[engine starts] [music playing] I kind of went almost my entire childhood without ever really giving it a second thought.

It was just go to the grocery store and buy some hamburger.

I became vegetarian as my little way of helping the planet and then started eating meat again, also to help the planet, because I want to support the people who are trying to make these changes.

As I was learning more, I wanted to support these small farmers, but I couldn't really afford their products for the most part.

I wasn't actually on the ground doing anything that would help me or future generations.

Once I decided to start raising it myself, I was like, well, why not just go a little bit bigger and just start farming?

[turkeys gobbling] Will you do chickens and then just come catch up with it?

I'm Annalese Danckers, and I work with my partner, Danny Dunlap.

And we run a regenerative livestock homestead farm.

[music playing] We raise pork and duck eggs and chicken eggs, and we rotate all of our livestock weekly, if not more often.

And it builds the soil.

At the end of the day, we're soil farmers.

We are working to reverse climate change using animals, which is counterintuitive to what a lot of people have been taught, including myself when I was younger.

So it is quite a 180.

I never thought of it that way.

[chicks chirping] Oh, ho ho ho.

Come on, kids.

Get up here before she does.

Good boy.

OK, today we're officially moving the lambs.

We've got to start a Home Depot list, too, just because we need-- Fire alarms.

What do we need?

Fire alarms.

We need more fire alarms?

Yeah, I told you, I replaced two of them yesterday, and I took three in.

Fire alarms.

We're only in year two of our farming operations in an official capacity.

We knew it would be hard to make money for a while.

And I'd say I felt prepared for that coming in, but, also, it's different when you're actually living it.

And every day you're like, I've got to feed all these animals, and so I need money for that.

But also, how are we going to house them?

Wood prices are through the roof.

There's a difference between when we started it and knew we wouldn't make money, but living it, it's different.

It's harder.

--work on [inaudible] table.

I want to try to see if those-- The margins are technically negative right now because all of the money we're spending is just going right back into the farm as infrastructure.

Within a few months, one of us will find a serious 8-to-5-type job or something that just pays incredibly well for not 8 to 5 and do that and throw a lot of that money into the farm till we are soluble, which will be a while.

No businesses make money in the first couple of years.

Hey, no chewing on shoelaces.

[chuckles] [music playing] We make our money with off-farm jobs.

Sometimes part-time, sometimes full-time.

Sometimes those jobs are on other farms, not making much money, but learning.

Sometimes those jobs are 9 to 5 where I'm just going and making a decent amount of money, but I don't get that much time to work on the farm.

But luckily, we were able to save up enough where I can now spend a full-time season here.

Come winter, I'll have to pick up another job again, probably full-time.

By then, one of us will have to find a serious job, not just my part-time goat dairy.

And we don't know yet if that'll be our norm.

That's not what I want our norm to be, though.

The norm, I want us to be full-time here.

Yeah, we just won't be there for a while.

We'll get there.

I don't know.

I think it's going to be a big year.

I think so, too.

When people look at a small farm from the outside, they see the beauty first, which is great.

They are beautiful.

But it takes a lot of work.

[music playing] (SINGING) End her sadness with the rain boots in blue.

Since I can remember, I've been running from you.

But this time you set your eyes down with no intent to move.

No.

(SINGING) You ain't no-- Phew.

Beauty.

Beauty, beauty, beauty.

(SINGING) The shock of your arrival-- Good to go.

Oh, boy.

Are we going this way?

OK. [chickens clucking] Good try, baby.

[chickens clucking] It is one of the jobs on the farm.

I didn't get it.

[inaudible] we're moving?

[music playing] There aren't that many young people like us coming in and trying to start a business because of land-access issues, because of funding issues, because it's really hard work.

It's not the glamorous lifestyle that it's really kind of made out to be on social media and whatnot.

[chickens clucking] I kind of went almost my entire childhood without ever really giving it a second thought, which is strange because I grew up fishing, and I grew up hunting.

But it was just go to the grocery store and buy some hamburger.

When I was in college, I started researching more and more and learned about CAFOs, concentrated animal feeding operations, the really large warehouses full of chickens and feed lots of cows, where most of the animals in the grocery store are living under.

Decided that I wanted to support these small farmers.

So I found a little local farmers market.

Was astonished at how much more of the meat costs there.

That's initially where I started wanting to raise my own meat, because I couldn't afford it.

We go on deliveries once a week.

We stole the concept from milk deliveries.

[inaudible] up here.

One of our main goals for the farm is to try not to price people out.

Unfortunately, when you can go to the grocery store and get $2 dozen eggs, we can't compete with that.

We got into this idea that stuff should be so cheap.

Realistically, it shouldn't.

It's only so cheap because the government is subsidizing it, and the animals are living in horrid conditions.

So when people see the real cost of food and what it costs farmers like me to actually raise their product, it kind of floors them because that's not what they expected.

When I tell people that I'm barely making money on $7 a dozen, I think some people just think that I'm lying, that I'm not telling the truth.

But that's just what it costs to pasture-raise chickens and buy high-quality feed.

[music playing] It is all about perspective, what we've been taught to expect.

When you walk into a grocery store, you expect to be able to buy eggs for, I don't even know, $3 a dozen.

But what you don't see when you pay those $3 is all of the people and animals that are getting gypped along the way-- all of the people who are not getting paid living wages, animals who are not being fed proper nutrition or are living in cages.

There are so many caveats behind that $3.

We aren't even organic.

Organic feed is astronomical.

If we sold our eggs for $2 a dozen, we would not be around in a year.

[insects chirping] [chicks chirping] [dog barking] Sometimes, during very intense dreams, I'll twitch my front paws, and it looks like I'm conducting the world's fluffiest orchestra.

You don't know what an orchestra is.

You're a dog.

Oh my gosh.

[inaudible] [music playing] Hoo-ah.

[engine starts] [pig snorts] We do this once a week.

The process is pretty simple.

We take down all these green fences.

We're going to move our trailer one spot to the west here.

[rooster crows] [turkeys gobbling] And just like that, 50,000 square feet of new pasture.

It's good for them.

They're able to forge through new grass, find new bugs, and it's great for our pasture as well.

They continue spreading fertilizer over all of the grass.

Good morning, mommas.

You can see that they've mowed this grass for us.

So regenerative in two ways.

They're mowing the grass for us, so we're saving gas.

And then they're also stimulating the grass by mowing it.

It kind of works both ways, right?

Animals can be detrimental, or they can be extremely beneficial.

But if we were to leave these chickens here for months on end, there wouldn't be any more grass.

There wouldn't be anything.

That's a detriment.

But the way we rotationally graze and move our animals around, we're actually helping fight climate change.

Hello, girls.

[pigs snorting] Hi.

Good morning.

Growing up, I didn't even know that there were small farms that did it right.

It was probably around seventh or eighth grade when I first watched one of those uber-dramatic documentaries made by PETA or somebody where every animal is dying, and there's sad Sarah McLachlan music in the background.

And there is some information, but it's mostly emotional.

What you thinking?

So it was, go vegetarian and stop eating meat because all meat is bad.

[music playing] And from then on, I started to pay attention to food a little bit more.

The whole reason I became vegetarian was environmental.

I thought raising animals was bad for planet Earth.

And then started eating meat again, also to help the planet, because I want to support the people who are trying to make these changes.

It came with more education that we need animals in our ecosystem.

[ducks quacking] [music playing] [chicks chirping] Basically, every year that the grass grows, its root system grows in tandem.

If you can picture a tree and its entire canopy, the root system of that tree is almost a mirror.

Well, when you bring an animal over the grass and it takes half of it, half of those roots kind of slough off, and that carbon in those roots, some of it becomes locked in the soil.

You're pulling CO2 out of the air via photosynthesis, putting it down into the soil.

That's regenerative agriculture in a nutshell.

But then getting the animals off and letting the plants here, anywhere from 3 to 12 months, so that the plants can regrow that root system, and you can repeat the process.

Overgrazing is basically turning the soil barren.

Then windstorms come in and blow your topsoil away, and that's all your carbon going up in the dust storm.

So by moving the feeders around every day, we can kind of direct where the poop is going, and therefore how and where our fields are getting fertilized, which is great for us.

We're not just raising them to nourish us.

They're nourishing the land while they're on it for two to three years.

We're building our land using animals that we then eat and enjoy and help nourish us instead of ignoring that animals exist at all and aren't an important part of the ecosystem because it's kind of scary to think about killing them, raising something for slaughter.

[chicks chirping] Butchery is a really hard day.

We don't talk a lot.

You form this relationship with this animal, and this is just the next step.

But it is a weird power when you kill an animal.

That is a reminder of how fragile life is and how valuable life is.

This animal that we have raised, that we have cared for, the cycle continues, and they care for us by feeding our bodies and our muscles so that we can do that for their offspring.

Being able to raise close to a hundred percent of the meat that I consume is really a blessing.

I can look out any number of the windows in my house and see exactly where the majority of my meals came from, which is a really cool feeling.

It, for me, is the long-term approach to a healthy life, to the longevity of life and a good mental health.

I will save money in the long run by buying that more expensive bird because it's not pumped full of antibiotics that I would eventually become resistant to when I end up in the hospital someday.

When you pay the true price of food, you don't see the benefits for years.

You don't see what it does for your local economy, for your health for up to decades.

Human nature is to think in the short-term.

That's probably one of the biggest challenges of farmers, that they would have to pay more, and they don't see the detriment to paying less maybe ever.

[music playing] The same thing with climate change.

They say we can still change it now, but it's not going to affect us the way it's going to two generations down.

That is very challenging for human nature.

I don't have a good answer to that one.

I don't know what you mean in that-- [inaudible] because you guys did change.

You both had changes in the way that you think about what you eat.

My values changed from those PETA documentaries.

I paid more attention to what I ate.

So they did their job in that way, but I kept asking questions.

[music playing] Maybe that's the difference.

I think the most important thing is that we're trying.

We might look back on this system we have right now in 10 years and hate it.

That's just part of living.

If you get set in your ways and you never change, are you ever happy?

Are you ever living to your fullest potential?

[music playing] I'm sure there are problems in this world that I don't know about and haven't decided to learn about because I'm busy dealing with 30 other things.

It's a lifelong learning process.

Realistically, we need to feed 320 million people in this country.

We're not going to do it via small farms yet.

[upbeat music playing on radio] [radio clicks off] [lamb bleats] I'm trying to be better about it, just moving stuff from the savings over.

And there's just so many Home Depot trips to finish projects.

We're in a weird in-between thing where we have enough money right now to keep living our lives and paying our employee and paying for animal feed, but there's not enough coming in yet from egg sales and pork.

[music playing] I definitely am afraid we won't make it or that we will have to change how we're doing it in order to make it, that we'll have to either sacrifice value here or there or dream that we have of what this place will look like in order to somehow make it.

They're so freaking cute.

If we ever want to have a kid, which we do, we can't afford a human child right now.

I go into those spirals a lot of the time.

In the short term, yeah, I'll have little, miniature panic-attack things.

But big picture, it seems like a no-brainer to me that it's going to be successful.

There's no choice but to be optimistic.

[music playing] Mommas, are you out in the field?

Hi, momma.

Are those your [inaudible]?

Part of my optimism is that we two suburban kids from different parts of the US could build a farm with no knowledge before being 18 of knowing what we're doing and learning it ourselves.

If we can be even just part of that light drawing people towards regenerative ag or towards a healthier future, that's why I'm doing it.

That's the optimism right there.

Do try.

If you don't try, why are you living?

[music playing] To anyone watching this or to anyone who cares about farming in general, just do one little thing.

And don't be afraid to ask a stupid question or to try a weird vegetable you've never seen that's at the farmers' market.

Do try.

Their purchasing power is huge.

Just supporting them monetarily if you can.

Talking to your neighbors and your friends about the type of food that gets you excited.

There are life-changing things that happen when you pay attention to your food, when you pay attention to the people who work their asses off to help feed you.

And it's wonderful, and it's enriching and all of the good things.

There are no bad things when it comes to connecting with your farmers.

Should I stand on an actual soapbox now?

Geez.

I just have all these values, and they come out all cheesy.

[music playing] [chicken clucking]