00:01:17.780I still remain admitted to the bar, but mostly I farm and I write here in Vermont.
00:01:23.980And as you know, I've got a book out about local agriculture and how conservatives can help support an environmental movement by supporting local farms without buying into the whole climate alarmism garbage.
00:01:39.660It's called Small Farm Republic, why conservatives must embrace local agriculture, reject climate alarmism, and lead an environmental revival.
00:01:49.880This seems like the perfect time for this book for a couple of reasons.
00:01:54.020I've noticed, as you've probably noticed, over the past couple of years since the start of COVID, there has been a move, it seems like, at least among the people that I follow on social media, to start, at the very least, gardening and growing some of their own produce.
00:02:08.920They realize the need for reliance on local farmers with all the supply chain issues that we've had over the past couple of years.
00:02:17.380It's kind of just made people realize, okay, maybe I should be more self-sufficient than I was previously.
00:02:24.460And then also what we're seeing globally with the attack on farming, the attack on livestock that we're seeing in places like the Netherlands, Sweden, Ireland.
00:02:35.820And so that's part of why this book interests me right now.
00:02:41.080But tell us why you decided to write it right now.
00:02:45.500Well, actually, I've been working on it for several years.
00:02:48.160I didn't plan to be a farmer, as the book relates how I ended up in it as a lawyer.
00:02:53.200I became very sickened with Lyme disease, which, by the way, also led to my faith journey.
00:02:58.300So I think I'm better off as a faithful farmer than a faithless attorney.
00:03:04.580The reason I felt this book is so important, and you're right on point with both of your points.
00:03:10.460During COVID, we saw the fragility of our food system, our medical system, our entire economy.
00:03:16.060And many people here in Vermont, you know, a lot of people have moved to Vermont.
00:03:19.100The cost of farmland is roughly doubled.
00:03:22.080It's making it hard for young people to get into it.
00:03:25.420And then, again, as you say, more and more people are seeing globally.
00:03:28.520There seems to be some kind of push to get rid of all the cows to save us.
00:04:05.900But over time, we have been destroying our local farms in a short-term push for profit.
00:04:12.560We have lost food quality, human health.
00:04:14.840And something that should be very important to conservatives, and part of the point of my book is even though I'm speaking to conservatives, this is an issue that should bring people together in this culture divide.
00:04:25.900On the left, they're trying to weaponize food.
00:04:34.500And there should be no controversy over supporting local food production.
00:04:39.340And I'm not an extremist where I say we should have only organic, and I support conventional farming as well.
00:04:44.860But the more we start outsourcing our food production, processing, inspection, and distribution to places like China, the more we are becoming dangerously dependent, and I would say unbiblically dependent, on a modern American techno-mysticism instead of the plan God gave us to raise our own food, which starts in Genesis chapter 3.
00:05:08.480You will work by the sweat of your brow, and thorns shall pierce your flesh.
00:05:12.760And now we think that we've cheated God's plan for us to be close to the earth and our microbiomes, but we've actually got a much worse situation than labor on our hands.
00:05:22.740We're giving ourselves cancer, and we're giving our children lower sperm counts, and perhaps transgenderism itself is caused by endocrine-disrupting chemicals.
00:05:31.940And this is where conservatives and liberals should be able to come together on the chemical pollution and not focus everything on the controversial issue of carbon, while we don't seem to care about the other chemicals.
00:05:43.500So that's sort of the summary of why I think it's a poignant book right now.
00:06:11.120And actually, if you look at my substack, you'll see I write about how we are in the midst of a new religion called woke theocracy.
00:06:17.300And it's a theocracy because it's being implemented at all levels of our government, and it's a violation of the Establishment Clause, and it meets all the attributes of a religion, according to many authors and Supreme Court and other court decisions.
00:06:31.220So what we're witnessing is a time when people have so much faith in their new religion that they're casting aside basic principles.
00:06:39.880They will throw away their food supplies and disrupt their food supplies in the name of equity, for instance.
00:06:45.000They will destroy the economy in trying to elevate ideological principles above basic money supply and other principles.
00:06:54.960Now, whether one is a Christian or not, the Bible is very clear about food, because as I recently gave a message about this, we have this sort of covenant in the garden that we will be gardeners.
00:07:08.160And now we're flipping light switches and getting our food delivered to us, plastic wrapped, replete with all the chemicals, not only in the food, but the phthalates and the PFAs and the BPAs and all of these other things we're finding have saturated our food.
00:07:21.480And but the end of the Bible and revelation has some pretty strong words about the third rider of the apocalypse on a black horse, starvation and famine with with scales in their hands, because it implies that there will be food inflation, as we're seeing now, and food scarcity.
00:07:42.360And that's something else I read about with my tax background.
00:07:45.420If we look at inflation, we can see why food is already inflating at a much higher rate than the underlying inflation rates and why it will continue to as fossil fuels and fertilizers increase.
00:07:56.800This is a crisis unfolding. And while the liberals are trying to terrify us with their religion about on scientifically, you know, it's proven climate change about guns, about women's rights being taken away.
00:08:08.780And the real threat might be the most close to our homes, which is our microbiomes, literally feeding our stomachs and our children and our grandchildren.
00:08:17.480So when you it literally is a new religion that is turning everything that is good and calling it evil and all that is evil is being called good.
00:08:27.020And so that's why I've mentioned technomysticism has led us out of the garden and into a much more dangerous predicament.
00:08:33.860So what is your response to those who say, to the so-called scientists who say, well, local farming is bad for the climate, it's bad for the environment.
00:08:55.120In Ireland, there was this terrible story of apparently killing livestock there.
00:09:02.420And we've seen that actually throughout the world, throughout Europe.
00:09:07.740Ireland's agricultural sector accounts for 37.5 percent of the country's greenhouse gas emissions and faces stringent cuts to meet climate targets.
00:09:15.640Irish farmers could be forced to cull cattle to meet climate goals.
00:09:19.280So this is something that's happening in several places because of apparently the emissions of the cows.
00:09:26.400What do you say to this, to those who say, well, we're just trying to save the world and save the environment by culling this cattle and clamping down on local farming?
00:09:35.140I would say Romans 8.28, that what they mean for ill, we can use for good.
00:09:43.080This is a great opportunity for us as Americans of wherever your faith or political or other background is to see exactly what a big lie this is.
00:09:53.800It is not true that local farming is more disruptive to the environment.
00:09:57.700In fact, they use CAFOs or confinement feed operations to label all cows evil.
00:10:01.820But as I document in my book, using the other books of people much more intelligent and trained in these areas than I am, who study soil, who study cows, it's pretty clear that there's something else going on here.
00:10:14.280This isn't about saving the planet at all.
00:10:16.440You said in a recent interview that you like Fourth of July because you like fireworks.
00:10:20.800Well, I don't want to take your fireworks away.
00:10:22.600But if we really wanted to save the planet, wouldn't fireworks be one of the first things to go?
00:10:27.740Maybe lawnmowers, maybe golfing or skiing or other things that consume fossil fuels and deface the environment without producing food at all.
00:10:42.520Ireland's particularly striking because a lot of that milk and dairy production and meat production is grass fed.
00:10:47.420And there's a huge difference between taking a cow and sticking it in a in a prison like factory and and then bringing its food to it and then bringing its manure elsewhere.
00:10:57.100And then the food you bring is made with grains, which are destroying the planet in their production.
00:11:08.140If you just put a 20 or 30 percent of our cows or 94 and a half million cows in the country back into rotational grazing the way God intended, the way we broke it with industrial technomysticism, you would sequester more carbon than in about 10 years than we've ever generated in the entire industrial revolution.
00:12:05.540And you don't save the world from pollution, even if global warming were being caused at the rates they say, which it clearly isn't.
00:12:12.900But even if you don't you don't solve the problem at a global global level, individual responsibility and my decision to cut back on how much I pollute or how many flat screen TVs I own or what I eat for food.
00:12:26.940These are how we make the differences.
00:12:28.520And we actually see that when when government tries to instill its moral code, its its new climate morality, its new animal morality, it's a cornucopia of causes.
00:12:40.940When they try to apply it to people against our wills, people rebel.
00:12:43.980And when they try to impose water restrictions, for instance, in California during droughts, water use went up because it's the tragedy of the commons.
00:12:51.300People are tend to be resistant and oppositional.
00:12:53.840If you help people understand why it's in their self-interest, like I'm trying to do in this book, conservatives have a tremendous amount of self-interest in their local food supply.
00:13:02.160And they should figure that out and see that for personal health and for food security.
00:13:31.560And you're talking about regenerative farming.
00:13:33.840Most people, even, you know, people in the suburbs, maybe are a little bit closer to farming life than people really in the, you know, thick of urban life.
00:13:42.700But they don't really know what that means.
00:13:45.080You know, they're thankful to go to their local farmer's market and maybe they're picking up raw milk, which you're not allowed to talk about, or they're picking up their organic eggs from their local farmer.
00:13:55.980But beyond that, they don't really know what goes into it and they don't know how to participate in helping their local farm.
00:14:17.180First of all, people need to be informed like anything else before you can have an opinion to vote upon.
00:14:22.640And people in the city are still voting on the farm bill through their elected reps.
00:14:26.160They're still influencing the legislation that impacts their food supply.
00:14:30.420So the idea that you are disconnected from your farmer is actually an idea of the adversary who lures you into thinking somehow the farmer is your adversary.
00:14:40.440As Wendell Berry observes, for decades we have lamented the loss of the family farm, and yet we keep losing them.
00:14:48.620And the answer is that for decades we've had policies in our government, and this is where I want to avoid the yawn,
00:14:54.640but we have subsidized monocultures and industrial farming at the expense of small farms.
00:15:00.180This has not been a free market agrarianism.
00:15:02.760This has been a non-free market where large corporate actors, as we see with pharmaceutical companies and many other companies who go down a list,
00:15:11.980gain access to our government to enforce and enact regulations that favor their business model and sacrifice the small little guy.
00:15:21.160And for decades our government even said to farmers, get big or get out.
00:15:25.140And now they're saying, look, you're polluting because you're too big, now get out.
00:15:27.880Now, Vermont had 29,000 dairy farms at the beginning of the Great Depression, and now we have about 550, I believe, at last count,
00:15:35.860most of which are consolidated, they're larger because that was the only way to be profitable.
00:15:39.860So, in answer to your question, what people in this city would also benefit from.
00:15:44.160By the way, they can buy directly from CSAs, they can buy more and more products out there.
00:15:49.180It's hard to rely on some of the labeling, so I recommend the book Beyond Labels by Joel Salatin and Sina McCullough,
00:15:56.120which will really help people make informed decisions and avoid those who are toxifying them and their children.
00:16:03.160But also, what about supporting two main policy areas?
00:16:06.580One is, let's pare back over time, not immediately, not like Sri Lanka,
00:16:10.820let's pare back the billions of dollars that we give to fund toxic, destructive industrial agricultural practices,
00:16:18.800particularly corn, soy and wheat subsidies.
00:16:21.380And let's divert some of that money to support small farms and the young people who do want to move in the country
00:16:26.400and raise local food and sell to other young people who want to move to the country
00:16:30.360and work on their laptops and make a lot of money online and then buy that local food.
00:16:34.800There's an emerging economic growth here to revitalize rural America.
00:16:39.400But the other big thing to do that would be so easy to do this
00:16:42.420would be to reduce the tightening regulatory structures, particularly at the federal level,
00:16:47.060but also at the state level, which have made it more and more costly, even prohibitively costly
00:16:51.860for young, small or small scale farmers to get into the business.
00:16:56.180And they want to keep us battling over small versus large or organic over conventional.
00:17:00.600But, you know, conventional food grown here in Vermont might be less toxic to the ecosystem
00:17:05.540than organic food that was grown and shipped, let's say, from Brazil or Chile or China.
00:17:11.520Even if I could trust that labeling, it's more complex than that.
00:17:16.480But so we have to come together and not allow this these false divisions, including over race.