43 minutes

Janice Person [00:00:02]:

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. Hey, everybody. Today I’m in southern Illinois, and I think this is a part of the country a lot of people have overlooked somehow, and I’m still a little shaky on exactly how I got here. I was in Nashville this weekend and I came across to Paducah, Kentucky, and I just kind of kept going west and a little bit north, and I kept going through Kentucky for a long time. And then I got into Illinois. There were so many rivers and bridges, but eventually I landed on river Bend, cahokia farms. It’s all those great things. And I’m going to be talking to Blake Gerard about rice. Okay, so in Illinois, you’re growing rice. That’s not a common perception. Most people will know if they know much about rice. Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, California, Missouri, they may know because the boot hill is like Arkansas plus kind of Illinois. How can you grow rice here? Like, what makes this part of Illinois? Because Illinois also has Chicago. You can’t grow rice in Chicago.

Blake Gerard [00:01:19]:

That’s right. It’s a big state. It’s a long state.

Janice Person [00:01:22]:

It’s a really long state. I don’t think people think about yeah, yeah.

Blake Gerard [00:01:27]:

Chicago 6 hours away. Starkville, Mississippi, is five and a half hours away.

Janice Person [00:01:33]:

How close are you to Memphis then?

Blake Gerard [00:01:35]:

3 hours.

Janice Person [00:01:36]:

Yeah. That’s crazy.

Blake Gerard [00:01:38]:

We’re right between St. Louis. Halfway between St. Louis and Memphis.

Janice Person [00:01:41]:

Okay.

Blake Gerard [00:01:42]:

Interstate 55 over in Missouri. We’re right on the Mississippi river.

Janice Person [00:01:45]:

And it is a strange place. There is so much water. Like the roads, every time I turned, it was because there was water ahead of me. If I didn’t turn, I’d be in a river or something.

Blake Gerard [00:01:55]:

Yeah, well, we’re right at the confluence and actually coming through there, you drove by our southernmost fields right by Cairo at the confluence of the Mississippi and how. And then there’s a lot of other small rivers and tributaries that you came.

Janice Person [00:02:10]:

Know, water is a big thing for rice is why I brought it is.

Blake Gerard [00:02:14]:

A big thing for rice. And we’ve got almost too much, oftentimes.

Janice Person [00:02:20]:

Even this year because there’s been such drought issues for so many of us.

Blake Gerard [00:02:24]:

Right? Yeah. Droughts not our problem here.

Janice Person [00:02:30]:

It’s a water table. You have so much water.

Blake Gerard [00:02:32]:

Yeah. A lot of times I tell people, I farm in the bottom of the Mississippi river. We’re right on the river and it’s not so much different than anybody farming up and down this river all the time.

Janice Person [00:02:44]:

Where I was in Mississippi for years and years, it’s the same. You got river ground and you got other is.

Blake Gerard [00:02:52]:

Our delta here is very narrow compared to as you move know, the big delta starts just south of Cape Girardo. It opens up into southeast Missouri, and.

Janice Person [00:03:03]:

We’Re right across the river from Cape Girardo. So if people are trying to look for us on the map, McClure may not be on the right.

Blake Gerard [00:03:09]:

That’s right. Cape Girardeau is. We can look out the window and see Cape Girardeau on the other side of the river.

Janice Person [00:03:17]:

So how long has your family been growing rice? Because we talked about a lot of things before the mics got turned on, and I didn’t hear a lot of talk about rice.

Blake Gerard [00:03:26]:

Yeah, so no, this is my 24th year growing rice. 24th season. And so my father did not grow rice. His father, none of us, nobody in the family. I was the first one to start growing rice, and it was simply because of this river and how the river has kind of evolved over my lifetime. When my grandpa farmed here, he raised wheat, corn, alfalfa, more upland crops, and it was not an issue, but they flooded, but not constantly, and it’s kind of changed. The river has changed.

Janice Person [00:04:09]:

I think we started it’s going to do that.

Blake Gerard [00:04:11]:

From what I read, we’ve started manipulating the river when? In the early 19 hundreds. So 100 years later, it’s been fighting.

Janice Person [00:04:19]:

Back a little bit.

Blake Gerard [00:04:20]:

Yeah. So that’s what got me. So we had a big flood of 1993 and another one in 95, another one in 97.

Janice Person [00:04:34]:

You start going, wait a minute. Yeah, the farming thing. Maybe I should figure out how to farm in a place that gets flooding a lot.

Blake Gerard [00:04:42]:

Exactly right. Or quit. I was 23, 25, 27 in those three floods, and it’s like, man, this is going to be tough. Way to go.

Janice Person [00:04:50]:

I don’t want to farm insurance for a life.

Blake Gerard [00:04:53]:

Well, we really weren’t using insurance as a tool.

Janice Person [00:04:57]:

Yeah. No, I understand.

Blake Gerard [00:04:58]:

It was catastrophic, and it wasn’t what it is today. Crop insurance, from what I recall, it definitely wasn’t a profitable operation with that scenario happening. Too much water. It’s hard to grow corn. Corn is expensive to grow. And then you lose it, get it up, have ears on it, and get a flood, and water comes shooting out of the ground. Seep water and it dies.

Janice Person [00:05:24]:

Yeah.

Blake Gerard [00:05:25]:

I thought about raising fish, but they will swim off.

Janice Person [00:05:28]:

Yeah, they would. When they flood. They absolutely will. For my family, we’ve never met a starch we didn’t like, but rice is one of our favorites. So some of my nieces and nephews think they have to have rice every day at the very least, and probably won’t at every meal. And so I think it’s an interesting food because people don’t think of rice as a midwestern food. You’re kind of southern midwestern, but usually Illinois is considered the midwest. And people in St. Louis, when I said I wanted to make red beans and rice, didn’t know what that was, and they certainly didn’t understand that that’s a meal. That that’s not like I was just going to have some rice if they wanted to eat it or something. Like it’s a hearty meal when you make it with rice, red beans and sausage and all that stuff. So tell me, do you eat a lot of rice?

Blake Gerard [00:06:17]:

I do. We eat a lot of rice, yeah.

Janice Person [00:06:21]:

And you guys sell direct?

Blake Gerard [00:06:23]:

We do.

Janice Person [00:06:25]:

How do you go from, we haven’t grown any rice, to not only am I growing rice, but I’m not selling it through the mainstream markets, I’m selling it on my own.

Blake Gerard [00:06:36]:

Yeah. Well, I started out seed rice the first year, raising rice, cleaning it, having it cleaned, selling to other farmers because it’s a new territory. Right. Clean seed, no red rice, fewer weeds, et cetera, and have done that ever since. So we do that.

Janice Person [00:06:56]:

Okay.

Blake Gerard [00:06:57]:

And also gosh, we only started with this higher protein rice about I’ve been raising it probably for eight years.

Janice Person [00:07:06]:

Okay.

Blake Gerard [00:07:07]:

But we didn’t start marketing it till five years ago.

Janice Person [00:07:10]:

Okay. Higher protein rice just sounds not like a thing.

Blake Gerard [00:07:16]:

Right.

Janice Person [00:07:17]:

So I need you to explain it because I think people think of wheat the same way as protein is not a thing. But there is protein in all these grains depending on how you process it. Is that right?

Blake Gerard [00:07:29]:

Well, there’s protein in the rice no matter how you process.

Janice Person [00:07:33]:

Yeah. But how much is there?

Blake Gerard [00:07:34]:

That’s right. Yeah. How much is there? That’s correct. Yeah. So up until five years ago, we were not market. We were selling rice as seed rice and also delivering it onto the river and whoever buys it yeah. Right here. We’re very fortunate to be they load rice out at, you know, a lot of rice from Missouri loads out right there. So that’s 5 miles from my farm. So that’s pretty awesome. And have done that since the day we started raising rice. Pretty much. So that’s convenient. A friend of mine and who’s now a business partner obtained the higher protein rice from LSU. Louisiana State University developed it.

Janice Person [00:08:14]:

Yeah. A lot of people don’t know that state universities in some places have breeding programs, and it really is more focused on what’s local or state important. So the rice station at LSU is awesome.

Blake Gerard [00:08:28]:

Yeah. Their premier rice and in the Texas Arkansas University of Arkansas, mississippi State business partner obtained that and we grew it a couple of years. They didn’t have a direction they were going to go with it. I’d always wanted to have a product that differentiate itself to be vertically integrated, right. To grow it and market it. And this was an excellent opportunity.

Janice Person [00:08:55]:

Some people love that idea and some people hate that idea, to be vertically integrated. Right. But to be able I mean, like the people that listen to this podcast, like the idea of getting to know the farmers that are growing some of the foods that they like to eat. So it’s a perfect fit.

Blake Gerard [00:09:11]:

So at the point he’s like, hey, we’ve got this rice. We’re paying a royalty to have the marketing rights to this rice, to produce it, and let’s take it to market. And I’m like, Heck, yeah, let’s do it. Why not? This is a good opportunity, it’s a unique rice. Okay, so first I’ll tell you a little bit about it. The health properties, the carbohydrate and protein and the so, and it’s a non GMO rice. I’ll step back to LSU developing it and they crossed it when they found the higher protein rice, they crossed it with a variety that was grown. I grew it the first year I.

Janice Person [00:09:49]:

Raised rice like Cyprus.

Blake Gerard [00:09:52]:

Yeah. You know? Okay, so which is one of the it’s been around forever quality rice. It’s still a good rice the US has ever grown. Yeah, it’s still a good rice. It was like in high demand Central American market. They loved Cyprus. So anyway, things have evolved, right? And we’ve bred new varieties. Yields have increased because those state universities are funded through grower checkoff and decisions are made. We get paid on the bushel, not on quality. So yields have increased, quality has decreased. They crossed the higher protein rice with cypress. So it’s got excellent cooking characteristics, taste and texture.

Janice Person [00:10:31]:

Yeah.

Blake Gerard [00:10:31]:

And so it’s a premium quality rice that has higher protein content. So it’s 11% protein.

Janice Person [00:10:39]:

11% protein?

Blake Gerard [00:10:42]:

Yeah.

Janice Person [00:10:42]:

That sounds really high for rice. What’s a normal rice percent? Like five?

Blake Gerard [00:10:47]:

I’d have to do the math, but I can know the grams. So grams per serving, like, our brown rice is 6 grams per serving of protein, whereas typical rice is three to four and then closer to like three and a half. And then our white rice is 5 grams, where typical is around two. What that does the cool thing, the biggest thing? Well, a couple of things. One, that’s in a plant protein, that’s fairly high.

Janice Person [00:11:16]:

Yeah. I mean, chickpeas are a really good one, comparable to black beans are a good one.

Blake Gerard [00:11:25]:

It’s comparable for a plant protein, it’s decent. But what it also does, and most importantly in my opinion, is it lowers the Glycemic score of the rice.

Janice Person [00:11:37]:

Right, I was looking at that on your website.

Blake Gerard [00:11:40]:

Yeah. So the protein to carb ratio, I was at a small trade show, I think in Springfield, Illinois, three or four years ago, and marketing to all the people that came through and given my spiel and I’m stumbling through it and I get on and the little girl is standing across from me. You’re all done? I’m like, yeah, I’m all done, that’s it, that’s all I know about this rice. She’s like, you didn’t tell me the most important part. I’m like, well, what’s that? She’s like, this is going to be low glycemic rice. She’s like, Everything you’ve told me. If that’s all legit people who are.

Janice Person [00:12:20]:

Watching their blood sugar, yeah.

Blake Gerard [00:12:22]:

She’s like, you need to get it tested. That’s a market way better because she.

Janice Person [00:12:25]:

Was like a registered dietitian or something like that.

Blake Gerard [00:12:28]:

Yeah. And she’s like, you need to send this rice off and have it tested for Glycemic score, because I think you’ve got low Glycemic score rice, which opens the door to a whole market of people that everybody really needs to be watching their Glycemic, their sugars when they eat and not spike your blood sugar. It allows people that the doctors told them to stop, don’t eat rice anymore. You can maybe put some back on your plate because it’s comparable to other low Glycemic. It took it from a high Glycemic food. It now falls into the low glycemic category. It scores 41.

Janice Person [00:13:08]:

Wow.

Blake Gerard [00:13:08]:

So there’s no other rice out there like that?

Janice Person [00:13:11]:

Yeah, it makes it really easy for that to be a reason to vertically integrate and keep it all separate from all the other rice and all that kind of stuff.

Blake Gerard [00:13:21]:

Right. So we’re growing it. It’s in retail and also in food service. It’s been exciting.

Janice Person [00:13:33]:

It’s so funny to figure out how this all works. So obviously you can buy it through their website, but you say it’s available through retail. Is that locally or is that regionally? Because it’s hard to get a product, like, on every market shelf.

Blake Gerard [00:13:49]:

Tell me about it. I’m a farmer. I don’t even know what I’m doing with it. So we’ve enlisted some help and hired sales, but it’s still in a controlled fashion because we know we’re going to screw up.

Janice Person [00:14:04]:

You can take some risk knowing you’ll screw up if you’re taking small amounts of risk to start testing the waters versus going all in on something.

Blake Gerard [00:14:13]:

So it’s through distribution is kind of how we’re growing it. Somebody can want it, but you’ve got to be able to get it to them without being an inconvenience. Right. Is what I’ve learned. And if you’re not working with their distributor, it’s very difficult.

Janice Person [00:14:28]:

Right.

Blake Gerard [00:14:29]:

So now we’ve established distribution with several major I would call major distributors here in the US. And Midwest. Then that allows us to target their client base, their current right. Yeah, their current customers, and that’s we found the most effective way to grow, especially in the food service side.

Janice Person [00:14:50]:

Well, more and more food service places are being asked to provide nutritional information on the foods they’re doing. Right. So hospitals are being asked to produce better tasting foods because they always had highly nutritious. And then restaurants used to have really tasty but maybe hadn’t focused as much on nutrition. And I think folks are trying to get nutrition across the board so they get good health properties in general. So it’s probably a good time.

Blake Gerard [00:15:25]:

Yeah.

Janice Person [00:15:25]:

I like, all right. I like the sushi grade. I like all of it.

Blake Gerard [00:15:30]:

Absolutely. Me too. Me too.

Janice Person [00:15:33]:

When you started doing this as a business, it was you and your partner.

Blake Gerard [00:15:39]:

Correct.

Janice Person [00:15:40]:

Just kind of winging it.

Blake Gerard [00:15:43]:

Correct? Yes.

Janice Person [00:15:44]:

How did you come up with a name like Cahokia and the logo and the branding and all that kind of stuff, because for people who don’t know, maybe I should ask you, since the name is called since it’s called Cahokia Rice, maybe I should get you to explain what that is for people who don’t know.

Blake Gerard [00:16:01]:

Yes. Okay. So my partner came up with the name. He suggested it based on all the artifacts that we’ve found and he’s seen, and he was really impressed by them, I believe. And all these farmers, all my friends, especially about 10 miles north of here, have, like, tremendous collections, amazing collections, and mostly they’re farming tools, right? Yeah. Cahokia was what, the largest city in what are the statistics on that? It was huge.

Janice Person [00:16:33]:

I mean, it’s still considered it was one of the top civilizations in this part of the world. Yeah, it was like the first mega city, and it was native peoples just on this side of the river. Illinois.

Blake Gerard [00:16:52]:

Illinois side, right?

Janice Person [00:16:53]:

Yeah.

Blake Gerard [00:16:53]:

The Cahokia mounds.

Janice Person [00:16:55]:

And there are incredible mounds. You can still go to that site. I think it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Cahokia has a specific connection to this area.

Blake Gerard [00:17:05]:

Right.

Janice Person [00:17:05]:

I assume that was part of it, yes.

Blake Gerard [00:17:07]:

In the name. Everyone around the Midwest knows is familiar with that story, and it’s in honor of it’s not really an Indian tribe. The Kokia was a community, not a tribe. It was multiple groups of Indians living together from what understand. And so it’s in honor of those folks that were farming here long before I was. Or my grandfather. Or my great grandfather.

Janice Person [00:17:32]:

Right. Yeah.

Blake Gerard [00:17:33]:

And we still finding their tools today, which is really cool.

Janice Person [00:17:37]:

I’m going to have to take pictures of some of those just to show people, because I always tell people if they’re interested in seeing the pictures, we’ll put them up on the website because podcast doesn’t go really well with Photos, but the website makes it work.

Blake Gerard [00:17:48]:

Right. There you go. Perfect.

Janice Person [00:17:50]:

Your favorite ways to cook rice or the favorite ways to eat rice. What do you do?

Blake Gerard [00:17:56]:

The most common is for breakfast in the morning with a little honey and either milk or preferably half and half, right?

Janice Person [00:18:11]:

Yeah.

Blake Gerard [00:18:12]:

Awesome.

Janice Person [00:18:13]:

I have never heard of anybody eating rice like that for breakfast with half and half and honey. So now I’m so intrigued.

Blake Gerard [00:18:20]:

I love it.

Janice Person [00:18:20]:

Is it almost like the so much.

Blake Gerard [00:18:23]:

For the Glycemic score.

Janice Person [00:18:25]:

Yeah, you’ve totally killed that. But it is protein. So do you fix it kind of like you would do like an oatmeal consistency or something like that?

Blake Gerard [00:18:34]:

Exactly.

Janice Person [00:18:34]:

Not a watery oatmeal. Nobody wants that. So do you have a rice cooker that you always have going in the house?

Blake Gerard [00:18:41]:

Yeah, exactly. Cook up a batch and throw it in the fridge. And then also my wife makes a rice salad a lot that I’ll bring for lunch.

Janice Person [00:18:53]:

Yeah. Other people bring orzo salads? Pasta salads. I love a good rice salad. So what does she put in it? Do you know?

Blake Gerard [00:19:00]:

Lots of vegetables.

Janice Person [00:19:02]:

Like pickled vegetables?

Blake Gerard [00:19:04]:

Not pick. I wouldn’t say pickled. No, fresh. Yeah, not pickled. Fresh vegetables. Lots of color. I’m not, like, identifying all of it.

Janice Person [00:19:12]:

I don’t know. I was thinking there’s one a friend of mine who lives in Italy taught me to make and it’s with the gardenia kind of I don’t know. It’s garden vegetables, like carrots and stuff that have all been pickled. It’s an Italian thing, so you can buy it on the hill and you can buy it in a lot of grocery stores and stuff. They put it out with charcuterie bars and stuff. But it’s really kind of nice. You also put a little mayo in it. So it does need to stay cool. But that makes it a great summer food because it’s cool. Right? So it’s like a really nice salad for summer when it’s so freaking hot you can’t right.

Blake Gerard [00:19:54]:

It’s a great lunch. I saw I throw it in Tupperware container and take it with me to lunch. Yeah, but we need to get that recipe because that sounds good. And of course, my wife doesn’t cook an A 2ft, but I love an A two FA a lot. And red beans and rice. She does cook red beans and rice, but probably the number one is just me cooking it myself and eating breakfast regularly. And I think watching your Glycemic score I like to ride bikes a lot. I don’t ride as much as I should, but like an endurance ride. You eat that brown rice, it hangs with you. You don’t get the spike in blood sugar. I use it a lot for, like we do gravel rides and stuff and races. And it’s a pre race meal.

Janice Person [00:20:39]:

It’s awesome, really.

Blake Gerard [00:20:41]:

Eggs and rice.

Janice Person [00:20:41]:

So many people talk about pasta and see, I love all my starches. So whether it’s whole wheat pasta or brown rice, right?

Blake Gerard [00:20:50]:

Yeah. And that’s where that Glycemic score comes kind of in play. Because it’s a longer burn instead of an instant hot fire, it’s a delayed, prolonged energy release.

Janice Person [00:21:04]:

Yeah. Which is hadn’t thought about that.

Blake Gerard [00:21:06]:

What you want?

Janice Person [00:21:07]:

Yeah. When you’re doing a race.

Blake Gerard [00:21:09]:

Yeah, right.

Janice Person [00:21:10]:

Not a sprint.

Blake Gerard [00:21:11]:

Right.

Janice Person [00:21:12]:

You want that nice kick you’re power.

Blake Gerard [00:21:13]:

Lifting or something like that. You want a fire, a hot fire. But if in an endurance event, a slow burn is what you want anyway.

Janice Person [00:21:24]:

So what are the goals with it? Where do you want to get it? You want it on the shelf at Kroger, right? On all those places, I assume.

Blake Gerard [00:21:32]:

Well, yeah. And to continue to increase our percentage, we’re not 100% of what we grow is not this high protein rice as we’re growing it. So to gradually increase the percentage of what we grow, rice that we’re actually marketing ourselves to the consumer, whether it be retail or food service.

Janice Person [00:21:54]:

Are the folks at LSU working on a follow up.

Blake Gerard [00:21:57]:

They are, yes, they sure are.

Janice Person [00:21:59]:

So what’s the next version? Because that’s the thing about plant breeding. I think a lot of people don’t realize how plant breeders are so competitive. They always want to get better and better. So are they trying to get higher on the protein levels? Are they trying to get better yields?

Blake Gerard [00:22:15]:

I think combination of the two, correct?

Janice Person [00:22:17]:

Right?

Blake Gerard [00:22:17]:

Yeah.

Janice Person [00:22:18]:

So what are the problems in growing rice, besides the fact that mosquitoes are the problem for me with rice? Because you got that much water just sitting there in fields, flooding. Mosquitoes used to kill me, really? When I lived in an area with a lot of rice fields. Mosquitoes like the taste of my blood, I guess. But what are the big problems for you growing rice? You talked about one of the weeds that’s like a lookalike, so it’s red rice.

Blake Gerard [00:22:45]:

Yeah. We still have done a pretty decent job of keeping once you keep it out here. Yeah, we’re really careful of what seed we bring in because that’s typically how it comes in. So that’s not really an issue here. Actually, we’re in a really good place to grow rice. Just it’s the far north. I mean, we get blast, which is a leaf disease caused by if you’re in a field surrounded by trees and the dew doesn’t burn off till, say, noon, that’s a disease that is a problem. And we get it up here just as we got to watch it and plant certain varieties. If you’ve got a susceptible variety, you need to put a fungicide on it at a certain time. But other diseases like that for folks.

Janice Person [00:23:29]:

Who haven’t ever seen how blast works, I mean, it basically just totally messes up the plant’s ability to do photosynthesis. Right. Because you have these big spots on the leaves that are burnt through kind of thing.

Blake Gerard [00:23:42]:

It does as leaf blast, but then neck blast, rotten neck blast, basically blanks the whole head. It’ll make zero. So you can have a field that was going to make 180 bushel acre. That will make 40. The leading indicator is leaf blast. And a lot of times, a lot of these fields where I get it, I don’t get it out in these fields that are wide open, you only get it in surrounded by trees and there’s no air. So it’s not like a major issue for me. I’ve just got two or three fields, but looking for problems for growing rice, we’re pretty lucky. We don’t have a whole heck of a lot of problems.

Janice Person [00:24:20]:

Hurricanes don’t come through here at harvest very often.

Blake Gerard [00:24:23]:

They sure aren’t as strong as they are in Louisiana. When the time they end up up here, they burn out a lot of energy. We’ll still get some wind and such, and then, fortunately, we get hot during the day.

Janice Person [00:24:39]:

Just like St. Louis gets 100 degrees all last week.

Blake Gerard [00:24:43]:

Yeah, exactly 98 to 100 all week, but we get 68 degrees at night, which is crucial for plant respiration. So that’s a big difference. You can look at nighttime temps up and down the delta, and we’re just darn lucky that we’ll hit 70 most nights, if not lower. So that’s a huge plus. But you asked about challenges.

Janice Person [00:25:10]:

Well, I was just wondering because it’s one of those things where it’s hard to figure out water was a problem here before, but now you change crops so that when water is a problem. Part of the thing with rice is you can get the water off of the field, too, right?

Blake Gerard [00:25:26]:

For the most part, yeah. I mean, to grow rice effectively and efficiently, you’ve got to be able to get water on and off the field when you need to. And so we are right in the middle of the river here. There’s a levee system around us, drainage district, a large drainage district around us. But I’ve built my own drainage district within the drainage district, so I’ve got levees around my own farm where I can pump water. I went to visit my friends in Louisiana that do this on a regular basis and saw how they had set up pump on, pump off system so I can put water on or off the crop and use there’s some years where we can utilize surface water. Depends on how we’re growing our rice. And water seeded rice will flood in early May.

Janice Person [00:26:18]:

And for folks that don’t know, water seeded means the water is already on the field and you go ahead and put the seed out and it’s usually by plane.

Blake Gerard [00:26:25]:

Yeah.

Janice Person [00:26:26]:

Okay.

Blake Gerard [00:26:27]:

So a lot of our lowest wettest fields get water seeded.

Janice Person [00:26:30]:

Yeah, because you can’t drive a tractor on a really wet field. You’ll just get stuck and then the seed won’t stay where you put it. Anyway, if you’re rutting the field all up.

Blake Gerard [00:26:43]:

And then our drill seeded fields go to flood about June 1 and we’ll hold our water till about 20 August. There’s a lot of years where we can go till mid July to late July using surface water, which is awesome because it’s warm, it’s ambient temperature. And so the rice field, the way I look at it well, not the way I look at the way it is, is it’s like a living biofilter. Right. So you can pick up the mud water that’s connected to the river and it’s muddy and nasty, these ditches, and put that up in the rice field. And if you pump too long and it comes out the bottom end, it’ll come out crystal clear like this bottle of water. So all the sediment and all the stuff you pump up in the field settles out in the field. It cleans that water up, which is really cool.

Janice Person [00:27:39]:

Yeah.

Blake Gerard [00:27:40]:

And it’s got to be good for your soil, builds your soil. Right.

Janice Person [00:27:44]:

That’s why they say all those Iowa farms are now on land in Mississippi and.

Blake Gerard [00:27:51]:

Know all the any water that leaves our farm has to go through a structure. Right. And that helps reduce the sediment load.

Janice Person [00:27:59]:

Keep it in place.

Blake Gerard [00:28:00]:

Exactly. And it’s all the goal. I’m what, fourth generation that I’m aware of, and then hopefully there’s more dirt there and it’s better than for the next generation.

Janice Person [00:28:14]:

Right. And make it always build for the next generation.

Blake Gerard [00:28:17]:

Yeah. Make it better, I hope. That’s what I’m trying to do. I’m sure. Spending a lot of money trying to do it the right way all the time, right? Yeah.

Janice Person [00:28:26]:

So can you tell me about the processing side of things? Because we haven’t talked about that, and processing is why we have brown rice and white rice.

Blake Gerard [00:28:35]:

Yeah. So brown rice is very little processing with brown rice, like, okay, so everybody’s peeled a banana. You peel the wrapper off the banana, and that’s it. Okay. That’s exactly what brown rice is. You peel the hull off of the rice, and that’s brown rice, that’s all the processing it goes through no different than a banana.

Janice Person [00:28:59]:

Do you peel it or do you polish it off?

Blake Gerard [00:29:02]:

A rubber huller takes it off.

Janice Person [00:29:04]:

Okay.

Blake Gerard [00:29:04]:

Two rubber wheels spinning different speeds and feed it through there, and it pops the hull right off.

Janice Person [00:29:09]:

Okay.

Blake Gerard [00:29:10]:

It’s very hard to peel. You got to have strong fingernails. That’s all the processing for brown rice, which so it’s pretty cool. It’s a raw food, basically. White rice is different than then that goes through, I guess, polishers, and that takes the brand layer off, which is to make white rice.

Janice Person [00:29:33]:

Do you guys do that somewhat locally, or do you have somebody do that?

Blake Gerard [00:29:37]:

I’m having somebody in Missouri do that for not it’s a major capital expenditure. When we started this, it was like I’ve done that before in the seed business and put in the facility, and you’re in it. There’s no getting out of it at that point.

Janice Person [00:29:57]:

You better make sure some of those college kids want to come back starting this venture.

Blake Gerard [00:30:04]:

It’s like, we can have this done custom until there’s enough volume there to justify that investment to do it ourselves. So we’re not taking it real far and having it done. It is local.

Janice Person [00:30:21]:

And they give it back to you. Packaged goods, or do you package it somewhere else?

Blake Gerard [00:30:26]:

No, it comes back to me packaged when we were in two pound bags and 25 pound bags, both white and brown. Yeah.

Janice Person [00:30:34]:

25 pound bags. For the more food service side of things.

Blake Gerard [00:30:39]:

Sure.

Janice Person [00:30:40]:

Although there’s a lot of individual I was going to say, although some of my family probably buys it, we’ve found bags. I know. I’ve bought similarly sized bags at times.

Blake Gerard [00:30:49]:

Absolutely. That’s what we do.

Janice Person [00:30:53]:

It works.

Blake Gerard [00:30:54]:

Yeah. It’s the most economic, most efficient way to eat rice. If you’re that much rice.

Janice Person [00:31:00]:

Yeah. If you’re going to keep some in the house warm almost all the. Time.

Blake Gerard [00:31:06]:

Yeah. Awesome.

Janice Person [00:31:07]:

Anything can be served over rice, is what we kind of figure.

Blake Gerard [00:31:12]:

Yeah, I agree. One of the things I really enjoy a lot just about the farming end of it, whether it’s the high protein rice or not, whatever, I really get into the production and the whole year round cycle of it and trying to do everything we can do to make it better.

Janice Person [00:31:35]:

So explain your cycle. Where do you start with yeah, let’s.

Blake Gerard [00:31:39]:

Say it starts at harvest. Really? So you harvest your crop that’s, like, in October. Yeah. September and October. Yeah. Hopefully we’re done by the middle of October with rice, and then we’ve also raised soybeans. But the new year starts with harvest. Right. It starts with how you manipulate the stubble to prepare for the next year.

Janice Person [00:31:59]:

Yeah. The rest of the plant, that’s not the rice seeds that we’re going to eat.

Blake Gerard [00:32:03]:

Right. And there’s a lot there, not only above ground, but below ground when the roots a lot, which is awesome because it does help build the soil, too.

Janice Person [00:32:15]:

It’s kind of like composting. I’ve tried to tell people, when you think about composting, a lot of people love doing that in their backyards for their garden. And what farmers are trying to do with managing all that plant matter out there is kind of like, wait, let’s get this to feed back to the soil some way. And those roots help bring the stuff down. The water filters down through the roots.

Blake Gerard [00:32:39]:

Yeah. Some of these fields are rotated with soybeans, about half, and then the other half are continuous rice. Just because they’re so low, it’s too risky. You’ll lose the soybean crop two out of three years.

Janice Person [00:32:51]:

Yeah.

Blake Gerard [00:32:52]:

So those are the most challenging. Typically, you got to be careful how we can prep that because you never know. The next spring, you may not be able to get on the field.

Janice Person [00:33:02]:

Yeah.

Blake Gerard [00:33:03]:

So it’s always still I’m still learning. And it’s never the same year after.

Janice Person [00:33:07]:

Year, 20 something years later, and you’re still learning.

Blake Gerard [00:33:10]:

Exactly. Yeah, I got to figure it out. But you never do. You think you do, and you don’t. So anyway, everything’s always different. But one of the most dependable ways that we get that stubble down on the ground, whether we lightly disc it or we roll it or we get it on the ground immediately and then flood back up. So after we’ve harvested, then we refloud. And if we can incorporate, what really works well is a light disc, and to get a little bit of soil up into that plant matter, and that will help dramatically decompose it and then put the water back on it as quick as we can. And we’ll hold that all the way till the end of February the following year.

Janice Person [00:33:52]:

That way you don’t get a bunch of weeds and grasses and stuff there.

Blake Gerard [00:33:55]:

No, that water will decompose the stubble. Like, amazing. And then, like, I say we’re right here in the flyway on the river. And so we’ve got all the ducks, lots of waterfowl ducks and geese and shorebirds and all that are flying through here all the time.

Janice Person [00:34:13]:

Wild.

Blake Gerard [00:34:13]:

Yeah, they love it.

Janice Person [00:34:16]:

Don’t eat anything else.

Blake Gerard [00:34:17]:

They come across these bottoms and there’s just sheetwater everywhere, right? Man, they get in there and we haven’t hunted them now for several years, and especially the geese, because the geese are like the most amazing tillage tool I’ve ever seen in my life. They go through there and they’ll go from one corner of the field all mow it down for they’ll go for a half mile in a line like an army eating and flipping it all over and just stirring it up like a tillage tool. And when they get done and you still got the water on it, the water is up and down because we’re not pumping all the time. It’s a lot of times it’s just rainwater, right. And man, you pull the water off at the end of February, 1 March and it’s all gone, it’s ready to go. You burned it. And I think the waterfowl have a lot to do with that and I think I like providing that habitat.

Janice Person [00:35:11]:

I agree.

Blake Gerard [00:35:11]:

Pretty amazing.

Janice Person [00:35:12]:

I’ve seen amazing, huge movements of birds when you’re in rice territory and stuff, because you’ll get like these amazing murmurations and stuff where the birds are, like, dancing and all those nature videos that you like to watch on YouTube where it just seems like the birds all know something all of a sudden and they all turn the other way or something. And it’s pretty amazing to watch. I’ve stopped on the side of the highway before just to stand there and watch take.

Blake Gerard [00:35:42]:

Yeah, yeah, people do. We used to hunt through here, but we’re so close to Cape Girardo that I think it’s probably been hundreds of years of pressure. Not hundreds of years, but I don’t you those big waves of waterfowl will leave really quick right here if you fire a gun.

Janice Person [00:36:00]:

It’s amazing.

Blake Gerard [00:36:05]:

And then now they just swarm, which is pretty cool.

Janice Person [00:36:12]:

Let them swarm here instead of like my backyard.

Blake Gerard [00:36:16]:

Well, they’re doing the job.

Janice Person [00:36:18]:

Yeah, I was going to say.

Blake Gerard [00:36:20]:

And they eat like all the leftover rice. They eat it up. So for volunteers, the next year they get rid of the majority of that. Okay, so the biggest challenge okay, now.

Janice Person [00:36:30]:

You figured out the answer.

Blake Gerard [00:36:31]:

Yeah, and I was going through the whole year, wasn’t I? Sorry, you get off on a tangent. But the biggest challenge is dealing with that river by far.

Janice Person [00:36:38]:

Yeah.

Blake Gerard [00:36:39]:

Okay, so when that river gets up, laid up on our levee, like at the flood stage, 32ft here, and it’ll start seeping, it starts coming out of the ground. And my lowest fields at like 28ft, it’s been to 50 before. And so then the pressure is unbelievable, pushing up out of the ground when there’s water coming, like my irrigation wells, we got to cap them off because they’re shooting water out. Like, if they’re turned on, that’s what makes it really challenging.

Janice Person [00:37:03]:

Well, and that works with the cycles, too. Right. When you talk about planting versus at planting time, you’ve still got snowmelt coming from Minnesota sometimes. And the river the river does different things on levels, but in the spring, it can be pretty here.

Blake Gerard [00:37:23]:

Okay, so we’ll pull the water off in February, and then we’ll do whatever we need to do as far as manipulate soil or whatever, prepare the field to plant. And if we can catch a dry spell in March, and then we’ll start planting April 1, no matter the temperatures, whatever the calendar, it’s time to plant. And especially because here, our river won’t necessarily like that spring melt isn’t here yet. It’s coming.

Janice Person [00:37:48]:

Yeah.

Blake Gerard [00:37:48]:

So we might end up with a not so big river. If we can get a dry week or two, we can plant a lot here, and then the river comes up. And that’s the ideal scenario.

Janice Person [00:37:55]:

If we can get it planted, then the water comes on after you’ve got the seed out.

Blake Gerard [00:37:59]:

Yes. And we are not having to drive on it.

Janice Person [00:38:02]:

Okay.

Blake Gerard [00:38:02]:

So if we can get it planted before the river comes up, that works awesome. Or at least get it totally prepared, like, get our water seeded, fields prepared, and then I’ll wait till about May 1 to plant them. But if the river is up, I don’t care. At that point, we’ve got them ready to plant. Yeah, we’ll disc them and rough them up and water seed into that. It works great. An early flood that starts in March is going to be a tough year for it’s. Going to be hard. That’s by far and away our biggest challenge. We didn’t flood at all this year. I don’t think we got over flood stage once this year, which was unheard of. Like, I can’t remember a year like that. Last year was pretty dry, but this year was really dry. It was so easy.

Janice Person [00:38:47]:

A dry year was so easy for you.

Blake Gerard [00:38:49]:

I made a plan, and you have.

Janice Person [00:38:51]:

Corn farmers and soybean farmers who are going, oh, my God, this is insane how dry it is. So it really does matter. Like, the weather really makes a big difference for one kind of farmer versus the other.

Blake Gerard [00:39:03]:

Yeah. And it’s awesome to go to different parts of the country and see how people do things. So I made my plan this year, which I always do. Right. Hopefully it goes this way. Never do you follow through with a plan A. You have to adapt because the river.

Janice Person [00:39:19]:

Not while you’re in July or we.

Blake Gerard [00:39:22]:

Followed Plan A and knocked it all out. It was unbelievable. I’ve never done that just because I’m like this. Farming is easy when it doesn’t rain.

Janice Person [00:39:29]:

Finally figured out.

Blake Gerard [00:39:33]:

It’Ll never happen again.

Janice Person [00:39:34]:

But I love it.

Blake Gerard [00:39:35]:

The big river is our number one challenge for sure. So the cycle is then we’ll plant in April or May. Cut off date of about the 20 May.

Janice Person [00:39:45]:

Yeah.

Blake Gerard [00:39:45]:

And then most rice goes to flood about June 1, no matter when you plant it. Because around here, you could plant April 1 or you can plant May 1. It’s all going to come up about May 5 because it doesn’t warm up enough. Right. There’s a little window in there. When it all comes up, what is.

Janice Person [00:40:02]:

The rest of the season? I mean, like, from May and June to harvest? You got a lot of time on your hands.

Blake Gerard [00:40:10]:

Oh, no, we’re killing it all day. It’s just now starting to slow down. And here we are, the end of July to get it to where it can go to flood. Now we’re starting June 1, going to flood and then trying to get it all flooded by July 1. We’ve got some zero grade fields that are flat, but with the majority of what we got are sloped fields that you got to put levees in. And so that’s a lot of work. We’ve got probably a couple of hundred levees out this year. And every one of those you have to put a tarp in, put a levee gate, and then control the water. And then when it doesn’t rain hard part about when it doesn’t rain is you’re gating nonstop. And we’re scattered from you drove by Carroll Airport. That’s our southernmost field, and we’re 25 miles from there. 20, yeah. And we’ve got fields scattered in between here and there. At Olive Branch, we’ve got farms, and then here, and then 20 miles north, we’ve got acres up there. So we’re strung out for 50 miles up and down the river here.

Janice Person [00:41:12]:

Putting water on and taking water off.

Blake Gerard [00:41:16]:

Keeping it all pumped.

Janice Person [00:41:16]:

Heck of a chore, right?

Blake Gerard [00:41:18]:

Yeah. And calling the right timing on fertility applications. And any, we’re really lucky here. Insects are not much of an issue here. Maybe we’re blessed with that. I think that’s part of the environment. Just common rice insect.

Janice Person [00:41:36]:

Yeah.

Blake Gerard [00:41:36]:

Rarely do we have to make an application. Water management, fertility management. I don’t know. It keeps us running, like there’s always something.

Janice Person [00:41:49]:

Yeah. Well, I love it. I really appreciate you spending this time with me. And now we’re going to go out and drive around a little bit.

Blake Gerard [00:41:56]:

Absolutely.

Janice Person [00:41:57]:

See a little bit of rice so I can grab some video and show people what this part of the world looks like.

Blake Gerard [00:42:03]:

Okay, that sounds great.

Janice Person [00:42:05]:

Thanks so much.

Blake Gerard [00:42:06]:

Thank you.

Janice Person [00:42:07]:

After we finished that episode and we’re talking and looking around the office and headed out in the field, it’s really funny. Blake asked me, oh, should I have talked about more of the ways I enjoy rice and things we eat and stuff? And I went, no, man, we’re good. To me, this episode really does highlight some of the pieces of enjoying rice. By the way, he frequently adds fresh fruit like peaches or blueberries or something to his rice. Loves it. And it made me think about mango sticky rice in Thailand and stuff. So it’s made with that creamy texture and mango. Oh, my God. So I had to have some of that soon after. Anyway, we’ll put up the video, some photos and all. Thanks, and we’ll talk to you guys again in two weeks.

The post Transcript for Episode 409 with Blake Gerard of Cahokia Rice – McClure, IL appeared first on Grounded by the Farm.

40 minutes

Janice Person [00:00:02]:

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. Hey, everybody, this is Janice, and I am in middle Tennessee, on the northern, northern side, almost to Kentucky, almost, but in Adams, Tennessee. And I’m at the home of the Swanson family. And everybody is here with us. I’m going to talk to Jeff Swanson, but later I’m going to take a family photo so you get to meet everybody, because these boys are something. She may give me a family photo she’s taken because it’s 100 something degrees today. We’re here talking about wagyu beef. Wagyu cattle. First off, I love beef. I love Kobe beef. I love wagyu beef. I have a ex brother in law who’s Japanese, so we still have family in Japan. I’ve gone there with my nephew, who we visited his grandparents while we were there and stuff. Wagyu, it’s a breed of cattle, sort.

Jeff Swanson [00:01:09]:

Of wagyu is more of a broad term. It refers to any of four breeds found in Japan.

Janice Person [00:01:17]:

Okay?

Jeff Swanson [00:01:17]:

So you have the Japanese black, Japanese brown or red wagyu, japanese shorthorn, and Japanese pole. Okay, so all those because wagyu translates literally to Japanese cow or Japanese beef.

Janice Person [00:01:31]:

All right. That’s not the way we usually think of it, though. In the US. We usually think of something on my.

Jeff Swanson [00:01:36]:

Plate or on the menu, which is true. I mean, if it’s descended from the Japanese genetics that were brought in, either in they had an importation of four bulls in 1976, and those bulls came here to do a study for the Japanese on how they crossed on other breeds.

Janice Person [00:01:56]:

Okay.

Jeff Swanson [00:01:56]:

Because at the time, japan was looking at increasing their beef production, but the only other prominent breed in Japan other than their native wagyu was Holsteins. So they sent two reds and two blacks, four bulls over in 76 to do a study with Washington State University on how they would cross breed. And then that kind of got out, and other people got semen off those bulls. And from there all the way up until 92, 93, they developed what were considered purebred wagyu in this country.

Janice Person [00:02:33]:

Okay.

Jeff Swanson [00:02:34]:

Still very small, very localized. Didn’t get out a whole lot. And then a couple of investment groups found a loophole in the Japanese export system in the mid ninety s. Oh, nice. And they imported 100% wagu animals from 93 to 97, I believe. And then in 97, after the last shipment, the Japanese said, no more. We’re cutting it off.

Janice Person [00:02:56]:

Okay?

Jeff Swanson [00:02:57]:

These are a national treasure. No more. We’ll leave Japan.

Janice Person [00:03:01]:

Wow. Okay. So that’s got so many questions to me in it. So wagyu I’ve been to Japan, they truly treasure what they treasure. Like rice is like an incredibly glorious plant, and it means life, all these kind of things. So wagyu is like a treasured part of their country’s history, and they don’t want it just necessarily taken everywhere and things. But we had a time period where we could pull it out.

Jeff Swanson [00:03:30]:

Exactly.

Janice Person [00:03:31]:

So help me understand how it’s gotten growth in the US. Because it’s still high end. So help me understand how it’s such a premium.

Jeff Swanson [00:03:43]:

And that’s the thing is, up until even now, there’s more and more people getting into this breed every day. But if you go all the way back to the late 80s, early ninety s and all that, there’s very few people raising these animals. Yeah, I personally didn’t know about wagyu until right before, about a year before we started raising them. I had heard of Kobe beef.

Janice Person [00:04:09]:

Are they hard to raise or something?

Jeff Swanson [00:04:11]:

They’re not hard to raise. I don’t think they’re just like anything else. An unknown, I think would be the best way to put it.

Janice Person [00:04:20]:

People are very familiar with Angus. Charley exactly.

Jeff Swanson [00:04:24]:

And then because of the rarity of them several years ago, I think the total numbers of wagyu in the United States was roughly 50,000. And that sounds like a big number, but it’s not.

Janice Person [00:04:37]:

Not when I think how many people like beef.

Jeff Swanson [00:04:40]:

Well, you look at the Ames report on how many are processed each week under USD inspection, and it’s up over 500,000 every week.

Janice Person [00:04:49]:

Okay.

Jeff Swanson [00:04:50]:

So if everybody decided, hey, we only want wagyu beef, they’re all gone in a day.

Janice Person [00:04:57]:

So this is totally not what I wanted to talk about early, but I saw last night there’s like an Arby’s commercial where they’re selling wagyu beef, and then I saw in really small fine print, it’s like 51% wagyu and 49% other American beef.

Jeff Swanson [00:05:14]:

And I actually saw a little insight into that. And it’s a blended product. So they’re taking what I guess is an industry standard name of American wagyu, which is genetically the animal is half wagyu, half Angus.

Janice Person [00:05:30]:

Okay.

Jeff Swanson [00:05:31]:

They were taking the ground beef off of those animals and blending it with regular commercial ground beef. So that 51% is really not accurate.

Janice Person [00:05:42]:

Okay.

Jeff Swanson [00:05:42]:

You’re more about 25% or somewhere in that line. You’re still going to get some of the benefits from the wagyu, but not the benefits that you have with the floor.

Janice Person [00:05:52]:

So wagyu has such an amazing connotation. Your mouth starts watering when you think of it, but people who haven’t had it, how would you explain it as a beef product?

Jeff Swanson [00:06:07]:

You’re going to take the best steak you’ve ever eaten and just multiply it exponentially. Exactly. It has a rich, buttery taste to it because of the fat content, and it’s just literally melting your mouth.

Janice Person [00:06:21]:

It’s fork tender when you’re cutting it.

Jeff Swanson [00:06:23]:

Exactly. You can almost cut a steak with your fork. It’s just wonderful. And we had some steaks analyzed several years ago, and I think the melting point on the fat of the steaks was like 96 degrees.

Janice Person [00:06:37]:

Wow.

Jeff Swanson [00:06:37]:

At that point. So it literally melts in your mouth. So you get that really soft, buttery texture to it. And then the tenders on the Warner Bratzler shear force test, which is how they test tenderness of meat, I think a four is considered extremely tender. And the ribeyes we sent, I think they tested like 2.9.

Janice Person [00:07:01]:

Oh, wow. Which is insanely.

Jeff Swanson [00:07:03]:

Insanely. More tender than the most tender steak. Yes.

Janice Person [00:07:07]:

Yeah.

Jeff Swanson [00:07:08]:

It’s just mind boggling. These animals are just that inherently different from our continental breeds.

Janice Person [00:07:16]:

Yeah. So that’s part of the premium, is that kind of level of tenderness. And then part of the premium is that there’s not so many of them.

Jeff Swanson [00:07:24]:

A lot of you know, and that’s you mentioned Kobe beef earlier. And Kobe is a name brand. They’re all specifically a tajima strain of black wagyu raised in Hayogo perfection of Japan. And then they have to grade above a certain level to be basically trademarked as Kobe.

Janice Person [00:07:42]:

Kind of like Vidalia onions, champagne versus sparkling wine.

Jeff Swanson [00:07:47]:

Exactly.

Janice Person [00:07:47]:

All those things. Okay.

Jeff Swanson [00:07:49]:

And that’s what makes Kobe beef Kobe. It has to be from a specific lineage of Japanese black wagyu, and it has to be raised in that area and has to grade above a certain level. And of course, they’re going to have animals that do not grade there, so they get sold under other names, a different name.

Janice Person [00:08:06]:

It’s a Japanese beef that’s just yeah.

Jeff Swanson [00:08:08]:

And that Kobe is not a breed of animals. It’s a trademark, basically.

Janice Person [00:08:12]:

Yeah, like certified Angus in the US. Okay. So wagyu, though, part of what at least I think I’ve seen so you’re going to correct me if I’m wrong, is that the marbling of the steak looks a little bit different. So a lot of people are used to what a ribeye looks like.

Jeff Swanson [00:08:29]:

Yeah. And with the wagyu influence, you can get a very well dispersed marbling. And depending on the genetics of the.

Janice Person [00:08:38]:

Animal, you he’s obviously going to find me photos or something.

Jeff Swanson [00:08:41]:

You can get very fine marbling to where it looks like somebody just took a pen and started oh, really? Punching holes and putting marbling in there. And we’ll find some really pretty steaks.

Janice Person [00:08:56]:

Well, I’ll make sure I put these on the website. I’m going to get him to text those. Oh, wow. That almost looks like a salami or some kind of thing that you’ve mechanically gone.

Jeff Swanson [00:09:09]:

That’s all natural. This is literally a picture of when they first split the carcass.

Janice Person [00:09:15]:

Yeah.

Jeff Swanson [00:09:16]:

So that’s the initial. Once they split it open right there, you can see the rib. So that would be a ribeye once it’s all cut up, that’s the first impression we got of that beef.

Janice Person [00:09:27]:

Wow. Okay, so now tell me why that marbling really matters.

Jeff Swanson [00:09:32]:

Helps with increased tenderness and that rich buttery flavor. And that’s one thing with wagyu is our particular program. You have people that try to push the envelope and compare to Kobe and Mitsiyaki or whatever. The extreme a five japanese. We’re a little bit more, I guess, modest. I mean, too much of a good thing. But wagyu is so rich in flavor. It can be so rich in flavor that you really don’t want to eat huge portions. And I’ve always been a steak guy. I love a big, juicy steak. If we went to the Extreme, and that is actually right on the border of that would be considered in that a five scale. But that’s one of those you don’t.

Janice Person [00:10:15]:

Always get them away.

Jeff Swanson [00:10:16]:

We’ll take it. But that’s the thing, is one of our ribeyes is going to weigh 24oz on an average. They’re thick cut, inch and a quarter.

Janice Person [00:10:29]:

I’m sitting here eyes wide open. A 24 ounce ribeye, it’s something you.

Jeff Swanson [00:10:35]:

Would not typically want to sit down and eat by yourself.

Janice Person [00:10:38]:

No, I would not split it with.

Jeff Swanson [00:10:39]:

Your spouse or a friend or somebody.

Janice Person [00:10:42]:

And it’s a better way to cook it because that fat melts at such a low temperature, you don’t have to cook it as hard as some people like to cook.

Jeff Swanson [00:10:53]:

No. And most of your wagyu beef is going to be best eaten medium to medium rare. Yeah, I’m a medium guy. Some people like medium rare. To me, when it gets on the rare side, you almost get a little chewiness to it. Where? Right there at that perfect pink medium.

Janice Person [00:11:09]:

I get the exact experience at 24oz. I’m thinking how much thicker that steak is than a typical grocery store cut, right?

Jeff Swanson [00:11:20]:

Yeah, your typical grocery store cut is going to be half inch to three quarters.

Janice Person [00:11:24]:

Exactly. So cooking it through at medium rare or something is very different than well, just me personally.

Jeff Swanson [00:11:33]:

Everybody has their own way of cooking things. I started when we first started processing four years ago, experimenting on how to cook. That way I could relate to my customers what works for me okay.

Janice Person [00:11:44]:

And give them you do the cooking around here instead, Chris.

Jeff Swanson [00:11:47]:

I cook some of the meats. She does a lot of the cooking, but I usually cook the meats. But for me, what works best for us is the reverse sear method. So it’s low and slow, and then hit it with the heat at the end.

Janice Person [00:11:59]:

Okay.

Jeff Swanson [00:11:59]:

And our meat just works out really well that way because we can take just about anything. You can take a roast, reverse sear it, and it’s phenomenal. Just a simple thing like a sirloin.

Janice Person [00:12:13]:

Tip roast, because so often I hear about searing it first and then cooking it low. So the reverse sear is reverse of that.

Jeff Swanson [00:12:21]:

Exactly. And I’m going to show you. This is a picture from a customer.

Janice Person [00:12:25]:

He’s going to have to text me all of these so I can put them in.

Jeff Swanson [00:12:29]:

But you see how that is perfect throughout the whole steak with a thin crust around the outside.

Janice Person [00:12:35]:

Yeah. Gosh. I’m going to want steak now for lunch.

Jeff Swanson [00:12:39]:

And that’s what I love about the reverse sear versus hitting it with the heat first, because you hit it with, say, 400, 500 degrees first, you’re starting to overcook that outside layer.

Janice Person [00:12:51]:

Okay.

Jeff Swanson [00:12:51]:

And then as you put it in, you lower the temperature down. It minimizes that, but at the same time, that first quarter inch or whatever is going to be overcooked.

Janice Person [00:13:01]:

So do you cook it on a grill or do you cook it in the stove?

Jeff Swanson [00:13:05]:

Most of the time I do it in the oven and then sear it on the skillet.

Janice Person [00:13:09]:

Okay, but I’ve done cast iron skillet? Yes. Okay. So do you use any butter or anything? Because a lot of steaks I know people talk about using butter with usually.

Jeff Swanson [00:13:18]:

What I’ll use when I sear it is I’ll put some of our beef tallow in it. So we take look at that, keep some of the excess fat off the animals, and we sell it to people that want to make their own tallow or maybe mix it with venison or something like that. We usually render it down, make our own tallow, keep a jar in the refrigerator, and I throw a little bit of that in my skillet. I love it, and I’ll sear it in that.

Janice Person [00:13:42]:

So one of my favorite places to eat in St. Louis that has it’s a butcher shop and lunch place, and they make tallow fries, and the fries are just going to be differently. Right. But it’s a butcher shop skillet.

Jeff Swanson [00:13:56]:

Potatoes with beef tallow is.

Janice Person [00:14:00]:

Okay. So, wow. I’m learning a lot. And we’ve gone out and we’ve seen your herd. We saw you have bulls here. You have different ages every six months, right?

Jeff Swanson [00:14:13]:

Pretty much, yeah. We have everything from three years old here at our place down to some yearlings.

Janice Person [00:14:20]:

Okay. And so we went to one of your places that you lease. That’s where we saw the mamas and the babies. And so those were your brand new ones?

Jeff Swanson [00:14:30]:

Yes. They’re all 30 to 60 days old.

Janice Person [00:14:33]:

Okay. And so they’re just playing in the pasture, playing in the woods, whatever they want to do with their days. We saw them playing around. They ran like crazy towards us as we were driving up. And then at what point do you bring them over here to your home place?

Jeff Swanson [00:14:50]:

Usually, hopefully by that time, I’ve got another lot cleared out to move a group in. But we try to bring them here about 14 months old.

Janice Person [00:14:59]:

Okay. So they’ll stay out there playing until they’re 14 months old, and then you bring them here. It’s more of like a feedlot kind of.

Jeff Swanson [00:15:06]:

Yeah, concentrated feed environment. So we give them free choice hay once they come here, and then we give them a grain ration twice a day.

Janice Person [00:15:13]:

And you kind of keep them together by age. So they’re the other cows that they know, the other steers that they know.

Jeff Swanson [00:15:20]:

They just more comfortable that way. And you wouldn’t want to put a year old calf in with the three year old steer just because of the size difference. The bigger one is going to be the bully and push them around and they won’t get the opportunity to eat. So this keeps everything a little bit more even.

Janice Person [00:15:35]:

Well, we even saw with some of your mama cows, one of them pushing the other one, they can get kind of bossy, wanting to get to that feed or keep the other ones away from it. It’s so intriguing. And here you’ll feed them hay or grass or whatever it is, and then you also give them a little bit of corn or something.

Jeff Swanson [00:15:56]:

Yeah, we give them a mixture of corn, barley, soy meal, protein, pellet, and then we also feed spent brewers grain.

Janice Person [00:16:04]:

That’s right.

Jeff Swanson [00:16:05]:

We pick up the spent grains from a brewery right down the road in Nashville.

Janice Person [00:16:10]:

My listeners are very familiar with Tennessee Brew Works. Christian’s been on the show a couple of times.

Jeff Swanson [00:16:14]:

Matt’s been our friends for several years. And so we take all their waste product and utilize it. So instead of it going to a landfill and them getting charged a disposal fee, we bring it here and feed it to the cows.

Janice Person [00:16:27]:

So what kind of grains?

Jeff Swanson [00:16:28]:

They’re wheat and barley mostly.

Janice Person [00:16:30]:

Okay. Yeah. I was just thinking you think about which beers people are drinking, right? So there’s always barley, and we did an interview with one of their barley farmers, but also, wheat beers are pretty darn popular. And so they just as they process that stuff off to get the alcohol and parts they need. Then there’s this additional part.

Jeff Swanson [00:16:49]:

Yes. The solids that are left over, and it’s a lot of it. Each bin that we get weighs about 1000 pounds.

Janice Person [00:16:56]:

Okay.

Jeff Swanson [00:16:57]:

The bin itself doesn’t weigh 40 pounds, but then you’ve got roughly 1000 pounds of material inside it.

Janice Person [00:17:04]:

Oh, wow. And what do the cows get from that?

Jeff Swanson [00:17:08]:

They get a lot of nutrients. The biggest thing they do not get is calcium.

Janice Person [00:17:13]:

Okay.

Jeff Swanson [00:17:13]:

Or the sugars and starches, they get a little bit because there’s still a little bit of residual sugar in there after the brewing process, but it’s depleted in calcium is the biggest thing, but it’s a high energy commodity, steel. I mean, we had some analyzed a few years ago. It was 79% total digestible nutrients.

Janice Person [00:17:37]:

Wow.

Jeff Swanson [00:17:38]:

And that’s based on the dry matter, of course. It’s about 60% moisture.

Janice Person [00:17:44]:

Wow.

Jeff Swanson [00:17:45]:

Even though their particular program, it’s not big solids. It’s more of a fine cornmeal type mix.

Janice Person [00:17:53]:

Okay.

Jeff Swanson [00:17:53]:

They run it through a hammer mill before the brewing process. So it’s very fine particles, but there’s still a lot of great nutrients for the cows to absorb from it.

Janice Person [00:18:01]:

This is one of those upcycling things that I think happens so often in agriculture that people don’t hear about.

Jeff Swanson [00:18:07]:

Yeah. And I’ve heard of other producers, they get like unsellable candies bread, all kinds of different commodity things that would end up going in a dumpster somewhere.

Janice Person [00:18:19]:

Yeah. Going to a landfill and becoming a problem somewhere else.

Jeff Swanson [00:18:23]:

Exactly. So why not bring those what they would be waste products home to the farm and feed it to your cattle, feed it to your hogs, whatever you have, and make something else out of it. Yeah, that’s the saying. Cows are the best upcycle in the world. They turn the grass into beef.

Janice Person [00:18:40]:

Well, their stomachs can do things that you and I they can take things that you and I would never be able to take.

Jeff Swanson [00:18:47]:

And that’s the thing, is, we spoke a little bit about this in the truck. There are so much misinformation out there, people that think, oh, my gosh, don’t feed cows corn because it ruins their stomachs. And it doesn’t. You need a balance. I mean, obviously they need that hay or that grass to help solidify and balance things out in their rumen, but they can eat a lot of corn.

Janice Person [00:19:13]:

Well, and you think about it, a lot of grasses that they could be eating out in pastures and stuff. It has seeds and stuff like that on it, too. Right. And those seeds are, I mean, the wonder of breeding. But Tiacente was a grass that was like the head of it was as small as my pinky. And now we’ve got corn that came out from that from centuries or millennia, thanks to the native people of this world.

Jeff Swanson [00:19:40]:

Right, exactly. Yeah. They’ve cultivated. And the same thing has happened in the cattle. We started out with one specific thing, and then we’ve selectively bred and they’ve.

Janice Person [00:19:52]:

Done dairy and you have beef, and.

Jeff Swanson [00:19:54]:

It’S split off into all these different tangents. And there’s literally a breed for everybody.

Janice Person [00:19:59]:

Yeah.

Jeff Swanson [00:20:00]:

You’ve got the people that love the wally like we do. You have the people that, oh, nothing’s better than a Longhorn or Angus or Hereford or Scimitol or limousine. There’s just so many breeds out there for everybody to pick and choose from.

Janice Person [00:20:15]:

When we were out looking at your cattle, you kept saying, I just like the look of them.

Jeff Swanson [00:20:20]:

I do. Well, I mean, I’ve been a cowboy at heart for my whole life, pretty much from a little kid riding my pony around, that’s all I wanted to be was a cowboy.

Janice Person [00:20:30]:

Well, if you’ve had ponies since you were little, I can see why you have horses and stuff out here now and how easy it was for you to get into cattle. But you actually had a military career for a while.

Jeff Swanson [00:20:42]:

I’d spent six years in the army and got to see the world a little bit and enjoyed it, but decided that wasn’t what I want my future to be. And then you were a farrier for.

Janice Person [00:20:54]:

23 years, an important skill set to.

Jeff Swanson [00:20:57]:

Clean up those horses, trimming shoe horses every day for years on end.

Janice Person [00:21:06]:

And now you’re in this space where you’ve got your cattle. How many do you have? Is that okay to ask?

Jeff Swanson [00:21:13]:

Right now we have 40, mamas.

Janice Person [00:21:16]:

Okay.

Jeff Swanson [00:21:17]:

So we calve about 20 in the spring, and then we’ll calve another 20 or so in the fall.

Janice Person [00:21:24]:

And you’re trying to run your so you’re occasionally processing cattle, instead doing them all in one fell swoop.

Jeff Swanson [00:21:32]:

Yeah. We cater to the individual consumer. We don’t have any big restaurant accounts. We don’t do wholesale or things like that. We basically are set up to take care of the individual person that wants to come directly to the farm and buy some really wonderful beef. Yeah, because we’re not super small scale where we only have five or six head of cows, and we’re not super huge where we have several hundred. So we’re kind of in a spot where we don’t have the volume for the big, huge Walmart whatever accounts, big grocery store accounts. And we don’t have a small volume where you can just sell it to your friends and family and be done. We’re kind of in that middle ground where we’ve got to be able to keep a consistent volume of people coming to pick it up.

Janice Person [00:22:26]:

So how do you do? Like, where do people find you?

Jeff Swanson [00:22:30]:

Facebook and Instagram is pretty much what we’ve done from the start.

Janice Person [00:22:34]:

Okay.

Jeff Swanson [00:22:34]:

I’ve set down a starter.

Janice Person [00:22:36]:

Instead of going to farmers markets up.

Jeff Swanson [00:22:39]:

To this point, up till this last spring, I shot horses all the time. So I had a schedule of five days a week. First thing in the morning, I feed cows, get in the truck, and I go shoe horses most of the day and then try to catch up with the farm stuff at the end. And then, of course, we have two young boys. They’re active into baseball, football, and everything else. And my wife, fortunately, takes care of a lot of that stuff, and I help out where I can. So as far as the farmers markets, there’s just no time.

Janice Person [00:23:09]:

Yeah.

Jeff Swanson [00:23:12]:

And we’ve developed enough of a customer base because we started selling in April of 2019. What happened about ten months later?

Janice Person [00:23:21]:

Yeah. The world shut down.

Jeff Swanson [00:23:22]:

The world shut down. And for us, as basically a new business, just kind of getting out there. We had a big influx of people early on, like April of 2020. We had oh, my gosh, the grocery store.

Janice Person [00:23:35]:

Because suddenly the grocery stores were empty because so much food was going into cafeterias and restaurants and weren’t all going into the grocery stores, which is where everybody was buying all their food.

Jeff Swanson [00:23:46]:

Yeah. And people found out about us, and they came out and they bought a little bit, took it home and tried it, and some absolutely loved it, and others liked it, but the price was not cheap. Yeah. It just didn’t fit into their budget. And we still get a lot of those people. They come by every few months, but it’s not a regular thing every week deal. Most people, they’re going to run to Kroger Walmart or even Publix or whatever to pick up their groceries. That one day a week or every other week where a lot of our customers it’s that once a month, maybe every couple know they want something.

Janice Person [00:24:24]:

Yeah, yeah.

Jeff Swanson [00:24:25]:

So it’s kind of one of the nature of the beast we’ve got to consistently advertise just to keep people coming through.

Janice Person [00:24:32]:

Okay. So I’m guessing people really love the steaks they do from wagyu ground beef or what else do you do with it? Because you got the whole animal, I’m.

Jeff Swanson [00:24:44]:

Assuming everything you can imagine. We do all your normal steaks. You’ve got ribeyes, New York strips, fillets, sirloins, because the marbling these animals can produce. We get some really phenomenal steaks out of the chuck or the shoulder of the animal. Flat Irons Denver’s we do a ranch steak, which is a little bit leaner, but compared to commodity beef or what you buy in the grocery store, it’s way more well marbled. It’s going to be similar to a sirloin, but has a little bit beefier, richer flavor than sirloin does.

Janice Person [00:25:21]:

Nice.

Jeff Swanson [00:25:22]:

It’s a really wonderful steak that most people don’t know about. We do the Culada pecania steaks and that are phenomenal also. They look like a miniature New York strip. Once we cut them, then we do very few roast. We do a mock tender roast out of the shoulder.

Janice Person [00:25:40]:

Okay.

Jeff Swanson [00:25:40]:

We do a chuck eye roll roast out of the shoulder. And so we’ll take the chucky and we’ll cut about the first three pieces of that into a steak because that’s the same muscle as your ribeye is. So your chucky is a baby ribeye, essentially. We’ll take about the first three steaks off that. Then you start losing the eye muscle. So it’s not worth cutting into a steak anymore. Becomes a really wonderful roast. If you want to do a pot roast or something, we do sirloin tip roasts, which are from the knuckle on the back leg and or hip, I guess, area. And they’re a wonderful well marbled roast cook that a bunch of different ways you can do it as a pot roast. We reverse sear it and make sandwich meat out of it.

Janice Person [00:26:26]:

Oh, yeah.

Jeff Swanson [00:26:27]:

Phenomenal. Done it on the grill that way. Slow roasted on the grill about 300 degrees until it got up to 150.

Janice Person [00:26:35]:

Oh, yum.

Jeff Swanson [00:26:35]:

And then had that smoky flavor with it too. It was amazing.

Janice Person [00:26:41]:

I could tell from your face it makes you hungry. Talking about it too.

Jeff Swanson [00:26:45]:

That’s been one of the most fun things with these animals, is just experimenting and seeing what’s possible.

Janice Person [00:26:50]:

Yeah.

Jeff Swanson [00:26:51]:

Korean short ribs. I think I just had a picture up here was going to show you those. Your chuck short ribs thin sliced across the bone. So you’ve got a little piece of bone in every single one there are.

Janice Person [00:27:05]:

So all of the favorites on his all the photo favorites are of meat.

Jeff Swanson [00:27:09]:

Meat pictures and few cow pictures.

Janice Person [00:27:12]:

I love it.

Jeff Swanson [00:27:13]:

We do so many things that you just can’t find anywhere. We keep all the off wall. We keep the tongue, the cheek meat, the oxtail, and sell that.

Janice Person [00:27:22]:

And then with all the little trimmings and stuff, you make sausages.

Jeff Swanson [00:27:28]:

We take a portion of what would become ground beef. We make bratwurst and Dewey sausage, sweet Italian sausage. We just came out with the tree Zoe a month or two ago. That is phenomenal.

Janice Person [00:27:40]:

That’s my love language.

Jeff Swanson [00:27:42]:

The easiest, wonderful tacos you’ll ever make.

Janice Person [00:27:45]:

Because once you cook the meat, you’re good.

Jeff Swanson [00:27:48]:

You’re done. Yeah.

Janice Person [00:27:49]:

You might want to put some lettuce or cilantro cheese on it and a.

Jeff Swanson [00:27:52]:

Little bit of sauce. We fed eight people one night with four pounds of trees and still had leftovers.

Janice Person [00:28:01]:

Everybody was happy, and it took five.

Jeff Swanson [00:28:03]:

Minutes or maybe ten at the most to fix it all.

Janice Person [00:28:06]:

It was just amazing. I love it. So most of your people, I assume, are from Clarksville.

Jeff Swanson [00:28:12]:

Very local. We’ve had a few people drive from a little farther out. We’ve had people come from 3 hours away just to try our beef. Everything’s locally raised, locally sold. We do not ship or anything like that because we live within an hour of about 3 million people.

Janice Person [00:28:32]:

Yeah. There’s a lot of folks around here.

Jeff Swanson [00:28:35]:

Not that that’s a good, bad, or indifferent, but to me, it just doesn’t make sense to ship.

Janice Person [00:28:42]:

Yeah.

Jeff Swanson [00:28:42]:

Why would I box it up and charge you $50 to get there overnight when you only live an hour away?

Janice Person [00:28:48]:

Yeah.

Jeff Swanson [00:28:50]:

And that’s, I guess, the puzzle with this whole deal, is figuring out how to get the customers to us, and you’re going to have a lot that think it’s too far. For whatever reason. I’m used to driving all over the place, so it’s nothing to drive an hour down the road. But a lot of people aren’t used to that.

Janice Person [00:29:07]:

Yeah.

Jeff Swanson [00:29:08]:

So that’s kind of been the one struggle for us, is convincing the people to come here.

Janice Person [00:29:14]:

Yeah. In today’s world, I guess during COVID people were really excited to drive out into the country. I noticed that from friends that were in the city that never used to go to the country to get away from. People suddenly were excited to go for nice long drives. Right. They kind of get out of the house because they were so tired of their house. But this part of the country is gorgeous for a drive.

Jeff Swanson [00:29:38]:

It is.

Janice Person [00:29:39]:

I mean, when we were coming through, there would be like these really wooded hollers, and you could see, like, there’s got to be a creek down in there somewhere. I’m not sure where it is. So many trees, you can’t see it, but then it just opens up into some beautiful pasture land, and then it’ll close back in with lots of trees and. Stuff. It truly is beautiful.

Jeff Swanson [00:29:58]:

A few cornfields and bean fields. Tobacco is a big crop around here, too. And yeah, it’s a very diverse area.

Janice Person [00:30:06]:

Yeah. So if people aren’t in an hour or two, strive and stuff, is there like a wagyu network?

Jeff Swanson [00:30:15]:

That’s the one thing that’s, I guess, amazing. And we’ve had people contact us from all over. It’s like, well, do you ship? I’m like, sorry, we don’t. But the biggest thing is the Internet’s amazing. If you type in wagyu and search enough, you’re going to find somebody within a reasonable distance that raises these animals to some extent. You’re going to have a lot of the crossbred. So the Wagyu and Angus cross, there’s more people out there raising those than there are the full bloods. They’re a little bit faster maturing, faster to process because of that crossbred genetics and the benefits from the Angus meat quality is going to be good, but it’s not going to be the same as 100% animals. It’s just the nature of the beast. We decided to stick with the 100% wagyu from the start just because of the consistency of the meat.

Janice Person [00:31:07]:

Yeah.

Jeff Swanson [00:31:08]:

So you’re going to get 50% genetics from the sire, 50% genetics from the dam. So if they’re both wagyu and they both have phenomenal bloodlines, it’s going to increase your chances of producing really awesome beef with the crossbred. And we produced a few early on and we had some really great results, I mean, comparable to what our full blood do. But the biggest thing is you’ve got that possibility they get the marbling at some point.

Janice Person [00:31:38]:

You don’t know whether it’s going to shift.

Jeff Swanson [00:31:40]:

And if the marbling genetics from the mom and not the sire, and you get an animal that doesn’t perform as well as it could.

Janice Person [00:31:47]:

Yeah. And you don’t know that until you’ve taken it to be processed and stuff.

Jeff Swanson [00:31:51]:

And you can have one turn out great this time, the next time. And that’s the thing is, in the cattle industry, everything revolves in three year cycles. So almost three and a half, almost four, actually, because by the time you breed a cow gestation is nine months, and then you’re going to raise that calf for a certain amount of time before you process it. So it’s a very long drawn out process.

Janice Person [00:32:18]:

Well, when we were talking, you started this with a partner and it’s been forever and you feel like you’re going to make a profit one of these days. Yes, but that’s also why you were still shoeing horses off, right?

Jeff Swanson [00:32:37]:

You got to be able to keep the bills paid and keep the cows fed. When we had shortcomings, like if we had a slow month on meat sales and we had to kick in a little bit to help cover feed costs or whatever, that’s what we did.

Janice Person [00:32:49]:

Yeah. So eight years.

Jeff Swanson [00:32:52]:

Well, there’s seven now.

Janice Person [00:32:54]:

Seven now.

Jeff Swanson [00:32:56]:

Next spring will be eight years.

Janice Person [00:32:57]:

Seven years before you quit the job of shoeing horses. It’s a long term deal.

Jeff Swanson [00:33:08]:

And I knew full aware that the thoughts that we had producing the beef and there are things to do. We’ve sold a few bulls. We haven’t sold really any females, but we’re kind of getting to that point where we will we’ll start selling a few heifers probably coming this fall.

Janice Person [00:33:26]:

Yeah.

Jeff Swanson [00:33:27]:

But everything’s been worth it to us to maintain and grow the herd. And we do process we process females, too, because that helps prove what your genetics do.

Janice Person [00:33:38]:

I love it.

Jeff Swanson [00:33:38]:

Yeah. It’s a labor of love, and one of these days, I hope it pays off.

Janice Person [00:33:44]:

So is there anything I really forgot to ask you? I was going to let the boys tell me, but I knew they would get tired of listening. And they have been making faces at me for like, the last 20 minutes at that door. They do that. So is there anything I missed asking you? Like, when your customers come out, is there something that they’re always blown away by?

Jeff Swanson [00:34:07]:

Usually they’ll look at the steaks, especially if we’ve got ribeyes and New York strips in stock. The marbling on them is beautiful. And they’ll pick it up and they’re like, oh, my gosh, look at that marbling. And then they’ll realize how big that steak is because it’s assurable. They’re used to going to the grocery store and buying personal package of ten ounce ribeyes, and all of a sudden they pick up one ribeye that weighs a bunch. And that’s the thing, is we try to keep our prices as reasonable as.

Janice Person [00:34:40]:

Possible because the price per pound is one thing versus the price per steak.

Jeff Swanson [00:34:44]:

Exactly.

Janice Person [00:34:45]:

Okay.

Jeff Swanson [00:34:46]:

And we figured that out years ago when we first started selling meat, because we started out at price per pound, and all it did was confuse people because they would pick up a ribeye that was 24oz or 22oz or whatever, and like, well, how much is that going to be? Well, it says 1.25 pounds. Yeah, but how much is that? They didn’t want to sit there and do the math in their head, so we broke it down and basically based our steak prices on an average, a minimum average. So our ribeyes are based on an 18 ounce steak.

Janice Person [00:35:22]:

Okay.

Jeff Swanson [00:35:22]:

And they’re never 18oz. So the customer is getting they get the nice little bonus.

Janice Person [00:35:27]:

Yeah.

Jeff Swanson [00:35:27]:

And the processor asked me that we were at a couple of years ago. He’s like, well, we can get them down to that. 18oz at what cost?

Janice Person [00:35:35]:

Yeah.

Jeff Swanson [00:35:36]:

I said, okay, you’re going to trim a little bit off here and a little bit off there, and then what are you going to oh, we’ll just throw it in with the grind. I said, that doesn’t do any good. Yeah, I’d rather give it to the customer than throw it in the grind.

Janice Person [00:35:47]:

Yeah, I love it.

Jeff Swanson [00:35:49]:

Yeah. And the ribeye strips, we keep whatever they are. We cut them inch and an 8th inch and a quarter thick. And whatever they are, they are our other steaks filets. We cut them down to 8oz and sirloins, we cut a center cut sirloin down to eight or 9oz. And we do the same thing with flat irons and Denver’s and ranches. And most people love the smaller size because it’s a perfect meal, especially when you have that richer flavor. You realize you take an eight ounce Denver steak, which is phenomenally marbled, and it’s just beautiful. And by the time you eat that eight or nine ounce steak, you’re like that’s plenty.

Janice Person [00:36:33]:

Yeah, I love it. All right, Chris, now ask you, did I forget to ask him anything important? So people do buy their ground beef.

Jeff Swanson [00:36:41]:

They do? Oh, yeah, absolutely. It makes the most amazing hamburger you’ll ever eat.

Janice Person [00:36:48]:

Really?

Jeff Swanson [00:36:49]:

That same rich, buttery, tender flavor.

Janice Person [00:36:53]:

I do love really good burgers.

Jeff Swanson [00:36:55]:

When we first started processing it and made our own burgers here at home, the best way I could describe it, it was like biting into air that had a beef flavor to it. It’s that tender.

Janice Person [00:37:08]:

Wow.

Jeff Swanson [00:37:08]:

I mean, you had no resistance. Not much chewing. It’s just bite into your burger and you’re like, oh, my gosh, it’s fantastic. It’s just amazing. And then you get the rich, buttery flavor with it. Everything we do, minimal seasoning, salt and pepper, that’s about it. Because there’s so much natural flavor to the meat, it does not need much else.

Janice Person [00:37:33]:

I love it. Well, I can’t wait to get this episode out to people. As I do this. I’m going to tell you which all photos I need you to send, if you don’t already send them to me. I really appreciate your time.

Jeff Swanson [00:37:45]:

And I tell people, I said our goal for the future is one day we’d like to buy our own. Right now we lease, so we’d like to buy our own big farm. But it’s going to be more not just producing phenomenal beef, but the whole agritourism. We want people to come see how the cattle are raised, be able to walk around, enjoy nature. And like you and I going out and checking on the mamas. Just have a path where they can go by and see them, not get out in them. Because mamas can get territorial.

Janice Person [00:38:17]:

You saw. I know how to stay on the other side of the farmer.

Jeff Swanson [00:38:22]:

People are so disconnected from to where their food comes from that we’d like to get it back to it. They want to know where their food comes from.

Janice Person [00:38:34]:

That’s all. What I’m trying to do with this podcast is help people better understand because not everybody has phone book in their phone where they can just call up people and say, who else should I talk to?

Jeff Swanson [00:38:44]:

And there’s so much misinformation out there that if people really want to know the truth, all they have to do is come ask the people that are doing it.

Janice Person [00:38:54]:

Yeah, well, I’ll make sure they can find you on Instagram and Facebook, and they can ask you all those questions, too. But knowing that they could just find some farmers in their area by looking is also a great thing. Thanks so much. Your boys are dying to get back in this house, and I can’t make them stay out there any longer. Jeff, thank you so much for being here.

Jeff Swanson [00:39:14]:

Thank you for having me.

Janice Person [00:39:17]:

I have to tell you how fun it was when Braxton and Gunner came back in and were checking to see how the interview went and what was going to happen next about the sweetest kids ever. Braxton convinced his mom to make shepherd’s pie, which is one of his favorite meals, and was trying hard to get me to stay for the evening. It’s so sweet. But now I really want to try shepherd’s pie with wagyu beef because it seems like there may be a little bit of a different butteriness to it, and that does sound really good with shepherd’s pie. So I hope you guys found this of interest. We’re going to go ahead and share it on our social channels. If you could share it with people in the way you think, they’d find it most fitting. Those who might enjoy hearing about the foods they enjoy, but a little bit different perspective than they may normally hear. Thanks so much. We’ll talk to you again in two weeks. Bye.

The post Transcript for Episode 408 with SouthwindS Cattle – Adams, TN appeared first on Grounded by the Farm.

This transcript accompanies our remastered & updated episode talking about life alongside a cranberry marsh with cranberry farmer Amber Bristow. This update follows the remastered episode from 2020, was a favorite from our holiday foods series.

53:48

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

cranberries, harvest, fruit, people, year, water, vines, cranberry juice, growers, ocean spray, tractor, crop, fresh fruit, freeze, craisins, berry, add, instagram, blueberries, bit

SPEAKERS

Grounded by the Farm, Janice Person, Amber Bristow

Grounded by the Farm  00:03

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

00:13

every other week

Grounded by the Farm  00:14

as we talk about the foods we love. In this updated episode for the holidays, we’re talking to cranberry farmer Amber Bristow. She is a longtime favorite here, such a great conversationalist and breaks things down about cranberry farming in a way that it leaves me amazed each time I talked to her. So this redo, we have the first episode that we recorded with her with some minor modifications. Later in this episode, you will find caught up with her on what’s happened in the two years since she and I talked the first time love that we get to talk about how cranberry juice what really big, how she’s got a new farmhand at the house and the family how ecology on the farm is working and some of the kinds of wildlife they have. Which fits right into a lesson plan that we’ve created. It’s available on TPT for teachers to use with students, we did talk about a few products that she’s found in the cranberry space. I’m going to put those links everything else on grounded by the farm.com. Let’s go ahead and get started. I was so excited to find Amber on Instagram. There aren’t very many cranberry farmers are there. No, there’s not. You guys are a an elite bunch. I think Amber,

Amber Bristow  01:35

we’re a unique brand.

Grounded by the Farm  01:36

All right. I’m gonna suggest there aren’t a lot of cranberry farmers out there. So can you tell me sort of how many farmers there are like you? And you’re one of the only ones on Instagram, I assume. But where do we find cranberry farmers.

Amber Bristow  01:52

Most of the cranberry growers are found in Wisconsin, we produce over half of the world’s supply of cranberries, which is humblebrag. I’m not exactly sure the total number of growers in the state. But there’s quite a few other top producing states are out in Massachusetts. They’re second in line and kind of out east in that area in Massachusetts, New Jersey, also in Washington State. And then there’s a few growers up in Canada. And actually recently down in Chile. There’s a few growers that are popping up down there too. So mostly Wisconsin is a Top Producing state. Well, we’ll just leave it at that.

Grounded by the Farm  02:28

I love it cheese heads and cranberries. That’s what Wisconsin has going for it. Yes. I’ve always thought of cranberries is inextricably American foods. And I remember going to Italy Gosh, a million years ago, it seems for a friend’s to visit them at Thanksgiving. And they had Mabry and cranberries and cranberry sauce. Is it really like an American native plant or something?

Amber Bristow  02:54

Yeah, so cranberries are one of the I think four native fruits to North America, along with the blueberry Concord grape. And I think now strawberries just got added into that mix as well. So they were found growing wild here in Wisconsin, and we found a way to cultivate them and turn it into the industry that it is today. So we still have a few wild cranberries growing out in our marshes that we can find before the critters get to them. So that’s pretty cool. That’s a really unique thing to be really proud of.

Grounded by the Farm  03:24

Yeah, it’s interesting. I didn’t even think of what you would call them. They’re not fields you call a marshes. What’s farming, cranberries look like?

Amber Bristow  03:34

Oh, it’s a year long process, kind of like any other type of farming. Usually our busiest seasons are obviously harvest. That’s kind of the image that people are really familiar with, with you know, the guy standing out in water that’s only happens during harvest time. Cranberries actually don’t grow in water. So they’re a perennial plant as well. So they they require they require year round care. So it’s it’s busy all year round for us.

Grounded by the Farm  04:01

All right, the plant cranberries each year, you said it’s a perennial, do always intercede or do you have one plant out there and you continue to

Amber Bristow  04:09

harvest. The way cranberries are planted is pretty unique. We only do a couple we call them cranberry beds. We have 230 acres of cranberries total, but we divide them up into cranberry beds. So kind of like think of like a two to three acre plot is what we refer to as a cranberry bed. If we have a bed that is kind of reaching the end of its production life, we will replant that in the spring. So the way that we plant is the common way that we do it is we have there’s different varieties of cranberries as well kind of similar to apples. They all taste the same, but they kind of vary in size and shape and ripeness rate I guess so we have like an earlier variety, just like a standard variety and then a later variety just depending so it can kind of stagger or harvest out. So if we have a variety that we really like, what we’ll do is we’ll go out And we’ll just mow those vines right off, so they grow on a low running vine. Wow. So we’ll just mow those vines, and then we’ll go out with like a hay bale. And then we’ll just pick those vines up and compact them into a hay bale full of cranberry vines. Wow. And then we will dig up the old bed, we’ll just rip out all those vines dig up all of that soil that they’re grown in, and just put a new soil and then we’ll take those cranberry vines that We mowed off and we’ll just kind of shake them over the sand, disc them in, put water fertilizer on them, and they will regrow from those vine clippings. And then those clippings that We mowed off, those will also regrow within the next two years. Wow. Yeah, it’s pretty cool. They’re a very efficient plant. After we replant, it takes about two to three years of growth for them to produce a sizable crop that we can actually get a harvest off of so much

Grounded by the Farm  05:49

of this is like, did I know that and I’m thinking I’ve learned some of it over the year from Instagram following you. So your channel is cranberry chats. I like that you put Amber and cranberry. Yeah, as your hashtag cram marry, it’s really very good. That’s amazing. So they’re vines, they’re not bushes, we have the image of oil and water does water play much of a role the rest of the year, only at harvest mostly at

Amber Bristow  06:19

harvest is when we use large quantities of water like like you’re used to seeing, we use it all throughout the year. So like in the spring months, so after the fruit is harvested, the vines go dormant in the winter months. So in the winter months, we need to protect the vines because they are perennial. So right now we have buds developing for next season’s crop. So we need to protect those vines. And the way that we do that over winter is we’ll actually flood those beds back up again. So put like two feet of water on all of the beds, and then we wait for that water to freeze up. So it forms a thick layer of ice. And once we have a few inches of ice, usually it takes about seven and 10 days to get like a sturdy layer of ice will pull any extra water off. And then that ice just kind of settles right on top of the vines, it actually protects the buds from any harsh elements. And we’ll do that a couple of times throughout the winter, just to build that ice up so it doesn’t get any damage. And then once that ice melts in the springtime and the vine start kind of waking up and coming out of dormancy, those buds are really vulnerable to frost overnight. So we’ll actually use our irrigation system to irrigate the plants and just make sure that that water isn’t freezing up on the buds or like that frost isn’t sticking to the buds. So that energy between the moving water helps keep the frost from sticking to the buds into the vine. So it kind of keeps them protected in that sense. And then in the summer months, we also use water for just general irrigation purposes. So they required water just like any other plants. And we have a lot of water out here we have a high water table. So all that water that we’re using is kind of recycled and reused. So we’re never letting water go to waste at all. So any water that we do use for like flooding purposes, it’s always getting pulled back out and stored where it came from.

Grounded by the Farm  08:05

That’s really cool. One of the questions I always ask my family and friends, what questions and even on the Facebook page and stuff, what questions people have for the kinds of farmers I’m interviewing. And one of them was asking about climate change. And you know, with different things going on with trout, different seasons. Right now we have these like fires going on in the west coast and stuff. And so it’s kind of hard to predict what kind of weather we’re gonna have each year. That was why they were wondering about water. Are there other issues that you guys have for pest or other problems like that with cranberries.

Amber Bristow  08:42

We since we are in kind of like a marshy, swampy area, we are more prone to bugs. Unfortunately, we don’t have like a lot that can destroy your crop by any means what we do have some nasty, nasty little critters out there that we have to take care of. So a really cool thing that we can do like the flooding in the in the winter months, that water hopefully will suffocate any eggs that were left throughout the summer or fall. So we don’t have to do quite as many treatments in the spring when they start to hatch. So hopefully that water just kind of kills all the nasty bugs right away. And we don’t have to worry about it too much. We also have a lot of spiders out here that can take care of the pest for us too. But we’re pretty fortunate that we don’t have a lot of disease or you know a lot of insects that that really can affect the fruit. We also kind of have to be careful of the wildlife like white tailed deer. We have a lot of geese out here that like to eat the fruit so those are more pests to us than anything else.

Grounded by the Farm  09:43

Yeah, I was thinking birds and staff present such a tough issue for some berry crops or you know things because it gets bright red and people you know, it’s like attracts the animals. Do you harvest cranberries like have you already harvested? This year we’re talking. It’s September Have you already harvested?

Amber Bristow  10:03

Not yet, actually, we are doing our early varieties. I’m trying to check the calendar next Tuesday. So I think like the 15th, mid September is when we’ll kind of start our trial with our early fruit just to kind of work the kinks out before we start our full harvest. And that usually runs from the entire month of October. So we try to finish up by Halloween is kind of like our deadline that we like to set because once you start getting into November, then it starts getting too cold to be out in the elements like that. So we’d like to finish up right around the end of October.

Grounded by the Farm  10:36

The only image I think Americans have of cranberry farms are two people standing in a field in an Ocean Spray for a commercial talking. And there was I can remember like a ninja, and all kinds of different things. So is that just at harvest that you would see the berries above water and farmers and waiters do you go in the marsh like that?

Amber Bristow  11:00

Yeah, so that only happens that image is only during harvest, and the rest of the time, it’s completely dry, I can walk out there and tennis shoes most of the time in the summer and not have what feet. What you see in the commercials, that’s all during harvest, but we don’t have chest waders like they see in the commercials, we just have hit boots. So not quite as stylish, but still still just as functional. The only time that the berries are floating like that is during harvest, the rest of the time, they’re kind of growing underneath a canopy of leaves. So they’re just connected with a little stemmen just hanging out closer to the ground.

Grounded by the Farm  11:34

So when they’re floating in the water like that, as a as a farmer, do you actually go out in the field to help move them towards a harvesting machine. I mean, I can’t imagine you’re like netting them all up, or something.

Amber Bristow  11:48

So I’m going to try to explain this as best I can. So if it’s not making sense, just just let me know. The way that we start our harvest process is we start off by flooding the beds. So we put in six to eight inches of water. And then we have this cab tractor that has tracks instead of wheels on it. And this tractor has like these metal fingers on the front and on the back. So this tractor will drive in the bed. And as he’s driving along these combs just gently just comb the berries right off the vines. And then once they’re kind of off the vines and all the fruit is off, the vines will go back in and we’ll add extra water on top of that. So in total, we have about two feet of water. And we add that extra water to help those various kind of come up out of the vine. So when we do corral them, they don’t get stuck in there and we we get all the fruit that we can. So once all that water is on top, we have two tractors. So the shape of our cranberry beds is just like a long rectangle, we have these two tractors that have these big spools on the back of them. And on these spools, they have what we call a cranberry boom. So if you can imagine like that divider that you have in a pool, where it kind of separates the shallow end from the deep end, like those floating, I don’t know, like that floating rope type. It’s kind of like that, but it’s wrapped in like this waterproof material. And they come in 100 foot sections, you can hook these sections together, you determine just kind of like looking at the crop size, and you kind of determine how many feet of this boom that you need to corral everything. Without it being too tight or too loose. It’s a very, it’s a very precise skill. These tractors will kind of backup to each other on the short end of the of the bed, and one tractor will be stationary, and the other tractor will pull that boom off of that reel of the opposing tractor, hook it up to their tractor. And both of the tractors have kind of like giant hair dryers that will blow in towards the bed. So the hairdryer is just basically push all the fruit

Amber Bristow  13:56

will just kind of push all their fruit into the in the middle of the bed so that they can slide that boom, right alongside of the bed. And then one tractor will start driving. And it’s just pulling this constant boom along until the other tractor driver kind of waves him off and says, Okay, that’s enough. And then he’ll unhook from Israel, hook it up to his tractor, and then he’ll drive along the other side. And then they’ll just kind of meet in one corner and unhook that, boom, stick it down into the ground and move on to the next one. And then our fruit pickup crew will come along to the bed that they just finished corralling. And we have what’s called a berry pump. And this is where it gets hard to explain because there’s no other equipment like this out here. So I’m sorry, if you don’t have a good visualization. I’ll be posting pictures soon. So hopefully, hopefully that helps. But we have this berry pump. And it’s basically just like this giant cart on wheels. It has like two levels to it. So there’s a platform on the bottom that you can drive and then the upper platform that raises It raises up to like 30 feet in the air, which is crazy. That’s where I’m standing. This very pump has like this metal arm that goes out. Yeah, this arm goes out into the water. And on this arm, it has kind of like this metal box on top that has a little sprayers, that will blast into the water. And then down below that box, there’s this little pan that acts as a vacuum. So this arm will go out in the water in the pan sits underneath the water, and the sprayers sit on top, just like right over top of the water. So when we start this up, it pushes water through that metal bar, and it blasts the fruit that’s sitting on top of the water. And that kind of self cleans the fruit. So it kind of knocks off all the leaves and sticks, that kind of gets stuck to the fruit. And then that pan will suck the fruit up out of the water. And then it travels all the way up to the top of this platform where I’m standing. And it goes up into like this big metal bin on top of this platform. And that fills up with water and fruit and it’s still kind of self cleaning all the way up there. And then from that metal container up top, it goes down kind of down at a slant and down that slant, it has a metal grate on there. And those metal grates are set just far enough apart. So all that smaller fruit kind of falls through because we can’t send in small fruit because it just can’t get used for anything, right. So then all the larger fruit that doesn’t fall through the cracks, it goes down into the back of a semi trailer. And that’s what gets sent off into Ocean Spray. And then everything else like any leaves or extra sticks, or sometimes frogs, unfortunately, they fall down those cracks, and then they get shot off into the opposite end and goes into the back of a dump truck. Yeah, so that’s what we call our trash truck is just all the leaves and sticks and stuff that we can’t have. Okay, and then we use that later for compost. So my job standing on top of this berry pump is to make sure that the grades don’t get backed up, like with any grass or anything, because once that fruit starts to backup, then it just turns into this whole big mess. And we don’t want that so and then I also kind of control I let the guys know down below, when it’s time to move that semi trailer ahead. Or when it gets full, then I shut down everything and I started back up whenever it’s time to do so. And then the guys down below, they’re pulling that cranberry boom in out of the water. So there’s a kind of a rotating reel down below that they wrap this boom around, and then they just have to just physically pull that boom, right out of the water until there’s no boom left. And then they make sure that all the fruit gets sucked up. So kind of a real quick overview. That’s kind of harvest in a nutshell.

Grounded by the Farm  17:42

Wow. Okay.

Amber Bristow  17:44

Hopefully that made sense. It does.

Grounded by the Farm  17:45

It does. And we’re going to have videos that we can post in here that will help people. But I think part of the idea is, is so different than any other crop that we grow in the US. A lot of people have gone out and gotten berry picking. But cranberry picking is totally different. It’s a little bit more labor intensive. But when you look at him, they don’t look back different from Yeah. Yeah, I mean, blueberries have a similar shape. And it’s just so weird. Wow, I had no idea we were gonna learn that much about cranberries in descriptive language. I’m impressed because I’m going to make it for harvest next year. Good. Next year, I will be traveling. You mentioned that some of them go to Ocean Spray, right? You know, your cranberries go to Ocean Spray. Can you help me understand it? Is it a cooperative? Like, are you guys part owner?

Amber Bristow  18:42

We are Yeah, that’s a really cool thing. Ocean Spray is a grower Co Op. So it is owned by a lot of multi Gen families like myself. I’m fifth generation out here on our family’s Marsh. And it’s really hard not to find a multigenerational cranberry farm out here. Once you come out and you see what it’s all about, you’re going to understand why there are so many multi generational families, it’s so hard to leave. It’s impossible to leave and never come back. It’s just such a cool, unique industry and there’s so much pride that goes in to into this industry. So that’s why you’re going to be seeing a lot of new marketing from Ocean Spray really highlighting the growers. You’re going to see us more on the back of like juice labels, you’re going to see us on the back of Craisins to hopefully one day you’ll be blessed with my face on your cranberry juice or something I don’t know. But it’s pretty cool.

Grounded by the Farm  19:40

I have had friends on milk jugs and stuff so I guess it’s only good to go there with cranberries. I think that’s that’s so interesting because most people think of Ocean Spray is like a food brand like the the cranberries I have in my freezer right now because I buy some in winter knowing it’s like they’re not going to just putting them out fresh. And so but they’re Ocean Spray cranberries. Good. Thank you. They could have been grown by you. Or your family, maybe the ones that grows?

Amber Bristow  20:11

That would be cool. Yeah. I mean, when you tell people I could get cranberries. Amber, what do you tell people? You can just tell them? They’re from me, I will take credit for them.

Grounded by the Farm  20:21

Can you tell me since you guys are part of the cooperative, what else do you know about how do they determine which ones are freshen? Is there a way? Like are different varieties better suited for the processing side? Or for the crazy side? Or yeah, so how does all that stuff work together? That’s,

Amber Bristow  20:39

that’s totally up to the grower, what they want to grow our family, we just grow for processed fruit. So all of our stuff goes in for juices, sauce, Craisins, that kind of thing. We don’t do any fresh fruit. And that requires a completely different harvest type, I guess, then what we do since we do processed, we don’t have to make the fruit look pretty necessarily. Yeah, it can be dinged up a little bit from our harvest practices. Whereas if you’re doing fresh fruit, it has to be done in a completely different way. It has to be done a lot more gentle. It’s a lot more labor intensive, I think to due process fruit than fresh fruit. So some growers, they have completely different varieties that are a little bit more hardy. So they can withstand a harvest process and not have a few nicks and endings. I’m not totally confident on how they harvest. I know it involves boats and in different water practices. But it’s weird. I don’t know, you can look it up on YouTube. But

Grounded by the Farm  21:38

we’re gonna we’re gonna pretend that like the crawfish.

21:43

That’s really funny.

Grounded by the Farm  21:45

It may not be like crawfish. But it is interesting to think that you have to have different varieties. And it’s the same in apples. So you know, the apples that are cut up for a salad bar or for the little snack packs are different than the Apple rate that I typically buy. It makes sense, but I just wondered like so yours are processed. So as a child, I always had cranberry sauce that came out of the can and what’s frequently served in the shape of the cranberry. But yeah, us too. We love it. What’s your favorite way to eat cranberries? Or drink cranberry? Yeah,

Amber Bristow  22:19

growing up, I always had cranberry juice. It’s just a necessity in our house. So all juices I love obviously, but my grandma makes a really good cranberry sauce. And I’m not I’m no cook by any means like ask. Like when I go to family gatherings, they asked me to bring a fruit salad like just cut up a watermelon pineapple. Lucky if I come there with all my fingers. Honestly, if I am in the kitchen, it needs to be something pretty easy. But my grandma makes a really good cranberry sauce. I have the recipe right in front of me. Let me just whip it out.

22:52

Oh my goodness.

Amber Bristow  22:53

So it’s four cups of fresh fruit I came prepared today. So this is coming from my grandma. That’s what I call her on on Instagram. I love it. I’ve got all the Korean names just just as an FYI. So it’s four cups of fruit, two cups of sugar, one cup of liquid of your choice, we usually use orange juice to add a little zing. And then you just put that in a nine by 13 covered up with foil you can add like cloves or cinnamon or anything that you want to it and then you just bake it for an hour at 350 and the fruit will stay whole. So it’s really pretty deserved. So you still have the nice round berries in there. They don’t pop or shrivel up like a lot of other a blueberry wouldn’t necessarily. So it just stays like this really pretty, round red cranberry sauce. We love it. It’s super tasty. Oh

Grounded by the Farm  23:44

well. I’m gonna get that recipe written down you’re gonna send me a photo of it so I can put it on the blog. I’m going to also share my mother’s favorite cranberry recipe which makes my family go nuts. And it is one that you boil on top of the stove. So you do want to pop the cranberries with pineapple juice and then you put in sugar we do like sugar. I like the tartness of cranberries but some sugar in there helps to a little bit of gelatin, some pecans and some crushed pineapple. And it’s oh my god, good. But I also like Craisins and salads. Yes, me too.

Amber Bristow  24:21

And anytime with salads or oatmeal Craisins are also really good to bake with as well. Like I mentioned, like I’m not knocking blueberries in any way shape or form. Don’t Don’t get me wrong. I love blueberries, but I have a play. Yeah, they have a place but in muffins and breads, they bleed. So if you’re looking for something a fruit that’s if you’re looking for fruit that’s similar go with a cranberry. Yeah, it’s gonna make everything look prettier.

Grounded by the Farm  24:47

I like it. You know, last year I had something I had not had before and that was a cranberry wine kind of punch. That was Amazing. It was at a nice gift shop over on the other side of the river. And I’m gonna have to see if I still have that recipe because I made it last year it was kind of like a sangria almost. But may well cranberries helped

Amber Bristow  25:13

me in my sounds good.

Grounded by the Farm  25:17

It was good. It’s a little gift shop called fuzzy wigs. Fuzzy wigs sold that last year and they only have it around the holidays a special wine. I’m one of those people who just love it. What is the biggest use of cranberries? Like is it juice or Craisins? Yeah,

Amber Bristow  25:35

up until recently, it was juice for a really long time, that was just kind of like our go to thing. But we didn’t really branch out into many other areas, I guess just because juice was so popular. And now that everyone’s kind of on a health kick. Not that that’s a bad thing. But that’s great for us because cranberries are considered super fruit. They’re very low in sugar, they’re high in antioxidants. They’re proven great for gut health. Everyone knows them for like urinary tract issues. So they’re, they’re great for every aspect of your body. So we’re starting to incorporate that more into different food options. So you’re going to be seeing a lot more like granola with cranberries in them, or cereals, or I just recently saw cranberry dental floss because they’ve been proven great for gum health even. And I saw a pet company come out with like, like this liquid that you can put into dogs water or something like to add, like immunity, health and gut health for your dogs, like people take better care of their pets and themselves. So go ahead, buy all this stuff for your pet. Yeah, definitely. But there’s also a 100% Pure cranberry juice that I buy quite frequently for my smoothies in the morning. Because it is a very low sugar. So I can just add that in instead of water or orange juice or something. So I use that as my liquid base for my smoothies. And I love it. It’s an easy way to get in extra vitamins and it tastes great. If you’re if you like that pucker. Yeah, that pucker power. That’s a good alternative. Yeah,

Grounded by the Farm  27:11

I think that’s interesting, because a lot of us have cranberry cocktail juices are pretty common, right? Like cran Apple, or something. But I haven’t thought about 100% Cranberry. Like, I’m not even sure I’ve ever had that like that would be a tartness to it. For sure. But as a start for something like smoothies, smart Yeah,

Amber Bristow  27:37

if you do buy it, don’t pour a big glass of it. Take take a shot at a time if you can do apple cider vinegar shots, or if you can do grass shots you can do a shot of is this cranberry juice? I never understood grass shots so please don’t come after me for knocking.

Grounded by the Farm  27:57

I am I am picturing people lined up at the bar. Getting there

Amber Bristow  28:02

use it as a vodka chaser. I don’t know whatever you want to do. That’s fine. Yeah,

Grounded by the Farm  28:07

it’s a quite an image. Well, there are quite a few alcoholic drinks that are made with cranberry juice. And one of our friends Leah has a blog farm wife drinks, I’m sure she’s gonna have some breakfast there too. So it will all come together. Ultimately, when we buy cranberries, you guys are harvesting Um, now those will be the ones that are in the markets in October November this year.

Amber Bristow  28:33

That’s, that’s, that’s it. That’s what you’re going to be seeing coming up in the markets pretty soon. And cranberries. They are great to freeze once but they’re not great to freeze twice. So that’s why you don’t see them in the supermarket’s much past like February because we want to make sure that the consumers are getting the best product possible and we know that you as a consumer are going to be freezing them later on just to keep them throughout the year. So we want to make sure that after you freeze them that they’re still going to be a great quality fruit we don’t want you to freeze them and then have us freeze them and then you freeze them again and then when you take them out they’re going to be a little bit mushy compared to if you just froze them the one time so that’s why they don’t have a great shelf life it’s like any other fruit or vegetable they don’t they don’t keep well on the shelf obviously and they don’t freeze well twice. So unfortunately that’s why it’s a little bit harder to find fresh fruit all year round.

Grounded by the Farm  29:32

Yeah, no, it’s a great seasonal product then right like you know you’re getting fresh product in season and then you have juicers year round and craisins year round that are easily you know, kind of easily stored. So I have no idea if you know this so you can tell me know, I buy fresh ones and then I put them in the freezer should I be like putting those in like a zip pack you know, so that it pulls all the air out. Because Chris Memories are kind of sturdy.

Amber Bristow  30:01

So what we like to tell people is when you get a bag of cranberries to wash them off goes through them, make sure that if you do happen to get a bad one that you get rid of it, lay them flat out on a paper towel to dry. And then we just put them in like a freezer Ziploc bag. And then they will keep in your freezer for like a year or so. But if you just have them in your crisper, they will keep for like six to eight weeks as well. So just make sure that you’re cleaning them drying them off. Don’t put them in wet. We think they last longer and better in like a freezer Ziploc than just in like the plastic bag that they come in. Yeah,

Grounded by the Farm  30:39

I’ll always do better. See, if I learn a little bit, always put it into practice. There you go. And then that way, if I’m doing that in the winter months, if I’m getting them and washing them, nicely freezing them, I’ll have some so I can add them into my muffins even in the summer, or add them in with some yogurt in the summer. You know, like if you freeze them in small bags, you can take the smaller bags out and have some available off and on forever. Right? There you go. I mean, part of it is the idea of trying to get more fresh fruits and vegetables and frozen fruits and vegetables and juices in people overall, right like most of us need more fruits and vegetables anyways, that you can do the kind of encourage that helps. Yes,

Amber Bristow  31:26

definitely. I know I need help with that a lot

Grounded by the Farm  31:29

there. It really is. And you get tired of the same thing over and over.

Amber Bristow  31:34

Right? So add some cranberries in there to spice it up a little bit.

Grounded by the Farm  31:38

Exactly, exactly. All right, everybody. So

Janice Person  31:42

this is Janice and we’re back with Amber. It’s been a little over two years. So we talked the Ember it was in August because he was trying to be so smart and ahead of my time, and talk to people about holiday foods before they were really busy. And now here it is October and you’re still willing to talk to me. So thank you. First off.

Amber Bristow  32:04

Thank you for having me again. Talk to you. Now this is great.

Janice Person  32:09

And I wish people would see you but you’re in a marsh a bong or whatever it is. You’ve got cranberries floating behind you because Oh, isn’t it magical wallpaper is so amazing. But two years ago was so long, and I started thinking about it. And when I listened back to the episode, I’m like, oh my god, Janice, you didn’t ask her anything about the skateboard and did from Idaho has like made cranberry juice something amazingly famous. And he was on Tik Tok and Instagram. And like we never mentioned tick tock.

Amber Bristow  32:46

So since social media wild two years ago

Janice Person  32:49

now feels like the history books.

Amber Bristow  32:52

does. It does it feels all just like a fever dream. So much has happened in the last two years. You’re bringing stuff up earlier, before we started recording. I was like, Oh, that was only two years ago. Holy cow. Yeah, the beta, the Tiktok. guy. He came in at the perfect time. Like with Ocean Spray. We didn’t. Ocean Spray didn’t pay him to make this by any means. It just was like in the peak of COVID. And everyone was just like, oh, cranberry juice, it’s so good for you. I need to go out and buy this immediately because of this tick tock. And it was just flying off the shelves and the industry was just booming at that time. So it was it was great. It was perfect. So well. I’m forever grateful for him for like breaking me into the

Janice Person  33:34

it was so funny because one of the last things we had talked about really was sort of how cranberries were on this rise, and that they were beginning to be more and more really healthy food options that included cranberries and stuff. And so then he like, bam brought it to everybody. And I have to say, you know, I told you he’s in one of my favorite TV shows, which is Rez dogs because I spent four years in college in Oklahoma and the Native American community and it just feels very much like home. So I had to put all that in here because I just think it’s great. But take a moment. It is the big thing that’s happened for you is you made your mom or grandma or a cram baby in or the patter

Amber Bristow  34:21

Yes, yes, I had a baby His name is Porter he was born last August so he just turned one and he he’s walking he’s trying to talk he’s handful but he’s the most perfect little thing I’ve I’ve ever seen in my entire life. He rocked my world completely I’m not quite so involved in in the farming side of things right now which is totally okay I’m perfectly content staying at home with him most days and so getting involved when I can and when I’m needed. So we just wrapped up harvest last week actually. So being away from him was the first time I was away all day in a long time and is like, Oh, I didn’t realize how much I missed you for just eight hours and to come home to him and it’s just it’s been great motherhood is just it’s a lot of fun

Grounded by the Farm  35:12

some of the pictures and video you’ve shared of him while he was out, you know, visiting harvest, right. So, like the play time of harvest, which is the kind of pictures I usually take me at harvest, right?

Janice Person  35:25

He looks like he’s very comfortable in the farm world with you guys and pretty much is willing to hop out there and touch the water and try the cranberries and all the things. Yeah,

Amber Bristow  35:36

he is he’s been he’s, he’s a true Instagram baby. I’m just gonna. I think that sums it up. He’s just willing to pose and be a ham and just have fun with me. So I’m grabbing that while I can and hoping it lasts a little bit longer until you start slurring the word. No. And then I think I think the content is going to just just disappear for a little bit, but that’s okay. Well, I

Janice Person  35:58

have to ask you, so if you’re the one that’s home with him more of the time. Are you making him things

Grounded by the Farm  36:05

with cranberries yet?

Amber Bristow  36:08

Yes, yeah, we were we started introducing him to fresh cranberries, especially during harvest, obviously, you break it up into little pieces, and just kind of seeing his reaction, just fresh cranberries. If you’ve never had a fresh cranberry. The texture is very similar to an apple. So it’s got kind of like a thicker white flesh, but they’re very tart. They’re one of the few fruits that are just very low in sugar. So there it is a very tart fruit. So to watch, I really enjoy watching people’s faces the first time they try your fresh cranberry. It’s a little bit of a pucker shock. So to see him try it and keep going back for more it just it warms my heart so much just starting to like them and then we’re adding you know, like the sweet dried cranberries to to like his yogurt and stuff like that. So it’s been it’s fun. He likes them and that makes me happy.

Janice Person  37:02

That’s awesome. I remember my nephew, Tryon lemons and kinda like Yeah, and also having that pucker face like, Oh, wow. And that’s what the baby kinda does and then grabs another one.

Amber Bristow  37:15

Yeah, yeah, we started him with a lime actually, just to see because I was like, well, maybe he’s not gonna like it. I don’t want to have my feelings hurt when the time comes. He loves it. He loves all things tart and pepper II so he must have got my taste buds. Perfect.

Janice Person  37:31

I love it. Well, let’s talk about some of the other things that are going on for you because you just like have blown up like you love Instagram. You love Tik Tok. And then like It’s wild. You’ve got a good following there, though.

Amber Bristow  37:46

Let me tell you about tick tock I, I didn’t have I didn’t do anything on tick tock because I’m afraid of the younger generation and like their wild comments and their lack of filter when they leave comments. I’m too sensitive for me, for me and things on the internet. So I kind of stayed away from posting on Tik Tok. And then, just recently, I only I only had like two or 3000 followers. And then I shared a video about harvest. And now it has 5 million views. And I have 23,000 followers just like overnight and it’s wild. And it took one video on on tic tac for me to get more followers than I have on Instagram I’ve been posting on consistently for like three or four years. Yeah, it was wild. I don’t understand it. But it’s it’s fun. It’s really cool to see a different group of people reacting to the content, you’re sharing and educating people. So it’s always cool to get like their feedback, like oh, I had no idea. Like this is so perfect. I need to go out and buy cranberry juice now. And so to get that fresh, I’m like a new group of people is really fun and exciting. So tick tock, I was afraid of it. I’m still a little afraid of it. turning out to be really fun and reaching like a new demographic of people that I wasn’t reaching on Instagram. So that’s cool, too.

Janice Person  39:09

I will tell you I think a lot of people have that fear factor and I certainly do because you’re you’re at least a millennial and I’m Gen X so you know, but it is amazing to me how many different segments of tic tac there are there are people that do incredibly deep smart things as well as people that do the silly dances that we all know. Right? And all the smart comments and all the Yeah, so I’m glad you found your home there.

Amber Bristow  39:38

I hope so. I hope it doesn’t take like a weird turn and I wind up on the wrong side. Then you still have to cranberry

Janice Person  39:43

chats there and on Instagram so it’s yes it’s pretty easy to find you on either

Amber Bristow  39:49

yes so hopefully I don’t upset like the wrong person. They come find me on the other platform I don’t it’s scary world we live in I

Janice Person  40:00

love it. Well, I wondered if there were any new foods that you like to have cranberries and I showed you. I love these Velveeta Breakfast Biscuits. I carry them with me when I travel especially because sometimes when you get to a hotel, the only thing they have is like sugary stuff right? And so this is something I typically buy and take with me and keep them here at the house. I love the the cranberry orange is my favorite. And then when even anything about you, I ate those this morning and then went oh my gosh, you’re talking to Amber this morning. Good thing you have cranberries on the desk. How about you? Have you found some new things that you really like?

Amber Bristow  40:41

I just actually yesterday I found like a new water enhancer? Like those little Squeezy things that don’t have any calories. Yeah. And then what are they called? They’re like called stir. I think St. Yeah, are. There’s a cranberry pomegranate flavor that I found I brought a variety pack off of Amazon and it’s actually pretty good.

Janice Person  41:03

Well, I love the pucker factor of pomegranate too.

Amber Bristow  41:08

It’s not like it’s not too tart, but it’s not too sweet. And it has antioxidants and vitamins and stuff in it. So it makes me feel better when I drink it. So that’s pretty good. Otherwise, let me see there. It’s hard to find but they Ocean Spray came out with cranberry seeds that you can eat so it’s kind of like chia seeds or flax seeds.

41:34

I am amazed.

Amber Bristow  41:36

I don’t I don’t know if it’s like a test market thing. But they turn that into like a flower as well. Yeah. And it? Yeah, yeah. It like because when I eat cranberries, like I really enjoyed tasting the seeds. That probably sounds really weird, but it has kind of like a nuttier taste to them. And I really like it. So when I saw that they were coming out with the seeds, I was excited. I don’t know what to do with them other than, like, add them to smoothies and stuff because it’s not like you can just grab handfuls because they’re so small. But those have been a good addition to my smoothies in the morning. I kind of replaced like my flax seeds and chia seeds with those, just because they do have a lot of antioxidants and vitamin C and like all the good things that cranberries have. Yeah, and the seeds. That’s been that’s been fun if you can find them. I think I found them on Amazon a little while ago. Everything. Yeah, Amazon. So it’s so

Janice Person  42:31

weird. How many food introductions and food things are on Amazon now?

Amber Bristow  42:36

Yeah, it is what it is like, yes. It’s your easy these limited

Janice Person  42:39

time things that pop up and go. So I’m gonna try and get cranberry seeds before I even published this episode.

Amber Bristow  42:48

I just couldn’t find them

42:49

just so I can do a test. Yeah, I didn’t want to have it.

Amber Bristow  42:53

Let me know if you if you find them. And if you try them what you think?

Janice Person  42:56

Yeah, I think it’s an interesting one. Because my, you know, my nieces and nephews. So I now have great nephews who are that age of your seven. So there’s one, that’s three. And there’s one that just turned one a little while ago. And so they love new foods, like cranberries and stuff like that. Now, they do like them in smaller amounts, then you know, some things and stuff. But they love the diversity of colors. And they love the diversity of textures and things like that. So I could see how Porter would be a big fan. Yeah,

Amber Bristow  43:30

yeah, it’s really fun seeing what he likes and what he doesn’t like. And it always helps if the food is a bright color and something different than what he’s used to. So that’s, that’s kind of a small perk as well.

Janice Person  43:42

I love it. I love it. I wanted to make sure people knew we also have available for schools to use with students. We have a program that we put together and you were able to review that for us and everything and make sure we actually had information, right, we talked about bogs as well as marshes, because in the northeast, they call on bogs. And then the Midwest. They’re Martius. Right? Very different, very different people. It’s okay, both are fine. But then the other thing was as we go through sort of the ecology of it. And I think that people are really interested in the ecology of cranberries and stuff, what all is like a natural Wonderland at times.

Amber Bristow  44:27

Basically, my favorite time of year is always springtime, just when everything starts coming back to life. So one of the reasons that cranberries do love growing in Wisconsin is because they do need that really cold, kind of harsh Wisconsin winter. And so when everything kind of starts thawing and coming back to life, and the plant starts waking up from dormancy, and you really get to see all of the wildlife out here kind of coming back to life as well. So we have a ton of white tailed deer. If you go by any cranberry Marsh animal Wisconsin, you’re, you’re going to see a deer fence around the property, we have that many deer. They just reintroduced elk into our area a couple of years ago as well. So it’s kind of fun to go out and see in like the cornfields or in the soybean fields to go out and look for the elk. They’re kind of majestic. They are, I don’t want them near us. But they’re fun to look at from afar, that they’re a little aggressive when they walk in. We don’t want that out here. But we have a lot of Fox like a lot of raccoons, a lot of possums. We have a family of swans that always comes back every year, we have a couple of families of swans, a lot of East frogs a lot of a lot of every day. So that’s kind of one way that I like to explain that cranberries are such a sustainable industry is you take a look at the wildlife. We’re not the only things living out here. We have such a great ecosystem. And there’s a reason why all of us enjoy living here is because we are such a sustainable industry and everything is happy and healthy and loves being here. So it’s a lot of fun to see kind of the new things and and otters. I posted a video Well, this summer, we have a family of otters that have been around for a couple years. And to see that every year, it’s always really fun swimming along in the in the ponds and in the ditches and stuff. That’s fun. We’ve got a lot a lot of little critters out here.

Grounded by the Farm  46:27

And they’re like me, they tend to hibernate.

Amber Bristow  46:31

Yeah, yep, that’s living the dream.

Janice Person  46:34

Well, you guys have finished harvest already. That seems early. Because you say you try and finish before Halloween, but sometimes it doesn’t always happen. So was this year a good year? Or did you finish early? Because it wasn’t so good.

Amber Bristow  46:52

Both It was It wasn’t our best year. I’m not going to I’m not going to brag and say that it was an excellent year. Yeah. But it wasn’t a terrible year by any means. Either. We started a few days earlier in October as well. So that kind of played into it, too, obviously. And once we started, we just kind of said, You know what, we’re just gonna it’s not a bumper crop, we’re not going to try to stretch it out as long as we can. And try to make it till the end of the month, we’re just going to kind of pedal to the metal and get it all done. So we did have pick a day and just stop harvest because it was snowing and so cold overnight. It was awful. So with cranberries,

47:36

they are not

Amber Bristow  47:37

a good fruit to freeze, thaw and then re freeze. So the flesh gets soft. Yeah, the more times that they freeze and thaw. So we That’s That’s why you can’t find cranberries in store all year round. They’re not a good. They’re not a good, yeah.

47:56

Groceries counts that way too. Right?

Amber Bristow  47:59

Right. So if if we had cranberries floating in water or a night, and it froze to the degree that it did freeze, they would they would get softer. By the time I was ready to by the time the water thought and they could be picked up again. So we had to stop harvest. We couldn’t we couldn’t get any more berries off the vines. We just had to kind of just pause, wait for the call to pass and then continue the following day. So that slowed us down a little bit. But but not a lot. So we just kind of wanted to get it all done and and say good luck next year.

Grounded by the Farm  48:36

I think a year the rest of the year, or did you guys have a lot of drought problems because it was kind of spotty around the US.

Amber Bristow  48:43

It was we did go through a drought period. The really great thing where we’re located. We are in a marshy area. So we do have a naturally high water table. So if you do look at a cranberry bed, it’s dug down into the ground quite a bit. So that’s because we want the roots as close to the water table as possible. So it was always just kind of damp underneath there. You don’t want it soaking wet. But it’s just kind of Yeah, always damp. But we were irrigating quite a bit throughout the summer. We weren’t getting a lot of rain. So our reservoirs were drying up a little bit. But we do have well water that yeah, we can turn on if we need to. And we did have to do that once towards the end of the summer. And it’s very expensive. So we don’t like doing that obviously, but in Drastic times. You know, you kind

Janice Person  49:30

of still want the fruit to mature and be good. Right? So yeah,

Amber Bristow  49:34

we need that. We still need that moisture. But yeah, it was It wasn’t okay here. Again, it’s just kind of, I think, something more drastic circumstances than we’re used to with with all the storms and getting warmer in the spring. Whether you like it or not. I think global warming is a real thing. And there’s some change in the weather patterns. There’s there’s Some change come in. So we’re just trying to adapt and adjust to that. But what’s really great about the cranberry industry is we work so closely with our University Extension Program. Yeah. So we have researchers that we can work one on one as an industry with and come to them with our concerns and our problems and say, What what happened this year? Like, why was Why wasn’t the fruit set as great as it should have been? And they can go back and say, Okay, well, here’s the growing pattern that happened earlier in the spring, early summer, and this is what caused this to happen, and they can come back and, and bring us new research and say, Okay, if this happens next year, maybe apply fertilizer a little bit earlier, you know, things like Yeah, so it’s really great to have that, that those resources so readily available for us and just dedicated to our industry, it’s really great and, and really helps us grow and develop as an industry as a whole. So it’s pretty cool that we have that those resources for us. Yeah, I

Janice Person  51:01

love that, you know, the ability to maintain production, despite

Grounded by the Farm  51:06

changing climate is a big question for a lot of crops and a lot of different areas. And, you know, knowing it’s droughty Okay, well, there’s drought, if you don’t have irrigation, like you guys do for other crops, it comes really problematic, right stuff. So there’s a lot of really smart people doing research into understanding those patterns and figuring out the cycles or the different, you know, shifts because like right now, it’s, it’s 41 day here. And then it was like, at the next day, like the shift in the temperature was so dramatic. And that probably complicates growing food.

Amber Bristow  51:45

Yeah, it does. It really does. And I’m glad I’m not. I’m not the researchers trying to figure out what to do. I just, I just ask the questions and, and see what they say. So yeah,

Grounded by the Farm  51:56

and let them work with the data. And they probably have 100 years where the data on weather and impacts on crops and they can figure out all those deep, dark secrets. And then today

Amber Bristow  52:08

what to do. That’s also how to get paid the big bucks.

Janice Person  52:12

I love it. Well, I hope you guys have a great holiday season. This is a great just to catch up and just to see your smile again. Everybody can find you at cranberry chats and you’re on Instagram, tick tock and Facebook. Yes. So whatever platform other people like they can find you there, Amber. That’s right.

Grounded by the Farm  52:34

Thank you, girl so much. I appreciate it. You have a great holiday. Thank you. You too. Okay, before I let you go, I just want to say thank you for joining us. We love holiday foods and bet you do too. There are so many out there we would love to hear about your favorites. To do that. We’ve got a voicemail number set up where you can just leave a message that numbers 989-303-8489 We would love for you to call leave your name. If you want to leave how to get in touch with you feel free, it’s not needed. And then tell us about your favorite food. What makes it your favorite food and your family actually prepares it all of those kinds of things, some of the ingredients. If you have any questions for farmers of those foods, shout it out and maybe we can include it in a future episode of grounded by the farm. Thanks so much.

Janice Person  53:33

Don’t forget we’ll have everything on our website grounded by the farm.com Talk to you soon.

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