Building a Resilient Food Supply Chain

What must agriculture companies and policymakers do to ensure secure and resilient food supply chains?

We spoke with Cole Mannix, co-founder of Old Salt Co-op, a rancher-and-worker-owned company integrating meat processing, e-commerce, wholesale, two restaurants, an annual festival, and in-house distribution — all in service of a regenerative food economy.

Can you tell us a bit about how you grew up?

I grew up on a cattle ranch that's been in my family since 1882, in the Blackfoot River Valley near Helmville, Montana — the valley some people know from A River Runs Through It. My parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins still run it together. It was a tight-knit small town: a bar, a post office, a K-8 school, and a lot of heart.

I started college in metallurgy at Montana Tech, then transferred to Carroll College, where I graduated with degrees in biology and philosophy. After that, I did a master's in systematic Catholic theology at Boston College. A mentor back home used to send me $125 checks each month with "don't let your schooling get in the way of your education" in the memo. I didn’t.

Trips to El Salvador and Honduras in grad school showed me how American business and politics had shaped life abroad. I came to believe that social justice meant cleaning up our own economic act at home — and that livestock agriculture, despite falling out of public favor, was essential to any version of American farming that could actually endure. Our way of doing business was broken. I decided to work on that.

What's the most interesting story from your career?

After grad school, I worked for a startup meat company that gained real traction — over 100 ranches recruited, a genuine vision for empowering producers. Then, in 2016, everything collapsed at once. Our meatpacker died of a heart attack. Country of Origin labeling was repealed at the federal level, undercutting our value proposition. And our biggest buyer, a veggie burger company making an 'Omnivore Burger' from meat, flax, and sweet potato, got new investors who took it fully plant-based. We had to shut down.

It was a hard education. But fast-forward eight years into Old Salt, something unexpected happened. Wendell Berry's daughter, Mary, called to ask about how we'd structured the co-op. Wendell Berry is one of my heroes. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't nervous she'd see right through me — but she graciously agreed to speak at our annual Old Salt Festival, which draws around 4,000 people. It felt like confirmation that we're onto something.

Which three character traits have been most instrumental to your success?

Willingness to be vulnerable. Everyone’s got shortcomings, including leaders. Once you really understand that about yourself and admit it with your team, it takes the pressure off everyone to stop thinking about personal status and start thinking about how they can contribute.

Commitment to something greater than money. No one is clever enough to succeed alone, and you don't outsmart loneliness. The people who've shaped me most put serious work into taking care of each other while also expecting a lot. That's what I'd call love, and it's the most durable competitive advantage I know.

Stubborn Grind. I’ve been continually surprised to find solutions at meetings or events or exercises that I expected to be a waste of time. I no longer think this way. You need to be as present as you can in the moment, for a lot of moments. There’s no substitute for putting in time. The oldest wisdom traditions agree: you find yourself by giving yourself away.

What exciting projects are you working on now?

Right now we're focused on supporting our internal teams, expanding throughput in our processing facility, launching bresaola and snack stick products, and building out our distribution capacity. We've crossed 100 employees, so our most important project is actually growing well together — as people, not just as a business. If Old Salt can prove that regenerative business is viable even while swimming upstream against market and policy conditions, that matters for everyone.

On the Food Supply Chain

What does the term "supply chain" encompass in the livestock industry?

Source to customer: cow-calf ranches, growers, finishers, slaughter, fabrication, further processing, distribution, retail — grocery or food service — and finally the individual or institutional customer. That's the chain. Most people only see one or two links. The whole thing matters.

What are the key weaknesses in our current food supply chain?

Extreme concentration, mid- and downstream. A handful of companies control processing through retail, which has made ranchers and farmers increasingly squeezed upstream. Fewer buyers. Thinner margins. Less redundancy in the infrastructure. Less time and mental bandwidth for producers to invest in their own professional development, think about the long term, including succession, land health, or their families.

The hidden costs are enormous: soil degradation, habitat loss, rural economic decline, and a population where 60% of adults and 30% of children have at least one chronic illness. We've lost nearly 30% of our ranchers in 30 years. That's not just an economic problem — it's a cultural and ecological one.

What would a nationally secure and resilient food supply chain look like?

Instead of the "Big Four" in meatpacking, we need the "mid-sized regional 400." That principle applies at every level of the chain. Redundancy creates resilience. More players means more competition on quality — not just price.

What is Old Salt Co-op doing to build supply chain resilience?

Old Salt Co-op is a vertically integrated ecosystem — ranchers, workers, butchers, chefs, and customers collaborating to build an alternative regenerative marketplace for livestock products. We control the chain from ranch to processing to restaurant to direct-to-consumer delivery, which means quality and economics stay aligned at every step.

We don't split hairs over certifications and sustainability criteria. Established players can too easily fake those signals. Our focus is on building a better shelf — one where more of the value flows back to the ranchers and workers doing the stewardship.

Two things set us apart: a values-driven vision that treats community and land health as inseparable, and an operating agreement that ensures producers and employees are the single largest beneficiary class and hold 100% of governance. More throughput through our system means more capacity for good stewardship. That's the virtuous cycle we're trying to model.

What threats on the horizon should we be addressing now?

Consolidation of power in agribusiness is the largest. Despite miserable enabling conditions, ranchers and farmers across the country are nevertheless figuring out how to demonstrate that low-input, diversified, circular production is possible — real carbon sequestration, habitat enhancement, improved nutrient density, viable yields, accessible prices. Imagine what could be unlocked if we fixed the problems downstream of the producer.

5 Things We Must Do To Create Nationally Secure and Resilient Food Supply Chains

1. Make producer welfare as important as consumer welfare under antitrust law. The current framework measures consumer surplus — the gap between what consumers will pay and actual price. We need an equivalent producer surplus measurement with equal legal weight.
2. Enforce pro-competition measures like the Robinson-Patman Act, which prohibits price discrimination by large retailers and distributors. The law exists. We need to use it.
3. Increase access to institutional markets — especially schools — for mid-scale food companies. During COVID, $1 billion was invested in small and medium meat processors. Most of those facilities will close because market access is too tightly controlled. Infrastructure without market access is just overhead.
4. Eliminate the broken Farm Bill incentives that subsidize crop insurance for monoculture corn, soy, and wheat production. These incentives entrench the system we're trying to reform.
5. Eliminate mandatory checkoff programs. Originally designed to help industries promote product categories, they've become tools for the most powerful players to maintain their dominance. That's the opposite of their intent.

Any additional ideas for reimagining the food supply chain?

Create a tax incentive for capital invested in food companies in the middle and downstream portions of the chain — from processing to retail — provided those businesses demonstrate at least 51% producer control and fall below a maximum market share threshold. Align investment incentives with the structure we actually want to build.

If you could inspire a movement, what would it be?

Adapt the New Deal's Civilian Conservation Corps for the food system. A program that builds the national food system labor force while giving urban young people real food system literacy and land skills. We're losing that knowledge generationally. We can't afford to.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Sign up for my newsletter, The Salton LinkedIn.

Join us at the 2026 Old Salt Festival on my family’s ranch, June 19-21, 2026.