Welcome to Grounded Wellness. I'm your host Bethany McDaniel,
founder of Primarily Pure, mom of Three, and biohacking
enthusiast. We created this podcast to bring
you practical advice to live a more vibrant and intentional
life rooted in long lasting health.
We record right here on our regenerative farm, grounded with
our feet in the soil, exploring bold truths, overlooked wisdom
and holistic tools that support true well-being.
These conversations will challenge everything you know
about health and Wellness. Today on Grounded Wellness, I am
joined by my brother-in-law, Farmer Rock.
He's the founder of Primal Pastures, a data four, and a
practicing physician's assistant.
What started out with just fifty backyard chickens has grown into
a full-fledged regenerative farm, raising the cleanest meat
in America. This conversation will expose
the corrupt, misleading world of meat labels as well as the half
truths and straight up lies that the meat industry doesn't want
you to question. Free range, organic, hormone
free. These labels are designed to
sell, not to protect your health.
Rob is pulling back the curtain and giving you the knowledge to
shop smarter and eat cleaner. If you've ever felt confused at
the meat counter, this episode is for you.
Let's dig in. Rob, welcome to Grounded
Wellness. We're here at your farm.
Actually, you own this place. Primal Pier has a small plot of
land here, but this is the Primal Pastures farm.
And I'm so excited for this conversation.
We have so many fun, juicy topics to cover.
But first, I think our audience would love hearing a bit about
the Primal Pastures back story from your perspective.
Yeah, well, thanks for having me.
Super honored to be here. Primal, Primal pastures started
It was 2012. We were sitting around the table
at my parents house Easter dinner and we are all kind of
talking. It was your husband, my brother,
my dad, my brother Alana. And we're sitting around
basically talking about our different health journeys,
complaining about all the misleading labels out there.
And I thought we kind of came to a conclusion, well, all right,
instead of paying all this extra money for these labels in the
market and all these chickens that we're paying extra money
for, well, we kind of came to a conclusion.
It was my understanding that we were going to raise our own
chickens. So I left that conversation,
went into the other room, did what anybody does.
I went on Google and said, where do I get chickens?
And I ordered 50 baby chicks to be delivered to the house.
So I went back out like 30 minutes later.
I said, all right, guys, I got the chickens.
They're coming in two weeks. And they were all just
dumbfounded. They were like, what?
We've never even raised an animal before, Like how are we
going to raise 50 chicks? And I was like, well, we got two
weeks to figure it out. And so knew absolutely nothing
about farming at that time. Really the whole, the whole
purpose behind it was we knew we wanted to feed our family well
and raising the chickens was essentially the solution we came
up with. And so we had two weeks to kind
of put something together. We did what anybody at the time
would have done. We went on Google, we went on
YouTube, we watched videos, we watched all these people doing
backyard farming, tried to piece together what we could, and in
that two weeks we were able to build a brooder to raise the
chicks in. I had no idea but chicks get
delivered by USPS so. I remember that.
That was so shocking to me, too. I remember like, a few times I
had to go there and pick up the chicks.
It was so weird, like walking into the post office and
grabbing like, a huge box of baby chicks, just chirping.
Yeah. You'll never get better service
at the post office than when they have chicks for you.
You get a front of the line pass.
They cannot wait to get rid of them.
But yeah, 50 baby chicks showed up.
We had built a brooder in the backyard in our shed, basically
a tub with infrared lights to keep the chicks warm for the
first two to three weeks. And my dad at the time, he was,
he's always been into regenerative farming.
He's been researching it for 30-40 years.
And so he was kind of the inspiration on what to do and a
lot of where we gathered our information from.
But with his knowledge, we built the brooder.
And then Joel Salatin played a huge role in in in what we do.
And he's what I consider the grandfather of pasture raised
poultry. And so we built a pen which was
2 feet tall by 10 feet by 12 feet with no floor on the bottom
and just chicken wire on the outside to kind of keep the
chickens protected and the predators out.
And we said, all right, this is what we're going to do.
We're going to put 50 chickens outside on grass.
We're going to feed them a soy free organic feed, and we're
going to move them to fresh pasture every single day.
And that was the foundation of how we raised our animals.
And we did that. And my brother-in-law, Paul, at
the time, he was in his master's program at UCLA.
And so he's always looking to the business side of things.
And he's like, well, let's just tell people what we're doing on
Facebook and see if anybody's interested.
And within two weeks, we had a list of 100 people interested in
these birds. We still hadn't even processed
them, processed them, and never even processed a chicken before.
And Paul had already sold all fifty of them.
So I remember vividly the the night we decided to process, we
had no money at all. We are completely bootstrapping
all this. So my dad and I for the
processing equipment, we bought an old washing machine and
converted it to a chicken plucker.
So we, we, we took it, cut the top off of it, got the rubber
fingers, kind of put it in, had to change the spin cycle.
And then for our scalder, because you have to dip the
chickens in in hot water to loosen the feathers.
After they've been. Already been killed correct you
had we we cut a water heater in half and converted an old water
heater. So we were we were like the
Beverly hillbillies out there type of situation.
And so we have this makeshift equipment.
I remember my brother-in-law Paul holding up a cell phone
camera on how to kill a chicken. And so we're watching this video
and my first experience processing was led through a
YouTube video and we went through those 50 chickens sold
all of them didn't even get a try.
One of the first batch had no idea if they're even good, but
we had a ton of people asking for more.
So then we said, all right, well let's raise 100 this time, then
let's raise 200 and then 400. And about that time we're like,
all right, we might be on to something here.
Eventually we started adding other proteins, lamb, beef,
pork, Turkey, but essentially the entire business grew out of
this tiny 1800 square foot house.
Nine of us were living in it and essentially maybe 1/4 of an acre
of grass in the backyard is what we started on.
Yeah, it's wild to think back on.
I mean, I remember those days so clearly.
People always ask like, well, did you guys have a, like,
farming background? Did you guys grow up in this?
And it's so crazy to think how we literally pieced it all
together from like Tom, my father-in-law, your dad's
knowledge and YouTube and then just enough family members like
willing to chip in and help with different things.
I mean, we literally had our entire family in the backyard
and everyone had a different role in the chicken processing
line. I mean, whoever like grows up
thinking that they'll do that someday.
I don't know. It was wasn't fun, but I'm also
grateful for that experience. Like, being able to take a
chicken from like a live bird to eating it that night for dinner
is an experience that I'm forever grateful to have a part
in. And Primal pastors even used to
offer that for the community, like chicken processing
workshops. I mean, we're so disconnected
from where our food comes from in today's day and age, but that
was such a cool thing that you guys did to give people that
experience. It, it really is just an awesome
experience. And we, we had people from all
over the spectrum come out to that class.
You would have big game hunters, people who have taken down elk,
moose before come out and say, Hey, I just want to learn how to
break down a smaller bird to we would even have vegans to come
out and they're like, I really want to eat meat, but I, I don't
feel like I can do it unless I'm willing to take the life myself.
And it would be an emotional experience.
And it is anytime you take a life to sustain a life, it's an
emotional experience, But it, it was really cool to see somebody
be able to come out and acknowledge that and, and take
those steps. But it's honestly something that
your grandparents, my grandparents did as kids in the
backyard. They would have their, their
laying hands. And when it was time the hens
became stealing hens, they would go out, they would wring its
neck, they would process. Everybody just knew how to
process chickens over 100 years ago.
And, and with the industrial revolution, the food revolution,
agriculture evolution, all of these things, we essentially
lost track of that. And so it was.
This was just a skill everybody had at one point in time for
thousands of years. Absolutely.
So this was about 12 years ago when Primal Pastors was just
getting going. We were all living in this
house. I was starting to experiment
with skin care products at the time.
I was using the kitchen a lot of times to make deodorants and
body butters. I was rendering tallow from the
farm to put into the products. Like doing all these things that
I never in a million years would have thought I would have done.
And at one point we also got a dairy cow, Mabel, and you and I
had quite the experience on our attempts to milk.
Mabel, do you want to talk about Oh.
Yeah, this is this is one of my favorite.
So we finally got Mabel and you and I had been wanting raw milk
for a long time, which was part of the reason we we got a dairy
cow. And so we just had no idea.
This was essentially how a lot of primal pastures had.
We'd call it fail for fail, failing forward because we would
do things and just learn from it.
And so I know we just said, Hey, how hard can it be?
Let's just go. She had just had her baby Fred.
We had weaned him. And so we're like, all right,
well, let's just continue to milk her.
Had no background at all and, and dairy at all.
So I think we went out there with a rope and a stool and a
bucket right just into the middle of the pasture.
And I was like, all right, well, how hard can it be?
And so Mabel was a super friendly cow.
I thought we could do it. And I think we were out there
for, I don't know what, like 3 minutes and I maybe got maybe
2-3 ounces of milk from her. She turns and gores me with her
horn and so in the rib cage. So I'm like on the ground, just
in excruciating pain. And maybe 10 seconds later, you
get stung by a bee and you're horribly allergic to bees.
And so I'm rolling on the ground.
Your face is swelling up. But we didn't realize that it
had stung me. I just so I knew there was a bee
that was kind of like messing with me.
I was kind of flailing around like.
And then I felt like what I thought might have been a sting,
but then I wasn't sure because you said there was no Stinger in
there and I trusted you. But I thought maybe I hit myself
in the eye with my wedding ring because I was.
Like. Fully like flailing trying to
get away from this bee and so so yeah we didn't get much milk but
the bee sting ended up being terrible.
Yeah. Because didn't know there was a
still a Stinger on my eyelid Went got a massage with your
sister. My sister-in-law Jamie after the
I got out of the massage and the therapist looks at me and goes
you need to go to the hospital. And I look in the mirror my
whole face is just completely swollen.
Swollen. Yeah, and I looked closer.
I couldn't really see it myself. I had Jamie look and she was
like, there's still a Stinger in there.
And this was like 3-4 hours after the fact.
So the Stinger was still in there.
We'll we'll have to like show a picture on the video of this
because it was so it was so bad, so bad.
And my, my whole right eye was swollen for like, I don't know.
It took probably 10 days for it to go down.
It was a disaster. Oh yeah, And we get questions
all the time of when are you guys going to bring raw dairy to
the farm? And I tell that story to remind
people that it's probably not anytime soon.
It's not as easy as it looks. It's not nothing a.
Cow. But yeah, we have a lot of these
stories and fun times. Glad they're in the past, but we
have a lot of cool memories from those early days for sure.
Yeah. And you're a PA, so can you
explain what a PA is? And how you reconcile these two
worlds in which you live, because they're very different,
like you're a full time PA and also the full time founder and
CEO of Primal Pastures. Correct.
Yeah. So I've been a physician
assistant now for over 10 years. I work mostly in the hospital
setting. So it's a acute care type of
situation. Patients that are admitted to
the hospital, whether it be trauma or exacerbations of their
chronic symptoms is mostly what I deal with.
That spars quite a bit with what I do on the Primal pasture side.
The the mindset behind both of them is to provide a service to
help people. One addresses it kind of at the
grassroots of it and that's what Primal does in terms of we
provide the cleanest meat in America.
We try to produce the healthiest food that you can to provide a
lifestyle that prevents you from ending up in the hospital where
I would see you on the other side of the spectrum when I'm
apai get patients that maybe haven't had exposure to.
All right, the standard American diet, the SAD diet we call it,
is what's putting you in this situation.
And so I get to have those conversations with him in the
hospital where I can explain things to him.
I can show him things, OK, your heart failure is directly
correlated to what you're putting into your body.
And to you and me, that makes sense.
You know, obviously what we eat affects the outcome of our body
and how we perform. A majority of America doesn't
understand that, especially the patients I see in the hospital.
So I may share something like, you know, eating a microwave
dinner every night isn't great for your health.
And they're like, oh, but it was chicken and rice in the
microwave dinner. I thought that was healthy.
And so there's there's a ton of conversations there that really
do kind of tie back into what I'm doing at Primal and are very
beneficial. But but overall, yes to
contrasting professions. Are patients receptive to that
when you have those conversations with them?
No, I've had, I've had some patients that have had their
lives radically changed by information I've given them.
I would say less than 1%, though.
It's, it's very hard to break those habits.
And so you have these conversations and you just hope
to plant a seed that will eventually grow.
Somebody else can water it, but at least give them the knowledge
that, hey there, there's other alternatives out there.
But one of the most discouraging things about when I first
started in the PA profession is patients would come into the
office and I'd spend time with them and I'd talk with them and
I would just be like, all right, you're on four or five
medications. I would always explain our goal
is to get you off of these. Like you shouldn't have to be on
medications. These aren't solving the core
issue. Let's find the core issue.
Let's get you off these medications.
And a majority of the a vast majority of the time, they would
be like, OK, can you just refill my prescription?
Like even when you broke it down and saying this prescription,
this medication you're taking is not fixing the problem.
It's covering it up. It's taking care of the symptoms
and you could explain that and they're like, OK, but can I just
keep taking the medication? But but it, it is rewarding
because you know, you do get those patients who come in and
they're like, oh, OK, I didn't realize that if I did this, and
I mean, I remember one patient I'll always remember is a 30
year old dude had Crohn's disease forever his whole life,
but he was like 3040 lbs overweight, ate terrible.
I was like, you know, have you ever considered what you're
eating is affecting your gut health?
And he's like, that would affect it.
And I was like, absolutely. And so he ended up doing the
carnivore diet for like 6 months and he's never had a flare up
since and just completely got rid of it with his diet.
And, and so being able to have those successful cases really
encourages you and, and kind of keeps you doing it.
But for the most part, the whole mindset, the American mindset is
what's the easy fix? What's the next fix?
And, and so we see that in the hospital all the time because
that's one thing America does really well is tertiary medicine
or like acute care. And so these people come in and
they're super sick and we can give them medications and, and
get them feeling a whole lot better.
And they just think that's part of the cycle instead of breaking
the cycle, finding out what is actually causing those.
And so we do get people feeling better in the hospital.
We do give them medications and take care of it in the acute
care setting. But in terms once they leave the
hospital, all those chronic conditions, it's, it's up to
them. There's not a lot that we can do
with it. Yeah, I'm sure that's
frustrating, but worth it, even if just a few people end.
Yeah. Absolutely.
And it, and I mean, there's been a radical shift, especially
since I would say right around 2020, right around COVID,
there's been a lot more people that are paying attention to
what their health. I think the fear of COVID itself
made people pay a lot more attention to what's going on in
the healthcare industry and what what they're doing to their
body. And so I have seen a big shift
even in like doctors that I work with that have been in the
industry for 30-40 years. Some of them are going like, oh,
you know, maybe eating well and exercise.
That's always how you start everything.
So when I'm in PA school, every treatment was diet and exercise.
And then if those things don't work, give them this medication.
And so everything teaches you that diet and exercise, weight
loss, all these things can be treated, but it's a blurb like
that long. And then it's, these are the
medications you can prescribe. And so it's, it's frustrating,
but they do acknowledge that obviously most of these chronic
conditions can be taken care of just by changing your lifestyle
habits. What are some of the most
misleading meat labels out there in your opinion?
Yeah. So this is honestly, this is
what started the whole primal pastures movement is we looked
into what the labels were and realized that they were all
lies. And, and the, the one that is
really frustrating and I think it kind of starts all of the,
the misleading labels is the free range label.
People are becoming more aware of this, but 1012 years ago when
you saw free range, you picture this, you picture wild pastures,
you picture chickens outside on grass.
A free range chicken to me is a chicken that's.
Outside that's that's what that sounds like.
I believe that's what they're intending you to think.
All free range means is. Let's start with this. 99.9% of
chickens in the US are raised in grow houses.
So that's a 60 foot wide building that goes about 100 to
200 feet, sometimes 600 feet long.
And there's anywhere from 5 to 30,000 chickens in that grow
house. So that is your conventional
chicken. You go to Costco, you get your
rotisserie chicken, your 6 LB rotisserie chicken, it's raised
in a grow house. That's your standard
conventional chicken, which is fine, call it what it is.
But if you take that same grow house and cut a hole at the end
of it, 10 foot door and have access to a concrete pad on the
outside, you've given those chickens access to the outdoor
and now that's a free range chicken.
Regardless of whether or not they ever use.
Those chickens will probably never go outside because most of
these grow houses it's 120° outside.
They can either stay inside an air conditioned barn where they
can go out onto a concrete pad. As long as they have outdoor
access. It's considered a free range
chicken. And their food and water source
is also inside. So really they have no like
biological desire to be outside. Exactly.
So if I mean if you're a chicken, it's air conditioned
inside your food and water is inside, why would you even
consider going outside? It's it's designed that way.
And free range, cage free? Are those kind of synonymous?
Yeah, so cage free in the last 5-10 years has kind of gone out
the window. California passed a law
basically banning cages and cage.
Cage free mostly applies to eggs.
Broilers were never really raised in cages, but they would
put about 3 or 4 hens in a cage, like 1 foot by 1 foot by 1 foot,
and they would just spend their whole life in there.
They'd be able to stick their head out to get food and water,
and when they lay their eggs, it would drop down.
And it was atrocious conditions. And so basically lately that
movement's been banned. They still put cage free on a
lot of the labels just as a selling point, but a majority of
chickens now are not raised in cages.
But that's what cage free means. What about hormone free?
Antibiotic free? Are those legitimate?
Yeah. So let's talk about hormone free
first. For decades now, hormones have
been banned from chickens. You have not been able to to
give chickens hormones. So if you see that, that's just
somebody it it. It would be the equivalent of me
saying. This is a water bottle and then
on this water it's also water, but I say arsenic free water.
Arsenic's banned from water, but I just put it on there.
It's obvious. That's the same thing as
hormones. You you can't feed hormones to
chickens anymore. Antibiotics are different
though. Antibiotic free, you would
think, means the chicken won its entire life without antibiotics.
That's not true. You can give a chicken
antibiotics, but as long as you stop the antibiotics close
enough to a time that's processed for it to not be in
the system, then you can label that chicken as antibiotic free.
Whoa, I didn't know that. And, and so if you go to the
store and you're looking at an antibiotic free label, they,
there's a good chance that they had antibiotics and.
They're like, and the whole reason they even need the
antibiotics in the growth house setting is because of their
living conditions. Like the chickens raised out
here don't even need that because they're not exposed to
the same infections and crowding and all those things that can
cause infections. Right, exactly.
And so if if you've ever seen a picture of a grow house, it's
basically a layer of chickens. You can't even see the floor
under them is typically another layer of chickens that they're
sitting on and then wood chips. And so they're just sitting.
And that's where they eat, they drink, they poop, they sleep.
And so they're sitting in their feces for four or five weeks at
a time. And that's the perfect breeding
ground for infection. So viruses, bacteria, and so the
the way the system's been designed is these animals
literally need antibiotics and vaccines to survive because of
how atrocious the living conditions they're in.
What about organic chicken? So organic does a little bit
better job. If you're organic, you can't
have any antibiotics at all. So organic does actually mean no
antibiotics were ever given. But you take that same grow
house we talked about earlier and all you have to do is switch
out the feed. So you put organic feed in
there. Now you have an organic free
range chicken. It will never go outside.
It's still living in its own filth.
It's still piled on top of other chickens.
I haven't even talked about the fact that in the grow houses
they have to sear the beaks off these chickens because their
natural instinct is to pick and scratch and Peck and they'll
pick and scratch each other because they have no grasses,
they have no bugs and worms to eat, and so they have to sear
off their beaks. They do that.
That's still an organic chicken, never goes outside.
Once you're paying an extra 2 to $3.00 a pound for an organic
free range chicken, that's never left to grow house.
Not to mention organic doesn't eliminate corn and soy.
Now, corn and soy are about 99% of what's fed to chickens in
conventionally raised because they're cheap sources of grains.
Soy is a great source of protein, but because of how much
soy they're getting, it actually once it gets into the meat and
into the fat, it works as a hormone disruptor.
So that was one of the main reasons we've never had soy or
will never have soy in any of our supplemental chicken feeds
is because of what soy does to the body.
And these guys, these chickens are eating massive amounts of
soy. And so if you are what you eat
eats and you're putting a ton of soy into these chickens and then
you're consuming them, you're going to see a a lot of
correlations to basically endocrine disruptor.
So there's correlations with breast cancer in women, thyroid
issues. And so we definitely make a
point to not include soy in anything we do.
What about grass fed when it comes to beef?
Yes. So grass fed is another great
misleading label. So every cow ever is going to be
grass fed at some point in its life.
And So what do I mean by that? So essentially when a cow's
born, they'll be with the mom cow calf combo and they'll feed
off their mom for the first several months of their life.
Once they get weaned, a lot of times they're still on pasture,
they're out grazing, eating grass.
But from 6 to 9 months on, they'll take them to a feed lot,
maybe a year and then spend the next three to five months
fattening them up on corn and soy in a feed lot.
But when you sell that cow, because it did eat grass, you
can label it grass fed. So it may spend the last four to
six months of its life eating nothing but corn and soy in a
feed lot that is a grass fed cow.
So now people are changing it to grass fed, grass finished
because that kind of indicates, OK, in my head, they're
finishing them on grass as well. But that's misleading as well
too, because in these feedlots, they're still getting corn,
they're still getting soy, but then they drop in some grasses
too. And so it's still a confined
animal eating corn and soy. But that is a grass fed grass
finished cow. So can you really trust that
label? No.
Is there? Is there a sure tail way to to
know how your animals raised? Not without really knowing your
farmer and where your beef comes from.
Yeah, and similar with 100% grass fed then I'm assuming?
So 100% grass fed will at least mean they didn't get corn and
soy right, but that doesn't mean that they weren't in a feed lot
for the last six months just getting grass pellets.
So basically what you're saying is it is extremely difficult, if
not impossible to find really clean quality, well raised meat
in the grocery store. What would you say is like the
worst out of all of the factory farmed meats or even some that
maybe maybe they have some of these labels that mean like a
little bit like organic? Like what would you say people
should just avoid across the board when it comes to meat
shopping in the grocery store? Probably the three that I would
say absolutely avoid are farmed fish, pork, and chicken in the
grocery store. Farmed fish.
What are the issues there? So I'm not sure if you're
familiar with the way fish are farmed in the ocean.
They basically have these giant, I mean, they call them farms,
but it's these giant Nets in the ocean where they have 10s of
thousands of fish. It's like a grow house, but in
the ocean. And these fish are just swimming
around in this confined area, getting fed absolute trash
that's just dumped in from the top and they're pooping on each
other. The amount of parasites in the
fish. This is all store bought fish
that you're going to. And so farmed fish is absolutely
terrible. And they're also fed corn and
soy, right? Which is such an unnatural feed
for something that lives in the ocean.
Exactly. And then I've also heard that
they can be fed food dyes that there can be food dyes in their
feed so that they have like salmon, for example, might like
they, they might be able to replicate that orange color that
they get in nature from eating the algaes and such with food
dye in the feed. Have you seen a salmon or a tuna
without the artificial dyes? So salmon is like white?
Yeah, it's super awful, Yeah. And so tuna the same way.
Now what they do with tuna and we, we've we've done a real with
this before, is they use carbon monoxide to turn it that dark
red color that tuna should have. And so you could take like a
store bought tuna and it starts to get like pale and stuff and
put carbon monoxide on it and it gives it more red.
And so that's actually a thing they're doing before they sell
it is they basically gas it to have this color and then they
sell it as TuneIn, a grocery store it's.
Awful. Wow.
And they do the same thing with eggs, right?
Cuz I think by now people know that naturally an egg yolk, it
should be orange, it should have this rich color.
And people are replicating that in unnatural ways, Yeah.
And so that was one thing. 10 years ago when we started, you
could tell a, a, a good pasture raised egg because of the color
of the yolk and, and the yolks were never like symmetrical.
And so you would have based on what plants they're eating
around in the pasture, you would have some that were real dark
orange, some you would have a variation.
And, and so one thing they figured out is they could feed
like marigolds to conventional egg layers.
So in the girl house, they would put marigolds and a couple other
things in their feed and it would give them that darker
orange. And so if you're selling a free
range chicken and they got a darker orange yolk, customers
feel good about it because that's what they had been
trained. But now Fast forward 10 years
later, people are starting to catch on.
All right, They've they've figured out ways to manipulate
the way an egg looks. But if you've if you've cracked
open like a pasture raised egg, it looks like a proud egg.
It's got the yolk that sits up off the egg, whereas like a
store bought egg, if you get a conventional factory raised egg,
it's kind of the yolk just kind of sits flat.
I almost think of like an Egg Mcmuffin where it's just
smashed. But when it has the right
protein content, the right amino acids, you're going to see that
yolk sit up on top of it. And Big AG is always going to
find a way to mimic what nature does really well, and they're
going to try and replicate that the cheapest, easiest way
possible. So the best thing people can
really do is to know their farmer personally, to visit the
farm, to know the practices. If if you go to the grocery
store and you see a brand and they don't have a website with
live footage of their farm or pictures of their animals, stay
away from it. Yeah.
And I try not to eat like any conventionally raised meat.
But if I have to, if I'm at a restaurant, they don't have
great options or at the grocery store, if I'm in another city or
whatever, I feel like beef is going to be better.
Like conventionally raised beef is going to be better than like
conventional chicken or, you know, pork or fish.
Like you just. Yeah, and, and and for a couple
of reasons. Cattle are bigger animals.
It takes longer to grow out. So they do have to do a better
job with, I mean, confined beef lots confined feeding
operations. They're still sitting in their
feces. They're still not great, but
beef overall is is a better option at the store than a
factory form chicken or pork or fish.
Yeah, so at least they were outside, right for a portion of
their life. Exactly.
I mean probably all of their life, but in a feed lot for the
last part if not all of it. Right, if you had to choose I
would definitely say beef over the other 3.
At a high level, what differentiates the way you do
things here at Primal Pastures compared to other farms?
Really, our whole goal is to mimic the way nature intended
the animal to be raised. We want our chickens, our pigs,
our turkeys, our beef outside on pasture.
We want them eating a natural basically what they would eat in
nature to the best we can. So for ruminants, they're
supposed to eat grasses. Our our lamb, our beef.
That's all they eat. They eat grasses.
They're outside from the time they're born till the time we're
processing them. They're outside foraging our
pigs and our chicken. They are omnivores.
So we do give them a supplemental feed.
What we do is we've eliminated all corn and soy.
We do supplement them with certified organic feed, but
that's mostly peas, Milo, barley, and then like
diametatious Earth, couple rocks to help them digest it with the
gizzards. But that's a majority of what
they get in their supplemental feed, and we avoid corn and soy
like the plague. Yeah, I don't think most people
realize that even pasture raised chicken requires some
supplemental feed or else the bird would never grow beyond
what, like 1 or 2 lbs? Right, exactly.
And So what you guys do that's different is that it is super
pure and it also doesn't have any seed oils.
And you guys had to really go to extreme lengths to find, feed or
create. I think you even worked with a
mill to create your own blend that didn't have seed oil.
So how does that impact the finished product?
Exactly. And so one of the things corn,
soy and seed oil is a lot of times it's soy oil or corn oil
that they put inside the feed. We worked super hard with our
mill to to get olive oil put in and any seed oils taken out of
it. And so we've been doing that for
about 3 or 4 years now and super excited about that.
But essentially the reason we do that is because of the
polyunsaturated fatty acids. And so putting those seed oils
into the feed, the chickens are going to eat that.
That's going to go into the meat, that's going to go into
the fat. And then when you eat that,
obviously you're consuming those.
And so we always say you are what you eat, eat.
And so we wanted to take out anything that we wouldn't eat
ourselves. We really don't want to feed the
animals that we're going to be consuming either.
On a nutritional level, is there a difference, a measurable
difference, in birds that are raised this way eating quality
feed versus a conventionally raised chicken?
Absolutely. So there's a ton of data out now
to support pastor raised chicken over a conventional raised
chicken. And and one it just makes sense.
They're outside, they have way more access to different plants.
Animals are intuitively smart. They, they know what they need.
You watch a cow grazing, you watch a chicken out picking,
scratching, they'll go and eat a certain leaf if their stomach
hurts. They know they know what's going
to make them feel better. They know what they need.
They know what nutrients come from each plant.
And so just giving them access to the for the chicken to
express the chickenness of itself.
I don't know if that makes sense or not, but just putting them
outside in their element to where they can be a chicken.
They know how to take care of themselves.
And because of that, you create a robust immune system in that
animal, and you don't need things like vaccines and
antibiotics. Another thing that sets Primal
Pastures birds apart is that your chicken isn't vaccinated.
What's the significance of that? Yeah.
So like we've talked about in these conventional grow houses,
they've created an environment that these animals really can't
survive without vaccines and they can't survive without
antibiotics. And so they're in a situation
where these birds immune systems are so weak and so poor that if
they don't get vaccinated, they could have marriage disease,
just wipe out 20,000 birds just rapidly.
And so they have to preemptively vaccinate and give antibiotics
to these birds just to keep them alive.
We actually have to pay extra to get our birds taken off before
they vaccinate the birds. So sometimes they spray the eggs
with the vaccine before they even hatch.
And Ovo is what they call that. Or sometimes as soon as they
hatch, they're they're vaccinating them.
And so we actually pull our birds off.
And it's not that we're saying we're anti vaccine or anything
like that. Our birds don't need it.
So you have diseases like Merrick's disease, Newcastle
disease, these diseases that can just wreak havoc on conventional
raise birds. But because our birds are
outside, they're on grass, they get fresh air, they get moved to
fresh pasture. So when they poop, they're not
sitting in their feces. So if there's any of that virus
or anything there, they move on to fresh pasture that next day.
The other thing I want to talk about is the one thing that
kills viruses and stops them from replicating and infecting
is ultraviolet light. And so if you raise your animals
outside on fresh pasture, the sun's doing all the vaccinating
we need it to. And so it it, it kills the
viruses. And so we've been doing this for
12 years. We've never had an outbreak.
We've never had an issue with disease on any of our animals.
You had a viral reel about how most chickens, even organic
ones, go through a bleach bath during processing.
Why do they do that? It honestly, it's the conditions
they're raised in that you have so much bacteria on these birds.
So campylobacter, salmonella, if they don't dip them in a
chlorine bath or a bleach bath, then a lot of times they won't
be healthy enough to eat. Like you'll have bacteria grow
on these, the the product won't last long.
People would get sick. And so it's very standard
practice for most of these places to dip them in a chlorine
bath. So is there an alternative for
that? So there is and and it's
actually what we do. Again, we we have.
Not had any issues with disease burden or anything like that.
So we actually use a vinegar bath.
You can also use like hydrogen peroxide.
When we were processing in our backyards, we would just take
capsules of vinegar, put it in the chill tank, dunk them in
that and that took care of it. But when you have conventional
raised birds that have such high disease.
Burden. That's what they have to use.
Did the bird flu epidemic impact you guys at all?
How did you navigate that whole thing?
Yeah. So again, all of our birds are
raised outside. We haven't had any issues with
that. Honestly, I think most of the
bird flu epidemic was manufactured the way they handle
it. I don't agree with it all.
Essentially, my thought process would be if I have a flock of
chickens that get infected with bird flu and they're dying, I
would take the ones that survived that and breed them
because they have built in immunity.
That makes sense to me. And so what's happening is you
get these flocks of 30,000 egg layers and you know, 1020 of
them test positive for bird flu. Instead of letting that take
place, what they do is they just go into these grow houses, they
pump this foam up, suffocate all 30,000 of them and.
Just kill them all. And so they manufacture this
crisis where really if you raised animals the appropriate
way, where they can have a robust immune system and they
can fight this off, none of that would be necessary.
And you could take the ones that actually have that built in
immunity breed from them and then the virus doesn't have the
same effect. Yeah.
I mean, that would be a logical solution.
And it's not even passed through consuming animals that have it.
So the only cases have been with farmers coming into direct
contact with the animals because it's a respiratory disease and
not something that impacts the digestive system or that's
contracted through eating the infected animal.
Or at least there haven't been any documented cases of that,
right? I want to talk about tallow
because you guys just started producing your own tallow and we
are actually starting to use it in primarily pure products.
What are the nutritional benefits of consuming tallow?
Yeah, so tallow's awesome. It's.
A super food in itself, but it's not just that, obviously you
know better than most the benefits of applying it to the
skin. But tallow, when you think of
where tallow comes from, we use 100% suet, which is typically
the fat that comes around the kidneys.
It's the cleanest fat. It it, it's got the best
nutritional profile of the fat in the body.
And so we selectively sourced suet for our tallow that
provides a huge amount of your fat soluble vitamins.
So vitamins ADEK, all of those are robust in tallow, especially
if you use grass fed grass finished pasture raised cows.
The reason it's much better in grass fed grass finished cows is
because all of those vitamins are getting pulled from what
they're eating. If you're taking tallow from a
cow that is stuck in a feed lot and it's only eating corn and
soy, a lot of those toxins, a lot of that soy gets stored in
fat. So now you're rendering that fat
down and then you're using that for your tallow, which is not
great. And so for us, we want to make
sure that it's sourced from the best cows that we can, raised
outside on pasture, grass fed, grass finished.
We use the highest quality of fat from the sewer.
And then we. Render that into the tallow
which you're using. But not only that, you can use
it to bake. You can use it to baste, you
can. We love frying in it.
Yeah, it's super heat stable. Yeah.
Really good for high temperature cooking.
Exactly. Yeah.
So the, the oxidization level is very high.
And so if you've had French fries cooked in tallow compared
to French rice cooked in vegetable oil, it's night and
day. That's why McDonald's was famous
for French fries for so long. It's because they used tallow
and then they changed the vegetable oils.
They started adding, you know, beef seasoning, different things
to try and get that flavor back. But tallow is really what gave
it the the true flavor. OK, another animal based
superfood is liver as we both know.
What are the benefits of consuming liver?
So liver will always have a special place in my heart and
I'll, I'll tell a quick story real quick.
It was I got COVID in 2020 and I went a year without being able
to smell. I just, it was a completely
dwarfed smell. And after about a year, I
decided to go straight carnivore diet and I did that with liver.
Every single day. I was doing about 1 to 2 ounces
of liver. Within three days of that, my
smell came back. Yeah.
And so I started researching that.
I was like, all right, liver is essentially nature's
multivitamin. It's the most nutrient dense
food you can consume. It's got like we talked about
much higher levels of the fat soluble vitamins that you get in
tallow. So Ade and K and especially if
you get it from grass fed cows. So vitamin A, retinol, super
huge for vision, immune system, your skin.
Vitamin K actually from grass fed cows.
There's a study I was just reading recently that takes
calcium. And if you get grass fed cows,
it takes the calcium out of the arteries, which a lot of times
causes heart disease and, and uses it throughout the body,
puts it in the cells where it's supposed to be.
These are all benefits of grass fed liver, grass fed tallow over
conventional race. How were you consuming the liver
when you were eating one to two oz per day?
So this is my goal was to insult my senses any way I could.
So I was literally just eating it raw and I wasn't blending it
up. I wasn't, I would just take 2
ounces of raw liver and just and just I couldn't, I couldn't
smell your taste. And so by day three, I was like,
oh, what? This is terrible.
Like when it kicked back in and I was like, but I had done it
for two or three days. So like the texture didn't
really bother me. I was kind of used to that, but
I couldn't smell or taste it. It was just kind of chalky.
And so I did like 2 weeks and then after a week and a half, I
just started drizzling it with some honey.
And then finally after doing that for a month, I was like,
all right, well I know you are notorious for your liver
smoothies. I was like, all right, let me
start mixing it into smoothies because my wife and kids
wouldn't touch it. But once I started stealing your
recipe. And put it in smoothies.
The family loved it. I'm laughing because I'm
remembering the picture you sent to the family recently when you
made the liver smoothie and you like, did you forget to put the
lid on what happened? It just like Rob sends this
picture of like he's standing next to the blender and there's
just liver smoothie all over him, all over the kitchen.
It was a disaster. Yeah, so I, I didn't think it
was sweet enough. So I wanted to put some of our
honey in it. So I took the top off and didn't
think to put the top back on. And so I poured the honey in,
turned it on, and before I could even, it just erupted over the
entire kitchen. And I was just covered from head
to tail. And I spent 30 minutes scrubbing
my kitchen because I forgot to put the lid back on.
That's terrible. So we actually have liver
smoothies here. Normally I make them but my
sister-in-law Jamie, Rob's sister made made ours today.
Should we try it? Cheers.
This is really thick.
I need a spoon. It's more of like a acai bowl.
Yeah. It is.
It's good though. It is good.
She did a good job. I like the mint she took from
the farm, that's a nice touch. Probably a bit all over my teeth
right now. What about other organ meats?
Do you have any other favorites? Have you tried any other ones?
So when it comes to organ meats, I'm a firm believer and you
should consume what you're deficient in.
So if you're somebody that struggles with thyroid issues,
we call them sweet breads and cows, I think you should consume
that. I think there's a huge benefit
to consuming an organ meat that you're deficient in.
And that's like an ancestral concept too, right?
Yeah, that that's, that's not something I came up with on my
own. That's, that was standard
practice up until the early 1900s.
And so I really like heart beef, Heart chicken.
Hearts. Actually so mild like chick.
I haven't tried beef heart, but chicken heart, like I remember
when we used to have chefs come out and do meals and a few times
we had chefs that would use the heart and they would just put
like little chicken hearts onto a skewer and it just kind of
tasted like steak. Exactly.
And and, and it's, I mean it is a muscle, the heart is a muscle.
So it honestly, if you took beef heart and cooked it just like a
steak, the only difference I think you would notice is it's
just a little tougher. Yeah, it's just a little firmer,
but. But nowhere near the strong
taste of liver. Nothing like liver.
Yeah, I think liver is probably the most insulting 1.
And the most nutritious? Yes, exactly.
And and I love liver. I I eat it all the time, but
it's definitely an acquired taste.
What about bone broth? Bone broth is huge and and for a
number of reasons, I don't think a lot of people understand how
important it is for gut health. So when you you take healthy
bones, healthy joints, you meltdown, you get that
cartilage, you get all of the essential amino acids that come
from the bone marrow as well. But that goes in and a lot of
times people who have leaky gut syndrome, they can heal that
with bone broth. And so super important.
It's great for your immune system.
It's great for digestion, especially with the studies
coming out linking like leaky gut syndrome to mental illnesses
and and depression, anxiety, things like that.
I can't recommend bone broth enough.
Good for the skin too, all that collagen.
And you can also get the collagen in chicken skins,
right? That's why I love the the primal
pastures chicken, like ground chicken blends well, they're
delicious, but also like they're so gelatinous because you guys
grind up the skin and everything cartilage, all of that ends up
in there, right? And they're really good raw
milk. Are you a fan of raw milk?
Huge fan of raw milk. This is another one that's a no
brainer to me. If if you take something in its
natural state and you enjoy it, you get the benefits of it makes
no sense to me that you would heat it up, kill basically
everything living in it. I mean, I understand why they do
that because the cows that are getting the milk live in
horrendous conditions and if you don't do that, you run the risk
of severe disease. But if you're getting it from
Mark McAfee, if you're getting it from a respectable source
that is doing appropriate hygiene practices, the benefits
of raw milk are so much better than processed milk and
homogenized and pasteurized milk.
And, and so if I've had patients come in and go, I'm lactose
intolerant, I can't try, it was like, OK, well, have you tried
raw milk or a 2A2 milk? And they're like, no.
And they can do that, and they can tolerate it because when you
process milk and when you pasteurize it, you get rid of
the lactase, which is an enzyme that actually helps a lot of
people digest lactose. And so when you have it in its
natural state, in the way it's supposed to be, a lot of people
that have lactose intolerance do much better.
Yeah, it's a completely different food, pasteurized milk
versus raw milk. It's I mean it tastes like water
versus not what I. Mean what it should be exactly?
Yeah. What would you say to someone
who loves the idea of eating higher quality meats?
Really wants to, but they're hesitant to pay a higher price
point for it. OK, so so that's a great
question, and we get this question all the time.
It's super important to understand how people spent
their money over the last 100 years.
So prior to the agriculture revolution, a majority of
people's money was spent on food and very little was spent on
medicine. Now you're seeing the shift
where a lot of people spend money on healthcare, chronic
diseases, and they're spending less and less money.
So there's a shift where if you focus more and invest in your
health ahead of time, you may have to spend more on food.
But in the long term, chronic illnesses that cost a ton of
money down the road can be avoided.
And so yes, to get nutritious high quality food does cost
more, but I think there's a trade off in that too.
And I also want to address there's, there's ways to get
nutritious food at a lower price point.
And, and I always recommend people buying in bulk.
So if if you're looking to stock your freezer, hey, I know it's
more to get this nutritious food, I know the benefits are
there. What's the best way to do it?
So I recommend getting the quarter Cal, buying a half Cal
because you get all your cuts at the same price.
And so where typically you may have to pay a ton of money for
your rib eyes, your fillets, you get those other cuts too at a
cheaper price. And so your fillets, your rib
eyes, your ground beef, all of that's coming in at a cheaper
price. And so I recommend that.
The other thing you can do is the nutritional value and steaks
is very similar. And so if you're concerned about
your health, buy a top sirloin instead of a rib eye.
You don't have to buy the most expensive cuts to really get the
nutritional benefits. That's good advice Rob.
I asked Paul, our brother-in-law, when he came on
the same question too. But you have 4 kids, 2 full time
jobs. How do you personally take care
of yourself and still show up well for all the demands that
you have on a day-to-day basis? Yeah, majority of it is my faith
in my family. I have an unbelievable support
system. My wife's a rock star.
She just is on top of it always. And so that's a huge support.
Obviously our extended family is super helpful.
We have I have three sisters and a brother that live right around
town, my parents, my in laws and so we have a ton of family
support. We have a church that backs us
and so. Having that foundation.
Let's me push harder and further.
And, and one thing that I always, always emphasize on top
of that is exercising. I, I have to get into the gym.
I don't have time to plan out workouts.
And so I work out at a local CrossFit gym.
I show up, the workouts done, I spend an hour work my butt off
and I'm out and I'm refocused. All the stress and anxiety
throughout the day is balanced and and that plays a huge role
in it too. Yeah, I can.
I agree with all of that. Ditto.
We call it the McDaniel shuffle sometimes because there's like
always like ongoing conversations on the text
thread, like, oh shoot, can someone pick up this kid from
this place at 3:00? Or like, I forgot about this.
Can someone help me with this thing?
And someone is usually able to to chime in and provide support.
And it's so valuable for me as well.
I mean, we all have busy lives and we all like things are just
kind of always in motion for all of us.
And so having that built in support system is huge.
Yeah. Rob, thanks so much for being
here. Where can people find you and
primal Pastors? Thanks for having me.
We've shipped to all 50 states. It's just primalpastors.com.
One of the best things is the convenience that we offer.
You can have the cleanest meet in America shipped right to your
door. Little effort and great quality.
We're on Instagram, we're on TikTok, we're on Facebook.
Follow us. Really appreciate you having me
on. Thanks, Rob.