Latest / TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast / #782: Fiat Food Is Destroying America with Will Harris

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#782: Fiat Food Is Destroying America with Will Harris · TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast

0:00
Will Harris, welcome to the show, sir. Thank you for having me.
0:04
You were just saying you're honored to be here before we hit record. I'm honored as somebody
0:08
who's been following your work from afar for many years now. Like I was telling you,
0:16
we've had a pretty big focus on shaking your rancher's hand here at TFTC over the years. A
0:22
lot of our audience is going out, meeting their local rancher, buying a quarter cow,
0:26
half cow going to their local farmers markets to support local farmers and i view you joel
0:32
salatin um and others of that caliber is really leading the chart so this is a bit of a a a treat
0:39
for me specifically but i guess let's just jump into it um starting with white oak pastures why
0:47
why to start why decide to go from industrial farming to regenerative farming and i guess we
0:52
we can get into a conversation about the differences between the two.
0:57
So I was the fourth generation of my family to operate this farm.
1:02
My children were the fifth.
1:03
My grandchildren hopefully will be the sixth.
1:08
My great-grandfather and grandfather operated the farm in a very pre-industrial kind of a way.
1:16
My dad, born in 1920, took over the farm post-World War II,
1:20
and he is the generation that really industrialized the farm.
1:25
On his watch, he became a monoculture-only cattle.
1:29
Previously, there had been a lot of different species of animals.
1:33
And he was kind of a pioneer in becoming a link in the chain,
1:42
the industrial chain that beef goes through from the cow-calf producer
1:48
to the stocker out west feedlots to big beef companies.
1:54
And I don't know that my father would like that.
1:58
We didn't talk about it.
1:59
He was cowboy.
1:59
I was cowboy.
2:00
We didn't talk about stuff like that.
2:02
But he was successful with it.
2:05
And I never wanted to do anything except run the farm industrially,
2:11
just like my dad.
2:12
I loved it growing up.
2:14
I went to the University of Georgia, majored in animal science.
2:18
came home and ran it industrially for 20 years, and then just, you know,
2:23
for a fairly short period of time, really got tired of it,
2:25
really got disgusted with the excesses of it.
2:30
Yeah, and I think that the excesses of it is something that's become clear to me,
2:37
and a lot of the conversations we've had around cattle ranching,
2:40
particularly over the years, have been around where the centralized points
2:45
of the industry really lie and how that's corrupting incentives for farmers across the
2:50
country where you're really not incentivized to produce the best product, but to produce
2:55
as much product as possible, get it to these large slaughterhouses, and then distribute it
3:00
from there. And then not only that, but the whole aspect of bringing meat in from other parts of
3:07
the world just to increase margins.
3:10
And that's the big question I want to get out is how do we move from this hyper-centralized
3:18
big farm industry here in the United States to a more decentralized?
3:24
And where does regenerative play into that?
3:27
Well, I think you were on the tack for answering that, what you just said.
3:33
You know, when my great-grandfather and grandfather ran this farm, they raised a lot of different species of animals.
3:41
They and their employees got up way before day, every day, six days a week, and they killed something.
3:49
Might have been a cow, might have been two or three hogs, might have been a few sheep or a few goats or something.
3:56
loaded on a mule-drawn wagon
3:59
without refrigeration or without USDA inspection
4:03
and came up the dirt road three miles to Bluffton,
4:06
the little town.
4:07
That's where I'm sitting right now.
4:09
And they peddled the meat.
4:10
They went to the hotel, to the boarding houses,
4:16
to the more affluent citizens and sold the meat
4:20
they had slaughtered that morning.
4:23
And they had to sell it.
4:24
It was sell it or smell it.
4:25
There was no refrigeration.
4:27
And they were incentivized to have a really good product
4:33
because the consumer knew exactly where it came from,
4:37
and they would not buy from them anymore.
4:39
So they were incentivized to make it the best it could be.
4:44
Fast forward to now, it's evolved to the point where we meet minimum standards.
4:50
We don't go for maximum.
4:52
We go for the minimum.
4:52
I mean, the USDA publishes the minimum standards acceptable for whatever product you're producing.
5:02
So when you evolve from trying to make your product the best it can possibly be to keep your customer to meeting minimum standards because you selling into an anonymous market where nobody knows who you are It a game changer
5:20
Yeah.
5:21
And how bad has it gotten in recent years and the turn of the century up to this point?
5:28
I think it's as bad as it can be.
5:30
I don't think that's going to get any worse.
5:32
I think it's as bad as it can be.
5:33
You know, producers are living in total anonymity because they sell to someone who sells to someone who sells to someone.
5:45
And it was a product that's very distantly removed from the producer.
5:53
You know, here on my farm, we breed the cattle, we slaughter the calves, we grow the calves, we slaughter them, we butcher, we sell the meat.
6:03
But if it's not good, it's my fault.
6:07
It's just my fault.
6:09
I screwed something up somewhere.
6:11
Yeah.
6:13
And what about the idea that regenerative farming isn't scalable?
6:19
Because I think that's the one thing that I've really admired over the years,
6:24
watching yourself and others like Joel Salatin, again,
6:27
go out there and prove that regenerative is actually scalable.
6:31
needs to be more distributed. How do we get there? Because that's another thing I think we have to
6:38
worry about is due to the financial stress that many farmers and ranchers are under,
6:43
you have a situation where the art is somewhat being lost because the incentive to actually go
6:49
out and do it isn't there. What we're left with is people are truly passionate about it,
6:57
unless that's passed down through generations. It's something I think
7:00
has the potential to be lost within two or three generations if we don't hate or tell it.
7:04
The fact is that regenerative farming is absolutely not as scalable as industrial farming.
7:11
It is not.
7:12
But it is far more replicatable.
7:16
We, as a family, we made the decision a few years ago that we were as big as we wanted to be.
7:24
We don't want to get any bigger.
7:26
We want to do better.
7:27
We are not interested in getting bigger.
7:33
In the commodity market, it's all about size.
7:37
You know, four companies produce 85% of the beef in this country.
7:42
Scalable, all about scalability.
7:47
You know, there doesn't need,
7:49
Huaydo pastures does not need to get bigger and bigger and bigger.
7:53
There needs to be more and more Huaydo pastures.
7:55
and I don't mean I need to own them.
7:58
Someone else needs to own them.
8:02
Today, we ship beef to 48 states
8:06
and I don't want to do that.
8:10
I need to produce the amount of product that I produce
8:14
but I would love to sell it in Georgia,
8:16
maybe Georgia, Florida, Alabama.
8:18
I'm down here where those three states come together.
8:20
Well, you know, Atlanta, we're a pretty big grass-fed beef producer, but I couldn't possibly feed Atlanta.
8:29
I couldn't do it.
8:31
You know, I don't need to be shipping beef to California when Atlanta's three hours up that road and I can't feed them.
8:37
There's a lot that needs to be done in terms of consumer acceptance.
8:43
You know, consumers have been told such a compelling story for so long that it is highly believable.
8:54
And the public has believed it.
8:58
But I think those blinders are falling off.
9:02
You know, I started, I was pretty early transitioning over from industrial beef to grass-fed beef back in the 90s.
9:11
and I was lucky enough to be accepted
9:14
from our public supermarket.
9:17
And they required me to have educational sessions
9:22
at every store that carried my products
9:24
offered to consumers and employees.
9:28
And no one knew what grass-fed beef was.
9:31
The 90s, that's not that long ago, late 90s.
9:34
But today, customers, consumers
9:40
have become far more sophisticated
9:42
and know a lot more about their product
9:44
and want to know more.
9:48
In the 30 years or so I've been in this business,
9:52
I've vacillated quite a lot.
9:56
And when I first started,
9:58
I would not have said this.
10:00
I wouldn't have said it out loud,
10:01
but I thought,
10:02
huh, I believe I'm what they call
10:05
an early innovator in this deal.
10:08
I didn't say that to anybody.
10:10
but I thought it.
10:12
And I operated for a few years,
10:15
and then I said, no, I am not an early innovator.
10:19
I thought I was but I not I advanced advanced marketer We just a niche marketer
10:31
Niche marketer is what I am.
10:34
I didn't like the way that sounded as well, but it was okay.
10:37
I mean, I could make a living doing it, and that's what I was about.
10:41
So through the years, I've isolated back and forth
10:44
from thinking of myself as an early innovator.
10:46
No, I'm a niche marketer.
10:48
Well, maybe I'm an early innovator.
10:49
No, I'm a niche marketer.
10:52
And now my two of my children and their spouses have come back in management in my company.
10:59
They've got children.
11:01
And for the first time, it looks, well, it looks more and more like it is an early innovator kind of deal.
11:08
More people know that there's a difference between this product I produce and what they get in about a big grocery.
11:16
grocery. I don't know to what extent it's going to change, but it's changing.
11:24
I've certainly changed my consumer tendencies over the last seven years. We buy a quarter of a cow at a time. We try to support as many local farms as possible.
11:37
I think the whole meme that really became a thing, particularly within the subculture of Bitcoin five years ago, to go out and shake your rancher's hand,
11:45
has definitely taken hold to a certain extent.
11:50
And the people, once you do it, it's hard to go back.
11:53
And so it's just totally but surely getting an individual at a time over the years.
12:00
And it's incumbent upon us producers to do some things to make it easier for the consumer.
12:07
You know, buying a bulk, a cow or half a cow, a quarter of a cow is very difficult for consumers.
12:17
That's hard.
12:18
And that's the way I used to sell it and still do sell some.
12:22
We offer those products.
12:24
But we had to make some changes so that we could sell people that wanted valets.
12:29
Filets, we can sell them filets or ground beef or stewed beef and a chicken and some bacon.
12:39
And it's going to be incumbent upon we producers to make it convenient for customers.
12:47
We're already asking them to pay more.
12:51
And we can't get away from that.
12:52
It costs more to produce beef or produce to farm this way than it does industrially.
12:58
So we already asked them to pay more.
13:00
We can't ask them to be inconvenienced.
13:03
We've got to do what it takes to make it easy for the consumer to buy it from us.
13:10
What ideas do you have around that?
13:15
Well, the first thing we did is our online store.
13:22
And that was not successful to begin with.
13:26
When the pandemic hit, it became very important to us, and it's where we make most of our money today.
13:33
We still sell to some wholesale grocers.
13:36
It's not very profitable for us.
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Last Saturday, we opened our first retail location in Atlanta, and we're excited about those possibilities.
13:47
It's a company from Austin, Texas, acquired an old industrial plant and turned it into a seven-day-a-week farmer's market.
14:00
So we get calls, let's have to have employees in Atlanta.
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I got 170 employees on this farm, and I've gotten used to that.
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But now I'm going to get used to having three or four in Atlanta.
14:14
But if that works, then we'll have another one, another one.
14:20
And I don't want to see how many I can have, but I need to have enough to sell what I produce.
14:27
Again, we're not trying to get bigger and bigger.
14:30
We, as a family, discussed the fact that if we grew this business much more, we would need to hire a CEO.
14:40
And we don't want that.
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Our CEO is going to be understandably focused on the month, the quarter, the year.
14:50
And as a family, we're focused generationally.
14:53
We do things on this farm that we know will not pay off in a month or a quarter or a year.
15:01
But we believe our great-grandchildren will be benefited by.
15:07
So is that the local pastures model that you're bringing to Atlanta from Shirtail Creek Farms?
15:12
in sam moffett say again local pack so i lived in austin for four years and i would go to local
15:18
pastures which was a seven day a week uh farms and shirttail creek farm sam moffett um who runs
15:24
that farm in austin stood that up and as somebody um who used it as my local grocery store for for four years that model is incredibly convenient instead of having to wait for the Saturday farmer market being able to go local cashiers was always The Austin connection here is it an Austin company
15:45
that bought this old facility
15:47
and turned it into a beautiful farmer's market.
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I went up and looked at it when they bought it.
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And it was, first of all,
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it's been sitting idle for 50, 40 years.
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And then on top of that, it was just a concrete industrial facility before that.
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So it was ugly.
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But they've made it beautiful.
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It's nice now.
16:12
Bringing this back to the consumer, you mentioned that the consumer is getting smarter over the years.
16:17
What are some of the largest misconceptions that broad-based consumers still have about big agriculture
16:23
and the food that they're eating on an everyday basis?
16:25
You know, big agriculture, big food, let's call it big food.
16:32
They are just brilliant people.
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I mean, they've got just billions of dollars.
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They are great people, fantastic marketers.
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And as sophisticated as the American consumer is,
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a very small percentage really understands the hardships
16:57
that industrial meat production places on the environment,
17:02
on the welfare of the animals, on local rural economies,
17:08
on probably the health of the consumer.
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I don't talk about that one much.
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There's people that are more qualified to talk about that.
17:16
But I am very qualified to talk about the impact on the rural community, on the welfare of the animals, and the horrible things it does for the environment.
17:27
You know, the way those, the direction that those food companies have led farmers and food producers is a tremendous amount of use of tillage, which destroys the structure of the soil, pesticides.
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You know, homicide means kill people, right?
17:50
Pesticide means kill pests.
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and the pests are
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of the plants
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of the insects
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of the animals
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of the microbes
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and
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the use of pesticides
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is horrible
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what it's doing for us
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is horrible
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you know
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we've driven countless
18:10
countless
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species
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into extinction
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plants
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animals
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microbes
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you know
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and every
18:19
I believe that
18:19
every creature
18:20
in a
18:22
ecosystem has a role.
18:26
We know that bees pollinate flowers,
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but I think that every single
18:31
species, plant, animal, microbe,
18:35
has a role in their ecosystem.
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We may not know what it is,
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but I think they have one.
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When we drive a species into extinction
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or near extinction, we change that ecosystem.
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It operates differently.
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It may be very subtle.
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And I think that we have done a lot of it. We continue to do a lot of it.
18:55
And I think that the degradation of those ecosystems will be what gets us.
19:05
Whether it's the pesticides or the monoculture, it seems like it does have a deleterious effect on the environment.
19:13
And I think that's one of the big misconceptions, at least that I've pointed out or understood over the years, is that you need pesticides to do farming right these days.
19:24
But I think that neglects that you can do things in a way, particularly with regard to farming, that solves the problem that pesticides are looking to solve.
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It just takes, from what I understand, meticulous attention to detail and effort to create an ecosystem.
19:45
It's a complete opposite of mindset.
19:50
When I was an industrial cattle producer, I didn't want any animal on this farm except cows.
19:57
I didn't want any plant on this farm except Tifton 85 Bermuda grass.
20:02
and I didn't think I wanted any microbes on the farm.
20:06
I know better now.
20:08
But I think I was a really good cattleman.
20:12
I was raised by a good cattleman.
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My degree was in animal science.
20:21
Every day I went to my pasture, every day I went to my pasture,
20:25
and I looked for something to kill.
20:27
That's the way I thought you did a good job raising beef is look for something to kill that was standing in the way of that.
20:37
And I might find an insect eating my grass.
20:41
I might find a nematode that was causing problems.
20:46
I might find some parasite in my abdomen.
20:50
But I could find something to kill every day.
20:55
And I knew how to kill it.
20:57
I knew which pesticide, again, that means kill.
21:01
I knew how to do that.
21:03
I think I was good at it.
21:05
And I would kill something.
21:08
And fast forward to today, I go to my pasture every single day,
21:13
and I'm looking for a way to keep things alive.
21:17
I want the pasture to be teeming with life.
21:23
I want there to be some insects.
21:25
I want there to be some nematodes.
21:28
I want there to be a lot of species of plants growing out there.
21:35
But that is a complete opposite of the way I was 25 years ago.
21:40
What led you to come to the opposite conclusion?
21:47
Well, this is not very flattering, but I think I woke up to it
21:53
because I was a very extreme industrial cattleman.
22:00
If the label instruction said put a pint per acre, I would put a quart per acre.
22:07
If the label instruction of the medicine said give them one cc per hundred pounds,
22:13
I would give them two cc's per hundred pounds.
22:16
I was of the mindset that if a little will do little good, more do more good.
22:23
And that caused me to be heavy-handed.
22:28
And I think it opened my eyes to the negative unintended consequence of using those sides.
22:37
Again, side means kill.
22:40
Yeah.
22:40
When it comes to a rich, diverse environment, what benefits does that have not only for the animals, but for the environment broadly?
22:52
Again, comparing this to the monocultures, the soil that exists on the farms that are only growing one crop, using pesticides heavily, it seems like that's not sustainable in the long run or good for the environment.
23:08
I believe that, again, pesticide means kill pests.
23:15
I believe that the role of the farmer, rancher, producer is to optimize the cycles of nature.
23:25
You know, the cycles of nature are the energy cycle from the sun, the water cycle from rain,
23:32
the microbial cycle, the carbon cycle, the mineral cycle, the grazing cycle,
23:39
on and on, many, many cycles, some of which we probably don't even recognize.
23:45
And I believe that when those cycles of nature are operating optimally,
23:51
it produces an abundance.
23:54
You know, all that coal and oil and gas, natural gas in the ground,
23:59
And that was all stored, that energy was stored down there in the era of the dinosaur,
24:07
when the cycles of nature were rocking and rolling at an incredible efficiency.
24:15
And what we have done with modern farming is decide that we didn't want the cycles of nature to be operating optimally.
24:25
We wanted to break the cycles of nature to produce whatever one commodity we were trying to grow that season.
24:35
And I think it had horrible unintended consequences.
24:41
You know, the organic matter, organic matter is talked about a lot.
24:47
Organic matter is just one of the good indicators of ecological health.
24:57
It's not the only one, but it's one that's measurable.
25:01
The organic matter in my soil, on my farm, that's been in my program for 25 plus years, is 5.5%.
25:10
5.5% of the top
25:14
4 inches
25:15
is organic matter.
25:19
The land that I buy
25:21
that is new
25:23
to me, that's been farmed industrially,
25:26
is 1.5%
25:27
organic matter.
25:30
Now again, organic matter
25:31
is not all that matters.
25:33
That's not all we care about, but
25:35
it's a good indicator.
25:37
1% organic matter
25:38
will absorb a one-inch
25:41
rainfall. A one-inch
25:43
rainfall is about 27,000 gallons
25:45
of water per acre.
25:47
One of the organic matter will absorb that.
25:51
We
25:51
get four, five, six-inch
25:53
rainfalls in the coastal plains of Georgia.
25:56
Not often but at least once or twice a year My land will pretty much soak up all that water The land that I acquire this half model won even starch
26:09
and the water's floating.
26:12
Sorry about that.
26:13
It's okay.
26:17
Yeah.
26:19
Sorry, somebody was calling.
26:20
No problem.
26:21
In fact, if you want to go to my website,
26:24
whiteoogpastures.com,
26:25
there's some pictures, some videos in there of water coming off my farm and my neighbor's farm.
26:33
And it looks like it's from two different planets.
26:37
The water coming off my farm is pretty clear.
26:40
There's not much of it.
26:41
The water coming off his farm is a turret, and it's muddy water.
26:47
And not only that, I mean, if you're spraying pesticides on your plants,
26:52
it's leaking into the water as well.
26:54
And so I think when you're talking about the ecology of these landscapes, that was one of the most jarring videos I saw.
27:03
I saw that video when you were on Joe Rogan of the differences in water flow.
27:07
And it is pretty incredible just to see your farm compared to those around you.
27:14
And the pesticides are part of that.
27:16
But chemical fertilizer is a big part of it.
27:19
Tillage is a big part of it.
27:21
It's the whole industrial complex that the land-grant universities and others have formulated through the generations to maximize monocultural production of corn, cotton, soybeans, wheat, oats, peanuts, whatever, that does such incredible damage to the soil.
27:45
Yeah.
27:46
Yeah. And the other misnomer, maybe not a misnomer, but one of the things that made me pretty perturbed is the whole push.
28:02
I think it's waned quite a bit in recent years, but the whole idea that cows are contributing to global warming, cataclysmic climate change, if you believe that.
28:12
And the whole push to reduce cattle ranching because cow farts, the methane, was leaking into the atmosphere and increasing greenhouse gases is completely insane.
28:27
And I think it neglects, I think, greening via cattle ranching is something that is very underexplored.
28:34
The way cattle specifically, and pigs to a certain degree, can, if managed properly, can be incredibly beneficial to revitalizing.
28:44
And that's, I think, the thing about regenerative farming that really excites me is this avenue towards top soil regeneration via grazing cattle
28:55
and introducing more diverse ecosystems to farms that have been monocultures for a long time.
29:05
That discussion deserves to be addressed.
29:10
And we cattlemen gave the anti-beef people the bullet to use against us.
29:17
in a feedlot situation, understandably, I think it's horrible for the land.
29:26
I think it's horrible for the atmosphere.
29:29
When those animals out there are standing on bare dirt, eating feed, urinating, defecating,
29:38
I think it's horrible for the environment.
29:40
And the anti-beef people seized that and used it as a broad brush to paint that all beef production is bad.
29:52
And we let them get away with it.
29:54
We shouldn't have, but we didn't fight back.
29:57
I don't know.
29:58
I guess we just didn't.
30:00
But now I'm prepared to.
30:03
The fact is, I just told you the organic matter in my soil has gone from half a cent to five and a half a cent.
30:13
You know where that organic matter came from?
30:16
Greenhouse gas.
30:18
The way that works is my plants in my pasture, grass and forbs, breathe in carbon dioxide
30:27
and capture it and create fats, proteins, and energy,
30:35
some of which grows the top of the grass.
30:38
This is the ground.
30:39
The top of the grass grows it up.
30:41
And when it does that, it's growing roots down.
30:44
If it grows this much grass at the top,
30:47
it's putting that much roots down.
30:50
Properly grazed land allows the plant to mature.
30:56
then put the animals through, let them bite it off.
31:01
When they bite it off, they turn some of it into manure, some of it into urine, some of
31:09
it is converted into beef And that root that carbon under the ground sloughs off a bit and the top bitten off
31:21
That carbon is sequestered in the ground.
31:24
Much of that urine and feces is brought down into the ground
31:28
through dung beetles and other fauna, our bath.
31:32
Then we don't graze that land anymore for X period of time,
31:37
60 days in my case.
31:39
Those are different lengths.
31:40
It allows that
31:41
those plants out like a pump.
31:45
Bringing that carbon in,
31:47
bit off, sequestering it.
31:50
And it works.
31:51
It works. It's been working.
31:53
It's been working
31:55
since the beginning of time.
31:57
And it's inarguable.
32:00
There's no
32:01
arguing that.
32:02
Come on, I'll show it to you.
32:04
But we
32:06
animal people, cattle people have let the
32:11
anti-beef, anti-cow
32:15
people get by with that for way too long.
32:19
It's not true. It is true in an industrial
32:23
feedlot model. Yes, I admit that. That's not what I do.
32:27
No, I deny I do that. It's just not
32:31
right. How do we get away, or
32:35
Is there a way to get away?
32:37
Can we get away from the industrial feedlot, in your opinion?
32:41
Well, I did.
32:42
I mean, I used to run an industrial feedlot.
32:46
If consumers will selectively choose grass-fed beef,
32:55
there eventually won't be any more industrial feedlots.
32:58
industrial feedlots take young cattle
33:02
and fatten them up into obese creatures
33:06
that the consumer had gotten used to
33:11
and in doing so did a lot of ecological damage.
33:17
It's still big business,
33:20
but I think it's under fire.
33:24
How much of this is on the large buyers of this beef?
33:28
like McDonald's, fast food chains, large supermarkets?
33:32
Are they going to have any say in this?
33:34
McDonald's, well, so the hamburger,
33:38
let's just say this hamburger or ground beef is a little different.
33:44
When a person fattens calves in a feedlot,
33:49
the way we just discussed,
33:51
they wind up with a large percentage of the animal
33:56
as what's called 50% trim.
33:59
It's 50% lean, 50% fat.
34:02
It's the obese part of the album.
34:05
And that's not very marketable.
34:07
Nobody wants to eat that.
34:09
It's just not marketable.
34:13
But Big Beef has discovered
34:16
that they can import super lean animals.
34:21
These are usually like old mama cows.
34:24
very lean
34:26
and their meat will be
34:29
90 something percent lean
34:31
when they grind it
34:32
and they can blend the two products
34:35
the 90 plus percent lean
34:37
from the mostly imported
34:39
older cattle
34:42
with the 50
34:43
50 percent trim
34:45
50 percent fat 50 percent lean
34:47
and get a
34:49
70-30
34:50
60-40
34:53
in 90-10, 93-7, whatever they want.
34:58
And that works.
35:00
It's not very appetizing.
35:03
A pound of that meat could contain the DNA of thousands of animals from all over the world.
35:11
Probably would contain the DNA of thousands of animals.
35:15
But that's what you get when you buy industrial ground beef.
35:19
That's why it's so cheap.
35:20
that product can be made incredibly cheap because it takes two almost inedible products
35:29
and turns them into something edible.
35:34
It seemed like the onus would be on the consumer to say, I'm not going to eat this crap.
35:42
I guess that gets into the question of the nutrient density of the different options, too.
35:47
Well, it is on the consumer, but it takes a very careful consumer to avoid that.
35:58
The way to do it is find you a farmer and do business with them, buy what they sell,
36:05
and feel free to ask questions about how that farmer does it.
36:10
You may not like it.
36:11
If you don't, you need to know it and find another farmer.
36:16
Yeah.
36:17
take your rancher's hand.
36:19
That advice we continue to give here And I mean on that part how could consumers better help farmers That one thing that has been really interesting over the years meeting a bunch of ranchers in Texas when I lived there and I back in the northeast
36:37
There's only one thing that the consumers can really do to help financially, economically help their farmer.
36:45
That's do business with them, buy their product.
36:47
I built a restaurant and a general store and lodging here on my farm so the customers could come see me.
37:01
It's not profitable.
37:03
It's very break-even.
37:04
It's okay.
37:05
It doesn't make any money.
37:06
It pays for itself.
37:07
But the reason we did it is we wanted people to come see us.
37:11
I'm in a very remote area.
37:15
We didn't have a lot of services.
37:16
So I fixed it so people could come.
37:19
And we get a lot of visitors.
37:20
We get visitors every day.
37:22
And we show them what we do.
37:24
We make them free to go anywhere they want to go and look at anything we want to look at.
37:30
Well, we have a farm in the tri-state area in the northeast.
37:36
I go to New Jersey in the summers.
37:37
And we have a farm in Cape May County called Beach Plum Farms.
37:41
And it's a great, it's a pig farm predominantly.
37:46
They have pigs and chickens and about a 20 minute drive from where we stay in the summer at the beach.
37:53
And I love the way that they've done something similar.
37:57
You can stay if you want.
37:59
They do weddings there, but they have a restaurant as well.
38:03
So probably about once a month, we'll go down there, buy a bunch of chicken and pork.
38:08
But I have three young boys.
38:10
They can run around, feed the chickens, feed the pigs and beautiful gardens as well, produce.
38:15
And it's not a bad trip to take, especially if you have young children getting to the farm and acquainted with the farmers and getting good quality food at the end of the day.
38:26
And you're welcome to come as often as you want to, but you probably don't have to come at one time.
38:32
And really, with the social media being as efficacious as it is, you can visit your farm without actually going there.
38:42
You need to know you could go there if you wanted to.
38:45
but we have a lot of customers, online customers,
38:49
that I know have never been here.
38:53
They have a lot of confidence because they read all the Facebook,
38:58
Instagram, and all that stuff, and it builds confidence in them,
39:02
and they know they can come here if they want to,
39:05
and they probably know somebody that's been here.
39:09
How on top of all this is the government, particularly this administration?
39:14
You think this is an issue that the Trump administration or the federal government more broadly is aware of and looking to fix or being sent to something?
39:23
I think that farmers like myself, if they're waiting on the government to fix this situation, it'll never be fixed.
39:35
I'm not being critical.
39:37
I'm just telling you what's true.
39:40
Consumers will fix this problem if it gets fixed.
39:44
I think there's probably more attention being paid to the industrialization of food production than there ever has.
40:00
I don't want to get into politics.
40:02
I'm pretty apolitical.
40:05
But I think that increasingly as time has gone, oh, we see more and more and more focus on it.
40:11
Probably more now than we've ever seen.
40:14
But it's not a political problem.
40:17
It's a consumer problem.
40:18
And it's not going to be fixed by politicians.
40:20
If it gets fixed, it'll be fixed by consumers.
40:25
And it will get fixed.
40:26
It's a matter of when.
40:28
I hope that things don't get so stinking bad that it's just a disaster.
40:37
And it will if it's left unchecked.
40:41
There's a dead zone.
40:43
I'm about 80 or 90 miles as the crow flies from the Gulf of Mexico,
40:48
way down in the rural south.
40:51
And there was a wonderful oystering ground in the Gulf of Mexico.
41:01
And they stopped oystering because the oyster beds had become so decimated
41:09
by the chemical fertilizing pesticides
41:12
washing off this farmland right around me.
41:17
So, you know, we're doing horrible things
41:22
for the environment,
41:23
and it's not going to get any better
41:27
until we do different.
41:28
Mm-hmm.
41:31
So what is the scale of the disaster scenario
41:35
on change?
41:38
I'm sure.
41:38
What is the scale?
41:39
Well, the disaster scenario that you mentioned looked like if we don't change quickly enough.
41:45
And I guess on top of that, based off of where your expectations were maybe a few years ago
41:52
when you went on Joe Rogan versus where things actually are today,
41:56
has progress exceeded your expectations, has it underwhelmed them,
42:00
or were you headed in the right direction?
42:01
I think that
42:05
I'll say that recently
42:08
in the last four, five, six years
42:10
I don't know exactly when
42:12
there's been more positive change
42:14
than I ever thought we'd see
42:16
it's not nearly enough
42:18
we're still light years away from fixing it
42:20
you know
42:22
one thing that I don't think many people
42:24
appreciate that I try
42:26
to make clear is
42:28
fixing degraded
42:31
land and water and
42:33
atmosphere is
42:35
so, so slow.
42:37
Once you decide, as I did
42:39
25 years ago, to fix it,
42:42
it takes
42:43
decades. I mean, it's just so
42:45
slow. It's not quick.
42:48
And
42:49
by human standards,
42:51
in terms of the millennia, it's just
42:53
maybe pretty quick, but
42:55
so we
42:59
you can't wait until the problem
43:02
is just absolutely dead
43:04
serious and it's getting started
43:06
we gotta get started
43:08
now, should have gotten started yesterday
43:10
and it's also
43:12
true that
43:13
not everybody's going to embrace
43:16
fixing it
43:17
some will, I did, and there'll be some others
43:20
there are others
43:22
a number of others
43:23
but it's going to be
43:26
by human
43:27
recollect
43:30
it's going to be very very slow
43:32
it's going to be generational
43:34
and that's why
43:38
we talk about it a lot in Bitcoin
43:39
Bitcoin is
43:40
a hard money to save in
43:46
but you have to realize that many people think it's a get rich quick scheme
43:49
but it really is like
43:50
just save in good money
43:53
slowly over time scheme. And this concept of low time preference, being able to delay
44:00
gratification many years into the future is something that people have to adopt. They
44:06
have to adopt that mindset And it is hard We often say on this show that we live in a high velocity trash economy where everything driven by like what have you done for me lately What are the quarterly financial results look like How much crop do we yield this month compared to last month And that mental rewiring of the brain
44:25
that is necessary to take a step back, start one day and recognize that you're not going to reap
44:34
the full benefits of this change for many years in the future.
44:37
It's hard, and it's culturally not something that's really ingrained in modern culture,
44:44
which is a shame, but I think it's something,
44:47
lowering one's time preference and then collectively as a society,
44:50
lowering our time preference to delay gratification
44:55
is something that desperately needs to happen,
44:57
but a lot of rewiring is necessary in this high-velocity trash economy.
45:04
I don't know anything about Bitcoin,
45:06
but what you described certainly sounds very familiar with what we do.
45:13
It's just very, very slow.
45:17
I started a nonprofit, the 501c3,
45:22
called CIFAR, Center for Agricultural Resilience.
45:28
And I started it because we had a lot of people
45:30
that would come here that are interested
45:32
in emulating what we do.
45:36
And I wasn't set up to educate them,
45:39
so we bit the bullet and set up the nonprofit.
45:44
And when they come here, it's interesting to me.
45:48
And these are not kids.
45:51
These are young, professional people that have,
45:58
that financially could start a farm if they wanted to.
46:03
And they come here to learn, and they've studied what they need to study.
46:09
And they've all got the, their focus and excitement is the production out in the pasture,
46:16
out in the field.
46:18
what do I do to the land?
46:20
Which is great.
46:21
That's important.
46:23
But we tell them there are three legs on the stool.
46:28
There's production, which you do out on the land.
46:32
There's processing, making it edible.
46:36
You know, people don't eat cows and hogs and sheep.
46:39
They eat beef and pork and lamb.
46:41
So you got to find a way to make it marketable And then how to get it to them is the structure
46:51
People, you know, I'm right in the middle of Bluffton, Georgia.
46:56
It's got a population of about 150.
46:59
I've got more employees than this town's got citizens.
47:04
And I can't sell $30 million worth of product here.
47:09
I've got to get it to them.
47:10
So those are all important things that prospective farmers have got to embrace and learn and figure out.
47:22
On the subject of prospective farmers, are you seeing an uptick in interest, particularly around regenerative farming from younger generations?
47:29
Because that, again, like I said earlier, I worry, and I don't know if the worry is misguided or completely out of bounds because it's not true.
47:38
But is there, in your mind, enough interest in people taking on farming as a lifestyle and a career path and a calling?
47:47
We accept nine, say eight or nine interns per quarter four times a year.
47:58
No, six is six.
47:59
We would take six interns four times a year.
48:02
And we get probably 20-something applications for those six slots.
48:09
So there's that.
48:12
We also have three-day sessions where we teach specific things,
48:21
pig production or gardening or poultry production, egg production.
48:27
and those we have probably
48:30
I don't know 15 or 20 of those a year
48:34
and usually cap it
48:36
25 people per
48:38
and those fill up
48:40
so there are people that want to do it
48:43
and then most of these are people
48:47
that can do it
48:48
you can't just get out of school
48:52
with no money and say I'm going to start farming
48:55
there's a capital cost
49:00
of going
49:02
into it and these are people
49:04
that can need that capital cost
49:06
but there's a lot
49:08
there's a lot
49:09
to
49:10
grow it
49:13
make it marketable and then merchandise it there a lot to that How long would you say it takes to develop the three schools of knowledge there
49:25
to become a competent farmer?
49:27
It's taken me towards those years.
49:31
But I'm a slow learner.
49:33
Somebody hasn't talked to it a lot quicker.
49:35
I'm just trying to imagine again, the little time preference angle,
49:40
if you're getting into farming and how many times you're going to fail
49:42
before you actually get the hang of things.
49:46
And it's probably not something you want to go into in your 60s
49:52
because it's going to take you some time to establish.
49:59
Well, this has been a great pleasure.
50:03
I hope we can do this again because I think it's a very important topic.
50:07
That's not – it's definitely becoming more popular,
50:11
But I think to your point, we've made some progress, but there is a lot of progress that still needs to be made.
50:18
And this has been an ongoing conversation on the show for the better part of six, seven years now.
50:24
And I just want to extend a heartfelt thank you for doing the work that you do, for being the example that you are, not only for other farmers, but for consumers who I think I can say very confidently have become better educated because of the work that you've done and your willingness to go out and educate the public on shows like this and others.
50:51
I think it's extremely important work.
50:53
I think you're having an extremely positive impact.
50:57
And if you're listening out there and you've heard us say,
51:01
go shake your ranchers, go shake your farmer's hand over the years,
51:04
and you haven't done it, maybe plan to find a local farmer
51:08
and go do that at some point in the near term.
51:11
Well, thank you for having me on today.
51:13
And I would mention that I wrote a book.
51:16
It's called A Bold Return to Giving a Damn.
51:18
And a lot of things we've been talking about are going to more detail in that book.
51:26
Where can people buy the book or preorder the book?
51:32
Online.
51:33
Anywhere that sells books, we'll sell.
51:36
Okay.
51:36
Awesome.
51:37
We'll find a link to that in the show notes.
51:39
Buy the book.
51:40
And, Will, I hope you have a great rest of your Monday.
51:44
And, again, thank you.
51:46
Thank you for having me on.
51:47
I enjoyed talking to you.
51:48
Alright. Peace and love, freaks.
51:50
Okay.