#26 - Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin @ Tree-Range Farms

Episode Recap:

ReGen Brands Recap #26 - A Regenerative Poultry Ecosystem - (RECAP LINK)

Episode Transcript:

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated with AI and is not 100% accurate.

Kyle Krull - 0:00:16
Welcome to The ReGen Brands Podcast. This is a place for consumers, operators, and investors to learn about the consumer brands supporting regenerative agriculture and how they're changing the world. This is your host Kyle, joined by my cohost, AC who is going to take us into the episode.

Anthony Corsaro - 0:00:33
On this episode we have Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin who is a Co-Founder and the CEO of Tree Range Farms. Tree Range Farms is supporting regenerative agriculture with its regenerative, tree range chicken that is raised in a jungle-like habitat that honors the true nature of chickens. In this episode, we learn about the ecosystem of entities that is powering this regenerative poultry system. We get a behind the scenes look at the unique agronomy and production practices being used, and we hear from Regi on the importance of having a consumer-facing brand. Regi is truly one of the great philosophers of the regenerative movement, and he consistently challenges all of us to decolonize our minds and not let regenerative just be a set of on-farm practices. His insights shared in this episode left me energized and continued to think bigger and take more collective action. We're excited to share this one with you all. Let's dive in. What's up everybody? Welcome back to another episode of The ReGen Brands Podcast. Very, very excited today to have our friend Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin from Tree Range Farms. I did my best on the pronunciation Regi, so you tell me how good I did there. But so.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:01:43
Welcome my friend. You did well. Thank you.

Kyle Krull - 0:01:47
Awesome. We're super, super pumped to have Regi on board today. I've been hearing about his legendary work in the regenerative poultry space for literally years. So it's going to be really fun to to dig in here and learn more about, you know, how this whole thing started. Before we dive in, give us a quick high level of, you know, what do you make today or you produce like as a company where can people buy your products just to to give a listeners a quick lay of the land.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:02:15
Sure. We produce broilers, meat, meat, birds and they are sold primarily in the Twin Cities metro area pretty much at this point. We are confident every food grocery store, food coop, grocery store is going to be carrying it if they are not yet, but we are reaching out to them. So that's the first place you can go for the product. You can order through blue nest beef is an online distribution system and also soon we are right now negotiating with force of nature and they will also have our chicken on their system. So that's primarily where we are right now. We're just getting launched this year. So we're moving into those markets.

Kyle Krull - 0:03:03
That's huge. Congrats for anybody who's attending the infra and NCG shows later this year and heading to Minneapolis. Like keep an eye out so we can we can try the chicken then.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:03:15
Yeah. And you can also schedule a visit to our own operations here. Many people done that. Last year we had over 450 people including legislators, Commissioners, Commissioner of AG and this year we had Zach Ducha. Now that they have to say administrator out here and. And the whole team from the FSA in in Minnesota and and the local food coop then we hire them to prepare our chicken and you know Adriana Casias is a super super good chef and and she makes it and then we get to enjoy it and that's another way people can come and and experience not only the the chicken but also the whole environment where the chickens are raised and and really go home with with this. Idea that you can really transform the world and it isn't that hard after all.

Anthony Corsaro - 0:04:09
Love that. I love that, yeah. And if you don't follow Regi on LinkedIn yet, definitely do that. He puts some great updates with photos and videos of what's going on for the whole ecosystem and also the Home Farm there that I love. You know, keeping keeping in touch through that platform. Right. This is going to be, this can be a long answer probably a multi part answer and we'll we'll guide you through with some additional questions but they'll take us back. I really want to give the audience a deep understanding of your personal journey. But then also you know Tree Range Farms is the brand but there are many entities in an entire ecosystem and a very intentional approach that you've taken to kind of building this whole thing that I think one we need way more of and two a lot of other people can learn from so. Just take us back to where it all sure.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:04:55
And one way to do that probably more effectively is let's start with the present, right. So we have, we have a company that we started recently, Tree Range Farms, Tree Range Farms. Is the go to market strategy for poultry regenerative poultry and we'll, we'll, we'll get into why this is regenerative versus just poultry, right and what makes it regenerative. But the company's role is to take that poultry from the farms, contract the farmers and bring that chicken into our. Warehouses marketed branded, distributed to the markets willing to engage in this kind of in this kind of supply chain, right. So that's our main role and that's what the company is. I'm the CEO and we have a team that oversees overseas. The the startup stage that we are in right now behind this company is what we call a business ecosystem and a landscape based ecosystem management strategy.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:05:29
The company it actually is nestled on an ecosystem of businesses that include 1A nonprofit organization the Regenerative Agriculture Alliance, which I founded in 2018 and is now directed by Diane Christopher. Now Diane runs the regenerative a culture alliance with the team of experts, professionals, and they also own and operate the poultry processing facility. Where farmers bring their products when we when we purchase and contract from the farmers, before we take ownership of the product, it is it is brought over to the processing facility, which is owned and operated by the nonprofit organization. Now, the reason we do that is because poultry processing at the scale we have to do right now, it really isn't profitable. So why try to pretend that it can be put into a forprofit structure when it isn't?

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:06:27
And so it belongs in that nonprofit structure. And it allows also for many other things to happen. One of them is can.

Kyle Krull - 0:07:03
I pause you there. Real.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:07:04
Quick.

Kyle Krull - 0:07:05
Yeah. So out of curiosity, why did you decide to open your own processing facility instead of utilizing some of the other processing facilities that are already available?

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:07:13
Well, there is no other available.

Kyle Krull - 0:07:16
Why is?

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:07:18
That I mean, basically the industrial system obliterated all of this small. Processing infrastructure in this country in the consolidation process, so they were they have been undergoing for many decades, and one of the results of that is the complete massacring of the small. The, the, the processing infrastructure that independently operated so that small farmers like us could have access to that piece of the middle ground infrastructure necessary to bring our products to market. And so you either are now an indentured servant of the industrial system or you got no choice. And so we had to build that infrastructure and there was a small processor that we started using way back. But it's so small that the minute we started growing, we outran them. And in fact, though the owners of that processor, we're the ones helping us set up the new one because they also understood. So this is like the story of small farms and tried to be a small farmer in this country. Now, one thing we did not do.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:08:00
Is try to run, try to set up a process facility on our farm or on my farm or anything, not our banks. So from the beginning what we did was we designed a ecosystem of enterprises, and that's what I'm describing here. That ecosystem of enterprises includes the farm, the prototyping and the full design, economic, social and ecological of the farm operation. The farm operation is nestled is is triggered by what we call the production unit. The production unit is the engineering element of where we put the agronomics, the protocols for the chicken, the standard for how the chicken is raised, all of that and again you know back to the layering of this Tree Range Farms buys from those farmers. Those farmers are trained and supported by the nonprofit.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:08:48
The nonprofit also owns the processing facility and operates it that their processing facility has its own management and its own team and that way the workers get to participate in making decisions as to work in conditions and pay and and so on and so forth. At the processing facility, that this is unheard of in in the meat packing sector. I mean meat packing sector is brutal, it's abusive, is extremely inhumane for both animals and for people and all of that had to change. We can't call our chicken regenerative if those things are not taken care of, right. So that's what I'm talking about, a whole ecosystem behind the company where there is farmers processing facility, a nonprofit financial institutions that actually are engaged directly with us to ensure that farmers have access to capital, even Realtors that understand what we're doing and are willing to look for those pieces of land that are actually, I mean you start adding it up and it's a lot more, but I hope that.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:09:45
And gives you the a sense of the story. Now, before that, I was a new immigrant, you know, in this country trying to get into land. And so before all of this happened, I was in another town called Jordan, Minnesota. I had access to land. I lost that land. And that's how I ended up doing what I'm doing. I just wanted to farm. Honestly, I didn't want to get into this whole mess, but here we are. Well, The thing is.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:10:15
The thing is that that once I started to try to farm in that line, one of the things that hit me really quickly was that, wait a minute, there is no system for me. I mean, I can either go into the conventional system and try to do something very conventional with corn, soybeans, you know, livestock under a contract with a aggregator or company or whatever. All of those those systems are there. Vibrant and really powerful and they got the rest of the whole Food and Agriculture system is they got it by their throat because they can squeeze when they want, they can release when they need you to breathe more so they can squeeze you some more. That's kind of the way it goes. They squeeze you until you are choking. And then when you are choking, sometimes they let you choke and die. Like a lot of the farmers in the poultry sector that just went belly up, right, because they couldn't. Maybe they forgot to release. So I don't know what happened there. I mean, if you want to know, there's plenty of little.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:11:10
On that. But the bottom line is this. Doing that, I realized that wait a second, there is no system to support me. I was being, you know, harassed and discriminated and abused, you know, by neighbors that didn't like the idea that I was a farmer and there was no support system. There was no system for me to work, I mean.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:11:40
Literally thousands of nonprofits all doing so-called justice and so on and so forth and inequality and fighting for against discrimination. But when he comes down to it, literally you're still in your own because there is no actual organized system to work with. And so as I went through that and came to Northfield and I I lost access to that larger piece of land. Which now I regain in 2020 when when you know Jen and I got together into this this business partnership this that Jennifer Sabela is chief of staff at Treebridge Farms and and. And she came in and said, well, can, can I do something? And and I said the one thing I need to do before too long is get a piece of land. And so we ended up with the land that I have now and this one I have titled to, which is different than the way I tried to access land before. But the one thing I did before I went back and tried to be a farmer was I designed a whole system center on poultry. Now that poultry system design has this ecosystem blueprint.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:12:39
And then also the production model the the way you raise the chicken a lot of people think that did your system is the way you raise chickens. Well that's not a system that's simply a set of ergonomics principles and and production standards and modeling that can allow you to aggregate so that we can build the system now that. It goes takes us back to the previous stage of my life which was before I came to this country and before I came here I worked as part of the of the the reassessment of Guatemala as a country that was just ending the the the the 36 year old civil war and we were trying to reorganize the country into a different way of of social and economic you know construction. So I was able to actually tap into some of the. The brightest worldwide minds in terms of nation building and if you just go into theory of nation building, you, you will get some of the people that actually mentored me and trained me. At that point I was 25 years old, so it was still early on in my life, right. So, but the bottom line is that I was trained in in the northern rainforest by elders and community members who taught us.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:14:00
About how to work within the ecosystems that we inhabited there. And so regenerative to me was just a name that was giving to those ancestral systems that I grew up with. Believe me, Rodell didn't come up with it. He may have coined it, but the concept of regeneration is actually ancient. And yeah, I mean, some people have a right into that space lately, in the last 100 years and in the last five years, probably the most. And yeah, just like Alan, I just came to this country and they found, oh, there's land here. Oh, and there is people, and we're going to give it a name. And we discovered it.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:14:43
And so on. I mean that's no different for regeneration and the concept of regenerative ways is this was discovered recently and it was named and everything but no different than the patterns that we have watched you know lead us into the place where we are now in terms of the degenerative way that we live our lives into agriculture. So off from that the bottom line is that knowledge coming out of that understanding of of life. As a foundation of the expression of the energy of the planet and the universe. So you see life across all the spectrums, right? And when you understand that from a childhood, simply as an expression of of energy and the and the expression of the breadth of the Creator, what you in the great spirit, what you understand is fundamentally a mental, a mental reorganization of synapses and processes that allows you to see how ecosystems actually.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:15:36
Transform energy and regenerate on a continuous basis and done it for billions of years. We're just arriving at the sea and actually, but regeneration has been happened for billions of years and it is based on the energy of the planet. All that happens in front of you is a consistent permanent biophysical and chemical process, primarily you know, defined by the laws of thermodynamics that through the process of photosynthesis, animal intervention and soul microbiota. Are responsible for the mass transformation of all of the energy on the planet on a continuous basis, which then happens to be expressed in things and forms that we can harvest, such as the wild pigs in the forest, the northern gormala, the wild drinking the nuts, or the bananas and the oranges and the avocados and the pineapples and the gems and so on that we harvested all of that. I already understood it simply an expression of energy, and to the extent that we were to interfere with the processes that allowed for that transformation, we were actually degenerating the ability of the ecosystem to regenerate that fundamental concept. I went through agricultural school, never got it.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:17:03
Took all of the science and technology that they taught us in conventional training, brought it back to bear fruit. When I had to figure out how was I as a family here, as an individual, as an agronomist, as an immigrant, as a landless, you know, farmer, and as a entrepreneur, and within a very aggressive, ruthless system that is centered on exploitation, extraction and decimation of the planet and it's ecology. In the name of fit in the world, I had to figure out how the heck are we going to enter this space and guess what? The chicken was the answer. And that's that's what we are here now the chicken is the answer.

Anthony Corsaro - 0:18:09
I I love you man. I love you so much. That is that. I mean, it's just I have so many just thoughts swirling in my brain. But I think. One major take away for people from that is you know we we oversimplify and over complicate regenerative a lot of the times. And one thing that you the way that you frame that and the way I've heard you frame that similarly before has really helped me with is just it's just an energy cycle and we're doing it incorrectly, right and we have to find ways to restore that to the natural balance now. That took every that took the beautiful Symphony that you just laid out and made it very, very simple. But I think it's good to have some of those simple frameworks too, right? And you know, I think to dovetail off that, ready start, start with just explaining diagonomics and how they're different than typical poultry, right, than the the vast majority of the poultry.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:19:06
Well, you have to remember that when we started taking animals out of their natural environment. And started putting in artificially structured, human centered homocentric ideas on what animals need. You know what we did was we weren't doing it for the animals. That was not ever the intention. We were doing it because we are in a endless race to the bottom to make everything cheaper. And to make everything cheaper you have to mechanize as much as possible, pass the cost.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:19:13
And the energy cost, especially of that mechanization onto new on your future generations or to taxpayers through the farm bill, talking about the farm bill, which is going on right now, that's how we actually subsidize that. And So what happens is that bringing especially chickens into confinement was done for the purpose of reducing the lifespan, cheapening them and extracting more, more biomass. Notice I'm not calling it food. More biomass out of the system. So their goal was to harvest more biomass and sell it and sell it and make money. That was the reason we did that. Fundamentally, we squandered the natural processes, which are super efficient at energy transformation.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:20:10
Reduce it to mechanical processes that are very inefficient from an energy transformation perspective, but very effective at extracting wealth from the animals, from the landscape because we can get grain that is subsidized and all of that, and from people, because now we can hire the cheapest labor we can find and put them to work. And then by the way, if you follow, you know. The meat rocket. I don't know if you Christopher Leonard's book, if you follow that it will, it will show you how a lot of the food industry, especially the meat in the the the poultry industry, uses the Immigration Services as a way to deny workers payments, in some cases by calling immigration or payday steal their wages. And there is this whole wage theft.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:20:59
That the that the food the the food system workers have been actually documenting it's actually in the in the in the 10s of millions of wedge stuff right. So there are many ways that that you've subsidized producing or bring or harvesting this biomass to move it into the market as poultry poultry meat now that's. Your conventional approach, that's, you know, you can verify that in any way you can. It's just absolutely the truth. And then there is us trying to figure out how can we, how can we validate, you know, from a spiritual perspective, our relationship with the fact that we will eat animals, we'll eat creatures. Now you can't just do that. It is actually detrimental, degenerative to your spirit.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:21:48
To just go and buy beef or chicken at the store and mindlessly eat it because you are eating the flesh of a creature, that's a fundamental thing that we disconnected from in the mechanization of extraction and the cheapening of something so sacred as a meal you put on your table. And so that is just to give you the the vast difference between the way we approach this and then. And how the conventional system approaches this kind of thing. We didn't do this from a homocentric perspective. In fact when you look at our system, you will notice it's a free range chicken system, free range into two paddock system. And we started with four paddocks. We thinker with the idea of moving the coops and very soon we realized. But if you look at the world from the perspective of the chicken one, the chicken wants to.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:22:45
Go back to the same spot every single night. It actually has its only mechanism. So if you start moving their shelter, you are actually disrupting the very psychology of the night time, which is the rest time when we regenerate so we can take on the next day. And if you stress an animal, it has the same effects as us. If you're stressed, you get sick sooner, your immune system deteriorates. There is like this chain reaction you generate by a single thing that you know may look right for us.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:23:14
But what we know the chicken knows way better right? So that that was the next big piece of how we did is different. So the chicken comes out of this jungles of Southeast Asia. It's a jungle fall. You put a chicken in an open space and you very quickly realize he hates it. It's stressed out, it doesn't want to be out. It won't range it. It. The chicken wants to be protected, multi layers of protection because.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:23:44
Because he wants, you know, he wants to be able to to go out. And then, you know, in Europe and many other places, they started to realize that when there were trees out there, chickens were arranging more. Well, we knew that just by asking the chicken, you know, what do you want? Mr. chicken? And the chicken told us, literally told us, hey, listen, dude, listen. When I turn my head.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:24:11
The sun blinds me, so if it's sunny out there, I'm not going out unless you put some shade out there for me. And so we we asked the what shade will be good for you? And the chicken answer well, it would be good to have a lower canopy that I can feel like cozy it up. And then if I see one of those suckers that want me for dinner up there flying above, I can go straight down under that lower canopy very quickly and get out of their way. And also listen, those those guys up there that want to eat me for dinner, they actually have their own code and then their own system and they need a place to land. And so if can you please put some trees out there so they don't have a way to land and then they also need a rat to take off after they catch me. So can you also block them from getting up because they're doing their math up there and figuring out how I'm going to land and how I'm going to take off.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:24:57
And if I got all of those tools to myself, then I can just relax out there. I can go on and scratch and grab bugs and and be in the shade when it's too sunny, I can lay on the ground and then spread and then let the heat of my body be released into the top part of the soil, because guess that's how chickens cool themselves off. The shade now allows for that soil to be always at a low temperature because it's not getting direct sun. It's protected. Is armored on and on you go. That's how we develop the economics. And then and then after that we started to to grow, you know, different numbers of chickens. And so the flock that we put into a production unit is 1500 broilers. Now we may be able to go up to 1700, maybe even 2000, but we didn't know that when we started because we started with land that had been.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:25:54
Deteriorated with corn and soybeans and all of that and chemicals. And so at the beginning went up with the with the, with the density of chickens. Once we passed 1500 birds the packing order started to go go nuts. Now we don't, we don't mutilate any part of the bird. They are not even the hook is not, is not is removed with laser which is done in some cases.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:26:22
It's it is allowed in some animal welfare standards. We don't even do that. The chicken is intact as it was born to be in. And chicken, I don't know if you knew this, but they are the closest modern relative to T Rex. So they are literally little things running around and they're incredibly aggressive and they can injure each other very easily with that hook and their beaks and their claws, and they're also cannibals.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:26:45
And so you you really want to manage that flock density has a lot to do with disrupting that psychology of the chicken as we call it. And so beyond 1500 in the natural environment it just didn't work out. They started to get more aggressive they started to Peck on each other in a little injury turning to the all of them coming on to one of the chickens and the mortality and started to increase mortality being the critical most important indicator of animal welfare gave. That's the clue. OK, there's too many chickens in there. And the other thing is, it's not like you could just expand the paddock. I'm sure if somebody listening was like, well, why didn't you make the paddocks bigger? Well, they don't range beyond a certain point either. We had already calculated that. And so only a certain amount of chickens were ranging beyond, say, 100 and 8200 feet from the shelter. And so we knew that was the space we had to work with, and that defined what we call the production unit, which is 1 1/2 acres.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:27:40
Divided into two products at .75 Acres each. Planted with an understory, in our case here in Minnesota, with hazelnuts or elderberries and an overstory of the big wood native species, Big Woods native species here, which is fast wood, you know, Maple, oaks, and that gives us that upper canopy, lower canopy and then at the ground level. Is the chicken with all this organic matter incredible amounts of leaves and twigs and things that then then generate the the environmental conditions for lice to to regenerate in there including sprouting grains that we spread under this this space which with the higher level of of moisture organic matter and the chickens tossing it all around sprouts and then the chicken can harvest that is food and so on. So you can see this is like it's a whole different system. There is very cool places where our system is our production model has any similarities with anybody dragging chickens across the field. Whether it's the chickens drag, you know the coops drag themselves or not, doesn't matter. They they what we did is totally different. And I'm not saying that I wouldn't do some of those other things for different purposes, but for the purpose of building an actual large scale system.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:29:06
Of small scale farms that are also compatible with immigrant families, which was a critical aspect of our social engineering process that help you know, you know 24 by 72 or 20 by 80 or whatever it is as long as it's got one square foot per chicken and there is .75 acres on each side for paddocks and those paddocks are planted with this species and managed according to a very well detailed. Process of economics and everything. You can be a farmer in our system with even 1 1/2 acres of property. That is also unheard of. But if you got 15 acres, you put more production units. If you got 100 acres, we'll say you put ten production units and then you grow some of the grains that the chickens are going to eat. And so you can just expand over and over and over to the point that that you can build quite sizable farms.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:30:05
And do not the size that the large scale farm does not discriminate against the the the one production unit farm because they are all built consistently and standardized. That is is the way you actually build a small scale farming system that can be scaled to any level in this country. And so basically that's where Tree Range Farms now sits, is nestled now in this whole side. I hope that gives you.

Anthony Corsaro - 0:31:08
Yeah Kyle I know you want to ask the question I'm not going to ask the question I'm going to recap for for the audience a little bit because I I have this is not my first time getting some of this information. So Ray connect me and and correct me if I if I make some mistakes here the RAA the Regenerative Agriculture Alliance the nonprofit what it does is it it houses all that information and all that philosophy that right you just said that's not been proven. And it takes all that technical expertise, all that plans and it finds the farmers, it helps them set up these these systems. And then it helps basically do everything that's needed to actually create the production that then is processed through that same nonprofit and then becomes the birds that true Range Farm sells, just so people can understand how that's all kind of operationalizing that.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:31:53
That's correct and we have separated. Consulting firm also that can help the farmers and other companies and businesses and that's a separate entity. And also within that entity we host the training system which is under a separate platform called regenpoultry.com. So anybody who wants to get training goes to regenpoultry.com and that's the entry point. And then once they get familiar with it, they can call the RAA and say. Listen, I don't have resources to pay for the cost, but I want to be part of the system. Can you find me a scholarship? The Rea works with them to support them and and there we go. So that's the only piece that I would add to the to your summary.

Anthony Corsaro - 0:32:39
Yeah, beautiful.

Kyle Krull - 0:32:42
So, you know, one of the things I really loved about everything you just shared, I'm really just a spine absorbing a lot of this information right now. Do you think that that were one was kind of humorous like? A bird of prey acting like a pilot, thinking about how to land and take off is just something I've never really considered before. So that was really like. I also love the way that you talk about, you know, the human centric approach to raising animals and how we might think like, OK, hey, if we want to increase animal welfare for a chicken, just give it more space and think about it from our perspective or how we raise livestock or cattle. But to your point, like that's not exactly what a chicken wants. They feel vulnerable. They feel like they're susceptible to prey and they can, you know, they're gonna die, so it's gonna stress them out. So I just think that that the way you flipped the script on thinking about the animal first before the human first was really like a good paradigm shift. And it's almost like you could draw a similar comparison like we want to raise.

Kyle Krull - 0:33:17
Fish better, so let's give them more land. It's like, well, fish don't want land because they're in the sea like that. That makes no sense at all. But that same rationale can be applied to anymore.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:33:47
Like the chicken.

Kyle Krull - 0:33:48
So I thought that was really interesting. I'm curious to get, I want to get like a better visual representation of these what what I think you're calling the scalable unit acres of production, right. So like it's scalable unit, yeah. So there's two paddocks. It's 1.5 acres. What does that rotation look like between the two paddocks? How do you know when they need to go from one to the other? Walk us through that process.

Anthony Corsaro - 0:34:14
And there's a barn. There's a barn in the center, right?

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:34:16
Yeah. So, you know, let me back up to two things that because you mentioned this, it's a, it's flipping on, on the head. It's a mindset and regenerative agriculture, not as a set of practices on the land, but as a way of thinking, as a way of learning. As a way of relating to the rest of the living systems. As a way of knowing not just knowledge for the sake of having facts in your head, but the wisdom to know how to use those facts, that's knowing. And then also how to engineer them. From a perspective where you do it from the indigenous aspect of us to remember we are all indigenous to this planet. And we are born both indigenous and colonizers because we are living systems as well and we need we have this survival incident and that's what makes us colonizers and extractors, because we want to survive at any cost. But the indigenous mind is also the one that sees everything, the other 99% that the colonized mind doesn't see. The indigenous mind sees it when you use that part of your, your, your.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:35:02
Innate intelligence, as it's called, combine it with the knowledge that we acquired during schooling and all of that as we get domesticated into a certain way of taking over the world. Then you create this this as you apply that wisdom from the innate intelligence and the process of observation and learning in the indigenous mind. Then you create what is called we call the indigenous intellect with the indigenous intellect in development, which never ends. Then you are able to. To actually conceptualize the world and our relationship with each other and with those other living systems in a way that results in regenerative engineering, regenerative economics, and regenerative social relationships. That is what makes a system regenerative. Not, not whether the chicken was ranged, is organic or or or whatever, or whether you're organic, organically growing a grain or doing no till. That's not what makes the system regenerative.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:36:00
So back to your question about the unit, the, the this again and I I had to explain that because that mindset is what defines what goes on in that unit. When you come into this space, what you have is a barn, like Anthony said, a barn in the center which serves for the first four weeks. It serves as as a brooding unit. So you get. One day old chicks, they're tiny. They're totally vulnerable. You put a a Rondell, a circle in the middle. You put heat lamps or heaters. However you want to do that, water hydrolytes in the water and feed and really close to them and they spend the first five days just just rolling around like cotton bowls anyway. And and so this 1500 of them right. So it's not just a handful.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:36:55
And after five days, they will have secondary feathers, as we call them. They're not as fluffy anymore. They're starting to look up like tiny little dinosaurs. And and then after 10 days, they are strong enough that we remove that protection. We still leave the heat on, but then we open the whole barn to them. Okay, that happens for 28 days, at least four weeks on the first day of the 5th week.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:37:23
They will go out on one side of that barn to a set of doors into one of the two paddock system. That paddock before they went out was managed with forages and some small sprouted grains. Most of that was done closer to the building because they they don't know that there's a whole world out there. So for the first three days we have to train them. It's a, it's a.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:37:49
Very detailed process in fact is in our training manual. If you ever want to know how how we get 100% of the chickens to go out on the third day and how we get 100% or maybe 98% of them to come back in on their own into the barn every day for the rest of their lives after the 4th week, then you got to take the training. And pay the fee, but is the.

Kyle Krull - 0:38:40
Training called how to train a dinosaur, because it should be.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:38:44
That's not a bad idea. We should call it how to train your dinosaur. You should. I'm so totally.

Anthony Corsaro - 0:38:51
There's a good you guys have put a video out about it that I've watched that's really good and what we'll find and try and link it in the show notes, but I'm like. I'm like a chick right now watching the barn doors open, and I'm like seeing the the vast world in front of well.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:39:04
So anyway that that space outside then was managed for them. These are tiny animals at that point, half a .75 pounds at 4 weeks. They are barely finished developing their basic processing ability, gizzard and and they're pecking and scratching and all of that. So they go out and start eating out everything. Away from the barn. So we at this point we remove all feed from inside the building. 0OK no feed. This is critical because if you put food anywhere that's where the chickens will be. If you food inside the building they are never ranging. I don't care how you cut and slice it for me and we have.

Kyle Krull - 0:39:46
When you say rangy, they're never ranging. That means leaving the building and kind of forging and exploring the outdoors. Is that correct?

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:39:52
Exactly. Exactly. Even with this whole system in place, the the first day that they are starting to range, we put the theaters right outside the doors so they can see it and they are also won't go hungry because those suckers, they will if we push them out as we do, we push them out right there with the feed and the water is outside and they will turn around and lean on the barn waiting for the door to open so they can go back inside and it's only like. A few hours later that they get hungry enough and thirsty enough that they are they they, they decide to take those 10 steps to where the food actually is, but they want to go back and that's the very first day. The second day is way different and by the third day it's, it's quite relaxed and they realize this is this is the world we want and then they go at it, right. So the first days are very different than than to say the second week by the second week.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:40:20
We already have the feeders far away from the barn in the morning. They Stampede out of the building because they know there is food and there's drink out there and there's all these forages in there. And the ones that get out there first, they get all the bugs, they get all the stuff because by the time the last ones arrive, they obliterated everything. The idea that chickens are gonna you, you can raise your chickens like this, eating grubs and stuff, it's so homocentric because. Those suckers, they are not going to let anything that moves you know live in that space. And even what doesn't move, I mean the the the forages, they they literally move through and need a move up. What happens is when you move them to the next paddock is is depending on 2 fundamental things, the regeneration of the forages and the sprouting of grain and the length of time.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:41:16
That they have been on one panic. You don't want to keep them too long because you don't want too much manure to accumulate before it is absorbed and processed by the worms. And by the way, the worms and the macro biology of that soil, it will process that manure in two to three days to the point that you can walk out there and there is no manure lane. Believe me, it's hard. Even though you see it and and we have brought people when the chickens are on the other paddock and they go and and you can see all the manure they are laying out and they turn over and there is no manure on the other one they they most people assume they haven't wrenched there yet. Even if we are the 4th 5th rotation when the rotation is done. It's really depending on how knowing is this the right time? There is no recipe but there is a set of criteria the the ground not bare.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:42:07
The vegetation has regrown, the sprouted, the grain has sprouted, and you want to move in there on the first three days to four days after the grain sprouts, because that's the point of optimal nutrition of that sprout. If you allow that sprout to grow, leave, and to go for a synthesis, just start, you know, doing photosynthesis and turns green. The protein and the minerals and all of that that it had accumulated in order to sprout actually get dissipated and it become, you know, increases its amount of fiber as a ratio of protein. And the chicken wants protein more than it wants fiber because fiber, they need some fiber. But very small amounts to the extent that you can't put more than 2% of of the total feed ration that we put out in the buckets if you put more than 2% of say oats, which are high in fiber.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:43:01
You actually start rubbing energy out of the animal and he wants stall, he won't grow anymore. So that all kinds of considerations like that. It's all now formulated into the agronomics. And as farmers, you know, grow the first flock, they will notice very soon that if they let him too long in the same space, they will obliterate the, the, the, the, the, the forage and they had to be rotated. The the rotation is going to happen less at the beginning because they are smaller.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:43:30
And a lot more towards the end because there will be 6/6 and a quarter pound plump birds walking out there, you know, foraging and obliterating everything in front of them. They will do it a lot faster towards the end. So you move them a lot faster and then band they are gone and now you got a long period of wait between this next block grows enough and that everything just comes back. Lush and ready for the next flock. And you do it over and over. In my case, I don't know, 15 years of doing that. I can tell you almost every detail about it.

Kyle Krull - 0:44:37
I love the way you paint the picture. Like Anthony said, I felt like I was on the journey. And just to be clear like that there's the barn in the middle. They have access to, you know, there's there's two doors, call it like a door on the right side and a door on the left side. They get access to pasture on one side. And then when it's time to rotate, they go back into their same home, and instead of opening that door on the left, you flip it and open the door on the right. So they get access to new pasture, but they remain in their same home. Like you mentioned before, that's where they want to be in that singular location. They're not being forced to go other places, correct?

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:45:10
Correct. And you know the idea that they don't like to sleep. You know that we get the idea that for a chicken is bad to sleep on the same space. There's nothing wrong with it. In fact, they if you, if you track a lot of them go to the exact same spot and they come back into the building in about the same order, and that's very important. I think it's important for the psychology of the bird, but that's a homocentric idea. I don't even know if how they think or or how they process information, but what I know is how they behave and supporting their natural behavior is central. To everything we do and that is the indigenous mindset I'm talking about. And so yes, now of course if there is a lot of rain and they are bringing in moisture, there will be ammonia, potential ammonia production. It won't happen when they are little because they are endorsed. And so it will only happen after they start ranging. And so in those cases, yeah, the farmer has to observe if you walk into the barn and it smells beyond the normal smell of chicken barn.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:45:50
That is, you know, aviated and healthy and everything. Then you push the birds out. I mean, you open the doors, they all go out. Then you can close the doors so they won't. A few of them will come wandering in. You come in with your tractor and you pick up the the minote, put new bedding in and you're done and very quick because you are not actually disrupting the birds. They are outside. And then you clean it up, you make it look nice again and they are coming back to the same space. But here, listen to this.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:46:20
Even doing that, which I have done many times in the middle of a flock because it rains a lot, some days, some some some years here in Minnesota, and last year was one of those years. When that happens, even changing the bedding disrupts their behavior. They they have a hard time in that night, the night when we change the bedding, you have to actually help them come back in because they are spooked by that foreign space. They don't even recognize that. Just to give you an idea.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:46:49
Of the level of indigenousness that we bring into the mindset of how we learn, how we relate to these creatures, and how we respect their lives so that we can be spiritually grounded and at peace with putting a piece of these chickens on our table. Give thanks to the Creator for giving us the privilege and being able to actually enjoy it. That is the fundamental aspect of feeding our body. The body is only part of it. If your soul suffers because of the process, because of how that animal came to your table, then you will start thinking differently and probably become a vegan, you know?

Anthony Corsaro - 0:48:05
And well, it's a, it's a really good segue, right, because we've covered the ecosystem, we've covered the agronomy, we've kind of covered production, right. So let's talk about the brand and I really, I really would love to hear you speak right to. Why did you need a brand? Why did you need a brand to be in service of the whole ecosystem? Why do you need a brand to fulfill that kind of that the mandate that you just gave about you know putting it on your plate and and it nurturing your soul, not just your body. I mean talk, talk to us about why did you need your range farms and what is, what is specifically the brand's role in this whole thing and the value.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:48:38
Great. Good question. Because you posted something recently on LinkedIn about the transformation or the transitioning of the supply chain. Now think about it for a second. Every farmer right? Now that is not well, even conventional farmers are under the gun to transition and we are describing and prescribing what that transition needs to look like. Oh no till organic man carbon sequestration. Organic certification are regenerative. However, people are defining it, brands defining it, all of that coming in and again imposing that on the farmer and they are being forced to transition. Now who's forcing the brands to transition and to what does transition look like? What does it look like right now, right now? Brands, companies, Cpg's.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:49:09
They got their power, they got their they they are in between all the wealth of consumers. They capture that wealth in the name in with certain claims claims that the farmers are forced to transition into practices that they claim and and and product attributes and system attributes that the brand is claiming that farmers have to do. Now what is asked in in return from the from the brands. Are they taking ownership of the companies and saying farmers here is 25% of our shares which you can have as payment for your, for the amazing work you are doing to make our brand more successful. That transition is what I'm talking about, transitioning from owning, controlling and governing the whole thing and then.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:50:02
Just like we decided about how we raise chickens, then decided, well now I got the capital, I got the money, I got the wealth from the consumers that I captured with this product that I bought from this whole ecosystem of farmers that I am asking and literally forcing to transition into a different way. And now I got the power again back to the same old, same old colonizing process. It doesn't matter if you. The supply chain now is coming from a socalled regenerative sourcing because you are you are you companies not participating in the transitioning to regenerative which is the spreading out of ownership controlling governance. And This is why we needed a company that could model how you do that. How do you transition the supply chain from extractive, exploitative and discriminating into part of an ecosystem?

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:50:51
Where we get to make money along with everybody else. And where the wealth that we now are collecting, entrance and managing, it's actually done with accountability to the ecosystem, not just to a board of directors or a few investors that they may have just come into this space to make money. And now I know that in our case, our investors understand this, this is explained to them and they have agreed and they have signed on. To the philosophy or how do you transition the supply chain into us into a supply chain that is actually regenerative. This is why we needed the company. On one hand, because we needed to put this product in the market. On the other hand, because we want to see if if the world is actually ready for true regenerative supply chains, because this is where where the rubber hits the road and we'll see. I mean again, there's a lot of talk out there.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:51:48
But the proof is including are we actually willing to do the things that need to be done so that we can actually transition the world and stop this, this train wreck that is called climate collapse and degeneration of the soil in the ecologists on which we depend to feed the world? And that's why we need a company that can model that.

Kyle Krull - 0:52:37
So we we've been talking about all the incredible work you're doing for 50 minutes now, and I think that this is a really important segue into the brain side of things. How do you effectively communicate all of that information as a brand to a consumer and you know the the stores in Minnesota or on blueness or with forced nature so that they can understand that they want to support this system and they're willing to pay the premium to to to make sure that they're buying the best possible food they can for themselves and for the and for the planet?

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:53:10
God, you asked then. Because here's one thing. Once you try our chicken and you're not going back to other chicken, the taste is the best proof that we actually have this thing that is worth every penny you are paying for. That's number one. Number two, we didn't bring, we didn't build a product brand, we built a story brand and the story is incredibly powerful because it you know if if you. As you follow us, watch us study to produce you know the how to train your dinosaur elementary school books.

Kyle Krull - 0:53:54
Yes.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:53:55
I'm telling you, I'm totally taking this to town. I mean, this is, this is how we have evolved. We learn from listening to your own ideas and stories and and so on. And so bottom line is, the world is now aware. That in the name of food we have been poisoned, scientifically, verifiably poisoned. And so people do want something different. Integrity is the key to the game, to stay, to be in the last one standing. We have integrity. We're only going to say the things that we can deliver on, but we will also deliver you, hands down, the best chicken. And then.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:54:12
This move it one step forward. The chicken is only one of the products of the ecosystem. Now remember, the chicken is under the shade of trees and so on. Well, the first story is hazelnuts. We now are harvesting hazelnuts and I just made myself some some hazelnut snacks last night. I'm also harvesting Maple syrup and so I took this Maple.

Anthony Corsaro - 0:55:03
From.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:55:03
The farm which you know the the the sugar maples which are the over story. Took the hazelnuts from the understory, hold them and make that absolutely nutritious snack. The chicken is no different. It's an absolutely nutrition source of food. Nutritious source of food. It's got nutritional integrity, which means if there is nutritional density in a chicken, we have it. We have it by default because we gave the chicken everything it needs, nothing it doesn't want.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:55:09
And so as we go forward, this is the story that sells and is proven by by what's going on in the market right now. We are being sought over by our clients. They want to tell our story, they feel proud of that story. A consumer that comes in by our chickens walks home and cooks that chicken with this concrete idea and this feeling that they are cooking the best chicken and there is no lie to it. They're not going to find out tomorrow that that we were lying to them and that integrity we are banking on that integrity becoming more and more important as new standards, new governing systems and auditing and verification systems come into place and as we are able to tap into that infrastructure, starting with the.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:56:06
With the ESG's, with life cycle life cycle assessments, with the science, the labs that are testing our chicken for nutritional integrity, with the animal welfare certification that is coming and making sure that yeah, these things are real and so on the story behind it is what we are banking on, that's how we, that's how we market the product and my understanding so far based on the indicators on the market. Is that that is what consumers want. We are delivered over delivering on what they expect and we'll keep doing that. And to the extent that nobody's willing to do the real thing, we'll be ahead of the game.

Kyle Krull - 0:57:11
I love that. And there's something I want to touch on because I I'm a little bit familiar with some of the intentionality behind regenerative chicken raising and the fact that you're we keep talking about hazelnut trees and the chicken excrement is super high in phosphorus. And hazelnut trees are a tree that really thrive in phosphorus rich soils. So the fact that you've paired those two like you said, it's really about that full system. And you probably have some of the best, most nutrient dense hazelnuts you can too. It's not just the chickens like you said, it's it's the full system working together. So I just want to highlight that intentionality because I think it's it's worth mentioning.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:57:47
But but remember, we didn't pair them. They care themselves and the hazelnut told us. So I could go and talk to the you are now on behalf of the hazelnut, I tell you the whole story of the hazelnut and how it evolved to attract chickens and how it metabolically evolved and genetically and typically evolved to actually feed on the chicken extra men. That was not a coincidence and they told us so if you got the indigenous mind, you see through all of that and then you can engineer. The real food that we needed, consumers. Listening to this, I mean, I am not going to eat any other chicken except the ones that I raised when when I couldn't raise chickens, I just didn't eat chicken for many years, my wife and I, I even went vegetarian for a while because we couldn't find meat that was spiritually aligned with us and that is now becoming more common among consumers. That spiritual connection to the animals we eat, that is fundamental to our spiritual wellbeing, to our mental health.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 0:58:17
And yes, to the strength of our bodies and the ability of ourselves to regenerate. It's a regenerative system, not a chicken.

Anthony Corsaro - 0:58:56
Well, Kyle and I are due for a Minnesota visit and to try some of the chicken because we have not yet. But I'm I'm looking forward to that day. And now I am also very hungry after talking about it for the last hour. I you know, one thing like this is where my brain goes when you're saying some of that right. You too is like. A lot of some things I like about the model that you're building. Minnesota has the highest percentage of coops like per capita, I think and like the nation, right. So you have a great groundswell like grassroots of like people that want to support these kinds of brands and these kinds of systems. So I think that's a huge plus. And I think a lot of times, you know we on this podcast, we're guilty of it too. We talk about region brands, it's going nationally and getting into Whole Foods and Sprouts and all the things and that's all great and like.

Anthony Corsaro - 0:59:14
You know, it's different paths for everyone, but especially for something like this where the farmers are all going to be localized to Minnesota and the Midwest like to use an extracted investor term like the Tam is big enough just in the Midwest for you guys to create an amazing scaled chicken brand and and and systems business. Right. And I think sometimes we forget that and I just think that's a really powerful story to then tell the consumer and it's just a powerful transformative system to change the food system and. Sometimes we forget that and that just was coming to mind for me and I want to share that, you know?

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 1:00:15
As thanks for saying that, because one of the things you got to layer out this is back to the to the theory of nation building. We see the Midwest as a territory to be managed for regeneration and the people who can do that are the indigenous minded people and most of the natives think that way. And so naturally the native people are the most indigenous people around here. And those of us who are not native but are indigenous in our mindset are fit to be part of that revolution, right? That's the first thing the engineering unit allows us the tool. So the production unit, then you aggregate production units to create a farm then, which is an enterprise level unit. Then you take that enterprise level unit, you aggregate across a region to build a regional, what we call economic cluster or regional producer pool as others call it. And with that level of infrastructure, in this case stacyville, Iowa where our poultry processing facility is based out of is the epicenter of that regional deployment. That regional deployment includes the poultry processor as the epicenter, the networks of farms supply and tree range.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 1:01:00
And the nonprofit, the financial institutions providing capital for coops and I mean like right now we are talking to institutions about $15 million to just build 400 coops in the next three years. All of that it can be done now on a regional blueprint. And that way you create the economies that allows us to achieve that scale that you're talking about and then to build this region. With the markets and then then tackle the the more condensed food court market in the Twin Cities and Milwaukee and and Madison and recently talking about folks in Chicago now that blueprint down you move it to the next level which is you aggregate regions to supply the key markets across the country and now you actually have a regenerative poultry system of America that love it you actually. Transform system is is you go to the smallest piece and then you grow it from there. Like like my Celia. There's no different. We are mimicking the way the way natural systems evolved. We're not, we're not reinventing sugar water here.

Kyle Krull - 1:02:40
I think it's incredible. I think kind of it segues nicely into, you know, what is the future for turior inch farms and it sounds like, you know, what you just laid out is a potential future where we create these. Systems, these regional systems that can be replicated in different parts of the country to service different metropolitan regions which I love because it reduces the you know the transit impact for chicken. You know versus you know all the chicken being raised in the Midwest being shipped out across the whole country and or world. There's a there's a big you know transportation costs there. Whereas instead like let's just put the food, let's grow the food in the region is going to be solely consumed in why not. So that's awesome, but what else is on in the future for Tree Range Farms?

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 1:03:22
Well, keep in mind that the poultry is the ignition point. The hazelnut comes next, the elderberry comes next. In this case, a lot of Maple syrup comes next. After that comes bass wood. You know, that is part of that upper canopy, together with maples and oaks. Bass wood as crafting material and as. Potentially, you know, fine wood, wood, fine woodworking supplies. Then comes the oaks 10 years later with high quality lumber. Meanwhile all of that is being trimmed and turned into biomass which then mix with the poultry manure is allowing us. Right now we are actually scaling up the production of garlic which similar to the hazelnut is completely compatible with the nutritional profile of the chicken manure. That allows us to systemically manage that at larger and larger scale. Then comes the fact that this last year we aligned the grain growing farmers and also the grain, the grain aggregation and contracting facility which now allows us to do our own grain grinding into feed and we can now manage the the mixing of the grains to shift that over to the farms for sprouting in the fields at the end.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 1:04:11
The future of tree range is around 20 enterprise sectors coordinated to create multiple layers of outputs, including door per ship that will be grazed in the rotational processes of bringing grains and rotating grains. There will be pastures in the middle of the rotations for a couple of years and then door per ship coming in that ignited a conversation with. With a partner organization in Pine Ridge Reservation where in South Dakota where they got larger access to lands to finish the doper ship there and also engages our smaller farms on the genetics of doper ship beyond the chicken like my farm is 64 acres, I only need 15 acres for the chickens to have a nice. Economically viable poultry operation. The rest of the farm is divided into 26 acres of woods, which we are doing all of this other, you know, agroforestry and camping, you know, agritourism and the rest of it, where the that is still small but sufficient for reproductive sheep, not enough to grow them out. But then the partnership with the natives allows us to access the larger land. We transfer the all the offspring from all of the farms, again organized.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 1:05:26
To produce thousands of offspring twice or three times a year and then finish them. You know in the in the larger blends more suited for ranging. So the future of tree range is an actual is really bright expensive but completely focused on energy transformation engaging the photosynthetic the animals and the soil as the foundation of our business proposition and. Engaging all of the outputs under a brand that can be recognized not only as a leading brand and a story brand, but also a new model of a business that can represent the potential future of how we manage the landscape not only the Midwest but beyond. And honestly, if if we are serious and if the military actually ends up implementing the largest potential national security strategy, which is center on food and the health of the soil.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 1:06:22
And the capital actually flows. We will be part of transforming this country into one of the strongest agricultural economies in the world. And I hope we do that because the alternative is pretty grim. Yeah, that's the future of our company.

Anthony Corsaro - 1:07:10
Man.

Kyle Krull - 1:07:11
You've given it some thought.

Anthony Corsaro - 1:07:12
We have. We've had. Yeah, yeah. I love it man. We've had some folks that source from Latin American agroforestry systems on here and this is the first I would say brand with supply chain based in America. We've heard something similar about all those different value chains and all those different crops and thoughtful commercialization of them. And just so it's such a different paradigm or flipping the scrape like how you know said earlier, but it's like so needed because. We just have such a monocrop mindset here, but it's like we have these beautiful agroforestry systems and, you know, diversity and biodiversity here. We just have structured all the infrastructure and all the systems and all the mechanization to basically cater to monocropping, right. And that just really stood out to me because.

Anthony Corsaro - 1:07:48
What it says is we have to change that one, but we also have to have the capital and the resources to retool infrastructure or have some infrastructure to move that new system through and right you, you, you've been just an amazing kind of voice in the space and and and I would say like an activator to challenge people to think differently to to do differently to live differently to to live that. You know true regeneration like you kind of talked about earlier but I really just want to pass the mic back to you and say like. What are some other calls to action for different people in the space that you're seeing right now and coming to mind for you on not just how people can support things like you're building, but just overall like what what are you seeing and calls to actions that you'd make to some folks in the?

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 1:08:48
Space, well, I would like to say that there is what we call affinity sectors in this country that just like we picked poultry as our affinity sector. And then we took this and organized it on a systemic way for scalability and national application. I'll call everyone. If you are in the pork sector, please do the same. Stop thinking as an individual farmer as an individual company and start thinking as an ecosystem and how the individual success of anyone, whether it's us as individuals or us as individual farm or us as an individual company, the individual success is completely. Completely dependent on the collective success of your sector, your affinity group, if you are in beef, grass fed beef would do the same. Don't just go out there doing business as usual. Organize, organize, and when you're done doing it, organize again and again. Because this layering of organization and restructuring cannot succeed if if we are, if it's only done in one sector.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 1:09:31
And and let's come together eventually. I mean our next big thing here is organizing the governance. Last two weeks, two weeks ago we had the second annual regional poultry convergence here in North Dakota. There were just about 150 of us in in the poultry ecosystem here and plus you know selected friends and speakers we brought in, but it was 100% focused on regional poultry. It was not a conference.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 1:10:00
It was like an annual meeting of our ecosystem. That was the second time if other sectors start doing that. And the grass fed exchange actually kind of has a similar version because they are about grass fed and they come together every year. And I went to speak to one of those in Santa Rosa, I think it was 2018 and California. And so as we do that, we are, we are committed to building this.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 1:10:27
Governance infrastructure that we're building now into the Regente Poultry Council of America, which will be literally a console representing all the multitude areas of regente poultry transportation workers in the plants, workers on the farmers, grain growers, poultry growers, egg layer growers in the South, which we're going to start, you know, sometime in the next year and so on. That will be the regente poultry. Council is the representation of those, those affinity groups within the poultry affinity sector. If everybody were to do the same in their own sector, we could a few years from now coalesce on the national convergence where we actually build the Regenerative Agriculture Council of America, and then that becomes the governing institution for this country's regenerative agriculture industry. Now, if we do this with that level of commitment, vision, discipline, relentless commitment to actual regeneration, not just whitewashed versions of it, we will change the world. We will change this country and the world as a result of it. I invite everybody to be that ambitious. And if you don't feel like you got what it takes to go all the way there, take the next step and do what's right in front of you.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 1:11:49
You know, don't whitewash this concept. We inherited an incredible concept from our ancestors that is now being called regenerative. But it was a concept that allowed us to think, to behave, to relate, to know, and to learn in a way that results in attitudes, practices and things and things that we do that then to regenerate in in our part of. Building and supporting life as a as a result of how we do things now, that is really what what I invite everybody to start doing. No matter where you are on the journey, the journey, stop killing anything. Start supporting life as a foundation of of succeeding in building a regenerative food system.

Kyle Krull - 1:13:04
Inspiring.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 1:13:07
Yeah, man. Yeah.

Anthony Corsaro - 1:13:10
Whenever you're ready, whenever you're ready to run for office, you got my vote. It's.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 1:13:13
Just one office. You're going to have to be more clear about that.

Anthony Corsaro - 1:13:18
Yeah, maybe, maybe the the President of the future of Agricultural Council you just described. Yeah, I think you just, I think you just answered this question, but you might have some things to add and this is kind of our final question for each each guest. But I think you just started answering it or maybe totally answered it, which is, you know, how do we get region brands at 50% market share by 2050?

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 1:13:45
Well, region brands as in all the brands you are working with or region brands as in your podcast, your company it.

Anthony Corsaro - 1:13:57
Doesn't have to be. It's definitely not relegated to just the people that we're working with, but I would I would say the* is. Regen brands with real integrity, right? With that real that they really are.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 1:14:10
Well, one thing is organizing again. I mean, we didn't get to where we are right now with our thorough systemic discipline, organizing, militant kind of organizing, relentless that we have to do everywhere across the sectors as we do that. Guess what? In order to do that, you have to connect with thousands and thousands of people and guess who's going to consume your product. The thousands and thousands of people who organize with you, and then you secure the market. The market is as big as we're willing to organize.

Kyle Krull - 1:14:45
Like that.

Anthony Corsaro - 1:14:49
Yeah.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 1:14:50
I mean that's how market right now. I've been organizing around here for a while. Yeah, I mean my database shows just around 7000 contacts, not mailing lists, actual contact. And then you know in the last few years I've been tracking speaking engagements and podcasts and articles and stuff and there was a point where we were reaching almost 500,000 people. So as we go out there, that eagerness of those stores to put our product in the shelves, that didn't just happen. That's I am not fighting for that market share right now. We are actually just coming into a space we already organized ourselves into when we. It relaxes your mind, relaxes your spirit, makes you more attractive to somebody to do business with you. More people want to do business with you when you are in that state of balance spiritually. I mean, how do you know how cutthroat this space is? I mean, people bad mouthing and lambasting others as a way to get into a shell. I mean as long as we keep doing that and thinking that's how we're going to get market share.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 1:15:30
We're going to keep getting bounced back because that's just like a meteorite trying to bounce into the atmosphere at an angle. That is incorrect. It's just going to get bounced down. So yes, that's what we a lot of people. Again, let's back up, indigenize your mind, decolonize your methodology and your processes, and then let's flow like a river into this space and that river.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 1:15:59
With all the people, the farmers get, the consumers who come and visit our farms, I never say no to somebody who wants, wants to come and have a farm tour because I know that family. That group, whether it's General Mills bringing their executives or whether it is, you know, Alan Lewis and Tina Owens coming out from another state or whether it's Anthony and Kyle coming out to visit. I will never say no because I know that the ripple impact of every one of those individuals who have seen. Taste it and experience this space. They will never go back to where they were before because now they know that things are possible and then they are, and that they are easier than we thought. And this idea that the world is going to hell in a handbasket and that we are all doomed disappears. And you are one with yourself again. And you can now have hope again. Remember Obama's campaign. The hardest thing to restore in people is hope.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 1:16:56
That's why they launched campaign. But this is your hope campaign. And who doesn't want to have hope in that? Their future that their children will be fed food with integrity? Who doesn't want to have that hope? You tell me who? Which parent doesn't want to have that for their children or for themselves so they can grow old, healthy and vital? I mean, who doesn't want that? That to me is the best way to actually build.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 1:17:22
The A market share, but it's not building a market share. It's simply shifting the market so that we can live with more integrity and, you know, really materialize and express the fullness of our potential as human creatures to be the best we can. And the only way we can do that is if we live with that level of integrity. We have one of those options because now you can have chicken on your plate that you never have to feel guilty about.

Kyle Krull - 1:18:19
I feel like if you just close, just close right there. That was that was great. Yeah, yeah.

Anthony Corsaro - 1:18:26
Thank you for joining us. Thank you so much, Ray. Appreciate.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin - 1:18:29
It. Appreciate you. Thank you for what you do.

Anthony Corsaro - 1:18:34
For show notes, episode transcripts, and more information on our guests and what we discussed on the show, check out our website regen-brands.com. That is regen-brands.com. You can also find our regen recaps on the website. Regen recaps take less than 5 minutes to read and cover all the key points of the full hour long conversations. You can check out our YouTube channel, Regen Brands Podcast for all of our episodes with both video and audio. The best way to support our work is to give us a five star rating on your favorite podcast platform. Subscribe to future episodes and share the show with your friends. Thanks for tuning into The ReGen Brands Podcast brought to you by the Regen Coalition and Outlaw Ventures.

Anthony Corsaro - 1:18:47
We hope you learned something new in this episode and it empowers you to use your voice, your time, and your dollars to help us build a better and more regenerative food system. Love you, guys.