In this episode, we talk to Will and Jenny Harris, owners of a regenerative farm and an industrial farm, about what it means to grow your own food on your own land, and why the government should be doing more to protect the environment. We also talk about the devastating effects of runoff from industrial agriculture on our local rivers, and the people who live along them, and how they can do something about it. We also discuss the loss of a whole town in Florida that used to be a thriving oyster-harvesting community because of the pollution that runoff from their farms has done to the water supply and the fish that depend on them. And we talk about why no one is doing anything about it, and what could be done to fix the problem. This episode is brought to you by Ground Up, a production of Native Creative Podcasts. Our theme song is Come Alone by The Weakerthans, courtesy of Lotuspool Records, and our ad music is by Build Buildings. The album art for the episode was done by Mark Phillips, and music for this episode was written and produced by Bobby Lord, and edited by Haley Shaw. Thanks to our sponsor, Zapsplat Records, for producing the music for our theme song and music, and for our sound design and editing by Matthew Boll, and thanks to Mark Phillips for the mixing and mastering and mastering of the mixing, for our mixing, and mastering, for making this episode and editing, for which we thank you so much so much love and appreciate you all so much for all your support and support, we really appreciate you, we couldn t do it. Thank you for being a lot of good work, thank you. Thank you to all of you, everyone! and we hope you enjoy it, Thank you, for all of the support and love you, so much, for your support, and thank you for all the love and support you all of it, it really means a lot, it means so much to us, it's a lot. we really mean it, we appreciate it, you're amazing, and we really means it, thanks, we're gonna do it, really really appreciate it. xoxo, bye, bye. - Will and Jeni - Sarah, Sarah, Jack, Jenny, and Will, too, and your support is so much Sarah, too. Sarah and the rest of the crew, too!
00:00:49.000So you can see the difference in the...
00:00:50.000I mean, I don't know if you guys can see it very clearly in the video, but one of them is very light-colored, and the other one looks rich and dark, and it's filled with twigs and all sorts of biological material.
00:01:19.000One side of the fence versus the other side of the fence.
00:01:21.000There's no difference other than the way they've been managed over the last 20 years.
00:01:27.000Yeah, and we've showed many times that video of the, was it a creek or a river near your house, where the runoff from their farm is just polluting the water.
00:02:22.000So, you know, this is, it's just strange that it's legal to just have the runoff pollute the rivers.
00:02:34.000That it seems like someone would see that and say, well, the downstream effects of this have to be pretty substantial and pretty detrimental to the fish, to every other piece of land that's downriver that's going to encounter all this fertilizer and pesticide and herbicides,
00:02:55.000Well, if it was a construction site, it would have to be under what they call SWIT. That's an acronym for something, stormwater something, something.
00:04:04.000There's like a whole town, Apalachicola, that used to be a real thriving community because of the oystering business and industry, and the whole town has suffered, which is one thing we'll talk about with regards to rural America.
00:04:17.000But there's like a whole city that's suffering because they can no longer do what they've done for generations.
00:04:29.000Well, I'm not in a lawsuit filing business.
00:04:32.000Not you, but someone from that town, and someone from the oystering community, because it seems like that's a no-brainer.
00:04:39.000I mean, if you were running a tire company, and the tire company was upstream of something, and the water went down and started polluting it and ruining people's livelihoods,
00:04:54.000you would think that someone would have the grounds for a lawsuit.
00:04:56.000We had RFK on, and he talked a lot about, you know, in New York, the river and the pollution and how he led the charge.
00:05:05.000You know, people like that need to look at Apalachicola Bay.
00:05:09.000And if you had a runoff from a tire manufacturing company, you could trace it back to that one entity in one location.
00:05:20.000You know, that water comes from all over South Georgia, and it's from...
00:06:30.000So it seems like that they would want to study that, though.
00:06:34.000I mean, that seems – it's insane to me that they just allow that to continue, and it's happening every day, day by day, just constantly dumping toxic chemicals into the water.
00:06:44.000So I think, you know, I'm certainly not answering for that whole kind of politically motivated question, but you've got to remember That the politicians who control the bureaucrats are controlled by pesticide companies and agricultural companies.
00:07:09.000And, you know, if I were a politician running for office and begging for funding, I probably wouldn't want to be the guy that opened that can of worms.
00:07:20.000It seems like it all boils down to that.
00:07:38.000It's such a dirty system, and it allows things like this to happen.
00:07:43.000But then the question is, you explained how you changed your farm from an industrial farm to a regenerative farm, and that it took approximately 20 years?
00:07:57.000Well, I mean, when you start that process, moving from an industrial farm to the regenerative farm that we run today, coming out of the chute, you see a decline in production, and it lasts for a period of time,
00:08:14.000three years, four years, or something.
00:08:16.000Then you see a very gradual increase Until it gets back to where ours is today.
00:08:23.000And where ours is today is not as high yielding as if we used all the crop inputs.
00:08:31.000But it's approaching that because we don't have to buy the crop inputs.
00:08:38.000It's certainly a more resilient system.
00:08:41.000And if there was legal or at least some sort of financial repercussions that were enacted on the farm itself for the pollution, it would seem like that would balance itself out.
00:08:55.000Like if someone did the correct thing and said, hey, you guys are ruining the earth itself with this just so you can make a little more money, which is so crazy that that's allowed and not just allowed but subsidized.
00:09:09.000Well, you know, the farmers are making a little more money.
00:09:14.000The big multinational corporations are making a hell of a lot more money because they're manufacturing these products and they're handling these huge quantities of agricultural production and turning out this industrial food that we all eat.
00:09:35.000And don't forget, I think I might have mentioned to you when I spoke to you before, that it's a way of life that senior bureaucrats go to work for the big ag companies.
00:09:47.000So if you're a very senior person in D.C. in the Department of Ag and probably other departments, And you're getting close to retirement.
00:10:00.000If you've been a good boy, you can retire and get a job making twice what you were making with the government.
00:10:06.000If you're not a good boy, just retire.
00:11:50.000You know, Clay County, Georgia, where Bluffton is, was the poorest county in the United States of America in 2020. Number one, not just Georgia, the whole country.
00:12:01.000And when that whole dollar stays in Clay County, Georgia, it's beginning to correct that.
00:12:10.000That results because only 14 cents stays there.
00:12:16.000And it seems like the problem is so complicated now because of fast food chains and because of big cities that absolutely don't grow anything.
00:12:27.000That when you're getting food, you have to get food at scale.
00:12:31.000You have to get massive amounts of food.
00:12:33.000Like, say if you're living in California, if you're living in Los Angeles, which is just an insanely overpopulated place, And you want to get beef, especially if you want to get a cheeseburger from Jack in the Box or something like that.
00:12:46.000I don't mean to pick on Jack in the Box.
00:13:21.000So 25 years ago, when Dad decided to change the way we farmed, he knew that in order to put all the cost that it was going to take to raise animals differently, he had to find a consumer that would pay for that.
00:13:35.000And so he went, you know, looking for customers, and Public Supermarket was, you know, one of the first ones.
00:13:47.000But the point I want to get to is that when Dad started selling beef, grass-fed beef, to those two grocers, the first pound of American grass-fed beef to be marketed as American grass-fed beef came from White Oak Pastures.
00:14:03.000And that was not a sustainable option.
00:15:24.000The United States imports beef from places like Australia, Canada, and much of Latin America.
00:15:28.000It then runs that beef through USDA inspection, and if it passes, sticks a label on it that reads, product of the USA. How dare you?
00:15:38.000But honestly, the erosion of this type of farming in America is completely being exported to another country because we're importing all of this product and then due to loopholes in labeling,
00:15:54.000intentionally fraudulent labeling even, selling it as a product of the USA. Then we have to consider, if everybody's really concerned about climate change and CO2 output, think about the amount of freight, just these massive boats that are making their way across the...
00:16:09.000Did you see this thing they did recently?
00:16:11.000I was reading this article, and I was actually listening to a podcast.
00:16:28.000Change the emission standards for these gigantic freight ships.
00:16:33.000And when they changed the emission standards, what they found was when they were releasing less pollution into the air, it was doing less of a job of blocking the sun.
00:16:43.000So the ocean water was getting warmer, quicker than they anticipated.
00:17:20.000That seems like the most organic solution.
00:17:22.000You're going to take seawater, blow it, but who knows?
00:17:24.000I mean, think about all the pollution that's in the sea now and microplastics in the sea.
00:17:29.000Does that spray into the atmosphere and that get into people's lungs now and cause a host of new autoimmune issues and cardiovascular issues?
00:17:39.000It's so crazy that we're doing it this way.
00:17:41.000So that label change, Product of the USA, even though it was imported, occurred in 2015, I think, 15 or 16. And it was a reaction to the fact that some of us had gone into the grass-fed beef business and were doing pretty good with it.
00:17:58.000We had some really good years in the early 2000s.
00:18:21.000I don't think either of us want to debate product quality or the fact that it is from another country.
00:18:27.000The issue that we have is that it's being sold under the guise of product of the USA. Right.
00:18:32.000So if you're a person who wants to buy all American-made stuff and American-raised beef, and you're like, oh, great, product of the USA, I feel like I'm doing a good thing.
00:19:11.000But they make hunting gear, they make outdoor stuff, they make jujitsu geese, they make fantastic handmade boots.
00:19:18.000And if you want to support an American-made company, Origin's great.
00:19:21.000But, you know, they have a limited amount of They can only make so much of it.
00:19:25.000You know, they have one major factory that's doing it in Maine, and it's all people working on it by hand, and it's pretty cool, but it's, you know, it's limited.
00:19:34.000Yeah, we're not saying that beef from Australia is bad.
00:19:46.000A really awkward situation that occurred last week.
00:19:51.000A company who is owned by friends of ours that we care about was buying some grinds from us, some trim actually, making ground beef out of.
00:20:03.000And Jenny was renegotiating the deal with them last week.
00:20:09.000And it came out that they were importing some beef.
00:20:13.000What happened is they showed her the projections of how much more they were selling.
00:21:17.000What led to this decision, the initial decision, to change your farm from an industrial farm to a regenerative farm?
00:21:25.000There had to be a lot of soul-searching involved in that kind of a decision, because it's not an easy one, and it probably cost a lot of money, and it was probably quite a headache.
00:21:35.000It was all those things, and to be real honest with you, I went into it with a little bit of naivety.
00:21:42.000I didn't think it was going to be as big a deal as it was, but it was.
00:21:49.000I was a very industrial cattleman for 20 years, graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in animal science, came home and put it to work.
00:21:57.000My dad had been a very industrial producer, using all the tools.
00:22:02.000I had a lot of pride in my knowledge and understanding of how to raise cattle industrially, monoculture of cattle at that time.
00:22:12.000And I think probably because I was an abuser, if it said to use a little bit, I used a lot.
00:22:21.000And I just came to see the unintended consequences of that industrial system more clearly probably than people that were playing closer to the rules.
00:22:33.000And I just thought I didn't want to do it anymore.
00:22:36.000And I did not do a good job planning an alternative production program.
00:23:23.000Since you've gone public, I found about you from Fox.
00:23:28.000I was watching television and you were doing this interview and we talked about it the last time you were here and this guy was rushing you.
00:25:05.000You know, true pastured poultry might cost two or three hundred percent more than commodity poultry.
00:25:11.000And so you have these consumers who are very busy.
00:25:14.000You know, they don't have time to learn the nuances and read and research like, you know, you have done and we obviously do.
00:25:23.000And so they see pastured poultry for $6 a pound or free-range poultry for $3 or $4 a pound.
00:25:32.000How could you expect for them to pay 50% more, 75%, or 100% more for something that is so loosely defined and, due to labeling, pretty misrepresentative of the way it's actually raised?
00:25:48.000Yeah, free-range sounds like you just let them out of the chicken coop and they wander around.
00:26:20.000But I've gotten eggs from the grocery store that say free range, and I get it, and I crack it open, and it is that light yellow bullshit yolk that I know.
00:26:30.000I know that chicken has just been eating feed.
00:27:56.000We couldn't start to scratch the surface.
00:27:58.000And I don't know the answer, but I'll say this.
00:28:02.000When you say, can we produce enough food like that, can the industry produce enough food like that without doing such extraordinary damage?
00:28:18.000This stuff is so cheap, not because it's really being produced that cheap, it's because expenses are thrown off And not borne by the producer or the company buying it.
00:28:32.000The dead zone in the Gulf would be a great example.
00:28:36.000That's a great example because I mean think about the extraordinary amount of money it would take to take the Gulf and bring it back to a pristine condition.
00:30:24.000Pissing in your britches to stay warm.
00:30:28.000Yeah, it's really sad and it's weird how we haven't addressed this and how this is just something that just keeps going and going primarily because of the amount of money that's involved and the amount of money these companies are making by doing things the way they're doing it right now and the fact that it's subsidized.
00:31:02.000So thousands and thousands of years ago, the indigenous people of the Amazon figured out a way to create this Regenerative soil, and it's composed of biological material,
00:31:20.000carbon, all sorts of different things.
00:31:22.000They don't exactly know how they made it, and they don't know how to recreate it, but this is a self-sustaining soil.
00:31:29.000And when you grow in it, it acts like this soil that you folks have.
00:31:34.000And these people that lived thousands of years ago figured out how to way to make this sustainable soil.
00:31:41.000It just seems like that is something, if there's so much money involved in all this, that's something that someone would be able to figure out how to recreate today.
00:32:15.000They're calling it biochar, terra preta, but it's a phenomenal soil for growing crops on and for growing things on.
00:32:23.000And it seems like that should be something that someone should invest in, some sort of research.
00:32:29.000I mean, look, if they figured out how to do it thousands of years ago and we assume that they didn't have computers and AI and all the different advantages that we have in terms of technology and knowledge, Figure it out.
00:32:41.000There should be some sort of a large-scale project if we're really at 57 years left of topsoil in the American farmlands due to monocrop agriculture and industrial farming.
00:32:52.000It seems like they should be able to figure out a way to do that.
00:32:57.000And then you can see there about the subsoil below that guy's hand, which is like the degraded soil, and the good soil, which is above it, which is soil that we...
00:33:45.000And they meticulously made it in a lab, but then somehow it wasn't after they did everything that science told them that seawater was, when they made it, it wasn't seawater.
00:33:58.000That makes me question my, you're right, that makes me question my reliance upon reductive science.
00:34:05.000The project that Jenny's talking about, I don't remember where it was done.
00:34:10.000They took seawater and And broke it down as well as they could with qualitative, quantitative chemistry.
00:34:20.000And decided it could determine exactly what was in it.
00:34:25.000Then when they put it back together, a fish wouldn't live in it.
00:35:18.000People listening to this probably feel very helpless because it seems like it's one of those situations like, oh my god, this is a problem.
00:35:25.000It's almost like you don't realize there's an avalanche coming because you're sitting in the town and you're like, oh, this is a good place.
00:36:14.000It won't be, sadly, the land-grant university system because so much of that funding comes from the huge multinational companies that are profiting from industrial production.
00:36:28.000I can list a whole lot of things it won't come from.
00:36:31.000But if it happens, it'll be by consumers.
00:36:36.000Consumers making the choice, this is what I'm going to support.
00:36:40.000This is not what I'm going to not support.
00:36:43.000That's the only way it's going to happen.
00:36:48.000And I don't know that it's going to happen.
00:36:51.000Well, it seems like it would take a massive re-education of the American public in order for that to take place, and then people would have to be willing to be financially impacted by their decisions because you're not going to be able to get a 99-cent cheeseburger.
00:39:37.000Yeah, and that's unfortunate that this whole green thing has become a political movement and it's been a political movement that's hijacked by industry.
00:39:46.000And they are trying to enforce mandates that will allow them to make extreme amounts of profit and also to control people and to control their choices.
00:39:55.000You know, all you read is that cattle are great contributors to global warming, greenhouse gases and all that.
00:40:06.000And we talked about before, there's a scientific study, a very expensive scientific study called a life cycle analysis on our website that shows that we're actually sequestering more carbon in our cattle side of our business than we're putting up.
00:40:23.000Yeah, that's the way it's supposed to be.
00:40:26.000So one of the differences in those two soils and the ones you showed and the one that you talked about in South America, there's carbon and microscopic life in that soil.
00:40:36.000Which is what makes it dark versus the other one.
00:40:42.000So, you know, the way you build those carbon-rich soils is through proper livestock interactions.
00:40:53.000That's the way the eight-foot-deep soils in the Great Plains came about, those huge herds of buffalo going across.
00:41:01.000And it's the reason that those two soils look so much different than the one that Jamie showed on the board there.
00:41:08.000So I think we know a lot more about how to fix the problem And we acknowledge, but it's just going to be so expensive, especially for big food, big ag, big tech.
00:41:22.000And then ultimately also for the consumer.
00:41:24.000Because if McDonald's went purely to regenerative agriculture, if they had a large-scale effort to eliminate industrial farming and get all of their food through regenerative agriculture, there's not a chance in hell they're going to charge 99 cents for a cheeseburger.
00:41:38.000You know, and I'm not opposed to there being chains like McDonald's, but I just don't know how they work with any sort of local food movement.
00:41:50.000I just don't know how you make that work.
00:41:55.000I mean, there's a large amount of people in this country that primarily eat fast food, unfortunately.
00:42:01.000That's where they get their calories from.
00:42:03.000And you see it because of the health consequences.
00:42:06.000I mean, it's a gigantic issue in this country.
00:42:09.000If you look at the human beings, I'm sure you've seen these photographs of people on the beach in the 1950s and 60s versus 2023. 2023, it's insane how obese everybody is.
00:42:44.000In marketing, we create our own customers.
00:42:47.000Those people who suffer from obesity and sedentary lifestyles that have diseases and whatever else, then we get to sell them medicine.
00:42:56.000And then the medicine's called side effects, which then we treat with more medicine.
00:43:01.000So I'm the director of marketing, and one thing that I love is just good old-fashioned marketing and reoccurring business and returning orders and all those things.
00:43:16.000The very idea that these lifestyles create a certain issue, which are then prescribed with certain medicines that then create more issues that we treat with more medicines.
00:43:49.000Primary changes is, from the 30,000 foot level, is I used to go in my pastures every day looking for something to kill.
00:44:01.000I was looking for a fungus on the grass to put a fungicide on, looking for an insect to put insecticide on, looking for another Competing weed that I put herbicide on, looking for parasites in my cattle,
00:45:50.000That's what's crazy, you know, when you're dealing with 80 plus years of this going on.
00:45:57.000Like, how do you unwind that and how do you...
00:46:00.000I guess you do it through conversations like this initially to get enough people aware of how big of a problem this is and how bad it is for everybody.
00:46:09.000Three generations and trillions and trillions of dollars.
00:46:13.000There's just so many people making so much money on this.
00:46:15.000When you think about it, you probably won't be here in 80 years.
00:46:18.000I know you're the specimen of health, and maybe so, but your kids will be.
00:46:25.000I didn't really focus on it until I became a mother.
00:46:29.000I have a son and a daughter, and my sister has kids.
00:46:34.000It's like, all right, we can probably keep it in between the ditches.
00:48:27.000So they found a ghostwriter named Emily Grieven, who is great.
00:48:32.000And she and Dad had phone dates every Friday for probably a year that lasted anywhere from two to four hours.
00:48:42.000In listening to the book, Dad narrated it, and it is like a glimpse inside of his brain.
00:48:51.000All of his thoughts are there, and I think it's so important because Dad started a business and a mission that is going to last a lot longer than him.
00:49:02.000He's 69 this year, and the food system is not going to be fixed.
00:49:10.000And so to be part of that and to be part of a business that's bigger than one person, bigger than one person's life that lasts so much longer, I think is so important.
00:49:20.000And people like him have got to focus on that.
00:49:23.000You know, he can't fix the food system.
00:49:25.000He has to set the groundwork for people like you and I to fix the food system and then to instill it in our children to fix the food system.
00:49:33.000What was the motivation to write this?
00:49:37.000I felt like people needed to know what I spent the last 25 years learning.
00:49:43.000I'm not the only one that knows it, but I'm the only one that has this particular slant on it.
00:51:02.000So if someone is out there that does run an industrial farm and is sort of tortured by it, that they're aware of the consequences of what they're doing and they maybe admire what you've done and would like to move in that direction.
00:51:18.000Since you mentioned it, Gabe and I, we're both about the same age.
00:51:24.000We're both industrial farmers that went this route.
00:51:29.000And there's some great regenerative farmers out there, but there aren't a tremendous number of them that used to be an industrial farmer.
00:51:55.000Well, you were originally brought onto that Fox News show because they were trying to figure out what a farmer thinks about Bill Gates buying up farmland.
00:52:04.000You know, Bill Gates, who's famously said that everyone's got to stop eating meat.
00:52:46.000Maybe four meat processors, at least with beef, occupy over 80% of the nation's beef supply.
00:52:56.000Chitty just gave me this before we came in here, but this is in 2023. The United States has imported 956 million pounds of beef so far in 2023. Wow.
00:54:21.000I think on Tyson's website it has, and I gave it to Jamie, but one in every five pounds of meat that's consumed in America is a Tyson product.
00:56:53.000We've shown the footage of, someone got drone footage where they fly a drone over a pig farm, an industrialized pig farm, and you see these lakes of pig waste, and it's so disgusting.
00:58:18.000But there's one more that's like our brands.
00:58:22.000So one in five pounds of meat, we just read that, was produced by Tyson.
00:58:28.000But consumers have no idea that it was a Tyson product.
00:58:32.000So if you look at the amount of brands that these big multinational meat corporations own, there's no way for a consumer to know that that's one of those products.
00:58:48.000So it's just a really incredible system when you start pulling the layers back on it.
00:59:19.000If you're hungry and you're on the go and you want to be able to pull into a drive-thru, get a cheeseburger and some fries and a soda, bam.
00:59:27.000It's kind of extraordinary, the system they've created.
00:59:30.000It sucks that you can't do it in a healthy way, but it's kind of extraordinary that you just pull into someone and get a thousand calories like that.
00:59:42.000And that is also reflected in the health consequences of impoverished people.
00:59:48.000If you look at people that are poor that rely upon this kind of food all the time, those are the people that have the worst health outcomes because they're eating stuff that doesn't have any nutrients in it.
01:00:04.000They've done these little tests where they've taken a McDonald's cheeseburger and just sit it on a shelf for like weeks and nothing happens to it.
01:00:14.000You could probably eat it, which is so insane.
01:01:26.000I mean, the preservatives have a consequence on your health.
01:01:29.000The eating stuff that, you know, we were talking about dog food earlier, and I feed my dog raw food, and I just started feeding him raw food about six, seven months ago, and it kind of, it's embarrassing to me that that's the case.
01:01:43.000Because I always just thought, if you go to the pet store, I didn't think about it.
01:01:46.000You go to the pet store, you buy healthy food, the best food that they have available at a nice pet store.
01:01:52.000Like, this has got to be good for the dog.
01:01:54.000Oh, look at all the nutrients, look at all the stuff.
01:01:55.000But then I was thinking, like, how is it just sitting there?
01:02:44.000But what I was saying about my dog, he was getting fat, and we were lowering the amount of food that he was eating because of that, and increasing his exercise, and he still just...
01:03:01.000So I'd shoot an elk, and I'd take some of the ground meat, and that's what I would use in his dog food, and I'd cut it up, and boy, he would just dive on that food.
01:03:10.000He couldn't get it in his mouth quick enough.
01:03:11.000To him, it was what he was supposed to be eating.
01:03:15.000Now, when we switched over to the stuff we're using right now, there's a bunch of companies that do it really well, and they sell real food for dogs.
01:03:46.000You think about the high instances of cancer in dogs and also the high instances of cancer in human beings that have been correlated to cancer.
01:03:54.000Preservatives and all sorts of environmental contaminants that are in human beings' diets.
01:04:58.000They're used to having to gnaw their food off of a carcass that they've run down or whatever else it is.
01:05:07.000You know, it is sad to think that we have turned dog food into something, you know, little bites that can be gulfed down and we don't give dogs something to chew on and then they get in trouble for chewing on your shoes or chewing on your chair leg when that is how animals evolved.
01:06:51.000But there's people that go crazy with it.
01:06:53.000And there's like a community online of people that have like overused their jaw muscles to the point where they develop these massive like bull mastiff jaw muscles.
01:07:04.000On the side of their face and it becomes a like kind of a weird thing like almost like anorexia or something like that.
01:07:10.000You know they get obsessed with jaw muscles.
01:07:14.000Yeah, there's like before and after photos.
01:07:16.000These people that have just have developed these because they want a square jaw, right?
01:07:21.000So in doing that will give you a square jaw because that's where it comes from.
01:07:25.000It comes from this muscle right here, this muscle right here and you could You build that muscle just like you can build your biceps or any other muscle.
01:07:44.000We did a tremendous amount of education for cooking grass-fed beef and for The first several years that we had our e-commerce online store, we had consumers call and say, it's like shoe leather.
01:08:14.000But when I look at, like, when they slice Kobe beef and they talk about how expensive it is because of all the marbling, I'm like, that thing's dying.
01:09:04.000You know, that's what I like about wild game.
01:09:06.000When I'm eating wild game, I'm eating this animal that is essentially eating and living the way it's lived for thousands and thousands and thousands of years with no input from human beings whatsoever.
01:09:19.000And there's some companies that do that, like Certified Piedmontese has a very specific cow that's much higher in protein than other cows because it's leaner and it looks different.
01:09:31.000It's darker, but you have to cook it differently.
01:09:32.000And the way I cook it And the way I tell people to cook game is what's called a reverse sear method.
01:09:39.000So I cook it very slowly until I get it up to an internal temperature of like 120 degrees or 115 degrees.
01:09:46.000Then I sear the outside of it to give it a nice crust and it's tender that way and that way you get all the flavor of the meat.
01:11:37.000That's what you're getting, and that's what makes it juicy and delicious.
01:11:40.000But that's also what makes it sick, and that's also why they have to use so many antibiotics.
01:11:46.000You know, I'm sure you've seen, there was a documentary, I forget what the documentary was, but there was a documentary where they showed various cows and that these cows, all these diseases that these cows encounter because of eating that way and all the chemicals that they have to use and the antibiotics they have to use to treat these cows and the unintended consequences those have on the consumer.
01:12:10.000Well, you know, our concern is antibiotic resistance because we use those antibiotics on the pathogens when they're not sick.
01:12:32.000You know, it's got to do with the rumen.
01:12:35.000I don't know that, but it's got to do with that, you know, a cow...
01:12:41.000The way they digest is there are microbes in the rumen, the gut, that breaks down the cellulose or grain, and somehow that antibiotics enhances that procedure.
01:13:00.000It probably keeps them functioning while still eating an unnatural diet.
01:13:08.000Here it says, the damage caused by antibiotics depends upon the mechanism of action, dosage, treatment, duration, and administration route.
01:13:16.000Antibiotics given at low doses to animals have the notable effect of increasing weight, a practice termed subtherapeutic antibiotic treatment and used since 1946 in livestock.
01:13:28.000You know, we only have a certain number of antibiotics.
01:13:32.000And when we use them indiscriminately at very low levels, resistance in pathogens spills up.
01:13:40.000So we put ourselves at risk of losing these life-saving drugs that we depend on.
01:13:45.000And then also the rise of MRSA. You know, medication-resistant staph infections are huge in this country.
01:13:52.000I mean, it's such a giant issue when people get surgery or if they get cuts.
01:13:56.000You know, in the jiu-jitsu community, it's a giant issue.
01:13:59.000And I have several friends that have gone through lengthy hospital stays because they developed staph infection that didn't respond to antibiotics, and it got systemic.
01:14:09.000And it's life-threatening, and people have died from it.
01:14:12.000It's something very scary because they're pumping you full of antibiotics intravenously, and it's not working.
01:14:19.000The antibiotics are not killing this bacteria, and this bacteria is consuming the person.
01:14:36.000You know, I mean, we don't know what the effects of this stuff's going to be.
01:14:39.000But for short-term profits, you know, that's one of the major, I think, differences between businesses like ours and corporations.
01:14:48.000You know, corporations are so steadily focused on quarterly reports and profits and, you know, whatever else.
01:14:55.000And there have been so many decisions.
01:14:58.000In fact, all of the big decisions recently, certainly, that When we get together, my wife, my sister, my brother-in-law, my dad, and he says, you know, do you want to buy this land?
01:15:17.000And, you know, my sister, my wife, my brother-in-law, we all decide if that's something we can or can't swing.
01:15:25.000And so businesses run like that for the longevity of Versus businesses for short-term profit have completely different motivations.
01:15:37.000Yeah, and we're seeing the health consequences of that with other things as well.
01:15:41.000I was watching this video the other day where this gentleman was talking about farm-raised salmon being one of the most toxic things that you can consume, which is so wild.
01:15:51.000If you think about salmon, salmon is just immediately associated with health.
01:16:02.000But people think about salmon as being one of the healthiest things.
01:16:05.000And so this guy holds open this fillet of salmon.
01:16:08.000See if you can find a video on it, Jamie.
01:16:10.000This guy takes this fillet of salmon, and it's a fresh piece of salmon, and he opens it up.
01:16:15.000And he's like, look at how easily these bones separate from the flesh.
01:16:22.000And the color of the flesh is very different, which is one of the reasons why they have to use dye.
01:16:27.000When you see a farm-raised salmon and it's a dark red color, a lot of times what you're getting is people putting food coloring on the salmon itself in order to make it that color, which is great.
01:16:39.000Because if you get a wild salmon, it's from the insects that they consume that turns their flesh that color.
01:16:46.000When I listened to your episode with RFK and he was talking about the mercury levels in fish, I mean, I was not a huge fish eater to begin with, but after that I was like, whoa, this is incredible.
01:16:58.000The farm-raised salmon thing is really crazy because people just don't associate salmon at all with being something that's not good for you.
01:17:56.000GMO corn, GMO soy, poo, and medications to prevent overgrowth of bacterial infections because it's so unhealthy.
01:18:03.000All fish is going to accumulate some heavy metals, which is not a good thing, but wild salmon is a much better choice than any Atlantic salmon.
01:18:10.000All Atlantic salmon is going to be farm-raised, and we know that these chemicals, PCBs, PBDEs, are endocrine disruptors.
01:18:16.000Yes, it's an animal food, it's not a plant food, but this is one of my least favorites.
01:18:21.000Yeah, he doesn't bring it down, but this one gentleman takes a filet.
01:18:25.000He takes a fresh filet and opens it up for you to see it, and he shows how this tissue is essentially just weak and soft, and it's just not the same.
01:19:47.000I don't believe you can find one anywhere.
01:19:49.000Everywhere there are plants and animals and microbes living in symbiotic relationships with each other.
01:19:56.000When you step away from that, which is what we've done in industrial farming, whether it's plants or animals, whether it's peanuts or hogs, you're fighting nature every step of the way.
01:20:34.000What she described with the medical is exactly what we've done in food production.
01:20:41.000One expensive technological tool that we pay money for that fixes a problem but creates another problem that requires another expensive technical tool and another and another and another,
01:21:32.000And the way we insisted on raising poultry, like all the rest of the species, is in an environment where they can express their instinctive behavior.
01:21:40.000So cattle were meant to roam and graze.
01:22:44.000And I think at one point, there were...
01:22:47.000We had single sightings, 84 bald eagles at white oak pastures at one time, whereas historically we had never had any bald eagles.
01:22:55.000I mean, I went 30-something years never seeing a bald eagle, but then in a very short amount of time there were 80-something, and they put us near about out of the pastured poultry business.
01:23:08.000But that is just a prime example of how nature will balance itself.
01:23:32.000The dogs are protecting the chickens from nocturnal predators, and the dogs are nocturnal, so they're working their butts off from sundown to sunrise.
01:26:39.000And it's rare for them to get a chance to kill some elk, especially when they reintroduce wolves and the elk haven't been accustomed to them.
01:26:46.000And now all of a sudden the wolves are there and the cows and the bulls don't exactly know what to do because they haven't encountered wolves before.
01:26:55.000They dropped the population in Yellowstone significantly.
01:27:00.000Which is where they initially introduced them but now they're you know there's there was an article today that I was reading about them in California that they're seeing them in you know and they're migrating into California and some of them being released in California by these wacky wildlife groups like I showed one that was in central California is near Bakersfield this lone wolf that was in a cow pasture that a friend of mine had filmed this beautiful big black wolf by himself that most likely was brought there by somebody Nature
01:27:38.000That's one of the issues I think that some people focus on with agriculture in general is that they have these expectations that it is kind or it is Walt Disney World or it is beautiful.
01:27:50.000We had a situation where we were kidding.
01:27:54.000So our goats were kidding and we were We were co-grazing a paddock.
01:31:38.000Yeah, you just gotta make sure that it's the right temperature.
01:31:41.000You know, you said something that was interesting that I can speak to and, you know, something inside of you that wants to experience nature.
01:31:49.000You know, it's just something that's just atavistic, you know, about watching nature.
01:31:53.000And we have, you know, we have a lot of people visit white oak pastures every year.
01:31:58.000And one of the things that they love the most are our big cattle moves.
01:36:14.000How many people have reached out to you, have a lot of people reached out to you after you've gone public with all this stuff and become sort of higher profile and wanted help and trying to figure out how they could do that for themselves?
01:36:27.000Yeah, we formed a non-profit, 501C3, CFAR, Center for Agricultural...
01:37:16.000And I think for a lot of people it's very satisfying to see, and it seems very natural and very normal, and it seems like the right way to go.
01:37:24.000But for the vast majority of people that are getting their food, this is not going to be an option with what's currently required to feed 300 plus million people.
01:37:53.000The price is probably a lot closer per pound when you take in the external cost than industrial agriculture takes outside of the cost of producing food.
01:38:04.000That's not at the per pound price on the label.
01:38:08.000It would take someone a lot smarter than you or I to figure out how to scale that and how to make that available for everyone and how to encourage people to do that.
01:38:16.000I think the only way to encourage industrial farms to change is financially.
01:38:23.000Yeah, there has to be some sort of a – like they have to be responsible for this damage they're doing.
01:38:28.000They have to be – and then also the health consequences.
01:38:32.000If someone started saying, hey, you know, what you're doing to these animals is having a direct effect on human beings that consume them, and you're responsible for that.
01:38:41.000If there's a change, it will be a consumer-led change.
01:38:45.000That's the only way it's going to happen.
01:38:46.000So it'll have to be a change of people voting with their money.
01:38:50.000There's no other way that's going to happen.
01:38:52.000And it's gonna have to get really bad before that occurs on a wholesale basis.
01:38:57.000And what scares me is that that's when opportunists and people that have a lot of money and influence and people that are in positions of power are gonna try to encourage people to do something else instead that's profitable.
01:39:10.000And they're gonna try to blame cattle.
01:39:12.000Instead of blaming monocrop agriculture.
01:39:16.000And they're going to try to force people to eat plant-based meat, which has really been interesting to me because that's one of the instances where people have voted with their dollar.
01:39:24.000Because when they first started introducing things like Beyond Meat or Impossible Meat or whatever the fuck it's called, when they started doing that stuff, Initially, a lot of people were like, oh, this is great, until people tried it.
01:40:11.000Yeah, cell-grown meat, which is essentially the same thing, I think, because they're taking that cell-grown meat and then they're using 3D printers to try to replicate it and artificially created ribeye.
01:41:04.000And I think they do realize that the plant-based meat is a bust.
01:41:09.000And also, more and more people are becoming aware of the health consequences of industrial seed oils and how many of these industrial seed oils are used in the processing and creation of these artificial plant-based meats.
01:41:26.000Inflammation that cause a host of health problems in people's bodies.
01:41:30.000Yeah, his mother grew up cooking everything in lard.
01:41:34.000And then when Crisco came along, that was like the thing.
01:41:39.000These vegetable oils, these canola oil, sunflower oil, it was like this very stark change.
01:41:49.000One thing that has been interesting for me is that, you know, in the last 24 months, our suet fat and pork lard is, you know, one of the fastest moving items that we sell.
01:42:02.000It's because people refuse to cook in canola oil and peanut oil and whatever.
01:43:43.000It's not supposed to get that much of it, first of all.
01:43:45.000Also, it's rancid and they have to use chemicals to treat the smell.
01:43:49.000They have to bleach it to make it clear.
01:43:51.000There's like so many things that are involved in the processing of that junk and then you put it in your body to cause a host of problems.
01:43:58.000And people are finally becoming aware of these problems and also becoming aware of other options like Olive oil, avocado oil, healthy oils.
01:45:14.000McDonald's finally made the switch to vegetable oil.
01:45:17.000What drives me nuts about that saturated fat thing is that's a small number of scientists that were bribed what is essentially the equivalent of $50,000 in today's market.
01:45:28.000So these guys were bribed by the sugar industry to write a bullshit article that Made this connection between saturated fat and heart disease because they were trying to lead people away from the actual conclusion is that it's sugar.
01:45:45.000And that sugar is what's bad for everybody.
01:45:46.000And that's what's causing the increase in all these corn oils.
01:45:50.000But research today is exactly the same.
01:46:05.000And these air-quote experts, like we detailed with the FDA, how they go immediately into some sort of a cushy job in these corporations afterwards, it's sick.
01:47:35.000The alpha wolf is the one that first gets the liver when there's a kill.
01:47:39.000Watching nature has been so interesting.
01:47:41.000Just to tell that story a little deeper, Dad always said if a bad herdsman has a calf go down, the first night the coyote will chew through the anus and eat the most nutrient-dense parts of the carcass, the liver, the kidneys,
01:48:36.000And the first thing that they eat, we so pretentiously want ribeyes and New York strips and filet mignon, when in reality the most nutrient-dense parts of the carcass are so far from that.
01:49:30.000I mean, it has to be some sort of an evolutionary thing where they realize that that's the most nutritious, that has the best benefits, it's best for you.
01:49:39.000I don't know whether it aids in digestion.
01:51:30.000But, you know, that's not a here, no there.
01:51:33.000If people could eat a little bit of liver in their diet, I mean, I have friends that are very health conscious that only eat it for the health benefits.
01:51:40.000They don't enjoy it, but they'll eat one ounce of liver every day.
01:52:03.000It's in his DNA that that is what he wants.
01:52:05.000I had a boxer who is still to this day like my BFF. She died like three years ago and I'm still not over it.
01:52:12.000But I trained her with liver and I would go to the kill floor at the plant, get some, cut it into little bites and I'd train her until she puked and then she'd be ready to go again.
01:52:30.000It is fascinating that we've moved away from that to the point where people crave the least healthy things like, you know, fucking Cheetos.
01:54:30.000And then you get accustomed to those foods and they become comfort foods.
01:54:33.000And unfortunately, a lot of those comfort foods are really terrible for you.
01:54:37.000One of the things that Gary, when we discuss these things, when I discuss these things with the experts, I'm always blown away by things that I didn't know before.
01:54:48.000And what Gary Brekka was talking about the other day was folate and that these enriched flowers that are enriched with folate, which is very different than folic acid, which is naturally occurring, or is the opposite.
01:55:26.000And that's why so many people, on top of the fact that a lot of, you know, they've changed the way wheat is grown to make it more high yield, so it's got more complex glutens in it, and then it's enriched with folate.
01:55:41.000Well, again, we're not really growing food anymore.
01:55:44.000We're growing food like ingredients that can then be manufactured into something that's put into a package with a shiny label that may or may not be indicative of what's actually in the package, and then we serve it to people at something that they can afford.
01:55:59.000Well, I'm very, very thankful for people like you, that you folks have, first of all, made this incredibly difficult decision to take your farm and to convert it over much cost and heartache and a lot of pain and a lot of back-breaking work to turn it into this regenerative farm.
01:56:18.000And then you've gone out and told the world.
01:56:23.000And you've shown, especially through these videos where people can see it and through these conversations that we've had, where people can become educated.
01:56:41.000And that if it wasn't for people like you that made this decision, it's a very difficult decision to do this.
01:56:49.000I think the conversations that we've had, the conversations you've had with other people in writing this book and having these people understand these things has changed the way most people think and feel about food itself.
01:57:06.000But I'm very very thankful that you guys have done this and also Joel Salatin who's been on this podcast before has a very similar type of operation at Polyface Farms and I know there's some other ones too so shout out to them as well but if it wasn't for you folks I mean who knows who knows where we'd be at I think people would be stuck without a solution because even the term grass-fed beef when I was a kid you never heard about grass-fed beef I wasn't even a term that people were familiar with it's a fairly new understanding And I think that if it wasn't for people like
01:57:36.000you that are out there shouting it from the barn tops, you know, I would say rooftop, but this is, you know, you're doing it the right way.
01:59:33.000If we could move the way we produce food, consume food in this country, the consumers would be so much better off, the producers would be so much better off, the land, the water, rural landscape.
02:00:15.000You know, to be in that one click in that path of food production, food delivered from the farm to the consumer, I don't think anybody ever enjoys that.
02:00:52.000They wouldn't have come back if I was an industrial beef producer like I used to be.
02:00:59.000They wouldn't have wanted to, and I wouldn't have encouraged them to.
02:01:03.000But the fact that we've made these changes has created an entity that, you know, while we're not blown away with profits, it's just very, very pleasant to be part of.