Meat You Can Trust: Regenerative Agriculture, Rising Tides, and the Messy Middle with Robby Sansom of Force of Nature

How do we produce meat in a way that works for farmers, animals, the land, and the people who eat it? Right now, that conversation happens in extremes. On one side: a highly industrialized system designed for efficiency and low prices. On the other: a growing movement toward regenerative agriculture and animal welfare. Somewhere in the middle is a complicated reality that rarely makes it into the headlines.

Robby Sansom lives in that middle. He's the co-founder of Force of Nature, a company building a national network of ranchers, processors, and retailers to produce meat raised with regenerative principles and higher animal welfare standards without further centralizing or industrializing the system. He calls it a rising tide approach. The goal isn't to corner the market. It's to lift it.

In this conversation, Dana and Robby get into what regenerative agriculture actually means and why the word is already being stretched. The tension between what consumers want and what farmers can economically deliver. Why transparency in food systems is harder than it sounds. How protocols for animal welfare evolve in practice (including why pork is so hard). Why scaling better systems is both necessary and incredibly difficult. And how consumers, whether they realize it or not, are shaping the future of agriculture with every purchase.

This one is honest, nuanced, and worth getting into.

Key topics:

• Force of Nature origin story, from Epic Provisions to meals & pounds
• The rising tide model: why they chose not to vertically integrate
• 700+ ranches and 17+ regional processors & how the network works
• How protocols evolve year over year (beaver analogs, cover crops, rotational grazing)
• The regenerative label problem, greenwashing and why momentum still matters
• Why pork is so hard, and what one farm visit revealed
• Consumer behavior as a market signal, not just a preference
• The organic cautionary tale and what regenerative can learn from it

Resources mentioned:

• Force of Nature Meats: forceofnaturemeats.com

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