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From tax lawyer to regenerative farmer leading MAHA · Cultural Wars | America Out Loud News

• 0:13
  Welcome everyone to the Maha Lowdown.
• 0:16
  This is Jeff Lauderback.
• 0:18
  And we're glad you're here for our first episode on the America Out Loud Network.
• 0:24
  The Maha Lowdown will appear on Wednesdays on the America Outloud Network and IHERT Radio as part of the Morning in America series.
• 0:34
  So we're going to uh have a good discussion here today about regenerative agriculture, and I'll tell you more about what the Maha lowdown will be about, but uh I don't want to keep uh my first guest waiting, and uh, I'm glad to welcome Ben John Clark, who is a a little bit of everything, an attorney, a regenerative farmer, a Maha activist, an author, a speaker.
• 0:58
  So uh we're glad you're here, John.
• 1:00
  Well, thanks for having me.
• 1:01
  I'm I'm honored to join you.
• 1:03
  It's an important subject.
• 1:04
  So I know there's a lot going on right now.
• 1:07
  Uh, and first I'll tell the listeners that uh a little bit about myself.
• 1:12
  Uh for those who don't know me, I'm uh national reporter with the Epic Times.
• 1:17
  And what I cover, I covered the RFK junior presidential campaign from start to finish, and since then I've shifted to the Make America Healthy Again movement and covering that and regenerative farming and Maha issues, Maha personalities.
• 1:30
  So I've gotten really immersed in it.
• 1:32
  And then about two years ago, I moved from the city in Southwest Ohio, the Dayton area to uh the Appalachian foothills down here in southern Ohio, and I've never grown anything in my life, and uh I'm growing microgreens.
• 1:47
  I have a tower garden, I'm growing a garden, still learning.
• 1:51
  But uh from talking to people like you, John and uh Joel Salatin and uh Food Independent Summit up here in Ohio's Amish country and traveling all around interviewing Maha personalities and farmers, and then of course I joked that when I covered RFK's campaign and traveled, I think I was in 28 states.
• 2:11
  I joked that I got to know what he was saying that I could have done a speech for him, but not uh not as good because as you know, RFK uh he's he's a eloquent um public speaker, I think.
• 2:25
  So uh but uh I'll I'll uh say more when it's uh when there's a good tie-in about my background, but uh just wanted to get that out there and then John.
• 2:37
  I know right now, obviously on the minds of a lot of people, especially uh here in this first show, a lot of my initial listeners will be people who are familiar with the everything going on right now with uh President Trump's glyphosate order, which was last week.
• 2:55
  And so I know the big thing with that is what has been going on really the last year, the importance of a shift to regenerative agriculture and away from herbicides and pesticides, and uh I know the the need for that seems to be magnified now, and uh maybe this is a good time for you to come in and uh talk a little bit about that because uh I know you have a lot to say about that.
• 3:23
  Well, I do, and I've spent over 25 years in this space, as they say, in the regenerative and food space, and and like you, uh I really didn't have a background.
• 3:34
  I I dubbed around a little bit of vegetable garden growing up as a kid, but I really did not uh grow up as a farmer, but I got really, really sick with Lyme disease while I was practicing law in Connecticut.
• 3:48
  My background actually was originally in tax law.
• 3:51
  I worked with one of the large international accountancy firms, and then I hung up my shingle and was a litigator in Connecticut, and I went very quickly from being extremely healthy and going to the gym every day and backpacking up Mount Washington in January and and um to not be being barely able to walk.
• 4:09
  And part of the reason I share this story is that it's such a common story in the Maha movement.
• 4:15
  There's so many people I meet within the Maha organization or who are supporters of Maha, who have had a similar encounter with ill health and found that changing their lifestyle and particularly their eating habits had a profound impact on their regaining their health.
• 4:32
  And so I didn't really, and and I also share this because I think people, you know, we don't want to sound like, oh, look, we're enlightened, we figure out how to farm, you know, come on in, the water's fine.
• 4:43
  I mean, we are saying that, and yet it's not like most of us claim any special enlightenment to have gut here.
• 4:50
  We were pushed here by adversity, by adversity in our health.
• 4:55
  And so I am a little unusual in having both uh a law degree as a background and then having spent the next 25 years farming and and just trying to stay physically active to to counter my illness.
• 5:08
  I didn't, it was only secondarily that I started to learn about food, farming, how many hurdles there were regulatory hurdles and economic hurdles to people to farm, um, how tilted or uh or uh corrupted the entire regulatory system is both at the state and the federal level against small farms and new farmers and favoring large corporate producers.
• 5:33
  And and then also the health benefits when you know one day my wife Jackie and I realized that everything on our dining table for our children we had grown on the farm.
• 5:42
  It wasn't even our mission, it just sort of developed that way.
• 5:46
  And the chicken and the butter and the milk and all the vegetables, we'd grown them all, and we didn't have to go to the grocery store very often.
• 5:54
  We'd go for citrus, of course.
• 5:56
  Um, but it was sort of like uh uh an epiphany of wait a minute, this is we grew all this right out of the dirt ourselves, and it's all better than anything we could ever get in the store.
• 6:09
  I didn't really expect that.
• 6:11
  It tastes better, it's better for you, you feel better.
• 6:14
  And so that and and then you know, my own battle in Vermont is you'll recall, but was over on farm slaughter, and then I wrote my first book.
• 6:24
  And as far as the specific question you've asked, I just felt also I should give that little introductory background.
• 6:30
  Glyphosate is something I've never applied to anything uh in any uh of my farming activities, but I'm sure I've eaten it because it's in our conventional food system.
• 6:43
  And what people need to understand in this battle over glyphosate with Donald Trump and and a lot of backlash against Bobby Kennedy for not going against that is that we have in a relatively short period of time made our entire the the good a good part of our agricultural production um dependent on glyphosate.
• 7:02
  And for people that don't understand glyphosate, the perhaps most active ingredient in Roundup, though, we don't really know because Roundup is a proprietary concoction that's top secret, made by Monsanto Company and then sold to Bear.
• 7:17
  So Baer, the uh German manufacturer of pharmaceuticals, also is now a huge producer of GMO seed crops and glyphosate and many other herbicides and chemicals, which is an odd combination if you think about it.
• 7:32
  Um but what most people don't realize is that GMOs, genetically modified organisms, particularly corn and soy and cotton um and some other major commodity crops, have been genetically modified so that roundup doesn't kill them.
• 7:49
  In other words, you can spray a crop of corn, you can plant your corn, and then go in a week later just before the corn sprouts and spray it with glyphosate, and it will kill all the plant life, but not the corn.
• 8:02
  Regular corn, um, conventional or his you know, uh heirloom corn varieties would be killed by the glyphosate.
• 8:10
  But the GMO variety, the GMO seeds have all been modified so that they um will not be killed.
• 8:17
  Sorry, my border colleagues are playing next to me.
• 8:20
  Um so that they will not be killed by that chemical application.
• 8:23
  And it really is a genius technology.
• 8:27
  But you know, a lot of times GMOs are touted as somehow uh beneficent or benevolent for the for us because they're gonna be grown in dry regions or they're gonna be higher in nutrients.
• 8:39
  But really, their key feature for the vast majority of them is solely that they are resistant to glyphosate and therefore become become extremely um profitable, right?
• 8:50
  Because if you're a farmer and you want this product, you have to you have to buy these seeds from only a handful of companies.
• 8:57
  And during the Obama administration, the Obama administration backed uh Monsanto in a case called Bowman v.
• 9:05
  Monsanto, when a farmer, I think from Indiana, uh figured out that he could just save back seeds from GMO crops that he grew on his own land and then keep them and use them again the next year, which is what peasant farmers and and traditional farmers did for thousands of years, seed saving.
• 9:22
  They save back their seeds.
• 9:23
  Well, he got sued by Monsanto.
• 9:25
  He was a little loudmouthed about it, and it went all the way to the U.S.
• 9:28
  Supreme Court, which ruled that this is a patent right.
• 9:31
  So, what this allows is the proprietary ownership of a vast quantity of America's chief crops, which are corn and soy.
• 9:39
  And we export a lot of those crops, and you hear a lot about it now.
• 9:43
  So the idea if we just eradicated all glyphosate tomorrow, and there's a whole controversy about whether it's harmful to human or other health and how harmful that is, and I think over time we're gonna find more and more evidence that it has a lot of harms, particularly to microbes in the soil and in our guts.
• 10:00
  Um, but if we wanted to get rid of it tomorrow, we would be it would be devastating for farmers who have no other alternative means of weed control now and have expanded their operations into massive farms uh that depend on this technology.
• 10:15
  And so we have to be sensitive to those farmers.
• 10:18
  We have to be sensitive to the economic realities, and we have to find ways to help incentivize farmers to uh transition back to less soil destructive glyphosate free methods.
• 10:31
  And that is the path that that Bobby Kennedy needs to seek.
• 10:34
  It needs to be a middle road, not extreme, either industrial farming or organic farming, but allowing the free market to control.
• 10:41
  And as more Americans want food, especially for their children that is not tainted with glyphosate, the more they will purchase goods from farmers that are not using those practices, and those farmers will be able to charge more for their products because it's more labor intensive to not use these handy dandy uh technological advances.
• 11:02
  And over time, we will we will reclaim our soil and our waterways and our health from a system that was really um uh co-opted by a lot of corporate actors, and we need to reclaim our food supply for ourselves.
• 11:17
  And that's interesting about what you're saying um how you can't just uh completely know there are plenty of people who want that, but you can't completely ban glyphosate um for some reasons you mentioned, but also and you touched on it, soil health, because I know I've talked to some farmers here.
• 11:38
  I did a story on a Christmas pre farm, and they're gonna be growing chestnut trees as well up here in Ohio.
• 11:47
  And they took over uh land that was that was depleted of all its nutrients, and you know, it's taken a few years to uh revitalize the soil.
• 12:01
  So I guess that's another um thing that a lot of like I didn't realize it until starting to write about this that you don't uh you can't just uh also stop uh stop herbicides and then your soil be healthy.
• 12:18
  Well, you can't because the soil's been depleted.
• 12:21
  You know, many people point to the example of Sri Lanka and what happened when they didn't have all of their artificial imports of glyphosate and synthetic fertilizers and how much their agriculture plummeted.
• 12:32
  Now, Sri Lanka is not it, there's some parallels there, but it's that's an oversimplification of Sri Lanka's experience.
• 12:39
  There are a lot of other uh factors that influence that decline in production.
• 12:44
  But let's get back to the soil in a minute, because you know, the idea is that if you've if you use glyphosate and also then synthetic fertilizers, which instead of cow manure or what we call we farmers call green manure, which is basically compost made from plant matter.
• 13:00
  If you don't use those to build your soils, every year when you're growing corn in particular, corn uh draws a lot of energy out of the soil.
• 13:08
  Look at the size of the plant, you know, relative to a lot of plants.
• 13:11
  It's an incredible plant.
• 13:12
  But you're drawing out the nutritional content, including things like nitrogen from the soil, it's depleted.
• 13:17
  So if you just keep planting in the same soil year after year, you're going to get smaller and smaller yields.
• 13:23
  And eventually the soil itself is drained of life.
• 13:28
  Really, it's the microbes that stimulate the growth, but they all then need those nutrients.
• 13:32
  So you have to spread some kind of fertilizer on there.
• 13:35
  And then when you also add not just glyphosate, but dozens potentially of other herbicides or insecticides for pests, atrazine is a big one used in corn.
• 13:47
  Um, you start to deplete the soil.
• 13:49
  And as long as you keep putting more chemicals on, you're going to maintain your yields generally, though often as the soil is deteriorating, you have to add more and more of these artificial additives to keep the same production, right?
• 14:05
  And so if you just suddenly withdraw that, you realize that underneath all the applications which were growing the plants, the soil has lost the ability to do so.
• 14:14
  And so now you have to rebuild that soil.
• 14:16
  And there's nothing like cow manure to do that, by the way.
• 14:19
  It fills it right up with microbes and all kinds of good stuff.
• 14:22
  You know, we go on about how bad cow gases are and ignore the manure.
• 14:27
  And if, and by the way, the alternative to manure, especially for nitrogen is called urea, and it's manufactured in factories and it's sprayed around with machines, and it does not feed the microbes the way manure does, but it is made, urea is made from natural gas, which is also known as methane.
• 14:46
  And so the whole thing is a scam when it comes to going after the cows.
• 14:50
  But back to your soil point.
• 14:51
  I would make one other analogy.
• 14:54
  Um is is this okay?
• 14:56
  Am I Oh, yeah, you're fine.
• 14:57
  Uh we have uh about two minutes before the break.
• 15:00
  Okay.
• 15:00
  Yeah, I knew we were getting close to break.
• 15:02
  So, but just to close the loop here, to make an analogy, I often see claims about solar panels, particularly large field arrays of solar panels, which are obscenely called solar farms.
• 15:16
  Umar panels, the solar panels I like are called blades of grass.
• 15:21
  I call them god solar panels.
• 15:23
  They're renewable, they don't they're not made with coal in China, and we laugh, but think about it.
• 15:27
  You know, that's what grass is.
• 15:28
  Grass is a solar panel using photosynthesis.
• 15:31
  And now we have this human machination to replace it with these solar panels.
• 15:35
  And I'll see these articles about how great this is.
• 15:38
  The solar panels and the solar farms are bringing back the pollinators and bringing back the wild plant growth and the biodiversity.
• 15:46
  Well, that's right, but it had nothing to do with the solar panels.
• 15:49
  What it had to do with is you stopped applying these chemicals to the soil and killing everything.
• 15:54
  All you've really done is withhold those things that were toxifying the earth, and now you're like, oh, look, the solar panel save the soil.
• 16:02
  No, they didn't.
• 16:03
  And then you'll have pictures of sheep being rotated as grazers underneath the solar panels.
• 16:07
  And look at how great this were, oh, they're complementary and they grow together.
• 16:11
  No, they don't.
• 16:12
  We don't have enough sheep in the country to begin to be uh housed under our solar panels.
• 16:17
  It's all lipstick on a pig, as a farmer would say.
• 16:21
  And so what you're experiencing and describing is that sometimes you don't know that soil is unhealthy until you withdraw the things that were giving it an appearance of robust life when in fact the opposite is what was happening.
• 16:36
  And that is industrial agriculture.
• 16:38
  Regenerative agriculture refers to the processes by which we rebuild those soils and and prevent runoff and start nurturing the microbes in the soil, uh, which ultimately are connected to the microbes in our gut, which we're finding out more and more are directly related to a lot of health outcomes.
• 16:55
  We're gonna explore that more when we come back and you're listening to the Maha Lowdown on the America Out Loud Network.
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• 20:31
  Welcome back to the Maha Lowdown.
• 20:33
  This is Jeff Lauderback, and I'm here with John Clark.
• 20:36
  We're having an interesting discussion on all things regenerative farming, I guess.
• 20:42
  It's interesting, John.
• 20:43
  When I um I I went to your farm, I think uh it was in the fall, and it's uh I'm a lifelong, even though I'm from Southwest Ohio, I'm a lifelong Red Sox fan.
• 20:56
  I don't know if I ever told you that.
• 20:57
  I've been to Boston several times, and I earlier in my career covered the Red Sox and the Red Sox Mirror League system, but so I'm a big fan.
• 21:05
  I love being in New England because I'm also a history enthusiast.
• 21:09
  And here in Ohio, we have you know, Ohio, actually, we just had uh Ohio's birthday uh March 1st, 1803.
• 21:19
  So there's a lot of old, beautiful towns and buildings, but it dates to the early 1800s, so a little different in New England because every, you know, everything dates to the 1600s, so it's uh it's just beautiful.
• 21:32
  And Vermont is one of those unspoiled areas, especially where you live.
• 21:38
  It's uh I mean you could you could sense how farming and how life was was probably like back in the 1800s when you're around uh where you are, and and that uh especially since I've been riding a lot about the Make America Healthy Again movement, regenerative farming and getting back to local sourcing and for farmers to farm like they once did, and for consumers to eat the way they once did.
• 22:07
  I it's just interesting to think about how it must have been like uh well, like it's 2026, so 1926.
• 22:16
  And uh what are your thoughts about that as far as uh I mean, obviously that was before pesticides and herbicides, that was before it became commonplace to you know, get fruit loops and uh Oreos and uh all that and meat.
• 22:33
  That was back when meat uh also I know you raise your grass-fed beef or your organic beef.
• 22:40
  That was commonplace back then, uh I would I would think.
• 22:45
  Uh what are your thoughts as a regenerative farmer on that getting back to getting back to 1926, I guess.
• 22:53
  Well, how quickly in one century, which in the human uh expanse of time is is just a blip.
• 23:01
  Um, if you want to look at history, we can go to Europe too.
• 23:03
  I mean, we go, oh, look, we go back to the 1600s, yeah.
• 23:06
  Well, go to Europe, go to the Middle East, you know, go to other parts of the world where we have cultures that go back thousands of years, and we realize we're mere babes, um, as you might recall.
• 23:16
  Actually, I was just thinking about you this morning because I was out feeding my cows, and I I ran out of round bales, and so I switched to square bales because we had quite a drought this year, and so I had to I have to feed some square bales to my cows, and I relocated my round bale feeder in a fresh spot of virgin snow, and it was over my knees in the snow, and my cows um were having difficulty getting to the ring.
• 23:42
  They'll they'll beat down a path.
• 23:44
  I can see them out the window now.
• 23:45
  They're finding their way around, they'll get there.
• 23:47
  But it made me think of you, how much it's changed just since I think September when you were here.
• 23:52
  You were here in the autumn.
• 23:54
  Um, but how much more has it changed since that 1926 date you use?
• 23:59
  As I point out in my book, Small Farm Republic, I believe in 1929 when the Great Depression started, I believe there were over 27,000 dairy farms in Little Vermont.
• 24:11
  And now there are about 500, consolidated, uh, very different technology.
• 24:17
  And so I'm reminded of that heritage all the time because where I live here, uh, I can tell you this house was built in 1852.
• 24:24
  You won't find that in the land records.
• 24:26
  We know it from our oral traditions of our family because my great great great great-grandfather moved here about around 1798 tradition has it, and then bought the uh the farm in about 1805.
• 24:43
  And this was a neighboring farm.
• 24:45
  This was the Trask farm, which was not built till 1852.
• 24:49
  Um, I do recall uh that you visited the uh cemetery where my intervening generations are.
• 24:56
  So, how much have things changed?
• 24:59
  Now, how much would they look at us today and and look at fruit loops and things?
• 25:03
  And I don't know, I think they'd be a little skeptical of them.
• 25:05
  Now, it was a time of hardship.
• 25:07
  Again, I'm reminded of it every day when I go out to this barn.
• 25:10
  There are so many echoes of that past.
• 25:13
  Um, the old uh milk house here, which was a little uh a water cooling system that ran out of a spring that's still here up over the hill, and basically you milked the cows into cans and then you put them in the water bank, you know, the cold spring water to keep it cold until it could be delivered to market.
• 25:31
  And it was a lot more difficult to deliver that milk to market.
• 25:34
  But what you're actually describing when you talk about uh hearkening back to that past is a recognition that I think more and more Americans, especially young Americans are coming to, which is that they've become divorced from their cultural heritage, from not just their food supply, but understanding and and appreciating with humility how much work goes into food production, how many things can go wrong between weather and parasites and calamities and you know, farmer farming remains probably the most dangerous profession that we have, except maybe military if you counted that one.
• 26:13
  Um and that's been part of the trauma of my own family.
• 26:17
  But as people realize that, they also should realize uh their jeopardy, that they're in peril, that if you live in the inner city and you know, in a large city, and you're getting all of your food from that countryside.
• 26:31
  You are extracting the wealth of the soil and the water and the plant life of that countryside in order to even enable you to live in that high um you know, 14th story apartment that you have without food.
• 26:45
  What would you do?
• 26:46
  Trudge out of the city every day, 30 miles to the countryside.
• 26:49
  And so, in this sense, nothing's really changed since Rome, because Rome suffered a similar problem before it fell as it started to lose control over its surrounding countryside and its food resources.
• 27:02
  And the Senate were all bickering over over esoteric things instead of watching where their food came from.
• 27:09
  Only we're we're much more vulnerable because we've dependent, become dependent on fossil fuels and technologies and transportation and glyphosate and all kinds of gadgetry, and we've lost most of the heirloom knowledge about how to do things the old way.
• 27:26
  And so that's fine as long as you have cheap fuel.
• 27:29
  But look at the war in Iran right now.
• 27:31
  If uh some of us remember the oil crisis of the 1970s, and if the price of fuel went to, let's say $10 a gallon, which really wouldn't even be that much.
• 27:43
  That would be uh comparable really to the oil, say $7 a gallon would be comparable to the oil crisis in today's dollars.
• 27:50
  Do people realize how quickly that would layer into their food supplies?
• 27:55
  Because everything from tilling the earth to planting the seed to spreading the the uh glyphosate or other herbicides, spreading the fertilizers, then harvesting the crops, and then getting them processed to market and then to uh to your home all rely on fossil fuels, which if they went up, it would our food prices would go up exponentially, and the entire modern structure of food distribution would be under threat.
• 28:19
  Our supply chains would be under threat.
• 28:21
  We now import more food than we export as a nation.
• 28:25
  And that's really only developed in the last few years, and a lot of that are processed foods.
• 28:29
  We get here in America, we get most of our food comes from California, particularly the San Joaquin Valley and that area.
• 28:36
  And then it's trucked or or uh rail, but mostly trucked by this elaborate system of cheap fuel dependent, still relatively cheap fuel compared to historically, all the way to Vermont.
• 28:49
  Vermont is now in that importer of most of its foods.
• 28:52
  And and so this is, you know, again, I think my ancestors would say, well, that's insane.
• 28:57
  You're totally totally dependent on others far, far away, and you have no control over them, and you could all die pretty quickly of starvation, a miserable way to go, because you gave up your self-reliance.
• 29:08
  You gave up your culture, your economy, you gave up your landscape, you gave up your healthy soils and let the trees grow back to be rewilded or put to solar panels while Pied Pipers told you that this was going to be wise.
• 29:22
  And history will show that this was folly, and that we need to reclaim our own local agriculture as a nation and stop becoming increasingly dependent on foreign countries that often are not overseeing the quality of the food.
• 29:37
  You know, we have a big problem with USDA organic now.
• 29:39
  We import about 40% of USDA organic food is imported, and often it's found to be contaminated because less scrupulous countries might just cheat a little bit.
• 29:49
  And that disadvantages our farmers in the organic field, but also exposes us to all kinds of chemicals.
• 29:54
  It could almost be a form of sabotage.
• 29:57
  And so what we're trying to do in Maha is
• 30:00
  Educate people and reclaim.
• 30:02
  And Bobby Kennedy is your right, he's a great speaker, and he's done a lot to infuse a grassroots movement, especially amongst young people who are becoming more aware of how animals are treated and why meat is healthy.
• 30:15
  You'll remember when we were told meat is bad, butter's bad, milk is bad, eggs are bad.
• 30:20
  Don't eat eggs, they'll kill you.
• 30:21
  Now we know it's a superfood.
• 30:24
  There's a new day dawning in American food supplies.
• 30:27
  And now we need to create a new generation of farmers to grow it for us because our farmers are getting older and young people, there are a lot of real problems, real difficulties in learning how to farm, let alone affording farming land, and most of the farmland's gone.
• 30:44
  And once you put it into suburbia, once you put it in a commercial parking lots, it doesn't come back again.
• 30:49
  So this is why, you know, in my next book, the the coming food crisis, I talk about how you know we face perhaps food scarcity, we we face threats to our food quality, and we also face a huge threat of food inflation.
• 31:04
  It's something, again, with my background in tax and finance, I talk about in the book and try to just boil that down so people can understand that when milk is a thousand dollars a gallon, they're gonna pay more attention to what where the cows are.
• 31:17
  And when I say when milk is a thousand dollars a gallon, I'm just talking about money supply.
• 31:22
  You know, I I could buy a brand new pickup truck for uh for less than $15,000, a Chevy four-wheel drive pickup in 1996 is now what?
• 31:32
  70, 80,000 or more.
• 31:35
  Yeah.
• 31:36
  A lot of that has to do simply with inflation.
• 31:38
  You know, I used to be able to go to the store.
• 31:40
  I used to get a 33% tip for um for as a breakfast as a as a waiter, I get a 33% tip when somebody gave me a dollar as a tip because they could buy breakfast for three bucks.
• 31:54
  And now you could spend 30 bucks a person on breakfast in a lot of places, and so that's just inflation.
• 32:00
  That's and and when you look at inflation and how, especially with this cheap fuel dependency we have, how much inflation could ravish our food supplies.
• 32:09
  We just saw just an inkling of that, just uh you know, uh a little hint of that during COVID.
• 32:14
  That's nothing compared to hyperinflation, which has struck countries like Zimbabwe and Venezuela and other countries through history.
• 32:22
  So I'll stop my rant there and leave it to you to lead me further.
• 32:26
  Well, I think that's fascinating because I and you're right, COVID was a wake-up call for a lot of us, myself included.
• 32:33
  Because I I mean my background, I've been a reporter and editor for newspapers and magazines and a content writer, excuse me, and uh publicist.
• 32:44
  I've been in the communication field my whole career, but I was more into just my career, and then uh COVID arises, and that and I know we've talked about faith and that revitalized my commitment to faith since then, and then awakened me on the food doesn't you know where does your food come from?
• 33:06
  I know uh food independence summit, which is up in Amish Country.
• 33:10
  Uh John Miller, he has superb canning and Marcus Wingerd who has Berlin seeds.
• 33:17
  They have uh food independence summit, and it's now called the Seed the Spoon Summit, and they talk about soil health all the way to preservation, and now that's become a big part of my life, that whole aspect.
• 33:33
  I mean, I used I wrote the story where I got back, I've lost 65 pounds getting back into the shape I used to be in just by eliminating processed foods and eating whole foods and even like the when I have like something sweet, I'll have like uh an Amish fry pie or something uh and that's rare, but I'll have something that's not you know, I don't I used to eat like Oreos and Nutter butters and things all the preserved foods and so now I get I'm down here in an area in Appalachian Foothills of Southern Ohio where there's a lot of Amish farms and as they call them English farms, and so I'm starting to understand where to get eggs and where to get milk and where to get meat, and I think that's uh it just seems like that's something that needs to happen more of I mean it's impacted me personally, but I mean, as a whole locally sourcing, I know that's something that we all talk about a lot.
• 34:42
  Anyone who's a Maha proponent.
• 34:44
  What do you think about that as far as because I know this is your life because you raise and you could talk about uh you can tell the listeners what you do.
• 34:51
  I know you raise uh beef or you raise cattle, but being a regenerative farmer, uh I think that that's uh and I know that's a passion for you, the promoting local local sourced in these days.
• 35:07
  Well, and and I think you know, you've actually whether or not intentionally hit on another nuance, which is there's local versus organic, and they're not necessarily the same.
• 35:16
  And as I point out in Small Farm Republic, a local product that's raised conventionally might have less deleterious impact on the environment uh than an organic product that's shipped from, let's say, Mexico, even assuming it's organic.
• 35:34
  There are a lot of fossil fuels involved in the packaging and shipping of that product, it also is likely to be less fresh.
• 35:41
  So you might be better off with a local uh just down the road farm stand, even if they used some synthetic fertilizers than buying something organic from far, far away.
• 35:51
  If your goal was freshness and less uh adverse impact on the environment, and we haven't counted their supporting your local rural economy rather than a foreign one.
• 36:02
  And Wendell Barry observed that globalization was the greatest weapon of mass destruction ever designed by man.
• 36:10
  And what he was talking about is how, because we can talk about being multicultural and supporting foreign countries, but if you don't support your own backyard, you're not going to have any wealth to support a foreign country with, right?
• 36:23
  And the globalist effort through the WEF and the UN and others to consolidate food production under an industrial model is the greatest threat to humanity ever.
• 36:32
  And I believe it's by design, which is what I describe in my upcoming book coming out uh March 17th.
• 36:38
  If people want to look on Amazon, it's called the coming food crisis.
• 36:42
  And it talks about you know these aspects of um a globalist effort that basically, and this is what's going on, by the way, in the in the European Union with all the various fights with the farmers.
• 36:53
  They're saying, well, you're destroying the climate and you're destroying wildlife and cows are a problem.
• 37:00
  So you have to get rid of cows, and you small peasant farmers, you don't really produce all the the food anyway.
• 37:06
  We industrial farmers do, and so we need to move to a global system of industrial farming that depends on GMO crops and glyphosate, because we're gonna save the world from carbon dioxide by doing that.
• 37:18
  That literally is their argument.
• 37:20
  What they are really doing is trying to maximize profit and market share.
• 37:24
  It's the oldest game in the in the book.
• 37:26
  They're not actually there to uh you know, altruist altruistically save humanity.
• 37:32
  That's just their front.
• 37:33
  All right.
• 37:33
  And that's there are some 400 million peasant farmers around the world, and they are in their sights because they're saying, Oh, these farmers are destroying the land, they're destroying the water, and yes, poor farming practices do that.
• 37:46
  But again, regenerative farming actually um improves soil so they retain more water with more water retention, you hold more of the natural rainwater, especially in places like our Midwest, so that you don't have to deplete the our precious aquifers, the Ogallala aquifer in particular, but others that are that some scientists say within 20 years, as little as few as 20 years could be fully depleted.
• 38:10
  And a lot of that water is tainted as well because of uh fracking and pumping the fracking water back into the groundwater, so there's that.
• 38:18
  But um it's so it's all interconnected in it, and and I don't mean to make it sound more complicated than it is, because it's actually really quite simple, Jeff.
• 38:27
  And so the first thing we had to do was wake up the consumer.
• 38:31
  And Bobby Kennedy did that.
• 38:33
  People can howl at him about vaccines or worm in his brain or whatever they want to do, but he was on the campaign trail, and he told people over and over and over again that your great enemy is chronic disease from what you eat from those nutter butters and Oreos that do not grow on plants.
• 38:50
  They are made in a factory and they're made with stuff that's really nutrient deficient, if not tainted with additives that are designed to make you keep eating when you're not hungry anymore, that are designed to make something taste good that you would never eat if it was not flavored that way.
• 39:05
  That a rat wouldn't eat if you put that Oreo on the floor, a rat probably wouldn't need it, a fly wouldn't eat it, the bacteria won't eat it, nothing wants to eat it except you, because you've been made addicted to something that's not found in nature.
• 39:19
  And that's why I could see you finding your way back to God in it too, because there is a sort of insidious, perverse sort of um almost demonic force that seems to be going on here when you've got a whole population of people that are moving towards we govy and insulin and pharmaceutical dependency from a company like Bear, which is the same company that may have seen sowed all of those illnesses that they now have the remedy for.
• 39:45
  I compare it to being a cannabis shop that also sells ice cream.
• 39:50
  I, you know, I make you addicted, and then I treat the consequences of your addiction.
• 39:56
  That's what Bear Monsanto is doing.
• 39:58
  And so in order to
• 40:00
  To liberate ourselves from that, we first and foremost have to have consumers make choices in the grocery stores and the restaurants to eat healthier food to see the outcome.
• 40:09
  And then, like you, they'll tell other people look, you know, there's a solution.
• 40:13
  You don't have to give yourself an injection every day.
• 40:15
  You can just eat healthier food.
• 40:17
  Pick, right?
• 40:18
  And once we do that, then we've got more of those consumers, as we call them, which is kind of a perhaps uh debasing term, like we're some kind of CAFO animals ourselves to be fed on a conveyor belt.
• 40:31
  But those consumers are also voters.
• 40:34
  And now they say, I want to elect somebody that puts my children's health in public schools above that of Cisco or other corporations that made profits off my children while making them sick and making them anxious and making them depressed and making them addicted, and maybe making them have disruptions to their uh reproductive systems, their fertility, or what gender they are.
• 40:56
  Look up atrazine.
• 40:58
  It's an endocrine disruptor that mimics estrogen.
• 41:02
  Um these are chemicals that under grass generally regard or recognize as safe.
• 41:07
  We just let companies put them in food and they do their own testing.
• 41:10
  And so when Bobby Kennedy also said that our the agencies that were created with our taxpayer dollars to protect us from food toxins have been co-opted and captured by the very industries they were supposed to police, that should be a wake-up call.
• 41:28
  And I think more people are waking up.
• 41:29
  The same as at the SEC, you know, when you've got stock traders, the same with the CDC, when you've got pharmaceutical companies in, you know, uh you know, in a revolving door transition back and forth between the federal agencies uh and those that they're supposed to regulate.
• 41:46
  This is something more and more Americans are waking up about, and that's why they're losing uh trust in the institutions that were supposed to be protecting us, and we need to reclaim those institutions.
• 41:56
  So that's what Maha is about.
• 41:58
  You know, it's not about vaccines as much as it's about food quality.
• 42:02
  And Bobby Kennedy deserves a lot of credit for helping more and more people realize that yes, something's wrong in Denmark.
• 42:10
  Something's wrong.
• 42:10
  And if you look in the mirror and you look in your in your kitchen cupboards, I'll show you where it is.
• 42:17
  It's in your food supply.
• 42:18
  And you have to take personal responsibility to change your behaviors, but then you we also have to take responsibility to create the markets to start satisfying people with healthy food that makes them feel good after eating rather than feel sickly.
• 42:33
  Yeah, and that's a good segue because uh you're and you're exactly right about that, as far as we have to take personal responsibility.
• 42:41
  I know I've had um parts of my, I mean, a lot of my life I've been in good shape because I've always played uh been active, hiked, played basketball, uh but once I got into my 40s, I started getting out of shape, and then I because I'm a I'm a little over 6'4, and where I am now, about 215 is a good weight, but I got up to 278 uh up in uh like last May at this time.
• 43:09
  And that's when I started making my changes, getting back to being active, but also for the first time in my life, cutting out the processed foods and getting uh locally sourced foods, and understanding the difference between uh like food food produced with uh pesticides and food that is not and so obviously uh it's important that consumer uh us as people and consumers come to that, have that willpower and discipline and understanding, but obviously if there's not the regenerative farmers to supply that, then there won't be the supply.
• 43:51
  So and I know you uh have talked about that, and your uh your upcoming books kind of addressed that.
• 44:00
  And then I saw uh Substack that you did, I think it was today about the regenerative agriculture incentive loan program.
• 44:10
  And uh what can you tell me about that as far as uh obviously to get more farmers who produce regeneratively so we could get the food supply that helps people get healthy?
• 44:22
  Uh what are steps being taken and what do you think needs to happen?
• 44:26
  Well, part of it is happening in this conversation and in your own life experience in my own.
• 44:31
  That first we have to wake up to the problem in order to try to solve it.
• 44:35
  And we've got people, you know, watching commodity markets and chasing things like silver, right?
• 44:40
  Silver prices are up, and people watch that and they want to invest, they want to get into silver because they don't want to miss the boat.
• 44:45
  Well, what about healthy food?
• 44:47
  Isn't that more valuable than silver?
• 44:49
  And what happens if it spikes in high prices?
• 44:51
  You don't have the option.
• 44:52
  You don't you don't have to buy silver.
• 44:54
  If you don't have the money, you can't buy silver, but you have to buy food.
• 44:57
  And so actually, if I could just take a little diversion, I want to plant a seed here uh of thought and and compare this to your own journey and my own, which is that I think an important thing is for people not to be afraid of the industrial food supply as much as they're drawn to a healthier one.
• 45:17
  And by that I mean actually to paraphrase uh Wendell Barry again, he talked about this in his book, The Art of Loading Brush.
• 45:25
  He talked about growing up in with a the idea of a nuclear threat and the cold war hanging over him all the time as a young father with young children.
• 45:34
  And now he didn't have the money to build a an underground bunker to hide when the you know the commies dropped the H bomb on him.
• 45:42
  And he said, What after a while, what happens is you you develop a resignation.
• 45:47
  You can't build the underground bunker, and so you become sort of stagnant in your thought, and you just accept your your your the threat.
• 45:55
  And a lot of people do that with food, and when they're intimidated by the complexities of reading a label or what they can trust, or whether that's really grass-finished or not, or whether that organic label really means anything, or they just they just a corporation slapped it on there, then they can uh fall victim of resignation and say, you know what, this is complicated, everything's toxic.
• 46:15
  I'm just gonna eat my nut or butters.
• 46:17
  I can't remember the last time I had a nut or butter now that I'm picking on you.
• 46:21
  I do have a uh uh a problem with anything home-baked, though.
• 46:24
  And you know, sugar's really not that good for you.
• 46:27
  I hope it's home-baked with maple syrup, but when it's home-baked, you know, I gotta try it, you know.
• 46:32
  I like cookies.
• 46:33
  Um, and and my donut around my waist is is made of cookies, I think.
• 46:38
  Um and I downsize and answer your question earlier about, you know, I we used to have a larger farm with a lot more animals, and I've gradually downsized so that I could spend more time advocating for other people to farm.
• 46:51
  And uh, and because of my own health struggles, but really more and more as I sold all my sheep this last year, 25 years of breeding.
• 46:58
  I loved my sheep and I love eating lamb.
• 47:01
  But if I'm gonna go to DC and I'm gonna work for Maha and I'm gonna work to improve food supplies for all Americans and even all around the world, then I had to pick and choose.
• 47:09
  But that means I don't get as much exercise.
• 47:12
  So I have put weight on because all I got to do is look at food now, and that donut is like, whoa, yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna bulge out some more.
• 47:20
  But so I think, you know, I would advocate for people to think about their food supply, not out of fear but out of joy.
• 47:26
  We have taken a complex, God-given life source of food from dirt to our plate and our bellies and our minds.
• 47:35
  And we have degraded it.
• 47:37
  We have taken it for granted.
• 47:39
  We have reduced it down to calories and dollars and cents and packaging and ounces.
• 47:46
  And so we can replace the fear of our food supply supply with the joy of discovering healthy food again and and counter that reductionism with um embracing the miraculous with understanding that life is a miracle, uh, to quote a Wendell Berry title, and start exploring our food supplies and growing some things as you've done, and find out that it gives you purpose and joy, and even and when the bugs eat all of your cabbages and you figure out what it was and try to counter it, now you've engaged in the adversarial life of the farmer.
• 48:20
  You know, it's not just rain clouds.
• 48:22
  Um, as far as the loans for regenerative farming uh article, which was published last week originally at uh Ag Daily, that's sort of a middle road argument.
• 48:32
  So again, we don't want to alienate farmers between the industrialists and the organics.
• 48:38
  We don't want to do that.
• 48:39
  I was tempted to do that early on in my own learning curve.
• 48:43
  Um, but there's no sense in vilifying either side.
• 48:46
  And there's a middle road, and increasingly conventional farmers are learning that they can employ regenerative practices that still fall short of being certified organic, but reduce the amount of money they spend on their inputs, maintain or even improve their yields, rebuild their soils, and start becoming liberated from their dependency and enslavement on chemical inputs.
• 49:07
  And that to me is a sweet spot.
• 49:09
  So, what are the tools we could do to use to do that using a carrot rather than a stick, because farmers tend to not be real happy about mandates, is to say, okay, you'll get a lower interest loan, a variable rate loan, and the more regenerative practices you use, the lower will bring your rate down, down to a 1% rate.
• 49:28
  And a lot of these farms are working on very narrow margins, and their crop prices have plummeted.
• 49:33
  Um, we're in trade wars, and and you know, with especially corn and soy, which we export, those are our big agricultural exporters, uh, export products, commodities.
• 49:44
  Um tractors are up, like those pickup trucks.
• 49:47
  Umil fertilizers, synthetic fertilizers tripled during COVID.
• 49:52
  They haven't come all the way back down again, but overnight they tripled because of the supply lines upon which they depend.
• 49:58
  Herbicides, pesticides.
• 50:00
  Fungicides, redenticides, these all cost money.
• 50:04
  And land and interest rates have been very high.
• 50:07
  So very an example of how we can help farmers become regenerative, and then once they hopefully get a toe dipped in the water, realize that they can make more money with fewer inputs.
• 50:20
  Even if their crop yields dropped a little bit, if they can command a higher price in a in a market that will pay them a premium to avoid those chemicals and to rebuild soils, then uh they're going to start shifting in that direction.
• 50:32
  So low interest loans is a good investment.
• 50:34
  Farmers have a very low uh default rate.
• 50:38
  So lenders, whether public or private will get their money back while helping our farming communities and our rural communities economically, culturally, et cetera.
• 50:48
  But what about also other methods beyond that?
• 50:51
  What about helping with marketing, helping procure more food for public use, public schools, our military, buying from domestic regeneratively produced farmers and paying a little bit more money for that?
• 51:02
  Part of the Maha movement and part of what Bobby Kennedy's trying to do at HHS is to prove that if we spent more on healthier food, that we would have savings, we wouldn't be spending more, we'd be spending less because we would save money on the other side in the response to the health crisis that results.
• 51:20
  In other words, we'd save on the Azempic and the insulin and the surgeries and the hospitalizations.
• 51:25
  We have the evidence, and you and I are examples of this that food can not only be preventive of illness, but can be curative of illness.
• 51:33
  So if we as a society start to turn the worm, so to speak, away from industrial dependency and towards maybe more expensive food, but it's healthier, it won't be more expensive.
• 51:46
  You know, those nutter butters and things in the long term are going to give you cancer and are going to give you obesity.
• 51:51
  They're going to give you all kinds of health problems, maybe even um Alzheimer's and other problems as we find out because there are thousands of chemicals in our food supplies.
• 52:00
  And we've never done any studies about how they interact in the body.
• 52:04
  And just that's just such a daunting venture to even try to do anyway.
• 52:08
  But we know that when we return to the joyful, uh, if difficult, because things in life worth having are usually require adversity.
• 52:17
  The joyful food that we raise from local farmers who we know supporting our local communities and building our local soils, then it's a win-win because we don't have to sort out which chemicals are bad for us because we're not eating them.
• 52:32
  And we're starting to reverse this cycle.
• 52:35
  And so it should be something that people get excited about.
• 52:39
  But the big daunting task that I've pointed out, because you know, I meet a lot of people in DC, and they're well intentioned or maybe they're not, but they don't understand farming.
• 52:49
  We don't have enough farmings uh farmers in our in our legislatures or our government agencies anymore.
• 52:55
  Once upon a time in those that colonial era era, I think 70 or 80% or more of all of our founding fathers and legislators were farmers.
• 53:04
  That was the main occupation at the time.
• 53:06
  And uh so people with no common sense, particularly the WEF and globalist organizations and NGOs are trying to dominate and make rules for farmers to follow.
• 53:17
  Uh the WEF has a big thing they put together between Bayer and Zurich Insurance and BASF, the chemical company, about this big agricultural plan for the future that Klaus Schwab croaks about.
• 53:30
  And it's all a bunch of garbage.
• 53:32
  Any farmer could poke 20,000 holes in it in about 10 minutes, but they are sort of like emperors with no clothes.
• 53:41
  So the big problem that I point out to people is you want President Trump to bring down grocery prices while improving the quality of food.
• 53:51
  Well, economics dictate otherwise.
• 53:53
  It doesn't work like that.
• 53:55
  And we're still going to pay farmers for the practices that yield those those better quality foods that cost more for a reason because when you get rid of the shortcuts that that hurt soils and hurt human health, well, it's not so cheap anymore.
• 54:08
  Now, Americans have been become dependent on a food supply that is only about 9% of their household income from like the 1960s up till the early 2000s.
• 54:18
  That's about what Americans had to spend on food.
• 54:20
  And historically, through history, this is not the way it's worked.
• 54:24
  It's all ultimately based on cheap fuel and cutting corners in production.
• 54:30
  And now we're realizing this, and we want to get off this addictive sickening uh dependency, right?
• 54:36
  And we want it all to still be at 9% of our annual income, which which right now is more like 12% since COVID during the Biden spending spree on renewables, which do not, you cannot eat them.
• 54:49
  Um how do you do that?
• 54:51
  So low interest rate loans is one way.
• 54:55
  Uh increasing um aggregation and purchasing opportunities for farmers to encourage them to become regenerative is another, simply using the markets.
• 55:03
  But another that I'm increasingly working on with many people globally as well as here in the U.S.
• 55:10
  is to develop a soil health credit, not a carbon credit that once again is reductionist because all it measures is that carbon molecule, carbon dioxide molecule.
• 55:20
  It actually measures things like water retention, microbial health, nutrient capacity and density of the soil.
• 55:26
  And it's something that we can pay farmers to do and create a market for that, and that's one way to also increase farmer income to shift to regenerative without putting a greater price burden on the consumer in the grocery store.
• 55:40
  But if we were to increase and suddenly go tomorrow, we want all our food to be organic, no more glyphosate, no more chemicals.
• 55:48
  We wouldn't just have the political backlash of entrenched interests that control our food supply, making trillions of dollars on it.
• 55:55
  Um we would have the problem that that food does not exist.
• 55:58
  And we would see skyrocketing inflation for those healthy foods that a lot of people couldn't afford, and there would be, you know, uh rebellion in the streets and backlash.
• 56:09
  So we have to, but if we increase the production too quickly and didn't have a market for it, then the farmers producing it would fail.
• 56:15
  So it's imperative for the Maha movement, and something I work on every day to um both bring down increase the demand for healthy regeneratively produced foods and the supply in tandem.
• 56:28
  Only one percent of U.S.
• 56:30
  food is organic in production right now.
• 56:32
  That's a crisis, and we don't want people to panic and run for the exits like in a theater.
• 56:37
  Um we need to gradually escort them down the aisle with lights to show them how to escape through the exit hatch and get back to fresh air, fresh water, and healthy food and healthy soils and healthy gut microbiomes and healthy children.
• 56:50
  And that's my rant.
• 56:52
  Yeah.
• 56:52
  Well, that's been uh this has been an interesting conversation as I knew it would, and we're we've reached the end and uh of this conversation, but I'd like to have you on again here in the uh future, and uh I'm talking to uh John Clark and John uh I know people can find you on Substack, and I'm gonna put an article up uh on uh the America Out Loud Network site uh based on the show, and so people will be able to find you there and uh appreciate you joining us.
• 57:27
  I appreciate what you're doing.
• 57:28
  I don't think you could pick a more important subject than regenerative agriculture and it's not going away.
• 57:33
  It's gonna be the new thing, and you're right on top of it.
• 57:36
  So I hope more people will join us and get on top of it and learn where their food's coming from and not be intimidated by the complexity, but actually embrace it.
• 57:44
  Thank you very much, Jeff.
• 57:45
  Well, thanks again, John, and uh I'm Jeff Lauderbach, and that's the Maha Lugo.