for so long, and it's kind of a weight that pulls you back in it, kind of had a tux in me. And I loved it. I didn't want to contribute to the brain drain, and Mississippi where people that can get educated and leave this part of the country. I didn't want this tradition to fall by the wayside, but I wasn't gonna move back and grow a crop farm. In high school, college, I was really influenced by a lot of people in the local food movement, a lot of the sustainability at that time, practices that were happening, a lot of kind of innovators in this space that were grappling with the same problem thinking, how can we keep these farms producing food, but not feed into this problem in the commodity industry, which is not just a financial problem that I laid out to you. But there's horrible externalities to the soil, to the watershed and to the air when you farm that way, that input intensive way.
So Joel Salatin, Will Harris, guys that your listeners may be familiar with, they had a big impact on me. I did an internship at a farm ,or a lot of people were thinking about this. And ultimately, I worked for a company in New Orleans that was selling meat to chefs, and it was just local. There wasn't really anything else to it, but it just really struck me that there seemed to be like, I was a 22 year old kid at that point. I could walk into an Emerald Steakhouse or restaurant, and get an item on their menu pretty easily. I was just walking into the kitchen like having a conversation. A lot of the things that I've read and the early parts of this movement that there was this demand out there, chefs, eaters, people that cared about where their food came from, everyone was getting more and more educated and focused on eating better and good ingredients, having something they trusted and could connect to that. They felt like it was intrinsically good, and that's what they wanted to support. And then there were all these farmers that were dealing with all the stuff I just talked about, and they were sick of it. They wanted to have another opportunity, or a way to continue farming that didn't feed into that commodity ag system, some kind of way to do something locally where they got a higher share of the consumer dollar than what the industry was giving them.
And so you have this supply and this demand. And in the middle of it, you have a tremendous amount of pain, problems and complications. But in that, lies the opportunity. And that's where an entrepreneur loves to get in there and figure it out. I will say I wasn't just purely entrepreneurial, I was trying to find a way to make the family farm thing work. And so I was trying to build a business plan around that instead of doing this because I saw it purely, no entrepreneur wouldn't touch this with a 10 foot pole. I have a mission to do this. I'm determined to try to make it work financially. So to connect the supply and the demand, the big thing to connect those two things is the meat plant, convert the livestock into sellable products. And that's a real brick wall for a lot of people trying to scale this in the meat world. So I, at the tender age of 24 thought that I would solve that problem and build my own plant in the middle of my farm. And again, we did that, which I'm really proud of. But I was very naive as to what I was getting into. And it's been super challenging.
Justine Reichman: I really was curious. I know that your father took this over from his father, and you are now back there. He had sent you off to go do anything else. What was his response when you came back and you're like, okay, I want to do it this way. I want to be able to continue in this family legacy.
Marshall Bartlett: I think that's probably a complicated question for him. But I definitely think that there was initially a lot of skepticism and maybe some disappointment like, hey, you sent me off to Dartmouth. And now, I'm coming home and raising pigs. And he's like, man, we could have saved a lot of money if you just want to jump straight out of high school. But I also think that it's been a thrill of a lifetime for both of my parents to see the rejuvenation that's happening here, my business and homeplace, and my siblings are involved as well. They're kind of minority partners. I want to be sure, and I mentioned that they don't live here, but they're super excited about this and supportive that we've been able to build this. We now have a restaurant, a butcher shop on the farm. We've cleaned up the whole place, and we greet customers here. It's just been thrilling for them to see this next generation come in and try to do something that has a bigger community impact. It's not so isolating, like you're on the phone in the middle of nowhere. We're bringing people in, we get opportunities like this. We have groups and tours at the farm, and my parents have a restaurant in their backyard now which they take advantage of a lot. So they love that. I also think that they worry about the financial viability, because we've obviously had to take a ton of chances. And farmers are not scared of debt. I mean, it's what we live by. But instead of doing it every year like dad would do, I've just done a hell of a lot of it all at one time that they're concerned about. But ultimately, it's been really gratifying to me to see both my parents around to this, and really take a lot of pride and joy in what we're doing here on the family farm.
Justine Reichman: I think that's so nice. And especially because they get to witness it and participate in it, and see how things evolve. And you're continuing to move this tradition forward. It might change with the times, but you're maintaining it still not all the same. I'm wondering what your vision is for that in your business. And there's so many generations to this. Do you have a hope for or desire to see?
Marshall Bartlett: Very much. So I think that a lot of generational farmers struggle with this. You don't want to push this on your kids. My daughter, my first child is 14 months old, so I don't have a tremendous amount of experience with parents and just to put that out there. But as she gets older, I think to have the approach that my parents have where it's like, you're obviously very involved in the farm. You're spending a lot of time down here, and you're expected to chip in and help out, but you're not expected to take the reins if this is not something that you want to do. So I hope that my daughter and any future kids, and my wife and I will have the opportunity to grow up here. Love the place and enjoy it. It was paradise. I love to hunt and fish, and I just had keys to the kingdom here. So I hope that that will mean a lot to them. And connecting with their roots in Mississippi and this North Mississippi community, it's not just the farm, it's also the literary history, the musical history, and some of the not so good parts of our history that I think forms this kind of complexity of growing up in the rural south that is really formative for people that creates a lot of great thinkers and writers. But anyway, I want them to be involved, but I don't want Jonie, that's my daughter, to be destined to take over the slaughterhouse. I want them to engage with it as much as they can. But the key is that we have built a business, a viable business enterprise that is here for them. And that is here. We haven't just let things decay and disappear, and that's really important to me. So I want to give them the option and a way to stay on the farm and keep this going. But not require them to do so.
Justine Reichman: I understand that everybody wants their children to be able to follow their passions. But also to remain true to your core values, integrate tradition into it, but equally be their own person. So all those things that were always right. I mean, it's a tall order. So when you came back and you started this new initiative, if you will, and you did a little bit of a pivot for the farm, what were you most hopeful for?
Marshall Bartlett: To me, I was most hopeful about the connection piece. One of our core values is to be able to connect people with their food, and in innovative ways. And it was so exciting to me to think about having a product that wasn't corn or cotton. That's every other bit of that commodity produced in the country, but we could actually do something special that was rooted to these practices and these principles, and also a sense of place because we love the farm, we love our community. I mean, come as I know, I'm wearing the hometown hat here. But that's a really special place to us. So that to me,was so exciting about the style of agriculture. It wasn't just the farming, but it was sort of the community and the connection aspect. And we could throw parties, music, festivals, Chef dinners, like really get these people and we were good at that. We're gonna throw them parties is one thing I'm good at. So that was really, really fun and got us fired up early on. And it's still a big part of what we do. But I think for a lot of people considering this type of venture out there, it's super challenging, and you don't need to have any stars in your eyes or idealism. I mean, it's just raw, gritty, risky and not very profitable, and a tremendous amount of work and risk. But if you're doing it by connecting to a local consumer base, your community, at least you can build a brand and you have some way of dictating your prices based on the value that you can demonstrate to your customer base. And that's very entrepreneurial, and much more exciting than just growing corn and taking what the market gives you at the end of the year. And so that was a really exciting way to integrate an entrepreneurial spirit and kind of a passion for those things with, also being able to farm for a living.
Justine Reichman: So Marshall, when you were coming back to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, and bring some new blood or some new ideas to the farm, what was your hope in terms of connecting food with health and agriculture, and the future of our planet?
Marshall Bartlett: Yeah, that's a hard one to encapsulate in a quick one, but I will do my best. I also want to emphasize--
Justine Reichman: Let's think about it like this, if you have it out, what would be the top three things you are aiming to achieve within health, plant and planet?
“Step number one is improving our farm to where we can leave it better than we found it for future generations.” —Marshall Bartlett
Marshall Bartlett: Great. That just saved you about 45 minutes of me rambling, so thank you. I also want to emphasize, I didn't reinvent the wheel. I mean, I did bring all this as a brand new business on the family farm. But there are a lot of really innovative creative thinkers that came before me that kind of paved the road to try this type of enterprise. Like I mentioned earlier, I think that our first goal was to farm in a way that made our farm a healthier place to live and to produce food from soil health and regenerative AG. Step number one, improving our farm to where we can leave it better than we found it for future generations. So get rid of all the chemicals, all the synthetics. Figure out how we can use natural practices to augment soil and therefore biodiversity, which also has a big impact on the downstream. The watershed and the air which is shared by everyone. Two, how can we produce food in a way that is ethical and gives the animals that we're eating a way of life that isn't the very, very not good way of life that 99.9% of them have in our industrial food system. So the amazing thing about this type of farming is that you can do both of those things at the same time just by allowing the animals to exhibit their natural behaviors, you're using them to build healthier soils. So those are two big things.
The third was the community investment part where if I come home, build a viable enterprise here with a meat plant and restaurant. I'm managing like 300 acres, roughly, and I have 25 employees. My dad when he was row crop farming managed just 2000 acres with the land that we own, and he had to rent a lot of land to be able to make it financially feasible depending on what part of the country. And that may sound crazy, but you had to really grow a lot of acres to regrow a farm, and he would only have four to five employees managing that many acres. So when you really think about bringing this whole process back to the farm, you create so much value, economic value, and just payroll jobs. A big part of that rural economic development was not just the jobs. We're creating directly through Home Place Pastures, but we're giving Farmers Market access to premium markets to raise animals this way. So we're spreading our mission, and we're adding revenue to small family farms in the region. And those are the main tenets of our mission, and it has been super hard. We haven't made any money. But dammit, we're doing all this. So we've succeeded.
Justine Reichman: What keeps you going? What are you hoping that people take away from this so that maybe you can make money and you can continue to do this?
Marshall Bartlett: That's a great question. I don't really know what keeps me going. But I certainly hope I don't run out of it. Because I think that just being excited about the mission and knowing that this problem, this fundamental problem that I started with 10 years ago, I had an idea about this fundamental problem. And it's the same today, and I've been fired up about that idea ever since I've just gotten a lot. I've just basically gotten the shit kicked out of me attempting to connect the supply and the demand that we talked about. But that's where all the tough part is in between all the problems. And I think that the landscape has changed a lot over the last 10 years. But the problem remains that consumers essentially, when they shop for their meat, they are looking at any product, they're assessing it in just two ways. At the point of purchase, what does this look like? What does this product look like to me? Does it look appealing to me? And that can be the meat that could be, how the packaging looks? It looks like what the label claims are. And then what is the price? Those are the two things, and we make those assessments in like nanoseconds because we're looking at this endless variety that's really overwhelming and stimulating. And so we just grab stuff. And what the industry has found is that people are gonna look at those two things and get the thing that looks the best of them, the cheapest. And that works every time.
And so the problem with that is the industry has figured out how to manipulate that and put label claims that are misleading. Like for example, the big one that's gotten a lot of press recently, y'all may have talked about the product of the USA label claim. So when you go to the grocery store, Trader Joe's, whatever high end grocery store, you see products from the USA, USDA organic, grass fed grass finished beef, and you're like, damn, this is good stuff. This is what I want. It's got everything I need. I've been reading all this. I've been listening to these podcasts. This is it. Here we go. I'm gonna grab it. So you buy it. And because it's cheaper than some local farm name on the package, ground beef, it says the same thing. And you're like, well, this claims to be a USDA organic product in the USA. And it's $2 a pound cheaper than Home Place Pastures or whatever. And the issue with that is, the reason that it's cheaper is because it's all coming from overseas. So there was a label claim, like change made.
I think in 2015 where the industry was able to basically manipulate legislation and regulation to get the ability to put products to the USDA on something that was minimally reprocessed and repackaged in the States. So the animals are raised in Uruguay or Australia where they don't feed animals corn, it's just not part of their industry. So they're mass produced, slaughtered in big slaughterhouses, cheaply shipped, and usually refrigerated barge containers over here and then. People buy the box meat or the trim, and then they grind it and put it in one pound packs and sell it. And that's significantly cheaper than buying from domestic farmers. So this has created a situation where the grass fed meat, this is just beef grass fed meat. The industry for grass fed beef in America has just exponentially increased over the last 15 years. But the market share of domestic producers has plummeted. And right now, 85% of the grass fed, grass finished beef says product in the USA that is available for market here in the States is from overseas 85%. When you tell people this, they're like, that is nuts. That's crazy, I don't want to support that. So I feel like we're all just trying to we feel like the consumers are on our side, they're just getting so confused by all these label claims. And if we can all get together and just explain to them how vital, important and much better the meat is for them, if they support local or regional producers, then we're gonna really solve a lot of these problems with the food system. And I still think that despite how challenging and daunting all of this is, that there's a real, that's the mission. And that is vital. I'm gonna make it work, so I think that's really what keeps us going.
“There's all these misconceptions about the labels on these other meats that are coming from overseas.” —Justine Reichman
Justine Reichman: So when you mentioned that your meat is local, and it's here, and there's all these misconceptions about the labels on these other meats that are coming from overseas, what role does education play for you in your business so that you could communicate with the end consumers? Why this is important and the impact it has for them as well as the planet by supporting your local farmers and buying locally grass fed grass, finished, organic.
Marshall Bartlett: I think that the education piece is more important than what I have found and what I see. My colleagues in the space, we're so bound to the operation side of making all of this work. It is very hard to squeeze out a little bit of time to do things like this, and to market and to get that message. Often, the people that are really talented at solving these problems and producing food don't necessarily have the same skill set that it takes to translate this stuff to consumers in a really concise, effective way. And that's a whole nother skill set. And that's really what we're working on now. And to us, the most impactful way to do that is to have people come here. You remember that our mission and our core values were rooted in this community. I'm sitting in the middle of a meat plant in the middle of Mississippi right now, and that's where I spend six days a week.
So when we get people out here, and we literally walk them around, and they're looking at our livestock, and their shoes are on our pastures, and they hear our story, meet us and talk to us, it is so transformative for me and for those people that are willing to come out and spend the time to do that. And that creates this connection that you can't reproduce with a damn label claim in the grocery store. So that is very, very powerful. And we want to harness that. Unfortunately, it takes a ton of time and energy, and you do it with about 10 to 15 people at a time, and set it like 10 to 15,000 people, which is what we need. But I think that that educational aspect is critical. And then, of course, getting opportunities like this in any way we can get some type of platform to tell the story and to explain to people in a more pleasant and natural kind of conversational setting, all these heady concepts and complexities to make them understand that this isn't just a purchasing decision. This has huge and sweeping ramifications. And as consumers, we dictate the food system, our choices are, pull a lever that directly dictates how all this works. And so we're just trying to get the word out any way we can.
Justine Reichman: Of course, and I just want to go back to that whole USA meat thing. Is there anything you're doing to try to change the way that that process is so that people can have more clear communication, and it can be more representative of what the meat is. So people will have the idea that they're getting meat from overseas, even though it's saying that it's not in the USA. So I'm curious, this is a big problem, and it's a government issue. How it's all dealt with. And I'm wondering, what if anything you're doing about that and you hope to do about that?
Marshall Bartlett: That's a great question. And I should mention that actually, because of activism from local farms, and really how egregious this particular label claim is, it's just so over the top.Finally nudged some change, and they've recently required that products bearing the product of the USA label claim only be applied to animals that were raised and harvested in the States, But this won't go into effect until 2026.
Justine Reichman: In the meantime, what does an end consumer do?
Marshall Bartlett: They have to buy from people that they know. So depending on your region, you're in California--
Justine Reichman: California.
Marshall Bartlett: Just buy from someone where you can ask him like, hey, you're not importing that stuff? There's a lot of brands. I will not name any names, but they're in the spaces. So I'm not the only person that sees opportunity and the challenges, right? So there's been a lot of smart folks that have started companies and had a tremendous amount of success, because they're really good at their branding and their marketing. And they start running into supply chain problems right off the bat. Because inherently, this stuff is difficult to scale because of the way it's produced. And there's this tremendous pressure to just import that box meat. Grass fed, it's organic, it's so cheap, and we can get as much of that. I can just get it in here tomorrow like, let's just do it. A lot of them do that. I understand the pressure, but you're just becoming part of the problem at that point. So we are really, really hardcore about telling that message. And every bit of meat that we sell walks in this building on four legs, and we do not import any box meat. For consumers, in the meantime, it's just never been more important because of these misleading claims and the complexities in this to just talk to the people that are making your food and get to know them. And that can be hard to do, but you just have to seek them out. They're out there. There's a lot of dirt farmers out here working our ass off to make the stuff available to you.
Justine Reichman: Are there any hard hitting statistics that you could share that talk about the impact of buying locally, buying organic in these regenerative areas versus buying from another country?
Marshall Bartlett: Yeah, that's a great question. I wish I had more of these. I should have notes on my hand. But one that was particularly striking to me was from an economist named Ken Meter who's done a lot of work on local food systems. He was able to figure out communities that were raising a lot of food and selling it under the commodity industry, and then they only had like big box stores that weren't sourced there. They had this massive food deficit where they were spending more on imported food than they were making on the stuff they're sending off. And they can somehow figure out how to close that loop, they would add a lot of value in communities. And he also found that if you spent $1 at a locally owned food producing company or small business, that dollar circulated an average of just over three times around that community through local jobs, putting other local businesses. In our case, our producer program revenue goes to other small family farms in our own region. Whereas when you spend money at one of the big box, sometimes internationally headquartered large companies, your dollar only circulated in your community just over one time, like 1.2. And most of that was just the people working at the establishment that you source from.
“Sourcing food from a regenerative farm is the only way you can become a net carbon sink through your food purchasing decisions.” —Marshall Bartlett
So it's a matter of three fold the impact that your dollar has when you shop locally. And the impact that is really hard to see as a consumer, because our pain point is, how much money do I have, and how much you have to spend to do it. Unfortunately, the warm fuzzy of knowing that's going around the community, you don't get to see any of that happening. It's sort of a long play. But that was really fascinating to me. One more thing I'll quote was some research done, Harris, who I mentioned earlier, he actually had a research group come out there and do a lifetime study of presenting his grass fed beef. Because he has multiple species, he has lived in forages year round, and he's practicing regenerative agriculture, composting, kind of a zero waste system, all these things combined. They actually found that for every, basically the cows in the lifetime of that product was a net carbon sink. He was sequestering more carbon on this form through his production practices than that product was emitting. And that's pretty revolutionary because that basically means that sourcing food from a regenerative farm is the only way you can basically become a net carbon sink through your food purchasing decisions. Because even if you're eating meat replacement proteins, I don't want to get into it. I don't have anything against veganism, it's all good. I know everyone's got the same goal. But the complexity in that argument is that a lot of those plant replacements are produced in monoculture environments.
What I grew up doing is just spraying fertilizers on giant mono crop patches of peas, beans and whatever that plant protein is. Whereas to really run a farm, like an ecosystem, you have to have a look at the great plains. Look at all these ecosystems we're trying to emulate. You have to have stack functions of life, including ruminants to come and harvest the grass. Basically, your impact on the local community is vast, and your impact on the environment is massive when you spend your money like this. But the only way you can really impact these things is to support a local regenerative farm. And if you're coming at it from an animal welfare standpoint, that's important. If we're coming at it from an environmental standpoint, that's critical for the reasons I just explained. And if you're coming at it from a supporting local and small business standpoint, you've got these very clear indicators that show your dollar is really having a bigger impact in the community when you shop locally. And if everyone kind of gets on board with us, I think it can really transform our food system and our rural economies, and just make all of our communities a better place to live and eat. I believe that in my bones, so I hope that that's the future that we have in store.
Justine Reichman: So if your dad was participating in this conversation, the generation before you, and we're asking him about what he sees for the future of the farm, and the direction you're going in, what do you think he'd say?
Marshall Bartlett: I think he'd be like, son, I think you're crazy. And you've taken a hell of a chance. But you're getting up and doing it every day, and I can't wait to see what comes. In all the arguments I've had with my dad over a glass of bourbon on the porch, which is how we like to mostly converse. The one thing that we've never disagreed on is the love of the land and the work ethic. And that's just kind of baked into what you do when you're involved in agriculture. And I think Dad has seen the amount of effort that's gone into all of this. And that's been really gratifying for him. And I think he thinks we're onto something, and he loves eating steaks at the restaurant.
Justine Reichman: It's right in your backyard. I'd like to have that in my backyard. It sounds a lot like family plays a large role in farming. At least within this conversation, your brothers are even part of that. Can you talk a little bit about the meaning of family for you family and farming, and creating a better for you solution? Your daughter is into that, because now your father too.
Marshall Bartlett: The family farm is a complex thing that has a big place in our American collective cultural identity. I think it's somewhere down the line. We all had somebody who was involved in farming, or wanted to farm, or lost land, or wanted land, or had land, and had this farm. And it's really, really challenging for most of those farms that disappeared because of macro economic pressures. And I think we're so fortunate because our parents were so supportive, and we had a happy childhood that my siblings and I have remained very close. And because of that, we've been able to navigate all those challenges. And even though I'm the one back on the farm doing this, they are very supportive. And we have a common shared interest for the family farm, and we want to try to leave it as intact as possible for our kids. And so that to us basically means trying to set up some kind of undivided interest where the land cannot be carved up and sold, because we somehow miraculously made it to the now sixth generation. And we want to preserve that. And so I think our interest in conservation, and not letting this place go by the wayside. It's really challenging because siblings don't often agree, and they all have different agendas. But we've been very fortunate that we're close, we love each other, and we share a passion for the farm and keeping that for future generations. So I'm very grateful to my siblings for their support for everything I'm doing, and for sharing that vision with me.
Justine Reichman: If your daughter was listening to this podcast down the road and she's trying to figure out what to do, what might you say to her?
Marshall Bartlett: I would say, I hope that we're not in debtors' prison right now. I hope you've got some means at this point in your life. But yeah, I would say that you just gotta do what feels right and follow that. I know that sounds so trite. And when you're thinking about a career, what you want to do for the rest of your life, you have to do something that makes you somewhat excited, and find a way to make it pay. But otherwise, you'll regret it. So even though I've done something that has been very unfruitful financially and very risky to date, I still have a tremendous amount of optimism. And I'm so grateful and find so much satisfaction in this path that I've taken. I hope that my kids will find the same.
Justine Reichman: So for those interested in learning more about Home Place Pasture, where might they be able to go to get more information to support the farm to be able to buy locally in your area?
Marshall Bartlett: I'm so glad you asked that, thank you. So if you're one of our neighbors here in the southeast, you can obviously come to the farm. We have a farm store that we mentioned that's open Wednesday through Sunday. We serve lunch from 11:00 to 3:00 every day, and you can buy our products there. We also do a steak dinner Friday night. And we have a lot of cool events, Chef dinners, concerts and stuff. So just check us out, follow us on social media. If you're a little further, we have a website that we're constantly refining and making more user friendly. But on the website, we sell subscription boxes, but you get to choose the frequency when you get it, and you get to customize it. So you get to choose the products that go in it to a certain extent. And then we have specialty add ons that you can throw in there that are only available to our box members. So that's a really neat program, an innovative thing. We're trying to connect to the end consumer, definitely check that out. And you can also buy whole and half quarter animal shares from us on the website, but you have to pick that as the farm. So there's kind of a variety of ways you can support us. And obviously, we would really appreciate that. Join our email list, stay in touch, and please contact me if you have any other questions, or follow up. I just really appreciate the opportunity, so thank you.
Justine Reichman: Thank you so much for joining us. And we will throw all that information into our show notes as well so that anybody listening can reach out, follow along and learn more about how to get access to meat, whether by subscription or on a local level. In the meantime, for those folks out there, if you liked this episode, give us a thumbs up. Don't forget to download and subscribe, and we look forward to seeing you next week.
