Regenerative from the Ranch to the Feedyard with Tom Fanning

You know, we were talking a little bit before we started the recording about how regenerative can kind of mean different things or have a different context depending on what part of the industry, both in the general ag industry as well as in the cattle business itself.

So do you mind talking a little bit about what your definition of regenerative is?

To me, regenerative ag in farming and ranching is focused on restoring and improving natural resources and production.

And that production depends upon our soil, our water, our biodiversity, our ecosystem, making sure those things function while remaining economically viable.

And so regenerative agriculture is basically improving the resources we depend on while remaining economically viable.

I look at that as in what we deal with every day in a production system is basically what are the four pillars or what are the four things at the feed yard that we impact is, you know, The manure that we create every day is a resource that goes back onto the farm grounds that we're then pulling the crops back off of to use back into the feed yard.

The water resources that we have that were water efficiency, is a big impact.

Clean water is one of the most important factors to having a strong performance in animals in their game, but we need to preserve those water aquifers and the resources that we have.

So we want to make sure those water tanks are super efficient and then, of course, animal performance and then using data and technology to help improve what we do to improve our resource use.

Do you mind diving a little bit deeper into, I know you mentioned that that manure is going back onto the farm ground that you guys are farming.

Where are those resources going? Are those crops going back into the operations themselves? So going back into the feed yards? How does that work exactly?

Yeah, so that's a really good question.

It depends on the feed yard, our location.

So here at Pratt, some of our lagoon water and then some of our dry manure would go back onto the farm ground that we have here.

But majority of our manure that we would clean the pens and then spread back out onto the farms in the local farmers that then are using that as a fertilizer substitute instead of buying.

It provides a lot of nutrients back into the soil.

And then we're able to then be a market for them to sell their products back to us once they produce those off that farm.

So it's kind of a closed loop, if you might think of it that way.

We also have a couple of three different compost operations where we're composting some of that manure and then the compost is going back onto farms as well.