Regenerative Agriculture: Building a Food System Worth Its Salt

Welcome to The Salt, a monthly letter where I'll share thoughts on the work we're doing at Old Salt and the vision driving it forward. This month feels like the right place to begin: with the story of why we started this co-op in the first place.

The Problem

In November of 2021, during a heavy snowstorm in Melville, Montana, my family's ranch was one of three ranches that met to discuss the future of our operations. On the surface, things were going well. Each ranch was profitable, and we felt that the ecological health of the lands under our combined management was robust and improving.

Yet we were all troubled by the trajectory of the mainstream food system we sold livestock into every year. That system was built for volume, efficiency, and corporate profit. In the same way a canal is built to get water from point A to point B, the status quo American food marketplace was built to get pounds of product efficiently to market.

The problem? It tended to treat careful management of soils, streams, and biodiversity as costs to be eliminated. This approach reduces nutrient density, turns good work into tedious labor, puts animals in crates, degrades both land fertility, and wildlife habitat over time.

We wanted to build a new kind of marketplace for food that would function like a stream, but where good inefficiencies like wends and eddies, logs and riffles support life of all kinds and the water from a stream ends up being much cleaner than that of the canal. The thing is, life makes its home in inefficiencies.

Can you think of anything more inefficient, or more worthwhile, than raising a child? Each child is different, each develops at their own pace. Patience, kindness, discipline, time spent, all of these things are part of the hard work of love. Love is inefficient, and caring for the land is like that too.

We Had to Figure Out What We Could Do

So we asked ourselves, “Is it worth the tremendous risks that come with trying to build something new?” We knew those risks were very real. All three ranches had tried and failed to build paths around the industrial food system before. And yet, we decided that nothing was riskier than accepting the status quo.

We decided to try again, starting with a few core principles:

To continue to work with nature, not against it;
To build a marketplace that sends more of the food dollar back upstream in the supply chain to nourish the stewardship of soil, water and animals;
and to connect with a group of customers who share our belief that land is a community, land is kin.

We wholeheartedly decided to go against the trends. Instead of stooping to the use of deceptive buzzwords and other fast marketing propaganda, we decided to build trust the only way it can be authentically built — slowly, by creating innovative ways to get to know our customers and for our customers to get to know us.

Finally, we decided that we were not interested in creating one boutique brand that benefited only one or a few ranches. We wanted to build a replicable model that could instigate systemic change in the American food system.

We Built a Regenerative Marketplace

Over many generations, our ranches had learned to produce food of the highest quality by taking world class care of soil, water, animals, and wildlife habitat. Now, the task was to get to work building a new food system downstream of ranching, one that would nourish people, the land, and our communities.

That was the birth of Old Salt Co-op. We decided to raise capital together, build meat processing capacity together, create distribution infrastructure, and to connect with customers in innovative ways. Today, Old Salt Co-op includes two wholly owned restaurants, an annual three day transformation event called Old Salt Festival, an online meat company, a wholesale meat company, a USDA meat packing facility, and a growing community of ranches, workers, customers, investors and partners out to build a food system that we can be proud to leave to our grandchildren.

Welcome to a Marketplace for Fine Montana Meats

None of this works without you — citizens who are not only looking for products with integrity but who are out to create what Wallace Stegner called "a society to match the scenery." You're not just customers; you're partners in building a food system worth passing down.

Sincerely,

Cole Mannix

Co-Founder and President