True Patriot Love - July 21, 2026


TPL On The Road： North Atlantic Organics ft Joe Dorgan


Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

170.68

Word count

1,796

Sentence count

143

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Jim Whelan is a fifth generation farmer on a farm in Pembroke, Nova Scotia, Canada. His family has always been farmers and he is the fifth generation of the same family. He started a company that changed the world.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 on true patriot love the east coast tour continues we're in pei kignish right made it then we have
00:00:11.840 joe dorgan here um for north atlantic organics right so welcome uh thank you for spending the
00:00:18.480 time with us today not a problem so joe we drove up right first of all beautiful right we like we
00:00:24.720 we're from ontario so we never see anything like this right okay so before we get into you know
00:00:30.880 what uh your uh what you founded uh your company and also you know how you've changed the world
00:00:37.120 with it i just want to learn a little about you so as i was driving up and i thought to myself
00:00:42.320 how does joe like how does he find dignish where how does he make it here um so were you born in
00:00:48.880 Born right here, fifth generation on this ground here.
00:00:53.480 Really?
00:00:54.220 Yeah.
00:00:54.820 OK.
00:00:56.020 And so Jim is how I know, right?
00:00:59.920 I met you today, Jim Whelan.
00:01:02.120 And I know a little bit about Jim's background.
00:01:04.520 So did you guys always farm?
00:01:06.740 Is that so good?
00:01:07.640 We farm here all our life.
00:01:08.640 Our old man farmed, our grandfather, our great-grandfather.
00:01:11.640 Everybody was farming.
00:01:12.740 Now we're still farming.
00:01:15.880 My son's, one son, he's not on the farm.
00:01:20.020 He was in the service.
00:01:21.120 He retired from the service.
00:01:22.920 My other son is in the fishing business.
00:01:26.320 And my grandsons, they're into the lobster fishing business.
00:01:30.820 We farmed all our life.
00:01:32.320 This place has always been farmed.
00:01:34.640 OK.
00:01:35.440 Cattle farming.
00:01:36.340 Cattle, pigs. 1.00
00:01:37.740 It was a mixed farm. 1.00
00:01:39.040 I was a dairy farmer.
00:01:40.740 The land we grew potatoes.
00:01:42.780 OK.
00:01:44.140 And it was a farmer pretty well every now
00:01:47.600 we just keep a few beef cattle, grow our own feed,
00:01:51.100 something like that there.
00:01:52.180 Yeah.
00:01:52.800 I'm 70 years old now.
00:01:54.300 And the younger generation, like my sons and grandsons,
00:01:57.640 they're not on a farm.
00:01:59.100 They like what I do on the farm, but they like to eat good
00:02:01.800 and all this other stuff.
00:02:04.380 Can I ask you something?
00:02:05.280 So we did a show on this recently.
00:02:07.180 Why?
00:02:08.580 Why don't they see it as a, do you ever
00:02:11.500 wonder why they don't see it as a future?
00:02:13.380 No, I understand it in a way.
00:02:17.020 The younger generation today are used to a little bit more
00:02:21.520 than what we were used to.
00:02:22.920 We were brought up, and we survived.
00:02:26.720 And my old man and my mother, they were down this farm.
00:02:30.640 There were seven of us in the family.
00:02:33.240 My old man, that's all he did was farm, just a little mix farm. 0.98
00:02:37.040 And we were used to it. 0.99
00:02:38.140 You had no money, but you got by.
00:02:40.380 You always ate good.
00:02:42.140 You got a roof over your head, everything like that.
00:02:43.980 But the younger generation today, and I can see that,
00:02:47.100 they got better educated.
00:02:50.140 It's not that we didn't have a chance to get educated.
00:02:52.620 We didn't want to get educated.
00:02:54.300 Right.
00:02:55.180 We went to work and made a living.
00:02:57.580 The younger people I know, our two sons got educated.
00:03:01.500 And one fellow went in the service.
00:03:04.060 He was there for 25 years or so.
00:03:06.700 And been all over the world and into the wars
00:03:09.580 or something like that, he's now retired.
00:03:12.140 My other son worked with me on the farm.
00:03:15.520 We milked cows, and we're good at it.
00:03:18.480 And we done good at it.
00:03:20.920 But for some reason, 15, 16 years ago,
00:03:26.440 another farmer called me up from the other end of the island,
00:03:29.240 see if I'd be interested in salad.
00:03:32.040 My quota system and stuff like that never crossed my mind,
00:03:35.980 but I said, I'm always interested in talking.
00:03:38.640 And we sat down on a Saturday morning at 8 o'clock
00:03:42.140 in his accountant's office.
00:03:44.800 And at 8.30, I had sold my cola.
00:03:48.820 Never thought it was going to happen.
00:03:50.620 But I had a price on to it, as I said, if something.
00:03:53.380 And I don't go back on my word.
00:03:55.240 And we shook hands, and it happened.
00:03:58.340 So my son said, my son wasn't even home at the time.
00:04:01.860 I was the boss.
00:04:03.460 We both talked about everything that we did.
00:04:05.340 But he was up in Ontario with one of his sons at Hockey
00:04:08.940 in the middle of July.
00:04:11.380 And I called him up.
00:04:12.480 I said, I think we're done milking cows here
00:04:14.240 in the next four or three months.
00:04:15.340 It took a while for it to go through.
00:04:16.940 Yeah.
00:04:18.240 And he said, OK.
00:04:20.440 When he got home, we discussed it all.
00:04:21.940 But he said, I think we grew up in a fishing area.
00:04:24.340 It's all fish in here.
00:04:26.440 Yeah.
00:04:26.940 And I did fish for years, never my own setup,
00:04:32.040 but I fished with other people.
00:04:33.840 And he said, I think I'll get into the fishing business.
00:04:36.500 So he did, and he was, he done well at it.
00:04:39.480 And started off with one lobster a year,
00:04:41.940 and now they have five.
00:04:43.240 Oh, wow.
00:04:43.900 And they're making an easier living, a lot easier living.
00:04:47.600 Like a lot of young people don't understand that today,
00:04:51.600 this farming and all this new stuff. 0.95
00:04:53.780 And they kind of bitch a bit about the fishing. 0.89
00:04:56.380 There's not enough money. 0.98
00:04:57.680 Maybe we're not getting paid enough and everything like that.
00:05:00.180 Like my son says, they never farmed.
00:05:04.420 He said, if they had a farm, they'd know how good this is.
00:05:07.180 He said, I call this, and he does.
00:05:08.720 He said, we're on vacation, fishing around here.
00:05:11.620 Now we're on vacation.
00:05:12.780 Yeah.
00:05:13.380 Well, because he knows, right?
00:05:14.580 It's like everything else.
00:05:15.880 So a little bit of background about me, and you and I just met.
00:05:18.780 But I grew up in Toronto, right?
00:05:22.080 One of my first jobs was working at Canada Packers.
00:05:25.580 Yep.
00:05:26.280 Right?
00:05:26.580 It was a meat processing plant where cattle used to come in
00:05:30.040 on trains and they used to offload it and then we used to work and i used to load trucks
00:05:34.840 and uh you know and uh so from there you know as i got older i actually did the racetrack business
00:05:42.200 so i mentioned to you i met jim in the horse business yep and uh after i finished in canada
00:05:48.520 i went to the u.s and i ended up building two properties one in oklahoma and one in texas
00:05:55.160 own star yeah uh two racetracks for for the company i was working for uh so you know the
00:06:01.320 cattle business uh was all around me all the time right from one way or another so when when jim said
00:06:07.800 i could come meet you i was really interested because of what you'd done and what you'd created
00:06:13.240 so so now you're you're here right you're you're uh you're farming you eat the cattle and the milk
00:06:19.800 and the dairy um so you decide one day to take the seaweed how do you get to the seaweed part
00:06:26.520 because uh when i'm reading the story and i'm trying to think about it did you just is it part
00:06:31.800 of your background or did you well we're always in the ci as our family like everybody around here
00:06:38.440 had always been in the seaweed business back then up until 20 years ago 25 years ago it was the irish
00:06:45.160 Moss, and this was the Irish Moss capital of the world,
00:06:50.320 Western PEI here, and we were always at it.
00:06:54.220 And you made good money, you spent money,
00:06:57.460 and everything was moving in the Irish Moss industry.
00:07:00.520 Well, it went to hell.
00:07:03.060 There's no Irish Moss industry left.
00:07:05.060 So we were always farming, and my son and I were milking cows.
00:07:10.120 We were milking out of 50, 55 cows.
00:07:13.880 And I decided, or we both did, said, well,
00:07:18.360 people wanted a company of material
00:07:20.160 was talking to us about going organic.
00:07:22.880 I liked the organic route.
00:07:24.360 I liked it.
00:07:25.360 So we talked about it for a year or more.
00:07:28.820 So we did.
00:07:30.060 There were five or six small 50 cow herds on the island
00:07:34.020 that decided we're going organic.
00:07:37.120 And then we did.
00:07:39.320 It was working out good for it, but the feed we had to buy
00:07:43.280 and the minerals and vitamins and stuff we had to buy
00:07:46.280 was very, very expensive.
00:07:48.080 Well, I said, Jesus, we're living here on the beach.
00:07:51.280 We've been involved in the seaweed all our life here.
00:07:55.120 Let's start feeding the seaweed to the cattle
00:07:57.560 for their minerals and vitamins source.
00:07:59.960 So we started, I started.
00:08:01.600 I was the only one that I never let on to nobody
00:08:03.840 and I didn't let that, I started it.
00:08:05.880 And it was 100%, everything was going along the road.
00:08:09.480 And we have, every month, we'd have a vet come in
00:08:13.480 and check all our cows, which you always done that.
00:08:16.280 And they started seeing a difference.
00:08:18.360 Within a month or so after we were feeding the seaweed,
00:08:22.200 and they didn't know why they were seeing this difference.
00:08:25.240 So they asked me one day, because we had never
00:08:27.000 told nobody what we were doing.
00:08:28.600 Asked me one day, well, why are you doing different?
00:08:31.480 Well, I said, why are you seeing different?
00:08:33.800 I knew there was a difference.
00:08:35.720 Well, he said, first of all, it's your conception rate
00:08:39.080 in your cows.
00:08:40.260 Yeah. 0.60
00:08:41.760 Holstein herd, we were pushing them along.
00:08:44.960 And we were running around 60%, 65% in our conception rate.
00:08:49.060 Well, we're up about 90% at this time.
00:08:51.560 Big difference.
00:08:52.420 So I told her that.
00:08:53.320 Well, she looked at me, foodies looking. 0.99
00:08:54.880 She said, yeah, you might be crazy.
00:08:56.920 She never ever tell of it or anything like that.
00:08:58.620 And then you can tell them they're looking at cattle
00:09:00.760 and everything.
00:09:01.480 So then she got telling it to other people.
00:09:05.520 And then other people started coming to us to get some,
00:09:09.280 to see what we were doing, and it started from there.
00:09:12.320 Yeah.
00:09:12.640 For that, I think it were 19 or 20 years.
00:09:16.480 And then to make it a little bit bigger, I had no money.
00:09:19.840 We had no money and I had to invest some money.
00:09:23.600 So a friend of mine that I had known,
00:09:25.840 he was in the seafood business all his life,
00:09:28.960 Gary Jenkins, he had a couple of fish companies.
00:09:31.360 He set up the oyster company down in Chile and he would be in it here and he had a fish plant and a lobster plant just down the road here and him and I had been friends and so he said he has sold out. And that's 20 years ago he was 77 years old and he said I like what you're doing here. He said we'll, so him and I teamed up. Nobody, you couldn't borrow your money. No one took me seriously.
00:10:01.360 We'll be right back.