Latest / Man in America Podcast / The War on Farmers: How Corporations KILLED the American Food System w/ John Klar

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The War on Farmers: How Corporations KILLED the American Food System w/ John Klar · Man in America Podcast

• 0:13
  Speaker 1: America now has fewer farms than it did a hundred years ago. Back then, we had a 100,000,000,000 people to feed. Today, we have around 340,000,000, and the average American farmer is 61 years old. 61 years old. Half of them will be gone within fifteen years, and most Americans have absolutely no idea.
• 0:33
  My guest today though knows all about this. He's been living it. He's been studying it. He's been fighting it. His name is John Klar.
• 0:40
  So John is a former attorney who left a law practice in Connecticut after nearly dying from Lyme disease. He didn't go back to the city though, he went to the land. And so for over twenty five years, he's been a grass fed farmer in Vermont. And while other people were just farming, John was also watching, connecting the dots, using his legal and tax background to ask the questions that most farmers don't even know to ask. Why are these regulations here?
• 1:05
  Who benefits? Why is it so hard to just grow food and make a living? So he wrote all these answers down in his recent book called The Coming Food Crisis, How Corporations, Activists, and Climate Alarmists are Waging War on Farmers. And now he's working inside the MAHA movement to fight for both the American farmers and the Americans consumers at the same time. So in this interview, you're gonna learn how our food supply has been deliberately consolidated into the hands of a small number of massive corporations.
• 1:34
  You're gonna find out how that creates a level of dependency that most Americans don't even realize that they're in, and you're gonna hear real practical things that you can do starting right now in your own family, your own community to reduce your vulnerability and start taking back control. So this isn't doom and gloom. This is eyes open. Forewarned is forearmed. Right?
• 1:54
  So welcome to Man in America, a voice of reason in a world gone mad. I'm your host, Seth Holehouse. On this show, I talk to real Americans with real solutions to the real problems that we're all facing today. I help you to connect the dots between the problems we see in the present with the powerful decisions that were made by these mysterious people throughout the past. Because once we understand how we got here and what the real history of America is, we can remember where we came from, really learn from the past, and make real change for a better future.
• 2:25
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• 2:38
  I I love reading through those. And every show, Man in America is done as a podcast as well as a video. So if you wanna listen instead of watch, just go up your podcast app, you'll find me there. And if you use Apple Podcasts, anyone do me a real favor, just leave a little review there, because Apple really prioritizes those reviews for their podcasts. So it just helps to reach even more people.
• 2:58
  Alright, let's get into our interview today with my guest, John Klar. Mr. John Klar, it's good to have you on the show, and I'm really looking forward to this discussion. So thanks for giving us your time today.
• 3:09
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much for having me. I'm looking forward to it as well.
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: So you have a really fascinating background that you are if I know correctly, you are an attorney turned grass fed farmer. And now you're involved with a lot more things, not just you know, you're running your own little farm, but looking at the bigger picture of what farming and health mean in America. And so, I guess, why don't you start with just giving us a little bit of your background story of what created the the man I'm looking at now?
• 3:37
  Speaker 2: Well, I think the first thing I'd wanna issue is a disclaimer. You know, some of us can talk as farmers about how, you know, you should you should jump out of the city and jump on a farm like we're somehow insightful and many people are, but I wasn't. I fell into it. My story is one of illness. I was practicing law in Connecticut and I got really, really sick with Lyme disease.
• 3:58
  And so I decided that I needed to do something where I needed to be physically active because I was on antibiotics for years and I also had spent my life just trying to make a living and I decided that I wanted to raise my family in Vermont where my extended family is and where my children wouldn't be exposed to risks from ticks from Lyme disease. But the ticks are here now. And so over a period of time, so I didn't even jump off a cliff to say, oh, I'm going go be a farmer. I literally was fleeing an illness and farming ended up teaching me so much about my own body, my health, about the world around me, about the economy, about the regulations. And then my old tax background and my law background came to play because most farmers don't have those disciplines.
• 4:44
  So I would look at things like, why is this regulation here? Why is this so expensive in the store? And why is it so difficult to just make a living farming? And that twenty five year journey is the foundation of pretty much everything I'm doing now. Trying to we've cut down the size of the farm because I had to decide whether I was going to farm or help other people farm and at my age, I want to open more doors to help more Americans farm.
• 5:11
  I think it's perhaps the most important issue facing us today, and most people do not realize their peril.
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: I couldn't agree more with that last statement. And and this is also why I think, I've I've been more drawn to your work is because you're not just someone that sees the specifics of your industry or the specifics of farming. You're looking at the role of food and population control in global agenda. And actually, I'll pull up a quote. This is for well, this is it was attributed to Kissinger whether he said it or not.
• 5:45
  It's, you know, kind of the quote is still the quote. And we know what Kissinger believes, so it matches. So he said, supposedly, who controls the food supply controls the people. He also says, you know, who controls the energy controls whole continents, who controls money can control the world. But look at that first one of who controls the food supply controls the people.
• 6:05
  And if you look at let's just look at what's happened in America, like so many other things that if you go back a hundred years ago, whether it was the amount of small local banks that have now been consolidated in these big banking giants, whether it was the doctors that used to be you'd have your small local doctor. You know, even now, you know, you you can't go find an HVAC company without running into a big one that's owned by BlackRock or some sort of investment bank now. So it's been a process of things, slowly just consolidating, which is what tends to happen as, you know, power extends for some time. And so but looking at what's happening with food in particular, you know, hundred years ago, the the kind of far average you know, the number of farms per people was significantly higher. And it was very common not just to have your your own local small farmer that you'd go to the market, you'd buy your food from, but also a lot of families have their own farms as well.
• 7:00
  Whereas now, most of what you see is monocrop ag agriculture. By and large, people are just walking in the grocery store, they're buying whatever's for sale on their local grocery store, and a lot of it's coming from Mexico or Israel or Brazil. If you're lucky, if it's in season in California, you'll get, you know, kinda grown in America that's roughly in season. But the whole food system has just changed. And there's a lot of indicators that those changes have not just been this organic, natural place to arrive here, but it's been very guided.
• 7:33
  And so, I guess, what how do you when you look at the food situation in America, especially as a farmer, what's the picture that you're seeing of just the sober reality of where we are right now?
• 7:46
  Speaker 2: Well, thank you. And and that's a good place to start with a bird's eye view, both of what I discussed in this latest book, but also really for people to understand what you just described. It's it's an evolution of dependency, we might say. And, I can't find where where Kissinger actually said that control the food, control the people, but that is the essence of what was contained in the Kissinger report, which I go over in the book and show how much it laid out a blueprint for what we're seeing now, which is a small handful of multinational corporations controlling the bulk of the world's food supplies under the pretense of protecting humanity from famine and climate change. What they're actually doing is bolstering corporate profits.
• 8:32
  So in responding to your question, being a lawyer, let me just I'll I'll give you and your audience a little bit of legal training here of sorts, which is don't make your case harder than it has to be. I don't have to prove that there's a conspiracy to take over the food supply to enslave us or control us when I can easily prove that it's happening for profit. Right? Whether there's an ulterior motive, I don't know. Did corporations make money selling shots?
• 9:01
  Yes. Could that mean they have the ability to act in unethical ways? Maybe. This is especially true in food production. We know this from the history of the tobacco companies that they would lie to keep selling people cigarettes that killed them knowingly if they killed them, even make them more addictive while selling them to them under the pretense that they were healthy for them.
• 9:21
  Okay. This we know. Those tobacco companies bought up the food industry. We now have the exact same unethical business model in our food supplies. 60 to 70% of all those foods that you mentioned in those grocery shelves are made from a few basic things, soy and corn mostly.
• 9:38
  Highly processed, inert ingredients that have very little nutritional value. That's very profitable. If I can get you to stop eating butter and eat margarine, I'm going to make a lot more money than if I have to milk a cow because I'm taking a waste product, hydrogenated fats made in factory process and turning something that's a plant product into an animal product, way more profitability. By the way, that was the pretense of fake meats. They were supposed to make higher profit returns by getting rid of farmers like me and my cows and just selling you something they can make out of corn or soy or something in a vat.
• 10:18
  If you really look at the environmental cost of that and the ecotoxins generated and the fossil fuels, it's absolutely insane. My cows eat God's solar panels. They're renewable. They don't come from China. They don't need to be disposed in a landfill twenty years ago, and those cows make delicious grass fed food for me without the intervention of a corporation or a government officer.
• 10:41
  And that's why they're going after cows, as far as I can tell. Cow farts, cow farts, why not go after lawn mowers? How about golf courses? How about things that are not essential for you to eat? The first thing they go after is agriculture.
• 10:54
  That should be suspicion number one. If you were my jury, I'd say, I'm trying to make a case that those who profit from your dining needs cannot be trusted and will increase their profitability even if it's at the expense of your health. We could talk opioid crisis as well. So where it's getting pivotal, and you asked me about America now in this. So if you look at Europe and all the farmers riots going on, I go through that in the book as well.
• 11:20
  I go through the history of how food has been used as a weapon. And what I often say to people is control the food, control the people. Control the farmers, control the food. The majority of American farmers, especially the conventional farmers, the larger the farmers, the more indentured they are to the agencies and corporations that really hold them in their sway. And so to really picture the modern food supply, you mentioned consolidation.
• 11:50
  It's not just the consolidation of farms, where you have people milking 10,000 cows in an operation where they used to have, you know, a thousand operations milking 10, right? That was New England, I'm in Vermont, you know. We've now got three forty million people and we've got fewer farms than we had a hundred years ago when we only had a 100,000,000 people. They've highly consolidated, so we're making more and more processed foods shipped from ever further away, as you mentioned. We're getting more and more food from China.
• 12:24
  Many of them process foods as well, and those create dependencies aside from any health issues. We're just talking about food security right now.
• 12:33
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• 12:49
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• 13:01
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• 14:13
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• 14:18
  Speaker 2: So where America stands versus Europe, where the farmers are in rebellion because these corporations pushed by the WEF and the UN and the WHO, oh, we're gonna help you. You have to stop eating meat. It's bad for you. You can only eat meat when we tell you. They literally did that during COVID in France.
• 14:35
  Five hundred grams a week, I forget. I write about it in the book. They actually were gonna they passed laws in you can't eat meat. You're gonna eat so much. I imagine the higher ups are still eating their big steaks, you know.
• 14:50
  But the real reason I raised Europe is that we're already way ahead of Europe. We're already way ahead of Europe in our consolidation. We go through drive throughs. We eat processed food. Europeans, you go to France, they really like their eschargo.
• 15:04
  They really like their bread. They really have really great food if you go there. Ireland, they really value their food supply having lived through a horrible experience of a famine. The Netherlands, one of the front lines of the fight, people don't realize that there was a famine inflicted deliberately on the Dutch people by the Nazis, a blockade. It was horrific and that's why The Netherlands became the largest food producers perhaps in the world per acre.
• 15:30
  And they're now being told that they're destroying the planet, so they have to stop producing food. It'll be produced somewhere else, presumably with similar or worse environmental costs. America is already way ahead of them. We don't really value our traditional foods the same way as like the Italians and their pasta. They pass laws against even calling it the wrong thing, you know.
• 15:50
  We want cheap and fast. We want processed. We don't care where it comes from. Just put it in my mouth so I can go consume, work, whatever. And that's the complacency that has led to a dependency on food that is less nutritious than our grandparents had and that we used to have in our backyards and one day we're going to wake up and go, wait a minute, when did I become so totally dependent on this corporate monopoly because all those other industries that you mentioned, you know, when we talk about fertilizer, seeds, equipment manufacturers, all of those industries are either monopolies or oligopolies.
• 16:32
  That's what's destroying the farmers. So when we bail out our commercial farmers in America, we're literally just using them as a conduit to give money to Dow and Monsanto and other companies. They're not closing up. They're not selling up their multi generational farms because they always get paid or they don't sell their product. When you're a farmer, you're bound to commodities markets.
• 16:52
  And so the entire modern conventional agricultural industrial system is flawed. It's not sustainable. It's in its death throes. That's what we're seeing right now. So people will become aware of this whether they like it or not, and they'll either see it in food shortages or food inflation or both.
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: And so and I think and, also, I wanna get to that. I'll bring up your book cause here. It's called The The Coming Food Crisis, How Corporations, Activists, and Climate Alarmists are Waging War on Farmers. So I wanna get to that and kinda dig into some of the information surrounding that. But before we we jump into that, though, you know, if you look at Europe, you mentioned Europe, you know, know, one of the big differences that you'll see between America and Europe that really proves the point you're making, how far, I guess, ahead we are in this or how far behind we are in health, is that so many of the pesticides, atrazine, glyphosate, etcetera, that they use here in many European countries, were never even introduced.
• 17:50
  Like, they looked at the studies at the very beginning and said there's no way we're gonna put these on our food for our people. And so, I think if you look at you have these giant corporations, which obviously have an immense amount of control over America, but I think that the real crux of the matter comes down to the regulatory agencies. And it's, it's this collusion of the, you know, FDA, the USDA, the EPA. It's these organizations that are supposed to be protecting the American people that are actually just protecting the corporations. You know, you look at what happened with the, forever chemicals, with DuPont, right, with Teflon, where, you know, one of the more famous cases where they they knew that they were poisoning people.
• 18:37
  They knew that they're killing and poisoning their own workers in the factory lines, and they're dumping it into the waterways. They knew all the stuff that they're doing, yet they kept on doing it. And then they paid some fines, and they kept on doing it. And and you could see through that process, that it was actually it was the the collusion with EPA and some of these other agencies that, in many ways, turned a blind eye. And so I think that that's one of the the the big things that is leading to the situation that we're in is that there is this it's almost like you could call it a, you know, fascism, right?
• 19:11
  It's this merger of the state and the private companies that, you know, these corporations. And without even getting into Big Pharma or any of those things, that's think it's a it's a very serious thing facing our country.
• 19:26
  Speaker 2: Well, is. And I think that at root, there's a fine line between a private, public partnership and how you just define fascism. I actually, my whole life have defined fascism that way when you have, you know, when when corporations and, or industry, we should say perhaps, and government are walking in lockstep and control us. And that is what we're seeing. And it tends to permeate all institutions.
• 19:51
  In other words, it can happen in a capitalist or a socialist society. We're not gonna just, you know, embrace Marxism and fix these problems. As Wendell Berry has pointed out, the socialists did a great job polluting their environment too. And so when we get to really looking at how we solve for these problems, these are huge problems. We didn't get here overnight.
• 20:10
  And so people shouldn't give up or be daunted by the challenge. In fact, just the opposite. We should be emboldened as our eyes are open to the need to reverse this. This could happen in any cultures, but our modern technologies have enabled the dependency that was unimaginable in the past. In fact, you know, in the past, I sometimes say, you know, people talk about preppers in a derogatory or pejorative way.
• 20:37
  And to me, that's silly. You know, my family, I'm seventh generation here in Vermont and they were subsistence farmers. They were preppers. They stored months worth of food. It's common sense.
• 20:50
  Either the world collapses and you're better off or the world doesn't collapse and you're better off. Everybody should be a prepper And so there's it's a win win and that's why I think there's room for everybody at this table. I also you know, I work within the MAHA organization. It's very exciting to see Democrats and Republicans coming together on these issues. Republicans, you know, conservatives waking up more to the importance of their food supplies and their farmers and Democrats who may already be in that area joining us.
• 21:19
  So there are so many so many positives about responding to this negative, but if we don't, we should not be surprised that there are those who would do bad things to us. You mentioned, I think it was three ms in particular had done a lot of the PFAS work. And they knew certainly by the 70s or 80s that their Scotch tape and their Scotchgard stuff was showing up in the blood of ninety seven percent of Americans and they covered it up. And so you mentioned it was the regulatory agencies. They're only partly culpable because they can only do what the law allows them to do.
• 21:56
  And people tend to stay ahead of the law. This is why, you know, as a tax lawyer, learned this. You create a new tax law, everybody will change their entire business organizations and everything to meet that. So then things squeeze out the cracks and you have to pass another law to stop the abuse. The same is happening within our food supply.
• 22:15
  But in the end, maybe we need to just have some stricter penalties. When a drug company can kill thousands or more of people with a drug like OxyContin and pay a huge fine and then still have come out on top profitability wise because that's what happens over and over, it's money. They actually arguably have a moral duty to their shareholders to kill people and make more money and that's what's starting to change and what we have to change. Now interestingly, we could look to China. I use this as an example, both of why you should be more careful about your food supply and why maybe we need to be a little more strident about enforcing it.
• 22:54
  About ten or twelve years ago, I think it was, it might have been longer, you might recall that there were pets dropping dead in The US from kidney failure and they traced it to a product called, I think it was melamine. Melamine or Valdean.
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: I think it melamine because it was in drywall as well, they found out.
• 23:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it was in drywall, but in the case of the pet food, they were putting it in. I don't know why it was in the drywall, maybe they get rid of it as a waste product, but in pet food, were putting it in to give a false nitrogen reading so that it looked like you had more protein content and you could advertise x percentage protein in your pet food. Now, they were doing the same thing in China with similar standards for baby formula. We in the West have not heard as much, but for decades, a lot of babies suffered kidney failure and death in China for baby food contaminated with melamine on purpose for money, just for money. Now, what I want to point out here, what most people don't realize is that I think three executives who were in charge of that in the baby food operation, baby formula, were publicly executed.
• 23:59
  Alright? Maybe it's time for us to have guillotines in our capitalist country. You know, we take forever to kill anybody for capital punishment, and then and then we're we're rooting for Luigi Mangini when he slaughters somebody, shoots somebody in the back of the head. We have corporate executives out there who are knowingly killing people all the time. We need jail time.
• 24:18
  This a basic issue of white collar crime. Right? And by the way, the reason I mentioned Melamine as well is as a lawyer and a farmer, was very curious about that. Was like, oh, you mean now companies have hundreds of millions of pounds of Chinese dog and cat food that they have to get rid of really quickly. They're not gonna ship it back to China.
• 24:37
  Costs a lot of money to landfill it. I wonder where it would go. And I figured it out as a businessman before I went and looked down the trail. Where did it go? It went to pig food.
• 24:48
  It went to swine. And that federal agency, I forget if it was FDA or which agency it was, seized and destroyed over 12,000 pigs because they had melamine in their bodies. That's what corporate America will do to make a profit. They will feed you melamine with a smile and tell you that's organic pork and charge you a premium and smile all the way to their barbecue while they do it. And so that's why we need to pay more attention to where our food comes from.
• 25:19
  Because food is cheap and plentiful, we have turned away. Like no society in history have we turned away and taken for granted one of the most important staples in our hierarchy of needs, which is food.
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: I couldn't agree more. Actually, it's a good time to really kind of dive into your book because I I feel like that there's a strong cognitive dissonance or normalcy bias with a lot of Americans. This idea that, well, I mean, this is America. Right? Yeah.
• 25:47
  You're gonna have famine in some third world country in Africa or, you know, some in some region hit by a hurricane, maybe you'll have some issues. But a lot of people, I think, America you know, I think it's it's changing, and there's more people coming to this. But by and large, I think the you go walk into Walmart or Costco, and you're gonna see the average American, they're still just going and lining up and buying box after box of processed foods and probably not that aware of their local farmers. And so, unfortunately, sometimes it takes something serious to really shake those people. It's kind the people that, you know, pre COVID, if you said that you're worried about government you know, the government kind of encroaching upon our freedoms, and you took top of the Patriot Act, they're gonna say, oh, you're a conspiracy theorist.
• 26:34
  Well, now they're saying, holy smokes. That government just shut down our businesses. It locked us in our homes. Like, they see it now. And I'm concerned about the food crisis.
• 26:43
  It's the same thing, but it's kinda one of the things that, you know, you'd you'd rather be ten years early than one day late with something like this. And so when you talk about the coming food crisis let's let's talk some more specifics here for the average American. What do you see happening to America? What do you see potentially happening to the food supply in America? How will that change the way of life for the average person in America that is just relying on groceries that got trucked in to their grocery store three days before?
• 27:16
  Yeah. Just kinda walk us through what what you potentially see coming out of this.
• 27:21
  Speaker 2: Well, specifically to that question, and and I and I wanna just preface this by saying, you know, the title of the book was originally the war on farmers. It was spun around from the current subtitle and and the coming food crisis. It was but we were afraid that consumers would think, ah, that that doesn't concern me. That's only farmers. What do I care?
• 27:40
  We made it the war on food because guess what? Consumers need farmers. We need each other, frankly. You know, it's the city mice and the country mice too. You know, the rural America is what provides the food to our urban centers.
• 27:55
  So people living in the city might go, what can I do? I can't grow any food. I'm on the way up and they move on. And yet they don't realize that they can be involved and not just rooftop gardening or hydroponics or empty lot gardening. Is happening.
• 28:08
  And so the worm is turning, in answer to your question. The worm is turning and that Americans are becoming aware, A, as we've been discussing that not all of their food is healthy and b, where will they get food at all if there's a disruption of this system? Now, know you talked with AJ Richards about this, about supply chain disruptions that we saw during COVID, but in identifying and answering your question now, what is the greatest threat I see? I document in the book, there are many. The purpose of the book is not to make people afraid, it's to make people prepared because forewarned is forearmed.
• 28:44
  If you can't fix it after the fact, Once people are struggling this way, it's too late and we have a lot of examples through history, but where people might dismiss me, I can then I think win them over this way. There could be, for instance, a a closure of the Strait Of Hormuz or other oil shipping areas. I discussed this in the book, which I published before Iran was invaded because I lived through the oil prices. I saw the price of cordwood go from $40 to a $100 overnight. This was in about 1974,
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: I think. You said price of cordwood?
• 29:23
  Speaker 2: A cord of wood. Yeah. A price of a cord of wood went from $40 to a $100, and everybody started
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: That's an interesting point right there. Just because that's new to me, that right there. So when there's the oil crisis, obviously, people more people are returning to wood to heat their homes because they can't it's, you know, less affordable to have to be buying oil, right, whatever you're you're using to heat your your home. So you saw the price of wood, just firewood, a quart of firewood went up, what, almost a a 150%. Right?
• 29:53
  From 40 to a $100 a cord.
• 29:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah. It went up 250%.
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: Oh, you're at $2.50
• 30:00
  Speaker 2: It increased by a 150%, which is 250
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: Oh, there you go.
• 30:03
  Speaker 2: I'm actually agreeing with you. But yes. Yeah. And and it could have gone higher. That crisis, we saw it end.
• 30:11
  And guess what? Americans went right back to buying gas guzzlers and Camaros in the 80s, muscle cars came back. There was a back to the land movement in the 1970s. As soon as the OPEC crisis ended, people went back off the land. It's too much work.
• 30:24
  What's happening now is different and, you know, and that's why MonHA is grassroots and I actually compare it to cigarettes. You know, you can find out that cigarettes are bad for you and some people keep smoking right through the oxygen tent to their death's door, right? But a lot of people will change their behaviors. Some people just like toxic food, but if you look at what's happening right now with the oil prices and you start to realize that all of that cheap food is dependent on energy, all right? Oil, Other energy, natural gas, which is used to make a lot of our fertilizers.
• 30:56
  All the rest of our fertilizers are moved around with oil and the food is moved around again, processed, dried, treated, packaged, all using oil, then distributed. So when you start getting your food from further and further away because it's cheaper and cheaper using foreign cheap labor or beneficial laws, you're obscuring the fact that that's all built on cheap energy and the whole thing gets punctured. Now, what happens when it gets punctured by high energy prices? Well, food inflation comes in. Now, what I document in the book is that an oil crisis is just one of many potential things that can impact this economic structure.
• 31:35
  This isn't local communities growing food and trading it at the fair. Alright? These are these are these are large corporate interests. These are are publicly traded companies, huge scale, huge long distances, all built on cheap fuel, all built on technology. You know, we import 90% of our antibiotics from China.
• 31:54
  That's not just for our military personnel, that's for our food. 70% of The US antibiotic use is in our livestock. Why? Because we're raising them in industrial confinement systems. So to try to demonstrate if this is okay because I'm being long winded, but is it alright, Seth, if I
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: No. Please do. I'm loving it.
• 32:13
  Speaker 2: So let me compare my cows behind me for those of you that are listening. I have two Hereford cows. They're
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: Question. How how did you get those cows to hold so still for your interview?
• 32:23
  Speaker 2: You saw that. Yeah. I had them taxiderm. They're both stuff that saves me a lot on feed, but I don't think they taste very good right now. But they were born here, and they they get nothing but grass.
• 32:35
  We give them a little bit of grain, just so if I need to move them, they'll come when I shake the bucket. If if I can get my grass in, in other words, I have pastures and then I put hay up for the winter, now I buy my hay. Now hay, right now hay is going $78 a bale. Twenty years ago, was $2 a bale. That's a little bit of inflation.
• 32:56
  Let's work on the percentage from two to seven. Right? That's more than tripled in price. It trickles up. But if you took my cows and you compare them to factory raised beef cows out west in a CAFO system, confinement animal feed operation, and you looked at the attendant costs, the energy needs.
• 33:19
  All right, so I use an old pickup truck and I go pick up bales. Now, are scale differences. We'll come back to this, but let's ignore the scale difference for a minute. If the price to fuel triples, the feed that goes into cows around the country and all those costs go up, because most of them are fed on grains, They're fed on corn and soy, right? Now corn and soy are very energy intensive crops.
• 33:43
  They're also really damaging the soils and causing water loss and so those are environmental aspects, but just looking at the economic aspects, let's say the price of fuel triples as it's kind of nearly doubled now. And we have many times in history, by the way, that's more than happened, more than tripled. And and by the way, something I point out in the book is energy prices can triple without an oil prices. They can triple solely because of monetary policy, something called inflation. Why is a pickup truck $80,000 now?
• 34:14
  In 1996, I bought a brand new Chevy, four wheel drive for $14,600 out of the off the line. $14.06. Did the truck get five times better? It's somewhat better. It's got a lot of bells and whistles and things I don't really want on it, microchips that I'd like to disconnect.
• 34:31
  But those industrial farms are all losing money now. The corn producers are all losing money now because everything they buy, all their inputs, their fertilizers, their diesel, their seed costs, their pesticides, their glyphosate, all of those are made out of chemicals, transported out of chemicals, layered costs, all right, hidden because they were cheap. As soon as they exponentially increase, they explode, all right? But not for me. The price of hay could go up a little bit, but it's not going to go up as exponentially as corn.
• 35:02
  I beg your pardon. It's literally If you did horse drawn conceivably and made your own hay with horse drawn equipment, you would be absolutely immunized from the inflationary pressures of an oil crisis. Right? So I've just given one example and I've shown multiple ways that energy prices can go up, and perhaps the biggest threat of all is inflation, monetary supply. We have almost $40,000,000,000,000 deficit.
• 35:29
  We can't just print money forever. We've been living off the tab for my whole lifetime. Alright? We've been in debt since before Reagan. Alright?
• 35:38
  And it just goes up and up. We still haven't paid off the S and L prices. We still haven't paid off the $7.08 prices. We just roll it into the debt like a huge credit card, and that should be what a lot of people are looking at because if nothing else gets you for food prices, then inflation itself could do it. But with all of those risks, the solution is local, small, diversified farms.
• 36:04
  People can say, oh, you can't feed the world that way. No, you can't because you've become industrialized, consolidated and done something really, really stupid. That's like, oh, I can't quit fentanyl now because I'm hooked, you know. We are addicted to cheap toxic food that destroys the soil microbes, destroys our gut microbes, destroys our water supplies, which are being depleted at an accelerating rate. We just had a desert, what is it, no, a winter drought, right, out west, you may have heard.
• 36:33
  If you don't generate enough water or snow in the Sierra Nevadas, you don't replenish your aquifers. California, where we produce about half of our domestic produce, the San Joaquin Valley, that area, the most productive area of land in agriculture in America is subsiding. It's literally sinking because we're pumping so much water out of the ground. It's not sustainable. And when you put 92,000,000 acres of corn a year or land a year to corn, about, I think, 40% of which is used for ethanol, total boondoggle.
• 37:07
  Gutted. Oh, back to regulatory cap for again. Back to back to congress. Back to how dare you question ethanol. As soon as you start touching the golden goose for corporations, you will be a silk wood, if you know what I mean.
• 37:22
  You will disappear. This is their gravy train, and that's what we small farmers are a threat to. They've been trying to get rid of small farmers for eighty years. They've been doing it. Why?
• 37:33
  Because they increase their profit margin, and they can control and dominate markets, and they can charge the consumers whatever they want because once you control the food, you control the people. And I will give up my AR 15 and my free speech rights and my right to travel or assemble very quickly if I've been three days without a morsel to eat. That's what history teaches us. Food is the foundation. Without food, you don't have national security.
• 38:00
  You can't march an army without its stomach, and you can't, wage a revolution. So they're trying to slowly pull that liberty, that that essential connection away from us, and and that's what I think more and more people are sensing and are seeking to reclaim. That's the homesteading movement. That's young people. And and by the way, the polls are showing, you mentioned earlier, people on the shelves, young people are reading their labels.
• 38:26
  Young people are scanning things and using apps to figure out where their food comes from. Young people want grass fed meat from animals that are well treated without antibiotic residues or, you know, veterinary medicine residues or hormones that their young human bodies don't need. That's our future. We old people, we're hard to change our habits. We like our Doritos, but young people are drinking kombucha.
• 38:51
  So that's our that's our hope.
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: There is a lot of hope there. I wanna pull up this this quick quote, attributed to Alfred Lewis nineteen o six. It says, there are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy. And I've heard this quote in a few different ways, and this may not be the original as you know with these quotes. It's like, you know, you know, in in ten years, they'll say it was Gandhi who said this.
• 39:13
  But this there's so much truth to that though because you made a really good point in saying that, a lot of people, they think that, okay, hey, they've they've got their guns, they're gonna, you know, they're gonna resist, they're gonna resist. But if they can't feed their family, they'll do whatever it takes. And I remember I was interviewing, a guy named Jeff Nyquist, who who's an an expert on China and communism. And I was asking him, I said, look, you know, for a lot of Americans, think that, you you know, China or Russia would never invade America. You know, they because we have we have hundreds of millions of guns here.
• 39:46
  We had the the world's largest, you know, private army. And, you know, he made a good point, and he said, look. He goes, they wouldn't just waltz in here and and get in a gunfight. He goes, but if they attack critical infrastructure in a way that they starve people out, if they cut off water, if they damage farming, agriculture, you know, you you give it even a couple of weeks, and most of those people that would have been resisting will be lining up for food. And and that's that's the key, though, is, you know, those nine meals between just what we see to get, you know, today's p relatively peaceful society and complete anarchy.
• 40:23
  Even a neighbor, a father that is a is a strong, good hearted man, if his children are starving to death, he'll do whatever it takes to protect his children. And that's just the sober reality. And, you know, if you look through, I'm sure you've obviously read a lot of books on this, and I've tried to read, you know, whether it's Mao's Red Famine or, you know, try to do my best to study upon these things as well. And what you see throughout history is when food shortages and famine, when they come in, the entire fabric of that society, everything that held the society together is just demolished overnight. So I interviewed a guy named Mark Wilburn.
• 41:06
  So he is the CEO, the cofounder of Neos Capital Development. And so Mark is a really interesting guy because he has a stock and finance background, yet he's very, very aware of what's really going on. He's not someone like a Jim Cramer or someone saying, hey. Invest in SpaceX. Invest in AI.
• 41:25
  You know, he's someone that truly understands the creature from Jekyll Island. You know, he understands the Federal Reserve. He knows the system is rigged. He understands the role of the global elites and their goals for us. But he's not someone that just kinda shies away the stock market.
• 41:38
  He's saying, look, don't just trust your four zero one k and shove it into the stock market. Learn how to play the game. Right? Learn how the game is rigged and learn how to play the game. And so one of the great things about him is that he loves teaching people.
• 41:50
  And so I'll pull up I have a little graphic here. So he has on this coming week, so on June 25 and then on also on so Thursday, June 25 or Saturday, June 27, he's doing a free seminar. So it's a couple of hours. There's gonna be q and a. Space is limited, but again, it's free.
• 42:06
  It's a live seminar, and it's called the Freedom Trading Summit. So it's, you know, Mark and other people there actually teaching you a lot of these tricks and inside information about, you know, how to approach the stock market as someone that understands how rigged the financial system is. And so if you want to attend to that, there's a link in the description or it's also just m I a, -neos, that's neos.com. We'll take you straight there or you can scan that QR code. So again, it's free to register.
• 42:32
  I'm gonna try and make it to one of these if I can because I've been hands off the stock stuff because I just like, okay, look, I'll just go buy some silver. However, there are ways of doing it where you can make good money and then kick that money out and then go buy your silver. So anyway, just wanna recommend you check that out. Again, it's mia-neos,neos,.com.
• 42:53
  Speaker 2: We don't realize this. We're kinda blind to this in America. We're blind to a lot of things in America, and you can see it in some of the movements, the vegan movement, the animal rights movement. That wouldn't have been possible a hundred years ago. You would have been just dismissed.
• 43:06
  Only the luxury of modern products and grocery stores give you even the fantasy world to imagine that you would somehow eliminate all animals from the food supply. You really wouldn't wanna do that if you you would be putting my cows out of life because if I don't sell meat, I can't feed them. People don't understand how much it costs to feed a cow. They're not really stuffed. They're out there right now waiting for more.
• 43:27
  They eat a lot. And so, I think that the real the real threats that are facing people that they're starting to wake up to is should be embraced as a hope. Right? Back to what we were talking about, and that people should get more informed about this so that they can be proactive in their own protection. I would say it's not nine days till anarchy.
• 43:55
  I'd say it's three days. I would say that people don't realize, again, we're complacent because we take things for granted. I've traveled the world a lot. I've worked a lot with supporting Ugandans. We don't know what true deprivation is.
• 44:09
  Even, you know, most the vast majority of Americans do not know what real want is and when they do, they'll panic and they think, oh, I'm gonna go hunt some deer. I'll go trout fishing. Well, here in Vermont in the Great Depression, all the deer were all were gone, almost all of them, through poaching very quickly. And this is in a very rural area. You're not getting there are a lot of deer in Connecticut, you know, they'll be gone though.
• 44:33
  They'll be gone fast because people don't realize how much food it takes. Imagine if you had to put aside all of your deodorant, your underarm deodorant for the rest of your life. How many bars of deodorant? How many tubes of toothpaste? How many packages of toilet paper we saw in COVID, a crisis, would you need to set aside?
• 44:54
  It's a lot. You'd need, you know, a storage facility, and we saw Americans going crazy hoarding toilet paper. What would they do? There were some limitations on food at that time, but what would they do if the stores were empty? And something I know because I stocked shelves at age 16 is that those shelves will be empty in three days without us us guys stocking them.
• 45:17
  Right? You've seen it maybe before a big storm. All the bread's gone, all the milk's gone, a lot of the water's gone, plenty of toilet paper usually. So, but also people will resort to barbarism. You mentioned it.
• 45:29
  Yes, in the name of protecting my children, are we gonna eat each other? What are we gonna eat? Because storing a lot of food for a food supply, you realize pretty quickly, and as preppers understand, it takes a lot of food. If it takes if your monthly budget's a thousand dollars right now for food, you're barely getting by, How do you put up six months worth of food? And that's what Vermonters did all the time.
• 45:52
  Both my grandmothers did. They had months worth of food. Everything was about food, recycling, saving things. They saved everything. That was from enduring the Great Depression.
• 46:03
  And you mentioned it earlier, it may take a shock for us to learn. Wendell Berry has written, he's an author in Kentucky and a farmer, that our only hope is in our collapse. I'm hoping that the COVID experience was a partial collapse, that currently with the Strait Of Hormuz closed, we're seeing a partial threat that's making people wake up and go, oh, you know, we're kind of vulnerable here. This is not a smart place to be. And if we could get more Americans involved, demand in a capitalist society leads everything.
• 46:36
  So if enough Americans insisted on only buying healthier food, if enough young people insisted on not buying food that was tainted with chemicals, those farmers and industries that produced those items would shift their production model. They only ship to this because we tolerate it. You mentioned Europe earlier, only allow 400, I think about 400 food additives. We have over 10,000 under grass generally regarded as safe and so we don't care. We trust corporations too much and ignore our neighborhood farmers too much and we will pay that price and we'll either pay it long term or short, but the sooner we start turning this around, again, it took us a long way to get here, it's time to turn the ship around and stop destroying our soil and our water and our children's health and our ecosystem all for short term profit, all built on cheap energy and printing of money.
• 47:35
  It cannot last. That's what my book's about and people are waking up to that, thanks to you and others and then we come up with solutions and we find them. We actually have them. We reclaim the knowledge of our past generations that we jettisoned again at our peril. You know, we we have taken it for granted that just because we've been in a time of peace that we'll always be at peace or that just because we've always had cheap food, we'll always have cheap food.
• 48:00
  I don't think we're ever getting $14,600 Chevy four wheel drive pickups back again. But anyway, but we could, That's a monetary issue. That's a monetary supply issue. We'll stay away from that. How else can I help you today, sir?
• 48:16
  I mean By rambling.
• 48:17
  Speaker 1: No. This is great. Well, because it is it is encouraging because I do see that there is a there's definitely a movement of people that's growing that are trying to just get back to the land. I think AI's accelerated. I think a lot of the younger generation, they hate AI.
• 48:34
  They're they're really put off by it. You know, they're not just adopting it like you would have thought. You know, they're going the opposite direction. And you mentioned these young ones drinking kombucha, and and you're right. There's definitely a a the tide is turning.
• 48:48
  And even I've met a lot of people or, you know, seen in the comments, people saying, oh, Seth, you know, from watching your show, we decided to move in, and now we have a small homestead. We're on three acres in the country. We've got chickens, and they moved from suburbia to that. And I think that's the the the the thing with this is that, you know, part of the hope that I see is that it's actually really easy to move yourself from, like, very, very critical and very exposed to actually quite secure. Now granted, if if someone's if if they've lived in the in Brooklyn their whole life, right, you don't want to be living in Brooklyn when the, you know, the crap hits the fan.
• 49:31
  Right? You're that's not a good place to be. But the and so that's a big change. But a lot of people are making some of these changes, or even if you live in a suburban area look, I grew up just outside of Columbus, Ohio. And even if you're living in Columbus, just outside the city limits, you know, 20 miles or so outside, there's farms everywhere.
• 49:49
  And so even for someone that says, you know what, I'm gonna stop, you know, buying my groceries from the local chain grocery store, you know, as much as you can, and start going to the farm market. And that's the thing is that even in these bigger city areas, in the summer, you know, most places, once a week on the weekends, you have a farm market. So that's a great way to meet all of your local farmers. And you can now so and that's that's what we've done. So now we, you know, we live in kind of Hudson Valley, Upstate New York area.
• 50:18
  And, you know, so I I've kinda gone through this process of, okay, if the local grocery store can just shut its doors, right, what would I do? It's like, okay, well, we get our milk. We have a raw milk farm about three miles that way. The cows aren't gonna stop making milk, right? So we got raw milk there.
• 50:37
  Our other farmer is another two miles the other way. So on my bicycle, I could ride around, and I could go to all the farms and get all the things I would basically need to sustain my family. Not to mention that we're on seven acres, and we've got gardens, we've got chickens, and we've got a lot of things like that. But I think the key is just that because so many people are living kind of, you know, grocery store trip to grocery store trip, that are very vulnerable, if if you're even if you're in in, like, the 5% of the population that makes a few small changes, Maybe you get a few months worth of some dried food to store up. You you meet your local farmer.
• 51:18
  You start doing those things. You take your threat from, like, a level 10 down to a level three, without massive changes in your life. And so and and there's a lot of people that are seeing this, and they're and they're seeking to to go back to that. And I I find that really encouraging.
• 51:34
  Speaker 2: I do too. And I think, you know, one so we're about to lose about half of all of our farmers in the next fifteen years because the average American farmer is 61 years old. And we don't have generations that wanna take that farmland on. So we're gonna sell it to the Chinese, to the Canadians who are the largest foreign landholders of US agricultural land. We're gonna sell it to hedge funds.
• 51:58
  We're gonna sell it to Bill Gates because he's not organic, you know. We need to find our young people that wanna do this and we need to help them do this. We've stacked the deck against them right now. Real estate prices are extraordinarily high. So, we saw it with COVID.
• 52:12
  We saw in New York City, people fleeing New York City. A lot of them moved to Vermont. Do they know how to farm? Nope. Joel Salatin estimates that it takes five years for a newcomer to learn how to farm.
• 52:23
  That it depends on what you're farming, but you hit on something else there whether you intended to or not. You hit on the idea of community that you can go one place for your raw milk and you go somewhere else and well, where do you go to get your oranges? You know, and by that I'm contrasting this, the community you live in, the Hudson Valley and the one I live in in Vermont from a hundred years ago. You didn't get a lot of oranges or bananas, you know. There are benefits to this modern food supply, but that's how it's allured us and deceived us because it's great that I can get avocados all year and strawberries all year, all at a cost.
• 52:57
  So overnight, if that rug was pulled, what you're saying is you could look at your existing resources, which could be scary for some people, but you immediately see that you need a community. You need a community of farmers when you come to your biodiversity. You know, when I want to breed them, need to go buy a bull. If I have a sow and I want a breeder, need to find a, you know, a boar somewhere. All of that's disappeared.
• 53:19
  All of that infrastructure that we need for these young people to come on board. And so I think that the more people learn rather than scoff at their vulnerability because some people say, oh, you preppers. Well, actually preppers make them nervous because they're not prepped. You with me? It's kinda like unvaccinated people like me make vaccinated people nervous because, you know, I don't know if I should go there or not.
• 53:43
  Get vaccinated if you want. Smoke cigarettes if you want. Eat Doritos if you want.
• 53:47
  Speaker 1: It's it's it's the fat guy at the beach or the fat woman at the beach that gets upset when the beautiful woman's in a bikini next to her. Right? There's a threat
• 53:55
  Speaker 2: there. Yeah. Right. And and I try not to make those judgments, but I'll tell you that, for us, I I think the more we started to learn about farming and food and grow our own food, the more we realized our own dependency, the more we realized how many other areas we were dependent in and only farmers really understand just how hard farming is. In other words, people say, oh, farmers work so hard.
• 54:20
  Yeah. We work a lot of hours. Sometimes farmers are going to work every day for negative money. They don't get minimum wage. But I mean just hard, the adversity.
• 54:29
  The pests, the bugs, the bears that come and eat your corn, the animals that will come in and eat your calves and your lambs, the bugs that eat all your beets underground when you went to harvest them and they're all gone. Farmers understand and don't take for granted raising food because something's always going wrong. And so another aspect of what you described, when young people are looking for the country, they don't really know what they're looking for and they get there and a lot of them find it. You know, this isn't, well, it's Green Acres, I guess, if you remember the TV show. But I think a lot of people are yearning for something more, not just healthy food, but clean water and cleaner air and a healthier life for their children.
• 55:12
  And they don't have to lock their doors and they're outside with their bare feet in the mud once in a while. That's just yearning for our roots and our connection to the land, something that is not appropriately severed. You know, there's a reason why suicide rates are high in Tokyo, and there's a reason why most people you know, we might be living in the country and we don't have as much money, but we're generally happier because we have these other things. We have materialized our world so much that we measure everything in dollars and we need to start measuring things in other outcomes. And when we do that, we have a huge opportunity right now for young people.
• 55:48
  And so when I say in Vermont, so there are some young people wanna move to Vermont. They make $200 a year working for their laptop doing code because AI hasn't replaced them yet. Give them 6 months, they'll be out of work, but they make a lot of money and they wanna buy really healthy food. And then we have this other young couple that moves here from New York City or California, and they wanna raise, they wanna start making kimchi, something value added. Well, there you have it, a community.
• 56:14
  You also have a market, and when you bolster your farmers, you build up all your other you bring in income for the whole community. You know, there's this idea that if we hire more people working for the government, it trickles down to people. Actually, it's trickling up, taking it from people that are working and productive. When actually have farms, when you lose the farms, you lose the sawmill, you lose the feed dealer, you lose the equipment dealer, you lose the restaurants where the farmers are going to have breakfast every morning. You bring them back, you fill up the schools.
• 56:42
  We want young people in the Green Mountains. We're all geriatric. And, you know, that's why me as an old farmer, I'm trying to pave the way, pun intended, for young people to come back to the land. Stop rewilding and growing trees back on farmland and then shipping your food from California. That's insane and properly stewarded soils with rotationally grazed animals sequester far more carbon dioxide than growing trees up.
• 57:09
  So ask you once again, where where is the money angle? Follow the money. It's a scam. Carbon credits, scam. Right?
• 57:17
  Everybody's looking at profit. EV cars, look at the tire dust and what it's doing to the planet. Look at the lithium mining and what it's doing to the planet. Consume less is the mantra that nobody wants to hear, but that's our future because we do not have infinite supplies of energy or oil or natural gas. By the way, just a quick little plug for my cows.
• 57:39
  They say they want to get rid of cows because of their flatulence. 95% of cow gas emissions are from their mouth, not their backside. So right away, they don't even know anything about cows, But that that's methane, which is a relatively stable gas when you look at what gas what what what cows create. But cows also create manure and urine, which rebuild soils, And our soils are depleting at the rate of hundreds of millions of tons of soil, precious soil. Then you need more chemicals to replace the nutrients in the soil, and the real action in the soil is the microbes.
• 58:20
  So, when you get rid of the cows and you get rid of the cow farts, how are you going to fertilize your land and grow your plants? Oh, synthetic fertilizers, urea, more money for factories and corporations again. What is urea made from? Natural gas. What's another name for natural gas?
• 58:41
  Methane. Oh, right. So we're going to replace the cows with a factory to plant the ground. Instead of manure, we're going to use chemicals, which are very high in price right now. You know, phosphate, 70% of the world's phosphate supplies are controlled by Morocco.
• 58:57
  We don't have a corner on the phosphate market. We ought to be careful about how we use phosphate. We've overused it in the past, then we've destroyed our rivers, and then they say we need to get rid of the cows because we have too much phosphate. Cows weren't producing the phosphate. Companies were producing the phosphate.
• 59:13
  So, this whole model, I think people are waking up to it and it takes a while. It took me a while because I wasn't raised, you know, was raised around farmers, but I wasn't raised in a farming life and I so yearn to share that with other people. Come on in, the water's fine. You're finding it out all the time. You take your kids out to a farm, it's way better than Disneyland, and they'll tell you that, you know.
• 59:36
  We took our grandsons last year to Monticello and to Polyface Farm in Virginia, which is Joel Salatin's farm, and they're four and six, and I said, did you like better? Oh, they liked the farm way better jumping in the puddles than seeing Thomas Jefferson. Who's he? You know, seeing his homestead. So it's exciting for some of us.
• 59:57
  You know, within the MAHA movement, there are many of us working, you know, within MAHA. We're bipartisan. We've been doing this for twenty five years, trying to warn people about their food supplies. Crickets. Now the crickets are singing.
• 1:00:09
  You know, I call it Horton, here's a who. They're like, we are here. We want healthy food. The crisis is the potential crisis, which would come back to something else you said if it's okay if I rant because I do a lot of ranting, is that we want healthier food with a new food pyramid, healthier food for our military, healthier food for our hospital patients, healthier food for public schools and our SNAP beneficiaries. I want to see them all have healthier food.
• 1:00:34
  Problem is it doesn't exist. And when you start producing it, it's going to cost more money because there's a reason why they're on cheap food. How do we improve food quality, increase yields to the farmers and not have anarchy, Right? Because people are screaming in the streets and banging pots and pans because they want $2 a pound hamburger and inflation is here. And so you can't have it both ways.
• 1:00:59
  We're working to solve that in a number of areas and that's part of my work at MAHA is working on agriculture and food supplies, helping the farmers and the consumers at the same time and we're a huge threat to a lot of industrial interests that are entrenched. So we we have our eyes wide open in what we're fighting.
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 1: Which and and that's that's it's it's really such an important part of the fight. Obviously, there's the there's the approach with big pharma. There's a lot of things that need to be need to be done and fixed at that level. But food supply, you know, supporting the farmers, getting these things back to what they should be is is critical. And I think that, you know, you mentioned people are you know, that they're making these these lifestyle changes.
• 1:01:44
  Because I think that part you know, part of it is, you know, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Right? And I think that we've been pushed one direction for so long. We've been pushed into a more artificial, more controlled, more subsidized, more dependent way of living. And I think that COVID was kind of the breaking point for a lot of people.
• 1:02:02
  And and now I think you're seeing the opposite reaction coming, where people like, they just wanna be human again. That's it. They they they don't want the new phone, the new AI. A lot of young young people, they they'd rather be on a little you know, on five acres by a river with a tiny house, you know, as opposed to living in some penthouse in the downtown, you know, kind of capital city. And so I think that there is this there's something bigger shifting in this, and that's what gives me it gives me hope.
• 1:02:33
  But I also think that and, again, this is why I do the podcast, and I'll pull your book up again. I think, obviously, why, you know, you wrote the book, in part, is because people need to be educated. There's still a lot of people that they sense something is off, but maybe it's a discussion like what we're having right now that then kind of clicks for them, and they're saying, Oh, wow, I never realized it. Yeah, what happens if the local corner store shut down? Where do I get my food then?
• 1:03:02
  And I think it's an important process, because I do think that I do think that America is headed for very difficult times. It's not a, you know, like, it's not a doomsday thing, but I I think that we're in what you could call the days of Noah. I mean, these are some rough times. But I think that the difficulty is what the country needs to go through. Right?
• 1:03:23
  We have to we have to kind of break this old system has to fall apart. Like, and and that's a painful process, but we have to build a new system. We have to we have to fix this fundamentally, and it's not gonna happen through, you know, putting the red tape on it this year, the blue tape on it next year. It's not gonna fix it. I think that it will be some sort of major disruption that and, you know, nothing will change a country faster than a food crisis, But I think that it's gonna be painful for a lot of people.
• 1:03:54
  And, you know, a lot of people are gonna very quickly understand how dependent they were. And I'm not sure what their fate will be, but I also think there's a lot of people that have sensed this coming for some time or maybe even recently that kinda tapped into it. And they're the ones that are making the changes, and they're I think they're the people that will, you know, make it through. You know, they're building their own ark right now. So when the flood comes, family's not gonna drown.
• 1:04:20
  And I think that on the other side of that, what are we gonna have? We're gonna have a lot of people that are the ones that saw what what was coming. They prepared for it. They built communities. They lived, you know, through virtue and and and whatnot.
• 1:04:33
  I think those people are gonna be the ones that are really gonna help establish the next stage of things. And so it gives me hope, all of this. It's scary, but I do see there's a lot of hope in it.
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 2: Well, I hope so. And I wanna contribute to the hope, and that was part of the challenge of the book because a lot of what I'm talking about, as we've talked about today, is pretty dismal, you know? It's pretty dire. But the longer we hold off responding, the worse it's going to be. So to the extent there's a catastrophe, the bus is already, it's full of Americans and it's already hanging off the cliff and we're grabbing at the rear wheels and trying to drag it back in.
• 1:05:08
  And I like your analogy to Noah's Ark and Newtonian physics. The opposite reaction is that people want to be liberty or to be, free and self reliant. It's an ancient human urge. But frankly, we like our ease. We like complacency.
• 1:05:26
  We like drive through. Let's face it. It's easy. And some people go, I don't wanna have to dig this soil and grow my own some people love it. But I can tell you when we talk about in terms of reverting to smaller, less consolidated farms as the best model for national security, for food quality, for environmental health, for water supplies, for all of us, people will sneer at that and say, oh, you can't do that at scale, you know, you won't make as much money.
• 1:05:52
  Okay, we won't make as much money per acre, but it's a much better alternative than a complete collapse and decertification of the nation, and by that I mean we are turning our prime soils that the bison built, we wiped them out, folly again, we didn't know what we were doing. Took millions of years to develop all those precious lands and we were turning them back into desert again. It appears that humanity has a long history of doing this. We're doing it in America. You know, we we are the world's largest exporter of food.
• 1:06:25
  In the last few years, we've now become a net importer of food. So we're getting more and more foreign food that's that is of dubious origin and oversight. We are reducing the amount of farmed acres we have every year in this country as young people don't want to farm and it gets absorbed into data centers for AI or solar panel arrays, which by the way are not farms. It's not a solar farm. It doesn't produce food, it's not a farm.
• 1:06:53
  You can't put little cute sheep under it and turn it into a farm. All right? We don't even have enough sheep in this country for all our solar panels. So we do all of those things at our peril. But meanwhile, we're also, it's estimated four to five tons of soil runoff per acre of corn per year.
• 1:07:10
  92,000,000 acres every year. It's not sustainable. So our hope lies in our opening our eyes before the bus falls off the cliff. That's what you and I are trying to do and I invite people to read the book, learn from the book, tell me where I disagree or I'm wrong, be scared by the book, but look it in the eye and figure out the solutions. We have to do this together.
• 1:07:34
  This is what will bring community back. You mentioned it. People want to be human again and they don't even know sometimes, you know, it's the rhesus monkey thing. You don't know what you've lost when you never had it. That was my story.
• 1:07:46
  You know, I didn't know all this. I don't want to sound like some farmer elite, but I assure you the water's fine. It's worth the journey. No. It's not easy because nothing in life is easy.
• 1:07:59
  And so some people don't wanna have an arduous life where they have to grow their own food, but that's way better than nine meals missing. Right? That's way better than starvation. And this alternative is not working.
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 1: Really is. I mean, it's there's so much joy in it. Because, you know, we we we, you know, we're I'd say we're a very hobby homesteaders, but, you know, we've got probably thirty thirty chickens running around. We've got gardens. We had some goats, but, know, goats are not really that fun to keep as pets since that didn't work out.
• 1:08:30
  But, you know, it's it's it's a beautiful way. Look, even my my my hands, my hands have been covered in, like, in dirt. I can't get out of them for the past couple of months. I've just been every waking, every moment I'm not not working, I'm outside doing just built a little waterfall in our landscaping, so I've been doing some of that stuff. We've been planting, building garden beds, you know, moving logs across the property to build more garden beds.
• 1:08:54
  And it's there's it's maybe because I think that in part of it, you get closer to God when you get closer to his direct creation of nature instead of all these artificial, you know, kind of man made things surrounding us. But there's something very deeply healing about it. And then even when I go out with my little girls, they're they're five and two, the two of them. And I see them running around, you know, sometimes clothed, they're not clothed, depends on how nice the weather is. Because we're out in the middle of nowhere in the woods, so it's it's you know, they're gonna be kids.
• 1:09:23
  Right? And but you look at them, and, you know, the other day I walked up, and, they're sitting there on the ground just eating weeds. Like, what's going on? Like and my little my little one June's like, oh, this is sorrel. We're eating sorrel.
• 1:09:35
  So my wife taught them what sorrel looks like. It's growing all over our property, and they're sitting out there in the backyard just eating eating weeds growing. And and it's but, actually, it's not weeds. It's it's this beautiful you know, you could put it in a package and sell it for $6 for a little plastic package at the grocery store. And that's that's that's there's something very beautiful about that.
• 1:09:55
  It's very soul nourishing to do. And I think that that's part of what people are seeking. That they're really again, yeah, they they wanna be human again. They wanna get back to these deep traditions that are in our DNA that make us what we what we are.
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 2: And then we get in and we go, wow. This is awesome. And it's arduous, and we like it anyway. I will tell you that you are doing the probably the most important thing you could do for your little girls. And I didn't do it intentionally.
• 1:10:25
  It wasn't intentional. But raising our three kids on a farm was the best education they could ever have for life in so many dimensions of gratitude, humility, diversity of knowledge, work ethic. But if you just measure it all in dollars, you're probably not making lot of money. You could go buy it at Walmart. You could buy so called organic food, which, you know, more power to them if it is organic, but what you're finding out is that we measure too many things in dollars.
• 1:10:55
  TS Eliot in the love song of J Alfred Prufrock said, we weigh out our lives in coffee spoons. I always was struck by that. He's talking about materialism. I don't want to measure my life in coffee spoons. Go out, some of what I do is very stressful, but I go out in the middle of my day, I can see my cows right now and I pet my cows, they're just chewing their cud, they live in the now, and they bring you right down.
• 1:11:18
  It's very therapeutic, and yes, there's a huge parallel between Scripture and farming. I don't even know if you can understand the Bible without being a farmer. That was written to a pastoral audience in a pastoral culture. There's so much imagery about food and lambs and, you know, wine and bread. And by the way, do you know what your skin microbiome is?
• 1:11:40
  Have you researched the skin microbiome? Because every time you're sticking your feet and your hands out in there, you're actually feeding this your your skin has a protective layer for your immune system, which is microbial and you pollute it with chemicals and hand sanitizer and all that, you're literally exposing your body and compromising your immune system. So roll in the dirt, roll in the mud. We have over sterilized ourselves. 98% of bacteria are not only healthy, you cannot live without them and we become so afraid of invisible diseases that we're spraying invisible chemicals that cause cancer and our endocrine disruptors and make us miserable everywhere at everything.
• 1:12:20
  We have to start opening our eyes and seeing with new eyes. That's what we have to do. So you're and you're on the right track. Tell other people. Tell them, nope.
• 1:12:30
  Don't do it if you wanna get rich. If you wanna get rich, you're gonna be miserable anyway. But if you wanna get rich in how many feathers you have or how many hairs on your cow's head, god knows how many there are. Right? I'm very cow fur rich.
• 1:12:46
  I just I value that more.
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 1: Exactly. And the other thing too is that, you know, you mentioned putting a price on things. And I remember when I built a chicken coop. I I built a couple now, but back when I was living in Ohio. And, actually, I'm I'm pretty sure that The Onion wrote an article no.
• 1:13:04
  No. Sorry. It was Babylon Bee wrote an article that was kind of mocking me, like, using my story. Because I I think at that time, I'm I'm guessing one of their their people were following my my show because I was talking about this guy, like, mashed my toe. I knocked a tooth out.
• 1:13:18
  I went through this whole process of kind of building a chicken coop. And it was kind of funny because they were talking about this this article, like, you know, this guy, he says, you know, oh, I I can I'll build a $3,000 chicken coop so that I can get 2¢ eggs for free. Right? Or, you know, some sort of mockery like that, which it was tongue in cheek. Of course, it's Babylon Beet.
• 1:13:37
  Was funny, but that's the thing is that a gallon of milk let's just say you have a gallon of milk at Walmart, which, you know, growing up, think a gallon of milk for us is, like, $3 a gallon or something. Maybe now it's $8 a gallon for Smith's milk or whatever. You you might look at all the work you put into your cows, but you can go get it for $8 a gallon. But the thing is, is what happens when you can't go get it? What happens when it's not there anymore?
• 1:14:01
  What happens when there's an egg shortage and all of a sudden, you know, the the few eggs that are there are $20 a dozen or there's none. Right? Then the eggs that my chick I I I have more eggs than what to do with. I'm feeding them to the animals. I'm dehydrating them, you know, freeze drying them.
• 1:14:16
  So those eggs that cost a lot of money to build the coop and and all that kind of stuff, a single egg, how do you how do you put a value on that single egg when there's no eggs available? That's how I look at these things.
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 2: Well, and that's looking with new eyes, because if you looked at the cost yeah. Was smiling because I know the story. I see people do it all the time. They're gonna get chickens. They go out and spend a couple thousand dollars on the coop.
• 1:14:39
  It's like, you realize how many eggs you're gonna have to sell? Because at $5 a dozen, if you're feeding organic grain, you're probably breaking even anyway. So forget about it. But gee, I go out every morning, set to drag. It's like going to the gym, go out and feed the chickens first thing every morning, bring in an egg.
• 1:14:54
  If they're not still warm in your hand, why would you eat it? And so actually what I'm saying is I'm talking about seeing with new eyes again. I went yesterday, I get milk, we raise beef cows and so I get milk from a local farmer. It's not organic, but it's raw. I know where it comes from and I know I'm supporting that farmer.
• 1:15:13
  That's priceless to me. So I look at that egg, I look at that milk and it's incomparable and there are great companies out there producing healthier milk, but I'm looking at something that it's actually in a way priceless. Now, I'm not naive, I'm not talking about idealism, we still have to pay our bills and that's why we don't pay $3 for a chicken coop to raise six chickens. But young farmers start, but that's how you learn, right? You start with chickens and then you get pigs and then maybe you move up to cows, cows are awesome.
• 1:15:41
  But it's rewarding and I'll tell you what you don't see also. It's fresher. It's healthier. You have more nutrition. Local honey is better for you.
• 1:15:50
  There are so many affirming acknowledgements in the environment around you when you start doing this to make you go, wait a minute, this isn't odd that I'm doing this. This is odd that I didn't always do this. The odd thing is that we weaned ourselves from this, that we somehow thought we were liberated. And you go milk your own gallon of milk, you go raise your own chickens, there's something else there, satisfaction. When my wife, Jackie and I started doing this, we didn't get into it to be farmers.
• 1:16:22
  I was fleeing, you know, the Lyme disease. And one day we looked at our table and everything on the table, our kids are saying, we raise it all. The milk, the butter, the chicken, the vegetables, the whole thing. I was like, honey, we grew all this. And then we started playing a game where we could see how long we could go without going to the grocery store.
• 1:16:42
  You still need the bananas and the oranges. A lot of Vermont farmers do this. We can go months without ever going to the grocery store. And then there are certain staples you need, like, because I don't grow toilet paper. You know, it doesn't I try plants and toilet paper plants and they just they won't bloom.
• 1:16:56
  Season's too short. So I go to the grocery store. But when you raise it right from the dirt through the animal to your freezer and you kill the animal on the farm like we do ourselves, so it doesn't suffer and you don't waste any of the body parts of the animal, you're not gonna leave a pound of burger rotten in the freezer, I mean in the fridge when you raised it. And Americans eat out four or five times a week and they're eating food that's high in salt, high in sugar, high in additives, you know, high in plastics and phthalates, right, all kinds of bad stuff. And that's the other thing.
• 1:17:31
  Most people don't even know how to cook anymore. You know, I'm just learning because I guess I'm older at 62, but I can't imagine dining out that often even if I had the money. I don't want to. I'd be heavier than I am, but don't people know how to cook anymore? They don't.
• 1:17:48
  So we have a lot of work to do, buddy. A lot of people, actually, I've talked about this in my other book, I think it was, might have been in this book, but a study showed that a survey showed like 50% of high school graduates did not know how to boil an egg. Okay? That's how bad we are. Do they know how to boil a potato?
• 1:18:07
  Oh, by the way, here's something I'll share. This is I don't if we could if you could see this. It's it's backwards, I think.
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 1: It's normal for me. Yep. I I can read it.
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 2: Oh, it is? Okay. It's backwards for me. This is an organic MRE. If you can see there, all the ingredients are organic.
• 1:18:27
  I'm working with this company to make these for all of our military personnel. Our military MREs, meals ready to eat, this would be for preppers too. The company's called Essential Provisions. Athletes and preppers can buy these. Their shelf life, three to five years.
• 1:18:41
  Really delicious, nutritious, organic. Supporting organic farmers, getting healthier food, that should be what all our military gets. Our military should get healthy food. Recent studies show MREs are packed full of phthalates and chemicals and nasty stuff that we should not be giving to our service members or anybody else. So sorry, just want I don't get a kickback on that.
• 1:19:03
  I just get so excited that I can get up every day and try to create a product that helps farmers and consumers in one fell swoop. Opportunities abound.
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 1: Oh, they absolutely do. They absolutely do. Well, John, I think that we could just keep going and going. Both of us like to talk. So, but before we finish up, I wanna make sure that I bring attention to your Substack, which is smallfarmrepublic.substack.com.
• 1:19:32
  That link will also be in the description. So you've got a lot of your content on here. Very, very important. And then also, again, which I'll put the link in the description as well, your book, The Coming Food Crisis. And I think that, in general, that education is really, really important.
• 1:19:48
  If I wouldn't have read the the books that I've read, whether it's on, you know, Mao's famine or even going and reading one second after, you're talking about what happens in America after an EMP, those are the things that really spurred me into action, is reading about what happens when things go wrong. Not because it's living in fear, but it's like, you know, when you're prepared, you're not scared. You're just like, okay. It's you know, the bad things could happen, but I'm ready for it. And so I I thank you for everything that you've done to to educate people for what you're doing within MAHA.
• 1:20:22
  I'm sure that you're a very important voice in there. And, yeah, just thank you for giving us your time and for doing what you're doing. It's very, very important.
• 1:20:30
  Speaker 2: Thanks for what you're doing. I'm really grateful for the opportunity. The, the currency that we need to be spreading is currency of information. Right? Not fiat currencies.
• 1:20:41
  Dollars won't feed you. You can't eat a greenback. So thank you for contributing, and I'm excited to hear what you're doing. I get really excited when I hear young people like you.
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 1: Well, part of what
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 2: I'm kids off the land.
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 1: So that, but also what I'm doing is, within, like with the within, like, they're probably a week or two from launching, but for the past, really, kind of three or four months, concertedly, we're actually we're building a private social media platform called The Arc. So it's literally called The Arc. It's, you know, it's buildthearc.com, but it's members only. But it's it's a you can also imagine it's a it's a, like, a private Facebook, but there's so much more. We've got, The Arc Academy.
• 1:21:19
  So we've got whole courses on, you know, food preservation, water purification. So there's a huge knowledge base on that. There's a built in planting calendars. So you open up, and it'll tell you tell you, okay. Hey.
• 1:21:31
  You know, here's where we start hardening your tomatoes. You plant it indoors, or it's got that. We've got food and water calculators. There's there's just a whole host of information, but a lot of it is really about making it easy for people to find local connections, because that's the the really center of it. It's really about being able to build a strong community.
• 1:21:50
  And so we're not building it to create some sort of new online app to get distracted with, but as a tool to build these relationships. And so say in your region, you wanted to meet other people that are also thinking like you, there's a kind of a friend finder, you can look based upon radius, you can find local farms in your area, you can find other local people, you can see, oh, wow, there's this guy that's twenty minutes away that is actually an expert in solar. And so you can see his information, contact him. So it's really kind to build. It's a networking site, but it's a educational site.
• 1:22:22
  We're gonna have the goal is to also have local chapters. So you can join your local chapter, get active in, you know, local training and everything. Then we'll do retreats. And so that's that's one of the things that we're doing that we're just we're really, really excited about.
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah. That's awesome. That excites me. You're building community. You're building alternative we need alternative media, alternative community, alternative food supplies, just do it ourselves.
• 1:22:47
  And nobody can sever those relationships. So that's exciting to hear.
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 1: Exactly.
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I'll be watching your progress.
• 1:22:53
  Speaker 1: Well, thank you. Thank you. I'm sure we'll do this again. It's it's a it's a joy speaking with you. And, yeah, again, thank you for giving us your time, and thank you for doing what you're doing.
• 1:23:02
  I really appreciate it.
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 2: Likewise. I'm grateful. Thank you.
• 1:23:06
  Speaker 1: You're welcome. Take care, and God bless you too.