The Story Behind The World's First Regenerative Dairy

We’re Christians, so we have a strong biblical influence. For me, regenerative is a new word to explain an old system that truly honors God’s intention to connect the ground and biology in the soil to absolutely everything else.

Regenerative is an awakening of a farmer’s mind that says, “Wow, this arrogant, pound-your-chest model that we’ve had in industrialized countries is not the solution. We’re seeing diminishing returns, and farms just have to keep adding another thousand acres to be effective. And that’s crazy.”

It’s really clear in my mind that it’s about the basics. It’s about the soil and the livestock under our feet – not the stuff roaming the earth. In simple terms, it’s the opposite of degenerating. It’s the opposite of a lot of things we get wrong. Exposed soil, soil erosion from wind and weather, carbon leaving the soil, fumigating the soil, turning it with a disk, making it vulnerable.

The stickiness of the soil is important. And that comes from roots, plants, their juices, exudates, and carbon from photosynthesis. Sugars are sticky, we know that.

The stickiness of soil, building aggregates, biology, and all the symbiotic relationships between soil, microbes, plants, and what we end up eating; it all matters.

When we started paying attention 30 years ago, I was initially a little annoyed by what I was told in college 40 years ago. It was all about NPK, but nobody told me that urea kills earthworms. We want to cultivate more earthworms, not destroy them.

How Do You Talk About Regen With Conventional Farmers?

Somebody has to politely tell them in a way where they can listen and learn. We’re often approached by groups that say we need to be regenerative and organic – that you can’t be regenerative without organic.

I say, “Heck no.” Regenerative is first. Just adopt some of these principles from the regenerative movement and honor the soil. Understand how the soil affects our health.

I’ve spoken to American Farm Bureau a couple of times, and when I do, I estimate 20% of the crowd listens, which is better than 0%. It’s certainly growing every year, so that’s great to see.

How Have Inputs Changed On The Journey From Conventional to Organic to Regenerative?

If we had stayed on one farm on the original hundred acres, farming regeneratively would undoubtedly prove more efficient, more profitable, and, of course, the healthiest option. But we’re not standing still, we’re now farming 9000 acres regeneratively, so we’re constantly reinvesting resources into the business.

It costs more to do anything unique, whether that’s regenerative, A2, family-owned, or any of the other things we’re doing. Like many folks, we could’ve gone with generic milk and ‘greenwashed’ it to say we’re special, but we’re after nutrient density.

Nutrient density is what motivates my wife and me. We want to give consumers a better option. We’re a high-fat company because we know that all the nutritional goodness from the grass is in the fats.

Young people get it. They’re changing the perspective on fats, so our 6% fat whole milk makes sense to new consumers compared to the standard fat options at most stores.

Can You Walk Us Through The Process of Transitioning New Land To Regenerative?

We have 1600 acres across the river that we took over 2 years ago. It’s a lot of fun because it was abused. It was growing flowers commercially, so it was fumigated, exposed, or abandoned for years at a time.

It’s a lot of fun to take that over and start from scratch. There’s no more dead brown grass in massive plots. We’ve got it all grazed and healing.

Here’s the rough process:

We manage roughly 25 “farms”, if you will. One starts out with 500 acres, then we get another couple hundred, then we get occasional 1000-acre blocks added on.

This new one came in at 1600. Then what I do is rank all of the “farms” and put a dry matter-tons per acre per year value to every unit. Our established fields are typically over 8 tons of feed per acre per year. This new ranch came in at 3.5 tons/acre.

Its irrigation system had failed, so it dried out in summer. It wasn’t being harvested, so the roots and biology are in low gear, and they need to get in high gear.

We’ve now completed almost 2 full years. We did a lot of fixing in year one and more in year two. Now we’re getting a grasp of it.

We incorporate some new seeds, a little bit of manure management, compost, and nutrient water from the dairy on the property. It’s all about soil fertility, so we want to kick-start that soil by introducing nutrients and planned grazing.

I’ve got the new acreage at 5.5 tons/acre in about 2 years. And we’ll be at 7 or more within a year.

On top of that, we spend a lot of time driving by our pastures to evaluate which ones are excelling and which are still behind.

When we find a pasture that could use some help, we give it a “field facelift” to boost fertility. We overgraze it down, broadcast on some compost and some seed behind a four-wheeler, aerate the soil, then let the rain sink into the soil to start it up.

It’s totally different than what I heard when I first started learning about organic. They used to say, “Oh, there’s a dip when you take the synthetic fertilizers away. You go through a slump that lasts one or two years until the biology and nutrients kick in.”

But not for us. Much of that is because we combine our grazing with our “field facelift” treatment.

How Did Compost Come Into The Picture?

In my world, my compost is wood chips we get for free, the fish waste we get for free, and the manures we already have. Then we manage it to send it fungal or bacterial, and we can make a difference immediately.

We make 10-15 thousand tons of compost every year and spread it with a manure spreader on the back of a truck.

We go through 300 truckloads of wood chips. We’re taking advantage of the fact that we live 20 miles from a big mill that has those byproducts. They process 150 truckloads a day of lumber, so their sawdust is a problem. They needed a spot to run a truck into California every week, so we told them to come here. They have a problem, we create a solution that helps us solve problems too.

We’ve learned a lot about compost in the last couple of years. We learned that we should keep some of our old compost to inoculate our new compost, so we’re excited that we’re making better and better compost.

We could’ve gone to school for Compost 101, but we had 300 truckloads of wood scraps to figure out on our own.

We’re not interested in composting in a lab or on some general farm. We’re interested in making the best compost for our farm.

How Did You Choose A2/A2 Genetics For Your Milk?

In 2007, there was a book written in New Zealand called Devil in the Milk. It was written by Keith Woodford from Lincoln University on the South Island.

Both of my daughters went down there for an exchange program and met with him.

But this book he wrote talked about this A2/A1 protein dilemma. The “Devil” in milk is the A1 mutated protein gene. It’s a 209-chain amino acid, and on link number 66, there's a histidine where there should be a proline. Farmers unwittingly propagated the new gene for centuries, and now it's prevalent all over the world in a lot of breeds.

That A1 protein gives a lot of people digestive stress when they consume milk.

When we decided to do A2, all of our samples had to go through New Zealand for 8-10 years. In 2016, many of their patents expired, so we launched our product in 2017. There was no A2 organic version anywhere in the world or on the market that we were aware of, so we went in our own direction to create a regenerative A2 milk option.

All breeds can have A1 in them, so you have to sample them and separate your A1 and A2 cows. You keep your A2 milk free of contamination from A1 cows, and you keep pushing your genetic pool towards A2 over time.

We started with ~4000 A1 cows and the remainder as A2. Now we have 4000+ A2 cows and a small remainder as A1.

We choose breeds from all over the world and focus on grazing genetics. So that takes us to the New Zealand breed and the German Fleckvieh genetics that we really like. The Fleckvieh is a dual purpose that’s bred for both meat and milk at the same time. That’s what gives them this incredible efficiency without grain. It’s perfect for a 100% grass-fed operation.

Why Should Farms Focus On Soil First?

I’m a strong believer that the “free spirit” of the US helps us generally do things better than our counterparts.

But it’s not perfect. In agriculture, we’ve gone too far down the path we talked about earlier – pesticides, tilling, and other poor soil management practices.

Now, though, we’re realizing that type of agriculture isn’t working. We just have to back up a few steps and rethink things to say, “Oh, wow, if I take care of the biology of the soil, it will start working for me instead of against me.”

We don’t have that on a broad scale yet, but it’s a new asset.

It’s a type of labor that works for you 24/7 at a very fast rate.

Comparing the soils at our new and old pastures has been interesting. On the new pastures, water percolation tests take 30 minutes for the water to soak into the soil. It takes seconds on the ones we’ve managed for a while now. Our soil becomes a sponge.

Our soil tests are amazing. We’ve seen transitions from 2% soil organic matter (SOM) to over 10-12% in a few years. It was surprising, but it makes sense. We’re managing our grazing, we’re using our fertility treatments, and we don’t use plows and discs. We’re never exposing our soil.

We graze tall feed because the roots match the above-ground volume. Our grazing helps us pulse those roots down, so it’s a beautiful kind of control. Grazing dairy cows is especially amazing because they come in to milk, which gives us time to reset our paddocks. Even better, they’re inadvertently carrying nutrients back into the new paddocks when they travel back and forth.

What Are Some Challenges In Regenerative Farming?

Practicing regenerative opens up doors, but we’re not automatically getting paid more for our milk because we have a better label.

We were already going to be in the stores that we’re in. That said, I think consumers are interested in nutrient density; they’re interested in better food.

I don’t need 80% of the overall market, we just want to appeal to the young mother who wants the best for her family.

When we started our Alexandre Family Farm brand, we were early. We realized how hard of a journey it was going to be.

The farmers have very little control over the outcome. It’s a little farm against the world, in many ways. Distributors and retailers have been around for a long time, so they can take advantage of brands and businesses.

Now, we’re at a point where we’re selling 60-70% of all of our milk products and over 95% of our qualified regenerative A2 milk. So we’re saying, “Wow, we didn’t see it changing that fast.”

But we need to find more sources of regenerative A2 milk that can be sold under a label that we endorse, so we’re talking to more farmers who are part of our shared mission to make that happen.

Supporting Alexandre Family Farm

We hope you learned something from our quick interview with Blake.

I had a chance to try Alexandre Family Farm’s chocolate milk and whole milk, and my unbiased review is they’re the best I’ve ever had.

If you want to get your hands on golden, rich, and nutrient-dense A2/A2 milk, ask your grocery store to pick it up.

Alexandre Family Farm supplies milk to another company we’ve interviewed, Alec’s Ice Cream, so even your indulgent desserts can support this awesome family-owned operation.

Follow Alexandre Family Farm:

• On Instagram

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And check out the farm’s website for awesome info on what they’re doing for regenerative agriculture!

See you next week, fellow earthlings.

— Permacultured