Bridging Worlds: Global Agribusiness, Resilience, and Innovation with Casey Bradley & Philip Johan Odendaal

Welcome to a pivotal episode of the Real P3 Podcast, where we're embarking on a refreshed journey with Casey Bradley and the new co-host, Philip Johan Odendaal, a proud Nuffield Scholar from Zimbabwe. This episode marks the beginning of an expanded exploration into global agribusiness, offering a unique blend of science, empathy, and the heart that defines our mission. Delve into the intricacies of animal nutrition and health from a U.S. perspective with Casey, while Johan introduces us to a vast global network, thanks to his experiences as a Nuffield Scholar.

Discover how we're connecting listeners with extraordinary individuals worldwide, inspiring unstoppable growth in life and business. This episode promises enlightening conversations and practical insights into agriculture, resilience, and the power of human stories. Whether it's discussing the challenges and triumphs of pig farming or exploring the broader landscape of global agriculture, we're here to inspire, educate, and transform.

Tune in to witness how our passions for the industry, our commitment to serving through science plus heart, and our global perspectives converge to empower our community. And for those intrigued by the enriching journey that the Nuffield Scholar Program offers to agricultural professionals, explore more at [Nuffield International](https://www.nuffieldinternational.org/).

Connect with us on :
Instagram @therealp3_podcast
LinkedIn @The Real P3
Facebook @The Real P3
www.thesunswinegroup.com

Transcript

Casey Bradley
 0:00:00
 Welcome to the Real P3 Podcast. Now co-hosted by myself, Casey Bradley, and my esteemed colleague, Philip Johan Oldendal from Zimbabwe. As we reintroduce the global agribusiness dimension to the Real P3, we aim to connect you with extraordinary individuals who inspire us to become unstoppable in both life and business. While I continue to shed light on the latest in animal nutrition and health, focusing on the US perspective, Johan will open the doors to his vast global network as a Nuffield Scholar. Embark with us on this enriched journey of discovery and practical insights.

Casey Bradley
 0:00:42
 Our expanded view will navigate through the intricate world of agribusiness, powered by the collaborative efforts of Animistic and Swine Nutrition Management. This podcast is your bridge to groundbreaking ideas in animal nutrition, agriculture, and beyond, promising episodes that are not only enlightening, but deeply inspiring. Tune in to grow and transform with us. Welcome to the Real P3 podcast, where science and heart converge, empowering knowledge to spring into action. Well, I think our audience on The Real P3 is going to be in for a treat. As many of you already know me, things are going to change, and I'm going to adapt to the times. And obviously, I think the most powerful content that I've had on The Real P3 has been getting to know different people around the world, learning about their stories, hearing about their wins and maybe their failures along the way, but learning how things work. And that's how we solve problems and we come together. Problems has always been a focus of the Real P3. And so I really wanted to introduce you to a past guest, but now co-host, and that is Johan from Zimbabwe. Welcome. Can you give them a little bit of background about yourself and then introduce them to what you're working on?

Philip Johan Odendaal
 0:02:11
 Cool. Hi, Casey. Thanks so much for this. And yeah, I think we've had obviously a couple of conversations leading up to really, really honored and excited to be a part of it. So I think the first thing to unpack is the name because you're going to hear different people throughout the sort of episodes refer to me either as Philip, which is my first name, Johan, which is what a lot of other people call me, or an infamous nickname of Boss. So, yeah, there may be some confusion as I'm referred to by one of those three. So I'm currently a born and bred Zimbabwean. I still live in Zimbabwe. I work in the pig industry as a general manager running 4,600 stalls. And then I have been also awarded a Nuffield scholarship. I'm a 2022 Nuffield scholar, which through my Nuffield journey has really opened me up to a really broad, diverse network of people, incredible people all over the world involved in various aspects of agriculture. And through this journey, this Nuffield journey, through people visiting Zimbabwe and hearing our stories and getting to know us, they've really shone light and really awakened in me what's been, I feel, a really dormant passion because everyone just lives their life, right? And you just go through life not really knowing what's on the outside of it. And it's taken people coming through and seeing that, you know, we have an incredible story.

Philip Johan Odendaal
 0:03:28
 And personally, for me, from a really young age, going through really tough social, economic hardships and then still just landing on our feet and carrying on and making the best of tough situations. Guys have really started reaching out and sharing what the story is doing in their lives. As a result of that, I'm really enjoying it and finding a lot of strength and a lot of hope in that the past and the stuff that's happened can actually be given to other people as gifts to help them work through pretty much most things that life can throw at from whichever angle. And that's a background of where I really want to work with people in the field of resilience. And I feel giving strength to people where they feel they don't have any. And if my stories and my personality are able to bring that to the table, then I'm absolutely all in.

Casey Bradley
 0:04:19
 Wonderful. And obviously you have a powerful story.
 You still keep going. You still keep contributing to agriculture. And so what you're going to hear a little different is I'm not going to be on all the podcasts, Billup or Johan or whoever we want to call it. I don't know how to say the funny nickname yet. But I'll put it up.

Philip Johan Odendaal
 0:04:44
 That's a long story too.

Casey Bradley
 0:04:45
 Yeah.

Casey Bradley
 0:04:46
 You host a lot of people in Zimbabwe and through the scholarship program, you get to meet people all over the world. You're going on an exciting five-week tour of the world in different agriculture segments. And this is an opportunity to use the Rural P3 to share your stories, share your experience. And I think that has been my most impact the last four years on this journey is not only Not only influencing how we maybe feed pigs or feed the world But how we help people as I say my personal mission is to create to help people go from Surviving to thriving and I think that's kind of your mission as well. And so it really aligns so Obviously, I'm going to probably have some guest speakers and focus a little bit on the animal nutrition space. So you'll have episodes coming out

Casey Bradley
 0:05:41
 in that area because that is still a passion of mine and some of the audience does enjoy that content as well. But a lot of it's going to change more to the people component and that's really what this industry is about. And you're gonna get to meet at least through audio maybe some videos some incredible people around the world to inspire you, maybe grow your network as well, and to help agriculture and feed the world.

Philip Johan Odendaal
 0:06:10
 Yeah.

Casey Bradley
 0:06:11
 Kind of, what else? Can you give us a little insight on this big five-week tour that you have coming up that you're going to bring some more information from?

Philip Johan Odendaal
 0:06:22
 Yeah, so with Nuffield, they do what they call a global focus program. So a group of us from all over the world, so there's going to be Australians, people from New Zealand, Chile, Brazil, Ireland, Zimbabwe, they're putting about 14 of us together. And then our tour starts in Indonesia. So we'll be traveling from Indonesia, France, Denmark, Chile, and USA. It's a really tough tour because while we're doing the tour, we're constantly visiting visiting different agricultural centers, different farms, different business owners, sometimes sort of leaders.

Philip Johan Odendaal
 0:06:55
 So, you know, for example, our trip to the UK included presenting to the Secretary of State in Parliament. So, it's a really well-received scholarship. It's recognized and respected really highly and it pulls really interesting characters. I've just been blown away by the Nuffield scholars that do join up and sign up and the characters and again, like I said it before, the diversity of what they bring to the table. So through this journey and hopefully we're able to share that with you guys, just massive differences in cultures and agriculture, how they're doing it in different countries, what their perspectives are, what those policies are and what's really nice with that is the comparatives between where we are in our own lives and our own countries and you can take lessons from that which I think is very much at the core. And our field is being able to learn from others and what you can take from that and apply to your own lives. And then again, the characters, the characters are just amazing. And that's definitely with my own travels through now,

Philip Johan Odendaal
 0:07:50
 I have realized that we humans, you know, humans are pretty resilient full stop. And I think farmers are an amazing breed. And it's not just the story of Zimbabwe, Africa where there's strength. I mean, I've looked at Canada and we travel Canada quite extensively and you know how those farmers there are farming in isolation and how they're managing to deal with stuff and they have their hardships too, which is different to ours, but it's still incredibly commendable. And it's being able to take all the pieces from what I think is a really hardcore group of people and sharing it and being a part of it and just collectively draw strength and enjoying it because some of the personalities are really, really fun as well. Some great friends met on this journey too.

Casey Bradley
 0:08:33
 Well, that is incredible. But for our audience who wants to hear about pigs, do we plan on talking about pigs every once in a while?

Philip Johan Odendaal
 0:08:41
 Yeah, no, I'm definitely a big fan of it. Like I said, I look after 4,600 sows. So any day of the week we'll talk about guilt-rearing or born-alives or feed conversions. I'm not a nutritionist So I'm not gonna say that. I know what actually goes in the feed. Just hopefully we trust our nutritionist

Casey Bradley
 0:09:00
 Which I would hope you would Like the co-founder of the real p3

Philip Johan Odendaal
 0:09:05
 Well the pigs tell the story right so no definitely there's their stories about pigs and some of the people that come through are farmers. Hopefully I'm going to be speaking to a pig only vet in the next couple of days if we can make some time. And then yeah, again, one of the friendships I made through Nuffield is a lady who farms 22,000 sows in Canada and she's also a Nuffield scholar. So we would definitely be pulling on some of those other pig farmers, definitely the, I don't want to say it too loud, but the king of livestock.

Casey Bradley
 0:09:38
 So I love it.

Casey Bradley
 0:09:41
 But also, what is going on with your farm from it's been almost three years since we've had you on the real P3 and in times you talked about recession and different issues that you still face in Zimbabwe, but your company is growing. And what does that kind of mean for your company? And then I guess probably the more work for you.

Philip Johan Odendaal
 0:10:03
 It's a lot of work. We're putting down another thousand sales now. I don't know. It's a very difficult market to understand. I don't know if it's the same everywhere else in the world, but we do have a very unpredictable market. But I think we fall under a really big corporate with some really clever guys at the top and they're just working a lot of figures based on population growth. So we're going to have a huge boom in our population being in Africa.

Philip Johan Odendaal
 0:10:30
 We're currently 15.7 million people and without even an increase or a level up of consumer triangle just the population growth of more than 10, 15% in the next eight years, it warrants the growth. So they predicted it and we see it in the markets busy and the country is getting busy and there's a lot of people you see condensed in the cities. You can really hardly get it around the cities now because there's just so much traffic and so much people. And definitely in Africa, it's a country I would almost say, stop a bit of protein. So the minute there's a little bit extra disposal income, guys are going to chicken and the next thing after chicken is pork for something different and different on the palate. So yeah, there's opportunity, it's growth, it's fun to be a part of.

Casey Bradley
 0:11:16
 Still going to be some challenges that you have to overcome from being able to even just feed all these pigs.

Philip Johan Odendaal
 0:11:23
 Yeah, yeah, definitely. We look like we're in a drought year now as well. So a lot of our food has to be imported at this stage from other countries in the region. So feeding the animals is a problem, but we have already and we sort of saw the drought coming. So there was sort of a contract put in place a year in advance for maize and maize security because I doubt very much this country is gonna be able to sustain itself.

Philip Johan Odendaal
 0:11:49
 It was actually one of the study topics that I wanna look at for Nuffield in the beginning, which has changed, it's evolved. I think Nuffield can embrace that. That's the whole point of Nuffield to evolve. But I also wanted to really look at how do we remove swine competing with human food sources, but at the same time maintaining the production efficiencies of the animal. There's no point going backwards to 24 piglets in the Basabia. How do we keep it at 32 plus and how do we keep the CDMs and the FCEs where they are, but how do we reduce the impact of pigs actually taking away a primary food source from humans? And that's probably something we could talk about, you know, going forward in further episodes. I think it's a really interesting topic.

Casey Bradley
 0:12:30
 Well, I definitely think we have lots to talk about. So you'll hear some dual conversations. My audience was begging for more multinational, global perspectives, which has been a challenge for me. COVID, everybody was sitting in front of a computer. It was easy to get people to commit a time that works and get them on the podcast. But you're going to also see a unique flavor from Phillips or Johan. I'm going to call you both right. But you're going to have a different flavor. He's going to have some of these conversations in person.

Casey Bradley
 0:13:11
 And that's where we will hopefully be able to evolve into some video content as well, because in the past we've had bandwidth issues, and we can see right now, I think Johan is actually frozen, so we have issues with Starlink and different Wi-Fi's, and, you know, load shedding and different things across the world, but I think you're going to be my arm and my reach into different regions that I have a difficult place to be able to get in front of and help bring more unique perspectives to agriculture in general and people and how we can overcome anything. 

Philip Johan Odendaal
 0:13:52
 Yeah I'm really looking forward  to it and part of it, yeah my heart's desire is to do well by you and get it right and like I said I'm born and raised Zimbabwean, so you guys have to forgive me. If people don't want to do a podcast, I'm quite happy to hold them down and get them to talk about it. Some of my perspectives also may be different, so if any of the stuff I do say or not think about needs to be unpacked or challenged or spoken about, I'm really happy to do that because again, it's really coming from a third world perspective, which I think is incredibly foreign as well.

Casey Bradley
 0:14:23
 Well, I think this is exciting for the Real P3 to go on to this and we're gonna be unstoppable with our mission and Having growth and changing one person at a time. Yeah, that's that's how powerful it is one life Yes, but as always at the end of the podcast if you get a chance today Hug a pig for me and I know you'll you can do that a little easier than I can.

Philip Johan Odendaal
 0:14:51
 Yeah. Yeah.

Casey Bradley
 0:14:54
 Until next time, everybody.