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Michael is on a quest to get his environmental footprint as low as humanly possible. So he built his own off-grid Tiny House. But downsizing and minimizing weren’t enough. He had to take more drastic measures, altering his lifestyle in some extreme ways, all in the name of saving the planet. But when it comes to his goal, he still feels in over his head. He doesn’t know if all the downsizing, minimizing, reducing, reusing, recycling, and sacrificing make a difference. It’s time to bring in the experts.
Join Michael as he sits down with scientists, policymakers, industry leaders, and environmental experts to figure out how to effectively reduce his footprint in all aspects of life. From food and fast fashion to cars and caskets, he gets into what the worst culprits really are and how we can all make more informed choices when it comes to the impact we have on the planet.
If you have feedback or would like to be a guest on In Over My Head, please email: info@inovermyhead.com
(00:00):
Well, I'm in over my head, no one told me trying to keep my footprint small was harder than I thought it could be. I’m in over my head, what do I really need? Tryin’ to save the planet, oh, will someone please save me? Tryin’ to save the planet, oh, will someone please save me?
(00:28):
Welcome to In Over My Head, I'm Michael Bartz. While exploring the Old Man Watershed, I wanted to hear from business owners who rely on it for their livelihood and learn about why it matters to them.
(00:38):
My name is Jim Lynch-Stauton. I have been ranching here, fourth generation on Antelope Butte Ranch, and I am educated as an engineer in university and came back to the ranch around 1999 and have been ranching since.
(00:55):
And tell me about the ranch itself. So how long has this ranch been here?
(00:59):
It started around the turn of the 19 hundreds. My great-grandfather and his brother had a ranching business that went over the area from Pincher Creek up to here on open range. And they had sort of an open range headquarters on the old Man river. And then as more of the land started to get settled, they started buying land in this area. So in this area they started ranching on purchased land right around the 1890s.
(01:33):
What do you enjoy about ranching?
(01:36):
I love the balance between trying to run a business, trying to balance animals and growth and cropping and farming and ranching. I also enjoy dealing with people and employees and trying to get that balance right. I'm nowhere near close on the best boss or the best employer, but we try to be, and I love the challenge of trying to put all that together.
(02:08):
Do you find that you connect with the animals that you have on your ranch, like when you're spending time with them or working with them, things like that?
(02:16):
Yes, I do. One of my big pushes on the ranch is really low-stress stockmanship. The way that works is kind of getting an animal to decide what you want it to do, and it's a matter of working with the animals in a way that they are quite happy to do what you want them to do. And we work really hard to do that really well, and I think we do do it better than a lot of people.
(02:45):
So you as a rancher, why does water, our old man watershed, why does that matter to you and your livelihood?
(02:54):
A third of our water that we require comes from a creek. The rest of it is either ground springs or just runoff dams. So the other two thirds would be springs and dams that we require. And of course we need it for growing our crops and we don't irrigate. I haven't got any irrigation rights yet, but we may well have, and of course we need it for our own personal water and our cattle water. As far as quality goes, water quality for cows is pretty poor. They can tolerate terrible water and do fine. Where you have issues is if you have mineralization in water like sulfur or other things that bind up minerals and kind of screw up their mineral balance.
(03:40):
I was just thinking about the amount of water too. Some of the guests I've been talking to, we're talking about how the climate's changing, maybe more extreme weather, more droughts, maybe more floods, maybe the water levels very low for a long period of time. How would that impact you?
(03:55):
Well, it would be a problem for sure, but our business, we get to deal with extremes in that case all the time. So all ranching businesses should have some tolerance or not tolerance, some adaptation to weather extremes because we've had them all our lives and everyone's worried about the drought we were in last year and the year before and the current drought we're in, and these are still about half as bad as the droughts we had in the eighties, seventies and eighties. They were terrible. They were much worse. And we see it on our place where some of our surface water was going low, but it wasn't nearly as low as it was in the eighties. We had a much worse issue then. I think most ranchers would agree that we've had it worse. And so it is a worry if you don't have enough water, you can't do what you need to do and you can't live and you can't grow grass.
(04:57):
And in the eighties we had grass, but we didn't have water to water cattle. So there was a whole bunch of situations where we were renting irrigation pumps and pipe and filling up dams and filling them out of rivers and creeks. And I recall doing that as a teenager laying out pipes and rolling up, not rolling up pipes, putting pipe on a rack and filling dams and dugouts. And since then there were a whole bunch of water programs to dam up more water so that you could store it in times when you need. And we're much more water resilient than we were then because we've built up a whole bunch of dams and water and we're caring for our surface water a little bit better. We are putting it in troves rather than letting free access to cattle. We do let free access into our creeks, but it's controlled.
(05:55):
We control their grazing. Those are the best forage resources we have on the ranch are the riparian areas. And we don't want to screw 'em up. We don't want to kill the trees, we don't want to kill the grass. We also don't want to wreck the stream structure and the stream bank structure. So we control it to really, really short graze periods. And that's really how all of our land has evolved. All the grasses have evolved to tolerate intense periods of grazing and disturbance and then long periods of rest. And that's really what we do. We usually graze our land once a year and for a short period, so it has a long rest to build up reserves for the next time we graze it. Most of the native grasses don't regrow that much in the middle of the year, so really we can only take them once. We may graze a field twice, but it'll have some species in it that can tolerate grazing twice a year and we'll graze them to that level and the cattle will prefer them at those times as well. So we'll graze those things and then we'll come back later and graze 'em again.
(07:01):
We only have so much water and reserve for so long, so let's say that if we were running low on our reserves. Yeah, I guess how else could you adapt? You had mentioned some of those management pieces on your ranch, but would there be other things you would do to help adapt so that you have enough water?
(07:20):
We can always expand our dams. I have dreams of building other lakes and other wetlands or maintaining making ones that are natural ones probably into a deeper or shallow lake kind of thing. And that's a possibility. We are dreaming of an irrigation system that we'll go through and I would be very interested in building, well, I don't know, it's all money and time and a bunch of, it doesn't really, in the grand scheme of the world won't make a difference. But we've always thought, or I've always thought that we could have some type of wind turbine that when it has excess electricity it would pump water up the hill to a lake that we have and reverse the flow later.
(08:12):
With some of the other guests I've been talking to, even irrigating farmland, there's shortages with water and there's concerns around that. There's the share of the shortage, things like that. So yeah, I just wonder if maybe you couldn't expand the irrigation if that would affect your ranching.
(08:29):
Yeah, it just changed the scope. If we couldn't get irrigation water, we have to live without it and we have to create a business that can live without it, and if we can't do that, the business will go somewhere else. And that's really how we need to think about it. If you can't operate with the environment you, you either have to change the way you're operating or stop doing it or go somewhere else where you can.
(08:55):
Yeah, yeah. Something that interests me is when you talk about just that connection to the work you're doing, if that would change, if suddenly maybe you weren't ranching anymore, how would you feel about that if you suddenly couldn't be doing what you're doing now?
(09:09):
It wouldn't be good. Yeah. Yeah. I love what I'm doing. I want to keep doing it and that's part of our business. We love doing what we do and it's not, I hate it when people say, oh, it's a lifestyle business and it really isn't. The lifestyle sucks if you're starving and you can't pay for the things you want to buy and you can't keep your wife happy and you can't keep if your kids don't want to come back and that kind of thing. It's not a good lifestyle. So if you think of it as a lifestyle, you either have enough money that it doesn't matter or you're not, you've got to run a good business. You've got to think of it as a business, make sure it pays you more than you pay out and satisfies the goals you need.
(09:59):
Are you concerned about our old man watershed or are you optimistic? How do you feel about the future of water around the Oldman watershed in your business?
(10:09):
I'm very optimistic about it. I think there could be issues with over allocation if we do silly things like have been done on the Colorado River Basin, for instance, where it's quite obviously over allocated and we know that because it doesn't run to the ocean anymore. If we were to have a situation where the old man or the South Saskatchewan dried up before it hit the Hudson Bay, that would be a problem. I don't think we're anywhere near that. And I believe that the people who are watching the water are watching it probably more closely, so they're more conservative than less. As far as climate change goes with the world warming, I believe that watershed will increase its water. The stuff I've read is that humidity will be going up with warmer climate and that leads to could be warmer or wetter areas. And I don't know if this is one of the golden boys or it turns into a desert, but we do know that this area was the palliser triangle that was believed not unable to support agriculture.
(11:23):
And we've shown that it can support agriculture really well to some of the most productive agricultural land in North America. So I'm optimistic about it. We're not in a case where the old man glaciers are receding, they're gone. So deglaciation isn't going to change the watershed. What would change the watershed is just overall weather patterns, and if they become drier, that's certainly possible. But I have seen a bunch of tree ring data that goes back a thousand years, and I've seen variations that are much higher than what we've got now, where it was much, much wetter and much drier. And also cycles that were similar to what I'm seeing today. And I've looked at the data and then, well, the scientists are showing it to me and they take a completely different interpretation of the data that I see as far as they've shown that there's been a tremendous fluctuation and cycles of wet and dry cycles. And they say, well, with global warming, it's going to be more extreme sooner, the frequency of those cycles will be shorter. And yet in the past thousand years, those have had anywhere from a hundred year cycles to 40 year, 2010 year cycles. So the answer is I think there's a fair bit of uncertainty about what's going to happen. So I think in my lifetime, it's probably not going to change enough that that'll matter in my kids or two or three more generations. Maybe it will. I don't know.
(13:05):
What stands out for me is your comment about adaptation, right? It seems like we need to adapt whatever the changes are. It seems like that's the thing we need to do, right? Would you say in order to maintain your livelihood?
(13:18):
Yeah, no, it is absolutely. And we're managing our land and we're grazing in a way that should make, one of my goals I've always had is to never let water run off our place. And if we do everything right, we're reducing that runoff and there's things we can do grazing to make it much worse and farming, to make it much worse, we are trying really, really hard to make sure that our water has the absorption, our soil has the absorption capacity of any water we get. If we make it so we don't have water running off, we should do better than our neighbors and we should be more resilient in those weather extremes, whether they're over wet or over dry, we should have more storage capacity. Really, we're all about sequestering more carbon than we're putting out, and that makes the water absorb into our soils better. It makes the water store in our soils better.
(14:21):
Did you have any other final thoughts that you'd like to express
(14:24):
With all of this? The issues are a lot bigger than we can see and get reported on. So when people say beef cattle is bad for the environment or feedlots are bad or plant agriculture is bad, there's more to it. So you really need to see all sides of the issues. And all ranchers and farmers are, I shouldn't say all, but most are trying to make their land better. They're trying to make it so that they can grow things better, that they grow more nutritious stuff. They're trying to keep their animals healthy, they're trying to get their animals to grow well. To do that, we have to make our land better. And if we're successful in that, it's good for the world. And we're land managers, we're kind of the ultimate environmentalist because we are directly impacted by doing it wrong. We'll see it immediately on our bottom line if we do it wrong. And so I'd like to ask our city people and say, come out to the farm, see what we're doing and see why we're doing it. And you might be able to see the benefits of what we're doing to try and make our personal lives better and how it's benefiting society.
(15:49):
Dwight Perry is my name. I'm 85 years old, 67 years growing sugar beets. My way of retiring was not to be growing four different crops, just growing too. So all I'm growing is peas. The peas are freezer peas. So if you happen to buy frozen peas in Safeway, they could have come from our crop. And the sugar beets, of course, that goes to Taber. I remember my brother and I saying when we harvest the beets back in the old days when it was an awful lot of labor and no cabs on the tractors, that when we got finished the harvest of the beach, we said, that's it. We're quitting that. Don't want to see any other sugar beet, have the winter off, do other things, fix machinery partially, and by spring we're ready to go again. So been doing that for 67 years.
(16:48):
What sort of feelings do you get when you're on the tractor or you're working on the farm? How does that feel?
(16:55):
It's enjoyable sitting on a tractor all day long. I got to the point where I was quite happy just because the sun comes up at four o'clock when we're doing that work, well, I'd go for a couple hours and then one of the crew would take over and I'd take over just for noon hour and maybe I'd go back in the evening. And the last little while, we've been a smaller operation with really not the crew we used to have. So what I find out now, when I do spend a whole day 10 to 12 hours on that tractor, I get pretty tired about it. So a lot of it's boring, but we're not doing the same thing more than a week or two of the year. We're always changing what the jobs are.
(17:46):
And Dwight, I'm talking about water with season, and I'm wondering if you have any concerns as a farmer around water.
(17:56):
I think it was the year 2000 and 2001, maybe one and two, that I had to buy water because there wasn't enough for a sugarbeet crop that requires way more water say than what the peas do or what the grain would require. So last year was, again, back in the year 2000 or 2001 where whatever type of irrigation systems you've got made a lot of work. Well, back at that time, we didn't have the pivots that we have now. And yes, this last year that we just finished up with, I was out of water by the 1st of August, St. Mary's Irrigation announced that we were only allowed 13 inches of water, and we'd already used 14. And well, it was frightful to consider trying to wait for rain, which never happened all summer this year. And I was able to buy water from another fellow by medicine hat that wasn't using it.
(19:05):
And so we were able to run the pivots that much longer. They made their tracks every time they go around, it gets a little bit deeper. So that was a bit of a problem, just filling the tracks in before harvest was an awful job this year. We're hoping this year is going to be better, but it doesn't look like it. We're way behind on the amount of snow. Third, I was told in the mountains and march coming up and march is where we usually get most of our snow storms in the mountains. We need that for the irrigation district.
(19:46):
And I guess, yeah, so this spring you're going to be seeding and what if we don't have enough water? What then?
(19:55):
I like what one Hutterite fella said regarding farming here, and he was, I mean, most of them do have irrigation also, but a lot of times they have a large area of dry land and he said, well, we should do our part. So we get ready, we seed the crop, and if the rains come, that's good, or if we're on irrigation, then we take care of that. But in reality to say, well, all of it's dry this spring, we shouldn't spend that money. We shouldn't do that work. No, as far as he was concerned, we do our part and then it's up to God to do his part.
(20:33):
Yeah. Do you have any other thoughts around water and farming and any concerns or?
(20:38):
Well, let's just say I am getting tired, but I don't want to retire because I have that time in the winter when I can be lazy. But I am quite glad that my grandson, Thomas is helping me and he'll do the lot more of the work that it takes to, even though it's with the machinery and equipment, it's much easier than what it used to be. And I'm afraid the time for the small farmer, my style of farming has come to an end. If you aren't big, you can't afford the equipment machinery to do the piece. Each of those machines is over a million dollars now. It's just surprising what's happening in our way of farming now. But I still say that the Lethbridge area is the best area in Canada, and Canada is the best place to live.
(21:36):
Hi, I am Kelti Baird. I manage and co-own co-founded Theoretically Brewing Company. We are a nano brewing company located in Lethbridge, Alberta. We started in 2015. A nano brewery is smaller than a microbrewery, so we only brew about 500 liters a batch, and we only make about 50,000 liters a year. So very, very small.
(21:59):
And I guess what made you want to start a brewery?
(22:02):
My business partner and co-founder Chris Fisher is a chemist at the university, and he was into home brewing beer, and I really enjoyed his stuff and I said, well, we should get together and sell this. And he's like, whatever, bring me a business plan. And so I brought him a business plan and now we own a brewery together. So yeah, we started kind of playing a giant game of chicken to see who would kind of pull out first, and neither of us did. So we opened in 2015, and it's been a wild ride ever since.
(22:30):
Great. Yeah. Do you enjoy beer?
(22:32):
I do, yeah. I do enjoy beer. I enjoy the history of beer, the science of beer, the artistry of beer.
(22:38):
Tell me about some history.
(22:39):
Beer has been synonymous with human history and human development since 35,000 years ago. That's the earliest archeological reference or evidence for beer brewing, like intentionally brewing beer. And it comes from a calcified residue of beer stone on the inside of clay jugs found in Central Africa. So we know that intentional fermentation has been going on for a very long time in human history, and for a very long time, beer was safer to drink than water in most settled areas because of the amount of trash that wound up in the water and contaminants and stuff. So if you didn't have a local brewery, you didn't have anything to drink. So yeah, they were really, really important in settled areas.
(23:21):
Maybe tell me a bit about the beer making process. How do you make beer?
(23:26):
So we start with a base grain. That grain can be any kind of grain. So in Northern Europe and North America, our grains are typically barley and wheats, and that goes through a malting process before it comes to the brewers. And that process gets into creating the chemistry that makes beer within the seed kernel of the barley. So they roast it like you roast a coffee bean, and that gives it the beer, the final product and the beer, different colours and flavours and notes and stuff like that. And then us as brewers, we take that, we grind it down and add water, boil the heck out of it, add some live yeast and let it ferment. It's a relatively easy process until you want to make the same batch over and over and over again, and then it becomes challenging.
(24:11):
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And being a nano brewery and being very locally minded, are the ingredients that you use, are they fairly local?
(24:20):
They're 100% local? Yeah, we are very picky about where we source our ingredients from. So actually all of our barley comes from central Alberta because it is the best barley grown in the world for what we do. And all of our hops right now are coming from a farm and Taber, which is just under a hundred kilometres away, and any varieties we can't get from our Taber location, we get from a wholesaler in Chillowak and bc. So a little bit further afield, but still Canadian. It's important for us to source as locally as we can.
(24:52):
And that sounds like that was a very intentional choice. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I guess what would be the reason for doing that?
(24:57):
Mostly to support our local farmers. We really do love supporting the guys who are putting in the work. I have been on a farm, I have done science farming, which is very different than actual farming, but it is hard work, and I have every respect for the people who go and grow our food. So we just really want to make sure that they're well supported. Another part of it, of sourcing locally is really focusing on our terroir, which is the taste of the region. It's a term borrowed from the wine industry, and we all know the wine industry is super snobby, no shade. I love wine, but the taste of the area. So we really want to imbue southern Alberta into our beer.
(25:42):
Nice. And what sort of beers would you be brewing that are very southern Alberta?
(25:46):
So historically, they used to brew pilsner here. Lethbridge had several breweries in its history, but Pilsner is a lagger, and we don't actually brew any lager. We brew all ales. So the reason for that is we didn't build adequate temperature control into our first system, but we'll fix that in a future upgrade. So in order to logger something, you want to ferment it really low temperature around 13 degrees Celsius, and really slowly over a long period of time, Ales you want more flavor out of. So they ferment hotter temperatures, usually around 18 to 25 degrees Celsius, depending on the beer, and sometimes up to 40 degrees Celsius because fermentation's an exothermic reaction. So if you don't control the temp, they get real hot and that'll throw a lot more different flavours into the beer from the east. So we specialize in European and more ancient styles, but brewed with modern ingredients. So it's more fun.
(26:44):
And I'm curious, we talked a bit about the process of making beer, and this can seem like an obvious thing, but beer is mostly made of water, right?
(26:52):
It's like normally around 95% water.
(26:55):
Exactly. Yeah. So I guess, yeah, how much water would you use to run your brewery and brew the beer?
(27:03):
So water is a very big topic in the brewing industry because in order to make one litre of beer from the seed in the ground growing the plant to the finished product, we need about 14 litres of water to make one litre of beer. So that is significant. The vast majority of the water is used in the growing process. So there's not much I can do as a brewer in terms of that unless we develop some amazing dry land barley strains, which are currently in development, but we haven't got there yet. The stuff I can control is the water efficiencies within our system. So when we built our system, which was built here locally in Lethbridge by local welders, we didn't have as much money as we wanted to put into water reclamation. So we don't have a super water conservation system in our current setup, but we want to build one in if we can expand the future.
(28:03):
One of the best breweries I've ever been to is actually in its Coachella Valley Brewing Company in Coachella Valley in California. So water is a huge topic down there as well, and they have a mash press. So at the end of the first stage of brewing, which is called mashing, you have all of this grain that you've been soaking in hot water for about an hour, and you want to pull as much liquid out as possible. So for us, we just let the water kind of gravity drain out. These guys want to get as much efficiency out of their system as possible so that they shovel all of their wet grain into a hydraulic press and they squeeze it like an accordion, like you're squeezing a sponge and it drips all the water out of it. So they're very water-conscious, and I would love to build that into my system
(28:49):
Generally. Do you have concerns around water as a business owner?
(28:54):
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Especially in southern Alberta. We have photographic evidence from the 1930s of what a dust bowl here looks like, right? So we're always very conscious of our watershed and our water usage. We pull our water directly out of the city of Lethbridge's water supply. We don't tamper with our water at all, which is beautiful. A lot of brewers have to do what's called doctoring, where they either put it through an osmosis system that pulls all of the nutrients and other chemicals that are not water out, and then they put back in exactly what they need. Things like calcium or gypsum or magnesium or those kinds of things that allow for better health for fermentation for the yeast, because fermentation includes a microorganism. So we want to make sure those microorganisms are healthy, so they do the thing we want them to do, and we don't have to do that with our water in Lethbridge, which is really beautiful. The only thing we do is we add a little bit of vitamin C to it to neutralize the chloramines in the water, so we don't have any of the chlorides kicking around.
(30:02):
So yeah, talking with some of the guests I have, we've been talking about climate change, and with climate change, there's more drought, there's more extreme weather. Do you see that possibly impacting your business in the future?
(30:15):
Yeah, because we're so connected to our local region and conscious of what's going on in it, and especially since all of our ingredients come from our local region, we really do want to be on top of what's going on with the watershed. Also being connected to academia through my business partner and our community, which is very academia focused. Being close to the University of Lethbridge, we've got a lot of water scientists here who are monitoring the watershed. And 2023 was the year I learned that our watershed is not a glacier fed watershed. We rely entirely on snow melt, and we just went through a winter where we had zero precipitation through October, November, December. It's so dry. So that's really intense as a business owner. So we're already starting to, the next thing we're putting into our building is a water reclamation system. So the other part of brewing that takes a lot of water is the cleaning processes, because if you have any microorganism, like a random stray single cell yeasty that gets into the beer, it can destroy an entire batch. So you have to clean a lot, which means a lot of water usage. So we're looking at a clean in place system that is fully self-contained, and then we can change out the water periodically, and then all the chemicals that we're using are 100% biodegradable and for human consumption. So we're not putting anything into our gray water system, putting anything down the drain that can harm the ecosystem going out. So that's what we're really conscious about is minimizing our impact as much as possible.
(31:51):
Was there anything else you wanted to include about your concerns around water adaptation, you as a business owner, things like that?
(31:59):
Mostly just redesigning how our building works will be a big part of how we treat water. So right now we have inside our building, even though we don't have a good water reclamation system, we reuse as much gray water as we possibly can. So inside our building throughout the year, we have a hydroponic system in our ceiling that reuses some of the water from the brewing, the gray water from the brewing process to feed plants. So it's nice and lively inside. And then outside, we have in the summertime a massive patio and all of that is fed through the gray water system as well.
(32:33):
I guess another thing that comes to mind, Theoretically Brewing is a very local business. And to me that seems like that's also an advantage because it seems like the more locally focused you are, the more people, your customers, the people you're dealing with, it seems like building those relationships is important for a business in general, but also just maybe adaptation or other things. Do you feel that's the case?
(32:55):
Absolutely. Yeah. And one of my favourite things is because my hop farmer is a hundred kilometres away, we've literally taken clients out to his hop yards and cracked cans of IPA out in the field, and like that hop is in this beer, and people get so excited about that and learning what goes into farming hops because oh my gosh, it's such a process. Yeah, it's really lovely as a business owner, having that connection to your community and to your natural resources.
(33:22):
Next time on the Old Man Watershed, I look back at the history of development in the old man and learn about one controversial project that people gave a damn about.
(33:32):
Here you
(33:32):
Are from the Hilltop, there's the stage, and there's the people, and there's the cars going all the way up and back. And here's a good shot of the audience. There's the Joe Crow Shoe and other chiefs sort of blessing the event. Gordon Lightfoot,
(33:59):
Marie McLaughlin's
(34:00):
David there, David Suzuki and the No damn way. Martha. Martha and Cliff
(34:09):
You. My heads, the Old Man Watershed season was produced by Michael Bartz in partnership with Environment Lethbridge. Special thanks to all
the guests who gave generously of their time and expertise.
I'm tryin' save the planet, oh will someone please save me?
This season was made possible with financial assistance from Land Stewardship Centre's Watershed Stewardship Grant, funded by Alberta Environment and Protected Areas. Opinions expressed in this season are those of In Over My Head.