Latest / Beyond Labels Premium / Episode #143: Joel's Diary: What Mainstream Won't Tell You About the Farmer Revolt in Europe

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Episode #143: Joel's Diary: What Mainstream Won't Tell You About the Farmer Revolt in Europe · Beyond Labels Premium

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Who came to see me at these seminars were small farmers.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: They weren't the big farmers.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: They were the they were the the you know the the smaller entrepreneurial uh innovators and they they were not participating in the protests.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, I asked one group, I said, if you could, if you could wave a magic wand today and do one thing for European agriculture, what would it be?
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: And without question, it was eliminate all the subsidies.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: What people in this country don't understand is that nearly half, think about this, nearly half of every farmer's income in Europe is a subsidy.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_02: Hi, everybody, welcome to Beyond Labels.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_02: I'm Dr.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_02: Stina McKella, and I'm here with our favorite farmer, Joel Salatin.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_02: And today is a very special podcast because Joel just returned from visiting both Austria and Hungary, and he is going to give us his latest perspective on what's happening in the European farmer protest and also talk about why we should care here in the US.
• 1:09
  unknown: Okay.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_02: Go ahead, Joel.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_02: Enlighten us.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, good.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Cena.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, so um it was it was a it was a great trip.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: I I was out there to do um two, I did uh two seminars.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: One was a two-day seminar uh outside of Vienna, and the other was a one-day seminar uh in in Budapest in Hungary.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, you know, if you if you think about your history, well, uh if you think about your history, Austria-Hungary was kind of an alliance, you know, for a long time.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: You you know, we we talk about Austria-Hungary um kind of together, but they're they're extremely different now because Hungary went through 50 years of communism.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, Hungary just came out of communism in 1989, you know, with the breakup of the Soviet Union and all that.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: What happened was that um that the Nazis came in and took Hungary during World War II.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: Then the Soviet Union came in and supposed and liberated um you know the Nazis only occupied uh Budapest for uh almost less than a year, and uh Soviet Union and so this is 1943, Soviet Union came in, liberated Budapest, but then they wouldn't leave, and they stayed.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's when communism in Hungary started.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I can tell you, talking to Hungarians today, they will tell you they wish that that the Soviets had not come and liberated them.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: The Nazis would have been defeated, and they would have been back to you know uh a normal country instead of being part of the Soviet, the Soviet bloc for all that time.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so the two countries are are quite quite different today.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: You you see it immediately when you you know when you cross the border, um, which is very easy to cross, by the way.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they they do have a good working relationship, they're but they're both members of the EU.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so um what I want to just so I I spent this time with all these uh farmers.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: Both both seminars were extremely well attended.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, I mean they were they were single person seminars.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, the first one uh I did I did four one and a half hour segments one day, and then four one and a half hour segments the next day.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: So I had uh there's 12 12 hours of content uh in the two days, and then the second one I did about four hours of content.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: So uh the first one was attended by about 120 people, the second one was attended, and and they came from all over Europe.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: There were people from Finland and the Czech Republic and um uh you know Belgium, Germany, and um uh I think there was somebody from Italy.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, and then the the second one, of course, in Hungary, uh was of course attended by numerous people from Romania, which is next door.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: So we're Transylvania.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: We had I had some farmers from Transylvania, of course.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: I had to make a joke about you know uh Count Count Dracula and and uh uh you know all that.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, they they'd heard every one of those jokes, you know, so they were they were all good spirited.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but anyway, the the the point is that I did I did get to spend a lot of time with farmers, and I asked them um as I was with them about you know the whole EU and the farmer protests and things.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: And um what what you have there is a uh is basically an agricultural welfare state.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: And um and it's not all what it seems.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: So if you'll if you'll think about it, uh the the stuff that we've seen on the news, Cena, um I I assume you've seen some of these, you know, these tractor cade and these tractor protests on the news.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: And um the thing that strikes me about all of them is how big all the tractors are.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: They're these are these are big, big farmers.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: And um, and of course, you know, having been there several times, I I knew that many of the farms in Europe are very small.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so I just got since I got back, I just got a nice long email from the fella who 10 years ago, he he sent this long, uh wonderful email to me on the 10th year anniversary of when he brought me to Europe for the first time.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: And he lives in the Netherlands, and of course, as you know, the Netherlands is where all these tractor protests started, and then they've grown to the uh you know, they've they've gone out to the other countries.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: And um I want to I want to just mention uh I just want to read a couple of sentences from this email he sent me.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um he said, I I won't let's see.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um I won't assume that you remember a late evening interview you gave on the that first trip to uh a big black-haired half-American lady, mostly likely wearing a black leather jacket, who came from the pig industry.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: I I do remember that.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: I remember this this media interview with this lady.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's 10 years ago.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: I still remember uh how you were able in one and a half hours to lead her from her own base to your configuration.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and you know, we found that article based on that two years later in a very obscure virtual corner, um, since her context would not want to know about it.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: This lady then, who lives close to us, has since catapulted into a political celebrity with a both tough and folksy appearance and style at the helm of a new a new political party.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there in Europe, they often have as many as five or six, you know, political parties, and they they make these coalitions, parliamentary type of government, who at one point looked like she might become the next prime minister.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: So this is this is a lady that was a uh just a journalist writing for a magazine when I was there the first time 10 years ago.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: All right, here's the here's the kicker.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um well, good thing she didn't get elected because she is essentially a mouthpiece of the agro industry, which runs, which basically runs the show and also does the sponsoring of tractor protests, tractor parades, and highway blockages that have spread, managing to keep out of sight, including on the European scale, um, and where it successfully lobbied for 10 more years of Roundup and is busy killing as we speak a great ambitious plan to save Europe's nature and water and anything else worth saving, as an understatement.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: So the um the the the awful things, the horribleness is all over the place, while a regenerative dynamic is what gives us hope and mostly models to tweak and replicate.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh generally, there's two different universes, one with a foot on the brake and head in the sand, and the other embodying a new creative, entrepreneurial, spiritually grounded, inclusive, and open culture.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um what what I'm the reason I wanted to read that is because it explains why the tractor protests seem to be extremely well funded, and why all the tractors are great big is it's being these things, these protests are being funded by the the industrial agriculture complex to save them from environment from environmental oversight uh on chemical and industrial agriculture.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: You don't see, here's my point, Cena, you don't see little farmers.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: And and and generally who came to see me at these seminars were small farmers.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: They weren't the big farmers.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: They were the they were the the you know the the smaller entrepreneurial uh innovators and they were not participating in the protests.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, I asked one group, I said, if you could, if you could wave a magic wand today and do one thing for European agriculture, what would it be?
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: And without question, it was eliminate all the subsidies.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: What people in this country don't understand is that nearly half, think about this, nearly half of every farmer's income in Europe is a subsidy.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not a subsidy like we think.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we have crop insurance here, so if you know wheat prices drop below a certain threshold, you know, the government steps in, or if you have hail damage or drought damage or whatever, I mean, the threshold, the thresholds to get government money here is pretty low.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: So a lot of people get it.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but in the EU, if you own, if you own farm property, you automatically get a check up to$1,000 an acre every year.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well, what that means is you overbuy equipment, you overbuild barns, it completely skews the economics, the the business aspects of running your farm.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: And then, and then the other subsidies come from all sorts of other things.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: Like if you leave um a cavity tree for a woodpecker to live in, you fill out the form, the government sends you a$1,000 check.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: You you um you leave a nest for uh you know, for a water bird, for example, on the edge of your field.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: You take a picture, you fill out the paperwork, the government sends you a check for$5,000 for not herding that bird's nest.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so there are all these kind of uh little ticky-tack ancillary things to fill out the forms and and taken altogether, half of all European farmer income is a direct government paycheck, direct government subsidy.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: So so when when the environmentalists say, let's clean up our water system, let's uh let's let's not dump all this Roundup on the land.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: And and you know, we we can debate about how much the government has to you know get involved with all this, or how much it should get involved with all this.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: But the point is the tug of war, what I'm getting at is the tug of war in Europe is between essentially uh a an environmental an environmental move movement that is tired of the of the environmental degradation that the industrial agriculture complex has foisted upon its land, primarily because people live next to it.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: In the U.S., we're so spread out.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of these great big farms, you don't live next to.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you see reports about it, but there aren't there aren't thousands of people who live within a mile of the aerial spraying of Roundup on the crop.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: And and and and so people don't see it, except you know, except in magazine articles or you know, nature conservancy reports or something like that, World Watch, okay.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but but in general, we don't see it.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: But in in in especially in the Netherlands, where you have several hundred people living per square mile through the throughout the whole country, here's my point, Zena.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: Farmers can't get can't get as opaque about their practices.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: People see the result of farmers' practices much more aggressively than they see them in our country.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I was gonna say, as you're talking, I thought this is so fascinating.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_02: It's something I hadn't really thought about before, but now it's like, you know, once you say something, it's like, oh, that was totally common sense.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_02: Why didn't I say that, right?
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_02: But it's true.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_02: It's one more way in which we US consumers are separated from our food supply, right?
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_02: It's one more step we're separated from.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and you know, hence we take kids on field trips to go see farms and stuff.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_02: Like it's a big to-do to go see them.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_02: But I do wonder how the landscape, the regulatory landscape, even would be different in the United States if our citizens lived up close to a farm and those farms were spraying, like the industrial farms.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_02: Would we, even you and I, as libertarians, would we be pushing more for regulatory action to get them to stop spraying so close to our homes?
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_02: Like, you know what I'm saying?
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_02: It it's it's easy for us.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, go ahead.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: And and and just and just the smell.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, yes, no, listen, Cena, nobody composts.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody composts.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: In Europe.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: In Europe, no.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: They they just they they so so you got to understand the animals are not outside.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: All the animals are confined inside.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: Now, their their houses, their concentrated animal feeding operations, their houses are not as big as the ones in the U.S.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: Well, they don't have to be because the farmers are getting all these subsidy checks.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: So they're not they're not pressed like U.S.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: farmers to scale up, to, you know, to go to, you know, um houses that are as big as a football field.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: They're not as pressured because they because they're being upheld by a government paycheck.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: So they don't have to, they're not pressured to turn the volume, to, to scale up like American farmers in in that system uh are.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: But but um I can assure you that that seeing animals outside, even herbivores grazing is is an anomaly in Europe.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, you don't see them outside.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: Even you know, even beef cattle, you know, they're confined in a barn, they bring them in feed, they haul out the manure, they bring them in feed, they haul out the manure.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so um, so the the the result is the result is that rather than having you know standing forage with all that biomass and all that biodiversity to to decompose um today's cow pies that the cows drop on the field, instead, what you have are manure spreaders right up against the public road, against the houses, against the beep where people live, spreading this awfully uh odorous, noxious, raw manure right out there in the open.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a it it's a you know, it's it's it's it's stinky.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_02: And is that the technical term?
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_02: It's stinky.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: It stinks, okay?
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: And and it's and it's all over the country.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, in other words, it's not predicated to just rural Alabama, rural Mississippi.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: It, you know, it it's not on dirt roads.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's right next to the town, it's right next to the village.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: You, you know, you you you drive through the village and and uh I mean a village of of whatever, a cluster of whatever, 30 houses, and right on the edge, here are these, you know, these noxious, um, noxious fields, noxious farms, and and confinement buildings.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: And and so uh so it it's not separated like it is here in the U.S.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's not nearly as separated, and the population is way higher.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_02: And and you're what you're describing, is that for not only the large-scale farms like what like the industrial farms, this is also the small family-run farms are operating this way?
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, it's all of them.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's all of them.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: And then and then what you have are you have incredibly, boy, you think regulations are something in this country.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the regulations for the the production regulations.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: Here in this country, we don't have a lot of production regulations.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, if I want to raise some pigs, I raise some pigs.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: In Europe, in the European Union, if you want to have pigs outdoors, you have to have a physical, non-permeable barrier four feet high around all the pigs.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: So think about a sheet of plywood.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: All right, you basically have to have a sheet of plywood fence.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: You you can't just use a piece of electric fence.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and this this you're gonna love this Cena.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: You know why?
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's to keep the African swine flu virus infecting your pigs.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: So the impermeable barrier, think about this.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: You're outdoors, the pigs are outside, and you have a four-foot plywood barrier around the pig field, and that's going to protect them from viruses.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_02: So the better solution is to shovel them into a building together?
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: So what's happened is that the the regulations for pasture livestock, for outdoor stuff, have become so onerous like this that farmers just they throw up their hands and say, forget it, and just put them in a confinement house.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: And a confinement house then is supposed to also protect is even supposed to protect them more from you know from uh from viruses and things, from diseases outside.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: But of course, now you have them, you know, on a concrete floor, um, you know, no decomposition, scraped every day, uh, hauled to the field, uh, raw.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, it's a it it's it's a it's a horrendous situation.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: And and um and you've got to realize too that the the intensity of European production is very much upheld by imports.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: So uh you've got Hungary, you know, import stuff from Poland, Austria imports stuff from Poland, the Netherlands primarily imports stuff from Uruguay, Paraguay, and Brazil.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: And boatload, shipload, shiploads after shipload is coming.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they don't they don't grow the food for all these animals, they they import most of it, very similar to Japan.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, um, I was just on the phone this morning with a with a guy in Japan and uh talking about how all the animals there again are are confined and they're fed primarily imported uh feed stocks.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: So my you know my um you know my theme there in Austria and Hungary, uh, my theme was how to how to get the animals outside to shut down the equipment, shut down the manure spreading, let the animals handle all this themselves, like nature intends.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: And how do we control this precisely, especially the Austrians?
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: Everything's about precision.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: And and so they can't believe that you can actually precisely mow grass with a cow.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you it takes a mechanical mower, you know, to make it uh look right.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so, and so, you know, part of my explanations was just uh was just uh illustrating, for example, what what the Serengeti looks like when the wildebees go past it, what what Cape Buffalo make Botswana look like.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we don't have picture pictures of what the American bison made the American plains look like, but you know, we have these vestiges and and and and these ecosystems.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: systems are not golf courses.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: They're not golf courses.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they have some some sprigs of tall stuff, some sprigs of short stuff, and there's a bit of a you know there's a bit of a uh height diversity, you know, a little bit of rusticness, rusticness in the in that, in the look.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: And you know what that rusticness does?
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: It maintains structure for spider webs to grow on.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: You know, uh a golf course, where's a spider going to make a spider web?
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: Where's the little tussock that a field mouse can make a make a nest under?
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: And uh you know where's the where's the overlooked uh uh plants that are that are blossoming grass you know legumes weeds that are going to feed a um you know a pollinator uh uh you know a a pollinator isn't gonna be on a golf course and and so having a little more a little more um rugged look is exactly far more environmental and and in the long term actually more productive than having this you know this this um precision mode uh situation and and the only reason that they can economically justify barn keeping hauling all the manure in hauling all the forage uh hauling the manure out hauling the all the forage in mowing it all handling it all handling everything otherwise you're handling everything in handling everything out with expensive petroleum with machinery the only reason the only reason that that farmers think they can afford to do that is because they're getting this great big this great big subsidy check if you abs if you if you take away that subsidy check suddenly the the economics completely change and so so as we look at these tractor protests it's not you know it's being billed in our country as the the EU hates farmers or the the you know the the EU wants to shut down farmers um nothing could be further from the case there is there is final people are are are fed up uh fed uh good good uh pun there fed up there they're they're tired uh cena they're tired of of these farmers um messing up the environment uh and and and their high taxes paying for it all and and that's what this is and you know you and I know probably the environmentalists are going maybe too far regulatorily and the farmers are being um uh they're digging in their heels saying we don't want to lose our our our subsidy check you know we're we're important we're you know we're feeding you blah blah blah so you better take care of us and so you know both sides have valid arguments and both sides have valid um you know uh liability in the in the issue I will tell you that um that that hungary you know um they're hungary is is trying to present itself they're branding their whole country as family friendly all all that you get off the airport uh airplane everything is hungary family friendly hungary family friendly and um as you may know hungary has been the most closed to the immigration all all the immigrations coming across europe you know from from the Middle East and Africa especially Africa and people have said you know they're xenophobic and and all this but you know they're they're trying to preserve their culture and um and trying to get their their birth rate up and so you'll love this if you have three children you never pay taxes the rest of your life why if you're married if you're married and have three children you will never pay another tax in your life oh my gosh I got to move there I have three kids I qualify yeah yeah uh so you know so they are um they are are really pushing and and by the way adoption is the same in other words you don't have to birth them you can adopt them too and so they're trying to increase from the inside out not the outside in their culture their birth rate and um and I I found I found people who loved you know Viktor Orban their their um their president there were some people who didn't like him but in the most part he's he's liked people think he's good for Hungary and um and again they're just 30 years out of communism you know the price of land the price of farmland in Austria is uh about thirty thousand dollars an acre in hungary 1500 whoa yeah whoa was right but Sina you can't go buy farmland in Hungary you know in fact even if you live in Hungary you can't buy farmland in Hungary because you have to take a farm test.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: What you have to take a farm test is it a written test or is it an actual hands-on flex no no no it's a written it's a written test it's a written test but it but it it's quite easy i mean it's like uh you know uh what's the difference between a steer and a bull and uh you know what you know uh how how long does a chicken have to grow until it begins laying eggs uh it's basic stuff um you know uh a horse they put an arrow at the neck and say is this a mane a tail or a hoof or a neck uh you know so it's it's a relatively but but it's in Hungarian so you have to learn you have to learn Hungarian in order to take the test in order to qualify as I can now own land and and and no no single person can own more than 650 acres so blackrock can't come in and buy land Bill Gates can't come in and buy land so there um you know you and I as libertarians we can view all this as being who this is kind of but but I can tell you it is it is opening up uh you know it is opening up a very egalitarian option for the Hungarian people post-communism you know when nobody could own land I mean realize in communism nobody could own land so they they've had to struggle with okay so how do we how do we how do we let people own land?
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_00: I mean this you know this is a basic discussion you go from from every government owns everything to individuals that's a that's a big policy shift and and and you've got to have guardrails in that you know so that you don't just have anarchy and free for all and all that so it was um it was really wonderful the people the people were were warm um friendly and it was just uh yeah it was just delightful so it was a good good trip that sounds awesome and uh we're almost out of time but I wonder if you could just clarify for me I'm a little bit confused about the farmer protests so you said that it's basically the big farms like you know what I would consider more like industrial farming they're the ones that are financially backing and pushing the protests that we're seeing hence the huge tractors that you're seeing and they look well funded.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_02: Okay so in terms of the small farmer though is the small what what's the small farmer's position?
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_00: You said you went out there and your audience of small farmers and okay go ahead the small farmers position is eliminate the subsidies.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_00: Oh they're willing to let go of it absolutely the small the small farmers uh they they they see the um uh the skewed they see the result of these subsidies and well just like in this country in this country i i mean i i i can't pull up the figure right now in front of me but i can tell you in this country only something like like 10 10 of farms in the u.s receive 90 of usda paychecks yeah okay well that's the same way it is there and so what you've got is as as the populace begins pushing back on on on their tysons and their smithfields and their purdues and their cargills as the people began pushing back because they're so integrated and close to it all and the and they're tired of it the farmer protests are being funded just like they would be here um if i i if if the government large s were shut down tomorrow the the farmers would protest but they would be financed their protests would be financed by cargill by the chicago board of trade by you know tyson um whatever uh uh monsanto okay or bay you know the the the the funding would come from these great big industrial ag complexes to make sure that the thing was going um you know it would it would not be let me put it this way it would not be similar to the Canadian uh trucker protests which were very grassroots during COVID remember when the Canadian truckers protested that was very much a grassroots um independent operator you know uh the big trucking companies did not finance the big transportation companies did not finance it really put a kink in their tail these were individuals that owned their own trucks owner operators small operators uh that that were that were protesting that is a very different that is a grassroots um uh different situation than than what we're seeing in Europe right now and so so I I think it's important to keep it in in perspective uh and and to realize that once again the mainstream media narrative is not giving you the nuances of the of the conflict it's it's just not giving you the nuances of the conflict so remember there's always there's always a story behind the story you know there's always a story behind the story and I love that and and that's that's what that's what Beyond Labels tries to bring you so uh thanks for thanks for your interest.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah I love that and actually Joel as you know we've just launched a new Beyond Labels community with our own forum page so on this community forum we're gonna pose questions because we want to hear what you guys have to think.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_02: We want to hear your story and how you think and um get more of your perspective on these topics.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_02: So Joel what is the question that you want to pose pertaining to today's discussion?
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah so I would I would pose this question um if if if you were omnipotent sovereign king for the day and had a had a magic wand you could wave and uh change something in American food and farm policy and you could only change one thing to make food and farm to make the agricultural system in the U.S.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_00: better what would that one thing be?
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_00: Not two things not three things one thing what would it be?
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_02: Oh that's a great question okay I cannot wait to hear the responses.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_02: I do read through the responses and respond and share them with Joel.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_02: So please feel free message us post on that forum and we'd love to hear your thoughts thank you so much for joining us this week and thank you Joel for bringing us this very unique perspective that we are not hearing in the mainstream media.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_02: It's as always enlightening and educational and empowering in fact I'm actually going to think about that question too and post my answer.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_02: Okay so thanks for joining us and we'll see you next week