Learn English with Robert Kennedy. Robert Kennedy is a former U.S. attorney general, senator, and presidential candidate who served as the first black president of the United States and served as Vice President between 1987 and 1993. Robert Kennedy has been a long-time advocate for food justice, environmental justice, and sustainable agriculture. He is a passionate advocate for the rights of small-scale farmers and the environment, and has long been a champion of the fight against industrial agriculture and food production. In this episode, Robert Kennedy talks about his early days as a 4-H kid growing up in Iowa, and how he became a lawyer fighting against the food and animal agriculture industry. He also talks about the dangers of antibiotic-diseases like antibiotics and other chemicals used in the production of meat and other food products, and the need to protect the environment and the land that keeps us alive. Thank you to Elizabeth Warren and Elizabeth Warren for joining us in Philadelphia to speak at Smithfield Foods' Plantation Plantation Park in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on Plantation Day, where we learn about the importance of food and soil in our everyday lives and the role of food in our every day lives. Thank you, Elizabeth, for being here! and Robert, Robert, for your passion for food, food, and soil, and for standing up to corporate greed and profiting from food production, and standing up for our environment and our food and our environment. Thanks to Robert Kennedy for being a voice for the fight for our food justice and our soil and our planet. - Robert Kennedy, Elizabeth Kennedy, for speaking out against corporate greed, and food waste, for fighting for our future, and so much more! - Thank you Robert Kennedy and Elizabeth Kennedy for coming here and for your courage and courage in speaking up for food and food, for our freedom, and your courage in our day to speak out about our food, our soil, food and for our planet, and all of our future and our future. . - Thankyou, Elizabeth and Robert Kennedy for being loud and for living our truth, thank you for listening, and listening to our voices, and thank you, for listening to us, Thank you for being kind and for supporting our voices and for speaking up and speaking out, and speaking up, and coming out loud, and we will keep on our words out loud and speaking our thoughts out loud thank you to you for speaking our truth.
00:00:01.000Robert Kennedy and I'm thrilled that he has such an interest and such a dedicated passion to the environment, to land stewardship and to food systems and health in general.
00:00:12.000And many of us have been engaged with food for many years in this space.
00:00:18.000It's an area that connects all of our lives.
00:00:36.000I'm really thrilled to be in the presence of so many amazing farmers today and leaders in healthy, wholesome agriculture and regenerative agriculture and good soils.
00:00:49.000I'll just tell you very briefly that I actually was a 4-H kid growing up.
00:00:54.000I began litigating against Against big agricultural interests, I probably have more lawsuits against the chicken industry, the poultry industry, industrial fat, poultry farming.
00:01:05.000But in the early 80s, Wendell Murphy, in particular against hogs, on hog production.
00:01:11.000And in the early 1980s, Wendell Murphy, who was a state senator in North Carolina, looked at what Frank Perdue and Bo Pilgrim and And John Tyson had done the chicken industry where they put a million chicken farmers out of business in our country and began raising chickens in battery cages and big warehouses and tiny cages, dosing them with sub-therapeutic antibiotics in cages where they couldn't even turn around or stand up straight.
00:01:41.000And hormones that caused them to literally lay their guts out over a short and miserable life.
00:01:47.000And they had all made themselves billionaires, those three men.
00:01:49.000And Murphy looked at that and said, I can do the same thing with hogs.
00:01:54.000And he was a senator at that time and he passed 28 laws in the state of North Carolina that made it almost impossible to sue a factory farm.
00:02:04.000And at the same time, he went into partnership with Smithfield, which moved 30,000 a day head hog slaughterhouse into North Carolina.
00:02:14.000And they dropped the price of hogs from 62 cents a pound to 2 cents a pound.
00:02:21.000And it cost a farmer 32 cents a pound at that time to raise a hog to kill weight.
00:02:27.000They put out of business every farmer in the state, except for 1,800 factories, which, you know, Murphy invented, left the Senate and invented this thing called Murphy 1100, which is a warehouse for hogs.
00:02:42.000And 80% of those 1,800 hog farmers that were left were either contracted to or owned outright by Smithfield.
00:02:50.000The farmers who ran them were allegedly family farmers, but they had no say over Any decision that happened in the way they managed their farms, and they had to mortgage their farms to buy the Murphy 1,100 warehouses, and those cost $120,000 to $250,000 a piece.
00:03:11.000And they only got five-year contracts from Smithfield, which allowed Smithfield to renegotiate in five years.
00:03:17.000And at this point, there's nothing else that can be done with that farm except for the hog.
00:04:30.000I watched the whole thing happen from beginning to end.
00:04:32.000And I, you know, did whistle-stop tours with the Farmers Union all over Iowa and Nebraska.
00:04:39.000And as they were moving it, I went to Alberta, warned the farmers up there what was coming their way.
00:04:45.000And I ultimately went to Poland And debated the head of Smithfield Foods in front of the Polish parliament, and I was sued in Poland by Smithfield for libel.
00:04:54.000And what I didn't understand is that in our country, I said the same thing in Poland that I said it a hundred times in this country.
00:05:03.000They had a guy called Trent Luce, who's a hog farmer, factory farmers, who followed me to every single speech I gave and recorded me all over the country.
00:05:14.000And I was saying the same thing all the time, so I said the same thing in front of the Polish parliament.
00:05:19.000And they filed a criminal case against me.
00:05:22.000In this country, truth is a defense to libel.
00:06:29.000We've already had a pretty profound impact up there.
00:06:31.000I'm a farmer, the founder of Hudson Carbon, and I serve on the steering committee of Regeneration International.
00:06:37.000And for the last 20 years, I've grown and sold organic and natural foods and researched the impact of regenerative organics or systems on ecosystems and the climate.
00:06:46.000I've come to believe that the American landscape, shorelines, and waterways are really the most critical element to an American revival And the survival of all the life in our environment.
00:06:56.000We really feel, with your leadership, this could be possible.
00:07:00.000To really rebuild an ecological, economic, and social fabric of this nation, we farmers have been pushed into a spot where we see the way, but we really need leadership to help us get there and bring our health and prosperity back to the 890 million acres of farm and ranch land in our country.
00:07:17.000The land is so important not only to our country, but to all the many people around the world we feed.
00:07:22.000And the last 80 years, our system and many of our policymakers and special interests have turned food into commodities.
00:07:30.000And a lot of us here tonight, all of us represent food as food and not as a commodity.
00:07:36.000And tonight, I think we all want to talk with you about how we need to move on from, as you know, intensive agro-industrial techniques and chemical inputs and genetically modified crops, and really rebuild the critical life system of our American landscape and the communities in it, and also the ecosystems these food-producing areas sit in.
00:07:57.000Lastly, I think it's really interesting that as we need to rebuild our own agricultural communities around food and not commodity production, and we need to connect directly with eaters, but we need to do so internationally as well.
00:08:11.000There's a really interesting example right now where Mexico is demanding non-GMO grains from the United States.
00:08:18.000The Biden administration is actually taking them to trade court.
00:08:21.000And in the meantime, in a free and fair market system, if we had one, there are farms and grain elevators and businesses and even seed companies that want to meet this demand of Mexico.
00:08:31.000And imagine the opportunity that would be for Mexican eaters, but also for us Americans in our communities here to do something different that could be healthier.
00:08:39.000So we're really, really thrilled as in the farming community to see you running for president.
00:08:45.000And we need your leadership to take these issues head-on and inspire, and we need the deeper form we need in farm country.
00:08:51.000Because what happens in farm country results in what we eat, and we the people really are what we eat.
00:08:57.000So thank you so much, and I appreciate you including me.
00:10:02.000We grow enough right now to meet a portion of the demand, but the seed companies to supply the seed, the producers, elevators, transport companies, are all ready to scale up over the next couple of years.
00:10:14.000Which would coincide with the timeline Mexico has laid out.
00:10:18.000So we have the potential and the willingness, is my point.
00:10:21.000And in a more free, fair market situation, I feel our government would link us up with this opportunity as opposed to opposing it.
00:10:44.000The demand right now is 17 million tons.
00:10:47.000Depending on corn yield, this could be between 3.5 and 5 million acres.
00:10:52.000Which will be an incredible boost to helping our farmers in America to meet a market demand that right now our government has put their fist on a scale, saying that another kind of seed has to be exported instead.
00:11:06.000Will Harris, I would love to welcome you to the table.
00:11:11.000I'm Will Harris and my farm in Bluffton, Georgia is called White Oak Pastures.
00:11:16.000I'm the fourth generation of my family to run the farm.
00:11:20.000My daughters are the fifth generation.
00:11:22.000They have my five grandchildren who are the sixth.
00:11:25.000We embrace three basic tenets on our farm.
00:11:29.000Regenerative soil management, compassionate animal welfare, and the re-enrichment of our impoverished rural community of Bluffton, Georgia.
00:11:41.000I chose to exit the centralized, industrialized, commoditized food production system 25 years ago.
00:11:49.000We built our own small standalone food production system.
00:11:54.000When I was an industrial cattle farmer, I maintained three or four minimum wage employees.
00:12:01.000I now have 160 full-time employees who are paid well above the county earning average.
00:12:09.000My farm is in one of the poorest counties in America, Clay County, Georgia.
00:12:14.000And my payroll is over $100,000 a week, every week.
00:12:19.000We're the largest private employer in the county.
00:12:22.000I'm also proud that my employees have subsidized health benefits on a 401k.
00:12:29.000An example of a politically created problem for my farm and others like it Is that imported grass-fed beef can now be legally labeled as product of the USA. Even though the cow was raised, born, slaughtered in Uruguay or Australia or New Zealand or any one of a dozen other approved countries.
00:12:53.000I believe that this legal perspective misleads American consumers and it's just plain wrong.
00:13:18.000Will, the points that you bring up around economics and productivity, the lives that are being peddled, that you have to be an enormous entity with very few people working there and looking at the economic vitality that you're bringing to your community is really extraordinary.
00:13:36.000And I would like to introduce Kerry Hofschneider.
00:13:39.000And Kerry's going to share with us a little bit more of a view on Really, what the rural communities are experiencing in contrast to perhaps the incredible experience that Will Harris' community is.
00:14:01.000I'm a descendant of homesteaders on a farm that is a descendant of homesteaders.
00:14:07.000And my focus is with the Grays Master Group, is a creation that a friend of mine and a group of close friends started about 10 years ago, and I would like to talk about education and the social ills I'm seeing, and also the hope in rural that I am seeing.
00:14:24.000My greatest influencer was my grandmother Ruth Heine, born in 1907, the first of 13 children to go to college.
00:14:32.000And who was very progressive-minded about the role of women in not only agriculture, but in all industries and businesses.
00:14:41.000If we look at on the landscape now today in New York County, we have fewer and fewer farms and ranches.
00:14:48.000And those farms and ranches, unlike Will Harris's, are not employing a payroll of $100,000 a week to their employees.
00:15:00.000This week I met with a couple friends who very much recall the 1980s farm crisis.
00:15:06.000And how often do we discuss that crisis?
00:15:10.000How often do we hear from not only the sufferers of that crisis, but also the indigenous community, the 80,000 Indian Country farmers and ranchers who are still serving our country's agriculture today.
00:15:27.000The Graze Master Group has partners of all political parties, all backgrounds.
00:15:33.000Among them, of our friends, are the Pawnee Seed Preservation Project, Deb Echo Hawk, the keeper of the Pawnee Seeds.
00:16:34.000Fresh water is a core issue of our time.
00:16:38.000Not only the fresh water and the amount, but the quality.
00:16:42.000And we can clean nitrates out of the water, yes, but how are rural communities going to be able to afford the multi-million billion dollar facilities when they can barely keep a shop open in some of these towns?
00:16:54.000So I want to extend now back to the group and to the farmers that I am praying are heard by people in my community.
00:17:04.000I just need to talk about a little bit more.
00:17:07.000The GrazeMaster Group has added four more farmers to our efforts.
00:17:10.000Farmers change because other farmers change.
00:17:13.000We used to be at each other's kitchen table helping each other out.
00:17:18.000The 80s did a great divide in agriculture and is a great hurt, but there is a great hope.
00:17:29.000I believe that he truly does care about the women Indigenous, the homesteaders, the people who eat, the people who don't have enough to eat.
00:17:39.000It is a crying shame that in Nebraska and across the country there is a hungry child and family tonight when we see all across this land plenty of room to grow real food for all of them.
00:17:54.000I am for a free market economy but I am So for the farmer's heart.
00:18:00.000And I know he can share a little bit more.
00:18:03.000And so I can't wait to hear from all of you and learn.
00:18:06.000Because every day I need to be learning.
00:18:10.000And tonight is a big deal for our country.
00:18:12.000And I know it's going to yield great, great things.
00:18:24.000Kennedy, I was told I only had four minutes to be with you and talk about what we're doing in Montana, so I decided to write a book.
00:18:31.000It's called Grain by Grain, and that's the rest of my story that you can read at your leisure.
00:18:35.000Anyway, I was raised on a 2,400-acre wheat and cattle ranch in north-central Montana.
00:18:40.000After 10 years of college, I returned home to our farm as many of my neighbors were leaving and going broke.
00:18:46.000In those days, the cost of our inputs often exceeded the value of what we grew in our crops.
00:18:51.000So we had to have an operating note with the bank.
00:18:54.000But it increased nearly year by year, and soon we're not able to pay it off before we had to renew it for the next year.
00:19:01.000My banker informed me that this was not going to be able to continue, and we too would soon be going broke.
00:19:07.000I've been selling some wheat to whole grain bakers in California.
00:19:10.000One day, one of our biggest customers called me and asked for organic wheat.
00:19:14.000That was not too easy to find in 1984, but I was able to find some.
00:19:19.000I was quite skeptical of organic at the time, but after visiting organic farms and hearing organic farmers tell their stories, I decided to try it myself.
00:19:27.000I started with an experiment of 20 acres, comparing winter wheat grown on a field that had been in alfalfa for a few years, so the soil was high in nitrogen, to an adjoining field that used chemical fertilizers and herbicides.
00:19:37.000Both fields produced nearly the same yield and were high protein.
00:19:41.000We had reduced the inputs on our farm And they're organic fuel by two-thirds and increased the value of our wheat by 50% because it was now certified organic.
00:19:49.000The next year, 15% of our farm was organic.
00:19:53.000It was 1988, a year of drought and grasshoppers.
00:19:56.000We sprayed our chemical fields with malathion, which killed everything in just a few hours.
00:20:01.000But after a week or so, the malathion had dissipated and new grasshoppers invaded.
00:20:05.000It was already a poor crop and we couldn't afford to spray it again.
00:20:09.000And at harvest time, the field was loaded with grasshoppers.
00:20:11.000I spread wheat bran, inoculated with a protozoa, which killed grasshoppers around the edges of my organic fields.
00:20:17.000And as the grasshoppers ate that, They got sick, and then their friends came and ate them.
00:20:21.000It's just like politics in America today.
00:20:23.000And what happened is that infection then spread throughout the whole group of grasshoppers.
00:20:30.000At Harvard's time, there were almost no grasshoppers left.
00:20:32.000So even though the yield was poor, but because we had better grain prices and were able to reduce our inputs, we broke even on most of those organic fields, while we lost tens of thousands of dollars on our chemical fields.
00:20:44.000After that, I decided to end my chemical agriculture on my farm and completely go to a regenerative organic system.
00:20:51.000We began to grow all of our own fertilizer using legume cover crops for green manures and using rotations of a wide diversity of crops to break up cycles of weeds, insects, diseases, which ended our need for chemical pesticides.
00:21:04.000After three years, we no longer even needed an operating node.
00:21:08.000Our convergent organic led us to another opportunity, an ancient grain, which you can read all about in Chapter 5.
00:21:14.000This delicious, nutritious wheat was sold on our own brand called Kamut.
00:21:19.000It could be eaten by most people who were wheat-sensitive, and our published research showed us that it improved health and reduced inflammation.
00:21:27.000We went from our first half-acre planted in our farm in 1986 to over 100,000 acres 30 years later, which was sold all over the world.
00:21:36.000We were then contracting with over 200 organic farmers in parts of Montana, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and the Dakotas.
00:21:43.000Not only have we abandoned industrial ag treatment of our soil, we also abandoned the industrial ag treatment of our farmers.
00:21:49.000Instead of owning the seed and charging farmers extreme high prices for it, and high prices for the chemicals required to raise it, we loaned the seed to our farmers at no extra charge, and they returned it to us at harvest time.
00:22:02.000We required them to grow it in a regenerative organic system, which lowered their input costs.
00:22:08.000We work as a community sharing the benefits of good years and working together on to solve problems.
00:22:13.000So from my experiences, I've come to the conclusion that farmers should be paid for nutrients produced per acre rather than pounds per acre.
00:22:20.000Buyers should know the nutrient level of their food.
00:22:23.000It's time to reconnect food and health so that we can have new hope for prosperity for our farm communities as well as to the 60% of our population who are now sick with at least one chronic disease.
00:22:35.000To me, that is the only future that really makes sense.
00:23:47.000When you talk to people who go to Europe and they say, I don't have any problem eating the bread there, those people, when they come back to America, if they would eat heirloom grains or ancient grains, anything that was in production probably before World War II, there's a very big chance they would have no problems here either.
00:24:04.000They should look at organic, too, because glyphosate, for example, causes some of the same problems that this gluten causes in your system.
00:24:13.000And so sometimes it's an effect of pesticide contamination.
00:24:17.000It's also giving people trouble with wheat.
00:24:19.000So if they would look at organic, they don't have to worry about that part, but they should also look at ancient and heirloom grains.
00:24:25.000And if they're eating bread and they still have trouble, look at sourdough, which is a long fermentation, which is also a change the bakers have made.
00:24:32.000We're going to sort fermentations and not having that anymore to pre-digest what we're eating.
00:24:54.000I grew up in the rainforest among the ancestors' trees and our ancestors who taught us A lot about how the world actually operates.
00:25:04.000And that is something that I bring into this profession in the regenerative agriculture landscape.
00:25:08.000But most importantly, I'm a farmer here in Northfield, Minnesota.
00:25:13.000I am in this panel to speak on behalf of farmers who are bearing the brunt of our collective inability to see through that in the name of food, we're destroying the very foundational ecosystems on which we depend to feed the world.
00:25:26.000Agriculture is not the only sector where these things are happening, but we're still, in this space, we are driven to extract the wealth of nature, the rural communities, the consumers, and nations.
00:25:38.000In fact, it now has resulted in a systemically and verifiable We're good to go.
00:26:01.000Well, we need government, in government, those who understand that being an environmentalist, protecting our rivers, our remaining rivers, the land, the lakes, the soil, the forest, the clean water, is not only a priority, but something we have to collectively stand for.
00:26:19.000As a farmer, I utilize farming methods that incorporate ancestral ways of thinking, of relating, of living systems, what we call indigenous ways of thinking, of knowing, of connecting spiritually, physically, and intellectually with the magnificent side of creation itself, of working within it.
00:26:39.000Now, it may sound philosophical, but this is exactly the foundation of what we are engaged in when we call ourselves farmers.
00:26:47.000Along with all the competent and capable people I work with, we have found ways to merge this thinking with modern scientific advances in technology so that we can engage the natural design And the most efficient ways of working with the land.
00:27:02.000Our end purpose is to ensure that we deliver nutritious foods, free of animal confinement and toxic chemicals, free of guilt and dishonor of treating the soil like dirt and the living systems of the planet as expendable or extractable solely for profit.
00:27:18.000Food, to me and to all of those I share this world with in this space, food is sacred.
00:27:24.000The act of eating is a spiritual act, and food sharing and ensuring everyone has it must be the end result of a successful agriculture system, and the policies that go behind it must understand, must be done, developed without full understanding.
00:27:41.000From my standpoint, as a farmer, I am not engaged in production of anything.
00:27:47.000From this perspective I come from, as a farmer, I am engaged in the business of stewarding the naturally occurring energy transformation processes that defined by biological, physical and chemical processes deliver us the stuff we harvest out of the ecology, out of the physical and chemical processes deliver us the stuff we harvest out of the ecology, out of
00:28:07.000Processes perfected by the evolutionary process of the planet itself, systems that ensured our evolution as humans and are responsible for the stability of the planet's climate, the nutritional density, and the health of ecosystems, and the food that we eat.
00:28:22.000There is a sector of humanity that is in danger of extinction that I would like you to watch over.
00:28:28.000And that is government officials who are willing to codify it into a way of living.
00:28:33.000Government and corporate accountability.
00:28:35.000Systems that incorporate the fact that we have no right to steal the right to future generations to feed themselves.
00:28:42.000Or the right to poison current generations and destroy the planetary living systems in the name of food.
00:28:54.000And I know you'll be doing that among the other folks who understand this crossroads we are in.
00:29:02.000Just to close up, I also wrote a book since I got that opening.
00:29:07.000It's called In the Shadow of Green Man.
00:29:09.000And in there, you can read a lot more about where this thinking comes from and how we are going about building the agricultural systems of the future.
00:29:31.000I grew up on a family fruit and vegetable farm in Northeast Ohio in an Amish community.
00:29:37.000Many people might be surprised, but within the Amish community, we were actually using insecticides and pesticides very intensely in the 1980s, 90s, early 2000s.
00:29:47.000In the early 2000s, we had very severe crop loss.
00:29:50.0002002, 2003 and 2004, we had three consecutive years that we had greater than 70% crop loss in spite of intense pesticide applications.
00:29:57.000It seemed the more intense that we applied pesticides, the worse the problems became.
00:30:01.000And we had some very interesting experiences on the farm where we began renting a new field that didn't have the historical pesticide exposure and the crops on that soil We're completely resistant to the diseases in insects when the same varieties planted and managed the same way on the soil with the pesticide exposure had major disease susceptibility to the point where we lost most of the crop.
00:30:21.000And this was a real eye-opener and I wanted to learn what are the differences between two plants, one plant that is resistant to a disease and the second one that is not What I learned in its simplest essence is that plants have an immune system much the same that we do, but in order for that immune system to function, it needs to be supported with nutritional integrity and microbiome integrity.
00:30:44.000When you have those two things, you can produce plants that have functional immune systems that are resistant to diseases and insects.
00:30:51.000Then, I learned that when you have these really healthy plants, Two things happen.
00:30:56.000First, you can regenerate soil health while you are growing a crop.
00:31:00.000So we have this paradigm in agriculture today that agriculture is somehow by its very nature inherently extractive, that we're extracting nutrients and we're depleting our soils.
00:31:10.000And that's true if we manage it in that manner.
00:31:14.000But it's possible to manage agriculture and crops and agronomy in such a way that we regenerate soil health while we're growing a crop.
00:31:21.000But the second piece that happens When we grow plants with these robust immune systems, they also have the capacity to transfer that immunity to the livestock, to the animals, and to the people who consume those plants as food.
00:31:34.000All of a sudden, we can have a legitimate conversation about growing food as medicine.
00:31:39.000Today, we stand at a threshold where Agriculture has the opportunity.
00:31:45.000There's this phrase of regenerative agriculture is kind of having its moment in the sun.
00:31:50.000And regenerative agriculture is so commonly defined in the context of regenerating soil health.
00:31:55.000But it needs, there are two other pieces that really need to be included.
00:31:59.000The first is the opportunity that we have to regenerate public health, to regenerate our own health systems.
00:32:07.000We have this epidemic of degenerative illnesses, which you know better than I.
00:32:11.000And agriculture is certainly not the only contributor to that, but agriculture is a significant contributor to the fact.
00:32:18.000The fact that we are growing food that is empty calories, empty of nutrition and empty of microbiome support for our own microbiomes.
00:32:25.000But there is another issue that is perhaps even more fundamental, and you spoke to it so eloquently in your introduction.
00:32:32.000We have the farmers of today, for the most part, are being farmed by agribusiness.
00:32:38.000We have, as you described them, feudal serfs.
00:32:41.000And if we really want to regenerate landscapes and regenerate agriculture, the fundamental piece that needs to be regenerated is we need to regenerate the capacity for stewardship.
00:32:52.000We need more people who care deeply for the land on the landscape.
00:33:21.000That is deeply in our minds is when we have these entrenched interests, which have this extensive framework of laws passed in their interest, what is the pathway to regenerating the capacity for stewardship?
00:33:44.000Kennedy, for inviting me here tonight.
00:33:46.000Quite an honor, and what a panel, you know, just to sit with these other farmers that I've been admiring for years.
00:33:53.000And being this far down the lineup, you know, I'm certainly going to echo some of what they've already said, and I just want to, you know, give thumbs up to what's already been stated earlier.
00:34:01.000I agree wholeheartedly with almost everything that I've heard tonight.
00:34:05.000I grew up on a pretty typical family farm in Kansas, and Like most family farms, as we were told to go big or go home, we became specialists.
00:34:16.000We grew the farm very rapidly after we survived the 80s.
00:34:20.000We survived the 80s because my father took a job in town.
00:34:22.000That was basically how we survived that.
00:34:25.000By the year 2000, I had taken over the row crop side of the operation and my brother had taken over the grass operation.
00:35:11.000And it was also about that same time that I found out that soil was a living entity.
00:35:16.000You know, I'm almost 40 years old and I've never been taught that soil was alive.
00:35:20.000As Reggie said, I was treating it like dirt because that's all we were taught.
00:35:24.000So we started making some major wholesale changes on the farm, bringing in the cover crops, trying to understand soil life and things like that.
00:35:36.000We brought more crops into the rotation.
00:35:38.000We started to cut our dependencies on pesticides and fertilizers.
00:35:42.000And in 2012, which was our second hottest rice year in Kansas to 1936, I was denied my crop insurance claim because of my management of my cover crops.
00:35:54.000And so after some discussion, we decided to take on the system and we jumped through all the hoops there.
00:36:02.000We took 20 months to take on this battle.
00:36:05.000During that time frame, I lost my operating line of credit because without crop insurance, you can't get an operating line of credit in the U.S. In 2014, I won a major decision.
00:36:17.000We won all three counts that was against us, but I had gone bankrupt in the process, so I'm not sure who really won, but we had that victory in our pocket.
00:36:28.000So, at the end of, you know, I guess the end of the story is, or not the end of the story, but the next chapter was, we lost the farm, we spent years fighting, trying to stay afloat instead of just walking away, lost friends, family, and depression set in, which isn't hard to understand.
00:36:45.000At the time, I didn't even accept that either.
00:36:47.000When we sold the farm, after years of hard work and paying property tax and income tax on gains, we then had to pay estate taxes on the sale of the property, which just added insult to injury and left us almost nothing to start over.
00:37:01.000You know, you look at crop insurance, and because of my case, there was a major overhaul of crop insurance rules and regulations.
00:37:08.000A lot of them have been relaxed because of my case, and there's been some very positive changes made.
00:37:15.000Crop insurance Today, a question I like to ask or a comment I like to make is, would you be able to buy car insurance if you had three DUIs?
00:37:24.000Why are we allowed to have crop insurance if we're losing five, six, seven, ten of soil per acre per year off of our farms?
00:37:30.000Crop insurance is incentivizing bad management.
00:37:36.000These are all called best management practices by RMA. But this is all taxpayer funded.
00:37:42.000So, you know, even their battle against me, they had nothing to lose because it wasn't going to come out of their pocket at the end of the day.
00:37:49.000It was going to come out of the taxpayer's pocket.
00:37:51.000But then what do you expect when industry writes the farm bill and is in charge of agriculture?
00:37:58.000And we've been told for years that we're supposed to feed the world, and this is how we do it.
00:38:04.000But as Kerry alluded to, we're talking about feeding the world, which we aren't doing, by the way.
00:38:10.000And in Kansas, one in four kids tonight is food insecure.
00:38:15.000So, feeding the world, we're not even feeding ourselves.
00:38:18.000And what we are feeding them has already been stated as low nutrient quality, high toxic food-like substances.
00:38:25.000So, Bob talked about his organic farm.
00:38:28.000Organic no-till is, there's more and more farmers all over the country doing organic no-till and at very large scale.
00:38:38.000Some of the things I would like to see, I think it's really all boils down to the monopolies that are controlling agriculture today.
00:38:45.000And I don't care what you want to talk about, whether it's beef, pork, or grain farming, you know, the top four industry, top four companies are controlling 60, 70, 80% of the income, whether it's seed, chemicals, processing, whatever.
00:39:04.000I think it was, someone was talking about the non-GMO, I think it was Ben was talking about Mexico and the demand for non-GMO. I know many farmers that have walked away from GMO corn and soy and their yields did not decrease, but their profit did go up because the seed was cheaper.
00:39:19.000The problem is it's much harder to find because the seed companies obviously make less money.
00:39:25.000So, you know, finding quality non-GMO seed is very difficult to do.
00:39:30.000And besides, you know, the monopolies controlling us, they're also controlling FDA, EPA, USDA, Congress, higher education, and even the ag lobby groups that claim to be working for farmers.
00:39:43.000And along those lines, we get the silencing of scientists that has been going on for years, and that needs to stop, obviously.
00:39:51.000I think, for me, the big question is, going forward, you know, we've got 100 years, 100 plus years of policy of subsidies, you know, starting pre-World War I with wheat.
00:40:03.000NRCS come along in the 30s because of the plowing of the prairie turned us into a dust bowl, and so we brought NRCS, and as my good friend Ray Archuleta-Alexa says, all the lakes, streams, and rivers in the USA are just full of conservation programs.
00:40:44.000Farmers are, you know, we're the greatest people on the planet and that's what, you know, we want to be responsible for our own livelihoods.
00:40:55.000I've gone over a little bit over time, not trying to do this as well, but Wayne, I think, is going to be able to pick up on some of the points where maybe you would be heading to, but Mr.
00:41:05.000Kennedy, did you have any reflective points on that?
00:41:07.000I'm very grateful for everything you said, and I actually would have liked to hear you go on for a while because I like just hearing that.
00:41:16.000You know, I'd like to talk to you guys at another time about what you think a transition would look like and how do we transition the country to...
00:41:26.000Something that is wholesome, nutritious foods.
00:41:30.000The USDA was set up to protect small farmers and to make sure that we have a wholesome food supply.
00:41:37.000And instead, it's become a sock puppet of the chemical and big ag industries and industrial agriculture.
00:41:44.000And it's doing the exact inverse of what it was designed to do.
00:41:48.000It's giving us poison instead of food.
00:41:51.000And we're the sickest country in the world.
00:41:54.000And there's all these perverse incentives that we need to unravel.
00:41:58.000But as you pointed out, the entire lobbying infrastructure is controlled by corrupt actors who are making money poisoning the American public and corrupting our democracy.
00:42:10.000Thomas Jefferson's vision of democracy, which I think holds true, is that it relied upon the existence of tens of thousands of yeoman farmers, each with their own Independent freeholds, each with a stake in our democracy.
00:42:27.000And without that, democracy is going to wither and die.
00:42:31.000And now we're increasingly seeing the landscapes controlled by and the food supply controlled by these big corporate interests, either outright controlled through ownership of the property or effectively controlled through control of the inputs and the subsidy systems that lock everybody into this corrupt system of producing poison and pretending it's food.
00:42:54.000I think a lot of it comes down to asking better questions going forward.
00:42:57.000And, you know, what are your goals for rural America?
00:43:05.000More farmers means more kids, more kids, more schools, more schools, more demand for small grocery stores in these rural towns.
00:43:12.000And I didn't get to talk on mental health, which most of you people know is a big thing of mine, is healing the farmer is every bit as important as healing the farm.
00:43:20.000The farmers, you know, I've seen this, you know, when I travel on these farms in Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, and many, if not most of the farmers that I talked to could not drink water from their own wells because it was poison.
00:43:35.000And, you know, these are among the dispossessed Americans.
00:43:41.000Kansas farmers are killing themselves at a higher rate than any other occupation in America, and that, you know, it's just a direct reflection of what we've become, sad but true.
00:43:52.000Thank you very much for your time, Mr.
00:45:55.000I'm also a consultant with the state, and we're coordinating African American and farmers of color on the LFPA grant to get the small farmers into the food system.
00:46:05.000I'm also a consultant for new and emerging farmers.
00:46:08.000And one of the things that I help them do, or several of the things I help them do, is one, find revenue streams on their farm, but also to win their zip code.
00:46:16.000I think that it's important that we focus on the zip code.
00:46:20.000If everyone is trying to make it to the main market, we're going to flood that market and we're going to go home with a lot of waste.
00:46:27.000But if I can teach farmers to supplement their income and how we scale is we'll take six months to eight months and I just want you to pay one bill on your farm.
00:46:38.000If your farm can pay for one bill with your all-farm job, but the farm, we can scale.
00:46:43.000But what we're doing now is we are training farmers on the administrative side.
00:47:13.000We talk about adding an Airbnb to the property.
00:47:16.000We talk about doing tours and silent tours and walks and getting with Audubon.
00:47:20.000We try to find as many ways to make profit on that farm as possible while using conservation practices, while being regenerative, and while offering people a tour on a farm that doesn't smell like anything but Mother Nature.
00:47:40.000And then we, oh, I'm sorry, another job I have is I'm the president of the Georgia Black-owned Farm Tour.
00:47:46.000And what we do is we take buses of people to these farms I'm talking about that are in small rural Georgia or they're in blighted neighborhoods, but they're growing.
00:47:56.000We bring customers to them, we bring politicians, we bring stakeholders, and we help people understand production agriculture.
00:48:05.000And I don't want to see your pretty farm.
00:48:30.000We're going to terminate that cover crop.
00:48:32.000And just having people hear this from farmers.
00:48:36.000Now I get a new appreciation of what a farm looks like.
00:48:39.000Because one of the reasons I tanked as a farmer is because as a beef farmer, the first question people asked me was, how many head do you have?
00:49:43.000But we want to reach you in a way that is comfortable to you.
00:49:46.000So one of the things we'll do if we were going to do a training for Mr.
00:49:49.000Kennedy is I may set up a call with Mr.
00:49:51.000Kennedy and ask you for pictures and for insight onto words or phrases that you use and that will be familiar to the group that you hang with.
00:49:58.000And that's what we're going to put in the presentation.
00:50:00.000So that they can be a part of the presentation so that they don't feel like they're being preached to or taught to.
00:50:07.000And it's important for us to teach because if we don't, we're going to lose the planet.
00:50:11.000So we're excited about the work that we do.
00:50:14.000I'm excited about what's going on in the state of Georgia.
00:50:17.000I have one of the things that we do on our farm tour Is we give every person an opportunity of the farmers to speak about their FSA or their NRCS experience.
00:50:28.000Those experiences have been getting better and better in the state of Georgia because of relationship building.
00:50:50.000Make sure that we get back to creating relationships because a lot of the issue that we have, some of it is historic discrimination, but some of it is just relationship.
00:50:59.000I don't know you, so I can't recognize that your folder is on number six, and maybe your folder needs to be on number one.
00:51:44.000One of the mottos that we have on our farm is less is more, and we can do more with less Especially my farmers who have off-farm jobs, and I'll give you an example of that.
00:51:55.000I had a client down in Brownwood, Jordan.
00:52:17.000The big takeaway I'd love if you were in office, Mr.
00:52:20.000Kennedy, I'll get right to it, is to have some parameters around who can apply for these grants.
00:52:28.000These large grants that are used to help farmers.
00:52:31.000And then I would love to hear if we can make people stick to what they wrote the original grant from versus changing it once they get their reward or award so that they can pocket most of the money.
00:52:44.000And I'll pause there so that other folks can have an opportunity to speak.
00:52:58.000I'm also an attorney and the founder of a non-profit called the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance that focuses on policy reform.
00:53:06.000Some of what I'm going to say is going to be pulling together pieces of what others have already said.
00:53:10.000We work to do policy with People from both parties, every end of the political spectrum.
00:53:17.000And that is both a really positive thing.
00:53:19.000We have opportunities with people from both parties.
00:53:21.000It stems in some ways, though, from a fundamental problem we have, which is that both parties for decades have promoted a get big or get out philosophy.
00:53:30.000That is, the others have spoken to have led to really control of our entire food system by a handful of companies.
00:53:37.000Everyone here is doing amazing work at different scales.
00:53:41.000And all of them are limited by working within this system that we have right now.
00:53:47.000And there are several key factors that this plays out with.
00:53:50.000One is the infrastructure, because all of our infrastructure on how to grow, how to process, how to distribute our food is geared for mass production, not even on a national scale, but on an international scale.
00:54:06.000The other key problem is that the regulations have been intentionally designed to support large-scale extractive agriculture.
00:54:13.000And therefore, it affirmatively, actively burdens small farms and regenerative farms.
00:54:18.000So if we want this type of food in ag to become the norm, we have to rebuild our infrastructure.
00:54:24.000We have to change the regulations so that they are scale appropriate.
00:54:28.000And part of that is reining in the power of large corporations.
00:54:32.000And there's often a misunderstanding, and people think we can shop our way out of the problem.
00:54:37.000And buying from producers like us is vital, but we can't shop our way out of the problem.
00:54:46.000So I'm going to give a few examples of reforms that we're pushing for.
00:54:50.000There's a longer list that needs to happen, but these are some ones that are key for us.
00:54:54.000So one of them is something called the Prime Act, which would allow small farmers to use custom-exempt processors to sell their meat.
00:55:02.000Now these processors are regulated, they're just not regulated the same Same way that the mega meat packers are regulated, who are processing hundreds of animals every hour.
00:55:12.000Those big meat packers hate the Prime Act.
00:55:15.000They claim it's because of food safety, but these small processors have a better track record for food safety than most of the large meat packers.
00:55:22.000What it's really about is the question of market opportunities for small farmers.
00:55:26.000The big operations don't want market share going to small farmers.
00:55:31.000They don't even want Americans to know where their meat comes from.
00:55:34.000Most people don't realize that the meat that they're buying in the grocery stores that have the USDA label on it, a lot of it's coming from Mexico or Brazil or Australia or any one of half a dozen other countries.
00:55:46.000We need country of origin labeling for meat so that consumers can choose to buy from American producers.
00:55:52.000There's a bill called the Fairness for Small-Scale Farmers and Ranchers Act that includes country of origin labeling along with multiple provisions to address corporate consolidation And rebuild our regional infrastructure.
00:56:05.000Ironically, at the same time that the big meat packers are saying, hey, we can't have country of origin labeling, it's too hard to tell people what country their meat comes from.
00:56:15.000At the exact same time they're pushing to require farmers to put electronic tags on every cow so that supposedly we can track the movements.
00:56:26.000The purpose behind that is to promote international trade and deal with trade barriers while they move the financial burden, the cost of it, onto the farmers and ranchers.
00:56:36.000So we see this, let's put the cost on the farmers and ranchers with something called the checkoff program, where farmers actually pay a tax on everything they sell within these checkoff programs to fund advertising campaigns.
00:56:50.000Those advertising campaigns Help the bottom line of the companies that are selling The meat and grain products.
00:56:58.000They don't help the small farmers who actually raised, actually the farmers of any scale, who raised those products but are paying for the check-off.
00:57:07.000So there's another bill, the Opportunities for Fairness and Farming Act, that would reform the check-off programs.
00:57:13.000Because one of the things to add insult to injury is a lot of that check-off money goes to non-profits.
00:57:20.000There are a lot of these non-profits that represent agribusiness interests And actually lobby against many of these same reforms that farmers like us want to see.
00:57:29.000The reforms I've mentioned, the bills I've mentioned, are coming from both Democrats and Republicans.
00:57:35.000But because there are so many powerful corporate interests behind the status quo, we need a lot more people speaking up for the policy reform that enables farmers that are already doing this, like myself and other farmers tonight, and thousands more who are interested In better ways to farm,
00:57:54.000in ways to husband their soils, to steward the ecosystems they want to, they just don't have realistic options because of the way our system is set up.
00:58:05.000With policy reforms like this and others, there's not a simple silver bullet to change this system, but we can have policy reform that creates something where the value isn't just how much shareholders make.
00:58:18.000It's resiliency and human health and long-term food security Through farmer prosperity.
00:58:25.000So thank you very much for the opportunity to speak tonight.
00:59:03.000I'm very grateful for all the wonderful things I learned from this incredible group of farmers.
00:59:12.000And I'm going to consider you my brain trust as I continue to work on this issue.
00:59:18.000If I get into the White House, God willing, I'm going to try everything in my power to wrest USDA away from corporate agriculture and the chemical industry and start making food, start allowing farmers, incentivizing farmers to make food in this country again.
01:00:25.000As an expression of energy of this planet, I'm blessed to have had this day, this moment, to share with you and with everybody who's listening.
01:00:34.000And I hope that we will walk away understanding this interwovenness Thank you.