Latest / Age Defiantly with Mark Young / [Ep 41] Organic vs. Regenerative Farming: Why Food is Medicine | Bob Jones Jr.

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[Ep 41] Organic vs. Regenerative Farming: Why Food is Medicine | Bob Jones Jr. · Age Defiantly with Mark Young

0:00
Welcome to Performance Driven Living, the podcast where we question everything.
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We don't tip to around tough topics, we walk right into them, not to provoke, but to
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get closer to what's real.
0:13
You might not agree with everything you hear, and that's okay.
0:17
The show isn't about being right, it's about being real.
0:20
These conversations are meant to stretch your thinking, challenge assumptions, and spark
0:25
something deeper.
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The views shared are those of our guests and may not reflect those of the host or team.
0:32
And while we dive deep into health, performance, and transformation, this is not medical advice.
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Talk to your doctor before making changes to your health or lifestyle.
0:42
Take what lands, leave what doesn't, but whatever you do, don't stop questioning.
0:55
We are back on Performance Driven Living, I'm your host, Mark Young, and I am joined today
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by a very interesting gentleman who I say he's interesting, he went to Ohio State, he's
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probably not that interesting as I just learned a moment ago, sorry, go blue.
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But I am here and I have to tell you Bob, I'm going to read this because my team puts
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together these introductions for people that I could never be so eloquent as to actually
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come up with this.
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So you're going to get me reading your bio here.
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Today's guest is Bob Jones Jr., regenerative farming leader and CEO and co-owner of the
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Chef's Garden, the family farm pioneering nutrient dense soil first agriculture for
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the world's top kitchens.
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For more than four decades, the Jones family has rebuilt soil health and flavor through regenerative
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practices.
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Alongside his brother, farmer Lee Jones, Bob has helped the Chef's Garden serve restaurants
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in all 50 states and 17 countries while championing food safety, consistency and true chef
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farmer collaboration.
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His work links soil stewardship to human health and sustainability, reshaping how kitchens,
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source, and serve vegetables.
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It's a privilege to learn from him today.
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Welcome Bob Jones.
2:09
Thank you.
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That's like quite the intro, right?
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Did we get that right?
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Yeah, the power of editing will help.
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Oh, oh, does that need some editing in it?
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Not at all.
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Fantastic.
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Well, I'm glad to hear that because I hate to see that we had to do too much of it.
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You are Bob Jones, right?
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Right.
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Hey, Bob Jones.
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Okay.
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That's fantastic.
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So here on Performance Driven Living, we talk about stuff that typically defies normal
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because that's who I am.
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I just define normal.
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But I'm always curious to learn everything I possibly can.
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And I probably know a few things about soil depletion and mineral deficiencies, you know, the
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how we've destroyed folic and human acids in the soil and so on and so forth.
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But one of my biggest things is that I believe that we as a nation, and I'd love for you
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to just speak on this topic, and I say that, I talk about this stuff all the time that
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we are nutrient depleted.
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Absolutely.
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And even if we ate the right foods, we're still nutrient depleted because the food itself
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isn't what the food needs to be or should be, could be was perhaps in the past.
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Am I crazy?
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No, I don't think so at all.
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Agriculture in the United States and around the world today is broken.
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It's broken both economically and agronomically.
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And the medical community has told us for decades that increasing our consumption of fresh
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fruits and vegetables is good for our health.
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Didn't take a rocket science to figure that out.
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Right.
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What they don't say and what most in the medical community don't understand is that not
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all carrots are created equal.
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There are a variety of differences and how you grow that carrot that make huge differences
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in the quality outcomes of that fresh produce.
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And then consequently, the outcomes of human health as a result of consuming either really
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good carrots or really lousy carrots.
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I laugh when you say not all carrots are created equal.
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Literally I've used that exact same quote multiple times when talking about nutrient depletion
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and soil.
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Right.
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Because we not only have issues with not all carrots are created equally because they weren't
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grown in the same soil.
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So it's not the same nutrient dense soil.
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And I always use the phrase that we are what we eat, eats.
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Correct.
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But I'm not what I eat.
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I'm also whatever I ate, ate something as well.
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And if that's a cow that's eating whatever we talk about, versus corn fed, versus corn
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fed exactly.
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Like if my cow is eating corn, it's a different meal than a cow eating grass and it affects
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my biology as well.
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But the same is true for vegetables, fruits, anything that grows.
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Anything that grows.
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It's amazing how linear soil chemistry and soil biology is in healthy soil.
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It mimics the same chemistry profile and biological profile of healthy plants, of healthy
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animals, of healthy people.
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That relationship, not only the presence or absence of things like magnesium, calcium,
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phosphorus, potassium, not just whether they're present or not present, but the relationship
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to one another is drastically important in healthy soil.
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As it is in healthy plants, we do a lot of sap analysis.
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So we will harvest mature leaves and young leaves off of a tomato plant, a pepper plant,
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a spinach plant, and we will harvest the sap.
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It's like a blood test for a plant.
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Different than a tissue test, this is a sap analysis.
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That then will guide our fertigation programs where we can actually feed that.
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We want to feed the soil and let the soil feed the plant.
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Then we'll take that sap analysis and see how healthy or balanced, balanced or imbalanced
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that plant is, and then add foliar applications of the nutrients that it might need to get
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it balanced so that it can be of optimum value for the folks that actually consume it.
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So you're using the biology of the plant to measure the health of the soil, much like
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we would use the biology of the human to measure the value of the food they're eating.
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Everything is wonderfully interconnected.
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And inputs and outputs, imagine that, right?
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Yeah.
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We're just trying to go back to the Garden of Eden.
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So it's funny you say that because actually my next question that I had for you, I don't
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know if I'm trying to think of his name, I don't know why I can't think of it off the
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top of my head.
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But I know several people who are in the mineral enrichment world that, you know, pouring
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humic and folic acid into your plants as they grow to create better whatever.
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100% on board with that, and I've know a couple of different companies that do that.
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I'm going to say this because we got into a conversation.
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I had him on my podcast and for the life of me, I'm drawn a blank on his name, maybe
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my team can remind me.
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But it was a conversation about exactly that, like mineral and how do we re-mineralize soil?
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And we got into this whole conversation about sharecropping and rotating soil about never
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putting the same vegetable, if you will, on the same plot of land year after year after
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year because different plants pull in different types of minerals from the soil.
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Sure.
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So we've got to crop rotation, not sharecropping, but crop rotation to make sure that we're
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always moving things.
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Can you speak to the importance of that because one of the things that I understand from
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our current farming practices here in the U.S. anyways is that we just beat the soil of
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the death with the same thing over and over again.
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The fastest growing acreage in the world today is desert land.
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So we have literally farmed soils to death where they're void of any biological activity.
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It's called desertification and we are fast running towards that as a society and it impacts
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not only the health of the food that we're consuming, climate change.
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Regenerative agriculture is a relatively new term and it is an essence about ecosystem
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function.
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How do we better understand and then better impact ecosystem function?
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So that is soil biology and soil chemistry.
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How do you make the land and the crops growing on that land more resilient to climate changes,
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to differences in higher temperatures, less rainfall, heavier rain events when they do
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come?
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Part of regenerative agriculture is not only crop rotation but also covercropping.
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So certain vegetables will pull certain minerals out of the soil and they become collectors
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of those minerals and that's if we're devoid of iron we want to eat more beets because
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beets are accumulators of iron when they're grown healthy.
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Healthy beets have a much higher rate of iron in them.
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Cover crops as well, different species of cover crops, different types of cover crops
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are accumulators of calcium, magnesium, silicon, salineum.
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And so we want to grow multi species covers so 15 to 20 different varieties in a plot.
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Our farm is 400 acres not a huge farm but only 100 acres of vegetables each year.
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The balance of the farm has multi species cover and then I rotate around the farm so that
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not only am I not corn on corn or corn corn beans, corn beans, corn corn beans.
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Now we're going to use that plot of land one year and then it is going to be revitalized
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for three years before I come back to vegetables again.
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It goes back to Leviticus.
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If you let the trees drop to the ground every seventh year then the following six years
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you will have better quality and a better harvest from that land.
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And we just felt like well if one out of seven years was good then if we flip that and
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said okay let's harvest one out of four years and let that ground not only set
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fallow because we want to cover crop on there.
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Every leaf of every plant whether it's cover crop or the cash crop is a simple solar
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panel.
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We sell energy.
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We package it in green beans and spinach and let us into my interest.
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Everything we need to grow that crop, the sunlight, the nitrogen in the air if you remember
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from junior high biology what we're breathing is 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 1% of about
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a hundred other elements.
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So the nitrogen is free if you grow a cover crop that is a legume that has the ability
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naturally to harvest the nitrogen from the air, places it on nodules in the roots of
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the soil so that the next year if I'm going to grow tomatoes in 26 on a specific plot
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I'm going to grow a legume cover crop in 25, accumulate nitrogen so that I don't have
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to add synthetic nitrogen.
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I'm only using naturally occurring nitrogen.
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Why would we ever buy nitrogen when the air is 78% nitrogen?
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Just use it.
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It's a very natural process and product.
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So you brought Leviticus in and literally before you said that I was about ready to
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say on this show we've had so many conversations about ancient wisdom now being proven right
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by modern science and then we look at it like a discovery when in fact I'm like I think
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that kind of been around a while.
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That was around a bit ago and in so many different ways.
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We've talked about it here even in talking about mixing fabrics and how every fabric
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has frequency and frequencies are emitted and how do we do this.
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We've talked about it with laws of attraction that do unto others right that bio fields
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that exist within our own resonance attract people with similar resonances right and
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I laugh and make so do unto others is actually a science lesson.
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It's not a spiritual lesson in fact at all.
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What is your background?
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I mean was it a was it a biblical perspective that made you think this was it a science forward
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education that ended up just happening to echo ancient wisdom?
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I think it's probably been an evolutionary process I was raised in a Christian home with
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to church every Sunday Wednesday grandparents were faith-filled folks.
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So that's always been a part of our life.
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I did not I didn't know what I didn't know.
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My father 20 years ago sent me to this was a pilgrimage right.
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He sent me to Minneapolis in December to take a three day soil chemistry course from
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a veterinarian and I asked I said what did I do to you?
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Nobody goes to Minneapolis in December on purpose correct much less to take a soils course
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from a veterinarian where you can't even see the soil at that time of year right.
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The veterinarian was a gentleman by the name of Dr. Dan Scow.
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He was in a large animal vet practice with 12 other veterinarians.
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They were seeing over the previous 20 to 30 years increasing incidences of what they felt
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were human health maladies in large animals kidney disease heart disease in a dairy herd.
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And it really just didn't make sense because it was getting progressively worse.
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They were looking at the quality of the feed and then the quality of the land where that
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feed was grown and they found a thread going through there.
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And they actually harvested hay off of healthy soils and took hay from unhealthy soils and
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put it in front of the dairy cow and they would sniff them both eat the healthy hay and
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walk away from the unhealthy hay.
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They did that three days in a row then they took the healthy hay away.
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The cow came in and smelled the unhealthy hay.
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They weren't off the feed for three days until it started to starve and then it would
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eat the unhealthy hay.
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So in some people might say the animal was smarter than we were because we don't walk away
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from the unhealthy food partly because of the addictive nature of sugar that's in everything
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and the different conversation.
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Very interestingly this veterinarian who taught this three day soils course the first thing
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he said was I will teach you all the chemistry, all the biology that I have learned over
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my 40 year veterinary career.
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However, unless you have a relationship with the creator you'll never get it.
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You'll never understand it.
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And the first 30 minutes of every day of those three day that three day course was a devotional
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and he wanted to ground people in biblical principles and then we're going to talk about
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soil chemistry and soil biology.
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That was the first time that I had ever I've been to professional conferences for 20 years
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and I'd never heard anyone tie that back and say wait a minute here.
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There is a connection.
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Everything is created out of order.
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You cannot create order out of disorder and so the sections of an orange I mean there
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are so many patterns in nature.
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It just became about better understanding natural processes and then doing everything
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we could to accentuate those processes working with nature instead of fighting nature.
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It's the difference between a living concept and supporting life versus supporting death.
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In conventional agriculture we use fungicides, herbicides and secticides.
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The sides all of those kill things.
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Versus life, soil biology, soil chemistry, healthy soil, healthy plant, healthy people,
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promote life and capture energy.
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It's really about the study of energetics.
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And how do we capture the how do we maximize photosynthetic efficiency and ecosystem function
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and crop resilience to yield a better tasting and a more nutrient dense finished product?
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And wow, like all of that, like that mic drop moment on all of that, I couldn't ask you
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to say that in a more eloquent way to be honest with you because there is this connection
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that I'm always trying to get back to and that is I'm a Christian man, I'm also going
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to always link back to what is source and origin truth look like and then reverse integer.
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I loved what you just said though and if you can expand on that a little bit that is
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the idea that life creates life, death doesn't create life.
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And we're here at the metabolic health day conference and I was having this conversation
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with somebody recently who got a cancer diagnosis and they were talking about, I was talking
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with this with nature earlier in fact, like friend of mine's dad got a cancer diagnosis
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and when I was talking about naturopathic type means to deal with cancer, one of the phrases
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I said was if I found a mouse in my kitchen I wouldn't go poison all the food because
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that would get rid of the mouse but it would also kill everybody in the family too,
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right?
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Like we're not trying to do that, all we need to do is create inhospitable environments
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where a mouse wouldn't want to live, you know, make sure the food's not present, you
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know, starve the mouse out so that he goes and finds another place to be, right?
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But this idea that in our modern, if I can say, medical philosophy, we have this tendency
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to want to poison and kill and eradicate everything and to your point, the sides, right?
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Like we're talking about glyphosate, like oh my gosh, like why is that even still a thing?
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Like why is that?
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Why haven't we outlawed that?
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But we're always trying to kill things, like we're just, we're pesticiding everything
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to get rid of the bugs because the bugs are going to eat the plants, never in a million
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years, is anybody stopping and going, yeah, but we're killing the plant too.
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Like we're killing it with what we're trying to do to make it, why do we keep doing that?
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Because we don't know what we don't know.
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They're very well-intentioned farmers and very well-intentioned physicians who worked,
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I had a conversation yesterday with someone, it was a cancer survivor who had worked with
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an oncologist from a well-known hospital system in the U.S., 40-year career had no idea
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whatsoever that diet impacted his work.
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Yeah, that just blows my mind.
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The energetics piece, so this same Dr. Scal asked a very simple question, why do insects
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have antennae?
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And the answer is because they are seeking and picking up and reading electrical frequency.
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A healthy plant puts off a completely different frequency than a unhealthy plant.
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So the insect actually is nature's way of preventing an unhealthy plant from reproducing seed.
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This genetic selection or the whole process of if the soil is healthy and the plant is healthy,
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the frequency that that plant emits is different and the insects will not come to that crop.
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They just won't be there.
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They will look for something else.
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It's back to frequency.
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Explain that to me real quick, you're saying that the insects would not attack a healthy
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crop.
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Absolutely.
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And I've seen it.
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I've seen it.
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I'm after time after time.
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Accidentally, did it myself, I've learned more from my mistakes than ever from my successes.
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So insects, you're saying that the frequency, again, the whole purpose of me doing this
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entire podcast is to learn things and I just learned something.
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So you're saying that if a plant is healthy, which I agree with you, it gives off a frequency
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which would be different than a healthy plant, fair, but a plant.
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So let me give you the example.
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But I would imagine a mosquito would still attack somebody who's healthy, not somebody
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who's unhealthy.
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Ah, you're...
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But I'm over my skis there, I don't know.
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I'm just...
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I'm curious.
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I mean, what an interesting philosophy that if that healthy plants don't need pesticides
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because they, they repel insects just themselves.
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Absolutely correct.
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If soils are healthy enough and the plants are healthy enough, I will use less pesticides
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not as a philosophical decision because I don't need to.
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That's the whole goal, but it's a plant's immune system.
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The healthier the plant is, the stronger it's immune system.
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If we get enough sleep and water, we get our rest and we're eating right, we are stronger
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and we can resist.
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Our immune system is stronger and we can resist the viruses and the bacteria that are present
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in the environment all the time.
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And this just becomes a problem, compounding a problem because if you're creating weak
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crops, then you attract bugs and if you attract bugs, you have to pesticide them which causes
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you to have weaker crops, which causes you to attract more bugs and use more pesticides.
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A crop and soil and a human are either getting healthier and healthier and healthier or
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sicker and sicker and sicker.
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There is no such thing as status quo.
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Correct.
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You're moving in one direction or another.
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I had a block of tomatoes.
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We were furtigating those tomatoes and we wanted to feed them calcium nitrate which is
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a conventional calcium and nitrogen fertilizer.
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Someone forgot and left that on overnight.
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So the nitrogen got way too high in the plant which waters out and dilutes the sap in the
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plant.
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Remember the blood test?
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Yes.
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The next morning, 12 hours later, now there's tomatoes 5 feet apart.
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We left it on too long on this row and we turned it off appropriately on this row.
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12 hours later, the variety of tomato or same variety, but the tomatoes that we had put
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way too much nitrogen in them were absolutely covered with aphids.
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The other tomatoes, 5 feet away, you could not find an aphid.
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And I was like, oh my gosh, doxca was right because we had so diluted the sap in that plant
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and the aphids went to that plant.
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An aphid pierce and sucks the sap out of the plant.
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That's how they eat.
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I've also heard doxca say that if you grow really healthy crops and that plant is resistant
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to and does not attract, not only does it not attract, it gets so healthy that the bricks
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is much higher, the sugar content.
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If an aphid were to pierce and suck that plant, the sugars are so high they would ferment
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in the gut and kill the insect.
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So yeah, this is all very natural process and it's about us understanding it.
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Unfortunately, modern agriculture is about yield, produce yield as cheaply as you possibly
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can.
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Tons for acre.
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The problem is that dog won't hunt.
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Well, I want to pivot us a little bit.
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So two things I want to still discuss with you and the one is going to be, let me actually
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start with this one and that is the amount of time we're getting crops from all over
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the world.
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And one of my pet peeves is we're putting preservatives on fresh things so that it can
24:54
last for weeks before it even shows up on a grocery shelf.
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What is that about?
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I mean, tell me, is that just we can't produce enough food in the U.S. is that it's just
25:05
more efficient to buy it from China.
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But how in the how do I get a pineapple to grow the way that it needs to grow across
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the world?
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And it shows up to me two months later in a grocery store, fresh, but what does that even
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mean?
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Let me unpack that as efficiently as I possibly can.
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Let's start by saying this, USDA tells us that fresh produce loses 10% of its nutritive
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value every day post-harvest.
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Yes.
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USDA also tells us that the average grocery store produce is 14 days old before it hits
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the shelf, which is why when we go to grocery store and we take stuff home at last two or
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three days and it's rotten, it just doesn't work.
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You're getting water and fiber because the nutritional value has been depleted over time.
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That's the first thing.
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The second part of this is it's all about economics, right?
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Americans won't do field labor, it's just not going to happen.
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We've been using a visa program on our farm since 92 called the H2A visa.
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It's a temporary agriculture or work visa.
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Folks can come in from other parts of the world for nine months and work on the farm.
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In Ohio, in 2025, the Department of Labor mandated wage rate was $19.57 per hour.
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In Mexico, a person harvesting the same crop is going to get $6 a day.
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So I'm at a competitive, a huge competitive disadvantage to start with.
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Now I have to have niche markets like restaurants that really appreciate and will pay for a consistent
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supply of high quality product to allow me to do what I do, very, very fortunate.
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We've been selling the restaurants for 40 years.
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They taught a bunch of dirt farmers the food business.
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Most farmers today don't even understand they grow food because they're in commodity
27:15
markets.
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They're in beans, wheat, those kinds of things.
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They don't have a direct connection to the end user and that is very valuable because
27:23
I can get a feedback loop that helps me understand what varieties do you want.
27:30
If you're growing lettuce Bob, would you also grow tomatoes?
27:34
Oh, so you're growing lettuce and tomatoes?
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Will you now grow basil for me?
27:38
Sure.
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We have over 800 varieties of edible plants on the farm.
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One of those is because a chef asked for them sometime over the last 40 years and taught
27:48
us about what true quality really meant, mostly from European train chefs because they were
27:54
used to that model.
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We had that model here a hundred years ago.
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The regional distribution of food was not a thing.
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We had pockets of truck farms all over and family grocery stores in every town had their
28:10
grocery stores.
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Now we have box stores every 5th or 6th town and we're probably going back to that regional
28:19
distribution of food.
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You're seeing a lot more dairies right at your farmer's market, right?
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There used to be, I live in South Florida and there used to be a farmer's market, like
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an open air market every Sunday and it was right a couple blocks away from where I lived
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and it was great to just go down there in the morning, buy what you want, it was all locally
28:39
sourced, it was all local farms and it was local honey, it was all this other kind of
28:43
stuff and it was great.
28:44
It was like Sunday morning, go down to the market, buy what you want for the week because
28:48
you were punished for the next week.
28:49
It may not have been regeneratively grown but it was fresh.
28:52
It was from the farm, correct.
28:54
And you were supporting a family farm.
28:56
A hundred percent.
28:57
So there was a product quality because it has to be the table thing there too.
29:01
Absolutely.
29:02
It was like this came out of the ground earlier this week and if 10 percent, 10 percent,
29:07
like I want to make sure that I'm getting something that's speed to table and I don't,
29:11
again, I would say it's organic because they all said it was organic but that brings me
29:15
to my next question for you and that is what is organic because there's so many different
29:20
things that people are talking about, this is organic, that's organic and I'm starting
29:24
to believe that people are just saying it's organic to sell it but it's questions that
29:29
I get asked all the time or things like is it organic worth it?
29:33
It's so much more expensive, is it worth it?
29:36
And what does that mean because it's not necessarily regenerative, organic meaning
29:41
what, that it didn't get sprayed with a pesticide, I don't know because I've heard conversations
29:45
about organic is still getting glyphosate, you know, and organic just meaning non-GMO.
29:50
Like, what does all this mean?
29:52
I mean, you're more knowledgeable on this topic than anybody else I've talked to.
29:56
It's a question that I get as well.
29:57
Our farm is not certified organic, it is certified regeneratively managed which I believe
30:03
or we believe that it is the best of both worlds.
30:07
Let me start by saying this, the organic farming community in the United States plowed
30:13
some really, really hard ground for the last 50 years.
30:18
They were ostracized, they were called everything in the book, you know, what does it mean
30:26
to say organic?
30:27
I mean, just what does that word mean?
30:29
I, in my opinion, organic is based on the principle of exclusion.
30:35
You exclude all synthetic inputs, fertilizer, pesticides, which include herbicide, fungicide,
30:45
insecticide.
30:46
You exclude all of those negative things.
30:50
That's a good thing, but we believe it doesn't quite go far enough.
30:54
Let me give you this analogy, I've been married 37 years, my wife is a saint.
30:58
She was a single parent because I've farmed and so she raised our three children, two
31:03
of which happened to work on the farm now, so we're very blessed.
31:08
I don't smoke, I don't drink, I don't use drugs, I never leave physically or verbally abused
31:14
her.
31:15
None of those things made me a good husband, they just made me not a jerk, being a good
31:21
marriage, any good relationship is intentional.
31:25
It takes thinking about what does this person need for me?
31:30
What was my wife's love languages?
31:33
I needed to better understand that, and it took 20 years of those 37 years to figure that
31:38
out.
31:39
I was a slow learner.
31:41
Organics, just excluding those negative influences is positive, but it isn't enough.
31:49
So cover crops to capture that light energy from the sun and put it into the soil to improve
31:58
soil chemistry, to improve soil biology, to rotate those crops, used compost.
32:06
What are those things that we need to do besides just eliminating the negative influences that
32:12
make it better?
32:13
What are those intentional things we can do to help improve the quality and the flavor
32:20
of the product that comes off of that farm?
32:24
Just excluding negatives isn't enough.
32:26
So I'm going to ask you, for the sake of time I want to make sure that I'm being respectful
32:31
of your time as well, but I couldn't listen to you talk about this all day, it's actually
32:34
making me hungry.
32:35
But the question that I have for you is for a listener who's listening what you're talking
32:40
about.
32:41
You specifically have a farm, and predominantly your crops are going to restaurants, as you
32:45
said, and very farmed table kind of setups.
32:51
What does the average person do?
32:54
How do we know what to believe?
32:56
I hear this all the time, somebody just made a comment to me about only buy your vegetables
33:02
at Walmart, and I was like, why would I buy my vegetables at Walmart?
33:06
Because Walmart refuses to buy vegetables from China.
33:09
I'm like, okay, I get it, maybe that's a step in the right direction.
33:14
But I'm like, I just think there's so much confusion for people, and I'm going to say
33:19
that, so I come from everything from the standpoint of our thoughts and our words lead
33:25
everything that goes on, our biology, our psychology, our ultimate outcomes.
33:30
And I say that when people get into this world of supplementation and they're in eating
33:36
an organic and non-GMO and grass-fed, but not always got to be grass-finished, like
33:42
all of this kind of stuff, it's overwhelmed.
33:46
It is just people eventually, and I'm going to say they either give up, or they just
33:51
think there's just too many gauges to watch on this.
33:54
The instrument panel is just so confusing that they're just like, I'm just going to
33:59
go eat Cheetos.
34:00
Like, what does it matter anymore?
34:02
Like I can't win this because I'm fighting on multiple fronts.
34:06
Like, what's the best advice you would give to just a consumer?
34:12
It's a wonderful question, because there is so much confusion in the marketplace today.
34:19
I guess what I would say, and I get that question as well.
34:23
Go to the farmer's market and get to know the farmer.
34:28
Go early in the morning, go a little bit later in the afternoon, not during his peak rush.
34:34
Not fair to the farmer.
34:35
He has a finite amount of time to make his income for the week.
34:39
But go early and go late, and get to know that farmer, and ask him questions, and show
34:43
a genuine interest in what they're doing as a general rule, we're all very passionate
34:50
about what we do, and we want to talk to people about it.
34:53
When people ask about our life's passion and our life's work, of course we want to share
34:57
about it.
34:59
If after two or three weeks of visiting with that farmer at the farmer's market, they haven't
35:03
invited you to come out to their farm, run, they're hiding something.
35:10
I want you to come to the farm.
35:12
We have over 800 chefs a year come and visit the farm.
35:15
We learn more from them than they could ever learn from us.
35:18
Come see how we grow harvest, package, ship the product.
35:22
But that's how it was a hundred years ago.
35:25
Absolutely.
35:26
So the farmer that grew my food lived down the road.
35:28
Yes.
35:29
We all went to church together, right?
35:31
Sure.
35:32
And there was a level of trust.
35:33
There was a community.
35:34
We think that your farmer at the local farmer at the farmer's market should be a part
35:38
of your health care team.
35:40
I agree with you.
35:41
Now, I want to push back a little bit, because people say, oh my gosh, organic or regenerative
35:48
or just even good quality food is so much more expensive.
35:52
Compared to what?
35:53
I agree with that.
35:54
Compared to junk food or compared to your pharmacy spend.
36:00
So how many people are on blood pressure medicine and diabetics?
36:05
100%.
36:06
I'll get you off of that stuff.
36:08
And you'll have twice as much money left at the end of the month, even if you're buying
36:13
expensive food.
36:14
I get asked all the time, what is your favorite biohack, you know, and then this biohack
36:20
community, right?
36:22
What's your favorite?
36:23
What are you loving most right now?
36:24
And I'm like, I have three.
36:26
And I'm going to give you what all three of them are.
36:29
Fasting, walking, and sleep.
36:33
I'm like, don't tell me how expensive it is to be healthy.
36:38
Right?
36:39
It's not there.
36:40
Absolutely.
36:41
Like, start there.
36:42
Yeah.
36:43
Just start there.
36:44
And it's like, because people, let's say we build these barriers, like, you know, and
36:48
I will say it's this fear of success, perhaps, but, but in that I actually, my father and I
36:53
actually, um, work with Kroger grocery stores.
36:57
And it's funny because they have a whole initiative called Food as Medicine.
37:01
And it's funny to me because like we go on a monthly Zoom call and actually train and
37:05
talk to their executive team about health and all this kind of stuff and what we could
37:09
be talking about, anything from supplementation to AI to peptides and, you know, invite people
37:14
to help co-teach some of this stuff as well.
37:17
Um, but in doing that, it's so funny to me and I'm like, why are we here teaching you
37:22
about health?
37:23
Like, you're the grocery store.
37:26
Like the entire premise of this thing is Food as Medicine.
37:30
And I, I 100% agree with Food as Medicine, but at the same time, like the people growing
37:35
to food don't understand the medicine.
37:37
Like, there's a problem in there.
37:39
And I read a thing on social media recently and it resonated with me because it was, if
37:45
your doctor is giving you a diagnosis without asking about your diet, find another doctor.
37:50
Like, I can't agree with that anymore.
37:53
Like, how in the world is a doctor supposed to prescribe or diagnose or do any of these
37:58
things without understanding the most important factor to our health?
38:03
Right.
38:04
So Bob, I can't say thank you enough for joining us today.
38:07
I love this.
38:08
I could talk to you for hours and learn and I want to come to visit the farm.
38:10
Please do.
38:11
I would love to.
38:12
Truthfully, I'll be up in Michigan later on next month.
38:14
Maybe I'll drive down to Ohio and say, I know exactly, go blue, but no, I would love
38:21
that.
38:22
Where are you in Ohio?
38:23
Right on the lake, halfway between Cleveland and Toledo.
38:25
Very near Cedar Point.
38:26
I'm right from Detroit.
38:27
We used to go to Cedar Point multiple times a year.
38:30
So you're, oh, that's super close.
38:31
You can see the top hill of the biggest coaster from the farm, which one is the biggest
38:36
one now?
38:37
Millennium?
38:38
Millennium?
38:39
I've been on that one.
38:40
I haven't been to Cedar Point 20 years.
38:41
I live in Florida now.
38:42
I haven't been to Cedar Point 20 years.
38:45
Bob, thank you so much for joining us at the time.
38:47
In our show notes, we'll put in everything in there and our team will get all of your
38:51
handles and everything else that people can follow you, learn more about what's going
38:55
on with you.
38:56
Guys, here's the conversation that I want to make sure that we're paying attention
39:00
to and that food is medicine.
39:02
Like everything starts with the basic biology of what we're in taking because if we're
39:06
not in taking the right things, our physiology doesn't function the way that it should.
39:10
And if we're in taking the wrong things, we could perhaps be, perhaps be inhibiting our
39:15
body from even functioning the way it should.
39:17
And then we get into topics like we're here at the metabolic health day, metabolic dysfunction,
39:23
which leads to pretty much the root of every disease that we talk about in the medical
39:28
community nowadays.
39:29
So Bob, you're at the forefront of this.
39:31
I say like you're literally at the stage zero of what health is about.
39:37
Like you're literally growing the food.
39:39
I thank you so much for what you're doing for the communities that you do serve, but
39:43
also for you're here speaking this weekend, talking to people from around the country,
39:47
perhaps around the world, about what you do in essence, hoping that they go to similar
39:53
things and that it inspires other people to do the types of things you're doing.
39:56
And I thank you for that because hopefully we can get back to the common sense that we
40:00
once had and perhaps this ancient wisdom that we talked about can be reinstituted into
40:04
society and not kind of shunned, because I think we're finding out through science.
40:09
I mean, I have to believe that Old Testament Prophets weren't doing soil testing and looking
40:13
at the sap quality of the plants.
40:16
They just followed the rules that they were told to follow.
40:19
And now we're finding out that those rules perhaps were exactly what they always should
40:22
have been and we need to get back there.
40:23
So thank you for having common sense.
40:26
Common sense is not a flower that grows in everybody's garden.
40:28
Fair.
40:29
That's okay.
40:30
Bless to be here, representing our farm team on the farm and glad to be here and learning
40:37
every day.
40:38
Absolutely.
40:39
I love that.
40:40
Take a look down on the show notes and learn more about Bob Jones Jr. and his farm to
40:43
table approach to supporting restaurants with actual healthy food.
40:47
Imagine that.
40:49
And follow all of that.
40:50
But I encourage you, learn more about organic, learn more about regenerative farming, learn
40:54
more about these things so that we can actually become healthier together.
40:58
Thank you again, Bob, and we'll see you next time.