Latest / Man in America Podcast / RIGGED: Four Companies Control Everything You Eat w/ AJ Richards

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RIGGED: Four Companies Control Everything You Eat w/ AJ Richards · Man in America Podcast

• 0:14
  Speaker 1: Welcome to Man in America, a voice of reason in a world gone mad. I'm your host, Seth Holehouse. So the topic of food has become central to this show because I honestly believe that the food supply is one of the most powerful levers that's being used to make Americans dependent. And not just dependent on corporations, but cut off from the land, cut off from the farmer, and completely unaware of how fragile that actually makes them. And here's why I don't really fully understand or I didn't really understand until I started digging into this.
• 0:45
  Right? So the food system in America is not really a food system anymore. It's a control system. So four corporations process about 85% of the beef in the entire country. The national cattle herd is at a seventy year low.
• 0:59
  And the rancher that's trying to raise clean, honest food for his community, he can barely make ends meet because he's not because he's doing something wrong, but because the system was built to make sure that the money flows up to the government, to the elites, to the big corporations, and not to your local farmer. And that's before we even talk about regulations. Right? Processing bottlenecks. The rules that make it nearly impossible for a small producer to sell directly to you, his neighbor.
• 1:27
  But here's where it gets interesting. My guests say didn't just study this problem, he lived inside of it. He actually ran a USDA processing facility. He sold beef direct to consumer. He comes from a long family line of ranchers and farmers, and he saw exactly where the money goes and who it's going to.
• 1:45
  And then he built something outside the system entirely. So his name is AJ Richards, He's the founder of From the Farm, which is a real working marketplace that connects farmers and ranchers directly with the families that they feed. So there's no middleman, no corporate processors taking their cut, just the producer and the person eating the food. And honestly, what I think that AJ's building is really exciting because it's not just a business. It's a blueprint for what a parallel food economy actually looks like in practice.
• 2:14
  One that gives back the power to the producer and sovereignty back to the family at the dinner table. So today, we're gonna be talking about the real pressures that are crushing American farmers right and ranchers right now, and why the answer isn't fixing the broken system, it's actually building something outside of it, Something decentralized, something that works even when the big system doesn't. And this gave me a lot of hope, honestly, and I think that's gonna do the same for you. So please enjoy this conversation with AJ Richards. AJ, man, it's, so good to have you here.
• 2:46
  We've chatting before I started recording, and I feel like I've known you for ten years already.
• 2:50
  Speaker 2: So
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: I'm looking forward to really getting into this discussion.
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: Likewise. Thanks for having me, Seth.
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: Absolutely. So, you and I have a I can see we have a lot in common. I think also with our audience, there's a lot in common there. But just these core values of of sovereignty, understanding the importance of building parallel systems, understanding just how fragile our current food supply is, the fact that, you know, you go to grocery stores, and I'm I'm looking and I'm seeing, oh, this was, grown in Israel. Why am I buying tomatoes grown in Israel and strawberries from Mexico?
• 3:21
  And that just is kind of the modern, you know, grocery experience versus what it used to be in America. And so there's a lot of good stuff for us to talk about, but I guess let's just go ahead and jump in first looking at your background. You come from a long line of family of ranchers and farmers. So I guess give us your a little bit of your story, and we'll kind of dive right in after that.
• 3:42
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm from a place called St. George, Utah, Southern Utah. It's rapidly growing right now. It's by Zion National Park and Bryce Canyon. Just a really beautiful area.
• 3:54
  And so post COVID is just really exploding. That's where I'm from. My family homesteaded North Side Of The Grand Canyon in Arizona in 1916. It was some of the last homesteading available in the Lower 48. And they've been ranching in that area ever since.
• 4:12
  I'm the city slicker cousin of six generations. I always joke and say if my mom was my dad, I would be a rancher because that was kind of the heritage. The men took over the ranches and so forth. Yeah, so growing up, I did the cattle drives and the brandings every opportunity I had. I love that life always wanted that life myself.
• 4:34
  My uncle told me when I was younger, if you want to be a millionaire rancher, start with 10, and you'll lose it all. So, I spent my young adult life trying to become successful in business so that I could then go and buy a ranch and entrepreneurship is, is, you know, as hard as ranching in some, some aspects. When it didn't work out, the other things I was doing, I just called my cousin in 2018 and said, can I sell beef for your ranch? I'm trying to get into ranching. I'm doing all of these things outside of it just to get there.
• 5:08
  Why don't I just get involved? He's like, yeah, would love that. ButcherBox kind of started online subscription meat concept. I give them a lot of credit for that. Although I'm not a fan of where they source their supply, but that was their business model and they did a great job.
• 5:29
  So they kind of paved the path for ecommerce meat sales. And so I started doing that for my cousin's ranch. In 2020 COVID hit, and we called to get our next round of processing. And they said we can get you in in a year and a half. And I was like, what?
• 5:48
  And so for context, for anybody that doesn't know this industry, two weeks prior, I could have called and they said how many? And if I said five, they would have told me to bring them in in two weeks. It was literally that different. COVID hit and our entire food system crumbled. Delays just in time, everything was built on efficiency, maximize revenue.
• 6:07
  So all this just in time process for food, which is produced by nature. Nature works on her own clock, you can manipulate as much you want. But ultimately, like we saw during COVID, it's a weakness. And so yeah, that's where I'm from. I served in the Utah Army National Guard deployed to Ramadi, Iraq in 2005.
• 6:28
  Spent a year there and, you know, got home. I was probably 24, 25 when I got home and just been trying to pursue something to be a value for this world ever since. And now I think that what we're doing it from the farm is the right thing at the right time.
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: And it's very interesting because, you know, what you're doing parallels a lot of what, you know, we're doing here as well. And, you know, we're building the ARC, right, which is our kind of online, more, you know, private member kind of social media slash education and kind of networking platform. We're really trying to just connect people with, you know, kind of more values based. Right? Because it's kind of, you know, you're you know, say, 80 ago, or think about, you know, Little House on a Prairie.
• 7:09
  Right? Most people America had this common fabric, you know, of just morality and just how you treated your neighbor, how you helped your neighbor. And there's a lot things that broke that down. I think one of biggest things that kind of broke that down is really the government coming in and saying, hey, we're gonna replace all of these systems where instead of having, you know, your local kind of homeless shelter that's kind of run by the church, we're gonna have the government run, you know, the Yeah. You know, systems.
• 7:35
  And all these things slowly you you ran Social Security, all that kind of stuff. These systems slowly just attached the average person to the teat of the government in a way that they don't know how to detach it. But what we're seeing now is what we're I mean, so what I'm seeing is that that relationship has been abused so much. And not just abused, but actually it's turning into a lever of control. And that's what's, you know, frightening if you look at, you know, the fundamentals of food, energy, money.
• 8:04
  You know, these are all areas where we're seeing the government's coming in and really, you know, kinda tightening down on that. And then, you know, in a couple years, we might see something where it's like, hey, you go to your local store to buy some beef, you kinda, you scan in with your QR code, make sure that you got your jabs up to date. And they say, oh, well, you know, you're up to your meat quota already. And so we've got this, cricket, you know, beef roast for you, instead. And that's again, that's what we're it's not just these aren't just kind of tinfoil hat things.
• 8:34
  These are things that they're actually talking about and really kind of rolling out. And I think it's never been more important to start building parallel economy, especially with looking at just the state of the world. And so, I guess, you know, before we jump into some of the more details of of what you're building and, just the importance of parallel economy, just from the broader perspective of what's happening with farming in America. Even before we got into the Strait Of Hormuz being shut down, the the drought that's, you know, kind of really wiped out a lot of the crops and, you know, lowest wheat production, I think, in sixty five years in America. But what are you seeing in terms of just food supply chain here in America?
• 9:13
  Do you see any vulnerabilities? What what are you kinda seeing from your perspective being within this industry?
• 9:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Great question. I mean, unfortunately, what covid highlighted in our weaknesses and the things that actually broke during covid, they haven't even fully recovered. We're at the lowest herd numbers we've been at since 1950. We bought 86,000,000 head of beef cattle.
• 9:39
  That's not dairy cattle, that's beef cattle. And when you consider it takes a full beef to feed a family of four roughly for a year, you know, obviously relative to the volume of beef that family consumes, but it takes roughly a full beef for a family of four. You're going feed 86,000,000 people out of three twenty million. You know what I mean? We're in trouble.
• 10:03
  Now we add on top of that unstable markets. So ranchers right now, cow calf ranchers have historically made no money.
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: What's a cow calf rancher?
• 10:17
  Speaker 2: Yeah, good question. So, that's where your beef starts. It's the rancher who's responsible for the mama cows that then have their babies that then become your beef down the road. So, they call that a cow calf operation. And those cow calf operations, by and large, many of them are in the West.
• 10:38
  Public lands, they should be ranching on all these millions of acres of public lands, providing the rumen from the livestock to fertilize the soil like the bison did. They have an ecological importance beyond just feeding us. And we've reduced those numbers. They started the Taylor Grazing Act in 1935. The Taylor Grazing Act was the first time they started regulating how many animals a rancher was allowed to have on the public land that they had the license to graze on or the rights to graze on.
• 11:15
  So, you know, public land grazing is is there's a lot to it for those that don't know much about it. You're if you're East Of The 1 Hundredth Meridian, you probably know nothing about what it takes to graze or what it means to graze on public land. They enacted the Taylor Grazing Act that then started regulating the number of cows they were allowed to have. When that was put into place, there was 18,000,000 AUMs, animal units a month, meaning one mama cow and one baby cow equals one AUM. And we had 18,000,000 of them throughout the West.
• 11:52
  They implement the Taylor Grazing Act and started regulating that. And then what followed was the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service. I'm paraphrasing a lot of this because there's a lot. And we're probably going to touch on a few subjects. But these federal agencies come in and then they start regulating.
• 12:10
  Well, then those federal agencies get buddy buddy with environmental non government organizations, ENGOs like the Nature Conservancy, Western Watershed. These these groups that are just completely anti livestock, some of them. Like, that's their only thing. They exist to to fight beef on on the ground. Is it because all the
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: all the cow farts, Right? That we're gonna the world's gonna blow up because of all the cows farting?
• 12:37
  Speaker 2: Well, that's the newest one. For years, it was they're destroying the environment for the sage grouse or for this thing or that thing or whatever. They you pick it.
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: But great. Grazing animals create an amazing environment. Like, there's a whole circulatory system that happens that Yes. What they eat, they they poop, and then it their seed spreading, and then they're they're fertilizing another. I mean, it's it's just like that's how God made it.
• 13:00
  Right?
• 13:01
  Speaker 2: 100%. Yeah. Now, practices can determine whether they're being managed under God's principles, the Creator's principles or man's design. Right? And so I won't say that overgrazing didn't happen.
• 13:14
  It certainly did. But we now know better and we've known better for a long time and we can do it without overgrazing. But that's not the point. It's just to remove them period. So what'll happen is they will sue these ENGOs will sue the federal government, the Bureau of Land Management, BLM, that's over Bureau of Land Management public lands.
• 13:37
  And they will sue a particular ranch and say this rancher is hurting the sage grouse. They don't have to prove it. They just have to make the claim. The rancher then has to fight it or give in. And typically, they can't fight it because it's very expensive.
• 13:55
  And so then the settlement is, okay, rancher, you used to be able to carry a thousand head of cows, but you lost this lawsuit. So now you can only have 500 and they cut their numbers in half. Now that's devastating to the finances of the rancher. It's also devastating to our food supply for us as a nation. And sort of that's been the problem is consumers have been so segmented, that they haven't heard the plight of the ranchers that have been being destroyed by these environmental terrorist organizations for decades until it starts hurting the pocketbook.
• 14:37
  Now beef is so high, consumers are like, what is going on? Some blame the farmers and the ranchers for gouging them. Some blame the big four, but they just weren't paying attention for so long until it hurt and now it hurts. So Taylor Grazing Act gets implemented. Those you know, and now we have where we are today, which is the lowest herd numbers.
• 15:00
  Then we look at our meat processors, right? So, you got the cow calf where the babies cows are born and then they grow up. At some point, they go into back grounding or finishing lot. In the West, it's very dry, you're not going to fatten a whole lot of cattle, at least not enough to feed the nation in the Desert West. So, they go to the Midwest, where the corn is grown, where the feed, the corn and grain is grown as feed for livestock.
• 15:27
  They get finished out there and then they go to the processor. Then from the processor, they go into distribution and in the grocery stores. All of that's been consolidated under major corporations.
• 15:41
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• 17:13
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• 17:17
  Speaker 2: So for example, in the beef space, four companies control 85% of the meat we consume now. That happened when the, antitrust laws were changed during Reagan's administration in the 80s. And so in the during the 80s, prior to that change, I think they only controlled like 30% of the market, these these bigger corporations, it's not the same, some of them are the same, but they're not the same from the 80s. They used to have like 30% control. Now, because those antitrust laws were changed and consolidation and corruption and in the case of JBS bribery to scale to the size they are now, they control 85% of our meat supply chain.
• 18:06
  And two of those four companies are foreign owned, both in Brazil.
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: Really? You got JBS, Tyson, Cargill, and National Beef. Right?
• 18:17
  Speaker 2: Yes. Yep. And JBS and National Beef are Brazilian owned.
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: Wow. Yes. Here you go. Yes. JBS, Brazilian owned company, world's largest meat packer, Tyson, largest US meat club.
• 18:29
  I also know that China's highly involved in Tyson. Right?
• 18:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Tyson's a multinational, so they've got investors from all over.
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: And then Cargill, Minnesota, and then National Beef, also Brazilian. So this is okay. So this is crazy. So that's what kinda add a few framing points to this because for a lot of Americans, you know, we we've been kinda it's been bred into us that we're free. America's land of the free.
• 18:53
  You can do whatever you want. And, yes, you know, we're not China's social credit score yet, right, or especially that kind of public. But I think a lot of people don't realize that we in a lot of ways, we we live in an open air prison here in America. And it's like you you don't see the walls until you're in a in in in whether it's an industry or something where all of sudden you can you hit them, and you're like, oh my goodness. And so the fact that even this is crazy, you think about America, which is is you know, this is, like, America is a breadbasket of a country, whether it's for growing, for raising cattle, you know, we should have so much food production here.
• 19:30
  But the fact that 85% of the meat is controlled of beef is controlled by four companies, and two of those companies are not even American companies is just insane to think about. It's like, how is that American at all? Like, it's just it's wild.
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Well, then you consider that 80% of the meat we consume goes through their processing facilities. And there's less than 40.
• 20:03
  Those are fragile infrastructure. In fact, in 2021, a year after COVID, some of your listeners may remember they had shortages of meat again And they limited what you could buy. Most people don't know that's because JBS got hacked by a rushing hacking organization and locked out of their systems for over a week. And when their facilities are processing 6,000 head of cattle a day, what happens? You've got a major disruption.
• 20:37
  We're not even talking about physical damage to the facility. We're talking about just their software was hacked. So part of my journey, I realized this was what I needed to build and actually start working on solutions and not just talking about the problem, my mentor said the last thing I would ever do as a startup is software. And he was a software developer. He's like, only one in 2,000 make it.
• 21:03
  You just don't want to do it unless you because I can tell you're passionate about it. I'm probably not going to sway you. So he's like, you need to do market research. You need to know for sure that what you think is going to help will. And so you got to talk to people.
• 21:17
  So I spent three and a half years asking questions and flushing out the idea. I didn't want people to say it was good. I wanted them to tell me why it wasn't. And during that time, I ended up talking so much, I ended up running a USDA slaughterhouse in Cody, Wyoming. It's impossible for me to chart you a path from 2020 to why I was in a slaughterhouse other than that's where God wanted me.
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: So you ran a USDA slaughterhouse? Yes. In this process. And how many head of cattle were you processing a day?
• 21:47
  Speaker 2: 35 head a week. Small facility.
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: Okay. Okay. Okay.
• 21:50
  Speaker 2: So USDA just means federally inspected. They can be as small as I was all the way up to the multi thousands. But we have the same rules, the same regulations, which is also the problem. You're regulating me the same level with 35 head a day as you do with the guy doing 6,000. But it's actually not the same because they have what's called line speeds in those big ones where those those the the animals are moving automatically.
• 22:19
  And so people in there just have like a couple of cuts as it's moving past. Your inspectors are not visually inspecting 6,000 head of livestock a day in a massive facility. But in my house, they're watching every single one. And so the amount of bureaucracy I have to deal with in a small local facility versus the massive facilities, it's not the same. I described it like putting the same number of NFL referees inside the UFC Octagon.
• 22:53
  That fight would get stopped every second because you would see every misstep, you know what I mean, from from the fighters because you've got so many eyes on. Now I'm not saying that we were trying to get away from doing things right. We were doing them right. But every little thing when it stops you costs time and energy and it just makes it really complicated to run. So what I learned about this part of the and this, by the way, was the last role I needed to participate in for me to feel like, okay, we got to get this going because we're in trouble.
• 23:28
  And because I didn't know anything about slaughterhouses, I knew what it was like to drop off live cows on one side and picked up packaged meat on the other. But what happened inside those four walls, and the impact that those were having around the nation was foreign to me until participating directly in that. So you've got less than 40 facilities processing 80% of the meat we as Americans consume. Disrupt that. What are we looking at?
• 23:56
  If we're going to turn this around, we built from the farm because I'm also involved in agriculture. I have a 60 acre regeneration project in the deserts of Utah with a couple of buddies of mine to regenerate and regrow the desert. So I understand that side of it as well. And in fact, knowing that this is the direction that we need to go, managing our landscapes in tune with nature, not with the enterprise. You're not going to make that shift significantly enough unless you fix the market.
• 24:37
  Farmers and ranchers are doing what they've got to do to pay the bills. If you tell me we need you to change the way you're doing it and do it this way, you've got to show me that there's a path to profitability or that there's a demand. So really all of this is in the consumer's hands. Where you're spending your dollar, even if it's a few more, if you don't spend a couple more now, you're not even going to have that person to buy from down the road later. You know what I mean?
• 25:02
  We're genuinely talking about prioritizing family's income for what makes the most sense long term.
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: Well, here's a I mean, talk about just kinda long term. I'll just do a quick search. This is a little chart showing farms, land and farms, and average acres per farm from 1850 to 2022. And so here, it's interesting because right here, the peak, we had nearly 7,000,000 so look at the blue line, how this is by millions of farms. So about 1934, we had about 7,000,000 farms in America.
• 25:38
  Now, keep in mind I don't I don't know off the top of my head, but the population in America was a fraction of what it is today. I'm not sure what the population was a hundred years ago, but I could probably quickly find out, but it's crazy because this is like, you pull we looked at that, this act right here you mentioned, right, the Taylor Grazing Act, right, which was 1934, 06/20/1934. You then look at this, boom. Right? So as soon as that's packed that happens, you see a huge drop off in the number of farms.
• 26:12
  And this is what we're seeing across so many different industries. Like, look at look at how COVID changed small businesses. You know, your, you know, your local Chili's or Applebee's, they're still operating right now because they had this huge multi you know, you kind of national or multinational enterprise, yet your local bar, which was owned by your neighbor, was shut down. Your local grocer was shut down. So the same thing has been happening, and that's a pattern we're seeing over and over again is that as the government comes in and regulates that same thing happened to the banking industry.
• 26:44
  You look at how many small kind of private local banks there were pre depression, pre crash, it's all about consolidation, consolidation, consolidation, and regulation and using regulation to force consolidation. And then you get to a place where, like what you're seeing here, you hit these record low numbers of farms. The only farms that can survive are these ones by and large that are just kind of playing straight by the government rules. Probably a lot of them are being acquired by these bigger companies. And so then what's happening over time is that America has become this country that is really ruled at a certain level by this corporatocracy.
• 27:23
  It's just these giant multinational corporations, many of them not even headquartered here in America, that are affecting everything about our way of life. And so now for most Americans, they're, they're just going and they're just going to their local grocery store and buying some Tyson chicken and not thinking anything of it. And you know, the problem is is that their own local farm, let's say, ten minutes away, is gonna have way healthier chickens, that's gonna be, you know, reinvesting in that community, that's gonna be feeding you. Because, again, what this also shows you is that this is reliance on a very, very fragile supply chain to make it so that these handful of giant companies control this whole system. And so, like COVID, or what happens if there's some kind of grid down event or what happens in any number of things.
• 28:15
  If that supply chain breaks, even looking at how oil prices can affect this, all of a sudden, all these people that, you know it's like, you know, what is it? The, well, I guess there's a lot of different kinda analogies for this, but it's like, you didn't use it when you should have been using it. Now you go there to ask for help, it's like, oh, that farm is now a data center. That farm is now a solar field. That farm is, you know, now the kids sold the land to a development because they couldn't sustain because so many Americans stopped buying locally because it was so much more convenient to combine that with their local grocery trip to their local, you know, you know, ShopRite or Kroger or Publix or whatever it was.
• 28:55
  Yep.
• 28:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. And like you rightly pointed out, we did a podcast a while back with a friend of mine that's a public land rancher and attorney for public land ranching, recently was appointed to come into the USDA to help them with some lawfare stuff. So we did this podcast breaking down this history. And like you so well, we're able to show the moment notice the graph pre government America was a land of prosperity. Government starts getting involved and look what follows.
• 29:35
  And if you base there's plenty of historical argument to say that a country's success lives and dies on its agriculture. Like it's kind of the canary in the coal mine. And so this podcast that we did, we broke it down from 1935. Every time there was a support from the government, there was a decline. And then they enacted some new policies, some new financial mechanism to support, whatever.
• 30:08
  And then it led to another steep drop every single time to where we are today. So they get involved. We have their strings attached essentially, and then we have problems. Often, I think those strings weren't seen. And often I think they were intended.
• 30:27
  I think it really depends on the people fighting for those policies at the time. Right now, I personally believe we do have one of the greatest secretaries of agriculture in American history, especially at this time. Now, the challenge is if people knew how convoluted, destructive, corrupt the government as a whole is, they would understand why it's really hard to get common sense done, even by people that are in these really incredible positions. That's like, know, put me in coach. I'm going to lay waste to it.
• 31:12
  They get in and everybody's like, what the hell are you doing?
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: Look at RFK coming in.
• 31:16
  Speaker 2: It's like,
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: what's what happened there? Perfect example. Right?
• 31:20
  Speaker 2: Perfect example. And those people, in my opinion I I work with the secretary as a private citizen, I've and been to Washington a whole bunch of times. I've probably been there four or five times this year already. With the lawfare stuff that they've announced to start, you know, we're talking about a secretary of the USDA, who's also over Forest Service standing up a lawfare council to go after forest service employees who are partnering with ENGOs to get the ranchers off the ground at the local level. She's on top of it.
• 31:55
  And yet our system has crumbled so quickly, not quickly, but so fast in the last six years that we've made our bed, we're going to sleep in it. Now, to me, it's more about damage control. How much can she get done while in the private sector? What we're doing, trying to work directly with our fellow citizens, because I'm not a lobbyist, I've never been paid to go to DC and lobby, I just started screaming about the problems. You know what I mean?
• 32:28
  I represent the people. I try to serve the people. We our we our whole business model is set up in a way where we don't win unless the people we serve win first. Like, that is who we are. And it's going to be the people that save ourselves.
• 32:41
  It will not be people we elect in government because the machine is so big. It's gonna take a lot to turn it.
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: Well, it's like I mean, have you ever read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand?
• 32:54
  Speaker 2: Long time ago,
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: yeah. It's, mean, it's a really interesting book. It's great book in many ways. It kind of shows what happens when the government steps in, but it's, I mean, even look at, look at the history books. Look at the Soviet Union, look at when Mao came into China, look at any instance when you see the government coming in and saying, hey, we're gonna take control of all these different processes.
• 33:15
  We're gonna take control of the farmland. We're gonna run all this. It almost always ends in famine and mass death. Like, it's just what happens over and over and over again. That's what happens.
• 33:27
  And and that's and that's the hard, you know, kinda scary part about this is that, especially, again, looking at now the ripple effect from the Strait Of Hormuz being closed for for so long, oil prices, diesel prices going up, the, you know, the cost to run your combine, the cost to ship your goods, the cost to ship fertilizer if you can get fertilizer coming from overseas. We're seeing that, and I think for a lot of Americans, we have this normalcy bias, this cognitive dissonance where, you know, it's the normalcy bias kinda look at and saying, well, especially for my generation, your generation, you know, the the last, say, fifty, eighty years, America has always been great. America's all we've never had famine in America. We've never had starvation here in America. We've never had great food shortages here in America.
• 34:11
  If anything, okay, beef is an extra dollar dollar a pound. Yeah. It's not good, but we survive. But if you look at where all this leads and you take you take this the progression of this, it it really spells disaster. I mean, we're looking at a very serious a very serious wake up call for a lot of people that think they can just hop on an app or just drive to their local chain grocery store and feed their family.
• 34:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah. There's good news, though. We've already got the science and the infrastructure to make it right out of a petri dish.
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you're right. Yeah, you're right.
• 34:46
  Speaker 2: I mean, honest, honestly, I think that might have been there might be some strategy there. Like the difference between food sovereignty and food security is food security is simply something to put in your belly to tide you over. May not be the best for you, may not be what you want, but I'm not starving. That's food security. Food sovereignty is my right to choose what I'm eating from the person that's growing it and producing it.
• 35:12
  You live in New York, I live in Wyoming. We can go down the street and buy raw milk. How many people that would land them in jail? Right? Probably not the buyer, but seller would put them in jail if that was the case.
• 35:24
  To your point of open air prison, like you walk across the border, this is okay. But one state over, this is not okay. This is kind of what I've been screaming for a long time. I'm not the only one, but we are so close to famine. There are so many little things that if they tipped, there would be parts of the country where people would be in really big trouble.
• 35:50
  And America has seen it. We saw it during the Great Depression. We saw it during World War Two when they were promoting the Victory Gardens because by the way, we don't have enough food to feed our troops and ourselves. A big part of the Victory Gardens was just keeping the rail systems freed up of moving food. But still, we have had that in our country.
• 36:12
  But to your point earlier, we didn't have 320,000,000 people.
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Actually, I I found a population chart. This is looking at, so in 1950, it's as far as well, this one goes back. We were at about a 100 150,000,000 people in 1950. Right now, about three fifty, right?
• 36:32
  So, we've more than doubled the population in the past, just since 1950. And so then if you look at that in comparison to the chart here, and we look at, you know, so, 1935, let's say there's a 100,000,000 people. There's 7,000,000 farms out of a 100,000,000 people. Now we're down to 2,000,000 farms out of 350,000,000 people. Right?
• 36:55
  So this is like, we've seen just a drastic, drastic reduction. And the thing is, it's not just about farms, this is it's also about a lot of those farms say 1935 or so when we hit that peak, they were supplying their local community. They they were actually feeding their local community, and people knew the importance of supporting their local farmers. But now, again, for a lot of people, they've just become oblivious to that. Know, not to mention that they don't know how to garden.
• 37:25
  They probably never planted a seed in their life. They don't know how to, you know, harvest food. They don't know how to hunt and clean an animal and preserve an animal. Like, we've really we've lost so many of these skills, which I I think it's very intentional. Right?
• 37:38
  Because it's it really it really brings the population to its knees, but we've lost our ability as a nation to really kind of our own sovereignty, right? We've lost that sovereignty, and it's been replaced by a big brother system, by the nanny state.
• 37:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, when you ask, like, what are the problems? Well, we could sum it up. Lowest cattle numbers since 1950, policies that are preventing direct to consumer sales and growth and supporting our communities that way, The low the lack of processors.
• 38:13
  You know, the biggest challenge for small processors is employees, people that know how to cut meat. This will inevitably lead to robots cutting meat. People will complain about that. But guess what? When I was hiring at the slaughterhouse, nobody wanted to work.
• 38:28
  And so you've got slaughterhouse issues. We now have drought issues, major droughts across the nation that's leading to wildfires and the forage being burned up that would otherwise sustain those livestock. I mean, fertilizer shortages for land that's dependent on chemical agriculture right now, it doesn't have to be, but currently it is. And it's a five or so year process, give or take, to wean your soils off of that. Like, it's just the list of problems that we're staring down the barrel of for the American food system is large.
• 39:05
  It's a lot. And Mexico borders closed because the New World Screwworm, we used to depend on them for a lot of the imported cattle from Mexico. That's been closed for a long time. I think a year maybe or close to a year. That's a real threat if the screwworm crosses the southern border and gets into America.
• 39:25
  That's even more devastation for our food system. So we are at a pivotal point in our nation. And the biggest thing that people need to know is you have the power. I'm like a broken record here. The consumer has the power to turn this around, and it is wholly dependent on where you choose to source your food.
• 39:48
  We're trying to help by building a system that makes that easier, more convenient, matches some of the conveniences of the grocery store. But if you wake up and there's no food available, you're going to be responsible for yourself and your decisions that you made from now till then. And I say this boldly because guess what? I'm not selling meat to anybody. I'm a citizen.
• 40:11
  I grow food for my family on our own place and whatever we have extra goes to our community. So I think I get to say things directly that ranchers wouldn't dare say because then you could like, oh, well, you're just saying that. I'm telling you. I don't make any money from you hearing this and you making a decision. I'm just telling you, if you don't, as a consumer, choose wisely now, that choice may not even be on the table in the next five years.
• 40:36
  And it's all in our power.
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: It can even be sooner than that. And that I but and this is I mean, I guess there is a silver lining. Much as the the general population is heading in a certain direction, I'm seeing you know, look at homeschool numbers. Right? You know, I'm seeing that there is this kind of this uniting these things.
• 40:55
  You know, a lot of these things that used to kind of be like, those are the liberal kind of free, you know, green greeny people that are, you know, going to their local farms and, you know, it's just kind of like it's all changing. But now there's actually this huge movement of people, regardless of their political affiliation, that are trying to get back to the land. They're trying to it's like they sense it. They can feel it in their bones. So they're moving out in the country, like, you know, their home setting.
• 41:18
  You know, in, you know, eight you know, seven or seven, eight years ago, I was living in a high rise in Manhattan. Now, up in the country. I grew up in farming country in the middle of Ohio. But, you know, my a lot of my adult life was spent in New York City. But now, you know, we're upstate.
• 41:31
  We're on seven acres. You know, we have a small kind of family homes that we've got, you know, chickens and dogs and cats, and we we grow garden you know, we garden and, you know, all these kind of fun things. But, you know, I know that there's some food sovereignty within that, right, because we can produce our own food. But that's the encouraging thing is that, a, there are a lot of people that I think are are really changing the way they do things. Right?
• 41:55
  They're they're supporting local farmers or going to local farm markets or building those relationships. But then b, there are people like yourself that are working to build tools to create this parallel economy. And, like, that's the key. Right? And that's like, you know, for me, we have the platform we're building called the ARC.
• 42:13
  I was like, why is it called Darecoin? We're trying to build a vessel to help give people security and safety and community that can sustain whatever storm comes, whatever flood there is. And so but you're doing the same thing. So let's I'm gonna pull up your website because I want you to tell me more about what you're doing. So your site is from thefarm.org, and I'll make sure that that link is in the description.
• 42:36
  And so walk us through what you've built here.
• 42:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. So picture this like Airbnb, but instead of short term rentals, it's local food. So when you go on here and you sign up and set up a free account, it'll start populating everybody around you that is on our website currently and you can buy directly from them. If you scroll back up to the top there and hit the search nearby me.
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: Right here see what's nearby?
• 43:08
  Speaker 2: Yep. So if you click that and then just maybe zoom out, that'll show you the map view. We've got a 100 producers.
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: Oh, wow.
• 43:15
  Speaker 2: 37 states across the nation and growing. And so, each of these little nodes that you see was built by the farmer. And so, when you go to their stores, anything that they have available for their particular operation, you can buy it from them. And depending on what that farmer and their lifestyle is, they might ship it to you. They might only have on farm pickup.
• 43:38
  It's really up to them. Because what has to happen is an ecosystem that is for them. They don't all fit into one model or another. I've talked to farmers that they're in their 70s and they're both trying to make it work. Well, limitations are going be way different than the five sprouts family there because they've got plenty of hands to help.
• 43:59
  So, each of these farms are set up for what works for them. But you are buying right from them. We are not the middleman. Your orders are organized through our system, but the delivery comes from them, the communication comes from them. We're just trying to bridge that gap and help people shake the hand that feeds them.
• 44:20
  So that's what it looks like as a customer. You kind of talked about it earlier. We have to also understand consumer behavior and build something that's convenient. And so what we're working towards there is you can go and shop from multiple farms, fill your cart, and check out one time. Oh.
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: So if I was gonna say the Wagyu mister Wagyu Ranch Yep. So you
• 44:43
  Speaker 2: can click on him and now he's not available where you're at, but you could add a product from there. And then you could go buy chicken from somebody else and dairy from somebody else if those are all available in your area. And then when you go to check out, you do that one time, and then they're all gonna send to you from their farms in their individual location.
• 45:04
  Speaker 1: So okay. This is okay. This is really, really incredible. And this is really useful because as I was telling you before we started recording, we just put a I've got a big beef delivery coming today. There's this because back when you bet you know, what, two years ago or so, the mRNA and the beef was, you know, kind of a big thing that we're talking about.
• 45:20
  And so my wife went and she found specifically this farm out in Jersey that really made a strong stance in saying, Look, we are not putting this in our cows, you know, really, really kind of healthy raised, you know, how they're doing things. And so, you know, we go on their website and I place an order, I've got a big box only because I can't there's other some other local farms I've been to, but there's certain products that I wanna get that I can only get from them. It's about an hour and a half away from us. But this is really, really convenient because, like, what this is doing is this is bypassing like, this is a true parallel economy. This is bypassing those four big companies.
• 45:59
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• 46:16
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• 46:41
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• 47:18
  So, like, a lot of farmers, even if they even they say they have an ecommerce on their website, they're still stuck in the mire of looking at Facebook advertising and Yelp advertising and Google advertising, and there it's it's really complicated. Not to mention a lot for a lot of them, their ecommerce websites are not that good. Right? I mean, it's just that they're, you know, farmers aren't really on the cutting edge necessarily of website shopping. So so okay.
• 47:43
  This is really interesting. Now what if what if I was a farmer? Or let's let's say, what if I'm a what if I'm a homesteader and I've got bees. Right? And so maybe I'm doing I've got local honey and bee related stuff.
• 47:54
  Is that something that also kinda ties into this and how that work for someone that is actually the seller or producer of products?
• 48:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. So if a seller or producer, cottage maker, homemaker, where are maybe you're just doing tallow or maybe you're making soap or you live somewhere where you can sell sourdough online, you can build your store on here just like a farmer can. Go to fromthefarm.org and that's where you start setting up a store. I get in contact with you, talk to you about our mission and our intention and make sure that everything is known. The main thing I want to share about the farmer side is the reason that I used a service when I was selling for my cousin's ranch.
• 48:41
  And I hated it. It was clear that it was built by tech folks, not farmers. The last place we want to be is in front of a computer all day or even for an hour, right? And so I had my 65 year old ranching uncles in mind when we designed this. How do we build something that my uncle can go and actually build a store and sell online with his limited knowledge of technology?
• 49:09
  Now, we didn't create a miracle yet. My uncle is still going to take him a few hours. But my cousin, his son, with any basic level of technology, even some of our older producers that use their phones and use the computer to some extent, they're done in an hour. Built, live, selling online. That's the main thing for our farmers is we had the producer in mind first and the consumer second.
• 49:34
  If we're going to build this, it's got to be built to serve the farmers and ranchers first. That's the core foundation across the board. Financially, it's got to be good for them. Technically, it's got to be good for them. Functionality, they've got to be able to customize it based on, like I was saying earlier, what their family dynamics are, where they live in conjunction to shipping UPS center.
• 49:55
  All those things have to go in to this to make it actually something built for and by producers. My COO and my CTO both run a co op farm down by Southern Utah. They're doing pork and beef and chicken and raw dairy. So our team are producers. My family, I was selling for my cousin.
• 50:18
  I ran a slaughterhouse. My co founder, she's got a ranch. We are producers and so we're like, we're not going to build it unless we would want it for ourselves. So, let's make sure that it works that way. So, that's what you'll see on both sides of this equation.
• 50:33
  For the consumer, we're improving all the time. We're getting more producers on there so you have more access. We're simplifying that process for the producer. We're simplifying it, customizing it and making it as easy as possible so that you can spend as little time behind the computer as you possibly can most of the time on the field. They can run their entire store now from their mobile phone.
• 50:56
  So, we did a big back end update. You don't even have to sit in front of your computer. You can even print your shipping label from your back office, from your phone. Those are the things we're trying to do because we are them and we want to make sure this is the absolute best place that they could be. That's why we don't take any commission from the sale of food, which raises a few eyebrows.
• 51:19
  People always want to know, can you even make a successful business if you're not doing that? The answer is yes. There's plenty of other opportunities where the margins that are being taken should be taken from these other areas, not from the farmer. The farmer needs 100% of the retail dollar. The last thing I'll say on that is, because you mentioned it earlier, I am very encouraged by the movement of people to go from the system of convenience that we were fooled into believing was always going to be there or naively believed was always going to be there to wanting to be self reliant and even getting into their own level of production.
• 52:01
  Homesteading is one of the fastest movements in the country. And we're building this parallel economy so that it's available for all these people trying to get out of there. I'm hoping is we have 1,800,000 farms left in America today. 86% of those are considered small. According to USDA statistics, that means 350,000 in gross revenue a year or less.
• 52:27
  So the majority of the farmers we have remaining all have off farm jobs, and they're doing whatever they can to stay in farming or ranching as it is. The new generation is working the off farm job, taking out loans potentially to try to get into this new lifestyle. And so they've got some of their own pressures. We can get millions of people to find these local farmers and ranchers on from the farm, They no longer have to deal with the marketing, which is a massive lift to add on top of managing the tech, raising the animals, storing and shipping the product, customer communication, all those are necessary to go direct. But if we could take off the largest chunk and expense, which is marketing, we genuinely change the game for the entire industry.
• 53:18
  We just need consumers to come there and find them. Then what'll happen is the guy sitting in a cubicle, his whole social media feed is homestead life and that's his dream, but he can't figure out how to make it work financially. The guy in the cubicle next to him who's sick and tired of him talking about meat chickens is going to elbow him and be like, Hey, there's this website called From the Farm. They've got so many customers. They need people to grow.
• 53:42
  Please quit and go grow your meat chicken so that I don't have to hear it anymore. Know what I mean? Like, it's the outlet. It's the off ramp for people to get back into growing food. If the solution doesn't include how to go from 1,800,000 farms back to three, five plus million, what are we even talking about?
• 54:01
  We are literally still only moving the goalpost for lab grown meat, for consolidated, high efficiency, methane free species, whatever buzzword crap is out there, unless we're looking at solutions that increase the number of small farms, and we're not talking about a genuine solution to fix America's food system.
• 54:23
  Speaker 1: I mean, and this is you know, looking at this, I mean, what what you're doing here, this could be something that could literally change the trajectory of the small family farms in America. I think two ways. One is, as you mentioned, just k, one is giving people an on ramp. So let's just say that, you know, like, you know, one of my kind of long term goals, you know, I've got two daughters, you know, I got two year old and a five year old. You know, as soon as I can, you know, obviously not right now, but I'd love to, you know, wanna start growing herbs, we wanna start making our own tinctures and medicines, we wanna start doing, you know, raising bees.
• 54:59
  I'd love to give them an opportunity to to kinda go into that, where they can see even as, you know, because we we homeschool, we have homeschool group, I'm thinking, okay, how can we build in entrepreneurship into this? And so imagine if they're working together and they're they're making honey, processing honey, or whatever it is that they're doing, you have this on ramp to enable new people to even on a small homestead. Right? Because see, if you have if you're trying to run a small homestead, what are you doing? You're going to the local farm market on the weekends.
• 55:29
  You're you're still working your nine to five job and struggling to do all this, and you're just you're barely getting by. But I could see this is something that really it's it's kind of it truly is a parallel system that connects the person to the local farmer. Now, whether it's someone that's ten minutes away that maybe you discover that person, start going to their farm, that's what we do. You know, we go and visit all the local farms that we're buying a lot of our stuff from. We know the farmers, we've built relationships.
• 55:56
  I remember talking about my wife about it. It's like, okay, what what the shutdowns again? It's like, well, the cows don't stop producing milk, right? There's still gonna be milk, they have to keep milking those cows. So there's a lot of reliability in that.
• 56:08
  But this is great, though, because it's again, it's giving the on ramp for people, but it's also for farms that are struggling, it's giving them this whole new window of opportunity to find new customers. And so I I'd love to see it, and hopefully, this show can help, you know, give you a boost in your members and maybe get some new farms signing up because this is this is really near and dear to me because this is true resilience. Like, this is, you know, you could call it, this is anti government activity that we're doing here because we're kind of going against the this big behemoth system that wants us eating crickets and getting our jab every week to, you know, and and maintain our carbon credit. So this is the the inverse of that. And so it's really, really amazing.
• 56:51
  I really encourage anybody here. So, again, the website actually, I think I have it here. From thefarm.org. And you're saying, so if I wanna go on right now and and shop and place orders, I can sign up for free. There's no monthly charge for the consumer to start using a service.
• 57:08
  Right?
• 57:08
  Speaker 2: Yep. That's right. Go on there. When you were showing that, mister Wigu, you can actually see that if you have specific questions that maybe you can't see the answers to, you can click on any one of those and I'll show you what I'm talking about. So if you click on any one of these farms and you go to their farm, there's a button in the bottom right hand corner, that little chat bubble in the bottom right.
• 57:33
  If you hit that chat bubble, you have to log in because we got to prevent spam. But once you're signed up, you can ask the farmer any questions that you might have. And I've learned that sometimes consumers are worried. They don't want to feel dumb. And so, the ability to chat with them on here makes it much easier, intimidating.
• 57:58
  But you can say, hey, I'm looking for something that doesn't have any antibiotics or whatever those concerns are. If they're not spoken out in the about section or anything like that, message them directly. That's why we say again, our slogan is shake the hand that feeds you. We're going to bridge that gap. It's between you and them.
• 58:16
  From the farm is just there to help make the introduction, but we're not the middleman. So, yeah, this is what we think, like you said, could be the future that we need. And it is anti government. This is by the people and for the people. Regardless of what the next administration does, we always have to get involved in policy because if you're in a state that doesn't allow you to buy raw milk, that's a problem.
• 58:43
  So we do have to put pressure there. But outside of that, we just want to do commerce between one another and keep people out. In fact, we built this natively because we didn't want anybody control us. We could have built this concept on Shopify for a fraction of the cost and time. But during COVID, Shopify was closing conservative companies, and we were not willing to build something that was at the behest or the control of anybody other than ourselves.
• 59:12
  Speaker 1: Oh, I understand. That's been my wife's life the past three months, you know, building our own system that we're hosting. We own every line of code. Everything is custom. It's just because we looked at it and said, We're not gonna build a system that in two years could be taken offline where, you know, our Stripe account gets canceled.
• 59:31
  So, we've got multiple processors, we've got all the redundancy. But this is just, this is incredible because you can look, and it's like, I want to buy meat from these people, right? It's like, I want to, every pound of beef is supporting this family, right? And you go on there and you can see they've got the galleries and you can see where they're, you know, this is just, this is really incredible. Like, I think this is just so, such an amazing thing that you're doing here.
• 59:57
  Speaker 2: Thank you.
• 59:58
  Speaker 1: Honestly, is, this is, it's God's work. Like, as you talked about, you know, you're kind of calling to do this. This is absolutely incredible. And so again, from the farm.org, people can sign up. If someone is a farmer or a producer, is there from the website, is there a link that you can say, hey.
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 2: Yep. Scroll scroll right to the bottom, the very bottom of the page, and you'll see a gold button there.
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 1: Oh, because I'm a producer. There you go. And then
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 2: when they click there, takes you to our landing page. I have a little video kind of giving you an introduction to who we are. And then you click learn more, fill out your information. And I personally talk to every one of our producers. So I do a Sunday night call for all new folks interested in being a seller, but I usually reach out before Sunday just to introduce myself.
• 1:00:47
  But it's important for me, at least at this stage, that I get to personally connect with every single person on our platform.
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 1: This is incredible. Well, AJ, thank you so much for giving me and giving the audience your time today. And this thank you for doing what you're doing. I mean, honestly, this is really important. It's really exciting.
• 1:01:04
  And maybe we'll find some way that we can work together with The Arc and From the Farm. There's probably some crossover we can have there. But this is, this is exciting. I love seeing this, like, is the American spirit right here. Like what you're doing, this is the true American spirit.
• 1:01:20
  You're creating solutions, especially solutions that are anti government. Because I America in and of itself was a solution that was anti government. That's kind of in the DNA of this country. So, yeah, man, thank you for doing this. And and do you have any final kind of closing thoughts as we wrap up here?
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 2: My only closing thought would be that I just I have a feeling that most people listening to your show because of you and and people that will hear this because of me, that this will resonate. But God's calling you for something. We are at a time in history that is significant. And I am living proof that there is nothing that you are not capable of if you put it in God's hands and you just are committed to stepping forward by faith. You know, when I look back, literally gone through a bankruptcy living in my mom's basement, trying to figure out this food system deal.
• 1:02:12
  And within such an incredible speed, the places I am now working in Washington. I mean, if you would have told me then you're going to be in Washington helping formulate policy that puts the power back into the hands of the people with the Secretary of Agriculture, I would have probably not had the courage to keep going. So walk by faith. Beat the ground with your knees every night and every morning and ask God to put you where you need to be because we need to rely on each other sovereign Christian individuals. If you aren't Christian, but you believe in a God that believes in loving your neighbor and treating your neighbor as yourself, you're part of that.
• 1:02:56
  I've got many friends that aren't Christians, but we have a lot of similarities there. This is the time. So lean into it. Don't be discouraged. That fear is an opportunity to become courageous.
• 1:03:08
  And if you're a man listening to this, your family needs you to protect, provide and preside today like no other time in history. If you're a mother, your kids need you, they need the nurturing, need the homemaking, they need you to be the one to in my home, my wife keeps me healthy while I'm
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: doing
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 2: what I'm doing. We all have a role, but just ask God where He needs you and then go. Don't let the fear stop you.
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 1: That's it, man. I couldn't agree. Time is now for this. I think that these are the days of Noah, you could say. And it's important, an important time.
• 1:03:43
  Well, AJ, thank you again. It's been such a pleasure meeting you and speaking with you, and I hope that we can work together more on this. And I also, I hope that from this discussion, you see more sign ups and see more activity. Because I think if we can get you a million members on there, and that means that anybody can, with a little bit of heart and, you know, and some elbow grease and some faith, they can take their kind of hobby and their passion and turn it into something that's gonna provide for their family and pull them outside the government system. That's a great, great thing.
• 1:04:11
  So, thank you again.
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 2: Thank you.
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 1: Thank you. Yeah, take care and God bless
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 2: you. God bless.