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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Ladies and gentlemen, today on the podcast, we have Nate Pontius with Pontius Ranches. Welcome, brother.
Chapter 2: How does Nate Pontius adapt his ranching practices during drought?
Thank you.
Chapter 3: What practices improve animal feed and health on the ranch?
All right. So right now it is raining here in Central Texas. So my dad's side of the family were dairy and crop farmers in Central Pennsylvania. And I knew how their lives and just their days were affected by the weather. How do you feel with days like today where it's raining pretty good?
What does that make you feel in terms of your property, the animals, the crop, everything as a rancher or farmer here in Central Texas?
Considering the entire time I've lived here, the last five years, we've been in just a prolific drought, year over year getting less and less rainfall. A day like today is a very, very good day.
Chapter 4: Why does pork quality vary and how does it affect taste?
And it's also kind of like forced rest. When it's raining like this, you're not out there aggressively getting after it on the farm. You are physically resting and allowing the animals and the land to rest and just take in this rain. So it's a really good day. Yeah, yeah.
Perfect day for me to be doing a podcast. I assumed that. I did assume that. I just remember growing up, my grandfather, he sold his farm when I was young. But I still remember the days where he was a dairy farmer. It's like waking up every morning, 4 a.m., milking the cows. Every night before going to sleep, milking the cows. But the mental state that he was in, was determined by the weather.
So these last couple of years, as we've experienced some of this dry drought, how do you handle that in terms of anxiousness or how does that affect you, the weather?
I mean, this prolific drought has guided me into making the decisions of raising a drought tolerant sheep on my farm. Did I really start out wanting to be raising sheep? No, I would prefer to be raising predominantly cattle, but due to the land that we had in this drought, it forced me to kind of shift my focus and use an animal that would
Chapter 5: What lessons did Nate learn from his transition from Marine to rancher?
perform better in this drought, which is a South African breed of meat sheep called Dorbers. And so that's what I mainly focus on at the farm. It's interesting. What makes the sheep different than a cow?
cattle have specific grazing preferences where they like to eat a lot of the longer sweeter grasses they don't really graze on brush and forbs and like thickets as much whereas sheep they they get down on that they eat all the really really crummy crummy forage and they can perform and gain weight a lot better and they're smaller they have a lot less impact on the land as what a cow does
Chapter 6: How does fatherhood influence Nate's approach to life and work?
You know, they're eight, nine times the size of a sheep. So I can stock more sheep on my land and benefit it more than overstocking it with cattle, if that makes sense.
Yeah, that makes sense. I do eventually in this conversation want to get into some of this pulp fed practice that you implement with your animals. But there's this ranch here in the Georgetown area.
Chapter 7: What challenges does Nate face while building his ranch?
It's called Bar 3 Ranch. And I bought a few quarter or half cows from them over the years. Never a whole cow. But I got to spend time with the owner of this ranch. His name is Jeff Rusk. And he walked me through his property and what he's learned over the years and From what I remember, he put radishes within his fields and it made the beef a little sweeter.
And it really gave the fat a super unique color and texture and flavor. And it was a really interesting experience where I remember I got this meat from Jeff. I came home, we first cooked the ground beef and the fat was so different where in the skillet, It sucked that skill up for what felt like weeks and months.
And where I'm going with this is when I've bought grass-fed beef from a farmer's market or a farmer, half a cow, quarter cow, and comparing that to the grass-fed beef that I buy in the supermarket, grocery stores, It feels very different in terms of the way the fat renders, the way that it tastes, the way that it looks. What do you think that is?
Well, I'm not really sure, really. But what I think is the most interesting about this is how you're drawing the parallel to the importance of what your food ate. And that's kind of what gets me going is...
in order to have a positive effect on my beef and the overall nutrient density of it and the flavor of it, the eating experience, I can influence that by my practices and what I'm planting out there for my cow to eat. So now what I'm eating
what what my cow is eating is important because i'm going to be eating that in the future and i can i have the power to influence what i'm going to be eating in the future and that's kind of fun and cool so like with that farmer that you were just talking about how he was planting these specific forages in his pasture the daikon radishes and how that influenced the beef like that's that's some of the most fun parts of of farming is being able to influence your end product that protein
Have there been certain inputs that you fed your animals that you've seen a direct reflection of flavor?
Oh, absolutely. The pulp, 100%. The juice pulp that I feed my animals from Alchemy Juice, not only does it have a direct impact on the flavor profile and the overall health of my animals, my diet,
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Chapter 8: How does Nate integrate health and training into his ranching lifestyle?
My animal's immune systems are incredibly robust because of it. The citrus pulp in particular, when my mama sheep and my mama cows are eating that, they're lactating like crazy. They've got higher buttermilk and protein content in their milk for their lambs and their calves, and their lambs and calves grow faster.
incredibly incredibly well and on top of all of that the beef the lamb the pork that i harvest after eating that pulp i've had i sent my beef samples off to a lab to get tested and the nutrient density that came back on it it'd blow your mind i saw you posted about that i found that wild like the amino acid contents are like 2,300% higher than USDA grass-fed.
We've got vitamin C in our beef, which is, there's no vitamin C in beef whatsoever, but that's just a direct reflection of them eating all the citrus pulp, very high in potassium, vitamin A, magnesium, calcium, all the good stuff.
So how did you come across, this is a good segue into talking about this because I'm really curious about this. I think for a lot of people, myself included, there were only ever two options. It was like your cattle were either fed grain or it's grass or it's a combination of grass then finished on grain. When did you come across pulp and what exactly is pulp?
Well, I was raising hogs at the time. Well, I still raise hogs, but at the time I was raising hogs. When you raise pigs, you kind of start to view waste a little bit differently. So I'd be shopping at Whole Foods or H-E-B and they'd be wheeling the carts around the produce section and just like throwing away all the old produce and bakery goods and whatnot.
I'm like, man, that'd be really good hog feed. And they'd wheel it around to the back of the dumpsters. And so when I was finished with my grocery shop and I'd go back to the dumpsters and I'd grab all the old blueberries and lettuce and all that old produce and baked goods. And I would throw it out and feed it to my hogs and they would go crazy on it.
And then just from that, it got me kind of thinking a little bit more. Well, Whole Foods, one of the managers at Whole Foods caught me doing that and was like, hey, you can't be rummaging through our trash anymore. So it got me thinking. I went to Sun Life Organics first, just walked in. I asked them, what do you guys do with all your smoothie stuff, your juice leftovers? Could I have your trash?
They're like, that's kind of weird. No, you can't have our trash, man. Alchemy Juice was another local place right in Dripping. They got a couple places in Austin as well. I swung in there, asked them if I could have their trash. They're like, yeah, that would actually be doing us a huge service. We have to pay a special company, a composting company to come and haul it away. So,
If you were to come and pick this up and haul it away for us, it would actually be a benefit for us and it would save us money. So I just started doing that every day. I would go in and pick it up and feed it out to my pigs. And then I started expanding to feeding it to my cattle, feeding it to my sheep. kind of it. Were people doing this that you knew of before you started doing it?
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