Wyoming Heritage Grains: Improving the Land, Community, and Health

In today’s episode, we talk with Sara Wood of Wyoming Heritage Grains and Wyoming High Desert Malt, near Ralston Wyoming. Sara is a fifth-generation regenerative farmer and the operator of the state’s only commercial flour mill.

Located in the dry high mountain desert east of Yellowstone, Sara’s and her family’s operation has the distinction of being in one of the first large water projects in the country, started by Buffalo Bill Cody.

Sara’s family began homesteading in the area around 1908. The land had previously been part of Buffalo Bill Cody’s country club. Now, her 250-acre farm produces beef cattle, alfalfa, a variety of heritage grains, and native corns. Acquiring a large stone mill manufactured in Austria, her operation now mills a variety of flours for baking, using heritage and heirloom grains.

Sara sees her farm as part of a larger mission to bring regenerative, holistic, and ecosystem-based farming approaches to produce sustainable, nutrient-dense food while enhancing biodiversity on the land.

“Producing a good high-quality crop will pay you leaps and bounds over pushing the boundaries on yields,’ says Sara. “So important to look at these more native varieties… instead of providing for a commodity market, provide for your community.”

In this talk, Sara discusses how her heritage flours can be eaten by gluten-sensitive people and describes the farming practices that are making a difference in her operation and allowing her to remain profitable. And she also addresses the financial and personal stresses today’s farmers are experiencing.

Photo credit: Vo von Sehlen

View Western SARE’s photo essay of Wyoming Heritage Grains

Resources mentioned in podcast: Ray Archuleta Soil Health Academy, Gabe Brown, Dale Strickler

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Transcript

Steve: 
 Today's guest is Sarah Wood of Wyoming Heritage Grains and Wyoming High Desert Malt near Powel Wyoming. Sarah is a fifth generation farmer and the operator of the state's only commercial flour mill. Sarah welcome and thanks for sitting down with us

Sara Wood 

Hi, thanks for having me today.

Stacie 

So Sarah, I was lucky enough to have a chance to visit with you and see your farm and it's a great operation, a beautiful area. It might be helpful for folks to first just kind of hear a description of your area of Wyoming and what it's like there, your family and the history of it.

Sara Wood 

Sure so we are about seventy miles east of Yellowstone National Park. We are considered high mountain desert, so we’re about forty six hundred feet elevation. Our precipitation is pretty low, we’re between six and nine inches a year, so we depend on irrigation for our operations in which most of our irrigation water comes from the mountains, so the Yellowstone ecosystem, it all starts up there and we got our water um basically we were one of the first big water projects in the United States. It was championed by Buffalo Bill Cody himself. He started that in the, I believe, like eighteen ninety nine when it really started. It was early-- it was late 1800s when he started it, but I think it started about 1899. It provides water for the entire Big Horn Basin. So, I can't remember how many acres it provides for, but quite a few. From Cody all the way over to the Big Horn Mountains level area is where the water comes from, and goes to.

 Fifth generation here. I am the third generation on our farm. Our family started homesteading up here about 1908. So, before we really got water they started homesteading. Our current farm we've had since 1946. My grandpa and great grandparents purchased it. At one time in the early 1900s, everything here in the little town that we’re outside of, Ralston, belonged to Buffalo Bill Cody himself. In our land that we have now, was actually part of his country club. So when my grandpa and great grandpa were plowing up sage brush and getting it ready to start farming they actually found quite a few golf balls as they were doing all that. 

<Laughter>

Stacie

That's great!

Steve Elliot

Can you tell us a little about the operation today, you know, how big it is, what you produce, and then we'll talk about your farming philosophy and practices.

Sara Wood 

Sure. So we're a pretty small family farm, about 250 acres. We raised beef cattle and alfalfa along with different grains. We do corn, just kind of different little niche crops. We've raised everything over the years from peas I think, beets, barleys, beans, corn. So, a little bit of everything. At one point my great grandparents were raising water melon to sell locally. So we've kind of seen it all. Our operation came from me going down one of many rabbit holes. I went to distilling school in 2013 and decided, you know, we’ve raised malt barley for, you know, Coors, Budweiser, different things like that. Why can't we raise our own barley and do our own malting here? So we started the malting facility here in 2016. And then it just I just kept going down more rabbit holes and looking into these different older varieties of like say, wheat, and why a lot of folks aren’t able to eat any more. So I looked into doing a little bit of flour on the side. And, of course, 2020 hit and had to stop malting and just basically went to flour and had to scale the business pretty rapidly. Within a year we were producing flour and shipping it throughout the state, a lot of stuff out of state. So it was kind of those, one of those things you had to pivot to survive, because with the malting we, you know, all the breweries and a lot of other stuff shut down, so they weren't needing a lot of malt and so everyone decided to start baking bread during 2020 and no one could get flour. And, so luckily the year before we had started growing some of these wheats so we did have some stock, some inventory and stock to start doing that.

Steve Elliot

Right, right, and you do a variety of different types of grains right? Different types of flours?

Sara Wood 

Yes I’m trying to get all the different classes of wheats. We do have soft white wheat. We have a couple of hard red wheats.  We have a Durham and there's, what else do we have, a rye. So I’m trying to get all the different types of wheats to fulfill everyone's baking needs because most flour that is available commercially is hard red spring, but they sift everything out of it. So we have a big stone mill that we got from Austria. So it's all stone milled, so it looks different than what you get in the store. It's not fully sifted out so, you still have a lot of that ash content in it. So it's a darker color.

But yeah we're starting to dabble into different native corns, pop corn. Just trying to expand out. We have raised a blue corn so we do have a blue corn for corn meal or polenta. And it's just kind of, figure it out on your own as you go.

Steve

How have bakers reacted to your flours when they get them and use them for the first time? What kind of feedback do you get?

Sara Wood 

I get a lot of positive feedback of how easy it is to work with. Because it is stone mill, so you have a lot of those, the oil, still in the flour and so you don't have to work it really hard. It's really easy to work with and so I get a lot of compliments on that, that they're not having to kill their backs trying to work the dough as hard because it's not hard to work with.

Steve Elliot

Makes sense.

Stacie

What are some of the advantages for you, as the grower, and for your customer, to be focusing on these older grains, the heritage grains?

Sara Wood 

Yeah, so a lot of these grains that we’re raising commercially now there's quite a few small producers in the US and Canada and actually all around the world, that are starting to revive these. We’ve lost so much biodiversity in our food and a lot of people are starting to realize that, especially with grains. As folks travelled, you know, from area to area as they were settling in different places, in places they took those grains with them. And that's how we got a lot of these different varieties that started with one thing, it was moved somewhere else and, it adapts to that area. They call them land race varieties. So they adapt to wherever they are grown.

And, of course, the trade off with these is a lot of folks are able to eat these varieties of grain that what is called gluten sensitive. So a lot of folks that are gluten sensitive are able to eat these varieties, but the main trade off is though they’re the low yielding. They can have other issues, but I think the trade off is well worth it. We don't necessarily need, you know, a hundred sixty bushels an acre, when, you know, a lot of people can't eat that anymore.

Because like one of our better yielding ones, it only yields about eighty bushels an acre but I have, you know, like I said a lot of folks say they haven't been able to eat wheat in 25 years, that have no problems at all and they are able to eat wheat again and are baking every single day.

Stacie

Wow! Nice, very nice.

Steve 

So, some of your farming practices, as most people's do, evolved out of necessity, you know with the pandemic, and the malting. What have you brought to it intentionally? I mean what is your philosophy for being a farmer?

Sara Wood 

That's a good question. That’s changed a lot, because I grew up on this farm and I couldn't wait to get off of it, like a lot of people my age, they don't see themselves making a living, it's not fulfilling because you are working you know 16, 18 hours a day during the summer. It was really great, built a lot of character as my grandpa always told me. Especially, you know bucking bales in 90 degrees in the middle of July and you're just covered in sweat and alfalfa. It’s horrible. 

But, so it's become really important to me to take it back to the basics. So, we are focused on, kind of the buzzword, regenerative ag. But I look at it more as like holistic practices, which include, the biggest thing, no till. Stop tilling. It's not necessary. It's, you know been pushed really hard for what, the last 80 years? Just work smarter not harder, kind of thing. It's taken me you know about four years to really wrap my head around it. I’m not the first one to do it, I’m not going to be the last one to do it. But we focused on— we've been no till for three years. We use extensive varieties for our cover crops, so we do multi-species cover crops in with our grains. We'll do companion planting with the wheat last year. We kind of had a failure with the crimson clover just because we had such a cold spring, it didn't really germinate and then we almost got hailed out on Father's Day so, yeah it was a kind of scary twenty hours or so as we got nailed with almost half of our precipitation for the year.

Steve 

Oh, wow.

Sara Wood 

And, so but it bounced back. I think our Durham was probably when the latest wheats ever harvested here in the basin. We had to cut it with a combine and wind row it. It was November 1st when we knocked it down. There was still a lot of green wheat in there. It was, ah, I was just thankful we were able to get a crop, but it was pretty scary there for while, pretty disappointing. Like most farmers, we get one shot at producing something for the entire year. But the regenerative, it has a lot of facets to it. So, it's number one: no till, using lots of cover crops. You want to build your soil. You know, it doesn't take a hundred years to build an inch of soil. You just have to keep a living root in the ground as long as possible. Another big component is also livestock. You have to have that livestock density put back on the land. It's a cycle. We've taken the animals off the land because we are trying to, you know, be more mechanized and, you know, people don't have time for cattle, where it ruins their nice rows or every excuse in the book. So, we use our cows. I would like to start getting other types of livestock back on there. What else do we do? We don't spray. Just, it's kind of like organic, but I don't like using organic, as well. It’s just another label. Our focus is growing good soil, healthy animals, and making the food that we grow more nutrient dense. Because every time you till, you're destroying that microbiome that's in the soil. We don't have true healthy soil anymore. And, most of our soils have become bacteria dominant. You have to have a balance between fungus and bacteria and we've lost that, and so we've lost a lot of the nutrient density in our foods and it's just so important to go to these more holistic practices.

Stacie []

So you have a lot of passion around trying different things with all the cover crops and the soil and also making sure that what you're growing it's very nutritionally dense. I guess I’m curious, where do you get your ideas? Where do you go to learn new concepts and then sparks your ideas to then start on your farm?

Sara Wood (18:36.042)

Oh there's so many great resources the understanding a folks have been really great so you have your Gabe brown's your at archlettas all the other folks that are part of that there's so many great videos on you tube I have I have a whole book case full of books that I’ve read m I started I can't remember the name of the book as given to me five or six years ago and that's what kind of sparked it

and I know it's like a typical producer I’m like oh this is kind of hippy talk like this doesn't work we have to do it this way this is the way we've done it and then I just started really I’m like why like is it because of like the bigger companies that are trying to get you know so product to make our lives easier which really hasn't made anyone's lives easier um like I said so I just I just get

lot of stuff on the internet and I’ve met a lot of different folks net working I have a great gal here um in warland dr katlen young twist she's katlen is great she's been trying to um pushed this here the last seven or eight years and we just clicked and we have helped each other it's starting to really take off because I had a lot of folks it

Stacie (19:45.462)

oh yeah

Sara Wood (20:05.962)

my neighbors are you know you're just a crazy hippy and but then I would I would look outside and I could see them out in my field walking around so of course you don't acknowledge that you see them walking around in the field because how old farmers are but it I’ve had a lot of folks now wanting to switch over to this because why should you spend sixteen eighteen hours a day an attractor you know going over

Steve (20:06.920)

hm

Sara Wood (20:35.842)

a field five or six times when you're plowing you roll or harrow your level roller harrow again you low level I mean why would you do that when you can just no till it's all done we do furrow irrigation in our now til we don't have any problems the once you start building that soil aggregate the residue there it takes longer to do a set of water can take probably

you per cent longer to do a set of water but here especially this last year we didn't know what was going on we were killing some of the peas a lot of stuff was just dying well we were watering too much because we were but we were still working on our same schedule you know every fourteen days you have to run water because it's so hot in area here the wind blows but we were actually we didn't realize that we were

Steve (21:18.560)

hm

Steve (21:29.460)

hm

Sara Wood (21:35.742)

killing stuff because it was getting it was drowning and you know we it's holding more of water and getting people understand that we're going to get to the point when we get that aggregate really built and start getting deeper organic matter we're only going to have to water maybe two three times a season now instead of having to pay for overages for our water because we only get certain allotment

Steve (21:36.720)

because your soil is holding more water

Sara Wood (22:05.842)

with our water rates and instead of having to pay you know several thousands of dollars in water overages were going to probably be under our water allotment which you know that's a big thing is people worrying about you getting into a draught because we when I was growing up we were in a pretty severe drought here and so there was a lot of people that there was a lot of crops that didn't survive because it was you know we were pretty desperate for water

Sara Wood (22:36.122)

so this can be such a huge win for these areas that especially now California where you guys are at there's constant issues with water and it I wish people wouldn't put such a stigma on the no till thing you know especially this last year with fuel prices nitrogen prices um a lot of folks are in a lot of these family farms are not going to survive you know there's a lot of places that have five hundred or a thousand acres it can't support one family commodity prices a lot of these have not changed since the nineteen seventies the inputs have gone up several thousand percent since then so it doesn't make sense to continue on with the more modern a practices

Sara Wood (23:35.702)

it doesn't hurt anything to know till it doesn't hurt anything to do cover crops um there's so many great studies so many great folks that are really pushing for this and just getting you know the old farmers to sit down and realize that you're not trying to sell them something because it seems like everywhere you turn you have someone selling you the new biggest and greatest thing um it's hard for them to de program

that and that it took me you know five six years to kind of start coming around last four years it's been okay this is what we have to do to survive and doing the value added with the flour mill that's the only way that farms are going to survive we you know most farms that you drive by you're never going to see those crops anywhere near you so you dry buy corn you're never going

see that corn you're never going to see that we you're never going to see you know barley beans unless it's produced locally and we've lost all that diversity with the varieties of food that we grow and you know the small processing plants that we used to have every town used to have their own little mill they used to have their own butcher but that's all been outsourced and I really wish that people would look at

Sara Wood (25:06.702)

the value for the community and the value for the farms as well to start doing that again

Steve (25:10.500)

are you seeing other than a few people wandering around in your fields are you seeing some of your neighbors some of the farmers in your area coming around or is it still a step too far for them

Stacie (25:25.182)

oh

Sara Wood (25:30.782)

they're starting to warm up to it they don't roll their eyes at me any more um baby steps you had baby steps you know old farmers are some of the hardest to get them to change their ways um but they're coming around I mean I’ve been in contact with some of the banks some of the lenders that have come to me and ask what I’m doing and what they can do to help their clients switch over

Steve (25:32.080)

well that's a start

Steve (25:36.900)

uh

Steve (25:42.980)

yeah

Sara Wood (26:00.862)

and you know maybe save their farms as well

Steve (26:01.500)

yeah

Steve (26:05.780)

yeah getting out of the mind set where it's all production volume I mean it's to what haven't I spent to get here what have I saved to produce this and get to a different bottom line and think next year next ten years next fifty years with my soil with my farm um that's a hard switch you know from

a year to year this is what I have to make to this is what I have to build

Sara Wood (26:49.462)

absolutely and getting people to focus on the you know max yield is not everything you know actually producing a good high quality crop will pay you leaps and bounds over you know pushing the boundaries on um yields I mean back in the day there people were ecstatic for thirty five bushel wheat like a lot of these varieties that I look back on they were

no it was incredible because they got twenty bushels that year we you know with irrigation and much better planting techniques you can get higher yields on these varieties you're not going to get the hundred and sixty bushel but you know it it's so important to look at these more native varieties of things you know

Sara Wood (27:50.302)

it's just so I can't stress how important is to look at instead of providing for a commodity market provide for your community I’m so tired of the phrase gets thrown around and pushed on farmers that we have to feed the world. I don't like that at all I think people should focus on feeding their communities. If everyone fed their own communities we could feed the entire world that way and it

Sara Wood (28:20.542)

everyone is just told to push and push and push and there's been so much pressure put on these farmers the you know it's become a huge issue in the farming community it's a small community but there's been so many problems with suicide because they can't take it they don't have the money to pay the bank notes at the end of year farms are taking out their loans every single year for their seed there

fertilizer their fuel I understand you know you have to have some of that but also when you're financing everything and you can't pay that back at the end of the year by you know using these new um gosh everything the new sees the newest chemicals um and you're still you know you're making the highest yields of corn or wheat or bar

Sara Wood (29:20.242)

and you're still not able to pay that bank note back is caused a huge stress and that's why I think there's so many people walking away from farming you see all these big farms that have been around and now no one can afford to take them over and they're just being turned off to larger corporations or

Sara Wood (29:41.542)

being developed for subdivisions we've run into that issue around here that a lot of our farm land is being subdivided

Steve (29:46.480)

hm

Steve (29:48.840)

yeah that's happening everywhere I think

Steve (29:56.440)

what I would to go back a little bit if we can I’ve seen pictures of your grain mill and people on the podcast obviously can't see pictures of it which is unfortunate because it looks cool how did you find it how did you get it there tell me about it because I just love that kind of old technology and it's just beautiful

Sara Wood (30:07.782)

m hm

Sara Wood (30:22.842)

oh man that was a journey because of course had to scale up really quickly in twenty twenty we just had a little eight inch stone mill that we had gotten in that obviously was not going to keep up a demand so I I mean a couple of years prior I had found the austro roller mill which their big beautiful made of wood pine out of Austria and so we started

process of ordering it from Austria and it took about seven months to get it here just because all the ports everything was shut down I mean they built him pretty quick it was about two weeks and they had it built but the actually trying the logistics of getting it from Austria to the u s was pretty extreme because everything was shut down so we got the mill here

about gosh November twenty twenty and had it functional I think it was ended November first part of December but I really liked it because it is they are made by a small family the greens have been making these mills for almost ninety years now so they're not a new company they ship there's quite a few of these mills in the u s as well I’m not I’m not unique but I really do

um like how it functions it's a very well built piece of machinery

Steve (31:57.980)

hm how do people order or your flour

Sara Wood (32:05.502)

oh sure we so we do have a commerce Wyoming heritage grain dot com I’ve shipped to just about every state here in the u s where going to be progressing and getting stuff out on the shelves and grocery stores throughout I think Wyoming in southern Montana so it's rapidly grown from where we started three years ago

Steve (32:29.080)

very good I think I’m taking over the rest of the questions maybe not now stacy's back

Stacie (32:30.682)

nice

Stacie (32:36.382)

yeah I got back yeah I just think it's great like how you're marketing and that it's being successful and I guess my question next is you mentioned earlier the crimson clover you had some problems what other things have maybe you tried and it didn't work but you've learned from it and we're able to pivot and that could be both but you grow in your production or even in your marketing

things that you had try differently

Sara Wood (33:11.762)

sure yeah the crimson clover for us because we're considered us a zone four kind of on the border line for in five so it last spring was just I mean we had snow storms end of may first part of june so it was just weird I mean we had a lot of the week didn't germinate or start germinating until in of July first part of august so we had

stuff that was drying down and stuff that was just starting to grow so the clover it was really pretty but for us it got stunted by the hail storm the cold so it wasn't a great fit so I’m looking at different clovers that would work better for us but one thing that's been a no fail our peas we've done we've grown peas with the wheat people may

be asking why we would do something like that because we is a heavy nitrogen feeder and of course lagooms like clover peas other things like that or nitrogen fixer so they complement each other and that you know lagoom fix feeds the wheat so you're not having to put nitrogen on um a lot of people will do cover crops afterwards nitrogen fixers to put that nitrogen back in the soil

Steve (34:15.440)

right

Sara Wood (34:41.682)

so we're looking at different things I’ve got a couple of trials were going to try this year it's not a new thing if folks look at like what the native Americans used to do with like three sisters where you have the corn the beans and the squash they all worked together they are kind of a close system that helped feed each other it

Sara Wood (35:11.722)

ve had issues with not so much lodging because a lot these great these wheats why they were bred down to you know like the standard red spring that you see that's like eighteen twenty four inches tall is because these grains are like the white senora red five all that they are they can get as tall as five feet tall so they were they bred those down for shorter straw because of lodging so

say you're running water and you have a strong wind and it knocks that down it was a problem but I mean even shorter wee and barley still lodged so it didn't really fix it just makes it less likely that that will happen so we've had not a whole lot of problems with that this last summer the of course after it got hit by the hail the blue beard Durham it lodged because we had a huge mice

Steve (35:44.260)

right

Sara Wood (36:11.742)

bursts go right across that section in the field so we really haven't had issues with any of that suffered a lot of other diseases um what other issues just trying to figure out the different seed makes it work for us we have been putting a lot of cover crops in our alfalfa as well we found that we've grown the sorghum to dan we were

Steve (36:12.200)

hm

Sara Wood (36:41.662)

able to know till teh in we've done peas chickory what else have we done clovers

Sara Wood (36:52.402)

there was a couple o things the first couple of years we did mixes of like seven or eight species into the hay um I think for the most part that we haven't had too many issues with the crops themselves but like marketing the biggest thing has been

Sara Wood (37:13.382)

uh the re education because a lot of people of course twenty twenty hit they had never baked before ousted loaf of bread and they wanted to go into straight sour do whole grain sorto like you guys picked literally the hardest thing to try to start baking yes and so getting re educating getting people interested in cooking from scratch so there

Steve (37:23.900)

hm

Steve (37:28.940)

start smaller start easier

Sara Wood (37:43.002)

education of that and teaching people the different classes of wheat you have soft red wheat you have soft white wheat have hard red hard white Durham so getting people understand that there's actually different it's not just a one catch all for just one type of wheat that's been the biggest thing is teaching people making them kind of little honorary farmers

Sara Wood (38:13.242)

and actually understanding what goes into their food what what has been available on the shelf and then show them all the other varieties that they've been missing out on

Steve (38:20.640)

hm

Steve (38:22.540)

are any restaurants using your flour or is anybody making pasta with it I mean do you have wet appropriate for pasta

Sara Wood (38:33.002)

um yeah the blue beard Durham very tasty I have a couple of restaurants right now that are testing that for their pasta um we have do have quite a few restaurants around here that are using the flour m one up in red lodgets making all their biscuits are wonderful to rosemary biscuit with the white senora there's another guy that's using it for pastries

Sara Wood (39:04.322)

um just like I said it re educating the restaurant side as well because they're just used to getting you know food services or Cisco flour so getting them to understand and you know experiment in teaching them as well it oh gosh it's been a undertaking I did not expect that because you know as a farmer

Steve (39:12.760)

right

Sara Wood (39:32.902)

you raise something and the people you know just use it or whatever you know we're used to selling beans dried beans yeah instead of going okay this is what this is for and then having to develop recipes for easy enough recipes that people can actually attempt and not fail because I got oh my gosh I got so much hate from people are like well my stuff didn't turn out and blow them like okay what were you trying to do with it you can't you know make big crusty loaves of

Steve (39:34.520)

right they buy it they use it you yeah

Sara Wood (40:03.142)

sarto bread with the soft wheat

Steve (40:04.100)

right

Steve (40:06.380)

so there's a whole education there's a whole education component to making to going backwards in terms of simplifying your ingredients or I mean getting to a more natural more diverse base that

Sara Wood (40:09.482)

oh it was so difficult

Sara Wood (40:14.222)

yes

Sara Wood (40:27.062)

yes and like I tell people like well your flour is really expensive and I’m like well yeah I’m not this is like actual cost of what it takes to produce this I’m not getting subsidies it's well and then telling people well I can't tell the difference between your flour and you know what I get from the grocery store and I tell people like it's kind of like comparing a garden tomato to one from you by from the store

Steve (40:35.620)

yeah

Steve (40:38.020)

yeah

Sara Wood (40:57.862)

like once you actually adjust your taste buds and really look at it instead of just being a consumer actually being aware of what you are using it's night and day

Steve (41:09.140)

yeah

Steve (41:13.360)

that's just that sounds fascinating to me I mean I can I don't bake enough but I can it would be very interesting to try the different flours in the way they're supposed to be used for the different kinds of goods and an experience those kind of differences um so I’m looking forward to doing that but we're keeping you I’m going to ask you one more question m and this has been very enjoyable thank you very much what advice do you have for young growers

any growers who want to start thinking and farming more sustainably and sustainably successfully

Sara Wood (41:59.242)

when you first try it it's de there's definitely a learning curve um and also don't give up the first couple of years because you were you're healing the soil from you know deep under the ground stuff you can't see but once you start healing that soil it all comes together rather rapidly and it's totally worth it

Sara Wood (42:30.842)

if people want there's a great video on YouTube dale strickler he now works for green cover seed he has got a great video where he talks about his journey with the now till and how um it made him enjoy farming again and just a lot of those stories of watching people of the family's you know the younger generations are moving off

farm the farm the family everything is falling apart because it is so stressful and I just I just recommend that you know it's taking the younger generation to see the problem and just convincing the older generations that it has to change in order for it to be sustainable that's the biggest thing is what we're doing now with farming is not sustainable um you ask people

they're like well we can't afford to have our know the kids come back and be on the farm because it doesn't pay the farm is barely making the bills to break even if even that so start small start with little plots do a comparison because that's the only way you are going to convince the older generation you start with one field start with ten acres and do a comparison and just keep going

Steve (43:40.060)

hm

Sara Wood (43:59.362)

um it's taken us you know three years to see the result that is actually two years and of until and we were drowning everything it may seem really difficult at first and it's overwhelming but there's so many great resources there's so many people and don't let people tell you that it can't be done in your area that's the biggest thing that I pushed back on we can't do that here be as heavy clay soil we have this and you don't under

Sara Wood (44:29.122)

and that's not true it can be done everywhere it's successful everywhere there's folks that there's a great guide that works for understanding ag and he's regreening the chaawa desert with cows they get three inches of precipitation a year and they're re greening that entire desert it's possible

Sara Wood (44:54.722)

so my words of advice are try to start it small because all the old farmers they have to have to see it and even if they see it they won't they won't tell you that they believe it they'll just let you do a little more and a little more and that's the only way you're going to be able to survive anymore

Steve (45:12.580)

that's very good advice and maybe with enough evidence people start coming around so thank you for this we're going to put a bunch of these links that you've mentioned in with the podcast so when they go to the podcast page they can they can one order your flour and to see some of these videos that you've mentioned and um things like that

Sara Wood (45:41.762)

sure I can I can send you a bunch of information I appreciate you guys so much

Stacie (45:41.842)

thank you Sarah I really appreciate all your kind

Steve (45:45.280)

great

Steve (45:47.540)

all right thank you Sarah this has been great yes so just the links will include him with the podcast episode link and get people some more education

Sara Wood (45:52.402)

all right

Steve (46:00.180)

all right thanks

Sara Wood (46:00.762)

awesome thank you guys so much by

Steve (46:03.020)

Bye