Caring for Cattle Around the US, Conversation with Ryan Goodman (Episode 305 Grounded by the Farm Podcast Transcript)

December 28, 2021

Caring for cattle has some differences depending on the area you are in. The terrain can be so different and the amount of grass and rainfall differs too. That’s what we discuss with cattle care with Ryan Goodman in the latest episode of Grounded by the Farm!

This podcast transcript was created through Otter.ai.

36:59

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

cattle, people, feed, beef, eat, yard, ranch, grow, mountains, forages, grass, wyoming, run, nutrition, animal, move, cow, raising, calves, steak

SPEAKERS

Ryan Goodman, Janice Person – Grounded by the Farm

 

Grounded by the Farm  00:01

Food is more than just what’s on our plate. It’s the places where it’s grown. It’s the people who grow it and so much more. Join me, Janice person your host on grounded by the farm every other week as we talk about the foods we love. In this episode of grounded by the farm, I took the most scenic drive I think so far on my trip coming in through Southern Virginia, crossing the Blue Ridge Parkway, which is like one of America’s most scenic drives. Every fall, people talk about it, this episode will be a little bit later, but the leaves are still brightly colored on centuries. They’ve fallen off others. And we’re going to be talking with a longtime friend of mine, Ryan Goodman, and Ryan, God loved him, he just test us, you know, he has this ability to Okay, I’ll go with whatever. So as we sat down, I told him what I wanted to talk to him about is having farmed and ranched working with beef cattle in so many different places around the US. So Brian, why don’t you tell us? I first got to know you. You were in college, but you’re really from Arkansas originally.

 

Ryan Goodman  01:11

Yep. So I grew up on my family’s cattle ranch in Arkansas. And knowing that we were on a large special operation, definitely took advantage of that opportunity. And I had a great experience, we had the cow calf side of the ranch, the mother cows with the young calves. And then we kept ownership of those calves after the time of weaning. And so then that’s kind of where you call a stock ring or backgrounding phase is the terminology.

 

Grounded by the Farm  01:39

So keep both steers and that. Okay, yeah, so you’re gonna keep raising the girls to have more babies. Yeah. And then you also do the others to feed them and to sell them into the market? Correct?

 

Ryan Goodman  01:55

Yep. So we would keep the females to raise and keeping the cow herd and they would eventually become mothers about two years of age. And then all the males and the females that we wouldn’t keep as replacements we kept them and so in the stocking backgrounding phase that’s kind of like where they’re growing on grass. And we had those in and we kept ownership of those calves until the feed yard and so that’s a feed yard feed lot to Keiko, where a lot of people there’s a lot of questions about that stage. But we kept ownership with them. We shipped them to Texas or Oklahoma Panhandles in paid people out there to finish feed them until they became beef for like an IVP or a Tyson ended up in grocery stores

 

Grounded by the Farm  02:33

and restaurants long did they stay with you before they’d go to a feedlot.

 

Ryan Goodman  02:37

So they would, we would wait about seven months of age, and we would keep them anywhere from 45 to 90 days. After that, they were ready to go on to the next phase. And then that kind of grew. That phase of the business. We started buying our neighbor’s calves after they wean their calves. And then word got around. And before you know, we were buying 12,000 head of calves a year. Oh my gosh. And so when I say we were on special operation, it was not your average 40 Head cow calf operation, which is the average across the country for a farm. But we had 1200 head of mama cows and had 12,000 You know, stocker cattle throughout the year. And my field trip my vacation on spring break was to drive to Amarillo, Texas, we might stop in Oklahoma City for a steak, but we drive out there and we’d look at our cattle in the feed yards. That’s kind of all that I knew as a kid. But that was definitely something different. But I knew that like growing up in Arkansas, that’s how we did things. And that’s how the feed yards looks and in Texas, but after I left high school, I knew, Okay. We live in a huge industry. We live in a huge country. And people do things differently. Our neighbors raise cattle there differently than we do. So I kind of took it upon myself to broaden my experiences after high school. And so throughout college and after college, I’ve had the opportunity to work on farms and ranches everywhere from eastern Tennessee, through Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, moved up to Wyoming and Montana ranch in the mountains on 80,000 acres near this there the tree lines and have worked in all of those different environments and work with farmers and ranchers from Hawaii to the east coast and everywhere in between. Yeah, and that has just been an awesome and unique opportunity that I definitely try not to take for granted. But it’s been pretty unique to see how things are done on different places.

 

Grounded by the Farm  04:26

I can remember one of the earlier pieces. So you went to school at Oklahoma State, which you are also studying livestock, right animal.

 

Ryan Goodman  04:34

Yep. So at Oklahoma State I studied in animal science, and they allow you to like drill in within that major. And so I focused on reproduction and nutrition. Okay, and beef cattle.

 

Grounded by the Farm  04:45

And so that’s when I met you and you were doing a couple of different things. So at one point you had the most picturesque photos because you were working on a ranch in Wyoming. You were doing horseback In the mountains, it was absolutely gorgeous.

 

Ryan Goodman  05:04

Yep. So I, I’m a big believer, whenever I talk to college students, I said one of the best things that you can do is take an internship into something, even if it’s within your industry that you don’t know. And so I took one of those summers, and I moved up to the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming, I had never been west of Oklahoma, like it’s still going to school there in Texas was like, as far as I had been. So moved up to Bighorn Mountains, Wyoming, I get up to the past. And in May, there was more snow on the past day than I had seen my entire life. And so I got up there and Ranch on 80,000 acres, got the opportunity to learn all types of irrigation for pasture and annual crops for hay forages, and got to push cattle up in the mountains. And when I’d moved up there, we didn’t have any phone service, obviously. And so my parents and all the family and friends back home, were like, You got to tell us what you’re doing. You got to tell us what you’re doing. So I’m like, Well, I don’t really have any way to tell you all the time. But what I started doing is on the weekends, when I’d have Wi Fi service on my day off, I’d go and I’d upload a blog post, this is what we did. And there’s some photos that I’ve gotten uploaded them to Facebook. And that’s kind of where blogging and sharing everything online really started. For me. That was such a unique experience. Because you know, in the southeast, we’re trying to pipe water off of fields, we have plenty of moisture that falls from the skies. It’s kind of a problem. Yeah. But out there. You’ve got to apply the water where you want things to grow.

 

Grounded by the Farm  06:34

So how much of a difference does that water make for the actual cattle besides the fact they’re going to be thirsty and stuff? But what other ways does, you know, moisture really impact them?

 

Ryan Goodman  06:46

Well, I think I took it for granted in how things grow. Right? We just have moisture fall from the sky and it kind of sometimes we have to water irrigate the garden and things like that. But we moved out to the high mountain country of Wyoming. And we’re talking 12 inches a year. Yeah. And most of that is snow and a lot of that runs off. And so if we wanted to grow a hay or forage crop, we had to irrigate it. And we had to let it grow. And you could see a line where there was no irrigation. It became sagebrush and cactus. That’s bewildering to a guy from the grew up in the Mississippi River Delta. Yeah, I mean, that was something that was very different. And then also wildlife. I mean, we had heard in the Ozarks, where they release some elk along the Buffalo River, and that was, you know, white tailed deer. And Turkey was what I knew of wildlife, but you move up in the mountains, and then you you’re getting close to grizzly bear country near Yellowstone and wolves, and elk herds and herds of elk that will just demolish a fence. And that was another aspect, but then like public lands, you know, I know the levee system along the rivers that’s government controlled or whatever, but out less public lands are a massive thing. And that was like, so much of that was just different in new to me. And

 

Grounded by the Farm  08:03

so one of the things about moisture, I was I was thinking of as you said that because I never knew, like muddy areas or problematic with livestock at times. So can you explain because I was like, What do you mean like, but it can introduce, like, if it’s in calving season, and you have a lot of mud, you can actually have cows kind of get stuck or something in some places. Have you ever worked in a place that has that kind of bad? Where you have to go pull it out of, I guess?

 

Ryan Goodman  08:37

Yeah, definitely. I mean, they’re they’re boggy areas. So I grew up along the line between Mississippi River delta in the Ozark Mountains. And so we had, you know, some foothills with a lot of rocky ground. But within that were some bio ground by you bio, however you want to say it, and then there was a lot of land that we lease, it was between rice fields. So Arkansas, huge rice country. Yeah. And so we would rent the ground between that there wasn’t fireable for our cattle, and there’s a lot of bog ground, a lot of baggy bottom ground that’s in there. And if you get the cattle in there, when it’s wet, you know, they can get buried up to their, to their knees to their stomachs in mud. And that can be a real problem, especially during calving. So you’ll have a cow that goes out onto an island in her calf won’t cross back across the mud or the water when it floods. And yeah, that can be a real problem. Whereas in the mountains, that’s not a problem outside like the rivers are the, you know, right next to the creek and the problem is getting enough water to grow grass. And so that was definitely something that was very different. There’s a huge contrast in parts of our country that you’ll get less than 10 inches of rain a year and then you’ve got problems getting enough water and I learned in Wyoming and eventually my time in Montana, where Same with policy, the true meaning of whiskeys for drinking and waters for fighting. You have to allocate, you know, here’s how much water I’m going to pull out of irrigation. versus, you know, that’s something I never thought about living in the southeast.

 

Grounded by the Farm  10:14

Right? Right, we just get so much rain, it’s rain fed, we don’t talk about dry land. Because it’s rain fed,

 

Ryan Goodman  10:21

right? A week without rain, and it’s dry.

 

Grounded by the Farm  10:23

Yeah. So, so you’re talking about Arkansas and Wyoming and you’re talking about hills in both places. Did cattle work well, on flat surfaces to or they, they really prefer kind of the mountains and stuff because I know sheep like mountains, to cattle really even care.

 

Ryan Goodman  10:44

Um, there’s differences, I guess, and how you manage them. So we had a lot of cattle when I was growing up on river, bottom land and Bayou bottom ground that were very flat and flood prone. And cattle graze really well, there’s not a lot of pushing them to one side or the other. And when you get into some of that, but whereas you get in the mountain country, and with that lack of water comes a bit more fragility to the forages

 

Grounded by the Farm  11:10

in the grasses. So sources for the food

 

Ryan Goodman  11:13

sources for the animals. So if they over graze the forages and the grasses, they’re there, it can really damage the root system and it won’t grow back. And then you’ll end up with bare ground or weeds, where there is where there is no moisture to get everything to grow back. And then they won’t always go to the top of the mountain. You know, they like to congregate near the water. And so sometimes you have to push them farther up. And so there’s definitely moving out west emphasize for me the importance of managing cattle and how you move them around different areas, and how long that they’re there and the management. Not only that, but an understanding of when you’re grazing cattle, you’re really a grass farmer. And I’ve kind of heard that term with people that were organic or niche marketing. It’s like, oh, roll my eyes. I’m not part of that. But really getting out west where you have to manage your forages more carefully, because it’s not just going to regrow. Right. That really helped me appreciate that part of the management of farming in ranching.

 

Grounded by the Farm  12:14

Yeah, when you went from those kinds of environments, you went to something really different than next stop. If I if I have your history right in my head, you went to like, the Texas panhandle.

 

Ryan Goodman  12:25

Yep. So after I graduated from Oklahoma State, I went to the Texas panhandle. And you’ll hear kind of old westerns and talk about the x it ranch or the honest Kado kind of rolling rough and rugged ranch country but what I was there for was cattle feed yard. Okay, I told you had kind of gone and visited those and had exposure to them. During high school and growing up. During college, I took an internship with at the time, the largest cattle feeder in the world cactus feeders. And because I

 

Grounded by the Farm  12:56

really do want to work at a place like that, right, exactly.

 

Ryan Goodman  12:59

But because of the relationship and I had gone and visited and taken interest and built my own relationship with people there in the end, they had an internship opportunity for me where I was able to work in each and every position in the feed yard. So I went and I was with the nutrition team and the cattle team. So we’re reading feed bunks, and how much do we feed cattle every single day. And then I worked in the feed mill. So I had the opportunity to work with every position in the feed yard, right. So I got the chance to go with the feed team and the nutrition team where we got to go and determine how much feed was delivered to the cattle every day and really how much is fed them. And then I went to the feed mill where we were mixing the feed and everything that goes into that and work with the veterinary crew on cattle health, and gave me a much deeper appreciation for like all the intricacies that go into feeding 45,000 head of cattle every day. And then after undergrad I went and took that opportunity and I guess it didn’t have enough and when worked for one of the JBS five rivers feed yards and by that time they had become the largest company in the world. So the feed yard where I was at in Dalhart, Texas, we had 60,000 head of cattle. So we’re mixing one and a half million pounds of feed a day to feed those. And so now I’d grown up around a lot of cattle and visitors but managing 60,000 head of cattle every single day when you go to work. It’s quite a feat and a big learning curve.

 

Grounded by the Farm  14:31

Yeah. So I think I’m a semi who hadn’t been around that right. So I love driving around and seeing like 20 cows on a beautiful green pasture. We saw a bunch of them today right where their black dots on the hill or there’s Charlayne so they’re white dots off on the distance or something. But the idea of working in a feed yard I mean Most people in the US have only seen things on documentaries or whatever. And, and it seems that that feed yard seems to be the opposite of the cattle we want, which are the pretty ones on the hill. But you’re, you’re saying they’re still the same cattle

 

Ryan Goodman  15:18

they are. And so I’ve written, you know, a couple dozen, probably at least two dozen blog posts, describing my experiences in the feed yard. And I get a lot of questions from people finding it on Google. And one of the things that people are really surprised by is that the cattle don’t live in a feed yard their entire life, that those are the cattle that you see out on the lush green pastures, that that’s just a segment in their life. And actually, they’re very intensively managed, okay, from their nutrition, to their health, to their welfare, their comfort, everything that goes on there, there is a trained professional that sees them every single day, whereas the ranch that I was on in Wyoming, we might see them once a week when they’re up in the mountains. And between that time, to be honest, you know, a wolf might have gotten that cow, or that calf, between that time they had gone through a thunderstorm or a snowstorm. Yeah, you know, is in between there. So I get a lot of questions about the feed yard, but every stage in raising cattle faces its own challenges, and might look a little bit different. And so cattle litter in the feed yard are there from, you know, 100 to 180 days, okay, on average of their life, that they’re there. And there’s a lot that goes into making sure that all of their needs are met, and that they’re comfortable. We get a lot of criticism for the feeding stage. Because one of the things he said, You say you might have seen the cattle as you’re driving by in the feed yard, but a lot of people smell it.

 

Grounded by the Farm  16:52

Well, I was trying to be polite,

 

Ryan Goodman  16:53

right? You know, I hear there’s there’s a lot of stories online of, you know, highway, interstate five in California, where people you know, smell feed yards and your population centers. And I was moving this summer across the country and drove by one in Nebraska that was right on the highway and the Google reviews on Google Maps. Yeah, you know, we’re negative it was people eat before, you know, it smells. And, you know, the sarcastic responses Ovilus city smells too, if you ever driven by, you know, the city plan. But it’s not always pretty and picturesque in what we’re doing. But that doesn’t mean that we’re not taking good care of the animals and the animals are well cared for. Because if they’re not, if their meat needs are not met, and they’re not well cared for, they’re not going to perform well. And so it is in our best interest to make sure that all of their needs are met in that situation.

 

Grounded by the Farm  17:45

Well, one of the things I think that always strikes me is it looks so weird to have some encounters all pushed in together, or stairs, or whatever it is, right? So many cattle all in one place. And then when I see them out on the past year or something, they’re usually all in one area, with the exception of just a couple maybe but they usually are all right up in the shade together or right at the water together or so they got a herding instinct. That’s part of who they are.

 

Ryan Goodman  18:18

Yeah, so cattle are herd animals. And they definitely need their space. So when they’re out on the pasture and eating grass, when they get their fill a lot of the time you’ll watch their natural behaviors. So I’ll go back to near the water source or source of shade, and congregate close together. Kind of where they’re at. In the feed yard. It’s you know, it’s a tighter spot. Definitely. They don’t have green grass and everything. But when you look in the bunks, they have a perfectly perfectly formulated ration. Their whole dinner plate is there in the bunk for them to be able to eat and

 

Grounded by the Farm  18:51

what kind of things do you put on their dinner plate? Because, you know, you think about it, we all know what their plate looks like in terms of colors. So we have proteins, and we have vegetables and we have breads and starches and we have you know all that stuff. So what do you need for?

 

Ryan Goodman  19:06

So yeah, this what what a cattle eat? That’s the question a lot of people ask and I went to school, continuing my graduate studies in nutrition, cattle nutrition and kind of what they eat in Tennessee. It was in Tennessee, I’d never went to a volunteer football game. I had to draw a line somewhere.

 

Grounded by the Farm  19:25

But that’s my home state, but

 

Ryan Goodman  19:26

I didn’t get to school there. Right, right. But so understanding cattle nutrition is very different. So cattle, their digestive systems are different than yours and mine.

 

Grounded by the Farm  19:37

Did they have multiple stomachs? I sometimes think my nephew did. But

 

Ryan Goodman  19:42

yep. So they’ve got multiple chambers to their stomach. Yeah. And they’re able to take nutrients from plants in multiple different forms to get what they need. So what we hear about in cattle feed yards is corn. A lot of people think corn in cattle feed yards, and it does a great job. source of starch and energy in the cattle diet, it’s a grain that is an awesome nutrient source and we’re able to utilize that. And it makes up a good portion of their diet. But that’s not all that they I have a lot of people come and ask that

 

Grounded by the Farm  20:12

because you sometimes see meat that’s sold as corn fed beef. Right? Right. And that doesn’t mean they only ate corn. Right? Correct. It’s only

 

Ryan Goodman  20:21

a portion of their diet. So, another big portion of that diet would be what we would refer to as rough edges, forages, so grasses, alfalfa hay, or silage. So, silage would be a wheat plant or a corn stock. And that whole plant is taken and chopped up and inside. And so we put good bacteria and then wrap it up and keep the oxygen out and it breaks down the plant cell walls where the animals are able to utilize all that. And then another big classification of things that catalysts are what we refer to as byproducts. Okay, and so it’s part of the plants that you and I don’t eat. So you think about cotton, my favorite, right? So we get the oils out of the cotton in the fibers out of the cotton, but what do we do with the rest of that plant? So we’re able to cattle are able to eat that

 

Grounded by the Farm  21:06

it’s weird because it’s a haul and it’s like the outside of the seed and everything but cattle seem to like it and they still get fiber and some oils off of that I think grass is a

 

Ryan Goodman  21:18

good source of good source of fiber, it’s a good source of fats in their diet. They’re able to eat Have you you know do you enjoy any you know, liquor or beer or wine.

 

Grounded by the Farm  21:29

So you’re going to get to burst grain

 

Ryan Goodman  21:31

brewers grain distillers grains. That’s what I did my specifically my research on in graduate school was with Jack Daniels distillers grains and cattle eating milk. That’s a great source of nutrition, protein and fats in their diet, and a lot of things like that. So anything that

 

Grounded by the Farm  21:46

it’s like the grain that’s been like mashed and had everything taken away from it to make the good liquors, right, as we take this stuff left. And that stuff happens to feed cattle in a way that’s really helpful to their diet.

 

Ryan Goodman  22:04

Correct? Yep,

 

Grounded by the Farm  22:05

should have gone it’s not like giving them Skittles all the time. Well, cattle eat Skittles, too. I know but,

 

Ryan Goodman  22:11

but not not in the sense that like over feeding them candy, but think about what’s in what’s in Skittles, it’s sugars. Yeah. So cattle, take plant sugars, plant based sugars, and break those down into the nutrients that they need. So people get really leery or curious about feeding cattle, different plant things like FAKHRY waste or something like that. But what we’re doing is we’re just taking plant based sugars and feeding them and I could go and nerd out on nutrition, I’m sure how they do that. But that’s gonna do that in the feed yard is we worked with cattle nutritionist to say okay, this is what we have to feed the cattle in understanding cattle nutrition, what what what

 

Grounded by the Farm  22:50

percentage of their diet should be sugars of different kinds, what should be fibers

 

Ryan Goodman  22:56

and being able to feed them what they need? And so we’re not just

 

Grounded by the Farm  22:59

when they Skittles, they don’t just eat Skittles all day, every day. Correct? It’s Skittles

 

Ryan Goodman  23:03

is mixed into corn is mixed into, like trail mix. Yep. It’s we’re able to mix that all together interest puppy for the cattle. And so that was huge in being able to do that in a cattle feeder. Can you imagine feeding 60,000? Yeah, yeah, I think time. So that was that was a pretty cool scenario. The other side of that was, so a lot of people may have concerns about animal health in that. And so we were talking about pin conditions will the cattle have room and the pins are big enough for every cattle can you know every animal can lay down and not touch each other and have space between them, but they still herd up. But animal health is one of those big things. So we paid a lot of attention to the pin conditions and so pins, pins were sloped, they were constructed where they shed water where there wasn’t standing water standing mud. And when that did happen, we went in and cleaned the pin and when we had a huge rainstorm, we drained it off and cleaned it and made sure that they had probably when it smells the worse. That’s when it smells worse when it gets wet. Yes, when you stir it up, but we trucked that out. We cleaned that out and made sure they had a dry place to lay. That was really important but then also every day every animal was looked at by a trained we call them cowboys but hurt Hills person Okay, so the pin writers are writing to the fan looking at every single animal every single day ensuring that they’re healthy and if they’re not, then they’re pulled out of the pin and they go to doctrine pan or a hospital that was treated by a crew that was trained by the veterinarian to treat them oversight by a veterinarian

 

Grounded by the Farm  24:40

and then you see if they’re not eating right or if they’re this or that or they got some open

 

Ryan Goodman  24:45

right or we would know their leg the first thing we do is do they have a fever, do they have a temperature you know what can we do to help them and a lot of that illness is actually respiratory. Yes like you and I get a cold

 

Grounded by the Farm  24:59

they coronaviruses or Coronavirus, is

 

Ryan Goodman  25:02

it you know anything like that could be an airborne virus or something like that or a problem. That’s your biggest problem. And when we’re using medicines in a feed yard to treat sick animals, um, that’d be your biggest source of illness. And so it’s just like, if you mix a, you know, a whole group of people together, we’re gonna get sick, by just carrying germs across each. Yeah, so

 

Grounded by the Farm  25:23

Well, I’ll remind people, we have an interview with Mary Beth fight is a veterinarian. So we’ve got an interview with her. And we talked about some of that, too. So if people want to listen to another one,

 

Ryan Goodman  25:33

so that’s one of those Yeah, one of those situations in the feed yard that I had to learn a lot about. Yeah. But then also is, I think, very well managed and often misunderstood.

 

Grounded by the Farm  25:42

Yeah. So you’ve also worked in, say, you worked on a ranch in Colorado. And now you’re here in Virginia? Yep. With your fiance’s family farm, and work in his cattle, and his name’s Aaron Sheeler. Everybody Shouts out to Aaron. But we were looking at it. And the differences in the environment are pretty stark. And even when he said something about moving cattle, I’m like, Oh, do you get on a four wheeler? And he’s like, Oh, no, we don’t do that. We lot. So which I didn’t realize there were areas where people walk. So those are just odd differences. I had never how all the move cattle then.

 

Ryan Goodman  26:25

Right? Big difference. So like in Colorado, so after several years, and I had been ranching in Colorado, and in Montana, and Wyoming and big, wide open ranches. And so out there, we know, in some places, we needed 40 acres to grow in a feed grass to feed a cow for a year. Oh, wow. Yeah, so we wouldn’t have 14,000 acres on the ranch where I was at most recently in Colorado, to feed the herd of cattle that we had for as I moved here to Virginia. And we’re able to get, you know, enough grass, grass almost year round, almost around, and we’re able to grow grass, you know, on one to two acres, most time about two acres to feed a cow for a year, kind of gives you the perspective and the difference in the amount of rainfall and grasses that were able to grow. And so here, you know, in 14,000 acres, I had to have a John Deere Gator to go and cover the amount of ground that I needed to to be able to see the cattle see the grass where they’re at feeding minerals every day, versus where we’re at in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia in southwest Virginia. You know, we’re moving cattle we intensively graze, meaning we use electric fences and move them every two to three days on to new fresh pasture and small patches. And so to move that fence around and move them just one section one place over. We don’t need we aren’t aren’t using any ATVs or

 

Grounded by the Farm  27:48

wave your arms go that way. You know

 

Ryan Goodman  27:51

what? The cattle can hear the click of the reel that winds up the wire? And they know it’s time to move? Oh, wow. Yep, they kind of get trained that routine, and are able to do that. And so it’s it’s a lot different than where I was out west. But same principles apply. You need to look at what are your resources, and how do you manage them? And that’s one common theme that I’ve been from, you know, far out in the West Hawaii, there’s cattle in Hawaii, did you know that? I have actually seen a few. Yeah, there’s cattle grazing up way up in the mountains in Hawaii, or all the way down to the coastline. And whether they’re the East Coast, the Mountain West, everything comes down to what are your resources? And how can we best manage and utilize those resources? Yeah, and I mentioned earlier not Yeah, I rolled my eyes. I was a little bit of a skeptic when people were talking about lawn grass farmer. But really, we’re trying our best to grow grass and utilizing cows, to harvest that grass to turn it into a protein and multiple other items that we as people are able to utilize.

 

Grounded by the Farm  28:57

That makes a nice sound for an end. Besides that, it’s a tasty treat.

 

Ryan Goodman  29:01

It is it is definitely tasty. So you know, beef can sometimes get a bad rap in the negative headlines that we see online. Yeah, but I’ve tried really hard not to just say it but to live it in it how beef can health help fuel healthy lifestyle?

 

Grounded by the Farm  29:22

Yeah, well, I mean, and if people want to find you on social media, that’s a really good plug over you go by beef runner. You’re an insane runner.

 

Ryan Goodman  29:31

Absolutely. A little bit so I was on a beef runners where you can find me online and a lot of people How do you find that in fact, I was on the on the phone line with the customer rep and a company that I was had a complaint about an order that he messed up and they said, your email and his be friendly. Tell me about that. And I’m like, Well, I raise cattle, beef, and I run really long distances in the runner. And so like

 

Grounded by the Farm  29:54

crazy long, I mean, you’re not like just doing little marathons. You know,

 

Ryan Goodman  29:59

I started with 5k in grad school, local beer market would give us a pint of beer, you know, after the reason, I’m good for that, and then it moved out in the mountains, and how can you not get out and explore the mountains. So I ran a half marathon near Yellowstone. That was good. And then friends taught me how to run a marathon. And then the next summer, I ran my first 50 mile race in the mountains of western Montana. And ever since then I’ve run, I think I’m over 40 Ultra distance races so far in the last five or six years, and so Ultra distance is 31 miles longer. And I’ve run 100 kilometer race on the Continental Divide in Idaho twice. And I ran my first 100 mile race in Wisconsin in August of 2021. And it took me 21 hours. And that was quite the experience.

 

Grounded by the Farm  30:53

It sounds way easier to work with cat to do the run?

 

Ryan Goodman  30:58

Well, it’s it’s definitely something that is an experience, you don’t often get the opportunity to experience what this links of your limits are.

 

Grounded by the Farm  31:13

Yesterday’s how far can you push yourself and, and still made it?

 

Ryan Goodman  31:17

Yep. And so the running for me is that and I love the trail community. We’re out there on the trails. And we can talk all day long while we are running, because we’re out there all day long, with fellow athletes stopping at the aid stations enjoying the food, talking about our love of public lands and the wildlife. And I often wear a shirt that has beef on it, Team beef, whatever it might be, and it never fails. I’m running with people from urban and suburban America, and they see that beef on my shirt. And they’re like, what is that? And so then that gives me the opportunity to tell them my beef story. Yeah, I grew up on a ranch. I worked on ranches, raising cattle, and I love beef. And you know what, I probably eat beef 10 to 14 times a week. And that people are what? Like, well, I just went to the doctor and I have great blood pressure, great cholesterol levels, like beef doesn’t have to be unhealthy. Yeah. When you’re when you’re eating it, and it can be part of a healthy balanced lifestyle. So I’m not only raising it, but I’m eating it and trying to show that, you know, I can grill it without all the salts with all the frying, you know, I grew up in the South, everything can be fried. But everything, everything. But not everything has to be deep fried beef can be really great source of nutrition. And when you are doing great feats of endurance.

 

Grounded by the Farm  32:35

No matter what nutrition is your friend, good nutrition

 

Ryan Goodman  32:37

is your friend and being able to eat beef as part of your plate. Yeah, doing that. So I think that’s been a unique journey as well. I’ve worked with a lot of registered dieticians, a lot of people in urban areas. And after we get past the shock of like, you can eat beef every day. They’re like, hey, you know what beef takes up a quarter of my plate. And then I do have a salad, I do have vegetables, you know, and I do enjoy my food as well. And that kind of brings it all back together. And I can talk about the nutrition that we and our cattle.

 

Grounded by the Farm  33:06

Well, since since you and I both love to travel. Where

 

Ryan Goodman  33:10

have you had your best steak? My best steak?

 

Grounded by the Farm  33:14

You can give me a couple of steak places, I

 

Ryan Goodman  33:16

guess. Um, you know, I think my favorite steaks have not been in the fancy nice steak houses. Those are good. You know, the steaks that are fried up prime with the butter, you know, seared on top of them. And that that the best steaks that I’ve had have been in bars and mountain towns out west. Its prime rib night. And you just get to talk to people. Yeah, and have a conversation over it. And I love that. I’m not a huge

 

Grounded by the Farm  33:48

fan. I also just love steak on the grill in the backyard with friends or something. Oh, yeah,

 

Ryan Goodman  33:52

it’s the experiences around it. You know, beef is great beef. I’m not a huge fan of you know, why Gu beef? It’s delicious and small bites. It’s just not for me. Yeah, right. But I enjoy the conversation, the experiences that you have around beef that you’re sitting around a table with friends and family and just enjoying that. And as part it’s a big part of your plate in the middle and what fuels you for whatever your goals are.

 

Grounded by the Farm  34:19

Lack gets us to what I had to ask you about and we’re about at time, what have I missed that I should have asked you or something you’re like, oh, Janice, you missed the whole big thing.

 

Ryan Goodman  34:30

We covered beef and kind of my journey in raising it across the country and how I utilize it to feel crazy adventures. But I think one of the best parts about beef and raising cattle is that people behind it. Yeah, and the people that I’ve been able to work with from coast to coast and visiting farmers and ranchers of all sorts. They all have amazing stories. They all care passionately about what they do and that’s what I enjoy most about being part of this industry and part of what I get to do for a living is get to work with people out there. And I think that here on the podcast you’ve featured so many of those voices out there that reference great people. And I think that that’s one of the biggest things is like no matter where you get your beef, yeah, the restaurant at the grocery store at the local farmers market, that there are people that were behind that people are raising it people that were raising it, feeding it in a feed yard and taking care of it there were the people that were processing it and shipping it to you that there was a person just like your I

 

Grounded by the Farm  35:29

behind so funny. I’ve eaten be fit so many different ranchers, homes or farms. And so many times, they’ll pull something out of their freezer, that was something from their herd. And so many times they also pull out something like, well, we didn’t have any steak, so I got them at the grocery. And it’s really kind of like, okay, whatever, we’re all good with it. You know, it’s not like Darren I was really hoping I was gonna get on Brian’s date.

 

Ryan Goodman  35:58

You know, I really love to go to Costco and look at their meat counter and say what’s on special today? Can I have a special New York Strip? get to enjoy that. And knowing that you know what this animal was? well fed. well cared for. It wouldn’t be here. Yeah, Christie

 

Grounded by the Farm  36:15

so we’ve already told people they can find find you be Freder so it’s on Twitter, Instagram,

 

Ryan Goodman  36:21

Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok. Be Friends, calm, be Fronter everywhere. I’ve capitalized on that and made it easy for you to find.

 

Grounded by the Farm  36:30

Thanks so much for I will talk to you later. And everybody don’t forget I’m gonna put some photos and things up on the website. You know, maybe show you a little bit of what this part of Virginia is like too. So check them out on grounded by the farm calm. We’ll see you guys in two weeks.

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