On this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, I sit down with Will Harris, a documentary filmmaker and farmer. We talk about how he got started in his farming career, why he thinks Bill Gates should not be allowed to own so much land, and what it means to be a farmer in the 21st century. It's a great episode, and I hope you enjoy it! -Joe Rogan is a comedian, writer, podcaster, and podcaster. He's also the host of the podcast "The Joe Rogans Experience" which is a podcast about the life and culture of the comedian, actor, and TV host, Joe Rogen. Joe is one of the funniest people I've ever met, and he's a good friend of mine, so I thought it would be fun to have him on the show to talk about a variety of topics. I know he's been on Fox News and other media outlets recently, but I didn't realize that he had a lot more depth than I thought he had. I'm sure you'll agree that he's got a lot to say. -Will Harris is the fourth generation of his family to own and manage White Oak Pastures, a farm that's been in his family since 1866 and has been around the business for a long time. He's been involved in farming since the early 20th century, and it's been a long, long journey. . We talk a lot about what it's like to grow your own food on a farm, and why it's so important to him and his family are doing what they do the way they do it, and how he does it. I think you'll enjoy this episode, so don't forget to check it out! -Jon Rogan Podcast by day, by night, all day. Enjoy! -J.Rogan Experience by Night, All Day All Day by Night by Day, by Night - by Night! (featuring Will Harris Jon Rogan and the crew at the J.R. Experience by Day Podcast by Night's Backyard Farm by Night Crew by Night Podcast by Day - All Day By Night, By Day, By Night All Day, all Day by Day by Night... by Night all Day - by Day by Morning, All By Night by Night By Day - By Night - By Day All By Day (by Night, by Day... All Day) by Night by Day: The J. R. Experience
00:00:31.000Maybe next time I'll be your friend, too.
00:00:35.000Well, I first saw you on television doing one of those very quick interviews where they were talking about all these issues that you like to discuss, but they only gave you a couple of minutes.
00:00:48.000And it was really hard, because you have a relaxed way of talking, but you were very interesting.
00:00:54.000And I was watching, and I was like, this is a stupid format.
00:00:56.000I want to hear what this guy has to say.
00:03:02.000I'm the fourth generation of my family to own and manage white oak pastures.
00:03:08.000I have two daughters and two in-laws who are there with me today helping run the farm.
00:03:15.000And I have seven grandchildren, so the sixth generation is on the farm that's been in my family since 1866. So my great-grandfather, James Edward Harris, came there in 1866 and established the farm and ran it all his life,
00:03:35.000followed by his son, Will Carter Harris, my granddad, followed by his son, Will Bell Harris, my dad, followed by me, and now, again, I've got two more generations in the offing.
00:03:53.000You know, I think the thing I enjoy most, and to tell you about the farm, so the farm is, that farm is 3,200 acres.
00:04:00.000We do some other grazing, but that farm is 3,200 acres.
00:04:04.000We pasture raise five different poultry species.
00:04:09.000Chickens, turkeys, geese, guineas, and ducks.
00:04:12.000And we hand butcher them on the farm in a USDA-inspected processing plant I built.
00:04:19.000We pasture-raised five red meat species, cows, hogs, sheep, goats, rabbits, and hand-butchered them at a separate USDA-inspected facility that I built.
00:04:29.000We raised pastured eggs, organic vegetables, honey, and a bunch of other little ancillary businesses that go from the organism that is white oak pastures.
00:04:44.000They're very different from what I did prior to 25 years ago.
00:04:49.000What did you do prior to 25 years ago?
00:04:53.000So, prior to the mid-90s, I ran it as my father had, as a very linear, monocultural cattle operation, the factory farm model.
00:05:09.000And what made you make a shift to the way you're doing it now?
00:05:12.000Would you call it the way you're doing it now, regenerative agriculture?
00:05:51.000We call it biomimicry, the emulation of nature.
00:05:55.000It's a very imperfect emulation, but it's better and better, and it serves to restart the cycles of nature, which we broke through industrial farming,
00:06:11.000and make our living off the abundance that comes from properly operating cycles of nature.
00:06:24.000And did you go out on your own to learn this?
00:06:28.000If your father was a monocrop agriculture guy and you developed the farm in this way, obviously it must have taken a lot of planning.
00:06:37.000So how did you decide to make that shift and what was the motivation?
00:07:50.000So they give the cows extra hormones so the cows get larger, and they try to feed them quicker, and they're feeding them mostly green to get them fat.
00:07:57.000Correct, which is a very unnatural feedstuff for a ruminant animal.
00:08:49.000There's so much fat in the system that the body's marbled with fat.
00:08:53.000If that was a human being and you saw it, that person would be sick.
00:08:56.000If you look at one of those cows that's completely infused with fat, if that was your body, you'd be like, wow, I might need to get myself together because this is not good.
00:09:25.000It would have two or three-tenths inch of back fat.
00:09:30.000And if I gave that animal a presidential pardon and said, we're not going to slaughter you at two years' age, they would live to be 20-something years old, probably.
00:09:44.000That's the normal life expectancy of a cow.
00:09:49.000Contrast that to a feedlot animal that would yield prime or choice.
00:09:55.000They would be probably 16 to 18 months of age, not two years.
00:10:02.000They would probably weigh 1,300, 1,400 pounds, not 1,100.
00:10:07.000They would have three-quarters of an inch of back fat.
00:10:11.000And while I have not done this, I would be willing to bet you that if you left that animal in the feedlot, gave it that same presidential pardon, it wouldn't live much over another year or so.
00:10:25.000You're eating a naturally obese creature that would never occur in nature and is slowly dying of the same diseases of sedentary lifestyle and obesity that kill most of us.
00:10:40.000So you're saying that a cow with a grain-fed diet, before they slaughter it, they just let it live, it would only live a year or so longer than that?
00:10:51.000During the pandemic panic, when the packing plants were closed down, they were euthanizing chickens and hogs particularly because they couldn't slaughter them,
00:12:36.000So, this is not to my credit, but I... In my 40s, I became increasingly aware of the unintended consequences of the production model that I was using,
00:12:59.000The more I looked at it, the less I liked it.
00:13:02.000Animal welfare was the canary in the coal mine.
00:13:08.000What I had previously believed to be good animal welfare is what most people still think of as good animal welfare.
00:13:18.000And that is, you keep the animal well-fed, watered, In a comfortable temperature range, you don't intentionally inflict pain and suffering on the animal, and you're good to go.
00:16:27.000So one of the horrors of animal agriculture was the great, the moment in England and in Europe where there's mad cow disease spread through the land, where I had a friend who, I think it was a decade plus later,
00:16:44.000after he had been to England, There was something about his medical report.
00:16:49.000He had a list that he lived there during the time that he ate ground beef.
00:16:53.000Because so many people had gotten mad cow disease from people feeding cows cows.
00:17:07.000Encephalus, whatever that stands for, PSE, Bobine Spongiform Ecephalitis, I think it is, comes from prions, which when they grind the central nervous system of an infected animal,
00:17:42.000Anyway, to finish the question, most of my transition from what I did 25 years ago to what I do today involved just giving up stuff, giving up procedures, giving up products, giving up techniques.
00:17:59.000The The problems that we have in agriculture today that make it so destructive is the misapplication of technology.
00:18:12.000I've been accused of being anti-technology, and I am not.
00:18:16.000My farm is a $25, $6 million business with 180-something employees.
00:18:39.000Have so often unintended consequences to misuse technology, and the unintended consequences are usually unnoticed consequences, and they're undesirable consequences.
00:18:56.000And so, like, what did you see as far as what technological applications on farms did you see that were particularly destructive that you felt like you had to eliminate from your farm?
00:19:20.000So let's talk about the land side because it's a little easier.
00:19:29.000So, I would say the three of the most damaging things we do to our soil, our land, is cultivation, the use of chemical fertilizers, and the use of pesticides.
00:19:47.000You know, and most of this misused technology came from the war effort, from the Second World War.
00:19:57.000I don't think agriculture changed much from the time the first person domesticated the first animal or put the first seed in the ground until post-World War II. And I'll give you some examples.
00:20:11.000Ammoniated fertilizer, chemical fertilizer, was invented, I think, in Germany in the 1880s or something.
00:20:22.000But farmers didn't use it because it was very expensive.
00:20:28.000After the war, so much money had been spent on the munitions factories, the technology to build those factories and make munitions, that somebody figured out that,
00:20:46.000wow, we can make ammonia fertilizers cheap enough to sell it.
00:20:49.000And they literally, companies, multinational companies, literally put salesmen out in the field to Bluffton, Georgia.
00:20:57.000I heard my dad tell stories about that.
00:21:00.000And to sell ammoniated fertilizer to the farmers.
00:21:04.000Well, ammoniated fertilizer is like steroids in your body.
00:21:08.000You put it on the land and immediately you've got this very visual growth and productivity boost.
00:21:20.000What is an ammoniated fertilizer that's different from regular fertilizer?
00:21:24.000Well, prior to that, it was organic fertilizer.
00:21:46.000That's where batshit crazy comes from, apparently.
00:21:51.000It was the most efficient way to import nutrients into cropland was Guano, but until World War II. Ammoniated fertilizer is chemically produced fertilizer.
00:22:48.000So supercharged volumes of nitrogen, and it makes things grow quickly.
00:22:53.000In fact, since we're into this, I'll tell you a brief story.
00:22:57.000So my dad told me that he was born in 1920. So 1946, he'd been 26 years old and taking over the farm.
00:23:05.000He told me that in 1946, after the war, a salesman came to Bluffton, our little town, and had a fish fry or barbecue or whatever it took to bring the farmers in.
00:23:18.000He had two 200-pound bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer that had been made in munitions factories.
00:23:27.000And they gave every farmer like a five or ten pound bag to take home.
00:23:35.000And the ask was, go home, put this out on your grass, your pasture, wet it, put water on it, and don't look at it for about three days, then come back.
00:27:13.000You know, you've got some fault leaders somewhere that have probably been around for a long time, but as far as actual acceptance by the practitioners, I think it's just now happening, and it's really struggling to happen.
00:28:49.000Very high number of people test positive for glyphosate, which is very disturbing because people want to pretend that it's not having any effects on people.
00:33:07.000That's exactly what I'm told, and I believe, and it's my observation.
00:33:11.000If I didn't just dump them out and go home, I've been looking at them every single day since I put them out, and I see them eating the tropical soda apple.
00:33:19.000And they're not eating it like locusts.
00:34:13.000Is there any concern, though, about bringing in an invasive beetle species that it might migrate onto other foods and, like, destroy other plants?
00:34:20.000That's certainly something that I considered, and I've extensively been assured that's not going to happen.
00:34:40.000I could very easily wind up with a 3,200-acre monoculture of tropical soda apple on my farm, which is equally flying in the face of nature.
00:34:48.000And yeah, so if you weren't a steward of the land, you didn't take care of that, that could be the trend that it's going into.
00:35:41.000If I own that piece of property you're showing right now, and I put a good fence around it, and turn my cows, sheep, goats, I'd probably put hogs in there too, let them work on the roots.
00:37:13.000And it's a very unnatural state for people.
00:37:16.000When we want to be able to just pull into a Jack in the Box and get a cheeseburger, How much meat is required to feed 18 million people that don't farm?
00:37:29.000That's so many people that aren't farming, so many people that aren't growing any food.
00:37:33.000So it's got to be grown in these other places, but could you have a farm that's a regenerative farm that's so large And supplies so much food that you could feed people the way they're living right now, but do it completely naturally?
00:37:47.000Or do we need a certain amount of factory farming in order for people to live like that today?
00:40:23.000And the industrial farming with all this misused technology that we're using today, If acres of land is the first thing we run out of, it is a much better system than mine.
00:40:40.000You can feed more people with the industrial centralized commodity system than you can with my regenerative system.
00:42:37.000And hay is just rolled up grass, right?
00:42:40.000So when you do this, how much If you decided you wanted to go back to the factory farming system, how much more money would it cost and how much more money would you get out of it?
00:42:53.000Is it more financially beneficial to do it the way you're doing it or more financially beneficial in a scale like the size of the scale that you're using right now?
00:43:01.000Because it seems like it would cost a lot of money to get all that stuff.
00:43:05.000To feed these cows, to make them fat real quick, and all the money for the hormones, and all the money for all these other things, where you just let them roam around and eat grass, but you don't get as much weight out of them.
00:43:40.000It's a great question, but I can't give you a short answer for it.
00:43:44.000I would tell you that in the case of my grass-fed beef, My cost of production is probably 30% higher than the industrial model.
00:43:59.000And you could argue, we could argue, if you told me 20 or 35, because I don't know, it's situational, but that's not going to be too far off.
00:44:16.000My cost for raising a chicken, a four-pound dressed chicken in Bluffton, Georgia, and putting them in a bag is like $4.50 or $0.60 a pound.
00:44:30.000I see chicken on sale for $1.10 a pound.
00:44:35.000So my cost of production for poultry is hundreds of percent higher.
00:44:41.000And that's because the chicken lent itself to industrialization more handily than the cow did.
00:45:01.000When you as a consumer ask me as a farmer to give up all the tools that reductionist science gave to take cost out of production, you add cost back to production.
00:45:18.000I'm going to amend it and say direct cost.
00:45:20.000Direct cost, because long term you're destroying the soil.
00:45:24.000The externalized cost, like destroying the soil, like losing antibiotics, like extinction of species, like the dead zone of the Gulf of Mexico.
00:45:34.000Like, if you believe in climate change, and I do, how much does a good hurricane cost?
00:45:39.000How much does a good 100,000 acre wildfire cost?
00:45:44.000And those externalized costs are not borne by the multinational companies or the people that incur them.
00:46:06.000So when you are around all these other people that are doing it in the industrialized way, and you're doing it in your sort of regenerative way, it doesn't have any influence on those people?
00:46:58.000That sounds intriguing to people because one of the big dilemmas about being a person who eats meat is contributing to this horrendous factory farming system.
00:48:07.000You know, if you were raised with your, as most of us generation farmers are, with your role model being dad and granddad, and what they did, you're not going to say, this is bad.
00:50:23.000People have forever talked about how risky farming is.
00:50:28.000You know, when you've got an arsenal of sides, pesticides, To throw at any problem you got.
00:50:35.000When you got irrigation and the water is free where I live, other than the energy cost of getting it out of the ground.
00:50:43.000When you've got crop insurance to mitigate risk, then compared to what I do, which is own the product all the way from when the calf hits the ground to the hamburger goes in your stomach,
00:51:01.000When he comes, I recall, and it's over for me.
00:51:15.000And all those things that you're citing in terms of the investments that are involved, the cotton gins and the cotton pickers and all the different things that they need.
00:51:23.000They'd have to restructure everything so it would take a significant investment to do that and then a big risk.
00:52:40.000You think that would be the only consequence of growing less cotton?
00:52:44.000I mean, do we absolutely use too much of it?
00:52:49.000Do we have an accounting of how much the cotton gets used every day goes to waste?
00:52:54.000You know, what I'm good at is regenerative land management and animal welfare and community building.
00:53:00.000So those questions are valid and they're out there, but I think that So I think that the way we farm today is wastefully—it causes food or fiber to be wastefully abundant and obscenely cheap and— Just very damaging in the way it's produced.
00:54:08.000But in the industrial model that we operate in, a farmer in this country can produce a 48,000 pound semi-truck load of anything And call Big Ag and they'll come get it and send you a check or an EFT. Whether it's oranges,
00:54:29.000hogs, soybeans, corn, cows, cotton, it don't matter.
00:54:36.000Big Ag, who I think of as being multinational corporations and being evil, but they'll come get it for you.
00:55:20.000So you had a significant investment in order to be able to do that and you have the FDA facilities and all that in place.
00:55:29.000This is a subject that is Being brought up more and more lately, because I think as time's going on and people are aware of all these things that they're finding in food, it becomes much more attractive to get food from a person like yourself.
00:55:46.000How many people do you feed per year off of your farm?
00:55:53.000This is what I call cowboy arithmetic.
00:57:41.000If you're assuming that animals would go back to being grass-fed, which would most certainly be healthier for everybody, healthier for the consumer and healthier for the animals, If you're assuming that, then you would have less monocrop agriculture that you would need for corn.
00:58:35.000I mean, I think the monogastrics, the pigs and poultry are going to have to have something besides forage.
00:58:41.000They've got to have a grain of some sort.
00:58:44.000Is there a better grain than corn, or is that the best one for them?
00:58:49.000It's outside of my expertise, but I'm sure the answer is no, because corn has become the dominant crop it is because it lends itself so well to these outside inputs.
00:59:07.000It's a fantastic assimilator of chemical nitrogen.
01:00:01.000Efficiency and resilience, and it's only what you're talking about when you're talking about people examining the soil and realizing the oxidation, realizing the damage to the carbon in the soil.
01:00:12.000What are the steps that we can take to mitigate that other than having farms run regeneratively like yours?
01:00:19.000If someone wants to continue with that industrialized model, But they're using all these herbicides and pesticides and it's destroying the soil in some way.
01:02:01.000So, and we can talk more about that, but the main point I want to make is, in the savory thought process, we talk about the difference in a complex system And a complicated system.
01:02:22.000So this microphone thing we're working on here is a very complicated system.
01:02:30.000And this computer this young man is working on over here is a very complicated system.
01:02:36.000And to me what that means is there's a lot of shit going on to make it work.
01:02:41.000And when one component quits working, it don't work no more.
01:02:46.000And reductionist science works great on those very linear, complicated systems.
01:02:54.000A factory is kind of the ultimate complicated system.
01:02:57.000Very linear and very, lends itself to scale, which lends itself to efficiency.
01:03:08.000And that is the model that my dad's generation and later my generation applied to agriculture.
01:03:19.000My farm, like your body, is a very complex living system.
01:03:26.000There's a lot going on in both of them to make it work.
01:03:30.000But if one component quits, everything kind of morphs and it keeps working, right?
01:03:38.000So in that scenario, it doesn't lend itself to reductive science as well because of the unintended consequences, that morphing we're talking about.
01:03:58.000Reductive science easily becomes misapplied to those systems because they have those unintended consequences that are not easily recognizable.
01:04:32.000So this is finally getting back to your question about feeding LA. Yeah.
01:04:37.000So we have, for the last 80 years, been feeding bigger and bigger and bigger cities using the factory model, applying that reductive science to a living system,
01:04:56.000Well, some of us think we probably ought not do that so much anymore.
01:05:02.000And if we do, then we need to move towards treating that cyclical biome, your body or form, in a manner that is favorable to the cycles of nature.
01:05:19.000Because those cycles of nature are essential and they must all work together to have your body working good or my farm working good.
01:05:28.000So let's talk about the cycles of nature just a minute.
01:05:33.000First, let me tell you that industrial farming breaks the cycles of nature.
01:11:20.000So because of the way we've managed my land for the last 25 years, my organic matter in my soil is 5%.
01:11:31.000You can look on my website, whiteoakpastures.com, under the Land Stewardship tab, and there is a LCA, Life Cycle Assessment, that was done on my farm.
01:11:42.000It'll show that over the last 20 years, the organic model on my farm has gone from a half percent to five percent.
01:11:53.000And every bit of that carbon came from greenhouse gases that were put through my ruminant animals and back out.
01:14:02.000But if you have a generational view, which is easy for us because we're six generations on the farm, then it becomes more tolerable.
01:14:12.000Do you think it's possible that Especially when you're talking about like your neighbor who's only got 200 acres and you know they're probably very productive with those 200 acres doing it that way as opposed to doing it the way you're doing it.
01:14:27.000How many of these without that sort of long-term 20-year investment Is there a way that the government can incentivize turning farms over that would be ultimately beneficial to everybody?
01:14:42.000Because there is some sort of government incentivizing, they're subsidizing, right, for certain crops that they started doing during the war, right?
01:14:51.000Because they wanted to make sure that they had a surplus of certain grains and food and things like that.
01:15:34.000Big Ag and Big Food decide what they want.
01:15:37.000And then they hire lobbyists, and those guys go to Washington and write the program, or get the program written through aides, congressional aides, or Senate aides.
01:15:54.000So if Big Ag and Big Food don't want to change, it's not going to happen through the government.
01:16:04.000To exacerbate that, Now, I don't want to get sued by anybody, so I'm just going to tell you what I believe.
01:16:18.000In the case of USDA, those bureaucrats, for the most part, I'm sure it's not all, but many of those bureaucrats that become very senior in USDA, And I'm sure it's the Defense Department, too.
01:16:34.000Post-retirement, they get really great jobs with big ag and big food.
01:18:50.000I learned that there is a program, a federal USDA program, called LIP, Livestock Indemnity Program.
01:19:00.000And the purpose of that program is to indemnify stockmen If a protected species is hammering your livestock, like not a coyote, not a bobcat, but a bald eagle, a timber wolf,
01:19:16.000or a grizzly bear, it's to identify the farmer.
01:19:21.000So I went to my local USDA office and they told me what to do to prove my losses.
01:24:09.000That's That's the individuals to choose.
01:24:13.000And I would go to war to defend a person who said that they're vegetarian or vegan because they couldn't bear the idea of eating a live animal.
01:24:36.000But I'm not going to let you tell me that you won't eat animals because they're destroying the earth when they're raised like I'm raising them.
01:25:33.000Every bit of that carbon, that 100,000 pounds per acre on 3,200 acres, used to be greenhouse gas.
01:25:43.000That plant, through the magic of photosynthesis, Breathed in that carbon and other gases, the carbon dioxide and other gases, and turned it into fat and protein and carbohydrate that is the plant.
01:25:58.000Some of it above the ground, some of it below the ground in roots.
01:26:04.000My cows or sheep or goats ate that plant and some of that carbon went to make beef or pork or beef or lamb or goat Some of it went out as manure.
01:26:21.000Some of it was put up as flatulence or burping or whatever.
01:26:27.000And a lot of it went into the root in the ground and was sequestered there for a time.
01:26:35.000When that plant grows, a growing plant is like a pump.
01:26:39.000It's pulling carbon from the air, putting some of it under the ground.
01:28:15.000As a practitioner of regenerative agriculture, a guy who's regenerated thousands of acres of land, you cannot cost-effectively do it without ruminant impact.
01:28:28.000You have to say, I'm going to take this degraded land and put it back pristine the way it was before Europeans got here.
01:28:41.000But I'm not going to put the animal impact in it.
01:28:45.000That's like you saying, I'm going to use my mama's recipe to cook brownies, but I'm not going to put the sugar in there.
01:29:20.000So that LCA I mentioned to you showed that we We are sequestering 3.5 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent, whatever that is, for every pound of grass-fed beef we sell.
01:29:38.000Ironically, the same Environmental engineers, Qantas, did an LCA on, I think it was Impossible Burger, Impossible Meats.
01:29:51.000And they're emitting 3.5 pounds for every pound of Impossible Burger.
01:29:57.000So if you want to have a zero footprint for every pound of Impossible Burger you eat, you've got to eat a pound of mine.
01:30:07.000Because if you ask the average person, they think that that stuff's good for you and it's good for the environment and that if we don't get away from beef.
01:30:14.000It's just like people have these narrow perspectives, these narratives that get fed to them.
01:30:18.000And so they just repeat it over and over again.
01:30:21.000But obviously when talking to someone like you who's an actual farmer, you realize how complex The organization is and how much time is involved and how much effort is involved.
01:30:32.000Very few people have put a lot of thought into what it takes to be a farmer.
01:30:37.000And what you were talking about, how it's high investment, low yield, and a lot of work.
01:30:43.000And most people, I don't think, are aware of it.
01:30:47.000They just want to be able to pull into In-N-Out, get yourself a cheeseburger, and don't think at all about where that cow came from and how much work is involved in bringing that cow to you and how fragile that whole system is.
01:30:59.000Well, I'm not glorifying what I do for a living.
01:31:07.000I am trying to show you where we went so badly wrong.
01:31:10.000The application of that siloed, myopic reductionist science to this complex, cyclical system.
01:31:25.000And also, this is fairly recent in human history.
01:31:28.000This is not like a new thing that people have been doing for hundreds of years.
01:31:32.000The industrial system is 80 years old or so.
01:31:36.000In my mind, when I went to the University of Georgia, I learned animal nutrition from a professor who had a doctorate degree in animal nutrition.
01:31:51.000And he knew all about animal nutrition, but he didn't know shit about the soil.
01:31:56.000And I learned the health aspect from a veterinarian who knew all about the health aspect, but didn't know crap about photosynthesizing plants.
01:32:07.000And you see everybody in a separate discipline.
01:32:11.000And you get away from the holism that is what a biome is, what a complex system is.
01:32:20.000It's like if you were watching a ball game through a wood fence and you just had one board going.
01:32:29.000And the third baseman was there, and you were the third base coach.
01:32:34.000You know exactly what he's doing, and you got it.
01:32:37.000You have no idea what's going on on first.
01:32:51.000And they don't teach a course on running whole systems?
01:32:56.000Like, if someone wants to be a young farmer, someone's interested in farming now, do they teach a course other than that savory type course?
01:33:05.000Do they teach something like that in American universities?
01:33:07.000You know, the only university in this country that I know of...
01:33:12.000You're talking about land-grant universities for the ag schools, right?
01:33:15.000There's one renegade ag school, Michigan State University, that is actually a savory hub like us.
01:33:23.000And it's that way because there's a powerful, one powerful professor there who gets it, a guy named Dr. Jason Roundtree.
01:33:32.000And he has been influential enough in that school, he has brought them in this direction.
01:33:40.000But land-grant universities are not going to be where the change comes from, if there is a change.
01:33:46.000I don't know if there's going to be a change or not.
01:35:45.000This brings back to what we were talking about earlier that we skipped over, but I wanted to bring back to it.
01:35:52.000You're talking about, is it normal to live where 18 million people live in one place like that?
01:35:58.000Okay, so, I'm not an urban planner, but I can tell you what I know about the centralization of the food supply.
01:36:11.000So, the difference in the way I farm today, and the way my dad and I farmed, and the way my great-granddad and granddad farmed us, Those guys then, and me now, are focused on,
01:36:28.000hyper-focused on the land, because that's our savings account.
01:36:43.000And the local economy, that's our market.
01:36:53.000When we industrialized, commoditized, and centralized agriculture, the industrialization was hell on the land and the water and the environment.
01:39:06.000And Bluffton, Georgia is a nice little town.
01:39:09.000You would enjoy bringing your wife and kids to Bluffton, Georgia and spending a few days.
01:39:16.000Prior to our change, we got a store, we got cabins for lodging, we got an RV park, we got a restaurant, we got a leather shop, we got a bunch of stuff, stuff that is commerce.
01:39:32.000Prior to us making those economic changes, the only thing you could buy in Bluffton, Georgia was a postage stamp.
01:39:41.000There was not a single new housing start in Bluffton, Georgia.
01:39:44.000From 1972 to 2016. Incorporated City, eastern Mississippi, zero new housing starts for nearly 50 years.
01:41:43.000Fiber-optic cable about four miles to Bluffton.
01:41:50.000Since Bluffton is considered a severe distressed community by the New Market Tax Credit map, it's reported that around 17.2% of adults do not go to the doctor due to concerns about cost, why do a pastor provide health insurance,
01:42:29.000So if it exists and you want to feed those people, do we need a certain percentage of just factory farming no matter what?
01:42:36.000Or is it possible that over time, that if everybody got on the same page, which I'm not saying they would ever do that, but if everybody got on the same page, would it be possible to feed the country the way you grow food?
01:42:50.000Is it possible for the country to keep growing food the way it's growing it?
01:43:08.000But obviously, if you look at that film, you could see a clear definition of the difference between what's happening with your water, how it's going into that river, and his water.
01:43:18.000Where his topsoil's fucked and he's just using industrial fertilizer.
01:44:29.000And that's the more attractive thing about it to someone like me who doesn't know anything about farming.
01:44:34.000I go, well, that guy, the way he's doing it, that's how I want to buy my food.
01:44:37.000I want to buy my food from a guy like Joel Salton.
01:44:40.000I had him on the podcast back in the day and we had these similar conversations about this natural blend of these animals existing together and that's what keeps the land healthy.
01:47:18.000I took some cash and started it, hired a brilliant executive director and fed it until it got going.
01:47:30.000And that's my part towards saving the world.
01:47:33.000If you want to do your part in saving the world, you want to replicate what we're doing, you can come there and we'll teach you what we know.
01:48:42.000And I think this idea that one person controlling all this farmland, you think it's negative, and I wanted to know why, since you are a farmer.
01:49:45.000And what he's done in Africa and India and some other places caused me to really – nothing I can do about it – caused me to really disdain technocrats controlling land, people who – And what are these things?
01:50:01.000What are these things that have been done in these other countries?
01:50:07.000I don't want to get into the intricacies of those train wrecks, but they've been train wrecks by bringing technology in as the solution in these biosystems.
01:50:22.000You know, Stuart Varney wanted me to say, Bill Gates is an evil man.
01:50:58.000And you think that that's going to be, if this is the largest farm owner in the world, or in the country, rather, and he owns that much land, he's going to use it that way.
01:51:36.000We could do a lot more good if we have not just carbon neutral, but carbon negative, where you're actually extracting greenhouse gases from the environment and using them in a natural way to grow food for everybody.
01:52:13.000All right, so we discussed previously how the narrative that Cattle are destroying the earth, just caught traction, and everybody has heard it, and so many people believe it.
01:52:30.000It's one of those narratives that people repeat whether or not they have the information at their fingertips or not.
01:54:11.000But there's going to be an incredible amount of money made on those machines if we make people believe that the only problem is we just got too much carbon up.
01:54:19.000But would those machines be effective if we use those in urban environments where we don't have regenerative agriculture to do its natural cycle?
01:54:26.000Would those machines be effective in that if we do have an excess of carbon, they could bring it to a natural balance?
01:54:35.000That carbon that's in those urban areas, it's the same carbon that's in the rural areas.
01:54:39.000Right, but without the ability to grow regenerative agriculture in these urban areas, unless we decided to level buildings and start putting farms up everywhere.
01:54:47.000I don't know that you've got to do that.
01:55:23.000You want to live in a city though, you have to acknowledge that you're paying a price for living in those urban environments in terms of your health.
01:55:32.000Like, that's a reality that's been documented in terms of, like, the length of life that people that live in heavily polluted areas or areas with high particulate matter, they live less.
01:56:21.000And we've got a natural solution for it, which is the way we manage our land.
01:56:29.000And I hope we don't succumb to what we've succumbed in the past, which is just grabbing technology to do it in a way that's completely unnatural.
01:56:39.000You said something earlier where you said you think it's being done intentionally.
01:57:07.000I do not respect the militant vegan decision.
01:57:12.000Militant vegans want to decide what everybody eats, what I eat and you eat and they eat.
01:57:18.000So the plant-based protein industry that sprang up so quickly and attracted so much money, I know it's not doing well now, but it sprang up quickly.
01:57:34.000I think that this overwhelmingly accepted narrative that cattle are bad came from the partnership, loose,
01:57:50.000probably unintended partnership of the militant vegan community and people that stood to make a lot of money on vegetable-based protein.
01:58:03.000And as you pointed out, the feedlot example makes the message easy.
01:58:09.000And you've got a very loud voice and a high platform to speak from, which is the people who make a lot of money on vegetable-based protein.
01:58:37.000And if we all go vegan, we're going to need a lot more of those.
01:58:40.000You're going to need a lot more of those monocrop agriculture farms in order to sustain all those people.
01:58:44.000Just like we're talking about sustaining 18 million people with meat, you have a real issue sustaining 18 million people with plant-based protein.
01:58:53.000And there's money to be made in the business of technology to take carbon out of air.
01:58:59.000There's a lot of money to be made in that business.
01:59:01.000When we villainize carbon badly enough that we're ready to have the carbon emitters, Delta Airlines and whoever else, pay a lot of money to mitigate their carbon footprint.
01:59:18.000Then who's going to, if technology is saw as the answer, there's a lot of money to be made.
01:59:25.000If it's managing land properly, not so much.
01:59:31.000When you said that you think that the food industry, like the plant-based protein industry, is not doing as well now, does that give you any hope?
01:59:42.000That at least people recognizing this is not a choice they want to make, it's not the way they want to eat?
01:59:47.000When they eat it, it's not satisfying.
01:59:49.000And then, at least in terms of some of these options, it's not healthy.
01:59:53.000You know, we talked about it yesterday.
01:59:54.000We brought up the rat protein or the rat studies that were done with Impossible Burger.
02:00:00.000They were talking about how they found all sorts of issues with rats that ate high levels of that stuff.
02:02:02.000To be sure, when I say $25 million worth of stuff a year, there's people out there that will pay 30% more for beef and 100-something percent more for chicken.
02:03:49.000The Whole Foods Market continues to be my biggest customer.
02:03:54.000They used to be virtually my only customer.
02:03:59.000But my relationship with Whole Foods has been cooling for a decade, and eventually I won't be in there anymore.
02:04:09.000I, Will, Will, Harris, me, sold Whole Foods Market the first pound of American grass-fed beef that they marketed as American grass-fed beef.
02:04:52.000Greenwashing is big food advertising using words to make consumers believe that the food they're selling is the same as what I'm producing,
02:07:03.000And I went to the first meeting, producer meeting, they ever had in Denver of the Whole Foods had for the Global Animal Partnership, rolling it out.
02:07:13.000And it was all about this And by the way, I thought it was a great idea at the time.
02:07:21.000This animal welfare system, so that step one, which is low-hanging fruit, a little bit better than industrial.
02:07:43.000We used to castrate everything born on my farm that wasn't named Harris.
02:07:49.000And we quit castrating all the things we had to do to achieve step five.
02:07:57.000And it was explained to us at the time that, you know, we want to bring the industry into higher animal welfare, which was right up my alley.
02:10:03.000And then Step 5 +, which is you, animal-centered, entire life on the same farm.
02:10:08.000As shoppers can know exactly what the animal was raised for, the meat they are buying just by looking for the color-coded step.
02:10:19.000Rating on the product label as of October 1st, 2014, the Step 5 program includes 2,451 farms and ranches that range from Step 1 to Step 5 plus and raise more than 147 million animals annually.
02:10:36.000But they added everything together there.
02:10:37.000Step 5 and program, look how they did that.
02:10:40.000Step 5 and program includes 2,451 farms and ranches that range From step one to step five plus.
02:10:48.000So by saying that and includes these 2,451 farms, they're not saying how many of them are actually step five.
02:10:55.000They're like kind of fucking with you with the numbers there.
02:11:47.000It's a kind of a moronic way of describing it.
02:11:51.000It's a different Whole Foods than the one I started with.
02:11:54.000Is it because it's corporate now and it's because it's owned by big companies and it's all about when you're involved in a gigantic corporation like that, it's about maximizing profits.
02:12:08.000The way I would state it is that industrialized farming and big food distribution co-evolved together.
02:12:19.000You know, prior to the end of World War II, there was no industrial farming.
02:12:24.000And there were really no great big food companies or retail companies, you know, local Piggly Wiggly or whatnot, but they weren't.
02:12:33.000And those all co-evolved, big ag, big food, and industrial farming co-evolved together to what it is now.
02:12:43.000And, you know, the guys that are managing the meat departments for Whole Foods really need to pick up the phone and say, Send me 48,000 pounds, a truckload of 48,000 pounds of six-ounce fillets to the following five distribution centers every week for the next month.
02:13:40.000I also sell to a grocery chain called Market District, one called Mom's, one called Publix, one called Kroger, and I don't feel as used as window dressing.
02:13:59.000So you feel that, like, your way of doing it is almost like it's a trick.
02:14:05.000They're trying to pretend that most of their meat is gotten from people like you.
02:14:10.000That's my perception of what you just saw.
02:14:12.000Well, it seems like that was the perception that I got from it, too, based on the way they used that giant number and said it's anywhere from Step 1 to Step 5+.
02:14:20.000They kind of lumped everybody in together.
02:14:22.000I actually sold Publix Supermarket Prior to selling Whole Foods.
02:17:14.000Yeah, 20, excuse me, about 100 cows a week, 40 hogs, 40 sheep or goats, several thousand birds, and at our slaughter plant, which is on the farm.
02:17:26.000And that generates about nine tons of what's called packing plant waste.
02:18:13.000When I first built my packing plant in 2007, Sadly, we literally threw away, composted, essentially threw away, a lot of the liver, the heart,
02:18:29.000the bone, a lot of the bones, the fat.
02:18:33.000We made biodiesel out of the lard and tallow.
02:18:36.000Fast forward today, because of the work that these nutritionists, carnivore, I think you had Diana Rogers on, Paul Saladino, those kind of people...
02:20:12.000There's a company called Silicon Ranch, which is a shale company, that is putting in like three or four thousand acres of solar voltaic in our area.
02:20:28.000And when I heard that they were doing that, I was a little dismayed by it, because I've seen those, you know, beside the road, and it's just, to me it was horrible.
02:21:21.000I really thought I was just throwing it out there.
02:21:25.000And as it works out, he is that ultimate corporate But his daddy was the poultry production manager at LSU, and he was raised showing chickens, and he just got it.
02:21:39.000And you might find, I hope you find this interesting.
02:22:21.000Now you see this grass material laying on top, probably 70% of it will oxidize and go up into the air and never find, the microbes will never know it was there.
02:22:36.000It's all about feeding microbes, microbial cycle, right?
02:22:40.000On the other hand, If that grass had been bit by a ruminant, a sheep, a goat, a cow, and spent 48 hours in that fermentation tank that they call a rumen, and then is defecated out on the ground,
02:22:56.000it is like liquid, not solid liquid gas, like liquid-like currency.
02:23:05.000It's immediately available to those insects and microbes.
02:23:10.000And can you not see how that is life-giving, life-forming, and this is not?
02:24:15.000Well, listen, Will, this has been a very enlightening talk.
02:24:17.000I really appreciate you keeping up with my stupid questions and filling us in on all this information and giving us an understanding of what the real problem is and what your solution is and the way you're doing it.
02:24:32.000And it's just nice to know that there is options like that available.
02:24:36.000And there are people like you that are committed to doing it that way, that is so attractive to people like me.
02:24:43.000I really appreciate being able to be here with you and reach so many people, and I hope that it does help move the P a little bit towards moving from industrial commodity agriculture to something that's kinder and chiller.
02:25:01.000And I think, you know, there's always going to be these problems of scalability and these things that we're talking about in terms of fast food and just feeding large numbers of people.
02:25:08.000But personally, people can make their own choices that are regenerative and beneficial and are ultimately a much more natural solution.
02:25:19.000Well, again, if it happens, it's going to be because of individuals making a choice, not government, not farmers, not big food, not big ag.
02:25:29.000But I think, unfortunately, most individuals aren't informed of the whole process the way you just described it.
02:25:35.000So I really appreciate you coming in here and laying it all out for us.
02:25:59.000We actually sold the book rights to White Oak Pastures about a year ago to Penguin, Viking, Random House, and they hired a lady to write the book, and it'll be out.
02:26:15.000They Galley copy or gallery copy or something is out, and it'll be published this time next year, and it's called A Bold Return to Giving a Damn.