#2062 - Will & Jenni Harris
2023-11-14 02:02:20
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
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Welcome back, Will. How are you, sir?
Good, thank you for having me.
Good to see you. Please introduce the world to your daughter.
Good. My middle daughter, Jenny Harris, who used to work for me, but now I work for her.
Get used to it.
That's got to be interesting.
Well, we'll tell you about it.
Please do. And you guys are the first people to ever bring dirt to the studio, so I want to thank you for that.
You're more than welcome.
So here is your soil compared to industrial commodity, what does this say? Dirt. Row crop. So you can see the difference. 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.
There's probably some worms in there.
Yeah, probably. And this looks like what I'd like to grow something on. Whereas this looks like some stuff that blows in the wind when it gets dry out.
I'm going to show you that.
Yeah, please do.
And they came from side by side, one side of the fence versus the other side of the fence. There's no difference other than the way they've been managed over the last 20 years.
Yeah. 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. I mean, a very clear line. I mean, the difference is so stark. It's so stark.
And how is that legal, by the way?
Let me tell you what you see in there. So the brown water is coming off my farm. The red water is coming under the road. There's a coal footpath.
There's a video of that. We can look at it.
Yeah. We've played that video many, many times, just to show people the difference between a regenerative farm and an industrial farm.
Is that me or my daddy? Damn, he looks old.
Look at those arms.
Oh, scale. Scaling like a fish.
So, you know, this is, it's just, it's just strange that it's legal to just have the runoff pollute the rivers. That 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. And this has to be terrible.
Well, if it was a construction site, it would have to be under what they call SWIT. That's an acronym for something, storm water, something, something. And they wouldn't allow that. But agricultural land is not under SWIT.
In fact, it's not even under SWIT. That's a subsidized production system by the government. So it's not only OK or acceptable, you know, it's the status quo.
So they've just accepted a certain amount of pollution.
Well, I guess it would be a nearly unlimited amount of solution, because nobody checks it.
Nobody checks the water. Nobody checks to see what the results are. Which is insane. I mean, what is it like downstream? What is downstream of that?
Well, it used to be the Apalachicola Bay, which was a thriving oystering grounds, but they don't oyster there anymore. Because of the runoff in the farms? Because of the decline in oyster population, which is because of runoff, correct.
Wow.
There'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, you know, with regards to rural America. But, you know, there's like a whole city that's suffering because they can no longer do what they've done for generations.
How come no one's filed a lawsuit?
Well, I'm not in the lawsuit filing business.
Not you, but someone from that town. I mean, someone from the oystering community. Because it seems like that's a no-brainer. I 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, you would think that someone would have the grounds for a lawsuit.
Well, he 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. You know, people like that need to look at Apalachicola Bay.
And if you had a runoff from a tire manufacturing company, you could trace it back to that one entity, one location. You know, that water comes from all over South Georgia. And it's from everybody's fields. And most of it is treated the same way. So, you know, I'm not answering a litigation question because I don't know.
But it would be a hell of a complex situation to jump on.
So you would have to sue a large number of farms?
You know, I don't know how that works. But yeah, there's a large number of people contributing to it. Virtually everyone who farms corn, cotton, peanuts uses the same cultivation and the same pesticides.
So, I mean, it would seem like it would be a very, very complex litigation to me.
It seems like it's at least worth a study. Have they done a study on the bay and the levels of pesticides and various chemicals?
Dead zones in the Gulf have been studied. And Jamie can probably pull that up.
Could you do me a favor and just pull that microphone just a little closer to your face? Yeah, just try to keep it like a fist away from your face like that.
So it seems like that they would want to study that, though. I 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.
OK, so 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. There's just a lot of money involved.
Yeah.
And, 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.
It seems like it all boils down to that money and politics. If we could take money out of politics, we could make it so that no one can donate other than individuals and a very limited amount of money. We could change everything.
I think so.
We could change everything. It's such a dirty system, and it allows things like this to happen. But 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. Is that what you said?
Yes. Well, 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, three years, four years or something. Then you see a very gradual increase until it gets back to where ours is today. And where ours is today is not as high yielding as if we used all the crop inputs.
Right. But it's approaching that, because we don't have to buy the crop inputs. So I think it's better for us.
It's certainly a more resilient system.
And 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. Like 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.
Well, you know, the farmers are making a little more money. You're right. The 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. Right. And turning out this industrial food that we all eat.
So the amount of money is incredible. And 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. So if you're a very senior person in D.C. in Department of Ag and probably other departments, and you're getting close to retirement, you can get –. if you've been a good boy, you can retire and get a job making twice what you were making with the government.
If you're not a good boy, just retire.
Right. Just like the FDA and the pharmaceutical drug companies. It's the same deal. It should be illegal.
Well, farmers aren't – I'll say this. Farmers are less and less raising food and raising food-like products. You know, there is a statistic said that farmers only get 14 cents of every food dollar that's spent. And you think about, wow, the person who cultivates the land, plants the seed, harvests the crops, you know, they get 14 cents of every dollar. And the truth is, the food production system has become such a long way from a farmer and a consumer, there's got to be room for, you know, distribution and manufacturing and logistics and whatever else.
A dollar – you know, the food dollar is still there. It's just the farmer's getting less and less of it. Because food more and more looks less and less like food.
She's right. But in our case, we get 100 cents of every dollar. But we still don't have much money. We still don't make a lot of money. We get 100 cents, not 14..
But then we cover all these costs. that in the industrial system is just – the farm is just the production arm.
Well, and ours is different, because we took 100 percent responsibility of that food product. So we raise, we slaughter, we butcher, we package, and we distribute. So we take account for all of those parts in the food production system so that we can keep that whole dollar. Now, it's not profit because we have to pay for those things, but the whole dollar stays in Bluffton.
And that's the most important part. 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. And when that whole dollar stays in Clay County, Georgia, it's beginning to correct that. That results, because only 14 cents stays there.
That's the result. And 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. That when you're getting food, you have to get food at scale. You have to get massive amounts of food. Like, 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.
I don't mean to pick on Jack in the Box, Burger King, whatever. Where's that meat coming from? It's not grown from local cows. There are no local cows. You have to go pretty far out of town to find a farm that raises cows.
You can go like an hour and a half out of town and find some cows, but that's not going to feed everybody. They'll all be gone. There's not enough cows.
A lot of it comes from Australia and New Zealand and Uruguay. Yeah. A lot of beef's imported.
Yeah, and a lot of elk. If you buy elk at a restaurant, most likely you're getting it from New Zealand.
I got a story about imports that I want to say. This is really important. Twenty-five 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. He went looking for customers, and Public Supermarket was one of the first ones, Whole Foods, very quickly after.
That worked out really well. The point I want to get to is that when Dad started selling 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. That was not a sustainable option. We can't feed the world. We don't want to feed the world.
Fast forward 20 years, and over 85% of the grass-fed beef in the American market is imported product, not raised in America. Isn't that nuts? In 20 years, we've gone from being a very early innovator to just a mere meager portion of 15%.
That's true, but it's not the worst part. The worst part is that imported beef is legally labeled product of the USA.
How's that?
If value is added in this country, it's a product of the USA. What? We compete with it every day.
How do they add value?
Ooh, ooh, go ahead. No, you go. This is good.
If they grind it, slice it, cut it, package it, label it.
Rebox it.
Transport it. But the animal, make no mistake, the animal was born, raised, and slaughtered in Uruguay, Australia, New Zealand, or 20 other countries.
Lithuania.
Lithuania.
Croatia.
The United States imports beef from places like Australia, Canada, and much of Latin America. It 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?
But honestly.
That's so dirty.
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, intentionally fraudulent labeling, even, selling it as 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. Did you see this thing they did recently? I was reading this article, and I was actually listening to a podcast. That's what it was initially.
But the podcast was about how they changed, I guess it was, I don't know what governing body, changed the emission standards for these gigantic freight ships. And 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. So the ocean water was getting warmer quicker than they anticipated. So it is having the opposite effect. So they're trying to come up with different methods to mitigate that now.
And some of the methods are spraying chemicals in the sky. Some of the methods are spraying ocean water in the sky, which sounds much more natural. You know, just taking some sort of machine. But then again, what's powering that machine? How is that going to work?
What are we doing? Instead of just growing it here.
Should we really be spraying seawater into the atmosphere? Should we really have to do that?
No, but I mean, it's just water. That doesn't bother me. That seems like the most organic solution. You're going to take seawater, blow it. But who knows?
I mean, think about all the pollution that's in the sea now, and microplastics in the sea. Does that spray into the atmosphere and that get into people's lungs now and cause a host of new autoimmune issues and cardiovascular issues? Who knows? It's so crazy that we're doing it this way.
So 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. We had some really good years in the early 2000s. And, of course, when they were allowed to bring the imported beef in as Product of the USA, the margin structure fell dramatically.
Of course. Dirty. Dirty. Everything is dirty. When you get money involved and stuff like that and decisions that affect everybody, someone always does something slimy.
And here's the thing. I don't think either of us want to debate product quality or the fact that it is from another country. The issue that we have is that it's being sold under the guise of Product of the USA.
Right. So 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.
It's like the textile industry. The textile industry has been exported. The automotive industry has been exported. But at least in those situations, it's pretty clear what you're getting. You look in the back of your shirt and it's a product of not America.
I started working recently with a company called Origin, that's in Maine. I'm crazy about them. They make everything. Yeah. Everything American-made.
They're great. Every thread, all the cloth. There is one part of their boots that they have not been able to source in America, and it's sourced in Latin America. That's the only piece.
But I bet they talk about it.
They do. Very openly. But they make hunting gear. They make outdoor stuff. They make jiu-jitsu geez.
They make fantastic handmade boots. And if you want to support an American-made company, Origin is great. But they have a limited amount of—they can only make so much of it. 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 limited.
We're not saying that beef from Australia is bad. No, it's definitely not. I'm not saying that. There's some great beef from Australia, I'm sure, and Uruguay and everywhere else.
Yes.
Just tell the damn truth.
Tell the damn truth.
We had a really awkward situation that occurred last week. A 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. And Jenny was renegotiating the deal with them last week.
And it came out that they were importing some beef. What happened is they showed her the projections of how much more they were selling. It was just way up. And they told her how much that they were going to buy from her. And it was way—you know, it was flat.
It was flat. And she said, how are you doing that? Because we're a pretty big supplier. They only advertise three people as being suppliers, and we're one of them. And they said—it came out—she said, are you importing beef?
And there was a long silence. They finally said they are. And I told her I was not on that call. We're not going to sell them. I don't want to sell them anything.
Because then they can attach your name to it.
Yeah, I don't want to be part of a scam.
That's a scam. Yeah, and it's not even a scam in terms of quality. What you're saying is important. It's not that this is bad beef. No.
It's just you're lying.
This is a household brand that you've probably eaten. And, you know, it's headquartered here. But, you know, we—I don't want to do that.
Yeah, and thank you for that.
What led to this decision, the initial decision, to change your farm from an industrial farm to a regenerative farm? And what—I mean, it had to—there 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. It was probably quite a headache.
It was all those things. And to be real honest with you, I went into it with a little bit of naivety. I didn't think it was going to be as big a deal as it was, but it was.
You know, I 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. My dad had been a very industrial producer, using all the tools. I was—and I had a lot of pride in my knowledge and understanding of how to raise cattle industrially.
Monoculture cattle at that time.
And I think, probably because I was an abuser, I used—if it said I used a little bit, I used a lot. And I just came to see the unintended consequences of that industrial system more clearly, probably, than people that were playing closer to the rules. And I just thought, I didn't want to do it anymore. And I did a—I did not do a good job planning an alternative production program. I just quit using stuff.
You know, I quit using hormone implants and subtherapeutic antibiotics and bad feedstuffs like chicken manure. I quit using chemical fertilizer. I quit using pesticides. And it was very expensive for a while. And it was economically painful.
But we survived it. And from day one, I enjoyed it better. But from day one, I made less money until I lost money. But then, thank goodness, you know, grass-fed beef became a thing. And it wasn't being imported.
So we became profitable again.
Since you've gone public with—I found out about you from Fox. I 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.
I enjoy the way you talk. But you have a way of talking that's very deliberate and clear. And it takes a little time. And this guy was just rushing you along and rushing you along. And I immediately reached out to my booking guy.
I said, let's get that guy. I want to hear him talk. Just, like, lay it out. Like, give him all the time in the world to lay it out. And I'm really glad you did.
But from the time that you went public, have you seen more of a demand for your product and for what you're doing?
I have. But it's been filled by imported product. The—.
This whole thing that we're talking about.
Grass-fed—yes. Grass-fed beef, pasture, poultry, all these more naturally grown meats and other poultry and vegetables. All of it is catching traction. But Big Food has figured out a way to cash in on it.
I can give a good example of that. So the word free range. So free range, by definition, so, you know, you would see a brand with a grassy knoll and a red barn and a white fence. And, you know, it would say free range. So free range, by definition, is just access to the outdoors via a concrete pad or whatever.
It's not actually pasture-raised poultry. It's just maybe a little different than commodity in-the-house poultry. But it's at a fraction of the price. You know, true, pastured poultry might cost 200 or 300 percent more than commodity poultry. And so you have these consumers who are very busy.
You know, they don't have time to learn the nuances and read and research, like, you know, you have done and we obviously do. And so they see pastured poultry for $6 a pound or free range poultry for $3 or $4 a pound. You know, how could you expect for them to pay 50 percent more, 75 percent or 100 percent more for something that is so loosely defined and, due to labeling, pretty misrepresentative of the way it's actually raised.
Yeah, free range sounds like you. just let them out of the chicken coop and they wander around.
Like your wife holding the bird.
Right, like my yard. That's it. Yeah, yeah. There's free range chickens in my yard right now. That's why Marshall's here.
Marshall doesn't get along with chickens. We talked about that earlier. But this is deceptive. I mean, and it's unfortunate that they're allowed to use those loopholes. And that should be more clearly defined.
I mean, if you would rather save money, and I understand that. If someone's on a budget, you want to save money. Yeah, I get it, 100 percent. But 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.
I know that chicken has just been eating feed. It's not eating grass. It's not eating bugs. It's not doing things that chickens do. And when you get a chicken that is doing things that chickens do, you get that dark orange yolk.
Blood yolk.
It's so dark and it tastes so much better. It's so much better for you. So much more nutrient dense. And it's what a chicken egg is supposed to be.
And sadly, I don't think the consumers will ever really get what they're looking for, unless they know exactly who they're buying it from. Right. It's just so easy to copy these, embrace, these new. I mean, right now we talk about regenerative. Well, I mean, now everybody's got regenerative.
It's too easy to label it. And it's too hard for really big companies to produce it. So it puts the onus on the consumer to know who they're buying from.
That brings me back to the initial question. Is it even possible to use regenerative farming the way you folks have your farm and feed everybody? I mean, can you feed, can you sell to McDonald's? I mean, is it even possible? I mean, how much beef do they use in a day?
It has to be insane.
The answer is no. We can't sell to McDonald's. We couldn't start, scratch the surface. And I don't know the answer, but I'll say this. When you say, can we produce enough food like that?
Can the industry produce enough food like that without doing such extraordinary damage?
We're going to pay for this. Right. You know, this 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.
Like what? Give great examples.
The dead zone in the Gulf would be a great example.
That'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.
Or wildfires. How much do we pay every year to put out wildfires?
Fires. That soil right there. You know, the experts tell us it is like, how many years left?
60, but that was like three years ago, so 57..
Who knows? But even the experts tell us there's a finite life left in that degraded soil.
This beautiful organic soil is perpetual. It'll last forever. Right. Now, that's a cost and it has a finite period of time. And I'm just not sure how this is all going to work out.
The water in the ground. You know, so much of these crops irrigated. I told you that one of them, the degraded soil, is a half percent organic matter. The beautiful soil is over five percent organic matter.
One percent organic matter will absorb a one inch rainfall. So the degraded soil will only absorb a half an inch of rainfall. The beautiful organic soil will absorb a five inch rainfall. So it requires a tremendous amount of irrigation for the degraded soil to make it. Well, we've got problems with water in the ground, even in the southeast and certainly in the west.
So all of these resources we're just using up and using up. It's pissing in your britches to stay warm.
Pissing in your britches to stay warm. It's a good short term strategy, but long term, not what you want to do.
That's a great way to put it. I love it. I'm going to use that one. Pissing in your britches to stay warm.
Yeah, 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.
Yeah, it's dirty business.
There's an ancient soil in the Amazon called terra preta. Have you guys heard about this?
Well, I watched the Graham Hancock episode.
Yes, fascinating. So, 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, carbon, all sorts of different things. They don't exactly know how they made it. And they don't know how to recreate it.
But this is a self-sustaining soil. And when you grow in it, it acts like this soil that you folks have. And these people that lived thousands of years ago figured out how to make this sustainable soil. It 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. This is the terra preta. This is the stuff that exists. So on the left, you see the actual soil, what it looks like before it's treated. That terra preta on the right is entirely man-made.
And entirely man-made from an unknown origin. We know the folks, the people that live there, they're the ones who did it. But we don't know how they did it. And what we do know is that you can grow on that indefinitely. You can just keep going.
They call it biochar, terra preta. But it's a phenomenal soil for growing crops on and for growing things on. And it seems like that should be something that someone should invest in, some sort of research. I 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.
There should be some sort of a large-scale project. if we're really 57 years left of topsoil in the American farmlands due to monocrop agriculture and industrial farming. It seems like they should be able to figure out a way to do that.
Actually, that's our farm. Yeah. And you can see there that 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 have built up. Yes. And it was built up by using the natural systems.
We emulate the buffalo ranging over the continent. It's not as good. We don't have from Canada to Mexico to play with. And we don't have hundreds of thousands of head, but it's a microcosm example of that. And it works.
Yes.
Denny, what was the story that you used to tell? that scientists figured out exactly what seawater was? What made seawater? And 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.
You're right. That makes me question my reliance upon reductive science. The project that she was talking about, I don't remember where it was done.
Jimmy can probably find it.
They took seawater and broke it down as well as they could with qualitative, quantitative chemistry.
And decided it could determine exactly what was in it. Then, when they put it back together, a fish wouldn't live in it.
Oh, that was it.
But what happened was not so much that it had too much sodium or too much whatever. It was that the life was not there.
There's something else.
It was the life.
The fact that they evolved together. Yeah.
And then there's some organic compounds. that's in the water.
Well, I don't know about the life. There are actually living microbes that they couldn't put back in there because they weren't there anymore. When you took it apart, put it back together.
So you just have sterile seawater.
Sterile ingredients that made seawater.
Yeah. Probably like a fish tank. But not even. Because fish tank has fish, poop and all sorts of other things. that also has life and leads to the microbes.
People 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. It'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. This is a safe place.
But meanwhile, there's an avalanche coming. And it's just a matter of time before it reaches the town.
No, not exactly.
Maybe that's a bad analogy.
I get it. And I agree, except for the fact that those people sitting in that town, there's not a damn thing they can do about that avalanche. It's coming.
When it comes to the way we treat our land and water and air, consumers have power. They can do something about it. You can't depend on the government because of the lobbyist thing, the dark money. We discussed that earlier. It 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.
I can list a whole lot of things. it won't come from. But if it happens, it'll be by consumers. Consumers making the choice, this is what I'm going to support. This is not what I'm going to not support.
That's the only way it's going to happen. And I don't know that it's going to happen.
Well, 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.
Correct. And to that point, nothing really brings about change except pain. And I don't think you can educate fat, satiated, full people and get them to spend more money for their food. But if there's enough pain, whether it comes from health or polluted areas or weather or fire, then maybe so.
And it's also a problem. people aren't aware of the issues. For most people, food is food. They just go and get their food. And then they don't understand the consequences of eating bad food until it's kind of too late.
But they're not really supposed to. Who's educating them? If they go to the doctor, there's a pill.
There's a lot of anti-correlation. that's happening where it's like, here's a problem, here's a solution, and we bypass all the hard work. We want the easy solution. So it's not just that consumers are making arguably wrong choices, but uninformed choices for the food that they eat. But additionally, we're big cycles of nature.
people. We believe that in order to be good stewards of land, all of nature's cycles need to be functioning. And when they do, they create an abundance. And that abundance is enjoyed by you and I in the form of meat and vegetables and whatever else. And there's been so much intense focus on the carbon cycle.
You think about what you hear from the media. It's carbon, carbon, carbon, carbon. That in reality, all of nature's cycles are broken. What about the water cycle or the mineral cycle, or the grazing cycle? You can't just work on one cycle.
And so there's just so much misinformation and so much of a spotlight on certain things, when in reality it's so much broader than that. And it's not hard. It's just they're not telling the complete story.
I agree with that fully. And I don't think that's an accident. I think that the carbon cycle gets all the press because that's the one that somebody can make some money fixing.
I agree with you. Yeah, 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. And 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.
All you read is that cattle are great contributors to global warming, greenhouse gases and all that. And 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. Which makes sense. Yeah, that's the way it is.
So one of the differences in those two soils, the ones you showed and the one that you talked about in South America, is carbon and microscopic life in that soil.
Which is what makes it dark versus the other one.
So, you know, the way you build those carbon rich soils is through proper livestock interaction. That's the way the eight foot deep soils in the Great Plains came about, those huge herds of buffalo going across. And it's the reason that those two soils look so much different than the one that you showed on the board about. So, you know, I think we know a lot more about how to fix the problem than we acknowledge. But it's just going to be so expensive, especially for big food, big ag.
And then ultimately also for the consumer. Because 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 it.
You 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. I just don't know how you make that work.
Right. And then how do you make it so? I mean, there's a large amount of people in this country that primarily eat fast food, unfortunately. That's that's where they get their calories from. And you see it because of the health consequences.
I mean, it's a gigantic issue in this country that if 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 is like it's insane how obese everybody is. And that's not an accident. That's a direct result of the way we eat and what we eat and where it comes from.
It's the same with our animals. The goal in a feedlot animal is to blow them up fast and quick with cheap food. That's what we do to our people, too.
Yeah. Yeah, that is what we do.
Yeah. Well, and in marketing, you know, we create our own customers. You know, those people who suffer from obesity and sedentary lifestyles, that have diseases and whatever else, then we get to sell them medicine. And then the medicine is called side effects, which then we treat with more medicine. Yeah.
So it's so. I'm the director of marketing. And one thing that I love is, you know, is just good old fashioned marketing and reoccurring business and returning orders, and, you know, all those things. I see how that works. You know, the very idea that these lifestyles create a certain, you know, a certain issue, which are then prescribed with certain medicines that then create more issues that we treat with more medicines.
What a genius plan. That's great.
I mean, it's terrible.
If you want to buy a yacht.
Well, it's terrible for the people and for the environment. But I mean, hell, it's great.
Very profitable.
I'll give you another slant on that. We talked about the changes I made, what I used to do, to what I do now. And one of the primary changes is from the 30,000 foot level is I used to go in my pastures every day looking for something to kill. I was looking for a fungus on the grass to put a fungicide on, looking for an insect, put insecticide on, looking for another competing weed that I put herbicide on. Looking for parasites in my cattle.
On and on. Insects. On and on. I was looking every day for something to kill. I was a successful commercial cattleman in terms of profitability.
And I was successful because I kill stuff every day. Spent money to high tech companies to kill stuff.
Now, since I made the change, I'm trying to keep things alive. I believe that all these species have a role out there. And I want to keep things in balance. We're trying to keep things alive. We're not trying to kill any of it.
You're trying to create, like a contained natural environment.
Symbiotic relationships between the animals.
Yeah.
That's analogous with the food situation.
And that's what the whole earth should be.
That's how it evolved.
Yeah. And it's just recently. Within the last, like, how many years, that we've done it this way?
Since World War II. I thought about that a lot. Read about it a lot. And I think World War II is kind of when we started the change.
Because we needed food.
Well, actually, I should have said the end of World War II. But, yeah, we needed the food, so there was a demand to produce it. And then World War II's war effort gave us so many tools. You know, the munitions manufacturing became fertilizer manufacturing. The nerve gas became pesticides.
On and on.
How do you unwind all that? That's what's crazy. You know, when you're dealing with 80 plus years of this going on. Like, how do you unwind that? And how do you, I 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.
Three generations and trillions and trillions of dollars. There's just so many people making so much money on this.
When you think about it, you probably won't be here in 80 years. I know you're the specimen of health. And you're, you know, maybe so. But your kids will be. And so, you know, I didn't really focus on it until I became a mother.
And I have a son and a daughter. And, you know, my sister has kids. It's like, all right, we can probably keep it in between the ditches. I'm 37.. Maybe I'll, you know, make it to 75..
So we can probably keep it in between the ditches until then. But, you know, what type of world are we leaving our kids? I mean, do you, your kids, you know, I mean, they're going to inherit something way the hell worse than you did.
It's going to get worse. It's not going to get better.
Way worse. Right.
Unless enough people make this decision that you made. Unless enough people take control of their health and start changing the way they eat and where they source their food from and caring. And, you know, the title of your book, A Bold Return to Giving a Damn, which is a great title. One Farm, Six Generations and the Future of Food. When you set out to write this book, I know that this is an important message to you.
But how has this been received so far?
You know, we don't get too much feedback on how many people are buying the book. It's out there, but we don't get it. Jenny, you can ask that question better than me.
So, you know, when Dad started talking about writing a book, we were like, oh, there's no way. You know, his brain is truly cyclical, just like the farm. There's, you know, birth, growth, death, decay, birth, growth, death, decay. Where do you start? The chicken or the egg?
Who came first? And for him, you know, we had talked about him writing a book for a very long time. And honestly, nobody knew where to start. And so he was approached by, you know, some folks who said, hey, we think, you know, you'd be a great book writer. And Dad quickly told them there's no way I can write a book.
There's like no way in hell. I don't know where to start and where to end. And so, well, let us help you. So they found a ghostwriter named Emily Grieven, who is great. And she and Dad had phone dates every Friday for probably a year that lasted anywhere from two to four hours.
And in listening to the book, Dad narrated it. And it is like a glimpse inside of his brain. It is such a all of his thoughts are there. And, you know, I think it's so important because, you know, Dad started a business and a mission that is going to last a lot longer than him. You know, he's 69 this year.
And, you know, the food system is not going to be fixed by the time he is gone. And 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 last, you know, last so much longer, I think it's so important. And people like him have got to focus on that. You know, he can't fix the food system. He 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.
What was the motivation to write this?
You know, I felt like people needed to know what I spent the last 25 years learning. I'm not the only one that knows it, but I'm the only one that has this particular slant on it. I knew I couldn't write a book. You know, I went to the University of Georgia and majored in agriculture. We didn't read many books.
We certainly didn't write a book. When they approached us about writing it, it just seemed like the thing to do. And I give so much credit to this, Emily Graven, that Jenny referenced who wrote it, who actually wrote my thoughts down on the paper.
Do you think this is a one-time deal?
I know, damn well it is.
It took me 69 years to come up with enough shit to put in that book. I don't have enough time for it.
It seems like another book, though, someone should write is how this can be fixed and what steps need to be taken. And I think it needs to be taken, for sure, it needs to be taken at a governmental level.
There's a bunch of books out there that I've seen, that farmers have written that I didn't agree with. There's one, Dirt to Soil by Gabe Brown, that's great. There are others.
So 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.
Well, since you mentioned it, Gabe and I, we're both about the same age, we're both industrial farmers that went this route.
And there's some great regenerative farmers out there, but there aren't a tremendous number of them that used to be an industrial farmer. There's just not a lot of that.
How many industrial farms are there in this country?
Oh, I have no idea, a lot. I mean, a lot less than it used to be, because they've consolidated and gotten so much bigger. But I don't know that number.
Well, 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. Bill Gates, who's famously said that everyone's got to stop eating meat and eat these bullshit, fake meat versions, these plant-based meats. So there's 25,000 factory farms. Factory farms continue to take over the agricultural landscape of the United States. There are currently 1.6 billion animals in our nation's 25,000 factory farms, which makes sense.
I mean, if you go to Arby's, where's that food coming from?
Jamie,
you should Google this, but when we talk about that, the centralization of the meat industry is even more stark. So what is it?
Maybe four meat processors, at least with beef, occupy over 80% of the nation's beef supply.
China 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. That's imported beef. That's crazy.
Jamie, will you pull up that, I think I named it, like food consolidation or something?
I bet most people have no idea. I bet most people listening to this are blown away by that number. That most people would, if you asked the average person on the street, how much meat do you think is imported from other countries? Beef. They would probably say, done.
They wouldn't even think of it. Especially if you get to label it a product of the USA, which is so dirty.
Consumers believe they have the impression of choice. They don't actually have choice. The image that Jamie's going to show us...
I'm trying to find a cleaner one.
Oh, good.
So look at all these brands that are owned by this 10 or so parent companies.
That's crazy.
So consumers have the impression that there is choice, but truly there is no choice. The same is true with meat. I 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.
Wow.
Whoa. So we talk about centralized food. We talk about food security. Do we really want a global food supply? And the answer is yes or no.
But with regards to fragility in food, think about COVID and the effects of what it did to the grocery store. There we go.
One in five pounds of chicken, beef, and pork in the U.S. is produced by Tyson Foods.
That's proudly registered on their website.
Yeah, there's another one that talks about how many animals they slaughter in a week, and that's another just incredible number.
And the shame is, the other four pounds are produced by two or three other companies. It's not like it was Tyson and everybody else.
Right, right, right.
Will you pull up that other one, Jamie? Because I want to draw a correlation between the scale of this versus the scale of what farms like us do.
No,
there's one that says like 177,000 cattle are processed.
Anyways, I'll tell you a little bit about our model, and then we can compare it to that. So when Dad decided to build the processing plant in 2007,, he built it to process 50 head of cattle a week. And we got to that number, and we were still hemorrhaging money. There was no way that was going to work. And so we made a few modifications, primarily around refrigeration.
We dropped the chill time. Yep, that's it. So our processing plant, on-farm processing plant, will process 25 head of cattle a day, five days a week. So it's 125 head a week. Compared to systems like this, which is also on Tyson's website, 155,000 head of cattle are processed per week in only 14 facilities.
Wow. That's crazy.
And the further to the right you go, so 471,000 pigs are slaughtered in a week at only seven facilities.
47 million chickens per week.
And I've been in those facilities, and it's not pretty. But that is the scale of food.
We'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. It's just toxic waste.
Which is sad, because that waste is what created that topsoil at White Oak Pastures. It's just, we took the livestock off of the land. We decoupled what had been coupled for millions of years.
So these are these lakes. Now, here's the question. Why can't they take that waste and redistribute it into the land and use it for fertilizer?
And there's some of that doing, but it's expensive.
That's the problem. That it's expensive. Is that what they're doing right here?
Yeah, I think so.
I remember them talking about the waste was getting spread on to people's houses. Oh. It would be in the air, and then it would be in the studio. Right, of course. Yeah.
Well, yeah, indiscriminate, because they want to do it cheaply.
Yeah, and there's a difference between a cow or pig or chicken defecating here and there and there. Right. In a natural way. That thick.
Yes. Right.
Well, and just to sort of tie all that together, Jamie, you have one more thing, and I swear I'm going to quit asking you to pull shit up.
That's what he does. It's okay. He likes it.
I have to apologize. He's probably like, who invited her?
No, no, no, no.
But there's one more that's like our brands. So one in five pounds of meat, we just read that, was produced by Tyson. But consumers have no idea that it was a Tyson product. Right. So 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.
So it's just a really incredible system when you start pulling the layers back on it.
And there's demand. That's the other problem. It's like you're not going to get them to stop doing that. There's a massive demand for all this food.
Yeah.
And most people listening to this are part of that demand. Most people listening to this have stopped at a fast food burger place this week and picked up a product of this system. Yeah. And they want to be able to do that. If 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.
It's kind of extraordinary, the system they've created. It sucks that you can't do it in a healthy way, but it's kind of extraordinary that you can just pull into somewhere and get 1,000 calories like that.
It's so convenient.
And cheap.
Yeah, very cheap.
Incredibly cheap.
Yeah, for the amount of calories. And that is also reflected in the health consequences of impoverished people. If 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. It's terrible for you.
It's filled with seed, oils and bullshit and preservatives. And I'm sure you've seen those,
they've done these little tests where they've taken a McDonald's cheeseburger and just sit it on a shelf. Yeah. Oh, yeah. For like weeks and nothing happens to it. Yeah.
You could probably eat it, which is so insane. That's crazy. I mean, you could sit it for weeks.
But you know, these companies, as bad as this is, these companies have done what the public told them to do. The public has said we want food cheaper, cheaper, cheaper, cheaper, cheaper.
Cheaper, quicker.
Consistent. And quicker. And you know how you get cheaper and quicker.
Okay, this is exactly the same after five years.
Five years.
Way to go, Jamie.
That is wild.
It doesn't look that bad.
That is crazy.
Stick a fork in me, I'm done.
Wow.
So, Megan wants to find out whether the cheeseburger will stay the same after another five years. So, I bet it will. I mean, what's going to change? Five years. It says she's inspired to carry out the experiment after seeing an old burger being showcased in her doctor's office.
And so she set this burger down and just left it out there for five years, and that's what it looks like. Hi, Megan.
Kind of crazy, but also disturbing. if you eat that. Like, what is that doing to your gut microbiome? What is that doing to your health? I mean, the preservatives have a consequence on your health.
The 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. Because I always just thought if you go to the pet store, I didn't think about it.
You go to the pet store, you buy healthy food, the best food that they have available at a, you know, a nice pet store. Like, this has got to be good for the dog. Oh, look at all the nutrients. Look at all the stuff. But then I was thinking, like, how is it just sitting there?
How can it, how does it not go bad? How does it not, there's never mold on pet food. There's the cheeseburger. 20 years. Oh, my God.
A Utah man, 20, well, there's your answer, Megan.
It doesn't even look like that one's been in the refrigerator.
Nope. Just sitting there. I don't think hers was either. Dang. This guy's just hoarding cheeseburgers.
This guy's got a 14-year-old cheeseburger. There's quite a few of them. He just breaks it out every year for an update. Oh, my God. That's insane.
That's insane.
The pickle went bad.
Yeah, the pickle went bad. Pickle kind of, he's got it, he's got the receipt. That's incredible.
How much was it?
79 cents.
79 cents. Not much more now, which is pretty shocking. Yeah. But there's a consequence. There's a consequence for all that.
But 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, it just did, and then I was thinking, I wouldn't eat that. Why am I feeding him what I would eat? And so I started feeding him, well, I was feeding him elk meat, so I'd get, 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 pour it. He would just dive on that food. I mean, he couldn't get it in his mouth quick enough.
It was, to him, it was what he was supposed to be eating. Now, when we switched over to what's, 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, and it's frozen, and it's cut up into cubes, and it's just basically raw meat and some vegetables and some blueberries and stuff like that, and it's changed everything. Changed his coat. His body slimmed down. He's got way more energy.
His endurance, when I throw the ball for him, he's got way more energy. It's incredible. It's incredible, but of course it is. I mean, it just makes sense. You think about the high instances of cancer in dogs and also the high instances of cancer in human beings that have been correlated to preservatives and all sorts of environmental contaminants that are in human beings' diets.
It just makes sense that that would be in your, especially since the vast majority of dogs are being fed these processed, preserved, industrialized foods.
Yeah. Here's another one, too. We brought Marshall some rawhides, and I think he'll completely love it, but there's another part of it, and so we became fast friends with a pet food manufacturer in Atlanta, a whole dog market, who also coined farmhounds. They're really, really great people, but they told me about the fact that puppies chew, and you hate your puppy because it chews up all your stuff, your seat, your chair legs, your shoes, and whatever it is, and you spank the puppy, and they learn not to chew, and whatever else happens, but truthfully, chewing for dogs is soothing for them. It's something that is calming.
It relieves stress. It's a natural behavior. They're used to having to gnaw their food off of a carcass that they've run down or whatever else it is, and so it is sad to think that we have turned dog food into something, little bites that can be gulfed down, and we don't give dogs something to chew on, and that is how animals evolved for thousands of years.
Yeah, it's natural behavior. It's also changed the way human beings' jaws are. The reason why human beings get crowded teeth and smaller jaw bones is because we stop chewing on meat. We stop chewing on food that's real food, and we start eating mush, and when you do that, over generation and generation, the human body changes.
That's right.
Yeah, it's very bizarre.
I brought you some gum, and it's from Turkey, and it's called Phalum. I don't know if I'm saying that right, but it's exactly for that, and I have chewed it for probably a year and a half, and it is the best stress-dealing-with mechanism that I have. There's just something to be said for chewing.
Yeah, they sell that stuff. I think it's called masticating gum. Yeah, I'm a huge fan. It's actually good for your jaw. Boxers actually use that.
I'm not a boxer. Shocking, I know.
It's good for their jaw, their jaw muscles.
Yeah, it's good for mine.
There's also a product called Jawsercise that I use. It's a rubber thing that you put in your mouth. I weight lift with my jaw, believe it or not. I put this thing in between my teeth, and I go like this, and I do reps with my jaw.
Let's insert a video of you doing that on this episode.
It's made my jaw muscles bigger, 100%. I was going to say something about it. You can see it in my face.
I mean, look, your jaws, they look good, man.
Thank you very much. You're welcome. I'm very proud of my jaws. But there's people that go crazy with it. There's a community online of people that have overused their jaw muscles to the point where they develop these massive, bullmastiff jaw muscles on the side of their face.
It becomes kind of a weird thing, almost like anorexia or something like that. They get obsessed with jaw muscles.
That's disgusting.
Yeah, there's, before and after, photos of these people that have developed these. Because they want a square jaw, right? That will give you a square jaw, because that's where it comes from. It comes from this muscle right here, this fat muscle right here. You could build that muscle, just like you could build your biceps or any other muscle.
You build it from chewing. A lot of people are just eating mush. What do they want when they want a steak? Oh, I want a tender steak.
That's exactly right.
Yeah, it's. one of the things that people don't like about game meat is that it's chewy.
Or grass-fed beef. We did a tremendous amount of education for cooking grass-fed beef. For the first several years that we had our e-commerce online store, we had consumers call and say, it's like shoe leather. It's so tough. You say, well, how did you cook it?
You walk them through. That has really cut down as consumers have become more familiar with it. But the fact that it melts in your mouth, meat's not supposed to melt in your mouth. No, it's not. That's not the way that works.
Well, I'm not a big fan of Kobe beef. But 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. Like, that is a sick animal. That is like a severely, morbidly obese human being. If you took a slice out of them, it's going to look like that.
Just a deep, just fat is everywhere. It overcomes the food where you're eating it and you just, it like, coats your mouth. And some people like it, you know, in like small pieces. Okay, whatever you want, if that's what you're into. Me, I like grass-fed beef.
I like a dark, rich ribeye steak where it looks like a dark red, like a cow's, supposed to look, like a bison steak. If you eat a grass-fed bison steak and you cut into it, that is a dark red. And that's what you're supposed to eat. That's nutrient dense. It's better for you.
It's much higher in protein. You know, that's what I like about Wild Game. When 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. And 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.
It's darker. But you have to cook it differently. And the way I cook it, and the way I tell people to cook game is what's called a reverse sear method. So I cook it very slowly until I get it up to an internal temperature of, like, 120 degrees or 115 degrees. Then 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. But it's not tender like Kobe beef. It's still a little chewy, but it's flavorful. It's delicious and moist, and it's great for you.
The life expectancy of a cow is, like, 24 years of age. And a feedlot animal wouldn't live much over two. Wow. Obesity. Yeah.
Tell them about the story about the presidential pardon.
Yeah. I tell them that, truly, the way we raise cattle, they live to be 24 years old. We don't do that, but that's what they would do. And I've always wanted to take a feedlot animal and give it a presidential pardon and say, we're not going to slaughter you. We're going to see how long you'll live.
And keep one in the feedlot and then turn one loose out there in the pasture with my cows. And I can guarantee you the fully feedlot animal wouldn't last, but maybe three years or four years or five years.
Yeah, no one wants to do that, because it's like you've got one of your friends. Say, let me make you a deal. Let's put a special tag on this cow. Put a little ear tag, so nobody slaughters it. And let's see what's up.
They'd be like, no thanks. No. How long do you think it would last, a feedlot animal?
I've never done it. I don't have a feedlot anymore. And when I did, I needed to sell them to get the cash flow. So I don't know that. But it wouldn't be long, because they are dying of all the diseases of obesity and sedentary lifestyle that kills people.
Right. They wouldn't last long.
As well as eating food that they're not really supposed to be eating. People love a grain-fed animal because it's obese. That's really what they like when they look for a lot of marbling. That's obesity. That's what you're getting, and that's what makes it juicy and delicious.
But that's also what makes it sick. And that's also why they have to use so many antibiotics.
Yeah.
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 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.
Well, you know, a concern is antibiotic resistance, because we use those antibiotics on the pathogens when they're not sick. The cow's really not sick. It just makes them gain weight faster.
Antibiotics make a cow gain weight faster?
Sub-therapeutic. Oh, go ahead.
That's the word.
Sub-therapeutic. How does it do that?
You know, it's got to do with the rumen. I don't know that. But it's got to do with that. You know, a cow, the 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. But I don't know that.
It probably keeps them functioning while still eating an unnatural diet.
Here it says, the damage caused by antibiotics depends upon the mechanism of action, dosage, treatment, duration, and administration route. Antibiotics given at low doses to animals have the notable effect of increasing weight. A practice termed sub-therapeutic antibiotic treatment and used since 1946 in livestock.
Wow.
You know, we only have a certain number of antibiotics. And when we use them indiscriminately at very low levels, resistance, and pathogen spills up. Yeah. So we put ourselves at risk of losing these life-saving drugs that we depend on.
And then also the rise of MRSA. You know, medication-resistant staph infections are huge in this country. I mean, it's such a giant issue when people get surgery or if they get cuts. And, you know, in the jiu-jitsu community, it's a giant issue. And 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. And it's life-threatening. And people have died from it. And it's something very scary because they're pumping you full of antibiotics intravenously and it's not working. The antibiotics are not killing this bacteria.
And this bacteria is consuming the person. It's scary, scary stuff. We're playing around with nature itself. And we're playing around with nature itself essentially just for profit.
Well, and unknowingly. You know, I mean, we don't know what the effects of this stuff is going to be. Right. But for short-term profits, you know, that's one of the major, I think, differences between businesses like ours and corporations. You know, corporations are so steadily focused on quarterly reports and profits and, you know, whatever else.
And there have been so many decisions. In 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? I'll die before it's paid off. Is this something y'all want to do?
And he abstains from the vote. And, you know, my sister, my wife, my brother-in-law, we all decide if that's something we can or can't swing. And so businesses run like that for the longevity versus businesses for short-term profit have completely different motivations.
Yeah. And, you know, we're seeing the health consequences of that with other things as well. I 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. If you think about salmon, salmon is just immediately associated with health. Like, oh, guy's eating salmon, must care about his health.
Unless you're pregnant or, you know.
Right, right, right, right. But people think about salmon as being one of the healthiest things. And so this guy holds open this filet of salmon. See if you can find a video on it, Jamie. This guy takes this filet of salmon, and it's a fresh piece of salmon, and he opens it up.
And he's like, look at how easily these bones separate from the flesh. And the color of the flesh is very different, which is one of the reasons why they have to use dye. When 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 crazy, because if you get a wild salmon, it's from the insects that they consume that turns their flesh that color.
It's crazy to me. When I listened to your episode with RFK, and he was talking about the mercury levels in fish. Yeah. I mean, I was not a huge fish eater to begin with, but after that I was like, whoa, this is incredible.
Yeah, it's pretty wild. It's pretty wild. The 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.
Or food.
I mean, why should consumers have to second guess the nutritional density of food?
Because I've been in the confinement animal business with cattle and other species. This thing about the fish doesn't surprise me a bit. When you raise an animal as a monoculture, there are going to be problems with it. It's just as simple as that. You're going against nature.
And you're pissing on your britches to try to stay warm.
Pissing on your britches to stay warm.
Did you find a video of the farm-raised salmon? There are a lot of videos. I think I found what you were just talking about. Because it's disturbing to look. Is it Paul Saladino probably?
Yeah, he just put one up on social media.
Paul did.
So give me some volume on this. GMO corn, GMO soy, poop, and medications to prevent overgrowth of bacterial infections, because it's so unhealthy. All fish is going to accumulate some heavy metals, which is not a good thing. Wild salmon is a much better choice than any Atlantic salmon. All Atlantic salmon is going to be farm-raised.
And we know that these chemicals, PCBs, PBDEs, are endocrine disruptors. Yes, it's an animal food. It's not a plant food. But this is one of my least favorite. He doesn't bring it down.
This one gentleman takes a filet. He 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.
This just doesn't surprise me.
Ecosystems are meant to be different species operating in symbiotic relationships with each other. And I don't care if it's cows or hogs, or salmon or mealworm. It doesn't matter. When you raise it in a monoculture, problems will occur. You fight nature.
It's inevitable.
You fight nature the whole time.
There's just every reason for it not to work well.
Yeah, and it seems like the whole movement of this happening has happened for so long. And we're just sort of getting aware of it now. I mean, I've just been aware of it over the last few years, the last decade or so. But most people aren't even aware of it at all. You think of the vast majority of Americans hearing this are just going, what?
What's going on? Like, this is—now I have to pay attention to this, too? And what do I do?
But, you know, if you think about all the ecosystems that exist on the earth, from tundra to desert, to rainforest, to alpine, on and on, there's not a monoculture anywhere. I don't believe you can find one anywhere. No. Everywhere there are plants and animals and microbes living in symbiotic relationships with each other. And that's—when 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.
And the only—the tools we use to fight nature all have an unintended consequence.
And then we have to take another tool to fight that unintended consequence. And another, and another, and another.
Similar to what she was talking about with medical interventions.
It's the same. I was going to start to say that. What she described with the medical is exactly what we've done in food production. But one 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. And there's no end to it.
You know, one thing that I'll say is that it has been so interesting to watch nature balance itself. And the best example that we have of that is that, you know, we evolved as cattle people. You know, the first generation, you know, had multi-species, and, you know, continued. And then we became a monoculture of cattle. And, you know, around 2012, we started diversifying again.
The first non-cattle species that we introduced at White Oak Pastures was poultry. And we got good at raising them. And 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. So cattle were meant to roam and graze. Hogs were meant to root and wallow.
Chickens were meant to peck and scratch. So our chickens were outside, unconfined, unrestricted. You know, they could walk to Atlanta if they wanted to.
And shortly after we turned the chickens loose out on pasture, we noticed, maybe around 2013, a few bald eagles settled in. And, you know, that, oh, come, look, this is awesome. You know, mating pair. It was really neat. We were proud of them.
You know, how American can you be? You know, I mean, this is great. And then, you know, their migratory birds, so they left. And the next year, there were probably eight or something. And it was like, man, that's really cool.
You know, they went and had such a great time here. They told their friends and, you know, brought more back. This is great. And then, you know, eight left. They migrated away, and, you know, 20 came.
And the next year, even more. And I think at one point, there were single sightings, 84 bald eagles at white oak pastures at one time. Whereas historically, we had never had any bald eagles. I 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. But that is just a prime example of how nature will balance itself. Yes.
How did you mitigate the effects of the bald eagles?
A brilliant poultry manager that we had came up with a plan to put the, so we used guardian dogs. And the guardian dogs were out there loose with the birds. But they're nocturnal. The dogs are protecting the chickens from nocturnal predators. And the dogs are nocturnal.
So they're working their butts off from sundown to sunrise.
For coyotes and things like that.
Coyotes, bobcats, raccoons, possums, skunks, dot, dot, dot. But when the sun would come up, the dogs would go to the woods and bed down. And it was fine. But the eagles were daytime predators. We hadn't had that before.
So they were eating us up. And actually, I mentioned that to you the last time I was on. And I told you that we were at odds with the government about a payment.
Reimbursement for Livestock Indemnity Program, LIP.
Yeah, LIP, Livestock Indemnity Program. And they wouldn't pay us. And we.
For the damages caused by a protected species. Right. So that's specifically.
If the birds were killed by a raccoon or a possum or a dog, they wouldn't, but a protected species like a cougar or a wolf or eagle, I'm not allowed to protect my birds. So they pay. And we spent a lot of money, but we collected our payment since I saw you last.
Well, that's good news. But is there a mitigation effort that you could do daytime, that's natural, to try to keep the eagles away?
Well, we put the dogs in with the birds in the fencing. The dogs kept the eagles at bay. We don't get zero predation, but it's limited predation. And I don't want zero predation. I like seeing those bald eagles.
I just don't want to see 80..
Dad calls it nature's tithe.
Tithing to nature.
That's a good way of putting it. I like it. There's one stealing a chicken. Yeah. They're beautiful birds.
It's kind of creepy, though, that the American animal is just such a vicious raptor.
Just a flying lizard. So, you know, as I said, an eagle killing a chicken and eating it or two or three is fine. They would kill dozens and dozens and dozens and not eat them.
It was a sporting event to prove hierarchy. You know, so it was like, you know, if I want to be at the top of the food chain, I kill more and more and more. I kid you not. I had a forerunner and, you know, got up and, you know, got in my car to go to work. And, you know, you crank up your car and then you look up and there was the back end, the two feet and tail of a chicken on my car.
And there was not chickens anywhere, probably within a mile of my house where I park. So it was a bloody mess.
Well, they have that same problem with wolves. Surplus killing. Wolves will just have fun and just kill 18, 19 elk. Like there was an instance in Wyoming where there's just. it was like 18 or 19 cows that had been slaughtered by wolves and just left them there, because that's what they do.
And when 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. And 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. And they just ran right through them. They dropped the population in Yellowstone significantly, which is where they initially introduced it. But now they're, you know, there was an article today that I was reading about them in California.
They're seeing them and, 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, it was 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 ain't kind and nature ain't cruel. She's so beautiful.
Yeah, it's beautiful. But it is what it is, you know.
That'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. We had a situation where we were kidding. So our goats were, you know, kidding and we were co-grazing a paddock. So there were hogs in with goats. And what was the wire called?
Page wire.
Page wire. And a goat got her head stuck. This is terrible. I can't believe I'm saying this.
The pigs ate her?
The pigs ate the kid. So she had a kid, and, you know, the hogs smelled the blood. They came, they ate the baby goats. And as sad as it was, that is nature. Now we don't kid with pigs anymore, but we learned our lesson.
New rules, starting right now.
Yeah, well, it makes sense.
It's incredible.
Pigs will eat everything. Anything and everything. Yeah. Do you have an issue with pigs getting loose and going wild? And do your pigs look wild?
Because pigs are one of the weird animals that if they're not domesticated. It's like when people see a domesticated pig like babe, right, like they think of. that's what pigs are like. Pigs are one of the strangest animals because when you release them into the wild within a month or so, they start to metamorphosize.
They do. They absolutely do. They get the tissues and longer snouts.
Thicker fur.
I have no idea how they do that.
It's crazy.
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