Mountain & Prairie Podcast

This episode was recorded live on stage at the 2025 Old Salt Festival in Helmville, Montana, where I had the honor of sitting down with two of the people at the center of this ambitious experiment in food, land, and community: Cole Mannix who is the President and co-founder of the Old Salt Co-op and Andrew Anderson who is the manager of the J Bar L Ranch. If you’ve been following Old Salt, you know it’s much more than a beef company. It’s a bold attempt to rethink how ranching families, local communities, restaurants, and consumers can work together to create a food system that’s resilient, regenerative, and deeply rooted in place. What strikes me most about Cole, Andrew, and the Old Salt team is just how hard they are working to make this vision a reality. They’re juggling ranching, processing, restaurants, and festivals—businesses that are notoriously difficult on their own—and somehow doing it all with an open spirit of generosity, collaboration, and humility. In this conversation, we dig into the early da