Nate Pontius

I believe it.

I grew up in a very agrarian rural town in central Illinois.

Family was kind of commercial.

Farmers raised hogs and cattle and grew hay and everything.

And the whole agribusiness model never appealed to me.

In fact, I was in all the agriculture classes in high school.

FFA was a really big thing in my high school.

And my agriculture teacher in high school, if you were to ask him back then, who is the least likely student that you would pick that you ever taught to go into farming, he 100% would have said me.

100%.

I couldn't care less about cows or crops or anything.

anything just didn't interest me and it wasn't until i started getting exposed to like being able to influence the quality and the nutrient density of your own food and like using my own physical fitness to make all of that happen that really started to like click and get me fired up like there is this

new way of regenerative farming where you raise higher quality, nutrient-dense food.

And that's something that got me really fired up.

I mean, if you want to talk about endurance and endurance athletes and endurance sports, it's like I think it takes incredible endurance to just year over year, day after day after day after day doing the same monotonous thing.

tasks with the simple aim of just keeping your animals alive and then you're going to have animals dying all the time and then you have to just continue to show up and do it it it is a lot of work

I've traded a lot of the physical exertion and effort that I used to put into the gym, slinging barbells and kettlebells and chasing numbers on a Concept2 screen.

And I've just taken it and shifted it into moving infrastructure around the farm, moving animals around, walking a lot.

And I enjoy it.

I enjoy the day-to-day of interacting with the animals, seeing the land improve just a tiny, tiny little bit every day.

If you want any sort of gratification, not even remotely immediate, farming is not for you.