Most conversations about nutrition begin with what is on the plate. This one begins much farther upstream—with the soil, the grass, the animal, and the way our food is raised.
In this episode of the Homesteaders of America Podcast, Amy speaks with Julia Mitchell, MSc, CNS, LDN, a clinical nutritionist, grass-fed bison rancher, mother of two, and Lead Educator for Ancestral Supplements. Julia shares how a desire to become more capable and connected to her food led her from a regional food hub to bison ranching in southwestern Alberta—and how working with the land has reshaped her understanding of human nourishment.
Together, they discuss what nutrient density actually means, why the quality of our food begins in living soil, and how modern agriculture’s focus on yield can leave nutrition behind. Julia also explains why traditional cultures valued the whole animal, what liver and other organ meats can add to the family diet, and simple ways homesteaders can make those foods less intimidating—from blending liver into ground meat to using bones, marrow, connective tissue, and slow-cooked cuts.
The conversation also explores where whole-food supplements may serve as a practical bridge, what consumers should know about sourcing and third-party testing, and why no capsule can replace the deeper work of rebuilding food skills, supporting responsible farmers, and understanding where nourishment comes from.
This episode is an invitation to think more deeply about food—not merely as calories or protein, but as the product of healthy soil, careful stewardship, practical knowledge, and a resilient family culture.
In This Episode, We Discuss
- How Julia moved from city life and a regional food hub into grass-fed bison ranching
- What makes raising and handling bison different from raising cattle
- Why nutrition begins with soil—and why food quality cannot be separated from land health
- What “nutrient density” means beyond marketing language
- How farming for yield can dilute the vitamins and minerals in food
- Why organ meats fell out of favor and what was lost when they disappeared from the family table
- How nose-to-tail eating honors the animal and broadens the nutrient profile of the diet
- A simple way to ask your butcher to blend liver into ground meat
- Why liver is so nutrient-dense and why it should not be misunderstood as a storage tank for toxins
- Where food-first nutrition ends and whole-food supplementation may begin
- How freeze-drying preserves organ meats for capsules or powders
- What third-party testing and careful sourcing should address
- Why practical food skills are essential to family resilience and self-sufficiency
- Why bison ranchers are, at heart, grass farmers—and why protecting grasslands matters
About Julia Mitchell
Julia Mitchell, MSc, CNS, LDN, is a clinical nutritionist, bison rancher, mother of two, and Lead Educator for Ancestral Supplements. Her work sits at the intersection of functional nutrition, ancestral health, regenerative agriculture, and optimal health. Shaped by both her clinical nutrition work and her hands-on experience raising grass-fed bison on a regenerative ranch in southwestern Alberta, Julia is especially knowledgeable about nose-to-tail eating, organ meats, animal-based nutrition, and making nutrient-dense whole foods approachable for modern families.
Links and Resources Mentioned
Ancestral Supplements — ancestralsupplements.com
The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It by John Seymour
Savory Institute and holistic management principles — savory.global
Topics mentioned: grass-fed bison, regenerative agriculture, liver and organ meats, bone broth, marrow, connective tissue, freeze-drying, and regional food systems
Follow Julie & Ancestral Supplements
Instagram: @juliathenutritionist / @ancestralsupplements
FB: @juliathenutritionist / https://www.facebook.com/AncestralSupplementsLLC
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ancestralsupplements
* This episode is for general educational purposes only and is not individualized medical or nutrition advice. Nutrient needs and supplement safety vary. Consult a qualified healthcare professional before making significant dietary changes or using concentrated supplements, especially during pregnancy, for children, when taking medications, or when managing a medical condition.
Listen to or watch the podcast here:
Podcast Transcript
Editorial note: Filler words, repeated phrases, false starts, recording interruptions, and minor grammatical errors have been removed for readability. The substance and conversational voice of the interview have been preserved.
This conversation is for general educational purposes and is not individualized medical or nutrition advice.
AMY: Welcome back to this week’s episode of the Homesteaders of America podcast. I have a special guest again with me this week because everyone is special on the HOA podcast. This week I have Julia Mitchell. Welcome to the podcast, Julia.
JULIA MITCHELL: Thank you so much for having me.
AMY: Yeah. Okay, so Julia is super cool. I am geeking out over her credentials and what she does just because we’re slightly in the same field of nutrition and just overall wellness and health outside of HOA. And so Julia, why don’t you tell our guests a little bit about you? Because they’ve probably never heard of you, but they probably have heard of the company you work for. So why don’t you take the platform on that?
JULIA MITCHELL: Sounds good. Professionally, I am the Lead Educator for Ancestral Supplements, a company that provides desiccated organs in capsule form essentially. We have some other products too, but liver is our main claim to fame, I guess, desiccated liver. So that’s my primary role and I do a great deal of education, both publicly and internally within our company. And then I’m a mom of two. I have two young boys. And then I also with my husband, obviously, because every ranching endeavor has to be a family affair, we raise grass-fed bison in Alberta, Canada. I wear many hats, but they are all centered on how we grow and feed ourselves the most nutrient-dense food possible.
AMY: You have firsthand knowledge from being a farmer, so I have to ask: what led you to bison ranching? When did you decide you wanted to raise bison?
JULIA MITCHELL: Well, it’s an easy answer. Long and short is love. Because I met my husband. So backtrack a little bit. I was really passionate about food and food systems and local food and regional food and being connected to farmers and growers and ranchers in my area. And so in 2014 I bought this little grocery store that I converted into what I would call like a regional food hub where I tried to I had I don’t know maybe 160 supplier, like around 150 suppliers, various makers, farmers, ranchers, creators, and I tried to pull them all in. To be like that one place that you could find all the local things grown in our area. And my husband just happened to be starting out his like bison meat business. And so I sold his meat in my store. And really it was like he walked in one day and I was wow, who is that? And then he said, hi, I’m your bison rancher. And I was okay, you’re even cooler now. You’re handsome, but you’re also cool. And so it started from there, but Yeah, so I probably would not be raising bison. I maybe I would eat it, but I don’t think we would be in it if I if it weren’t for Cody and his passion for bison and his desire to grow a grass-fed bison operation. So and that’s evolved a lot over the past, twelve years. But yeah, we’ve we’ve grown it together and it’s been something we’ve done together, but it is very much like his he took the initiative to go the bison route.
AMY: Yeah, that’s super unique. I don’t know that we’ve ever had anyone talking about bison on the podcast. So that might even be another podcast we just need to have all on its own is raising bison. So yeah, and we love bison. We actually have a bison farm down the road, not our farm, but somebody else’s farm. And so that’s not new to us, but it’s it’s always intriguing to see why people are doing that. So tell us a little bit about your farm. what does it look like? How many acres is it? What else are you growing there?
JULIA MITCHELL: My gosh, yeah. Okay, so we keep it pretty simple. We basically just focus on bison. and our one milk cow that I That I told you about before we started recording, Winnie, who we haven’t actually started milking yet. So that’s like my own little pet project. but these days, in ranching and farming, owning land is a huge challenge. And it’s it’s a big hurdle to overcome if you’re not a second or third generation rancher where you have land in your family. So from 2014 or 2013, when we started raising bison, till just like a few months ago, we’ve never actually been formal landowners. We’ve always leased land. And with bison, it’s quite difficult because to find a landowner who’s going to be sure, you can raise a wild animal on my ranch or something that’s not cattle is a little bit of a hurdle to get over. So finding landowners that have been willing to collaborate with us is obviously more difficult than if were just to be doing conventional cattle. So we R we lease land, about, five thousand acres-ish, where we have some bison and we also kinda do cattle at the same time just ’cause the landowner that we work with, he’s been in cattle for since like the seventies. and then we also have our own hundred and sixty acres which we just purchased, which we’ll be we’re developing right now and getting our infrastructure ready to bring animal a new little herd of animals there. Come like fall, early winter of this year. So it’s been an exciting year for us that we’ve finally been able to acquire some land formally for ourselves, which has been a huge step. but we’ve made it work so far with working with cool landowner partners who are willing to be innovative and do interesting things like bison, which is out of the box. So yeah, that’s where we’re at this point.
AMY: Okay, and all of this is in Canada, right?
JULIA MITCHELL: That’s right. Yeah, we’re in south southwestern Alberta, which is just a couple hours southwest of Calgary.
AMY: Okay, that’s super cool. So ha do you I don’t know if much about the difference in Canadand the United States, but do you feel like there’s any difference in regenerative agriculture or farming regulations that are like starkly different from each other?
JULIA MITCHELL: Like between Canadand the US? I don’t think it’s too different. And I think Canada leans a lot on what’s happening in the US as far as regenerative goes. it is still the Wild West. There’s no formal certification really that exists that is ubiquitous, but we adhere to holistic management savory principles, but we have adapted it to our own environment as well. So yeah, we’re Cody, my husband, he’s trained in holistic management. I’ve done a few of their courses too, or the Savory Institute. but yeah, I think we do like a spin-off of that.
AMY: Mm-hmm. Okay. So for people who are listening, one last question about bison because I know people are gonna have that question. So what’s the main difference between bison and cattle? What does that look like? Is there a difference in temperament? Is there a difference in their grazing?
JULIA MITCHELL: Well, so from a stockman Yeah, sorry to cut you off there. from a stockmanship perspective, it’s a little bit different. bison have a larger flight zone, which means like you can’t get as physically close to them. They operate very much on this pressure and release, similar like horse training, similar to cattle stockmanship, but they just have a larger flight zone. They’re more sensitive to pressure. So when we handle them, every bison rancher is different. And same with every cattle rancher. they some like to apply pressure and get things done really quickly and use tools to move them through systems. We try to do very, very low stresstockmanship. We’ve learned over the years working bison that the lowest stress possible leads to the fewest blow-ups, which we’ve had many over the years. But yeah. They just require a little bit of a more nuanced touch, I think, because they’re more sensitive. And they, I guess, would be closer to like their evolutionary, like they haven’t been domesticated as intensely as cattle. So they do, they are a little bit more wild in that regard. But if how to handle them, they are. They’re totally manageable and it’s just about knowing the animal and understanding the nuances around them. and but they behave very similar to cattle, just like maybe a little bit again, a little bit more sensitive. and then from a meat perspective, the meat typically is lower in fat and higher in some vitamins but pretty similar but the key difference is it’s just lower in fat because the animals are leaner and so we like it because We want like really high quality lean proteins while still getting the red meat factor. so that’s the main difference in the meat. And so when you cook it, for example, you would try to err on the side of caution, not overcooking too much because the meat is already lacking some moisture and fat. So you would cook it a little bit more rare than you would say a beef cow.
AMY: Okay, very neat. So you guys process your own bison and obviously you work for the ancestral supplements company. Are you guys connected to that in any way? Do you grow and raise bison for that company or just for yourselves?
JULIA MITCHELL: We raise them for ourselves and then our customers, which we have, some customers who will buy whole or half animals from us on annual basis. but as far as Ancestral goes, no, we are not connected because the product that we sell with Ancestral is beef, beef liver, beef, Beef organs. and we source for ancestral mostly from New Zealand Australia from grass-fed operations there. The supply chain, for some reason, and I’m sure there are reasons I’m just unaware of, but it’s really leaning. Most companies will be sourcing now from New Zealand Australia, there are a lot of grass fed meat operations there and the economics must just work better somehow than than American sourced animals. So
AMY: Yeah. Okay, so let’s move into that. Let’s let’s talk about grass-fed meat and the nose-to-tail eating, right? Like we hear the phrase nutrient dense, or like you were saying, bison meat has some extra minerals. What does it actually mean when you remove like the marketing part of it? What does it mean for your food to be nutrient dense? Because you are also a clinical nutritionist, right? So maybe talk to people about that.
JULIA MITCHELL: That’s right. Yeah. And this is actually really important to me,. and we could go into why nutrient density matters on like a systemic scale, but I’ll first define it. I don’t know if there’s like one definition, but the way I would think about it is nutrient density is the amount of nutrition you cacquire per calorie of food. So ideally, we want to have nutrient density that’s quite high, which means you get more bang for your buck from what you’re eating. You’re not eating calories just for energy’s sake, but within the energy you’re taking in, you’re getting the most nutrition you possibly can from that food. And so it leads to probably what I believe is hunger management, calorie management. I think the more nutrient dense we can go with our diets, the less tendency we would have to overeat. nutrient density flies in the face of the standard American diet, which is very calorie dense but nutrient poor. So it is almost like the opposite of the direction that we have been going. I think there has been a shift lately in the conversation. And obviously the standard American diet has received so much criticism over the past 20 years that we are, societally we are making a shift away from that slowly. But yeah, that’s how I would define nutrient density, the amount of nutrition you can get per calorie of food you eat.
AMY: Okay. So, this is some this is a conversation we have a lot just in this community and movement. Like even the produce, right, that you buy from the store and the meat that you buy from the store, if the soil isn’t full of nutrients, then those products are not gonna be full of nutrients. Can you unpackage that a little bit for us?
JULIA MITCHELL: Totally. nearly everything we eat begins with soil. I think it’s like ninety-five percent of the world’s food products come from soil first. And so recognizing that is is something is like foundationally important. And it’s something that I don’t think a lot of people really think about. Like they don’t put their brain on this concept of the fact that everything they put in their mouth essentially comes from soil. It’s not just a substance that like holds roots. It’s like a living ecosystem that’s responsible for water, it’s responsible for nutrient cycling, it’s responsible for ultimately food quality. We often talk about food as it as if it begins in the kitchen, but we miss so much of the primary steps or what goes on underground first. So yeah, soil health is foundational. And over the past I don’t know, they’ve done studies over the past fifty years and tested food for nutrient density. And there’s been, declines in vitamins and minerals in our food from three percent to forty percent depending on what you measure, what nutrients are measured in the food. And we’re talking about fruits and vegetables that are tested. So as our soil degrades, because nobody’s recognizing soil as this important component of our food system, the quality of the food that is then grown in that soil also goes down. And thhas been documented over time. So What we’re eating now, and there’s people throw around all kinds of stats, but what we’re eating now is less nutrient dense than what our grandparents or our great grandparents would have eaten per calorie.
AMY: Yeah. It’s crazy. We so our oldest daughter, we live a homesteading lifestyle. Obviously it’s not perfect, right? We are not perfect; it is simply life, right? we are definitely eating way better than most of America. And we grow our own food, we grow our own beef. That just started in the last couple of years, but Our oldest daughter, to give you guys who are listening an example of when this like aha moment, even more for me. she always, like from a young age, had these decay spots on her front teeth. And there was no reason why. I was well, maybe she hit her front teeth and she was she nursed. So it wasn’t like she was drinking formuland that was sitting on her teeth. And I could just not figure out why are her teeth just brittle? They’re just so brittle. And so we actually found these vitamins that are very bioavailable, right? For your body. And we started giving them and her teeth healed. Like within two weeks, her these spots started going away. And I mean, we’re like a raw milk family. We drink raw milk. We do all of these things. And I realized, okay, there’s even with all the things that we’re doing, there’s still gaps in our diet where she wasn’t getting the vitamins and minerals that she needed to really help heal that issue. even with growing our own beef. And we’re only on almost six acres. So, and this land has just it’s just not the greatest. We’ve been restoring it over the last four years. And so it does make a difference. Like when you think about the health issues that we see in the whole world, not just America, not just Canada, there’s these gaps of nutrition. And it’s because our food that we buy from the store and even on some properties, it’s the soil is not good enough to sustain putting those nutrients in the food. And so I don’t think like you said, people don’t think about that.
JULIA MITCHELL: I totally agree. And and also No, people don’t think about that. And the system, we are we’re focused on feeding as many people as possible. So if you think about the system is really designed for yield first. Yield, size of the crop, maybe how quickly it grows, but it is not designed to optimize for nutrient density. those people out there who are doing genetic modification of crops. They’re not testing the crops for nutrients and then selecting for those breeds. They are testing the crops for size and yield and then selecting those breeds. So what we’re getting is it’s been this term that’s been coined is called the dilution effect, where because we’re selecting for yield and growth and crop size, the nutrient density is actually being diluted as a result. So the conditions our farming system works within are not designed to have nutrient density in mind primarily. And it’s drives me crazy because what’s the point of eating? The point of eating is to acquire nutrition from food. And it just seems like we’ve got it like totally backwards.
AMY: Right, right. Man, it really makes you think when you really start thinking about like all the disease in the world and just how our bodies are supposed to work and how we’re supposed to get this nutrient dense food and eat it and be healthy, it really puts that into perspective, which pulls us into the next aspect of this is what you do, other than bison ranching about supplements and nutrition. let’s talk about organ meats for a second because some people, even in the homesteading community, people are Ew, I don’t like that. So why did organ meat move from being valued to being considered scraps or waste or something strange? Was it was it driven by just loss of taste, like of or cooking knowledge, or was it driven more by industrialization? What do you think that reason is that people we just lost that as a society?
JULIA MITCHELL: I think it’s all of those things. part the so if you think about a cow, you have a million different cuts of muscle meat, only one liver, only two kidneys, the organs are a finite resource as far as the whole animal goes. And so it’s harder to commercialize those bits of the animal. So I think partly it’s the industrialization of and the commoditization of meat. and what we have defined as meat. we also think, in our minds, like it’s protein. It’s like we’ve we’ve distilled it down to like not even meat or or the nutrients within that meat. It’s just like now in the nutrition world and the health and wellness world it’s like it’s just protein. It’s It’s oversimplified. whereas traditional cultures, we took different parts of the animal and those different tissues provided very different nutrients. And so, and that was back when, animal stewardship was more of a thing, we would be eating more nose to tail. And I think as a result of that style of eating, and the total respect for the animal and the total use of the animal, our nutrient, our access to nutrients is significantly higher. But yeah, now because of palate changes, commercialization of meat and the production of meat, also like livers; they are somewhat inconsistent. like you could get a huge one, you could get a small one, they don’t look that great in a package, they don’t package as well, they’re not as shelf stable. so there’s many different reasons why I think organ meats have have lost their place. but having said that, I think now is a critical time for us to be thinking again about organs because of this nutrient. gap that we just discussed, the fact that our food is losing nutrient density. It’s how do we then reacquire that nutrient density? Well, there is this there is this tissue of the animal that largely gets ignored, that largely gets put to dog food that humans for for millennia have been consuming that has, three thousand percent of the B twelve, one thousand percent of the copper, seven hundred percent of the vitamin A, a hundred percent of other B vitamins, and many times our daily need for other nutrients. Like if you ate three ounces of beef liver, that’s what you’d be getting. And that goes above and beyond your daily needs for the day. So it’s just this incredibly nutrient dense powerhouse superfood as far as I would define it, that it’s it’s available and we just aren’t taking advantage of it.
AMY: Yeah. So the people who are listening, a lot of them are already growing their own, beef or they’re thinking about it. Or obviously we have the group that is not growing food yet, and which is a lot of people, and we’ll get to that in a second, but let’s concentrate on the people who are already growing beef. Like they may have milk cows, raise the calves as steers, and eat them. how can we start utilizing, those organ meats. We get our organ meats back because we do not want to waste them. But a lot of people don’t do that. And I think part of it is because the knowledge is no longer common and the organs can feel intimidating. We don’t understand why it’s better. It looks a little bit gross because our society has trained us to think that way. So how would you encourage people that are Processing their own beef to hold onto those organs and how would they utilize them?
JULIA MITCHELL: Yeah, I think first and foremost recognizing that it is a part of the animal that should be eaten and that we try not to let anything go to waste. Even connective tissue, for example, like a lot of it gets thrown into ground and mixed up, but many people cut that trim from their meat. That connective tissue contains collagen and different amino acids than the muscle meat. So the amino acid profile of our diet even changes if we are willing to make bone broth, eat the connective tissue, and eat the bone marrow, all of these components of animal. And we’re not just talking about liver. we’re talking about all the offal. And you could draw your line of what you’re comfortable with. I don’t love kidney. I’ve tried to cook it a million times and it’s just not my favorite. So that’s not something that I really prioritize. But bone marrow, bone broth, liver, all connective tissue, whether in soups, stews, or slow-cooked dishes, bring really beneficial nutrients and a different nutrient profile than just having like the same ribeye every single day bought in a package from the store. First and foremost, recognize every part of the animal brings something valuable. And it’s about finding that value and recognizing it. And then I think once people start to understand that, it’s not a hard sell to say, okay, let’s figure out a way to creatively cook this. But if people don’t understand why they’re gonna go about cooking it to begin with, then it’s a little bit harder, right? So having that recognition. And then starting small, I really do think liver is a great entry point. partly because it’s arguably the most nutrient-dense food on the planet, and you don’t need a lot to get the value from it. So my easiest trick is to take keep if you’re growing animals already and you typically just discard the liver or you give it to your dogs or something like that. I would keep some and when you’re getting your animal butchered, ask your butcher to take that liver and mix it into some of the ground meat you’re gonna get at maybe like a ten to fifteen percent ratio. So That you have this blend of ground meat that has maybe 10 to 15% liver and the rest regular ground meat. And it behaves very much like ground, like hamburger meat. And you can make burgers, meatballs, anything you would typically use that ground meat for, but it has that liver incorporated, so it’s just got a little bit more nutritional punch to it. I think that’s the easiest and most accessible way to eat organ meats if you’re gonna just start.
AMY: Yeah, what, that’s so simple, and I never even thought about that. Like it I just that’s such a simple way to incorporate it into ground beef. And so I’m gonna start asking our butcher to do that too. But so before we move on to the supplement section, you’re talking about liver being the most nutrient dense, right? Can you explain why? Why is that? Why is liver the most nutrient-dense food?
JULIA MITCHELL: Yeah, that’s such a good question. And something people ask all the time. because, their their first reaction is Isn’t the liver like just full of toxins? isn’t the whole point of a liver to filter the toxins in the body? So we get that question a ton. And so, yes, the liver is a very metabolically active tissue. It processes and transforms a ton of substances in the body. It is not a storage tank for toxins. It doesn’t just like accumulate the toxins and hold them. What it does is it takes all of those. compounds from the body and it processes them. This is where your phase one and two detoxification pathways live. So calling the liver like a filter of toxins, it just misunderstands what it does. It’s just so metabolically active. And because it’s metabolically active, it holds a ton of nutrition. It is like. as a result very nutrient dense because it needs to have all of these byproducts to perform all the metabolic processes it needs to perform. So that’s why it’s nutrient dense. It’s because it’s like literally a powerhouse tissue. It can regrow itself, which is insane. like I was reading a paper a few days ago because this is the world I live in, that like liver transplant patients Within three months, the liver had regrown to 80% of its mass. So it is like a super organ, not only for nutrient density, but also there is no other organ in our body that will regenerate its mass and restore its function on its own. So that is pretty fascinating. And I mean, the Greeks knew this. There are Greek mythology stories about when they assign someone eternal punishment. They’ll set someone out and have an eagle eat their liver and then the next day it regenerates and the eagle eats it again. And this is like this eternal punishment because they recognize that the liver was like this life giving just resource and that it would regrow somehow they intuitively knew that. So I think for generations, for millennia, we’ve known that the liver has this very special quality. nutrient density is one component, but it is just like this incredible organ that does inspire awe in me when I think about it, just how amazing it is. so yeah that’s that’s why. Long story short.
AMY: Yeah. Yeah. We need to have you back on one day just to talk about like nutrition in the body and how it works because I feel like that is such it’s something that people don’t get. And we like you just said, we used to know how the body worked. Not just doctors, not just nutritionists, but a culture. There was a culture that knew how the body worked. And so I know that’s one of my passions is like trying to get people to understand your body is not as complicated as you might think it is, but it’s also super amazing and cool to learn about it. But We’ll get into that another time. let’s move into the supplement stage of
JULIA MITCHELL: Totally. Mm-hmm. And I just another example. I was just gonna give you one more example. It’s like pernicious anemia is basically B twelve deficiency. We were treating B twelve deficiency or pernicious anemia with liver before we even knew what the vitamin B twelve was. we just knew if we feed these people liver, they get immediately better. We don’t know why, but there’s some compound in this that’s good. It ten it turned out to be B twelve, but Yeah, there is some there is like certain magical components of liver that we’ve known about for a long time, even before we scientifically were aware of the reason.
AMY: Yeah, super cool. Okay, so we’re gonna move out of the food and into the supplementation. So where does that begin? Where should the food end and supplementation begin?
JULIA MITCHELL: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think if you are raising your own animals, eating nose to tail, and regularly eating liver, you eat it pretty consistently, I believe that you probably don’t even need a vitamin of any kind. You’re probably very well-rounded, and that’s wonderful. The reality is most people aren’t that person. I am because were raising bison and all of our customers never wanted the organ meats. And so I was well, this is either gonna go to waste or my family eats it. So I’ve creatively found ways to incorporate it into our diet over time. and some of my work actually with ancestral involves like coming up with cool recipes of how to incorporate liver. Like I’ve done popsicles, I’ve done brownies, I’ve done, all kinds of things. It’s like part of my job is like thinking of crazy ways to incorporate liver, which is actually the best part of my job. I love it so much. but if you don’t have access to high-quality organs, or your family doesn’t eat them, or it’s really off-putting, you don’t know how to prepare them.
AMY: That’s so cool.
JULIA MITCHELL: This is where a whole food supplement like liver capsules can come in. I really love our products at Ancestral because it’s just real food encapsulated. We take the liver, we freeze-dry it, we don’t take the fat out, we don’t add anything, there’s no flow agents, there’s no fillers or additives. We literally just freeze-dry the liver, put it in capsules, and then when you take about six capsules, which is our recommended serving, you get about an ounce of liver.
AMY: Okay, so what’s sorry, it’s okay. so what’s the difference? You said you freeze dry it. What’s the difference? What makes it different when you freeze-dry it versus some other way of preserving it?
JULIA MITCHELL: And so that sorry, go ahead. Freeze-drying retains the nutrition a lot better than say slow dehydration or I don’t know what other process you could use that would make it shelf stable and capsule ready. but freeze drying is like the method that anyone who’s doing desiccated liver will do. I think it just is the from a production standpoint the best way to retain the nutrition while also Drying it out, putting it in a powder and then into a capsule. That being said, I’ve seen a ton of people out there, especially in the homesteader community, who take their liver, they dry it out themselves in a dehydrator and they make their own powders, which is also cool. You can make your own liver capsules if you really don’t like the taste. There’s definitely a DIY process there that is very straightforward. You need like a blender and a dehydrator and liver and some veggie
AMY: Okay. Yeah.
JULIA MITCHELL: Base capsules you can buy on Amazon or whatever. So it’s pretty easy.
AMY: Hmm. So if a homesteader wanted to like freeze dry that liver and then powder it up, like you said, they could add that to anything, even, not just capsules, right? Like what are some ways they could just add in as a spoonful of the liver?
JULIA MITCHELL: Yes. Pretty much anywhere. Smoothies, yogurt, mix it in. Like I think it would depend on at what point does it change the taste or the texture of whatever you’re making. But it is pretty Even I break the capsules up into my kids’ smoothies sometimes if I don’t have liver on hand or whatever. and it is just easy to blend into things. So if you want, I mean, at any moment in time as a mom, I’m always thinking, how can I get more nutrients into my kids? How can I up the nutrient density of this meal? Whether I like sneak in vegetables somehow so they don’t notice, or add in some liver powder or add in some liver. I’m always thinking about that. So yeah, our capsules, or if you were to dehydrate your own liver and make your own powder or just a scoop of it in in sauces even like you can add dried, desiccated liver into like a tomato sauce or soup. It it to me, I think the and I don’t know about you, I don’t do I think liver tastes good. It’s not off-putting to me. And I definitely think I’ve grown accustomed to the taste of nutrition. I do not know how else to describe it, but I’m sure your audience, who most of them will be trying to source their animals from a farmer they know or, get closer to how their food is raised. But if I eat a steak, like I go to someone’s house and I eat a Costco steak, I’m this doesn’t taste like anything. Like it lacks that nutrient density taste that our
AMY: Right. Yeah.
JULIA MITCHELL: Grass-fed bison that we harvest in the field and eat. something about that meat just actually tastes like something. And so for me, even if liver does have a potent flavor, at least it tastes like something. You’re getting nutrition out of that. Costco steaks or steaks that are made, witanimals that are bred to be massive and industrial, I just think they lack a lot of the flavor. and maybe be yeah, I don’t I’m not sure if that’s an intuitive eating type thing where I can just taste the nutrition because I know or it’s me knowing in my head that they’re different. but yeah I always eat a Costco steak and I’m I’m so disappointed. I couldn’t taste anything.
AMY: No, I think that’s true. I mean When we first started homesteading and growing our own food, we could tell the difference within the first couple of months, whether it was the nutrients and how different it tastes or even just sugar. Like everything has sugar in it now. And so when we started pulling ourselves away from that, and then we would go eat out somewhere, or we would buy, a slightly more processed product, it was ugh, this is not we can taste everything in it. And that’s part of the palate change too, right? Our palettes have been programmed to taste a certain thing a certain way. And I love how you framed that: I know what good nutrition tastes like. And I think that’s really important. And so going back to the supplements and the liver. So I have taken these supplements. I’ve loved these supplements. They’ve been great. I actually was taking them with my second son. I think it was our second son. that I was taking them with. And I was taking the le the liver capsules because at that time were not raising our own beef. We were not, and around here it was increasingly difficult to Find a farmer that was not pumping their cows full of antibiotics or raising them as a certain way. So that’s my next question. You do third-party testing. And so what do you test for? Like what is the concept of that so that people can know these are not just coming from some random farm. we actually do testing in this.
JULIA MITCHELL: Yeah, we test for all kinds of things, but mainly, heavy metals and contaminants that would be potentially in the meat. And this is where like quality and sourcing does really matter because like any organ in the body, especially the fat component, fat accumulates and holds toxins a lot more than like non-fatty tissue. But in any animal, if they’re exposed toxins or chemicals or heavy metals that will accumulate in their tissue. So we make sure that even though the liver is not a storage depot for toxins, like I had said, but we still test them because like any tissue, they can be present. So we always make sure that quality testing is there, every batch is tested. and that we also are testing for things we know should be there. like the nutrients and the minerals and things that should be in there. So these are all tested. and we really stand by that. And b one step before that is that we source from farms and ranches that we vetted that are high quality, that raise grass-fed animals. And our standard starts from the farm selection and source. And then we test as added measure after that.
AMY: Okay, very neat. Okay, I have just another quick question and then I’ll let you go. so going back just to the beginning, like when was your aha moment from all of this, from your nutritionist standpoint, your soil standpoint, your organd ancestral eating standpoint, like when was the aha moment for you that changed your life?
JULIA MITCHELL: Okay, and maybe your homesteader audience is gonna know this. because I feel like it started from a similar place to a lot of your audience, which in my early 20s I was thinking, I just don’t know how to do anything. I’m I grew up in the city in the suburbs, I graduated university. I think I was like traveling in France at the time, and where like markets and like Like small regional food systems are way more common. And so I saw like these local food growers and things all gat people all gathering, and that was a little bit more normal. But I had this like crisis where I was if things fell apart today, I am a victim of society. I am not capable of doing anything. And so I started going down this rabbit hole and it was was it even did Amazon even exist then? I don’t know. I’m aging myself now. but I found John Seymour. Do you remember John Seymour? He used to write books. He wrote a book called The Self Sufficient Life and How to Live It. And I just became obsessed with this book.
AMY: No.
JULIA MITCHELL: And the these concepts where John Seymour was like it was a it was a how-to book of basically how to do everything, how to skin a rabbit, how to process your own vegetables, how to grow everything, all the dynamics, plant dynamics for a garden. Everything was in this book. And I was wow, I want to know more. I want to be able to do some of these things myself. So that led me to then like in the permaculture world, I got like super deep into permaculture. And it snowballed from there. And then permaculture to regional food systems. I bought my grocery store. I met my husband. We decided on bison. We got deep into regenerative agriculture for many years. And this is where now we’re at, where I’ve realized that my life is like a culmination of how do we, how do I equip me and my family to be very resilient, very self-sufficient, and well-nourished, essentially. Like Now we’re growing some of the most nutrient-dense food on the planet. In my opinion, that’s grass-fed bison. And if shit were to hit the fan, we’d be relatively okay.
AMY: Yeah. That’s a really good feeling too, isn’t it?
JULIA MITCHELL: So that’s my aha moment. I’m yeah. And and it’s I got to the point where I was I don’t know how to do anything. Like I have knowledge-economy skills. I have skills in like how to use my computer, but when push comes to shove, can I feed myself? Yeah. and for some reason that really hit me. wow, if you can’t feed yourself.
AMY: That can’t feed you. Right. Yeah.
JULIA MITCHELL: You never know what’s gonna happen,? And so for me that was a foundational
AMY: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
JULIA MITCHELL: Concept is I need to be able to feed myself. I need to know how to grow food. I need to be able to understand where food comes from and how to procure it and be good at it for my family and me. And in the instance where society collapses and all these very fragile systems that we rely upon somehow start to disintegrate, we have some redundancy and resiliency built into ours. So that’s really where it comes from for me.
AMY: So last thing at the end I always open up the platform. You have if you could say anything to our community that you wanna say, now is the time to say it. What would you tell them?
JULIA MITCHELL: I would just say, just think a little deeper about your food, where it comes from. And I know your community and the people who listen to this aren’t necessarily the people who need to hear it, but it really goes deep, goes back to the soil. And so just recognizing that and having a deep appreciation for that. I think is where it starts. For me, that’s where it ended. It starts and ends with we always joke that we’re not bison ranchers, we’re actually grass farmers. We farm the grass that the grass the animals then eat. And to farm grass is a very important job. We’re losing grasslands at alarming rate. So yeah, I could just go on and on, but I think first and foremost, like it all starts with the soils. That’s where it’s that’s where it starts.
AMY: I agree. All right, Julia. Well, Julia, thank you for joining me on the podcast this week. It has been a joy to have you. I will have to invite you back one day so we can talk more about these things. But guys, all the show notes will have all the information that we talked about.
JULIA MITCHELL: For sure.
AMY: And if you have any questions, by all means, leave them for us to check out and answer. And until next time, guys, have a great day and happy homesteading.
