Eco-Stories: Chase Renninger of Woodland Valley Farms

Eco-Stories: Chase Renninger of Woodland Valley Farms

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Eco-Stories: Chase Renninger of Woodland Valley Farms

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. See the full interview below.

Founder and owner Chase Renninger opened Woodland Valley Farms in December 2016, taking the first step toward his dream of owning and operating a regenerative permaculture farm. Raised in Maryland, he found a passion for farming and ecology at a young age. To date, Chase holds a degree in Agro-Ecology and Sustainable Community Development and has had the privilege of farming in a diverse range of ecosystems from the Hawaiian Islands, to Arizonan deserts, to lush deciduous Maryland terrain, and now sandy South Carolina. Chase opened Woodland Valley Farms with the goal of providing access to beyond organic foods, free of chemicals, and filled with nutrients. He loves learning how to be a better rancher and he loves his cattle dogs. When he's not fixing the tractor, building barns or moving cows, he likes to find fresh water springs, research medicinal healing herbs and plant fruit trees. He also does consulting for other farmers in addition to health and wellness coaching.

This interview was recorded on June 3, 2020.

Resources:

Fiona Martin (FM):

Okay. Welcome, Chase. We're with CR, from the Woodland Valley Farms. How are you doing today, Chase?

Chase Renninger (CR):

I'm doing terrific. Got all my chores done so I'm happy about that.

FM:

Good. It's a super hot day in South Carolina, so I'm sure you're happy you got that done before noon hopefully.

CR:

Oh, yeah. Well, I guess we could start with a little bit of background about me and the farm.

FM:

Yeah.

CR:

I think about 10 years ago, I was studying wildlife biology and wildlife conservation in college, and came to the conclusion that the majority of conservation and wildlife based issues and habitat or depletion issues, are really due to farming and ranching, natural resource practices that we have. That goes for everything from ranching to vegetable, grain production, timber production, all of those things are within the scope of agriculture. They all affect conservation and wildlife based issues. I figured at that point... I was 19, 20 years old, that I had to go into this career field, to be able to influence other farmers and ranchers and things like that. It took me down a rabbit hole into permaculture and this concept of regenerating land.

What permaculture is, it's a... well, if you look at the etymology of it, perma, meaning permanent, culture, meaning our culture, our civilization, our society, and/or agriculture. Civilization doesn't exist without agriculture, people need to eat. When you put those two things together, the objective of this philosophy is to create a civilization and society of permanence, because we're currently not living in a state of permanence. Everything is based on natural resource depletion and extraction methods.

The farming methods that we're using are regenerative. It actually improves the quality of soil, it improves the quality of water. We can increase our footprint in a really good way, from what we're doing on the farm. Let's see here. I went back to school and I ended up studying what's known as agroecology. My general focus was on permaculture, but agroecology is the study of how ecology natural systems flow into agricultural based systems and how they're affecting one another, and there are many different aspects to that. My minor was in sustainable community development so building infrastructure within communities, to allow for this transition into a world of permanence and regeneration. Not just the land, but also including social justice issues with people who need access to clean water, and clean food and good housing and education. The basics that sometimes are not met in our country, in many countries throughout the world. I just felt obligated to do what I can and change the world. I started that journey 10 years ago.

I farmed for many people. I managed farms. I did consulting and did irrigation installation, heavy machinery operation, all of these different things that kind of go into farming. I pieced all of this education together for myself, over a six-year period or something. Where I went to college, but I was also getting involved with learning trade skills like plumbing, irrigation work, and I know how to do all of that. The carpentry aspect of things. I worked for a carpentry company for a year, to be able to be a proficient builder. I started working on vehicles and working with truck and tractor engines, and mechanics and stuff like that.

I took it upon myself to build the skill sets necessary to become a farmer, because just because you're a sustainable farmer... and a lot of people come into this career path without the necessary skills. They just on a whim, they want to become organic farmers. They want to change the world in some way, but they do not have the practical skill sets to allow them to be successful at that career.

Most farmers through generations, have had all of those skills and that knowledge passed down from their forefathers. It allowed them to be really good farmers, but we don't have that anymore. 1% of the population are farmers. Of that 1%, of the 1% are organic farmers. We simply just do not have enough people in agriculture. The people who are currently in agriculture, the majority of them are over the age of 50, 60, 70 years old. They hold all of the land, and people who are younger are unable to actually get into this career field. A, because it's a very difficult job, but the land access is a huge issue. The access to all the resources, it costs a lot of money, a lot of capital to do this. When you screw up, which is inevitable as a farmer, it costs tens of thousands of dollars. It could cost 100 bucks, but it usually costs a lot of money. There's just a barrier of entry for many people. It's not just class-race thing, but it really affects everybody who could potentially get into farming, because of all these things.

I took all the knowledge I possibly could during my whole life. Then I decided to put that into practice with starting my own business. I partnered with several people, to allow me to start the farm. One of which is my uncle, and he owns a lot of land. He actually does land conservation. It allowed me to become a farmer. If it wasn't for him, I would never be able to do this, because he owns a ton of land and is an environmentalist. He really believes in land conservation and agricultural conservation, but he had nobody there to kind of do it the right way. Some of these fields were genetically modified, so wheat and corn and things like that. We're actively repairing the soil and stuff, from these damaging agricultural practices.

My partner, Allyssa, she runs half the farm. She does almost everything that I do. I usually tend to do the infrastructure and more technical build out things. She's doing a lot of the interacting with our customers and communications. On the ground work, she is a master pig farmer and she does a lot with her pigs.

A little bit about the farm that... so yeah, we started the farm about five years ago. It was just me when I started. I was out on this land, living out of a canvas tent and built this farm from the ground up. It's 200 acres. I've put all the irrigation lines in, I've done electrical work on the property. We've rebuilt the barns to the best of our ability. We've done a ton of work in this property, and all the people involved are really proud of what they've done. We also brought a group of people, some friends of ours, and they started their own mushroom operation on our farm.

We have a bunch of different people who are involved. We have a garden manager, Joey, he's terrific. He's done so much work with us this year, allowed us to expand our CSA. We have my dad, I brought my father, who retired, into the farm. We've made it a community farm kind of and everybody does their own thing there.

We all play our parts and it's really great. We get together for lunch almost every single day. We've always had community lunches. That's all grown on the farm, because we grow all of our own food. I can rave about a lifestyle that we've kind of created. It's terrific. That came with a lot of struggle in the beginning.

Our farm is based upon this ecological model. We have animals that take up every single different ecological niche. For example, bison, elk, deer, these animals are ungulates and they digest grass and forages and things like that. They cause a disturbance in an ecosystem through grazing, and movement and motion. We create that in our agroecosystem, with cattle and sheep and goats. Then in another disturbance pattern, we also use pigs. We use our pigs to do composting, which I'll get into in a little bit. We use pigs to disturb the forest, to help to prevent forest fires, to cause different effects of disturbance, such as rooting up trash from an old disturbed lot. Or we can leave them in for a really long time, and then we can establish a new understory of certain plants in this given area.

They're a tool for us to just heavily disturb an area, and we have the chickens and the chickens are our... they kind of act as our cleanup crews. They keep all the flies and maggots, and all the stuff that might accumulate from manure. They keep that away from the barn, and the same with the ducks. They do that as well.

We have everything kind of in rotation, all these animals and they're never in a one space. They're always constantly moving, like any animal in nature is in constant motion. We replicate that constant motion, through what's known as rotational grazing practices. The gist of rotational grazing is that, if you rotate animals, then you will have less parasites or no parasites, and you will not have to use deworming medication on your animals, which has an immense health benefit for them and for us. It also allows those animals to have constant access to fresh water every day, fresh grass, every single day. They're not eating their own manure. They're not eating grass that they don't want to eat.

They eat stuff that makes sense for them, which gives them innate health and wellness. Also, it allows us to make money, because farmers focus on the bottom line all the time. Which most people who are using grain, when it comes to the cattle feeding operations, they want to put weight on their cows really fast, and a rotational grazing operation allows us to put a lot of weight on our cows very quickly, because they always have really tall, thick, lush grass to graze on. We always have that abundance of grass, to be able to feed them.

The sheep, we are actually breeding a parasite resistant hair sheep. We've imported... not me personally, but many farmers have imported these Caribbean hair sheep from St. Croix and Barbados, and some of these other Caribbean islands. They're extremely parasite resistant, because of the heat there. They're already adapted to eating more coastal type grasses. In our particular ecosystem, we have coastal grass. It's almost subtropical now with climate change, so we need the parasite resistance that those sheep give us. We never worm our sheep. They're extremely healthy. We don't trim their hooves. They're hair sheep, so they shed. They don't have any wool, they're really meant for the South. It's a very mild meat. It's great. It's something we want to expand upon an hopefully will maybe be in Charleston restaurants one day.

Allyssa, my partner has been raising pigs for like four years now. When we joined forces, she brought all of her pigs to our farm. We started our own breeding operation, which is a cross between a Berkshire... so it's more of like a European standard, lard pig. We don't exclusively raise lard pigs. We cross that with an Ossabaw Island hog which... it's pretty much a wild type pig that its descendants come from Spain, extremely fine, quality hinds. When we cross these two, we get a little bit fattier of a meat, very nicely marbled. They also have a tendency to eat more forage than a more domesticated kind of breed. It's been working for us.

Our pig operation is at the heart of how we manage fertility on our farm. We take waste from off farm, from other places. We'll take horse manure and shavings, from some of these larger horse operations and horse shows and things like that. We work with arborist companies, and they'll drop wood chips on our farm as well. We get old hay bales, and we throw all of this in a huge barn. We allow our piglets to live in this barn for a certain period of time, before they're old enough to go outside. We train them on the electric wire in this barn, so we can rotationally graze them. We put all of this organic matter in, and they just turn it into the ultimate compost.

They act as shredders and they shred everything up. It composts easier and it integrates into our soil better. We have these huge pits. They're like deep bedded compost systems. The side of our barn, we're able to drive in with a bucket loaded tractor and dump about a yard of fresh shavings or wood chips and the manure. The pigs will eat it. They'll tear it apart. They'll poop in it, they pee in it. We dump our water in it, so it has moisture content, the perfect moisture content. Then every few months, we'll open the big gates up. We go in with the front-end loader, and we make enormous compost piles that are like hundreds of yards.

It's really cool. Over the course of the year, we have this composting cycle. Then at the end of that year, usually it's ready to go into our garden. All of the pigs and the chickens, they're making this compost in the barn for us. We allow it to rest, and we also turn it over the course of this time. We'll add other things into it, because we do chicken butchering on the farm. We add blood to it. We add feathers to it. We'll add animal carcasses, if we actually have to. It really helps us with not having to import any type of nutrients and fertility. If we do, it's very, very minimal amount of fertilizer that we use on our crops. All of that compost goes into the garden.

In our garden, we do a no-till system, that it's kind of been standardized and it's starting to be standardized by some of these farmers around the world. One of them is Charles Dowding, and he is an older gardener from Britain, from England. He's just terrific. He inspired a lot of farmers to take it to another level. There are a couple other farmers out there who are doing this. Essentially what we do is, we create this really thick compost mulch that's about this thick. That goes across our bed, and we plant directly into that with an automatic seeding system. Or we put transplants in, and it decreases our irrigation by... I'm not sure, because we hardly irrigate. We establish our crops with irrigation, and then we pretty much don't irrigate for the rest of the time that that particular crop's in the ground. We have extremely sandy soil here, so there's really no other way for us to do it.

We've had some no-till beds in production for four years now. The results are unbelievable, because the soil always stays loose and never gets compacted. We have immense amounts of microorganisms in our soil. That's really what it's all about, is our microorganism conservation that we have, which is, do not till the soil, do not put chemicals on the soil, don't spray harmful chemicals whatsoever. We do not use any biocides. We don't use harmful fertilizers. We don't use Roundup, anything like that. We're just growing plants and natural organic matter and increasing the carbon in the soil, instead of decreasing the carbon in the soil every single year. I think that this style of vegetable farming is going to be the new norm in the next like 20 years.

I don't think people are going to have an option, because there's so much soil depletion going on, that we can't continue to farm the way we are. Everything has to go over to no-till. Even the big guys, in their farming these days, who are using combines and tractors, they have no-till equipment. They are getting grants. They're getting government funding, to be able to implement these no-till practices, even if it's large scale.

There's really no benefit whatsoever to tilling, unless you have to establish a plot. When we expand our garden, we'll use machinery to be able to work up the soil, enough to be able to create our beds and everything. It's been working pretty well for us.

We have all the animals systems, which are the beef, lamb, pork, chicken. We have chickens for eggs. Then we also have a mushroom operation that is run by our great friends, Ben and Rebecca, who I saw on your sheet. David Harper was on here. They know him really well. I think they applied for some of the same grants together, which has been great. We've been applying for a lot of grants for this mushroom operation.

It's a very unique thing, because we're growing mushrooms in a shipping container. We take all of these old pharmaceutical grade shipping containers, closed cell foam, already insulated. We put a floor and we divide the walls up inside, and we can build scientific laboratories in these containers and have a completely sterile environment. We're expanding into our second container this year, which is pretty exciting. So yeah, there have been some issues with other local mushroom growers not being able to stay in business. It all worked out at the right time, for us to be able to come into doing this.

It's just item that we can include every single week for our customers. They really like the diversity, and there are a lot of health benefits from organic mushroom production.

That being said, we have all of these different enterprises on the farm. It's extremely chaotic and crazy from an outside perspective. It's taking a long time for us to build the systems, and we're still building these systems to be easy to manage. Another part of making this easy to manage is the way we sell our products.

We have a CSA, which is a Community Supported Agriculture program. We call it a farm share program, because people are really investing in us. They're giving us a lot of income-based security, by giving us a deposit and signing up and saying, "Hey, we're going to be your customer every single week. Since we have such a diversity of plants and animals on the farm, we needed an outlet for this. It's really difficult to sell to restaurants who might just want one pig. Well, we have a pig. We have a lamb, we have chicken. We have a ton of stuff to get rid of in this week.

We would have to go to like several restaurants. We would have to go to maybe three or four farmer's markets. Realistically, it's not worth it for a farmer to really leave the farm, unless than making a minimum of $2000. Even for a small farm, because it just simply costs so much money for us to the run operations.

After this whole COVID-19 thing, we already had our CSA model. We were already implementing this in Aiken, South Carolina and also in Columbia. Since COVID-19, this... it really allowed us to expand. The week that we had the farmer's market shut down, was the week that we expanded our CSA. We had a bunch of people who were just kind of referred to us from their friends, which is terrific. We really like to have that community atmosphere. That kind of got us over the hump, so we didn't have to go to the farmer's market. Then we just got flooded with customers, partially because I got on the news, it's kind of fun.

FM:

There you go.

CR:

We had all these people wanting to sign up. Now we have a waiting list for this program. Every single week, we have $75 and we have $100 shares. People get a combination of meat. It's usually two things. This week I think, it was like a whole chicken, chicken breast and a pack of bacon or a pack of sausage. Then we have about $25 worth of vegetables, which include baby salad greens, baby kales that are fully washed and processed and dried. The shelf life is three times as long on our salad greens, than what you would be getting from California. We have all of this stuff that you would normally get at the grocery store, cucumbers, onions, carrots, all of these things. We grow such a diversity of crops on our farm in the CSA. Then we also have eggs and we have mushrooms. We're unable to actually keep up with the egg production at this time.

FM:

Wow.

CR:

We did a little bit of work with another farm, and we got them to do some direct retail beef. There are a lot of farmers out there who have beef herds or flocks of sheep, and they're not selling directly to consumers. We met these young farmers, and we encouraged them to do direct to consumer sales. Forget about selling to the big livestock markets and all this, and it saved their business. We... or the increase of our CSA, we had an increase in this egg demand. They started a huge egg layer flock, and we're able to pair with them. That's really what it's all about, is being able to have more farmers that are out there, who are working with each other to make sales. We buy like 20 dozen eggs. I think it'll probably go up to like 100 dozen eggs here soon from now.

FM:

Wow.

CR:

It's really great for them, every single week to have that security, they're getting a paycheck from us and our customers love the free range, non-GMO terrific eggs that they get. Every single day, behind these wonderful organic grass-fed cows, it's like the most terrific thing.

FM:

Well, it sounds like you've set up a really idyllic place. When we think of farms, and even the packaging on those store bought eggs or kind of this little farm with all these different animals and different crops. Part of us grows up thinking that all farms are like this. I think people are really opening their eyes to realize that industrial farming is not like this at all. Do you mind spending a moment comparing high intensity industrial farming with your permaculture regenerative style of farming? I had mentioned to you before we started recording, that I had read an article that well, there is a lot of people coming out saying that the way we do high intensity meat production is only going to make us more susceptible for pandemics like COVID-19 due to the living conditions of the animals and how all of that is treated. Let's talk about the comparison, so people get a better idea of the benefits of regenerative farming over the current high intensity, conglomerated, centralized farming system that we have now.

CR:

Okay, so number one, is there're a lot of different farms out there that are contributing to the current model that we have. There're so many different contractors that work for larger corporations. We have farmers down the street from us who, they only have like 1,000 acres, maybe 2,000 acres of beef on production. All the beef that they produce, all the beef steers every year, they get trucked on semi-trucks, into these feed lot situations, right? Then the feed lots also buy grain from certain farmers. They might only have a couple thousand acres, or 500 acres in production. They might not be big farmers, but it takes many, many, many farmers to allow us to feed people the way we're feeding them right now.

It's not like your neighbor who has a couple hundred acres of corn and a combine is an evil guy. He's really not. The bottom line is, he's never been taught a different way and he's doing the best that he can to feed people. It's an honorable thing that these conventional farmers are doing.

We just do it in a different way. We work just as hard, probably a lot harder than they do, because they're sitting in their climate controlled cabs and we're on the ground on our feet every day. You have all of these players that are kind of within that sphere. You have these small farmers, and then you have giant corporations that kind of like rule and dictate what those farmers can do.

You have like a Monsanto and Syngenta Corporations, and they sell seeds to be small farmers and they have to follow specific laws and everything. You know what? I don't necessarily think GMOs are bad, because it decreases the use of biocides on those crops. It is beneficial in some way, because you have less chemicals like leaching into the water supply and less bugs being affected. Especially like bees and birds and things like that, affected by these really harmful chemicals. It does decrease that.

The thing is, with these, it takes many, many small farmers to have a big feedlot operation. You have thousands of cattle that are fined in very, very small areas. They're eating grain, which means that they're farting all the time. There is a lot of methane production from that. We have methane production on our farm, but the thing is, the way that we do it, we actually have decreased levels of carbon from our cows. Our cows are carbon negative. Their cows require a lot of petroleum and fossil fuels to feed them, through the grain production and through silage production and hay production. You're talking about a huge scale.

These animals are sitting in feedlots, where they're just ankle deep, maybe knee deep in certain case in their own manure. It's not mud, it's manure. You have chicken houses, with tens of thousands of chickens in them, all side by side. They're all fed the same thing. There's no access to sunlight. They have to pump these animals with a lot of antibiotics to keep them alive. The pigs' situation, some of the pig farming is getting better. It's cleaner, it's more organized and things like that. You still have some of these big... like Smithfield-type of corporations, who have pigs in confinement houses. Where they're on metal grates, and the giant gashes and slits in their feet. The mother sows can't move. It's animal abuse pretty much.

Not just that, but when the animals are sick, they're not well, they do not have access to clean water, clean air, sunshine, grass, bugs. You have to think about all of the different things that these animals need. When you create an aquarium, you are trying to mimic an ecosystem for that particular fish and you want it to literally look like the ocean. Why aren't we doing that for these animals? Why are the pigs in confinement houses, when wild pigs are out there running around on hundred thousands of acres and rooting up all kinds of different stuff in the woods? You have bison that are grazing in Yellowstone, constantly moving all of the time. They're not sitting knee deep in their own fecal matter.

That's the main difference with what we're doing. We are looking intimately at how these animals would naturally interact with nature, and we're replicating those natural systems in our domesticated farming systems. Which in turn, give us a lot of resiliency in the systems that we're building.

There will eventually be a transition from this monocrop and confined animals' situation. The thing is, there has to be money to be gained from it. We need to start looking at understanding, how to transition certain farmers into more regenerative practices. As I mentioned before, there are no-till seed drills and things like that, that farmers are already using, there are a lot of farmers who are already starting to cover crop and add organic matter into the soil, and in the season when they're fallow. It's not just dry dirt that's blowing away in the wind.

There are a lot of farmers who are starting to enact little things over time. We're just not doing it fast. Our model is to be able to scale our business to be enormous. We want to be huge. We want many, many, many farmers to be involved in what we're doing. We don't personally want to make a ton of money from it. We just want to see the benefit in our community and the planet. We want to make a good living at it. We want to have health insurance. We want to have the basics in our life taken care of.

What we're really planning on doing is taking what we're doing and looking deeper and deeper into the natural world, to understand how we can replicate ecosystems at a huge scale. What we want to do is plant nut trees and fruit trees, and all of the different associated plants in a wild ecosystem. We'll plant them on hedgerows, on the scale of thousands of acres. Instead of having corn and soy and wheat, and barley and all the things that we use in our livestock feed now, we'll be feeding nuts and seeds to our animals instead. In the form of chestnuts, pecans, hazelnuts, what am I forgetting? Hickory nuts, acorns.

FM:

Walnuts?

CR:

Oh, I don't know if I can grow them here, maybe.

FM:

We have two walnut trees on our property.

CR:

Really, can it work?

FM:

Yeah, they're coming back. They only produce fruit every couple of years, but I'm looking up at the walnut trees this year and I think this is going to be the year. I feel like I've put a lot of love into the land and they're going to give me something nice.

CR:

That's terrific. Well, anyways, pretty much what we're doing. We want to create this forest ecosystem. Where you have a giant canopy layer, these huge nut trees that go above. Then right below that, you have the trees at the next layer, which would be like your apple trees and your pear trees and cherries, and loquat trees and mulberry trees. Trees that spanned the entire season, and they're all fruit at different times.

Then you get down lower, and we have shrubs like currants and gooseberries, and blueberries and things like that. Below that, we have our vines that come up. We're growing like passion fruit and kiwis, and gourds and squashes and things like that. Then in between those giant hedgerows, you can have your forage-based blends. That's what we call it in ranching. You're going to have your clover, you're going to have alfalfas, you're going to have winter peas, rye grasses. Then you can integrate other things, depending on what crops you have. So for a pig, for instance, we would plant in between those hedgerows... in the pastoral space, we would be planting tons of squashes and pumpkins and things like that, for them to go in and eat that all year long. We can store squashes in the winter, so we get a really long shelf life out of them. Like last year, we had like trailer loads of pumpkins that we got. We'll get that from people who... people don't want their pumpkins after Halloween. We just take all the pumpkins from the local big stores.

FM:

Yeah.

CR:

Right now we do have a relationship with a local brewery, and we get all of their spent grain. That's kind of cool, but the bottom line is, it's not taking place on our farm. The growing of the calories that go into the chickens and that go into the pigs, that does not come from our farm. We're not growing those grain crops. We want to be able to build a system where, if we lost all of those grain crops for some reason, we have built-in resiliency within this hedgerow food forest system, to where we can passively feed those animals without having to use grain. I think we can do it.

FM:

Well, you're like a shining example. I think that the amount of work you've put into this is just impressive. I certainly really want to go down there and see it myself. I'm doing a little mini regenerative gardening thing here, and we're just starting out in the journey. Well, I think leading by example is just a great way instead of hypothesizing about what can be done. You're leading the way, so that's fantastic.

CR:

You can always think about stuff, and people can get around and have a glass of wine and talk all they want to. We have a cold beer at the end of the day, because we're really tired.

FM:

Yeah, exactly. It's a good tired. It must be a fulfilling sort of tired, that they're working in creating these systems and working in land.

CR:

Absolutely. I think our guiding philosophy on all of this is, human beings took a path of destruction, right? We're really interesting organisms on this planet, because we can think for ourselves. We have critical thinking skills, and it can allow us to change the course of history. We took one path, and that one path was the easy way. It was the way that allowed us to industrialize food. It allowed us to rapidly grow a population in a country. It allowed us to have manufacturing, and people are so used to having an easy way of doing things and an easy life, because of the modernization of agriculture.

For us, we view it as, we could have taken a different path. Human beings could have increased the diversity that we have on this planet. We didn't have to deforest all of these forests. We could have selectively cut. We could have planted all of these fruit trees over the past hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of years since the dawn of agriculture. We didn't have to continually domesticate crops. We could have continued in a more horticultural pathway, that allowed us to increase the diversity of plants, fungi, animals and bugs on this planet. We took the opposite path, we decreased the diversity. Right now, all possibilities are open. We can change that every single day, just by doing little things.

These are just little things like, when I drive around in a city, I will commonly just get out of my truck and grab some seeds off of a tree or make a couple prunings, if I see a mulberry tree or something. I'll take that home and root it. The next thing you know, in a month, that tree is outside growing. We'll bring in plant diversity from all different areas, and people need to start doing that. It's very, very simple. You can implement community gardens wherever. It's just a matter of putting the work into doing it.

FM:

Yeah, I think there is also a disconnect. I think modern society has disconnected us from nature. I know part of my journey is actually learning all this stuff. I wouldn't necessarily know a mulberry tree in the city, in order to take a clipping and root it. I've been educating myself on things I can forage in my yard, so I can get oyster mushrooms out of the back. We've got blackberries down the road, and weeds that we can eat and that's been an interesting process. I think the population as a general, is so disconnected from that, that we have to bridge that gap somehow as you have. I mean, maybe that's part of your education, of bringing people onto the farm. Is that part of it?

CR:

Yeah, it's definitely a part of it. I think you can sum that up in the term nature deficit disorder. People have such a disconnection from nature, that they're scared of it. I think a good example of this, we're all scared and terrified of mushrooms. "Don't touch that mushroom. You're going to die." There really aren't that many toxic mushrooms out there. You could grab one that's going to give you renal failure, but most likely not.

The thing is that, you can break that apart in every single way. People just need to get outside more, and I don't necessarily think it starts with gardening. It could, it really starts with just going on a hike. Going walking in the woods and doing it on a regular basis. That's the first step, and then maybe grow a garden in your backyard. You start to identify some of the trees on the daily hiking that you're doing. Not just that, but you're getting exercise. There some people who are just sitting on their couch all the time, and you can't expect to change the world if you're just sitting around. You have to be in really good shape to do it.

FM:

Yeah, and I think part of this comes back actually to... I don't think I coined this term, but I can't remember who coined it. Our convenience culture, which is something you were talking about, like taking the easy way or taking something that has more longevity. Our whole system is programmed to be hyper convenient. When things are easy to do, people are going to do them and that equals actually spending more money, when we have the sort of profit system that we have now, where that overtakes everything. You want that person sitting on the couch, doing nothing except for online shopping or whatever it may be. Our entire society has kind of unfortunately made this convenience culture. I think what I'm finding personally is, you don't get the same rewards out of things that are hyper convenient.

Part of the reward is going through the process. Like is going through a drive through at McDonald's more satisfying than spending an hour at my stove cooking something? At some point fundamentally, there is a difference there, but it's very hard to break people out of those habits. You have to have the personal will to do that. You can't force someone to do that.

CR:

No, you can't, but I think it also comes down to like making people stronger. We live in a really weak culture. Most people are very weak mentally and physically. It's about hardening yourself up a little bit more, and doing things that take you out of your comfort zone every single day. It's good to be uncomfortable, because guess what? After a while of being uncomfortable, you're not uncomfortable anymore. You get used to it. Early on when I was doing a real hard labor and stuff, my body hurt a lot and it just doesn't anymore. You get stronger, your body adapts to it. You don't think about getting dirty. You don't think about the dust or the smell of manure. That's just part of your life. We can adapt to a situation, any situation as human being, almost faster than any other organism. We're very, very quick to adapt. We can eat different foods. We can go vegan to going and eating meat. Your body can adapt to almost anything and people just need to really start to push themselves a little bit more, and figure out what they can do in their own lives to start moving in this direction of just living more resiliently.

I say that with a lot of intention, because I don't believe we should live in a sustainable way. We don't want to sustain the path... like our life right now. If we sustain the direction that we're moving in, well, we're going to end our civilization, so we need to take all the steps necessary, to make things more resilient from... starting at your home. You can grow so much food in your house. You can catch all the rainwater catchment off your roof. You can put solar panels on top of your roof. You can start talking to your neighbors. That's a really big thing. Getting them to grow certain things that you're not growing and trading with them, and working on some of these various code issues that we have in the cities where you can't have goats or chickens and things like that.

There are a lot of things that people can just do to focus in the home, which we call a permaculture zone one and zone zero. That's the area that's in and around your home, focus on that first. Then you can start to focus on getting out to the community and making change that way.

FM:

Yeah, you said some interesting points. I was taking a soil advocacy course, and they brought up this idea of, we need to not be sustainable. Sustainable is such a hot topic term, sustainable, sustainable. You've expressed it exactly. In this course, what they're talking to us about is, we're in a degenerative sort of system right now. Where this is a good place to be, we're way down here. If we sustain down here, like you said, we can't sustain down here. We need to regenerate up to a better level, and then talk about sustaining if we come back up here. That was the first time I had heard of that, because sustainable certainly is the buzzword now, like sustainable, sustainable. Like you said, what sort of life are we sustaining at this point?

CR:

Smithfield Farms is sustainable.

FM:

There you go. That's the perfect example, exactly.

CR:

You don't want to be sustainable, no.

FM:

You touched a little bit on city codes. I want to see if you want to illuminate some of the code issues that you encounter when it comes to this style of farming. You said... well, when we'd spoken previously, that there was a bigger demand for meat, because we have had these meat plants shut down. There are USDA regulations that may be prevent you from scaling your business up faster, and I don't think many of us know about these. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?

CR:

Oh yeah, sure. I don't think this necessarily has to do with code enforcement and code violations, but it does have to do with state and federal meat inspection based regulations for farmers, which is a huge issue. I'll break it down, so we can just start with chicken.

Federally, I believe people are allowed to butcher up to 20,000 chickens a year on their own property, but in the State of South Carolina, you have to have a certain facility that meets the requirements that Clemson University has proposed for 20,000 per butchery. On our farm, we can only process 1,000 birds every single year, because we have an outdoor butcher set up. We're on a concrete slab. We have water. We have professional butcher table. We have a professional plucker system. A whole nine yards, but we can only process 1,000 birds. That's a huge limiting factor for us. If we were able to just simply have a 5,000 bird processing on the farm every single year, then it would be a game changer for us financially.

I don't know why we can't do that. I really don't. I don't see it as a health and safety issue whatsoever. In fact, people are terrified of microbes. I think this is where it comes from. They're terrified of E. coli and salmonella and all of these things. I guarantee you, if you take a bacterial swab from any of our butcher tables and you compare that with an indoor butcher situation, our system is way cleaner. Yes, there is dust. There is animal particulate matter probably floating in the air. You know what? When you ingest that stuff, your body should be strong enough to handle it. Being outside, we have fresh air. There is a lot to having fresh air flow. You don't want something that's completely confined.

The only reason to have indoor spaces is if you have a fly problem and then the flies can transmit diseases and stuff. If you don't have a fly issue, it's not a big deal. In South Carolina, we really don't have any flies in the winter, early spring and late fall. It's a perfect time for us to be butchering chickens on the farm. We process a lot of our animals for our own consumption during that time period. They can maybe make some laws around, "Oh hey, you cannot butcher chickens from this month to this month. During six months of the year, you're allowed to butcher up to 2,000, 3,000 birds." 1,000 birds is just very limiting. If you sell a chicken at $20, then it's only like 20,000 bucks. You're looking at like 50% profit margins with that enterprise, so you're only making 10 grand.

FM:

Yeah. I listened to another podcast this week, that was talking to a regenerative farmer in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia.

CR:

Joel Salatin's.

FM:

Yes, exactly. That was one that Joe... someone sent that to me, the Joe Rogan podcast. He was talking about similar USDA restrictions on selling meat, that your neighbor could buy a piece of meat from you. I don't know if this is Virginia or US, if he-

CR:

The US.

FM:

... butchered a cow, the neighbor could pay him for that cow. Well, he'd have to sell the whole cow or the half cow. If he actually butchered it into steaks, his neighbor could buy it, but he would be in trouble for selling it. It's illegal for him to sell cuts of meat. Is that correct?

CR:

That is correct. We cannot butcher any large animals on the farm, and have that legal at any scale. It's not one, two, we can't do it period, end of story. This week, I took one of my beef cows in the butcher on Monday. I tried to get an appointment for my next one, and it's not going to be until November.

FM:

Oh, wow.

CR:

How am I supposed to feed people, if I can't get any animals butchered?

FM:

Yeah, that's a huge roadblock right there.

CR:

The thing is like, it costs a lot of money to have a legitimate butchering facility, even if it's just a state regulated one. You're looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars. We have to build our own butcher facility on the farm, with the way that we're planning on scaling our operation. There's no way that we can do what we're doing, and we continually expand without being able to open our own butcher facility. We're so limited by the meat processing that we have. We have one USDA butcher in the whole State of South Carolina.

We had two of them, but the other one got shut down, because the facility was run horribly. They were smoking cigarettes inside. I talked to other farmers, but they had animals sitting in cages in the back for weeks on end. That's why government regulations exist... is because people like that should not be operating a business. It's not a safe way to do it. Like Joel Salatin says... and I believe this, because our CSA model promotes this, is having connection with the customers.

If there were zero regulations when it came to this whole meat processing thing, then I could butcher animals on my farm and legally sell that without inspection, every single one of my customers would come to the farm and see the butcher set up. There is no hiding it from my customers, because we have an open door... if you are our customer, we even open door policy. You just need to make a scheduled time to come out and see the farm. We show everybody how we put your chickens. The thing is, there's accountability with community. Especially with the CSA based model, people know you. You show up to their doorstep every single week. There is a face-to-face interaction, and they expect to have safe, clean food from you. The practices that we have, in my opinion, are a lot safer than the ones that the USDA has.

FM:

Yeah.

CR:

It's a really big issue, because we do not have any processes to get our meat done. Right now, we have like 200 pigs on the farm, and we're having a lot of trouble getting those pigs butchered in process because of COVID-19. We probably have half the staff right now at our butcher facility, and there have been so many farmers who wanted to butcher more animals locally now. The big processors are shutting down, or something's happening with the middleman distribution, complicated, convoluted, ridiculous farming system. That we have... more ranchers are trying to schedule beef and pigs to get butchered locally so people like me who've had established businesses for years, we can't get our animals done. I mean, I don't really know what to do about it. What do we do, just stop butchering animals? Well, our customers needed their food.

If it came down to it, I guess I would just butcher the animals and deliver it to their doorstep and potentially get arrested. I don't think it's going to come to that. We have a close relationship with our butcher, and we are of somewhat priority to them. We'll kind of see how things go. The bottom line is, the government is going to be involved in our life, which I don't believe that they should be involved in our life. Maybe when it comes to other certain social programs and things like that. When it comes to what I put in my hand and it goes into my mouth, there should be no regulation around that. That goes for drugs and that goes for food.

FM:

Well, I mean, they certainly haven't been good at protecting us from harmful things that are going in our mouth. I mean, how many drugs are recalled constantly? The processed food that comes out under the label of food, they've kind of screwed all that up. As our food systems are breaking down because of COVID-19, I want to talk to you... like how can we envision the future? We've talked about this with a few other podcast guests. We spoke to Puja Ganguli about food systems. Then we mentioned David Harper, who is from Land in Common, which addresses the land issue you talked about, where it's hard for young people who want to go into farming to get onto land, just because the cost barrier is so high.

David particularly spoke about developing bioregions. You seem to be well positioned for Aiken and Columbia, maybe even Augusta. Do you see these bioregions or how do you see these...? Is this a positive way to move forward in the future, and do you see roadblocks in the way?

CR:

As far as land access programs and things like that?

FM:

Basically, I mean, my understanding of bioregions is to... your farm would feed the surrounding area. This farm would feed it, instead of us pulling food from California and New Zealand and also focusing on growing a native foods, instead of bringing in all these European or African, or whatever plants that we seem to bring in as well.

CR:

Sure, yeah. Well, number one is yes, we have to completely localize the entire food system, as it just doesn't make any sense whatsoever to be importing food anywhere. There's no reason. We shouldn't be shipping chicken from the US to China, to get processed and then, etc., etc.

FM:

When I lived in Scotland, you get your lamb from New Zealand and that always just blew my mind.

CR:

It's ridiculous. There aren't that many lamb farmers. That's why we really need to grow more sheep here.

FM:

Well, I mean, and Scotland especially is surrounded by sheep. I really don't know why they were bringing in New Zealand lamb into Scotland. It was... who knows?

CR:

As far as the bioregion thing goes, yes, we have to localize food. I think the way that it will be shaped is that, I think it's necessary for like 20% of the population to be farming.

FM:

Okay.

CR:

Well, I was looking at it this way. Like all the people who are involved in my farm... and we're feeding just like 50 people a week, like 50 families every single week. A huge portion of their groceries, it's me, it's Allyssa, it's Joey, as our three main partners. Then we have two volunteers who were at the farm almost every single day. Then we have two guys who work at my grain mill, and they get on my non-GMO grain. I have two non-GMO grain farmers, in addition to the mill workers. It's like nine people. Let's say... there's probably one person in there I'm forgetting, but let's just say 10. It takes 10 people to feed 50 people, 50 families a week. That's 20% of the population that we require in our system, but there're so many more people who are involved. We have seed production farmers, where we buy our seed from.

There are hundreds of people who grow our seeds and we buy seed from them. What about the guys who make the vacuum seal bags that we use, or the butcher paper or I ordered a bunch of fruit trees this year from online? There are nursery specialists who are growing those fruit trees. The list goes on about people who are involved in the farming system, to be able to feed families directly. It's going to require so many more farmers and many more farmers per acre.

That's the thing, you need more farmers per acre of land. We don't need as much land as we're currently using to produce food. It's just too much land. We need more farmers on less acreage, focusing on smaller systems. If we do that, that means all of these farm lands that are in corn and wheat and soy production, they don't have to exist anymore. That means that it can go back into wilderness and we can put trees in there. The deer population will go up and we have more hunting resources for example.

With our bioregion, we will be able to produce so much food. It doesn't matter where you are really. Your climate just dictates what you can grow, at what point in the year. You can grow food all year long in Vermont. You can grow food all year long in Canada. You're just going to have to use high tunnels. In the summer, you're going to have to have all these preparations, to be able to get your animals through the winter time. Where we are, we have a lot more diversity, but we have other problems that we have in this ecosystem, because of the lack of winter. We have all these problematic invasive grasses and weeds and things like that, that make it very difficult to farm here.

For example, we can produce 50% of the fruit and vegetables that you see in the store and that's huge. We can grow more than that, it's just, they're different foods than what people are used to. You might not be eating avocados, but you're going to have currants and gooseberries and blueberries, and Asian pear trees and persimmons and things like that. Just unique fruits that people are not used to.

I think that's kind of going to be the thing, if we're going to move in the right direction, is making a seasonally appropriate food for people to be eating. I think that's a huge thing and moving away from eating chicken. I don't think we should be eating chicken, because it requires such a massive amount of grain. I think we can move pigs in that direction, of having them eat less grain and slowly no grain. You can only have a certain amount of chickens on your farm. Every person could probably look after a couple of chickens, but every person, every family needs to have chickens in their backyard. It's not something that is meant to be had on a large landscape. If people just had all their food waste distributed into their chicken run, the chickens wouldn't need any food.

FM:

Yeah, we're doing that right now. We just got 15 chickens, which were my father-in-law's and he passed away in November. Since then, we've been trying to build the coop and all that. Yeah, now we have to prioritize food scraps for the chickens and food scraps to the compost pile. We get like two dozen eggs a week. I think five of the chickens are older and they don't lay anymore. They're just doing their thing. It's pretty cool.

CR:

I think that we just need to focus on what we can do essentially. What can we do in the region that we're in, and how do we allow people to access that food?

FM:

Well, hopefully Woodland Valley Farms will be leading the way and trying to... because you're leading the way in so much it sounds like. It was exciting for me to find a regenerative farm in South Carolina.

CR:

I think we are. Yeah, I think we have a lot of work to do. We need to become more professional in many ways, but that comes with time. We're young farmers and ranchers, and we're all under the age of 32. I think that you need to have more people coming into farming, who are learning and they're younger and they're making the mistakes that we're making. All those people are going to be the leaders of the future.

We need farmers to be heroes essentially. We need them to be able to stand up for wildlife conservation issues. We need them to stand up for our rights and our freedoms really, that we have in this country, to be able to process our own animals. I mean, this is a huge issue. It really is. I think the biggest thing that people can do right now, is just go and connect with a local farmer and say, "I want to spend my money with you. What can you grow for me?" There're so many times where we have people, "Oh, we want this or that." Like, "But you only want it one time."

FM:

Yeah.

CR:

We need consistent customers to keep our business going. I would do anything, if somebody came to me and they're like, "Oh hey, we just want to give you $1000 right now, and please grow all these chickens for me. I just want you to grow my chicken." There are so many farmers out there who would be like, "Please, please." You just need to find those farmers, and let them know that you want to be their customer. That's the biggest thing. Then figure out how you can help them, too. We need volunteers at our farm all the time.

We had 35 volunteers coming out on Sunday, and people just were... our CSA members, they were rocking it. They love what we're doing. They want to come out and support what we're doing. They helped us weed the garden. We had a huge barbecue. We butchered a pig on the farm. We ate it on the farm ourselves. We barbecued it. That's totally legal, but there are ways to get around these things. I hate to say it, but black market stuff, it might be the new normal. I mean, who's going to arrest you for selling vegetables to your neighbors without some license or something? No one's going to report you. These are just bureaucratic people who are trying to steal your money.

FM:

Yeah, and they don't have any enforcement behind it. I mean, there're so many laws and regulations out there that aren't enforced, so no doubt.

CR:

Did we miss anything?

FM:

No, Chase. I think this has been great. Tell us how people can connect with you and Woodland Valley Farms.

CR:

Okay. Well, you can connect with us on two different Instagrams. One is @farmerlissie on Instagram. That is my wonderful partner. Our other Instagram is @woodlandvalleyfarms. You can also find us on woodlandvalleyfarms.com or just Google me, and you can see us on the news.

FM:

Nice, what news station were you on?

CR:

It goes like Augusta News or something.

FM:

Okay. You guys are located in Jackson, South Carolina, correct?

CR:

We're in Jackson. Yeah, I think there are a couple of articles written about us online and stuff, so you can check it all out. We're hoping to launch our YouTube channel in about a year from now, so stay tuned.

FM:

Yeah, keep us in the loop. I will share links to the articles with our audience. It will be in the show notes as well. I really appreciate your time. It is really fun talking about regenerative agriculture, especially from someone who's living, breathing and doing it. Keep up the good work and thanks for joining us.

CR:

Thank you for interviewing me. I really appreciate it. Have a great day.