Latest / Beyond Labels Premium / Episode #75: Why Egg Prices Are Rising: An Eggs-tra Special Episode

Transcript

Episode #75: Why Egg Prices Are Rising: An Eggs-tra Special Episode · Beyond Labels Premium

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: So it doesn't make any sense at all that the survivors, I don't care whether you're a creationist or a Darwinian evolutionist, it doesn't make any sense that the survivors of a D of a disease, instead of being uh praised and let's save their genetics and let's, you know, let's go forward to the next generation, instead they are destroyed, they are exterminated.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: But to me, the precaution would be let's let's save the survivors and duplicate their strengths.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: Hi, everybody.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to another episode of Beyond Labels.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Dr.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Cena McCullough here with my co-host, Farmer Joel Salatin.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: And today we're going to talk about everything involving eggs, right?
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: We're seeing this massive price increase across the board with eggs.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the consumer price index is saying that eggs have increased by about 60% or so from the last year.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: In some places, they're seeing a 100% increase in the price of eggs.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not actually being as widely reported as one would think.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so Joel and I thought we would dive into this issue and bring in also the farmer's perspective.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: We both watched the Tucker Carlson episode where he is connecting dots between the increasing egg prices and not only the avian flu, but processing plants being destroyed.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: And also some farmers reporting that their chickens have dramatically decreased their egg-laying um production.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so we wanted to kind of tie all that together and get Joel's perspective on it.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm going to hand it over to my partner in crime.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: Take it away, Joel.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: All right, Cena.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: Well, uh, great.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: And and this is a this is an ongoing, uh, literally an ongoing story here.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh even though we're recording a a week before um broadcast, uh you know, things may change even in a week.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: But uh what we do know is that um, yeah, that there is a tremendous egg shortage.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, they're even uh smuggling eggs across the Mexican border, which which makes you realize, he, this is not a problem in Mexico.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: So there are a couple little, you know, very interesting tidbits of this.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, it's not a problem in Mexico.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and and it is uh yeah, it it's a it's a U.S.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's a US thing.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: Now, um there are a couple of different issues here.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: One is the number of backyard flocks that have quit laying.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: So these aren't so the the the people that were on Tucker Carlson that their chickens quit laying, those are not commercial egg producers, those are hobbyists, backyarders, and they're getting their feed from a lot of them from Tractor Supply Corporation, TSC, which handles uh producer's pride, Purina, Purina-based uh feeds.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: Now, what's um so far, so far, Purina is you know, is standing by their feed, and and we'll see what develops from that.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_01: But this has been ongoing.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: I I've been hearing about it just kind of quietly in the you know, in the homestead movement, you know, uh, for months.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: And um, and a friend just called me the other day and and and you know, his quit laying completely.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, chickens naturally do cycle.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: They you know they fluctuate up and down based on you know temperature and light and all those sorts and age, those sorts of things, but they don't they don't just go for it zero for months and months and months, especially if they look healthy.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: What struck me, what has struck me about this thing is these backyarders and homesteaders, when they when they do get on TV or whatever and they're holding their chickens, the chickens look very, very healthy.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: Normally, if a chicken looks healthy, she's laying eggs.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: So this is something that's affecting the fertility of the chicken, the egg production, and is not actually making the chicken sick, which normally, normally, if a chicken stops laying, she's sick.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there's something wrong with her.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and she'll, you know, she'll look sick, she'll be droopy and and uh you know, maybe uh pretty uh you know bedraggled looking.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um and there's numerous ways to know when a chicken is is sick.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but this is not the case.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so uh I what what we know is chickens aren't laying, egg prices have spiked.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: Interestingly, in 2020, I'm gonna go back a little bit.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: In 2020, one million new backyard flocks started in 2020.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: One million.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: So obviously, since Tractor Supply Corporation supplies many of these homesteaders, you know, TSC is there's what 2,000 some stores, they're all over rural America.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of these hobbyists and backyarders, small-scale people, you know, TSC sells a tremendous amount of prepared bagged feed for all sorts of things, including chickens.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's natural for people to just run in there and get a bag.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: Now, what's interesting to me is that for many, many years, um, I've heard in the dairy industry, dairy farmers, these are conventional, these are not organic, these are not pasture, they're just conventional dairy farmers who are paranoid of their cows getting out and getting into GMO corn.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: Because if they get into GMO corn, they abort their they abort their babies.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, if they abort, then they don't milk.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: Because they only milk after they've, you know, after milk is the lactation from having the baby.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: So they don't have a baby, then they don't lactate.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so um, so that's always kind of stuck in my mind.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: And now suddenly we have only the fertility portion, not the overall health, but just the fertility portion of the chicken uh being attacked.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: Is there some connection?
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: I have I I don't have any idea.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody is connecting those dots.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if those dots connect, but but it it's it's just it's interesting to me that that to see um the dairy people have fertility issues in their cows from GMO.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: We get we get all these backyard birds in 2020, all this additional uh influx of eggs into the system, self-reliance, if you will, people going to tractor supply, uh and and suddenly we have this.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: Is there something in the formula?
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we don't know what this is.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: Now, that's one side of the story.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: The second side of the story is high path avian influenza, which the last outbreak was in 2015.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: In 2015, we killed 44 million chickens.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: Now, here's the thing to understand about high path avian influenza.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: It is a very weak virus.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: Now, nobody knows what makes it jump from low path to high path.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: The the orthodox narrative is that it's carried by waterfowl, you know, ducks, geese, things, what wild wild waterfowl flying over, flying into an area.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: Now, obviously, if they have it, they don't die from it.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: We're not seeing millions of wild birds die from high path avian influenza.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: Now, again, I'm saying this is the orthodox narrative.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: And Cena, you and I know that the orthodox narrative often down the tracks, you find out, uh, you know, it wasn't quite right.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: And so, um, so I'm just trying to think through as a reasonable person.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: Let's assume the orthodox narrative is correct.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: But we're not seeing, we're not seeing dead waterfowl.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: So obviously, since there's no eradication effort there, um, they must be developing an immune system.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the I can't help but point out the similarities here between this and COVID and and the response.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: The COVID, obviously, we didn't exterminate people, but we did lock them down.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: And in effect, we did exterminate some people.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, if you really look at, you know, look at the look at what happened.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so this idea of of of um of dealing with disease by extermination, and I'm using extermination.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: The industry says euthanasia.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: No, it's the wrong word.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: Euthanasia is um euthanasia is is putting a pet down when there's no cure, you know, when the pet's uh uh in in uh in pain and there's no hope and no help, you know, euthanasia is putting down something that's extremely sick and can't get any better, and you, you know, you you put them down.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: In this case, if there is a if there is a a barn of you know 50,000 chickens and one chicken, one chicken tests positive for high path avian influenza, immediately without warrants, without warrants, the government can come in and and and and destroy all those chickens.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um all the healthy chickens.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: I just had dinner with a fella who lost 45,000 chickens.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: He had 15 flocks, 15 flocks, they were all separated.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: Avian influenza was only in one flock, or high path avian influenza, only in one flock.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_01: Now, it was deadly in that flock.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: That flock went from 3,000 down to about 250 in the course of a couple of weeks.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: So was it deadly?
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, but the fact is 250 never got sick, were perfectly healthy, laying eggs and doing great.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: But by the time the government got there, of course, the government destroyed all those 252 as well.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: Doesn't wouldn't it make sense if we wanted immunity to high pathaven influenza, that we would take those 250 that survived and breed them and select for them so that we would breed in immunity, which is what the wild bird populations have done without human manipulation, without human intervention.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: Nature adapts to things, nature builds this.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: This is the story of Zach Bush.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: This is this is the you know, the immunological function um uh uh develops.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: The immune system is like is like an organ, like a muscle.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: And when it's pushed, it it responds.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: And so uh so it doesn't make any sense at all that the survivors, I don't care whether you're a creationist or a Darwinian evolutionist, it doesn't make any sense that the survivors of a D of a disease, instead of being uh praised and let's save their genetics and let's you know let's go forward to the next generation, instead they are destroyed, they are exterminated.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: Uh um well, they say it's a precaution, but to me, the precaution would be let's let's save the survivors and duplicate their strength, their their immunological strength.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: That that makes sense from a from a genetic standpoint.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so so so here we are.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: Uh there is so much um annihilation going on in the industry that there's now a foaming association.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_01: So, how do you go into a Tyson chicken house with 50,000 chickens and and exterminate them?
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_01: Again, not euthanasia, it's extermination.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: How do you how do you exterminate them?
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you can't electrocute them, you can't cut off the oxygen, so you know, you can't you can't uh uh poison them, you don't want that, that's too difficult.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: So, what do you do?
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you pump soap suds in, you lock all the doors, you close up all the vents, you pump soap suds in, and you suffocate them in soap suds.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's called foaming.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_01: So when you read about the about foaming in the USDA, that's what this is.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: And there is now so much of it going on that there's now a national foaming association that chicken farmers can join, so that if you have to have your chickens exterminated, you'll be the first in line um uh to get you know to get the foaming, um, uh to get the foaming truck.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, this is this is an amazing thing.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: Now, what's interesting is that avian influenza is so weak, even high-path avian influenza, that 85 to 100 degrees kills it.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: That's why you never see it in the summer.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's it or or or you see it almost not uh it doesn't happen in the summer much.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's mainly a winter thing.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um now what we've done now is we've destroyed uh so in 2015 we killed 44 million uh chickens.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: And uh already in this outbreak, we've killed 58 million.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and and what you have to remember is that of those 58 million, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I don't have the data.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if anybody's keeping this kind of data, probably not, but just based on what I know with people in the industry, I would say of those 58 million destroyed, I would say probably, probably 55 million were never sick.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: I just want you to appreciate the, in other words, I I'm I'm giving the benefit of the doubt and saying 3 million, okay, maybe 3 million actually had it.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: All right, I'll I'll give that.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: But but they're destroying these 50, 60, 70,000 bird flocks, even 100,000 bird flocks when one tests positive.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: You have to understand um that that they're doing this, they don't know, they don't know where it comes from, how it spreads.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_01: There's there's very little actually known about high path avian influenza.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: And and yet this this draconian uh this draconian effort comes in.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_01: There's only one there's only one uh whatever cure in the nar in the orthodox narrative, and the cure is complete extermination of everything.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: Now, what's interesting, there's there's an interesting thing.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_01: There's some there's some uh some you know under under the radar work being done with a product called um hypo, I I think it's hypochloric acid, which again, I have to smile because it sounds almost like hydroxychloroquine.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but but this this is a completely uh non-toxic.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: Apparently you can you can drink this stuff, and it's now being used in very, very small slaughterhouses as a completely non-toxic disinfectant, uh um, almost like hydrogen peroxide, and which which simply dissipates.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: And um, so there's a guy who is um uh using this product on his chickens as a as a as a trial, and it appears to offer um immunity to high path avian influenza.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I don't know a lot about this.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_01: This is kind of just under the you know under the radar right now.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um I did get this from a good from a trustworthy source, so I do think it's happening.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: Uh there's not been any double blind studies on this, but um, but I I do think I do think it's it's interesting that the unorthodox community is looking at at other things, and um and you can be pretty sure that the whatever the narrative is that we're hearing is not true.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_01: The to my knowledge, to my knowledge, no, oh I should be careful about this.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I don't know of any truly pastured flocks.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh now the the one one guy did have his his were out on pasture, but he has very, very large flocks, um, and they run on the same ground.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: He he probably is pushing the system a little too far.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um but all the others that I know are are in barbs, you know, that they're not they're not clean and out on pasture.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so um so you know, uh a time will tell where we are.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: Now, let's talk, let's talk about the egg, the egg spike in price.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, there's a suit right now, there's a legal suit that's been filed by um by I don't know, the farmers union or something, um or or some some consumer union group against uh egg producers for the spike in egg prices, saying that the spike in egg prices um shouldn't be so high because what's been what's been killed so far is only like six per six percent of the of the um egg supply, but prices have gone up, as you said, Cena, 60%, even some places 100%.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_01: So they're they're saying that this is price gouging within the industry.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_01: But what the what the uh the filers of this consumer suit don't understand is that in food, which is a highly perishable product, margins are very, very small.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: When you when you see the margins from Apple Computer, for example, uh uh you know the the the technology sector, you see these margins of you know 30 and 40 percent.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um the cloud, the all this stuff is is high margins.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: But the but the but when you come to food, the margins are extremely slow, uh extremely low.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: So um if you've got if you've got a hundred eggs and a market for a hundred eggs, that's of course in perfect balance.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_01: But if you've got a market for a hundred eggs and you've only got 90 eggs, there is a mad scramble among those 90 buyers, uh I mean among those hundred buyers to get those 90 eggs.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_01: If if you if you had some wiggle room in there, if you were running on 30 and 40 percent margins, i.e.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_01: if there was normally uh um you know 120 eggs for the hundred buyers, then there would be some forgiveness and wiggle room in it to to uh to accept a few shocks.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: But the reason that shocks in the food sector have a magnified effect in the marketplace is because perishables are time sensitive and margin sensitive.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, uh a lot of uh uh a lot of food items are in the you know one and two percent margin range, very, very, very, very low.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh uh because there's spoilage, there's sell by, there's you know, there's all sorts of issues.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: And and and you can't just you can't keep an orange forever.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you gotta you gotta grow it, you gotta sell it.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_01: So the margins are extremely small, which which amplifies the hiccup.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: If there's a hiccup in supply, it's far more amplified uh um amplified than it than a hiccup in you know uh you know steel steel or or you know something like that.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: So uh I've talked a lot here.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um I'm glad to to you know, I'm glad to have your thoughts here.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: Those are just those are just some of the things that that we're seeing.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: I I can tell you that on our farm, um we are not we are not concerned about this at all.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I can tell you that back the cycle before 2015, and I'm not sure when it was, maybe it was um, you know, these things, these things seem to happen in like, you know, six and seven year cycles.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um so so you know, back in like 20 2006 or seven or something, we had another outbreak.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_01: And um, I actually had two of the federal vets on the extermination task force uh come and see us.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: They were from around the country, they'd heard about us, they just wanted to come and see the farm.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_01: And uh both of them independently, without provocation, told me that every federal vet, and I think there were 30 of them involved in the extermination process, um uh both of them said unequivocally, all of us know that there's too many chickens crammed into too many houses in too close proximity.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: We all know that that's the problem.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_01: But if any of us says that publicly, we'll be fired tomorrow.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's truly remarkable to me, right?
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: You start you really start to question things when you start going down this path.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: And you're like, even I find myself thinking, is this intentional?
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: Is there an agenda behind this?
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we know that the elites, you know, whoever whatever you want to call them, the technocrats and whatnot, we know that they want to transform the food supply, right?
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: This is not conspiracy.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: It is actually in their own words.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: So we know they want to do this.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so I hear a lot of chatter and I get a lot of emails from people saying, you know, this is all planned, this is all orchestrated.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I can tell you, you know, I don't, I don't know, right?
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: None of us really knows.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: We're guessing.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: And like Tucker Carlson was connecting the dots.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if you haven't seen that episode, it's free on YouTube.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: I'd go watch it.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, he's connecting the dots, and even he's saying, I don't know, but we should at least be questioning, right?
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: We shouldn't be complacent, complicit or complacent, same thing, actually, like the rest of the media, where they're just buying into, oh, it's just this avian flu and it's really awful.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: So we have to kill all these birds to save ourselves.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: And you know what that means?
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, birds can actually be really dangerous to humans, right?
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe we shouldn't be consuming these birds anymore.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: We need to go to a more, you know, climate-friendly um model.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so one thing I wanted to share, if it's okay with you, Joel, is I was, you know, I was going down my own little rabbit hole.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm thinking, okay, let me try to connect some of these dots.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: Where are they trying to nudge us?
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: If they're trying to nudge us, right?
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: Where are they trying to nudge us toward?
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: And one thing is obvious, they're they're coming up with these, you know, meatless options and you know, the fake egg options, the fake meat objects options, and we already talked about that.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_00: Another one that I found out about was um Kroger.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know if you've read this one, Joel, but so I'll just do the highlights.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_01: Kroger announced the first zero, the first zero uh carbon footprint egg.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you know, if uh and so they've already built four of these farms.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: Kroger's announced, yeah.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: Go ahead, go ahead, Cena.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry, yeah.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, and then you jump in as the farmer because this piggybacks on what you were just saying, that all those, you know, federal vets were saying that it's because of the close proximity.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so here is one of the solutions, and this is going to be backed by the government.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: One of their solutions is um this was just announced that um uh that Kroger has begun selling the world's first carbon neutral eggs in America.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: Kroger, which is of course one of the largest grocery store chains in the United States, they have partnered with um Kipster Farms, which is a Dutch company, to bring us the world's first carbon neutral cage-free egg to retail shelves in the US.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, if you go to their website, so I went today to their website, and they have a, they've got these pretty pictures of, you know, oh, we give our birds like trees to climb on and stuff, and there's skylights in there.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so there's one picture, and let me say this compared to a conventional keyfo, right, where most of the chickens are raised, that is an improvement.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so I'm I'm not gonna say that, oh, this is awful.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: It is my that picture that they're showing is a big improvement.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_00: But here's my two two of my concerns, and I'll throw it over to you.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_00: One is there's live cams.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_00: So you can go onto their website on Kipster's website, and you can click, and there's a YouTube live streaming um service where you can look into this facility.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_00: So I looked today and I had my husband look to confirm.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: I looked on all four of the cams they had up.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: And the chickens, while they're not in cages, right?
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: So that's an improvement from most of the KFOs.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: They're still this morning, they're in these areas where there are like these metal, it's like metal cages, but with no doors.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's like metal shelvings, and there are a bunch of them stuck in there.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_00: And they were in a room where there was no, you know, skylight.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_00: There's no natural light coming in.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: It was artificial light from above.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I clicked on the different videos, each one that I saw where the chickens were located, it's all the same.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_00: So there's so to your point, to what these um veterinarians are saying, they still probably haven't solved the problem because they're not out in nature, they're not in the sun, which we know is very healing.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: And there's still a lot of them stuck in this in this room.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the other thing I want to bring up, um, because this is what I'm thinking is they're going to one of the solutions, is um what they're saying is they are beyond organic.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: So check this out, Joel.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: It says under their their QA section, what they do is they're saying that instead of feeding these chickens corn, right, which is the typical uh feed that we're that we're seeing in the industry, instead of giving them corn, which has a heavy carbon footprint, they're saying that they're gonna feed them repurposed bakery byproducts.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_00: So if you look down under their QA section under upcycled feed, this is what it says.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: Why are Kipster eggs and meat not organic?
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: I think if you haven't read this, Joel, I think you're gonna be rolling on the floor.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_00: It says to make organic eggs, you need to grow organic feed.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: We use upcycled feed, which puts less strain on the environment compared to organic feed.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_00: We use less land and water and emit fewer greenhouse gas emissions.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_00: We are, quote, beyond organic.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_00: So they're not even feeding them organic food, but and then it gets worse, right?
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_00: But we're beyond organic.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_00: So then it talks about what is upcycled feed?
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: Like how do they make it, right?
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: This is what what it comes from.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_00: We use whatever humans cannot or will not eat.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: For example, example, residual flows from agriculture land, uh, malformed bread from factory bakeries, broken pasta and noodles from factories, a surplus of certain raw material such as rice or flour, and byproducts from slaughter facilities, since chickens are omnivores by nature.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so they're feeding all of this, what they call upcycled feed to these chickens, saying they're beyond organic.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: And then I saw in a press release, they're going to collect the manure from these chickens and put it in organic fertilizer.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_00: So you know that all this upcycled feed, it's not like they're saying these chickens are getting the organic bread from the bakeries or you know, or the organic rice and and flour byproducts, you know, but they're passing it off as organic fertilizer.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, and so this is just one example of something they're probably nudging us toward, and it is not going to solve the problem.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: Chickens, I'm sure.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_00: Look, Joel, I'm not the farmer, but I'm sure you can back me on this when I say chickens were not designed to eat bread.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_01: Like no, no, no.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, now, now, I mean, chicken chickens will eat almost anything, that's for sure.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_00: Well, so are humans, though.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't mean it's good for us.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_01: That that's that's exactly right.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, and uh, you know, when you're hungry, you certainly will eat almost anything.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, if you put some if you put some uh some some sweeteners and tasties on it, you know, uh, you know, you can you can go forward.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um, uh, you know, I'm yeah, um, there's so much to unpack here.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_01: You did a good job.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I I encourage people to go look at this.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I mean, uh the the the house has all these solar panels on it.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure they've got great big fans and ventilators and ventilators and things like that in there.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_01: And um, so uh I I would just the the thing the things to think about as you look at this um is is number one, notice that they they get no pasture at all.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_01: There's no there's no green material at all.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's number one.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_01: No green material at all.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_01: And back in the early 2000s, when we had that high path come uh avian influenza come across uh Indochina and it knocked on the door of Europe there, um, Great Britain did a study and they found that if a chicken gets two fresh, fresh blades of grass a day, she won't get high path avian influenza.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_01: And and and but the the pro the problem is none of these birds get fresh grass.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, they they don't they don't get it.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_01: And and and even and and I hate to say it, many backyard flocks don't get fresh grass because they're you know they're they're on a dirt, they're on a dirt floor.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um which is why, you know, well that that's another that's another topic for another day.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_01: But but but the point is here that that these birds are they're not getting any fresh green, they're not getting any salad, which has which is so beneficial, you know, for the for the birds.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_01: Now, um to say that they that they're gonna use uh Pillsbury and Little Debbie's uh ho ho cake uh leftovers, and and somehow that's better than non-chemical grown uh grain in rotation with other things is is a uh um oh what do you well it's it's it's it's clever messaging for sure, um to to use the term upcycled uh to be able to get to that point.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_01: But um, you know, the the beauty of I mean here on our farm where we use fur trail mineral, it allows it it allowed us to get away from slaughter wastes, you know, back 25 years ago, um which obviously were a mainstay of pork because they are they are omnivores, yeah, they eat bugs and things like that.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um but the the the way that the slaughter wastes are done now, you gotta understand that most of them are chicken, chicken slaughter wastes, because the chicken industry has eclipsed the beef and the pork industry.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, when I was a kid, you could go to the feed store and you could get you could get um meat and bone meal cow, meat and bone meal pig, meat and bone meal chicken.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_01: Now there is no separation.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_01: So chances are I expect that these birds are eating a lot of chicken slaughter waste.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't need to go into more of that, but you you you you you you can see you can see the ramifications uh of that sort of thing.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_01: Now, will chickens eat each other?
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely, you know, they're omnivores.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_01: They, you know, they uh if one if one dies in the coop, you know, uh you might go and and see her, you know, pecked out by the others pretty quickly.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um but but the you know that that is uh that's not a that's not a something you want to from from a health standpoint, it's not something you want to encourage.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, these these houses, they're they're still you know confinement factory houses.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um they're still susceptible to all the things we've talked about with avian influenza, uh, you know, chickens packed in a single place all the time, and and and no rest periods.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_01: On our farm, you know, one of the beauties of having the chickens outside in the summer, right now they're in hoop houses in the winter.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_01: We've got we've got an inch of snow on the ground this morning.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the chickens wouldn't like to be out in the snow.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_01: They don't like snow.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so they're in these nice warm hoop houses.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_01: The beauty of that is that we change quarters, you know, uh once a year, and that gives that gives housing rest.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_01: And that housing rest gets them away from their you know, pathogens and and and creates a host-free, a host-free break uh for them.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_01: And when you have a a piece of infrastructure like this for a single species, for a single purpose, at this degree of capital cost, there can be no uh no rest period.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so you you yeah, the obviously the pictures they're taking right now are taken the day after the birds go in, you know, and uh and it's gonna it's gonna start to deteriorate as we go forward.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, um and and then and then I would I would just say um the manure that our chickens generate on the farm, we don't truck it anywhere.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's it's returned to the fields where the chickens, you know, where the chickens live as as fertilizer.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um so so we're the idea that that we're gonna collect the manure and dehydrate it and turn it into pellets and and truck that somewhere, that that is somewhere a more carbon neutral footprint uh than than just having all the manure stay on site and use it on the pastures that the chickens are on, uh, is a is a pretty far cry from reason.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_01: And so I don't know what kind of um you know carbon gymnastics that they're going through to get to this point, but you can be assured there's a whole lot of carbon gymnastics and uh and plenty and and plenty of the um you know plenty of the players are upside down.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: I totally agree.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, even just from the list that I rattled off there, those um materials all have a carbon footprint.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_00: So you can claim that these are you know the first carbon neutral chickens, but what we're now forcing them to consume has its own footprint.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_00: So, so Joel, this is my big takeaway from this episode, and I really appreciate your insights, you know, um as a food advocate and a farmer.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: This is my takeaway.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_00: Humans created this problem, you know, with the chickens, with you know, the avian flu issue, uh, with the way that we raise chickens.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, if you know, if there's an issue with the feed that people are buying, the commercial feed, that's human cause that.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_00: You know, these humans have caused this problem because we are not in alignment with nature.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_00: We do not respect the nature of the chicken, right?
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_00: The naturalness of the chicken.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so we created this, and now, you know, these large chicken farms and these bureaucrats and whatnot, they're trying to nudge us towards their solution, which is also, again, an unnatural solution.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_00: In this one that we talked about with Kipster, we're now forcing the chickens to eat the things that we can't or won't eat.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: So, in essence, they're now our garbage disposals.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and it's not going to fix the problem.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_00: So, the solution is once again, if that resonates with you that this was this is man-made and man can't fix that problem, he has to go to nature, then don't support the system, right?
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_00: Stop buying your eggs from these companies who are raising the chickens in this unnatural environment, who are causing this issue with the overcrowding, the lack of pasture, the lack of sun.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_00: So just stop supporting them, right?
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_00: Get your own chicken or find your local farmer who you support, right, Jill, isn't that our takeaway?
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_01: And and if, you know, it in a time of defunding, defunding things, let's defund, let's defund the bad guys.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, and and I I think that's a that's a great thing.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_01: And and and and you got to realize too, you know, it's interesting how this comp like Kipster, this company, that they they put themselves forward as this great savior of savior of waste, but but the waste itself is indicative of a of a flawed food system.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, if our food system wasn't flawed and you didn't have massive um um oopses and mix-ups at the bakery and massive oopses and mix-up uh uh in the food system, you wouldn't have millions of tons of product being wasted.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_01: Humankind has always been pretty frugal about wasting food.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_01: But for the first time in human history, globally, we are wasting roughly 40% of human edible food in our food system.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_01: That's never happened in the course of human history, and so that 40% becomes a feedstock to be upcycled in this view, and therefore these people can come in as saviors.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_01: Look, we're upcycling stuff that humans won't.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_01: But but the whole reason that that is that that cheap byproduct is available is because of the inefficiencies and wastes within a mega-centralized food system.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so if we actually, if we actually tightened up the food system, I mean our farm doesn't generate that kind of waste.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_01: If we actually tightened it up, we we wouldn't have the waste.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_01: Well, then what's the upcycler going to do?
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, suddenly, you know, uh we're we're not throwing all this food away.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_01: Well, amazing.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_01: And so, yeah, there's a lot here to a lot here to unpack.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, Cena, thanks for thanks for bringing the the topic to our attention.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and we thank all of you for joining us on another episode of Beyond Labels, and we'll look forward to seeing you next week.