Rob Cain

Rob Cain sells sea salt for soil, for cattle and for people, and spent about 25 years unable to get back to the idea.

Cain came on the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast because a show about salty people eventually has to talk to the salt man. Brad Banyas opened by admitting he had grown up being told to keep the shaker off the table, which is exactly what Cain did for years too. Cain's answer was that the sodium was never the point. Brad later told another guest, on a separate episode, that a teaspoon of Cain's salt in his gym water had stopped the leg cramps that used to wake him at night.

The salt comes off a stretch of Baja Mexico on the old Colorado River delta, which no longer flows. Seawater arrives on the tide, gets trapped in retention ponds, and the sun takes the water off. The only energy the operation spends is moving what is left. Ordinary food grade salt runs 97 to 99 percent sodium chloride, and Himalayan pink is about 94. Cain's runs as low as 72, which leaves 28 percent for the rest of the periodic table's inorganic salts. The garden application is a pound per hundred square feet, and he warns people it will look like nowhere near enough when they try to spread it over a ten by ten square. His point is that you do not need much of these minerals. You just need them.

Cain learned the process in the 1970s from the doctor who patented it, an MD who had traced sick people back to depleted soil in the 1940s. Then he put it down for a quarter of a century. He calls the gap a sabbatical and says he went out into the wilderness for a while, and he did not resurrect the technology until 2000, when circumstances finally made it possible to move. He also would not sell the human version until he had run it on himself first. He mixed the concentrated solution, took it every day for a year while travelling to conferences and shaking hands with strangers, and did not know what it was going to do to him. He did not catch a cold that year. He waited through a second year before he decided he could make it and share it.

Cain has never made a cold call. He gave seminars at two Acres USA conferences, went home, and answered the phone for twenty years. The Amish became his first big customers. Then cattlemen started calling because their herds were doing better, and then because they had been tasting it out at the barn and their wives would not cook with anything that came out of a fertilizer bag. That complaint is the only reason Baja Gold exists in a kitchen jar. Asked for his secret, Cain named a Bob Dylan song: everybody's got to serve somebody.