Nate Pontius

overstocked and overgrazed.

The soil was very compacted.

There was not a heck of a lot of good forage available.

And I just immediately got cattle and threw them out there on the pasture.

My cattle were just not really performing that well.

I couldn't figure out why they were not eating the forage that was available because it was just, I know now that it was just such crummy forage.

And so I had to kind of learn that cattle were not quite the option for

For that moment, I had to kind of take a step back, look at the land that I was afforded and get creative with how I was going to utilize it the best as possible.

And I didn't start out thinking that I was going to be a regenerative farmer.

I started out thinking, I want to raise some beef and some eggs would be cool too.

And so just starting out with that end goal,

Like that end goal as my focus of like, I want to raise beef I found was the worst thing possible.

Like I needed to focus on what the land needed first.

I needed to start restoring the land first.

And that required me focusing on the soil and learning how the soil worked and learning how to grow plants.

Because in order to grow my own beef or lamb, I needed to grow plants for them to eat.

Pigs were an excellent creative way for me to radically start improving the landscape.

So you think about all of these destructive tendencies of pigs, like the rooting, the wallowing, everything.

Conventional farming would have you go out and just like spraying chemicals all over these weeds and like ripping up the ground, tearing everything up to get rid of them.

regenerative farming, I started harnessing the pig's destructive ability to rip up the soil, get rid of all the nasty invasive plants that my cattle wouldn't eat, and I would just move them around the pasture and plant new forage behind them so I can get new grasses growing for them to graze in the future.