KAYTE YOUNG: From WFIU in Bloomington Indiana, I'm Kayte Young and this is Earth Eats. 
NATE BROWNLEE: One of which was sorghum Sudan grass, and if you don't mow that, it gets to be like 10 feet tall. And so we had pigs that were running through there, that reminded us of the velociraptors from Jurassic Park, you can't see the animal, you just see the top of the plant waving back and forth. So we were always on safari when we had to go out and do pig chores.

KAYTE YOUNG: This week on the show we visit Nightfall Farm, a livestock farm in Southern Indiana focused on sustainable agriculture. We talk about perennial pastures, rotational grazing, and what farmers can learn when they listen to their animals. We cover a lot of interesting ground in this conversation, I hope you'll stay with us. 

(Music)
Kayte Young here, this is Earth Eats. Where I live in Southern Indiana there's no shortage of farmland. When driving along rural state roads, you're bound to pass through acres of land devoted to corn, and soybeans. We don't find those products at our local farmer's market though. Corn and soybeans are grown at an industrial scale, and they're processed into other products, some of which feed animals, also raised at an industrial scale, and others find their ways into processed foods that humans consume. 

And those acres of corn and soybeans are raised on land that is tilled, year after year, with the same crops planted, and chemical herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers are applied to the fields for predictable results. This week we're devoting the show to a conversation about another way of farming. I recently visited Nightfall Farm near Crothersville Indiana to talk with Liz and Nate Brownlee about their farming practices. We started with a tour of their farm. It's land that belongs to Liz's parents, and they had been renting it out to a larger neighboring farm before Liz and Nate took over eight years ago. 
LIZ BROWNLEE: So this was corn and soybeans for my entire growing up, three and a half decades. We've been converting this to pasture over the last three years now. We did a year of cover crops, where we just planted things that would just build up the health of the soil and bring in pollinators. And then we planted in a perennial pasture, and we've added all these trees. 

So the tubes you see are all made of trees that we've planted, and the whole idea is called silvopasture - we're adding trees into pasture, silvo is latin for tree. And that the benefits are many. Shade for our livestock, we're sequestering carbon obviously by growing trees, and many of these trees are fruit and nut trees. So a lot of what you're seeing out here is actually persimmons. And so once they're big enough we'll graft on cultivars persimmons and hopefully be adding a new crop to our farm's business. That's like best case scenario we get whole new viable enterprise and crop and moneymaker, worst case we get shade for our animals and some fruit for them to eat, and probably in reality it'll be somewhere in between. 

We are not in a very fertile place. The soils here are heavy to clay, and so in the spring it's wet as can be, and in the summer it bakes dry, and it's not easy to grow food. This place does a really good job of being a forest. Eking out an organic vegetable operation or a pasture-based livestock operation, it would be easier if we had better soil. There's no doubt about that. So that's part of what it means to bring this place to life because what little fertility was naturally here has been pulled out by years of conventional farming. And so that's why we're doing the diversity of cover crops and then planting in a perennial pasture, and then grazing the livestock is to bring these soils back to life. The things you're saying closest along the road here, these are all shrub Willows. 

NATE BROWNLEE: Willows are really great at rooting from just a little stick, so we put 18,000 little sticks into the ground here and we've got six rows of them. 

LIZ BROWNLEE: Yeah, spread throughout the field. And the potential benefits, one is just that we're expanding our sheep flock and sheep naturally get a lot of parasites, and so if you can keep them grazing up higher, the parasites don't crawl is high. They're closer to the ground level, so keeping their heads up off the ground eating things like willows as opposed to eating grass down to nothing will mean healthier sheep. But we're also hoping some of the varieties that we got to plant are like floral varieties, and some are for basket weaving so we're hoping to find markets for those things over time.

[To chickens] Hi girls
KAYTE YOUNG: [Narrating] We approached a long high tunnel where some of their laying hens spend the night.
LIZ BROWNLEE: In the past it had been the barn, and it's an old barn, it's in the woods. There' wasn't a lot of light, and chickens need 14 hours of daylight to lay. This is so nice because they get every bit of sunlight and the warmth. Like if it's 20° out and it's sunny this thing is 50° inside and so they get a nice temperature boost. And chickens are tropical birds, they would rather be a little warmer than colder. 

[Chicken clucking] 

And so these guys have a paddock out the back right now. Tomorrow we'll shift it to over here where it's greener, so that they've got green stuff to eat, they're going after the bugs that are in the ground.
KAYTE YOUNG: So just having the kind of fencing makes it really easy to just adjust where they can.
LIZ BROWNLEE: Exactly, yeah. This fencing, some people call it a net, so to kind of visualize it, it's three feet tall, and the net has openings that are maybe 4 x 6 at the top, and smaller at the bottom. So the chickens can't get out, it's like a physical barrier to them but it's electrified so for a raccoon, or something, that's coming around to check it out, they get shocked if they try to go through. But we can move it. Each post just has a prong at the bottom, maybe six inches of metal that goes into the ground. And so we move those, it takes maybe a half hour - 45 minutes to build the new paddock, and we can move them really frequently. And that's really the basis of all things rotational grazing, is we can move their fences frequently and quickly. It is labor intensive, but it is as sort of movable as possible.

NATE BROWNLEE: They like it, they learn when its fence moving time. And so these girls we close them in the pens to move the fence, so they don't just run around, cause we have to tear down these fences. But the sheep and the other chickens sometimes, we'll have them loose right up by the edge of the fence cause they know we're building a new fence, and they're just waiting. And as soon as we can open it, they know that that means it's buffet time. And they explore very quickly! They find the perimeters of their fence, and they find all the good spots. The sheep will find one sweet spot all the sheep will go there. Whereas the chickens, they spread out a little bit more. They like to stay a little closer to the shelters to feel safe. But they know as well as we do that it's a good way to do it.

LIZ BROWNLEE: Animals are moving to a fresh spot every single day, so they always have fresh forage, they've got a clean place to be, it's not all manurey or muddy. And so they're moving within the paddock.

KAYTE YOUNG: Some of the chickens are kept in smaller lightweight structures on bicycle wheels, a design called a ChickShaw. Liz and Nate built them from plans that are available online from a farmer named Justin Rhodes. With this method they fence off a large area called a paddock, and they move the ChickShaw forward a bit each day until the whole paddock has been grazed. Then they move the fencing forward and start over with a new paddock.

NATE BROWNLEE: With the chickens they don't stray too far from the shelters, and by moving those, that's how we utilize this entire area.

KAYTE YOUNG: And so some of it's based on the behavior of animal, cause what you know they do.

NATE BROWNLEE: They're always teaching us what they want to do, so part of our job is observing. So if we see them acting differently than we ever have before that means we got to learn something. Maybe they're sick and we need to learn why, or maybe we haven't noticed a hawk that's in the air, but they've seen it, and so it's kind of throwing them off. 

The neighbor has peacocks, they used to have chickens, so I think the peacock was lonely. So he started coming out to hang out with our birds and we saw at numbers dropped precipitously. We didn't know why all the sudden we weren't getting as many eggs as we were expecting. And then we started seeing peacock poop on the road in front, and we realized it he'll come out there, they don't know him even though he knows chickens. And he'd display, and it would scare the birds, and so they just kind of held on to their eggs a little bit, cuz they were uncomfortable. It's those things that happen when we're not around that we have to react to based on the ques that they're giving us.

KAYTE YOUNG: I asked about the pasture, in particular the small grass seedlings I could see sprouting up in rows.

LIZ BROWNLEE: We had a contract with the USDA to convert this from annual crop ground into perennial pasture. They support anything that benefits health of the soil or clean water, and they helped us figure out what we should plant here based on our soils and what animals we wanted to graze. 

So the first year we planted it was a total fail, it was a super dry fall, but the second-year it's taken better. So what we plant with this drill from the county, and it's a no till drill, and so basically has these different lines that it plants in. It makes a little furrow, a little strip, and then it drops the seed in, and then it has these two wheels that pushes the soil back together.

NATE BROWNLEE: It was a five species mix, so we've got some grasses and some legumes, so you can see some of the red clover that we planted. 
LIZ BROWNLEE: The other stuff that's out here growing, it’s all just weeds, and that's okay with chickens, the only thing that they're getting from the pasture in terms of nutrients is bugs. And bugs are gonna be anywhere where the soil is healthy enough for them to be, so if it's a little bit weedy, that's okay. 
KAYTE YOUNG: And are these chickens meat or...? 
LIZ BROWNLEE: These are laying hens. Yeah so these guys are 17 weeks old and they're just starting to lay their eggs. It's 140 hens here, and so we should expect 70-80% production once they're up and running, so that's over 100 eggs a day from this flock. With the pandemic, egg demand just rose pretty dramatically and so we expanded the flock last year to get to 100 because of the pandemic and now we're at 140, which is still really small, no doubt about it. 

KAYTE YOUNG: And they're not exclusively eating pasture, they also... 
LIZ BROWNLEE: Yes, yes. So the only animals that are 100% grass fed at the sheep. 
KAYTE YOUNG: Wow
LIZ BROWNLEE: They're ruminants, they have four parted stomachs, they can turn grass into everything they need. But the chickens and the pigs and the turkeys, they all have digestive systems a lot more like ours. So they can't just eat grass. 
NATE BROWNLEE: They're getting maybe tops 20% from the pasture. 
LIZ BROWNLEE: Yeah, like their nutrient intake, but they're getting other things from it, they're getting diversity of diet, they're getting a clean healthy space to live, sunshine, room to run around and route around and be pigs, or hop around and be lambs, you'll see that in a minute. 
KAYTE YOUNG: It was time to visit the sheep. I saw a few dozen white puffs with legs dotting a picturesque green field surrounded by trees close to their house. 
LIZ BROWNLEE: So you are looking at 17 ewes, the mommas, and 30 lambs. And the lambs are all 4-10 weeks old. 
KAYTE YOUNG: They're so chill. They're just laying around. 
[Lambs bleating]
It's so hilarious how they wag their little tails. 
LIZ BROWNLEE: Oh I know!
KAYTE YOUNG: And the sound is just random, or are they telling each other stuff, you don't know? 
LIZ BROWNLEE: Yeah no idea. I mean it's clear when we're building a paddock, what we'll do is we'll have a place where the fences come together, and we'll open that up, it's kind of like a gate, and they just walk into the next paddock. 
NATE BROWNLEE: Or run
LIZ BROWNLEE: Or run. And they know what's happening, and so they're ready to move, they know that there's more food over there, like the grass is literally greener on the other side. And so they will talk, they will tell you. And we won't even be able to talk anymore. It'll be loud enough, the sheep calling, that we can't hear each other. So we've gotten pretty good at doing silent moves. And then you open it up and it goes silent. The sheep all run right through and go right to work eating, and they're not calling anymore. 
[Sheep calling]
I'm trying to think how best to describe this, the sheep paddocks are roughly rectangles. And so there's a rectangle, you see the mowed patched there? It went from here to there, and then in the distance you see longer grass, and that's how big it is when they come into a paddock. It's 8-10 inches tall at least, and then they leave behind this, it's more like three to four to six inches tops, and then we move them to the next space. So the amount of time in a given paddock is based on how much they're eating and how many animals are in the fence. So this year with a much-expanded flock we're gonna have to move a lot faster and build bigger fences, but they were here for basically 24 hours then they went to the next paddock over and then last night we shifted them this new fencing. 
KAYTE YOUNG: Wow, really? So today?
LIZ BROWNLEE: And that can change, like once we're on the more official pasture, this is just a stop gap, the bigger pasture, the grasses are gonna be more like 16 inches going into the paddock, and so they're gonna have more forage, there's just more to eat. So each paddock will last a little longer. 

NATE BROWNLEE: Because we're going off of observation there's no like clear cut set point, are we moving the sheep? It's not a mandatory they move every day. 

KAYTE YOUNG: So it's constantly assessing and discussing? 
NATE BROWNLEE: Yeah so if we're both doing chores in the evening, we're walking around and saying, "Well do you think it's time to move them?" "No, they look good" or "Oh yeah we definitely need to move them." Decision fatigue is something I think, because...
KAYTE YOUNG: Oh my gosh!
LIZ BROWNLEE: It's a real thing. But I think that's part of the beauty of rotational grazing, is we have a reason to be with the animals every 12 hours, checking in on them, seeing how they're doing, and observing them, and their paddock. And that's fun. One, like we enjoy the animals. And two we think it helps us do a better job. 
KAYTE YOUNG: You're really in touch. There's no just, set it and forget it. 
LIZ BROWNLEE: There's no set it and forget it. If you figure that out you let me know, but. 
KAYTE YOUNG: [NARRATING] Before we sat down in the shade for our interview, we passed by a barn with turkey chicks that weren’t quite old enough for pasture. Liz and Nate don't raise turkeys year-round, but they were trying out a small flock this spring, and they always raise some in the fall for Thanksgiving. 

[Baby turkeys chirping]
[INTERVIEWING] So it's a mix of males and females? 
NATE BROWNLEE: Usually in the fall, yes. But these are all Toms. We're looking for parting up a turkey, or ground turkey, or legs or wings, the boys usually get bigger and it's more cost effective. 
LIZ BROWNLEE: But for the fall with Thanksgiving, we end up with a lot of customers that want a nice small bird, because it's just them and immediate family or a small gathering, and then we have a whole different set of customers that want a great big bird, because they're having a huge get together, which works well. So the hens are smaller naturally, the Toms are bigger naturally. And so we can try to please the customers that want the 14 pounder, and the ones that want the 24 pounder. 
KAYTE YOUNG: 14 sounds like a lot to me. 
LIZ BROWNLEE: I love Thanksgiving in part because people get so excited about cooking that special meal and getting their meat from us. But I also really like leftovers, so I go for the 20lb bird every time. And it's worth the effort to then eat on that and turkey actually freezes really well, so we put a bunch in the freezer and just pull from that. 
(Music) 
KAYTE YOUNG: I'm speaking with Liz and Nate Brownly of Nightfall Farm. After a short break we'll hear more from our visit including a decision on how they went from strident vegetarians to livestock farmers. Stay with us. 
(Music)

Kayte Young here, this is Earth Eats. Back to my interview with Liz and Nate Brownlee of Nightfall Farm, I wanted to hear about their backgrounds and what brought them to this farm and to this work. 

NATE BROWNLEE: I was born out in Colorado, but my family moved back and forth between Colorado and Indiana a couple of times. So since 3rd grade, Indiana is home, and I grew up in Franklin. So my parents are still just an hour up the road. 

LIZ BROWNLEE: Both of my parents grew up on farms in Jackson County. And when they got married they knew they wanted a farm, and they rented out for a while, and then they ended up buying this place. And I grew up here, it's a kind of standard small farm in that they did a little of this and a little of that and didn't make any money. 

So when I grew up, we were on the farm but there was no farming happening. So being a rural kid in the country, I did forage all 10 years and I was in FFA, but I never had a desire to be a farmer. In fact I was told get off the farm, like if you wanna make a living, you need to leave, you need to get an education and leave. And so it wasn't until I fell in love with sustainable farming and farming as a way to enact my environmental ethics that I started to think about coming back here, and turning it into something new and different, like turning this farm into a sustainable piece of the puzzle. 
KAYTE YOUNG: And how did that happen? 

LIZ BROWNLEE: Well Nate had taken some classes related to sustainable agriculture kind of right when we met, and I came to it on my own as well, we both were vegetarians for a while, we were thinking a lot about what we were eating. And I don't know, we just said we should probably try this, let's see if we can become farmers. We lived on a farm for about 3 months in Pennsylvania
KAYTE YOUNG: What's WWOFing? 
LIZ BROWNLEE: So WWOF is an acronym for Willing Workers on Organic Farms, basically it's a work trade. So it's a good way to try out farming without committing a long time to it. So we were WWOFing on an organic veggie farm in Pennsylvania, and just had a blast. And we said like, "Great, let's do this." 

We ended up finding work up in Maine on a demonstration farm there, and we had the pleasure of finding really good farming who took us under their wings and showed us how rotational grazing works, and how you can raise animals in an ethical way that builds up the health of the land and sell good meat and good eggs and build up a community all at the same time. And so we started to say, if we wanna do this, home is the logical place to go. 
KAYTE YOUNG: I'm just curious about the vegetarian part. So you were vegetarians, but then you started learning more about sustainable meat. 
NATE BROWNLEE: So we were vegetarians for 4 years and it was very important to us, and it was mostly because of the way we perceived animals being cared for in the industrial meat system. And when you're younger you kind of don't necessarily do nuance or grey area well. You're just like "Boom this is exactly how I believe and how I will act." And I'm glad we did that because it lead us to our exploration of small farms, and cause we got to really see more farms, to explore the depth of what a farm could be, we realized that the best way to have a farm was to have animals. 

Animals are a very great source of nutrients. They're a great source of disturbance for the soil to help cycle things. They're for us a great reward. We really enjoy working with them. And if we take animals out of the equation, fertility has to come from somewhere, so it's gonna be synthetic most of the time, or it's going to be an animal product that the farmer is buying in, and so we really started thinking deeper about what it meant to have animals as a part of our food system. And we were just on a daily basis, having in our faces, farmers that were treating their animals well, and understanding that we don’t like killing animals, that's always a hard day for us when we take animals to the butcher, it still is 8 years in and it will be until we're done. But that hard day, if it's mixed with a good life, felt a little more comfortable than it did than when we were first starting out. 

And so actually the first meat we ate after deciding not to be vegetarians, was meatloaf at a grazing conference. And probably not the first you would think of as like being your entry back into meat. 
LIZ BROWNLEE: We'd been working on this farm in Maine as educators, primarily. It was a demonstration farm. But they also had a farmer who raised beef cattle for them, and he just sort of took a shine to us, which was really kind, and we took a shine to him for sure, he was great. And he started showing us how rotational grazing works, and we were very curious, and we ended up being able to go to this grazing conference and we said like, "Well we better put our money where our mouth is, like if lunch is meatloaf and mashed potatoes, we can't just eat the mashed potatoes." 

And we still eat less meat than most Americans do on principal. We don't need near as much meat as we eat in this country, and if you're eating really high-quality meat, like we have the privilege of doing, you definitely don't need as much. A little goes a long way because it's packed with nutrients and brings you lots of health benefits and it tastes good. And so like last night for dinner we had a vegetarian pot pie, and that's just like part of our diet still, lots of vegetarian meals, and then our meat and meat from fellow farmers. 
KAYTE YOUNG: We talked about some of the upsides and downsides of raising animals. 

NATE BROWNLEE: With vegetables you can raise five crops on the same piece of ground in a season, people are a little more comfortable spending $5 on a bag of lettuce than they are $18 on a chicken. And so it's in some ways a harder sell. And it's diversified in some ways, but not in others. All we have is meat, and eggs, but we're only going to catch the people that come to market prepared to take home some frozen food. And I guess really the genesis of how we became meat farmers is twofold, one we like to joke that cows are more charismatic than carrots. The way we liked spending time, we liked that interaction, we liked seeing the animal's eyes looking at us, and getting that moving reminder that we're doing something. And they don't say, "Thank you" but they definitely tear into their food that we bring them, or enjoy the new pasture. And then the other reason is just that we wanted to do one thing really well. 

LIZ BROWNLEE: The farms that we worked on in Maine and Vermont, they were all trying to simultaneously have a diverse livestock operation, and 10-acre organic veggie operation, and do deliveries all the way down to Boston but also to their next door farmers market. They were just trying to do everything, and meat processing, and and and. 

NATE BROWNLEE: And they have bigger businesses. 
LIZ BROWNLEE: And they have bigger businesses and crews of 25. And we felt like if we tried to do all of the things, we'd do all of them with mediocre quality. And so we wanted to do a focused set of things, we wanted to just raise our animals and do that really well. And so that focus on caring for the animals well and using them as a way to rebuild the land and try to bring some life to rural Indiana, that's been our focus. And here we are in year 8. 

This was not the most logical place to be because we're not right beside a booming marketplace, we're not near an urban center with a lot of customers. The land is flat, it is poorly drained, its heavy clay soils, like it doesn't lend itself to fertile farming, but I really do believe that rural places can be alive again. We don't have to be this forgotten place in the middle of the country, and we don't have to lean into a certain type of politics because of that. I think that there can be places that people have a lot of different philosophies, and ideas, and businesses, and that we can bring some energy here and now I'm just preaching. But I just really believe in rural places and so I wanna enact that with our business. 
KAYTE YOUNG: What has been the process of transforming the farm from what it was? 
LIZ BROWNLEE: The transition has been a little bit of a time. So we started with one particular field that's right across from the house and so we can walk to it, and it was 13 acres, it as something we could bite off. And that first year we had 4 pigs, 300 chickens, and 45 turkeys and that was it. 
NATE BROWNLEE: And everything since then has just been a response. So we've been responding to markets, so raising more animals. We've been responding to lessons we learned from the pasture, so knowing that we need to have more grounds or that we need to have better drained grounds. So we have taken those observations and those lessons and gradually changed the farm to what it wants to be, as well as what we want it to be. And most of that's through systems, like adding a new pasture, or changing the system we use for the laying hens to meet the reality of our place. 

KAYTE YOUNG: So what were the animals grazing on before, like when you first started? 
NATE BROWNLEE: We moved back to a blank slate. It was beans in that field the year before. And so we planted three rounds of cover crops, so we had summer annuals, fall cover crop, and then another round of summer annuals before we planted a perennial pasture that second fall. So the first year was fantastic, we didn't ever tractor for the first five years of our farm, and so we planted in a mix of five or six summer annuals, one of which was sorghum Sudan grass, and if you don't mow that, it gets to be like 10 feet tall. And so we had pigs that were running through there, that reminded us of the velociraptors from Jurassic Park, you can't see the animal, you just see the top of the plant waving back and forth. So we were always on safari when we had to go out and do pig chores. But the sorghum Sudan puts in a really thick like cigar style stalk that the pigs would break off and chew on, get the sugar out of the grass, they looked like they were old mobsters smoking on stogies. But there were small stuff in there as well, and for the chickens the layover. They loved it. 

LIZ BROWNLEE: Well yeah, so there was also sunflowers and they would knock those over and eat those. The turkeys especially got full advantage of the sunflowers. So a cover crop is really neat to graze because it's got a lot of food for the animals and then it leaves behind a ton of organic matter, dead plant matter in the soil from the roots and above ground. And so then we planted in the perennial pastures and that brings a whole different set of food for the animals. 

KAYTE YOUNG: So over time you're transforming it from what was just row crops of corn and soybean, into a diverse landscape and pastureland. 
LIZ BROWNLEE: Exactly yes, so our goal specifically has been, like when we say to bring this place back to life, to turn it from what was a monoculture to a diverse functioning ecosystem. I count one of our biggest wins, like a year ago we saw the for the very first time, these giant beetles called carrion beetles. And I saw them, and I was sure it was like some invasive bug, and it was a bad indication, and something had gone wrong. 

And then we went in and googled them, these huge beetles, like a hard black shell with a big yellow spot on there. And they're quite distinctive and they only show up where there's enough dead things, meaning like a mole that's died or something. And you can only have detritivores like the things that eat the dead stuff, the animals that eat dead stuff, in an ecosystem where there’s actually a fully functioning food web. And so I felt like, oh this is working! Not only do we have spiders and dragonflies and birds showing up, but we even have the detritivores. 
NATE BROWNLEE: I think maybe a good way to explain it is that we make plans for the farm, and we enjoy the ways that it takes those ideas and turns it into reality. So we put in a diverse mix of forages for our animals, and lots of other things have grown. Because we didn't have a tractor for five years, we've got a lot of saplings coming up in the pasture. Terrible for chicken tractors because it's really hard to pull over the saplings, but absolutely great for the sheep to graze off, tree leaves that are at sheep height. The pigs have gotten shade from some of the ones that we've let get really tall. And that gives a lot of the tree frogs places to be. Things that we weren't consciously planning on, have been really fun indicators that there is enough life here that it's doing it on its own. We're not trying to control everything, and that is thrown on our face on a daily basis because there's a lot happening out there that was not part of our vision or our plan, other than just letting it do what it wants. 

LIZ BROWNLEE: yeah, but it's beautiful. 
NATE BROWNLEE: It is beautiful, yeah. 
KAYTE YOUNG: This place is really beautiful. 

LIZ BROWNLEE: Aw, thank you. I'm very grateful to my parents. A lot of beginning farmers don't have family land. Land access is like the number one hurdle for most people, how can they afford land to farm when it's being sold at development prices? So the fact that we could come back here and settle in a place with so many trees and so much life already happening all around it, and you know it doesn't hurt that we're on a dead-end road, we really like that. We feel very fortunate to have some peace and quiet here. 
KAYTE YOUNG: Liz and Nate sell their farm products through their CSA, to a few restaurants in the surrounding area, wholesale to a small grocery store in Seymore, and through farmer's markets. 
LIZ BROWNLEE: We sell to Madison's and to Seymore's farmers markets, which is a conscious decision, those are not big markets, but we worked really hard to try to develop the markets and be part of lifting those markets up. So as opposed to driving to Broad Ripple or Bloomington or Louisville, we stay closer to home, and try to emphasize feeding our neighbors. 

So the reality when we got started was we didn't have enough product for those bigger farmer's markets, we never would have been selected to be a vendor. But even as we grew, we realized we can drive 20 or 30 minutes and find enough customers for our sized farm. So we continue to sell out with the CSA and the farmer's market sales, and we feel like those markets are just getting a little better every single year, and that feels very good. 

KAYTE YOUNG: They talked about the difference between rural and urban customer's expectations. 
LIZ BROWNLEE: We have had plenty of people look at us like we're crazy asking for $5 a dozen for eggs. If we were in an urban area we could charge $7 for the exact same product, but we'd have to drive further to get there, and the fee to be at market would be higher, etcetera. But convincing customers who think of eggs as being $0.99 a dozen that it's worth it to pay $5, it isn't convincing. We have to educate our customers at the smaller town markets. 

But the other thing I see that I think is worth pointing out is that if you go to Madison Indiana, getting access to good quality food, you have to drive to Louisville, it's an hour drive, or drive to the farm itself. And so when we showed up and said, "Hey, we've got all this meat for you guys." People were pumped, we were clearly filling a niche that was there. 

Now could we move three times as much product through that market? Maybe not, but there's definitely more demand than we can supply, and we're seeing other farmers start to sell meat and eggs at that market, just in the last year or so. There's been more meat and egg farmers show up and that's been good, because there's a more consistent supply than we can provide on our own. And it's fun for us because now we have more farmer friends. 

(Music)

KAYTE YOUNG: If you're just joining us, I'm speaking with Liz and Nate Brownly of Nightfall Farm near Crothersville Indiana. More from our conversation after a short break. 

(Music)
Thank you for listening to Earth Eats, I'm Kayte Young, and my guests are Liz and Nate Brownley of Nightfall Farm. 
[INTERVIEWING] Could you talk a little bit about how the way that you raise meat is different from the way that the majority of meat is raised? 

LIZ BROWNLEE: Sure, so over 90% of the meat consumed in this country is coming from CAFOs, that's a Confined Animal Feed Operation, those animals are inside of barns with slated floors where the poop falls down and into the big pit below them. They never see sunlight; the conditions can be as good as possible in a CAFO and it's still a CAFO. Those animals don't get to be themselves; they're not eating a diverse diet. We have neighbors who have CAFOs, and they are good guys, but the system, the sort of the food system in this country has encouraged CAFOs and industrial scale production in a way that it turns into I think a real problem. 

Environmentally it's a problem in terms of pollution, but it's also a problem in terms of just like flavor and nutrition. So I'm a bad judge of this because I haven't had meat from a grocery store in over a decade, but people regularly tell us, "Oh Id didn’t know a chicken could taste like that. I didn't know pork chops could have that much flavor." and it's because when you raise animals in confinement, they don't have diverse diet, they're not as active, and so the meat just doesn't taste as good. So we try to talk mostly though about what's special about what we're doing as opposed to like disparaging of the alternative, but it is important for people to understand what they're getting at the grocery most of the time. And it's kind of a nasty thing to talk about, and so we all kind of avoid it I think.

And so what we're trying to do here is an alternative to that. So we're raising animals outside where they have fresh air and sunshine and plenty of room to be sheep, and be pigs, and be chickens, forage and wallow and lounge around in the sun and graze, and the diversity of diet that they get, and the healthy clean lifestyle that they get turns into a really healthy animal and high-quality meat. 

And so then there's a big piece of the puzzle there that has to do with our customers. The product that they're getting, and also the fact that they're choosing to prioritize buying good meat, because we know our product is expensive, there is no way to do this inexpensively. It's labor insensitivity, high quality feed costs more, a good butcher costs more, etcetera. We are definitely not getting rich doing this but for the customers who can and choose to prioritize this sort of meat, I think they see that it makes their lives richer and healthier. But that means that the person has to be paying attention and have time to pay attention. 

KAYTE YOUNG: You make a good point, that it's not just the money, it's the extra effort to go find the farmer. 
LIZ BROWNLEE: The find the farmer, and to choose to spend their money that way. I really take a lot of pride in the fact that we have CSA members who really span the economic gambit. They're not all professors, and lawyers and doctors, we have a lot of members who are teachers and factory workers and nurses and farmers and that really means a lot to me because these are not people of great means, it's just they're choosing to spend their money on good food. Now there's a whole separate issue of people who cannot afford to make that decision, and we as a country have to figure that out, but more people could afford good local food than what are buying it, if they prioritized it. 
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KAYTE YOUNG: What about processing the animals? Is it all one day? Is it all one time in the season? Do you do it in stages? How does that work? 
NATE BROWNLEE: So since we have all different types of animals it is spread out and joined together in different ways. Chickens throughout the growing season we're butchering every three weeks. And that process for us is a 3a.m. wakeup call, and then we put all the chickens into the coops that we transport them with, and drive 2.5 hours to closest butcher, and wait all day for them to butcher the chickens, and then drive them home and put them in the freezer. We sell enough chickens; we raise enough chickens that we can't process here on farm. 

We worked at a state inspected processing facility, so we know how to do it and we're good and safe and we would to put those nutrients to use here on the farm, the blood and the feathers and the awful, but it keeps doors open to go through a state inspected processor, they do a great job. They're a fair price that they charge, and we've had a great relationship with them. It's about 2.5 hours so that's why we have to get up at 3 because they need to be there between 7 and 7:30 so that means on the road by 5, so that gives us time to eat a quick breakfast and then load all the chickens up and get on the road. We do that fairly often and it's choreographed and just routine. 

All the other animals, it's a little bit harder because a they're bigger so loading into the livestock trailer takes a little more planning and staging and setup of equipment, and those days we don’t look forward to because we miss them, and we feel bad about being friends for their life, and then just saying "Alright, hop on that trailer, it's time to go." 

LIZ BROWNLEE: The best way I can explain the processing is we try to follow the mantra, of good life, good death, good butcher, good chef. We're only responsible for a small portion of that as it turns out, like how meat gets to somebody's table involves all four pieces of that puzzle. But we take really seriously the good life, and we do our very best that the good death is under our control as much as we can too, so by partnering with good processors that have humane practices, by making the loading process as low stress as possible for the animals, ideally by finding butchers that are as close to home as possible, so the travel time is shorter for the animals. But that's tough, there aren't enough small-scale processors in Indiana or anywhere in the country in fact. 

We do have a nearby lamb and goat processor, which is awesome. So we take our sheep only about a half hour away. Yeah it's definitely not a favorite part of this profession. Butcher days are always sad days. You did ask about the timing, so the sheep and the pigs are really all towards the fall. We try to have them out on pasture for the full grazing season and then butcher at the end of the grazing season. 

NATE BROWNLEE: It doesn't make it easier, but because everything generally is pushed towards that fall season, we're tired by then, and so while we don't enjoy taking the animals to the processor, we see the relief and work in our daily schedule that that brings. We get tired and so it is the time of year that we can start recovering a little bit. It's seasonal, we're just like the world, we need to rest and recover a little bit, and then spring out and ready to go for another season. 

KAYTE YOUNG: Before they started their farm, Liz and Nate had a chance to work in a small-scale chicken processing plant, through a farming apprenticeship program in Vermont. 
LIZ BROWNLEE: That was a really useful experience in a million ways. I would work on what they called the dirty side, so I was on the kill floor, and Nate as on the clean side, like eviscerating, and parting and packaging. And so we got just a ton of experience. I am grateful that that's not my every single day, that I just did it for a chunk of time. We learned a ton from that that does still influence what we do. 
KAYTE YOUNG: In recent years I've done a little bit of fishing, and I have to say that eating fish that I have caught is the best meal that I ever can eat. And fish isn't my favorite food or anything but it's just, to feel like "Okay I went through the whole process, I faced the killing of this thing, and I faced the cleaning of it, and the stinky part, and everything that's not fun about it." and it just feels different. Just that you faced it, that you faced the whole cycle. 
NATE BROWNLEE: We are disassociated now, it's all marginalized to people that take care of it for you, and you get the styrofoam, cellophane wrapped package that you don't have to deal with. And that felt like a big turning point in our lives, and once we started participating fully and like you said, that made everything just taste better and feel more complete. You're nourishing your soul. 
Another thing that we hear a lot is we name some or a lot of our animals, and we get customers that say, "I could never name them because I know what's gonna happen at the end." and we'll hear some stories from people that grew up on farms and they named their first cow burger because they wanted to remember that "I'm going to get attached to you, but you're going to become a burger that I eat." 

And for us we think that naming them in some ways attaches you, and that's a good thing. It makes that last day, that harvest day, that butcher day harder, but because we care while they're alive deeply, and let ourselves grow that attachment, we're gonna want to do the best by them that we can. And that makes that last day maybe way heavier but the getting to that last day gives us the strength to do it, and to feel like we did it right and did it well and not have permission to do it, but not doing it flippantly, and really appreciate the gravity of what we're doing. 

KAYTE YOUNG: What does land stewardship mean to you? 

LIZ BROWNLEE: Being a steward of the land is very important to the both of us. We debate pretty regularly about whether big scale change or small-scale change is actually gonna solve the world's problems, and I think obviously we need both. But the change we can make here on our farm is small scale change for sure, but the one thing we can do to try to save this planet and try to rebuild our communities is take really good care of these 250 acres. We have that privilege, and we have that responsibility. 

So we talk about eyes to acres ratio, so if you think about a corn and soybean farmer whose raising 4,000 acres of corn and soybeans, that's his eyes maybe two or three people doing that operation tops. So that's let's say three sets of eyes on those 4,000 acres. We have two sets of eyes, for what a long time was only 13 acres, but let's say the whole 250. We had two humans whose whole responsibility was to be on this land, and see what it needs, and respond to what it needs and to care for it. So the eyes to acres ratio is much better than if we were trying to care for 4,000 acres. That ratio is really important to us, that we're here and trying to listen and observe. 

I really do think that we vote three times a day, with our fork, how we want the land to be cared for, and what businesses we wanna support. But at the same time that can be overwhelming and lead to this confusion about what, "Well do I buy this package of broccoli or that one? " And then people throw up their hands and buy a frozen pizza. 

NATE BROWNLEE: There's so much guilt with food. 

LIZ BROWNLEE: There's so much guilt with food! Yeah.
KAYTE YOUNG: You said voting with your fork and it's definitely something that I think about a lot and really wonder about the power of that for change because what I see is niche markets. 
LIZ BROWNLEE: I know, I think the reason it resonates with me, this idea that we vote with our fork three times a day is because the people who buy food from us, are the ones who are letting us be here on this farm right now. We need to be here making change because Indiana needs change. 
KAYTE YOUNG: How do we get to a different kind of system? I don't personally believe that it's only through voting with your fork. 
LIZ BROWNLEE: For sure. 
KAYTE YOUNG: I think that it also has to be fighting for change at a legislative level, which is not as fun as going to farmer's markets. 
LIZ BROWNLEE: It will, and it just starts to get discouraging very quickly. An example is the last week we got to be on a call with Senator Brown. Which was great we got to share what some of our policy concerns are, and at the end of that thirty minute call, the reality is that I'm now going to back to my farm work and somebody, some lobbyist from the pork producers of America is going to continue after their thirty minute call with Senator Brown, continue to work on their policy needs because they get paid probably a lot of money to do that full time. And so they just, there're more resources working against us than for us unfortunately. 
KAYTE YOUNG: And so in thinking about climate change and the future of food and things I'm sure you guys do spend some time thinking about, what role do you think meat plays in that? 
LIZ BROWNLEE: So we definitely get pushback from people that say that, "It's time o stop eating meat. Hey world, no more meat." And we get that, we get that impetus to say that, meat is definitely a contributing factor to climate change, we should eat less meat. We completely agree less, but the science is really clear that animals, grazing livestock can be a part of stopping climate change and in fact we can be a part of that on a really small scale, and that's exciting to us. So good grazing practices can sequester more carbon than the farm puts out. And so we feel really strongly that we shouldn’t be taking livestock off the table as a solution. 

Climate change really scares me, like we already are seeing it here. The intense rain events, two or three inches in a day or a night, that has big impacts on our business, on the animals out on the pasture, and then intense heat, and heavy storms in general, thinking about wind and the shelters out on pasture, like all of these things have practical implications for us right now. And I think when we started farming we thought like, "Oh we'll have to worry about climate change in 20 or 30 years." and it's just not the case. Like we are worried about it right now. And we take a lot of pride in the fact that we are helping fight it right now, we're taking this land out of corn and soybean production which was absolutely contributing to climate change and putting it into something that can fight climate change. 

But we can't do it alone, like obviously we need a lot of farms doing this sort of thing and Americans are not gonna stop eating meat tomorrow, and you can make all the lab made meat that you want but that's not gonna replace most American’s meat consumption, and neither is our farm, no jokes about that, we don't want to fool ourselves. But meat raised in a way that's ethical and good for the planet, and sourced locally, that can have like a building effect. Those goods build on each other and so if we were all eating less meat, that was raised more locally, and raised in a way that is adding carbon back to the soil, that could be a big swing. There's actual data that supports that and shows how it can help if we can get people on board with it. 

NATE BROWNLEE: Yeah it goes back to that nuance that we were talking about earlier where if we're saying industrial meat, yeah, absolutely that's a big contributor to climate change, and eating no industrial meat would be a great thing for the world. But on our scale of farm, and on our style of farm, by grazing it we keep that land open. It's not put into parking lots or houses, and it is in a system that is sequestering carbon, is helping take care of rain events because it's not an impermeable surface, and it is something that can handle water, just maybe not as quickly or in the volumes that we've been seeing lately. 

But it's hard to have that conversation because if you're just scanning the headlines on news sources, they are saying don’t eat meat, meat is bad for the planet, you've got cow burbs, and sheep farts, and it's something that farmers talk about. We understand that animals contribute. But they can also help. And if you are conscious of the way you're caring for your animals, you're probably also caring for the planet at the same time. 
KAYTE YOUNG: I've been speaking with Liz and Nate Brownly of Nightfall Farm. You can find photos from their farm, and more about their work on our website EarthEats.org. 

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(Earth Eats theme) 
That's all we have time for this week, thanks for listening, we'll see you next time. 

KAYTE YOUNG: The Earth Eats’ team includes: Eoban Binder, Alexis Carvajal, Alex Chambers, Toby Foster, Daniella Richardson, Samantha Shemenaur, Payton Whaley and Harvest Public Media.

Special thanks this week to Liz Brownlee and Nate Brownlee.

Earth Eats is produced and edited by Kayte Young. Our executive producer is Eric Bolstridge.