I was sitting in my office in India reading Pastured Poultry Profits by Joel Salatin and a light clicked in my head. Joel wrote these dreamy visions of raising chickens on pasture and netting $25k in a year. Mind you the book was written in the 1990’s. I’m thinking to myself that this would work in South Texas. I started doing a little research and couldn’t find anything about anyone doing pastured poultry. To be honest there wasn’t a lot of information out there regarding the subject in 2010. A lot of crazy shit was going on with my job at the time and I was becoming increasingly weary.

Step back a few years, and I’m training horses full-time at the ranch. I graduated from Texas A&M University during the height of the Great Recession. Armed with a Bachelor of Science in Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences there were literally no jobs to be found. A once thriving job board shriveled to absolutely nothing. All of my dreams and aspirations of becoming a biologist were on hold. I applied for every job I came across and to be honest I thought most of them were out of my reach. I moved back to the ranch and started training young horses for folks whose animal needed a tuning or some additional skills. That’s when I met Mike Hansen, a professional cutting horse trainer, who at the time ran an operation at Valdina Farms. Valdina Farms was 40,000 acres when I was a young kid. It was a dreamy job working in a beautiful setting in the Texas Hill Country with world class horse facilities. Fortunately I was barely making enough money to buy a six pack of beer at the end of the day. Not to mention that training young horses is really hard on your body. I was working with a young colt named Red Duck, sitting in the roundpen during the height of August. The deep sand, intended to keep the horses and rider safe, was radiating into my face. My cell phone rang a strange number from Colorado and I answered. It was a laboratory position that I had applied for probably a year earlier. The lab had a massive grant from the Gates Family Foundation to conduct research on Leishmaniasis in India.

Before I knew it was on a plane to Colorado during the dead of winter. I’m not sure I had ever seen snow and cold like that before. All of my earlier travels were in the tropics and when I had visited the mountains it was during the summer months. South Texas boys don’t typically go trouncing around in the mountains during the dead of winter for no reason. They hired me on the spot because I had extensive travel experience and a first hand account with Leishmaniasis and several years earlier in the mountains of Costa Rica. A few months later after some training and untold rounds of vaccines I was on a plane once again, this time though my destination was on the other side of the planet. Getting to New Delhi took two full days of flights and layovers. I spent a few nights in New Delhi and then jumped over to Patna. I will never forget the drive into Patna early in the morning around 4 AM. As we left the airport and drove onto one of the cities main thoroughfares there were thousands upon thousands of people sleeping side by side on the sidewalk. We drove what seemed like kilometers and there wasn’t a single space remaining for someone to sleep. It was a wake up call for me of the extreme poverty living deep within India.

If you’ve never been to India it is a sight to behold, some beautiful and some of it is indescribable. The unrelenting heat and humidity, the smells, the air pollution and the enormous amount of people is almost unbelievable. Growing up in South Texas you are familiar with heat and humidity, but the heat in India is a whole other index above ours. It wasn’t uncommon for our thermometer to read above 110 degrees Fahrenheit. That in combination with the high humidity was stifling. The smells I will never forget. India’s cities for the most part have open sewer systems. Meaning it simply flows down tile drains next to the street. Beyond that the idling diesel vehicles exhuming huge amounts of exhaust, livestock living foot to foot with people and so much more. The amount of people for me was really hard to comprehend. There are some 1.5 billion people living in a country 1/3 the size of the United States. The small city of Patna had something like 9 million people, which was probably grossly under counted. It is shoulder to shoulder no matter where you go and their since of personal space is considerably different than our standards. Folks, this was the real, raw India. Severe poverty, political corruption and a strong caste system remained. To put it simply, it took me some time to adjust. It grew on me as time went by. The cultures, religions and languages are intriguing. It’s easy to see past all of the bad and fall in love with such a place. The only way I can describe it is it makes you feel alive.

Between our laboratory work and field we drove across much of the Bihar Province. I assume that much of it was the same as it has been for thousands of years, minus the cell phones. The vast majority of the villages remained without electric or other municipal services. They lived in traditional thatch or mud brick housing. Most folks didn’t own a car or motorcycle, but they did have bicycles and many walked. I rarely saw a tractor in a field. Most tended their rice fields with Bramah oxen. This was the India I had been seeking and it was intoxicating. I began to know many of the families throughout the villages we worked in. But things were starting to unravel with my job. The straw that broke the camels back was they wanted me to conduct research I didn’t morally agree with. Besides that I felt that we were just turning our wheels trying to fight one disease and acting as if it would make these peoples lives better. The real issues are much deeper into population, politics and poverty. These people couldn’t provide food for themselves, clean water or shelter. A parasitic disease was the last thing on their mind. I knew that it was time to move on and I was yearning to return to the ranch. I called Mandy while I was sitting in my office reading Pastured Poultry Profits. Mind you it was around lunch hour my time, which puts it at midnight here in Texas. I honestly believe Mandy probably thought I was out of my mind, but it made sense to me at the time. I told her how poultry would be suitable for the ranch and it could give us the quick return on investment needed to survive. Needless to say whether she was on board with the idea or not I was headed home on that long, dreadful flight within a few days. I picked up my truck in Denver, Colorado and began the journey back to the ranch.

Looking back on my year in India the time and experiences transformed me. For me it was an awakening to finding purpose and meaning in life. It’s so hard to describe such a vastly different place and what it does to you. I challenge you to seek out the unknown, things that make you uncomfortable and you will find that there is so much more life to live.