On this episode of the podcast, we are joined by Joe Ruzicka, who is a farmer, rancher, and small business owner. Joe and his wife Teresa own a small abattoir, a slaughterhouse, and a community slaughterhouse. In this episode, we talk about the differences between the food supply chain and the food system as it pertains to food production and processing. We also talk about what it means to be a small business and the challenges faced by farmers and ranchers in the current economic downturn. We also discuss the importance of having a food system that is locally sourced and locally sourced, rather than large-scale processing plants that are located in mega-designated facilities that are run by large corporations. And, as always, thank you for tuning into HYPEBEAST Radio and Business of HYPE. Please don't forget to rate, comment, and subscribe to our other shows MIC/LINE, The Anthropology, The HYPE Report, and HYPETALKS. Please take a quick moment to leave us a rating and review our podcast on Apple Podcasts. Rate/subscribe in iTunes. Please tell a friend about our podcast and tell us what you think of our podcast. We'll be looking out for you in the next episode! Timestamps: 1:00 - What's your favorite food? 2:30 - What do you like about it? 3:15 - What would you like to see more of? 4: What are you worried about? 5:40 - How do you think about your food production? 6: What can you eat? 7: What do we eat more? 8:20 - What does it taste like? 9:00 11: What is your favorite kind of beef? 13: What does your favorite type of meat? 14:50 - What is a beef beef? What s your favorite beef beef meal? 15:00 | What does a beef cow? 16:40 | What s a beef steer? 17:30 | What's a beef steak? 18:20 | What kind of meat do you would you need? 19:50 | What are your beef beef beef cut? 21:30 22:30 Is there a beef sheave? 26:40 What s the beef beef I ve veg? ? 27:30 // 22:10 | Is it a beefie?
00:00:05.000This is a perfect time to talk to someone like you about our food.
00:00:11.000We're in a very strange crisis now, and you just keep hearing time and time again in the news how much ranchers and farmers and people are really suffering right now, and how much Folks who don't have anything to do with that are now being forced to understand the importance of the food supply chain and ranchers and farmers and all the stuff that we've taken for granted for quite a long time now.
00:00:37.000And what's interesting about it is the juxtaposition between the, I'll just call it the industrial, the more, you know, a commercial industrial food sector versus the sector that I'm in, which is a local-centric, you know,
00:00:53.000direct sale branded product, you know, directly from the farm.
00:00:57.000The pandemic is the best marketing strategy we've ever seen.
00:01:01.000We're having the best season we've ever had.
00:01:06.000And the same thing was with farmers around the country as I talked to them.
00:01:10.000Everyone that's like us, that did not go into the supermarket system basically, that's selling in their community, in their region, regionally, directly off the farm, having the best year we've ever had.
00:02:17.000I mean, if you think about it right now, Joe, probably in the United States, the only places right now where every day thousands of people come together in crowded conditions,
00:02:59.000And the difference in the vulnerability, in the exposure and risk factor between our little 20-person facility where we do, you know, maybe 50 to 70 beeves a week,
00:03:15.000100 hogs, Versus these mega plants that have...
00:04:21.000And, you know, it's been in business for, I don't know, what, 60 years or so.
00:04:26.000We've only co-owned it now for a little bit less than 10 years.
00:04:30.000But the difference, because we do stuff by hand, workstations, you know, these stainless steel work tables are, what, you know, six, seven, eight feet?
00:05:07.000Completely different environment than when you're having 3,000 people in a cool, damp environment from—and I don't want to get into a rabbit trail discussion,
00:05:22.000but frankly, in these great, great big plants, most of the workers— Are generally not Americans.
00:05:28.000They're coming from other countries looking for the American dream.
00:05:32.000And so they're living in crowded conditions because they're trying to save every penny to send home to get uncle and aunt and other family members here from Ethiopia, Somalia, wherever it is.
00:05:44.000And so they're living in a house that we would live for in a house.
00:05:50.000They're living 20. And they're eating poorly.
00:05:56.000They're often separated from their family.
00:05:59.000There's just a lot of stress in their lives and...
00:06:04.000And so then you throw these big processing facilities, they're not eating well, and it's just an incubator.
00:06:13.000I mean, if you wanted to create an incubator for a virus, there wouldn't be a better place.
00:06:17.000Whereas small facilities are inherently, the workers are spread out, they tend to come from the community, they tend to be career craft people rather than just, you know, make this cut, Mac.
00:06:31.000The average poultry processing plant in our area, they say that every job can be learned in 20 minutes.
00:07:26.000And, you know, you've got to kind of take a little bit, a grain of salt, too.
00:07:33.000But one of the things we're certainly learning is that there's an advantage, that there is a density factor, a people density factor, like an urban, rural, you know, spreading out.
00:07:45.000The whole social distancing spreading out thing is...
00:07:52.000And so if we take that into the food system, wouldn't it be an amazing thing if instead of having 150 to 200 mega processing facilities doing 98% of the nation's meat, if instead that were 200,000 Small-scale,
00:08:13.000community-based, ecologically nested facilities, you know, all around the countryside, that would be an incredibly resilient system.
00:08:26.000It sounds like a much better system like as you were talking before about your relationship with your customers It's a direct to farm.
00:08:33.000I mean that's really ideal right cut out the middle person There's you cut out the confusion whether or not the animals are ethically raised or ethically slaughtered like what are the conditions they're living under I mean your poly face farms right so that that whole video that you have that I've seen that explains The way you do regenerative farming and you let these animals live the way these animals are supposed to live.
00:09:00.000And you get a better product, you get a healthier product, and you get a better relationship with both the animals and the people that you sell this food to.
00:09:11.000And ultimately, what we're looking for is a habitat that allows each life form, whether it's a plant or an animal, to fully express – we call it expressing the pigness of the pig or the chickeness of the chicken.
00:09:24.000You could say the tomato-ness of the tomato.
00:09:27.000And creating a habitat that allows that life – That life to express its phenotypical and physiological distinctiveness.
00:09:40.000In humans, we would call this self-affirmation, you know, the Tom-ness of Tom, the Joe-ness of Joe, right?
00:09:51.000And one of the things that we're seeing as a result, as we move into the kind of the social consequences of this whole pandemic, is there's a new phrase called the Screen New Deal,
00:10:08.000where everything is going to AI, we're dehumanizing.
00:10:13.000And so at a very time when people need to be personally affirmed, they're being denied their You know, their social humanity element.
00:10:25.000I mean, you can't even see whether a person's smiling or frowning.
00:11:31.000But the doctor did explain to us that there's primary immune system and there's secondary immune system.
00:11:35.000Your primary immune system, most likely, if you've been in contact with it, and his has.
00:11:40.000The doctor has been around many, many people that have had it.
00:11:43.000But your primary immune system, if you're healthy, he was saying, fights it off.
00:11:47.000Your secondary immune system is if you have had the infection and your body has developed those antibodies, it's your second line of defense.
00:11:56.000So, most likely your first line of defense, since you have been in contact with people that have had it, your first line of defense beat it.
00:12:13.000Explain what you do to strengthen your immune system.
00:12:17.000In this whole thing, like you, I've been screaming, let's talk about the immune system.
00:12:24.000I literally have not been sick A day, basically, in 20 years.
00:12:30.000I mean, not the flu, not a cold, not, I mean, just nothing.
00:12:34.000And I'm 63. So I'm not saying that arrogantly or proudly.
00:12:39.000I'm saying it gratefully that I think there are things that we can do to really build up our immune system.
00:12:46.000One of the things that I do that kind of makes all my staff laugh is that I routinely bend down with the cows and drink water out of the cow tank.
00:12:57.000I don't drink it when it's pond water, although I've drunk pond water.
00:13:02.000But when it's fairly clean water, I get down.
00:13:07.000Of course, the cows are dripping saliva and stuff in it, and I just drink right out of it just like a cow.
00:14:24.000It's like a drama, it's like a play that's going on inside of us, outside of us, and the thought that we can somehow, whatever, you know, isolate ourselves and extract ourselves from this magnificent life conversation that's going on in us,
00:15:22.000But for the rest of us that are generally healthy, going about our daily stuff, I mean, goodness, worry affects your cortisol limits almost more than anything.
00:17:02.000And I think that's one of the things we're finding out from this crisis.
00:17:05.000Is that when you talk about protecting vulnerable people, there's a lot of us that are vulnerable.
00:17:11.000Maybe not you or me, but a large number of people that are overweight, that eat poor food, and that don't take care of themselves, and those people are particularly vulnerable.
00:17:22.000And so they're right to be afraid, but they're wrong to think that the only way to solve this is to make sure that you stay away from everybody.
00:17:31.000The way to solve this is to stop eating shit and become a healthy person.
00:17:37.000While you're alive, there's always a moment, a chance to be healthier.
00:19:17.000And just like in our lifetime, Joe, we've learned to say words that when I was a child, did you ever hear the term, you know, salmonella, E. coli, campylobacter, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, food allergy even?
00:19:34.000I mean, how many kids in elementary school did you know that had food allergies?
00:19:42.000Mom isn't having to email—we didn't even have email back then—but mom isn't calling all the other mothers saying, well, now, what can your child eat and what can your little Mary have?
00:19:52.000And, you know, oh, we better not have any peanuts.
00:19:56.000And what's happened—the way I look at this is that humanity, that we as collective humanity, we've essentially taken this beautiful, benevolent earth, this benevolent A sustainer,
00:20:14.000partner, mentor, abundant provider, and taking this partner to the boxing ring, and instead of caressing This abundant, wonderful partner provider,
00:20:38.000We've put a dead zone the size of Rhode Island in the Gulf of Mexico.
00:20:44.000We've used antibiotics in animals and made MRSA and C. diff and superbugs.
00:20:49.000And so nature has been gently, gently Begging for relief as we've essentially put our foot on her neck, right?
00:21:01.000And she's saying, E. coli, salmonella, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, right?
00:21:11.000Including diabetes and all these other things.
00:21:15.000And we simply don't listen and continue to pummel and eventually...
00:21:21.000Eventually, when our benevolent nest, whatever, you know, is KO'd, we find out, oops, maybe we should have paid attention.
00:21:37.000Yeah, and I think a real parallel is when you were talking about these large-scale meat processing plants are a perfect sort of petri dish for viruses to grow so...
00:21:51.000So are these farms where you're stuffing pigs next to each other.
00:21:54.000You're doing all this unnatural stuff, right?
00:21:56.000It's unnatural for people to be stuffed into a warehouse right next to each other, shoulder to shoulder, working all day.
00:22:02.000It's unnatural for them to be stuffed into these homes, shoulder to shoulder, with bad food and all the things that you would need to keep your body healthy and strong.
00:22:11.000The same can be said about these factory farm situations.
00:22:14.000One thing that I find so attractive about the way you run your farm is that there's no weirdness in watching these animals during the day.
00:22:22.000They seem like animals just doing normal stuff.
00:22:25.000If you see a chicken wandering around just pecking at the grass, Looks normal.
00:22:29.000See a chicken in a cage getting fed out of a little cup or something, it looks all kinds of fucked up, right?
00:22:38.000We have the phrase, respecting the pigness of the pig and the chickenness of the chicken.
00:22:45.000And we know that these diseases are all coming from these places.
00:22:48.000I mean, there's a ton of agricultural diseases.
00:22:51.000You know, that are based from these factory farm situations where these animals live in these really horrific conditions and then the bacteria jump and...
00:23:07.000They're breathing in their fecal particulate matter, which is, you know, putting lesions in their tender respiratory membranes, making lesions there.
00:23:20.000And so when you have those kinds of conditions – and they're not getting exercise.
00:25:03.000So two things to realize is the bottleneck in the food system right now, the reason the supermarket is low on meat is not because there aren't animals in the field.
00:25:24.000So it's the processing that's the bottleneck.
00:25:27.000And so my vision is that – so we get two questions.
00:25:35.000First of all, let's deal with the production.
00:25:36.000With the production, absolutely, if we spread out the production, if we did, for example, if we took all the confinement chicken houses and put those chickens on pasture – No problem.
00:25:52.000It doesn't take any more land to grow the feed for a chicken on pasture than it does in a confinement house.
00:26:01.000Don't you get a lot more lost, though, due to raptors and things along those lines?
00:26:44.000And so, for example, I know one guy that's – it's not ready to sell yet, but he claims to have had great success putting reflective Coke can bottoms on like a traffic cone.
00:27:26.000They have a cannon that blows out pieces of aluminum foil, basically, like graffiti, aluminum foil graffiti out into the air, and it jams the whatever, you know, the honing devices of a missile.
00:28:31.000Now, one of the things that it would require is many more people on farms.
00:28:37.000So, you know, I've thought a lot about, obviously, as unemployment has skyrocketed through this, Right now, sitting here, it's hard for us to imagine what it'll take to fill football stadiums again,
00:28:55.000to fill Caribbean cruises, to fill theaters, music venues, whatever, boxing matches.
00:29:07.000Right now, it's hard to conceive what it'll take.
00:29:24.000And I would suggest that one of the things that people can do is that we can have a lot of these smaller plants and we have way more people actually growing food, participating in food production personally.
00:30:56.000If you start putting dollars on these externalized costs, you know, the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, the fact that we have, you know, hundreds of square miles that don't grow shrimp anymore, you know, because it's toxic from the runoff from the Mississippi, from chemical farming.
00:31:12.000So there's a lot of these externalized costs.
00:31:16.000And not only that, but if this actually became normative, The new way, the new orthodoxy, there would be definitely economies of scale that we don't have right now.
00:31:30.000I mean, I'll just give you one example that probably nobody would think of.
00:31:33.000So we pay workman's compensation at our farm.
00:31:37.000So how do you determine the exposure level, the risk factor of a poultry worker?
00:31:42.000I mean, think about if you have a Tyson chicken farm and you hire an employee to be in the chicken house, Think about his workman's comp risk.
00:31:55.000I mean, there's fecal particulate all day long that he's breathing.
00:32:33.000And so part of the cost, the reason that our chicken is more expensive than what's in the store, is not only externalized cost, but it is unrecognized cost.
00:32:46.000Unrecognized savings that we offer that can't be captured in a Square peg in a round hole.
00:33:19.000Much of our increased cost has nothing to do with actual production cost.
00:33:26.000It's the non-scalable regulatory overheads And this, of course, is why we don't have more community small-scale abattoirs around the country.
00:33:40.000It's not because there's not a demand for them.
00:33:42.000It's because the paperwork, the HACCP plans, hazardous analysis critical control point plans, and the paperwork to be able to launch Is
00:34:50.000Right now, the only way that you can sell a T-bone, if you want to buy a T-bone steak for me, the only way for you to get it is for me to go to a federal-inspected slaughterhouse, get the animal processed, packaged under inspection, and put in for you.
00:35:06.000Custom houses are where if you want to buy a half a beef, a quarter beef, all right, and it goes in with your name on that quarter and they're custom processing it for me, yeah, then I can buy it.
00:35:19.000And what Congressman Massey is saying with the Prime Act is, Why should we discriminate and only allow people to tap into the lower cost and lower overheads of the custom processing facility to only those people who can afford to buy a quarter of beef at a time?
00:35:53.000If we want to do business together, and I'm using a powerful phrasing here, as consenting adults, if we want to exercise freedom of choice and participate in a consensual relationship of commerce,
00:36:10.000why should that be a bureaucrat's business between two consenting neighbors?
00:36:19.000So what you're saying is long, but is the regulatory process in place to make sure that people are using the proper sanitation methods, making sure that the animals are healthy, making sure that all these things are in place so that unscrupulous characters don't take advantage of the system and then screw over the consumer and the consumer gets sick?
00:36:40.000This is like best case scenario for the regulation, right?
00:36:49.000And I would simply ask that at some point, when you have a very close, transparent relationship one-on-one, you don't have truckers and warehouses and big slaughterhouses and supermarkets,
00:37:06.000blah, blah, blah, in between us, there is We're good to go.
00:37:37.000You can keep up to three in your home without subjecting yourself to the licensing and compliance of daycare regulations because they know if all you're going to do is keep three in your homes, those parents, you're going to have a close relationship with them.
00:38:55.000And so all I would say is that from the safety issue That there needs to be some place, a point at which we can opt to do business with each other without a bureaucrat involved.
00:39:13.000If you wanted to slaughter a cow and then you wanted to give some of the meat away to your neighbor, would you have to bring it to some sort of a facility?
00:40:05.000But everything else in society that we've determined is a hazardous – a controlled substance, a hazardous substance, the prohibition is both on seller and buyer.
00:40:15.000And I don't want to go down that rabbit hole either of I'm a pretty libertarian drug, let it all go.
00:40:23.000But without regard to that, the prohibitions are equal on even possession.
00:40:30.000If you want to have a ton of cocaine in your house, Even if you just went over there in a corner on a pallet, yeah, I've got a ton of cocaine here, what's wrong with that?
00:40:45.000But when it comes to food products, the prohibitions are only on one side, and they don't include if you give it away.
00:40:54.000So if it was really dangerous, you shouldn't be able to buy it, you shouldn't be able to possess it, and you shouldn't be able to give it away.
00:41:08.000And second of all, the idea is you're trying to protect the consumer.
00:41:13.000And I think that they have exceptions for these small situations where you're the farmer and maybe this guy's growing tomatoes and you trade him some filet mignon for some tomatoes.
00:42:42.000On your own and sell that, what is it about selling something that suddenly turns it from benign to hazardous?
00:42:52.000Well, I think it's just protection for the consumer.
00:42:54.000And I think it's also like it'd be fine if it was a small neighborhood where you knew the farmer and you had a great relationship with them.
00:43:02.000But they're talking about doing things at scale when you're talking about selling food to, you know, a large city.
00:43:08.000You can't really just hope the guy did a good job.
00:43:14.000The argument for regulation is when things scale up, when you need someone to step in and protect the consumers, because if there is one bad actor who's not taking care of it, he has the potential of sickening thousands of people.
00:43:25.000Right, which is exactly the argument for decentralizing And de-amalgamating as opposed to centralizing and amalgamating.
00:43:39.000The factory farms that I've seen in videos where they have these pigs, they're stuffed next to each other in this large warehouse and the same with the chickens.
00:43:48.000How much space would you need to have the same amount of chickens and the same amount of pigs if you let them free range?
00:43:57.000What you don't see in those videos is you don't see The hundreds of acres growing corn and soybeans To feed them in that house.
00:44:07.000The industry wants you to think that this is some sort of an island.
00:44:13.000Boy, we're cranking this out of this house.
00:44:16.000They're not showing you the tractor trailers bringing in the grain and hauling out the manure and the square miles of fields to spread the manure.
00:44:25.000They're not showing you how dependent that is on this massive land base.
00:44:29.000And so in the pastured model, the decentralized pastured model, Instead of having 15,000—I mean, our farm, we're going to raise like 45,000 chickens this summer.
00:45:52.000So we buy from neighbors who do GMO-free, non-genetically modified, GMO-free grain, and we give them I think?
00:46:21.000In the kind of situation I'm describing, instead of having a fundamentally segregated food system, you have a fundamentally integrated food system.
00:47:56.000And this is one of the reasons that we're having this, I think, this blowback from nature is that instead of having a fundamentally integrated system, I mean, think of how in Switzerland, you know, they take the cows up to the mountain pastures,
00:48:11.000they milk, and the milk flows down and they make cheese up there.
00:48:16.000The whey from the cheese goes into the The pigs eat the whey, and so instead of transporting milk to a centralized cheese maker and pigs to a centralized processor,
00:48:32.000they're actually making the cheese on site.
00:48:35.000So all they've got to actually transport is cheese and pork.
00:48:42.000So they slaughter, you know, contiguous nearby, not on the same farm necessarily, but nearby.
00:48:49.000So you don't have all this transportation.
00:48:51.000What you have is a fundamentally decentralized, we could even say democratized, could we say food distancing, that creates resiliency in the system.
00:49:05.000So instead of being tied to these 100 or 150 mega processing facilities, We're decentralized throughout the land base.
00:49:16.000How much more money do you think it would cost for food?
00:49:19.000We kind of touched on this earlier, but if you're dealing with this more natural-based system and it's more complex, it's going to require more people, and it's going to require complete restructuring of the system that's currently in place.
00:53:04.000I mean, one of the biggest One of the biggest things that this virus has brought out, you know, they say that the crisis never makes, it never makes a trend.
00:53:14.000It simply accelerates or brings into focus a trend that was already there.
00:53:20.000And one of the trends that's been happening in this country now for 20 years is a bifurcation of access between rural and urban to the internet.
00:53:30.000Like on our farm, you know, We still have hours of the day where we can't get cell phone service.
00:54:10.000But when you're running a business, or you're trying to do schoolwork from home, so what's happening is we're now getting a very accelerated urban-rural divide of opportunity because rural,
00:54:36.000And I'm not asking for big government programs, but I am telling you that this access to broadband internet, especially now as we start Working from home.
00:54:53.000And as we have people there, there are lots of people, I'm sure you probably know some, that are saying, I'm getting out of the city and I ain't going back.
00:54:59.000I mean, right now, New York City, all the movie companies in New York, their warehouses are stuck full of people who called them and said, I fled the city from the coronavirus.
00:55:10.000I want you to clean out my apartment, put it in a warehouse, and I'll tell you where to send it when I get myself situated.
00:55:16.000I mean, that's a phenomenon that's already happening.
00:55:20.000Well, where are those people going to go?
00:55:22.000I mean, ideally, we would actually spread out and create a more, you know, spread out population on the landscape.
00:55:33.000Well, people are realizing the hazards of living on top of each other like that, not just because of virus and the things spread like wildfire through the population, but also when you have to get out.
00:55:45.000If something goes down and you got to get out of there and you realize, like, I don't even have a car.
00:56:11.000I was watching this documentary on the construction of viruses, this piece, and they were talking about when they give an 18-month window for creating a vaccine for this virus.
00:56:55.000I had Dr. Peter Hotez on, who is an expert in vaccines and infectious diseases and tropical diseases.
00:57:01.000And one of the things that he was saying that if you get the flu shot, even if it's not for the correct strain, there's still enough pieces of this that will protect you from getting really bad sickness from the flu strain, even if it's the wrong strain.
00:58:05.000We need to be asking as a nation—I mean, I'm still waiting for when they do the daily briefs up there in the White House—I'm still waiting for somebody up there, anybody, somebody, to step to the microphone and say, look, folks— Let's talk about immunity.
00:58:23.000Let's talk about how you build immunity.
00:58:26.000And the fact that we're in the middle of this and we've still got the coke trucks running up and down the road.
00:58:31.000And look, I like a coke, you know, once a year, twice a year.
00:58:36.000But there's a big difference between doing that and three times a day.
01:01:07.000In fact, there's an entire school of thought.
01:01:12.000You know, this hyperallergenic thing where a lot of the allergies we have today are because we're so sterile.
01:01:21.000I mean, this was part of the kind of unspoken part of the book Guns, Germs, and Steel.
01:01:28.000You know, that was a fascinating book, and it talked about the ascendancy of the Europeans who kept livestock in their house, and that's why they We're immune to smallpox and all these things that were devastating to the other people that didn't have nearby livestock.
01:01:43.000And so we want our customers to come out and pet a calf, go in the brooder and pick up a chick and hold a chicken.
01:01:51.000And we think that that's really, really...
01:01:59.000I would be interested to see what's going to happen when people do go back to normal life with these compromised immune systems from being inside all the time, whether or not just regular common cold kicks in on a larger scale.
01:02:15.000I can't give you names right now, but I'm like you.
01:02:18.000I'm sleuthing all this different material.
01:02:21.000And I can tell you there are numerous medical doctors who are saying that as we come out of this, we're going to see a spate of exactly colds, flu, different things, because we haven't been exercising our immune systems in this soup.
01:02:42.000It was interesting, his reaction the other day when he got the report, the data now, there's, you know, more data is coming out every day.
01:02:47.000And one of the reports that just came out last week was that in New York, the people who continued working actually had less, less, whatever, positives to the virus than the people who sheltered across the demographic,
01:03:32.000But if you're working and you're building and you're creating and you're doing your things, sure, you might think about the virus once in a while.
01:04:12.000Well, the media's played into it, and also people are hearing terrible stories about emergency rooms, particularly in New York City and places where it's stuffed full of people, and the hospitals are overrun, the ICUs are overrun.
01:04:25.000Thank goodness that that has sort of calmed down, even in New York City.
01:04:29.000Cuomo basically said today that they're back to where they were when the pandemic exploded, so...
01:04:35.000It's nice that they've sort of leveled that out, but what's going to happen when you just let people out again?
01:04:40.000Are they going to start getting sick like crazy again?
01:04:42.000I mean, is it going to be another spread?
01:04:44.000There's a real worry about that, and we're worried that during this time, we haven't been encouraging people to build up their immune system.
01:04:51.000We have been encouraging them to exercise.
01:04:58.000And so, you know, interestingly, I've got a book that's actually, we'll have in hand in whatever, 10 days, a new book coming out I've written with a nutritionist biochemist, Dr. Sina McCullough.
01:05:15.000And the title of the book is Beyond Labels.
01:05:19.000And it's a doctor and a farmer Lead you to a place of food empowerment.
01:05:27.000You know, when you stand in front of a bunch of labels and you see everything from organic certified to fair trade to, you know, natural, they're very confusing.
01:05:43.000And what happens is when you're faced with So much choice of label information, you tend to just shut down.
01:06:07.000She, from this chemistry standpoint, me from a farmer's standpoint, trying to cut through this.
01:06:12.000And so people can be empowered to actually make food decisions.
01:06:20.000And we talk a lot about immunity, feeding your microbiome, to build that up so that you have a diversified enough I've exercised enough immune system that you can withstand this.
01:06:34.000And so I think that developing a robust immune system, think about if that occupied your mind, how am I going to develop a robust immune system?
01:06:51.000Just think about Dwelling on that as opposed to, oh no, am I going to get it?
01:07:33.000And I think this kind of fear, particularly, I mean, the way I was experiencing it, when the Lockdown was first ordered and everyone was at the supermarket.
01:07:42.000No one was wearing masks yet, but everyone was stockpiling food.
01:07:48.000We were real nervous because we didn't know what this was going to be like.
01:07:51.000And we were also, I was nervous particularly because I feel like the information we were getting out of China was not correct.
01:07:57.000And I was worried that when you see those videos of them spraying disinfectant on houses and buildings, it's like maybe this is way worse than we think it is and it's going to hit America really hard because we've been lied to by the Chinese.
01:08:19.000I didn't sleep real good at all for maybe the first few days of lockdown until I sort of calmed down and realized, well, I'm not going anywhere.
01:08:30.000I'm like, okay, well, this is nice to know that I don't have it currently.
01:08:34.000Maybe if I just keep doing what I'm doing, I won't get it.
01:08:38.000Then, you know, I'd have days where half the day I'd think, this is all bullshit.
01:08:43.000What we need to do is tell people how to strengthen their immune system, and then you read some crazy story about some new inflammatory syndrome they're finding on, you know, some patients where, you know, their feet are swelling up.
01:09:00.000And I think that that brings up the issue of how our society now views death.
01:09:06.000I read an interesting article just in the last couple of days about how – as we have left – it used to be when we were kids, We use the term, somebody dropped dead.
01:09:25.000Well, today, we don't say they dropped dead.
01:09:28.000We say apparently medicine failed them or the hospital failed.
01:09:32.000It's like instead of just people, yeah, we do drop dead.
01:09:37.000Instead, every death is some sort of a failure of our techno-sophisticated cryogenic, you know, It's a system that's supposed to keep everybody, you know,
01:11:36.000But my thing is that, look, I don't want a bunch of people to die, but the fact is that That death is transformative, and I don't want to get all too mystical and spiritual, but whatever your spiritual tradition is – mine happens to be Judeo-Christian ethics,
01:11:56.000so I think there is an afterlife – but even if there's nothing, even if you say, well, I'm dead and there's no spirit and I'm gone, even so, that makes room For tomorrow's babies.
01:12:12.000It makes room for new ideas, new things.
01:12:15.000I mean, you can't have life without the regenerative capacity of death and the foundation of ecology.
01:12:44.000And when we get sterilized and move away from that, I think we lose the beauty of the transformative capacity of that part of life.
01:13:03.000Yeah, I think it speaks to what you were talking about earlier, that they look at death as some sort of a failure instead of just a part of the natural cycle.
01:13:10.000I was reading about one of the, you know, they try to find new ways that the coronavirus looks terrible in articles.
01:13:17.000And one thing they were saying was it takes between two and ten years off the life expectancy of the average person who gets it.
01:13:28.000I'm like, okay, well, how did you come to that conclusion?
01:13:30.000Well, they came to that conclusion because they looked at old people who got it that might have possibly lived, you know, seven, eight years, five years more, and they just started doing these random calculations based on how old people normally die.
01:13:45.000But then the problem with that is if you look at the overall numbers, the average age that people die from coronavirus is actually older than the average age people die.
01:13:56.000Which is like, well, what are you saying then?
01:13:59.000It's taking years off some people's lives, but everything does.
01:14:02.000If you fall down, it takes years off your life if you're old, right?
01:14:32.000I mean, cigarettes, no one even touched with a 10-foot pole because cigarettes was killing people at four and five times the rate coronavirus was.
01:14:40.000And no one was saying anything of it because it's an elective thing.
01:14:59.000Yeah, well, I think a couple of things.
01:15:03.000One is that, you know, our country has never told people, when we talk about, you know, personal self-worth and your own personal affirmation in a climate of fear and worry, the worst thing you can do is tell lots of people,
01:15:19.000you're not important, you're not essential.
01:15:24.000Yeah, you know what you've been doing all your life, what you do every day?
01:17:18.000And I think this is along those lines.
01:17:21.000We're looking at death through the coronavirus, but We're saying, oh, you're putting dollars over lives.
01:17:29.000You're saying the economy is more important than people's lives.
01:17:32.000No, we're saying you need a nuanced perspective because if you ignore the economy, it actually costs lives, and it costs a staggering number of lives, and in a horrible way – suicide, drug addiction, depression.
01:17:46.000And if I may go a little – just one other little Thread on this whole thing.
01:17:53.000Again, thinking about, well, how can we employ all the people?
01:17:59.000I mean, if our discretionary spending, if this is going to make people more careful about discretionary spending, you know, flying to Paris, going on a Caribbean cruise, going to the Sandals.
01:18:13.000Do you know how cheap those Caribbean cruises are?
01:18:16.000Jamie and I have been going over this.
01:18:18.000It's basically cheaper than being homeless.
01:18:20.000You could be on a cruise for like five to seven nights for 105 bucks with all you can eat.
01:18:28.000Where are you going to get that kind of food?
01:19:59.000So we integrate forest with open land.
01:20:04.000And we integrate the carbon from the forest, so we cut junk trees, dead trees, crooked trees, weak trees, and thin the forest.
01:20:19.000And that enables the good trees, the healthy trees, to grow more vigorously, better, reduces fire potential because you're thinning it out, taking out all the dead stuff.
01:20:32.000And that then becomes our carbon base for bedding the animals and for all the composting that we do.
01:20:40.000And we do mountains and mountains of compost.
01:20:57.000I mean, look at the devastation that fires have caused.
01:21:00.000Imagine if we had thousands of people with chippers thinning the forest Turning them into almost park-like,
01:21:17.000like they were before the Europeans came, the Native Americans kept them going with fire, but there was megafauna here, megafauna.
01:21:25.000And so we graze through, we convert a lot of it into silvopasture, widely spaced trees that are growing unimpeded with grazing animals underneath so that there's no fire damage, there's no buildup of fuel.
01:21:41.000And suddenly we're producing our own food and we're eliminating the danger of wildfire with technology called chainsaws and chippers and that carbon becomes the fertility for the vineyards and the agricultural lands.
01:21:57.000It feeds the soil, so now we have earthworms instead of hard soil.
01:22:01.000We don't have erosion because our organic matter is up.
01:22:04.000On our farm, using these principles, we've gone from 1% organic matter to over 8% organic matter in the soil, and every 1% holds another 20,000 gallons of water per acre.
01:22:55.000When you start talking about holding water, it's not just about How much rainfall are we getting?
01:23:02.000It's how much are we actually holding in the sponge to reduce flooding and runoff and things like that.
01:23:08.000So it sounds like your method could keep from the situation they find with some farms with the roting topsoil where they have to constantly supplement.
01:23:21.000Like if you want to have like those monocrop agricultural fields where you see Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of acres of corn, just corn, or just soybeans, or just alfalfa, whatever it is.
01:23:32.000Like, if you want to do those monocrop things, how are you going to re-fertilize the soil in the same manner with that large scale?
01:24:39.000So another huge percentage, like 20%, goes to feed cattle.
01:24:44.000And then another huge percent goes to hogs and chickens, of course.
01:24:48.000But one of the problems with the hogs and chickens is that they are not integrated with the food system.
01:24:54.000So right now, 50 percent, almost 50 percent, it's arguable, you know, what statistician, again, figures lie and liars figure, but somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of human edible food on the planet is never eaten by a human.
01:25:13.000It spoils, it's thrown away, and 75% of everything that goes in the landfills is biodegradable.
01:25:21.000So when you start matching up the waste, the waste streams and the losses in our food system and our waste streams, what happens is very quickly you start seeing that it's the segregated, it's this single species,
01:25:38.000single crop, single segregated notion Where it's not related, it's not symbiotic, it's not synergistic, that actually creates the problem.
01:25:51.000A city in Belgium, this was articulated in Pat Foreman's wonderful book, the title is City Chicks, and she's talking about urban chickens.
01:25:59.000A city in Belgium offered three chickens per household to anybody that wanted a chicken.
01:26:07.000And they had 2,000 families raised their hands and said, yeah, we'll take three chickens.
01:26:11.000So they got 6,000 chickens, distributed them through this city.
01:26:15.000And in the first month, it dropped 100 tons of food waste to the landfill.
01:26:23.000And so not only did they eliminate the landfill waste, all these people now suddenly had chickens.
01:26:29.000And Pat's done all the math on this and shows that if one in three households had enough chickens to eat your kitchen scraps, there would not be an egg industry in the United States.
01:27:01.000And the landfill would get way, way less material.
01:27:06.000And so then the chickens don't need the corn from the cornfields, so the fields can be turned back into prairie to feed herbivores, which now would be cows, not bison.
01:27:22.000And so now you're at perennials instead of annuals, and perennials instead of annuals, perennials put energy in the soil, annuals extract energy from the soil.
01:27:33.000So now suddenly you're producing, instead of producing an annual fertilized with petroleum to feed beef for somebody else, instead You're not growing the corn,
01:27:50.000you don't need the tractor, you don't need the petroleum, the cows fertilize it themselves, and the perennial builds the soil like it did with the bison, and you have the beef, instead of coming out of a feedlot, it's coming off the prairie,
01:28:30.000Corn is – I mean, that kind of monocrop, monospeciated thing is a complete – I mean, we started the interview talking about standing on nature on her neck, you know.
01:28:50.000And the reason our farm was so deteriorated when we came to it was because we're in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, and that was the breadbasket of the Confederacy during the Civil War, if you know your history.
01:29:03.000And essentially the war was finally won when they burned all the crops in the Shenandoah Valley.
01:29:10.000And during that time, The valley lost somewhere between three and five feet of soil during that time period.
01:29:23.000So the soils are worn out and then we got the westward expansion and it all moved to Ohio and Indiana and then finally the Dakotas and, you know, kept heading west.
01:29:31.000So this head west, young man head west, was partly because our agriculture destroyed the soils.
01:29:39.000And if we don't start using our agriculture to build soils, We have a lot more to worry about than a COVID-19 deal.
01:29:52.000If we don't figure out a way to produce food abundantly and grow soil while we're doing it, The pandemic is going to be the least of our concerns.
01:30:03.000There's a thing that keeps getting repeated, and it's that we only have 60 more seasons left in our topsoil.
01:30:10.000This is a thing that gets repeated almost as if there's no solution to this, that because we have to feed so many people, we're doomed.
01:30:18.000And what you're saying is, no, we just can't do it this way because this way is unsustainable and it's unnatural to begin with.
01:30:47.000I mean, the fact that landfills get green environmental awards for poking methane tubes in the landfill and running the excavation equipment on the methane from the decomposing material in a landfill It shouldn't be in there.
01:32:28.000So when we look at the megafauna that was here, you know, the fact is that the planet used to have more animal weight on it than it does today with all the animals, all the factory farms, and all the people.
01:32:42.000So it's not people and animals that are messing up the planet.
01:32:48.000It's the human management of the ecosystem that's messing up.
01:32:52.000The abundance here is through the roof.
01:32:55.000So imagine if we, and this is what we've been doing on our farm, is every time we get a few extra dollars, we build another pond.
01:33:05.000Now, we're not beavers, but we have excavation equipment that we can go in and build ponds.
01:33:13.000So that when we have a flood and everything is flooding, we're actually trapping a lot of that, not all of it, but trapping a lot of it up on high ground permaculture style that we can then dispense for irrigation in a dry time so that...
01:33:32.000When you pump from an aquifer, you're depleting the commons.
01:33:35.000But if you're reducing flooding and using that in a drought to keep vegetation growing when there's so much sunlight, then you're actually increasing the commons.
01:33:45.000And we believe very strongly that as a result of our farming, We should not be depleting the commons.
01:33:54.000As a result, there should be more soil, more water, more breathable air, more wildlife, more pollinators, more...
01:34:01.000There's also been a false narrative that attributes most of our greenhouse gases or a significant number, a significant percentage of our greenhouse gases coming from cows.
01:34:15.000And one of the things that they found through using satellite imaging and trying to detect methane, they're finding it's landfills.
01:34:25.000These landfills are a huge, huge problem in terms of greenhouse gases.
01:34:30.000The total wrong way of approaching it, the way you were saying...
01:34:35.000Burying this biological material in the ground instead of using it as compost is actually not just counterproductive, but it's actually detrimental.
01:34:45.000It's not the wrong way to do it because it doesn't serve the soil.
01:35:02.000If all the biomass that we have, what's the word, non-leveraged or thrown away, if all the biomass we've thrown away in the last hundred years, if it had instead been leveraged for Soil building,
01:35:25.000Today, we would not have all that methane, and today, we would have soils that would be a lot richer, and we would have better earthworm populations.
01:35:37.000We'd have a tremendous amount of soil, maintained soil-abundant fertility.
01:35:46.000So the beautiful thing is that this is not that difficult to bring back.
01:35:52.000I mean, I've been preaching this message, you know, all my life, and it's exciting to now suddenly have people stepping back and realize, wow, you know, we just kind of put a pause button and there are now – Dolphins in Venice again.
01:36:08.000In Shanghai, you can see across the street.
01:36:11.000How about L.A.? Yeah, L.A. I mean, amazing pictures.
01:36:16.000So when people say, let's get back to normal, look, I don't want the tragedy that we're having, but I also don't want to go back To normal,
01:36:34.000because normal was this foot on nature's neck saying, you know, we're going to...
01:36:38.000So that's where you start saying, well, you know, what does the future look...
01:37:04.000I mean, my thing about the carbon economy, of course, you know, we're there in that hardwood region of Virginia, you know, near the Blue Ridge Parkway, Shenandoah National Park, all that stuff.
01:37:13.000And the federal forests are atrocious.
01:37:23.000Wouldn't it be cool if mommy or daddy could come home and their six year old says, you know, what did you do today?
01:37:30.000And mommy and daddy are able to say, well, we stewarded You know, five acres up on Jack Mountain and kept it from having a fuel load to burn and took that biomass so that a farmer could feed his earthworms so there'd be soil for your future.
01:37:55.000There'll be abundance and soil for your future.
01:37:58.000I mean, what an affirming, sacred, righteous Vocation that would be.
01:38:05.000And it would affirm people who want to work outside and have calluses and blisters on their hands.
01:38:11.000You know, we've spent a couple generations marginalizing what we call blue-collar people.
01:38:20.000And one of the big issues right now as we go to an AI, you know, a techno future, is what do we do with people that I'm suggesting that a carbon economy is one of many pathways to actually envisioning a future where thousands and
01:38:50.000thousands of people would be employed in healing ministries so that we'd be caressing our nest You know, so many times the idea in agriculture and the farming community is that nature is a reluctant partner,
01:39:08.000that we've got to, you know, we've got to get them in a wrestling hole.
01:39:11.000We've got to dominate and conquist the door.
01:39:13.000We're going to make you, you know, we're going to push you.
01:39:15.000When actually, nature is a benevolent lover that just wants to be caressed.
01:39:21.000And we haven't And we haven't put attention on caressing in the right places for a long time.
01:39:28.000Isn't it also that when you say the word we, God, there's so many of us and so many people are already invested in doing these jobs that are actually counterproductive for nature.
01:39:56.000And that's why at our farm, our little moniker on our little cooler bags is healing the land one bite at a time.
01:40:06.000We want our people to know that what's on your plate – When it's multiplied a billion times, you know, that actually creates the legacy, the legacy ecology you're leaving for your grandchildren.
01:40:26.000That somehow that has to be made, and people have to understand that.
01:40:32.000And I think that the wake-up call, the shock, the jar, the emotional jarring of this pandemic, I mean, We're seeing for the first time people who never would have darkened our door or asked us for anything They're asking us.
01:40:52.000And that's why, you know, that's why C and I wrote this book, Beyond Labels.
01:43:30.000Because China makes everything, ships it here, and we don't ship anything back but, you know, microchips.
01:43:36.000So they don't take very many shipping containers.
01:43:39.000So we're building up these mountains of shipping containers.
01:43:43.000So this guy has figured out how to take a shipping container and simply refurbish it into a small, inspectable, mobile poultry processing facility.
01:43:55.000So I can call him, and for $100,000, he'll customize it to what I want, put a chassis under it, drive it to my place, put it on four pillars.
01:44:06.000It's not even a building, so no building permit required.
01:44:29.000Well, if we hit 150 and overrun the ability of this little facility, it's called Plant in a Box, P-I-B. And his blog is thinking inside the box because his thing is Plant in a Box.
01:44:47.000So instead of if we had sales for over 150,000 chickens, well then...
01:44:53.000You don't expand this and make it bigger.
01:45:07.000If you don't overrun your ecology, so we're going to set this thing on a farm.
01:45:18.000The acreage is enough to handle the processing water, and you compost all the guts on site.
01:45:25.000Now, you don't have to run a sewage treatment plant.
01:45:28.000You don't have to truck your guts to a rendering plant.
01:45:32.000They become fertilizer on site, called this fertigation, and it's a sweet spot That the industry doesn't have.
01:45:42.000And so there's no reason why we can't produce a million chickens and you just have eight of these scattered, you know, five miles apart, six miles apart.
01:45:53.000And once you get them processed and they're in a bag, you can put them in a tractor trailer and ship them anywhere, okay?
01:46:03.000The bottleneck is integrating the processing with the production.
01:46:07.000That's the bottleneck right now in our fragile system.
01:46:11.000And so if we can do an integrative approach and have a democratized, decentralized approach, then suddenly we have an ecological, humane, people-friendly, community-friendly,
01:46:50.000Especially now when we're realizing that it's difficult when the food supply chain goes down or something goes wrong and it's difficult to get food to people.
01:46:58.000Wouldn't it be great to have, I've always said this, that it would be great if you had like the neighborhood had like one large plot of land and everyone in the neighborhood lived off that plot of land.
01:48:25.000And very, very simple, poor boy, bootstrap, you know, nothing.
01:48:30.000And they quickly became a whole community, whatever, place for kids to come because kids were mesmerized by the chickens,
01:48:47.000they had a worm bed, the plants growing, they cooked stuff.
01:48:52.000And I was there, you know, I was there with them for a couple of hours and here come kids down the sidewalk, you know, pulling a little red wagon with food scraps in it.
01:49:16.000They were doing it as a gift to the inner city.
01:49:22.000But I asked them, I said, so how much of St. Louis's food could be produced this way?
01:49:28.000They said, if you take out the dairy and the beef, the big mega stuff, St. Louis could feed its entire city within the city limits this way.
01:52:35.000But yeah, if we can restructure what's valuable to us, it's very important.
01:52:40.000And as you were talking about earlier, these essential businesses, what is essential and not essential?
01:52:46.000It's so arbitrary and strange, and this is something that politicians really aren't supposed to have the power to dictate what we can and can't do in that way.
01:52:53.000And they're not doing it in a smart way.
01:55:49.000We're going to appreciate what it's like to do stuff, to be able to go outside, to go to a restaurant, to go to a public gathering, have a picnic, that kind of stuff.
01:57:05.000But the problem is nobody's done a control, so we really don't know.
01:57:10.000Well, there's been places that have less restrictions than others, and then also there's been countries that have less restrictions than others.
01:57:18.000And it's really difficult to parse the information and get a straight answer on is this a good thing or a bad thing.
01:57:27.000Ultimately, over the course of time, particularly what you were talking about with the unemployment rate equaling You know, 1% equaling 30,000 lives over the course of a year.
01:57:35.000I mean, we really don't know what that number is going to look like here.
01:57:39.000And it could be absolutely devastating.
01:59:08.000So as we go forward with this thing, I... I look at this and say, well, let's at least wipe ourselves off and say, okay, what can I learn from this?
01:59:22.000What can we learn from this going forward?
01:59:25.000And culturally, obviously, we can learn – well, we need to decentralize and diversify our food processing system.
01:59:36.000I mean, for me, that's like number one.
01:59:41.000And then for the average consumer, though, I mean, that's a macro thing.
01:59:45.000But for the average consumer, what can you do to facilitate a secure food system and your own secure food system?
01:59:53.000And one is to simply start stockpiling more food.
02:00:26.000When we talk about price, interestingly, our whole chicken price at Polyface is cheaper than boneless, skinless breasts from Tyson at Walmart.
02:00:39.000So the way to save money is to get unprocessed.
02:01:28.000Snickers bar is twice as expensive per pound as our grass-finished, world-class ground beef.
02:01:38.000So when you start looking at these kinds of things, you start realizing, oh, okay, so really I just need to adjust where my money's going and how I'm spending.
02:01:48.000So spend bulk by bulk, by unprocessed, get in your kitchen, yes, and develop a A love for domestic culinary arts, okay?
02:02:05.000And kitchens are a great place to teach your kids science, you know, fractions, a quarter teaspoon, a great place to teach your kids.
02:03:13.000I mean, boy, they know exactly what it is.
02:03:16.000So yeah, so Dr. Zach Bush has been actually developing microbiome bolstering concoctions to try to diversify your microbiome.
02:03:26.000You know, one of the things that farmers like me that direct market to people One of our concerns, I mean, I don't talk a lot about it, but one of our concerns is that our food, for example, our chicken, we don't immerse it in chlorine,
02:03:41.000you know, so it actually has – it's living food.
02:03:48.000And sometimes people are so sterile in their microbiome That they actually have to eat a little bit of real food a little bit at a time to build it up.
02:04:04.000I mean, the other morning I was out in the garden picking asparagus.
02:04:09.000And I had my knife and I was cutting it off.
02:04:38.000But, you know, how do we develop immune systems in babies?
02:04:43.000We don't put them in plastic wrap bubble.
02:04:45.000We put them around on the floor and the next thing we know they're You know, gnawing on the dog toy, and they've got a dust bunny in their mouth, right?
02:04:54.000This is how you build an immune system.
02:04:57.000And kids kind of know, or nature knows it, at least.
02:05:00.000I mean, Richard Louv writes about this in Nature Deficit Disorder, which is, of course, an iconic book about the importance of touching nature and breathing in nature.
02:05:12.000I mean, just the bacteria that exudes from vegetation and The ecology of plants.
02:05:33.000That's why you get food from people that don't use pesticides.
02:05:36.000And you say, well, there's not enough of that produced.
02:05:39.000Well, as you said, It would be wonderful if this broadcast went into every single household in the world and tomorrow everybody Said, we're going to do different.
02:05:54.000I think a lot of people are trying to do different because of this pandemic.
02:05:57.000I mean, I would imagine the number of gardens has grown up substantially.
02:07:29.000And in our book, Beyond Labels, Sina and I end up, the last couple chapters are about moving to a place where you actually are Producing some of your own food, a backyard flock of chickens, a little, you know, garden, a little herb garden,
02:08:49.000I really appreciate you, and I appreciate your message, and you really epitomize the best example of that sort of regenerative farming, and I really wish it'd be more widespread.