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Department, President Trump's upcoming meeting with his Russian counterpart, and Israel's new offensive plans in Gaza. | |
| C-SPAN's Washington Journal. | ||
| Join in the conversation live at 7 Eastern this morning on C-SPAN. | ||
| C-SPAN now, our free mobile video app, or online at c-SPAN.org. | ||
| Up next, a panel on the desired trajectory for U.S. agriculture policy. | ||
| Participants discuss how government can encourage private investment and innovation and streamlining the process farmers must use to get their crops onto the tables of consumers. | ||
| The Heritage Foundation event is just over an hour. | ||
| Well, good morning. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Quiz, think back, what did you have for breakfast today? | ||
| So when I was a kid, I grew up poor in Los Angeles. | ||
| I would have frosted flakes and milk. | ||
| I would have concentrated orange juice if we had orange juice. | ||
| It was never fresh ever. | ||
| You know, the frozen one that had that nasty ring around it. | ||
| Remember those? | ||
| You ate it when it was cold. | ||
| I ate it when it was cold, yeah. | ||
| I would often eat spam, Vienna sausages, and at night, TV dinners. | ||
| So you might say I'm lucky to still be around. | ||
| Having had that as my staple day after day after day, and it wasn't much better, even on the subsidized lunches at my public school that I went to. | ||
| You know, the mystery meets. | ||
| And last night, I actually had a wonderful dinner at a restaurant where it was farm to table and delicious food freshly prepared. | ||
| Very, very expensive, though. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So we've made some progress in that there are at least options with regards to our food and diet. | ||
| But what are we here to talk about? | ||
| How did we get to the point where the American diet progressively got worse for decades and it led to so many chronic diseases that we are beset with? | ||
| And, you know, Ben Franklin said an ounce of prevention is a pound of cure. | ||
| He also said that the best medicine is rest and fasting. | ||
| Fasting meaning eating in moderation or sometimes skipping meals. | ||
| And that was Ben Franklin, right? | ||
| So the wisdom that we had at the founding with respect to respecting the land, respecting our role in the world of cooperation with nature to our benefit, we've lost a lot of that wisdom. | ||
| And there have been a lot of forces that have made a whole lot of money on making sure Americans stay sick and are permanent patients. | ||
| So we're here to address some of those issues, educate ourselves, me included, as to how we got here and what are the alternatives to the system we have inherited and what it means for Americans' health and welfare, especially children. | ||
| Now, President Trump and RFK Jr. have kicked off the Maha Revolution, and we want to make heritage a key component in that effort. | ||
| Conservative principles, living the good life, going against big interests, sticking up for the little guy, things that President Trump and Bobby Kennedy have been champions of because people realize there's something, something wrong here. | ||
| We shouldn't be sicker than the rest of the industrialized world. | ||
| One of the key architects of the Maha Revolution has been Callie Means, who will be our first speaker today. | ||
| Callie Means is a senior advisor for the Maha Initiative at the White House. | ||
| He's a former Heritage Foundation intern. | ||
| He works to align healthcare spending with habits proven to prevent and reverse disease, nutritious food, exercise, sleep, and stress management. | ||
| He's the co-founder of TrueMed, enabling the use of tax-free HSA dollars, great policy program, and FSA funds for healthy lifestyle choices. | ||
| He's co-author of Good Energy with his sister, Dr. Casey Means. | ||
| Through his work in policy, business, and media, Callie is advancing solutions to create a healthier America from the ground up. | ||
| Please join me in welcoming Callie Means. | ||
| Thank you, Roger. | ||
|
unidentified
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And, God, I just can't get out of my head. | |
| As an intern many years ago at the Heritage Foundation, I really couldn't imagine in the past couple months we'd be having events with medical freedom advocates and psychedelic researchers and many folks in this room. | ||
| It was probably the first time entering the Heritage Foundation. | ||
| I just want to give a round of applause to the Heritage Foundation for convening this incredible, incredible coalition. | ||
| And I think it really feels right. | ||
| I think everyone in this room hopefully feels that this very unexpected Maha coalition that's tacked on to the MAGA movement, there's something right about it. | ||
| There's something spiritual about it. | ||
| And I think that is because we're facing a conundrum as a country right now. | ||
| As we've talked about a lot, we are facing civilizational stakes when it comes to health. | ||
| The stat we talk about the White House, Secretary Kennedy talks about. | ||
| I can't wrap my head around 38% of our teens have pre-diabetes and 50% of our teens are overweight or obese. | ||
| I mean, this is a moral stain on our country. | ||
| And when you look at our civilizational debt issues and budgetary issues, I mean, it's not defense. | ||
| I mean, defense is 11%. | ||
| We're spending almost 30% of our budget on metabolic-based conditions. | ||
| We are the sickest country in the world. | ||
| We're spending three to four times more than any other country in the world on health care, and we're living seven, eight years less than many other developed countries. | ||
| We have a civilizational issue. | ||
| And what's the conundrum is, is that just as a factual statement, these conditions, 90 to 95% of medical costs are tied to foodborne illnesses, are tied to preventable conditions that are tied to our food. | ||
| And I think the biggest issue facing our country is why is that the case and our farmers are suffering so much? | ||
| Why are family farms closing so much? | ||
| Farmers' children are not going into the business. | ||
| Farmers are getting kicked and degraded at every turn and suffering. | ||
| And they are the key to solving this health care crisis demonstrably. | ||
| And we have a real generational problem there. | ||
| And the reason we're here is because that frustration, that conundrum has been channeled into a political movement with this unlikely collaboration of President Trump and Bobby Kennedy. | ||
| And just as it's just extraordinary that this coalition is being assembled at the White House, I could not believe when Secretary Kennedy walked on that stage, probably some of us were there on that first day when he endorsed President Trump, the electricity in the room was the most powerful political moment I've ever seen in my life. | ||
| President Trump later noted it was the most electric scene he'd seen during the campaign. | ||
| It surprised everyone how this visceral connection that Bobby touched on, this almost unidentifiable complexity of this connection between our food and our health, electrified voters. | ||
| And it brought a lot of people into that coalition. | ||
| The reason we're here is because this very complex issue was channeled into real, a real political movement that brought women, it closed the gender gap, it brought 50-50 for Trump on independence and young people. | ||
| It showed us that a new political coalition could be built around these issues. | ||
| And in the first 150 days, we have achieved significant wins on this issue. | ||
| And I want to make that very clear. | ||
| We have achieved the Trump administration, I believe, the most significant food policy reform in American history. | ||
| In just the first year, we are going to reform our grass system at the FDA, where we're actually going to know what's in our food, where the FDA is actually going to take a stronger hand to actually know what's in our food, study it, and regulate it, which I think is very important. | ||
| We have achieved SNAP reform, where 21 states, that list is growing, have taken soda off of SNAP. | ||
| It is inconceivable that our fourth largest entitlement program, 18% of that money, goes to soda and candy. | ||
| Never thought possible that this would change. | ||
| It's the top issue for the various lobbyists in town, but we have been able to take soda and candy off of SNAP. | ||
| We are going to have revolutionary and transformative nutrition guidelines coming up very soon that actually tell the truth about what children should be eating. | ||
| We are going to have front-of-pack labeling and transparency that people from both sides of the aisle have been talking about that that's needed for 20 years. | ||
| It's never happened. | ||
| It's going to happen this year. | ||
| We're going to have an ultra-processed food definition. | ||
| And I think very importantly, the NIH, this $50 billion pot of money, this stated goal of the NIH is to not ask with that $50 billion that people are sick as a given. | ||
| How do we have incremental little shots to manage those diseases? | ||
| What is actually the root cause of why we have an explosion of all these metabolic conditions and really understand and put food and research on food at the center of how we think about health. | ||
| Despite all these policy wins, there is obviously visceral frustration still among many in the Maha Base. | ||
| And I think the flip side of this tidal wave of support and animation around the bonding of Secretary and President Trump does come with existential dread that many voters feel. | ||
| And I think we do feel like we're in a civilizational crisis here, that there's a crisis, a spiritual crisis, between our respect for what we put in our bodies and our soils. | ||
| And I think that a big challenge we have is really rectifying this intense optimism we feel with the sense that we cannot move fast enough and the administration needs to be moving faster. | ||
| And I have a couple thoughts on that and a couple thoughts on how to make this coalition successful and some principles I'm thinking about. | ||
| First, we have to understand this is a long-term fight. | ||
| We all, I think, are aligned, and I think most Americans are aligned on the situation in the stakes. | ||
| We have lost touch with what's happening to our soil, how that connects to our physical, economic, geopolitical, and spiritual survival. | ||
| We've become disconnected from the root cause of what's making us sick. | ||
| And I think what we're building towards and the bridge we're building towards is really a fundamental realignment where we are shifting the trillions and trillions of dollars that right now we spend $5 trillion a year waiting for people to get sick from food and then managing their conditions and making health care companies very rich. | ||
| And we have to fundamentally shift our incentives as a country to put that money towards helping the root cause of what's making us sick, and that's farmers. | ||
| And this is a big, big, big challenge. | ||
| And we must understand this takes years. | ||
| A group that comes here a lot to the Heritage Foundation is the Federalist Society. | ||
| And I do think it's notable that they put the goal in 1982 to overturn Roe v. Wade. | ||
| And that took 40 years. | ||
| And that is also, in their minds, a civilizational life and death issue that cannot come fast enough. | ||
| But it is true that the way coalitions have power is recognizing an existential, societally defining cultural change that's needed and forming a coalition and being patient. | ||
| And I am radical here. | ||
| I mean, I think the sick care industrial complex and these forces, they killed my mom. | ||
| And I think a lot of us feel like the fighting and the victories cannot come soon enough. | ||
| But I do think we have to understand that this will be strategic and will take time. | ||
| We also must understand this movement, if we're talking about the political realities, and I do think this movement is much more than political, it's cultural, but it does run through the political success of President Trump. | ||
| and Secretary Kennedy. | ||
| If this movement is going to stay alive, we have to show as voters that we support what's happening. | ||
| And I do think a lot of the success of this movement runs through midterm voters making clear that we're continuing to vote on this issue. | ||
| That's going to affect the 2028 election. | ||
| And if the 2028 elections is impacted, there's going to be a mandate for the future administration. | ||
| We have to continue to show as voters that we are supportive and are voting on this issue because that impact and that voter mandate is how we've been able to make change. | ||
| We must understand the deep state is real. | ||
| I would suggest as we're frustrated, we don't attack Secretary Kidding and Trump, President Trump. | ||
| And I can tell you, there's never been an administration in modern American history that has a mandate to stand up to special interests more and get wins. | ||
| They are fighting against a deep state that is unimaginable, an entrenched economic interests, an entrenched dysfunction that is impossible to comprehend. | ||
| And they are our warriors here, and I think we need to turn our attention and our fire on the deep state that is trying to obstruct them. | ||
| We also have to understand that as many policy victories that happen and they will, what our real advantage is is a cultural societal awakening. | ||
| I think whether we're frustrated or not with the pace of political change, there's something real happening in this country where people are understanding what they're eating more. | ||
| They're looking at labels. | ||
| They're looking at where their food is coming from. | ||
| They're asking their doctor more questions. | ||
| And I do think that's what is going to eventually impact the political system. | ||
| And we need to continually be optimistic and hopeful and foster and talk about and educate and have that societal change happening because the thing that's going to change the political system is that societal change. | ||
| We have to understand we're up against very, very powerful forces. | ||
| And I have empathy for that. | ||
| There are many, many, many, many people in America that are employed by the existing system. | ||
| We need to build bridges. | ||
| And particularly, I think this is true with agriculture. | ||
| We are not going to win if the soybean farmers and the corn growers are our enemy. | ||
| We need to have empathy for people in the agriculture community and understand that we are all aligned on this 10-year vision where the American farmer is held up as the foremost important person in our health care system and that our soil and that our food is respected. | ||
| This is a vision everyone agrees on and we have to understand that we need to build alliances with entities that employ more people than almost any industry in the country. | ||
| This is a civilizational fight. | ||
| And I soon realized after my mom died that preaching in doom and gloom really doesn't work. | ||
| We've got to break this issue down. | ||
| We've got to deliver tangible wins. | ||
| And I understand how difficult this is because we do feel like we're fighting this battle that's generational change can't come fast enough. | ||
| But we have to have dialogue to figure out the incremental wins that are impossible to disagree with. | ||
| I love the SNAP issue because there's so much opposition to that, but it is impossible to argue. | ||
| It's really hard to argue for government-funded soda for kids. | ||
| You know, it's a beautiful issue because as the issues become more complex, they're really hard to pick apart by adversaries. | ||
| So, I do think it's really important that we channel our urges into wins that are impossible to disagree with and politically resonate to continue to substantiate the momentum of this issue in the political sphere. | ||
| And my gut is over the next year, as we look beyond the initial wins, my gut is there's real power in school lunches and other areas where government spends money. | ||
| It makes zero sense when the government spends money to be underwriting altar-processed food and metabolic dysfunction for kids, which eventually bankrupts state Medicaid budgets and costs us down the road in health care and poisons our kids and poisons our human capital. | ||
| I'll wrap just by saying this is a I think looking at American history, one of the turning points, potential turning points in American history. | ||
| You know, when you read history books, history changes when political coalitions change. | ||
| And I do think the Maha movement, what's represented in this room at the Heritage Foundation, this unexpected group, I do think we're at one of the two to three most defining changes to the political coalitions in this country where people that maybe never even thought about voting Republican enthusiastically voted for President Trump. | ||
| And we need to keep this coalition together, and that's going to be hard. | ||
| It's going to be very complex, but the most important thing is we keep hope alive and we have messy, robust dialogue. | ||
| And that's why this event is so important. | ||
| And I thank the Heritage Foundation for that. | ||
| So let's have a great day, and thank you very much. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you, Kelly. | |
| Next up, we have Ryland Engelhardt. | ||
| Rylan is the co-founder and co-executive director of American Regeneration, a partner at Sovereignty Ranch, and producer of the films Kiss the Ground, Common Ground, and Groundswell. | ||
| Longtime leader in the health and wellness space, Ryland helped pioneer and manage the nationally recognized plant-based restaurant chains, Cafe Gratitude, Gracias Madre. | ||
| And he's a passionate advocate for regenerative agriculture, food as medicine, and building community. | ||
| He lives with his wife and two young sons on a 200-acre regenerative ranch in Texas, where he's learning to practice what he preaches. | ||
| Please welcome Ryland Englehart. | ||
| Yeah, wow, thank you. | ||
| I just want to say, as a vegan climate activist in California, starting a decade ago in my garage, to be here at the Heritage Foundation, bringing some of the best and the brightest practitioners and industry leaders in regenerative agriculture is a blessing. | ||
| And my time is short. | ||
| We have a three-minute video called Making Farming Profitable Again. | ||
| And that is really about getting off the increasing, increasing costs of agriculture and getting back to God's creation, the way that soil works, and the way that soil has always given this planet abundance. | ||
| So I'm introducing a short clip from a film called Common Ground, and I hope you enjoy it. | ||
| And it will set up today's conversation about what is regenerative agriculture. | ||
| Like many modern farms in America, this one is large. | ||
| And it's run by only a few people. | ||
| But unlike other big modern farms, This farmer has become famous for making a profit while rebuilding his soil. | ||
| What we have here to my left, this is the neighbor's cropland field of soybeans. | ||
| It was eroded by wind. | ||
| To the right here, this is my land. | ||
| It's in perennial pasture. | ||
| This is a shelter belt, tree windbreak to protect the soil. | ||
| They had tilled their field, then they had planted soybeans. | ||
| Then we had 50 mile an hour winds for three days. | ||
| Because they had nothing growing there except the soybean, the wind caused that soil to be blown away. | ||
| But unfortunately, you see the same type of agriculture, not only in the U.S., worldwide. | ||
| The six principles of a healthy soil ecosystem are: number one, working within the context of nature with our local environment in mind. | ||
| Number two, least amount of mechanical chemical disturbance possible. | ||
| Number three, armor on the soil. | ||
| Nature always tries to keep the soil covered. | ||
| Number four, you have to have diversity. | ||
| Where in nature do you see a monoculture? | ||
| Number five, living root in the soil as long as possible throughout the year. | ||
| And number six is animal and insect integration. | ||
| I have not taken a government subsidy since 2019. | ||
| I no longer take any crop insurance. | ||
| We've eliminated seed treatments. | ||
| We've eliminated insecticides, pesticides, herbicides. | ||
| It works out to be about $2 million a year in savings. | ||
| That is serious cash. | ||
| I have two beautiful daughters and I have two beautiful grandchildren. | ||
| They are not going to be around chemicals. | ||
| And that's my legacy is to have a viable, regenerating, no-till system to hand off to the next generation. | ||
| And that's what we're doing. | ||
| We looked at 100 corn and soy farmers across the Midwest that had been successful in their adoption of soil health management practices. | ||
| And on average, 88% of the farmers interviewed were making more money. | ||
| We can shift production agriculture over to regenerative agriculture while increasing profit. | ||
| We can go down the regenerative path, heal our soils, our rivers, our streams, our estuaries, heal communities, heal people, or we can continue down the path we are, a path of degradation. | ||
| Humanity has a choice to make. | ||
| Please welcome Jennifer Ghilardi, Senior Policy Analyst for Restoring American Wellness at Heritage. | ||
| How about giving a round of applause to Ryland and that beautiful film? | ||
| Can't wait to see all of it. | ||
| In the summer of 2021, I attended a Labor Day gathering at a yoga retreat center called Commune in Tobago Canyon, California. | ||
| It was in that kitchen chopping vegetables that I met Ryland. | ||
| At one point, as he mentioned, Ryland was the owner of the most popular C and B seen vegan restaurant in Los Angeles. | ||
| He is the epitome of good vibes only in the best possible way. | ||
| It was his warmth that made me feel comfortable in the liberal lion's den I found myself in that day. | ||
| After years of leftist indoctrination, I had been slowly coming around to realizing I am, at heart, very much a conservative. | ||
| Shocking working for Heritage, I know. | ||
| I also quickly discovered that my new worldview tended to be frowned upon in Los Angeles. | ||
| For the next 15 minutes, Ryland and I talked about the land, farming, the environment, and how it all impacts the food we eat and ultimately human health and flourishing. | ||
| I told him I'd be returning to Pepperdine University the very next week to work on my master's degree in public policy. | ||
| I had wanted to take the knowledge I had gained from years of working in the fitness and nutrition industries to help shape policy and encourage a very simple philosophy, which you've heard throughout the introductions today, food as medicine. | ||
| I'll never forget Ryland's words of encouragement. | ||
| Good for you. | ||
| We need people like you in DC. | ||
| I don't know if you remember, but that's what you said to me. | ||
| Here we are four years later, almost to the day. | ||
| Ryland and American Regeneration have been excellent partners in this event and I'd like to thank them. | ||
| Life update, Ryland and I both escaped California. | ||
| He is running a regenerative ranch in Texas and from what I hear, even hosting a pig roast from time to time. | ||
| And here I am, a conservative hippie in my dream job at the Heritage Foundation. | ||
| Thank you so much, Jay Richards, and the entire event team here at Heritage. | ||
| This event would not be possible without them. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Conserving the land and soil God has blessed our country with. | ||
| Living in harmony with it to grow abundant, vital, and nourishing food. | ||
| Health and flourishing for every American. | ||
| These are not Republican or Democrat issues. | ||
| These are human imperatives. | ||
| And we are all here today to figure out the best way to ensure everyone's needs are met. | ||
| It's a great honor to introduce to you three gentlemen who I believe play a pivotal role in helping to achieve those goals. | ||
| Rick Clark, whom you saw in this film, is a fifth generation farmer that cares deeply about soil health and human health. | ||
| The principles of soil health are the foundation of his regenerative organic stewardship system approach. | ||
| He has been no-tilling for 18 years and using cover crops for 14 years. | ||
| He has removed all inputs, again, as he mentioned in the film of Fertilizer, Herbicide, Insecticide, Seed Treatments, and Tillage, and is building a regenerative system that is profitable and viable for the next generation. | ||
| David Stelzer is a founder and longtime CEO of Azure Standard and Azure Farm, a pioneering force in the U.S. organic and non-GMO food movement. | ||
| Also a fifth generation farmer, Stelzer began farming organically as a teenager in the 1970s, driven by a belief in healthy soil and chemical-free food. | ||
| By age 21, he was delivering grain from the family farm to local customers via his truck, efforts that grew into the founding of Azure Standard in 1987. | ||
| Under his leadership, Azure Standard has grown into a nationwide distributor serving millions of individual and retail customers, I believe even your farm, Ryland, through his more than 4,000 community drops in almost every state in the U.S. Throughout his career, Stelzer has championed sustainable farming, soil health, and access to affordable organic whole foods, inspiring both innovation and community-based distribution in the natural food industry. | ||
| And finally, the one and only Joel Salatin. | ||
| For those of you who don't know Joel, you will not forget him after this introduction. | ||
| Joel calls himself a Christian, libertarian, environmentalist, capitalist, lunatic farmer. | ||
| Those who like him call him the most famous farmer in the world, the high priest of the pasture, and the most eclectic thinker from Virginia since Thomas Jefferson. | ||
| Those who don't like him, there's some, call him a bioterrorist, typhoid Mary, charlatan, and starvation advocate. | ||
| Welcome, you're very at home here at Heritage. | ||
| With his family, Joel co-owns Polyface Farm in Swoop, Virginia. | ||
| The farm services more than 5,000 families, 10 restaurants, and 5 retail outlets with salad bar beef, piggerator pork, pastured poultry, and forestry products. | ||
| The farm ships nationwide to doorsteps. | ||
| When he's not on the road speaking, he's at home at the farm, keeping the calluses on his hands and the dirt under his fingernails, mentoring young people, inspiring visitors, and promoting local regenerative food and farming systems. | ||
| I could go on and on about these men, but their words will be much more entertaining than mine. | ||
| Every day they are practicing regenerative agriculture with all its challenges and its rewards to ensure farmers have an alternative to modern farming. | ||
| So let's welcome them off the farm and onto the stage. | ||
| Thank you for coming, making this trip here to D.C. | ||
| So Rick and David, I believe you two have both transitioned your farms from conventional to organ. | ||
| You've always been, right, Joel? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So this first question is for you two because I think people really want to know is how do you do this? | ||
| How much time does it take? | ||
| So if you could tell us a little bit about that, why you made the switch and maybe how long it takes and some of the most difficult challenges. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Again, I'm honored to be here today. | ||
| This is quite an historic event. | ||
| So let's let this be the beginning of some great momentum. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| When we've been on this journey of regenerative, before it was even called regenerative, for about 18 years, and then when I realized that we can start to raise these crops with limited inputs to no inputs, that's when I decided to go organic. | ||
| The other reason why I decided to go organic was when I look back at my family tree and I start looking at an uncle that died of cancer, a sister-in-law died of cancer, a 24-year-old nephew had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, diabetes, diabetes, diabetes. | ||
| All of these things start to get you to wonder why. | ||
| And the common denominator comes back to the farm. | ||
| So I then, that was the real push that made me decide to make this farm to eliminate all those harmful, those harmful inputs. | ||
| And then what are some of the biggest challenges and how long did it take? | ||
| Yeah, the challenges are it's a totally different mindset of farming. | ||
| The current farming environment has a huge red easy button that they can push every day. | ||
| It's chemicals, it's tillage, it's whatever makes the job easy. | ||
| And to get the mindset to leave that comfort zone, that's difficult. | ||
| And when we started to make the transition to organic, we have a fairly large farm. | ||
| It's what I would call to scale. | ||
| When you have to abide by the organic rules, which are fine, you have to keep your non-organic crops segregated. | ||
| Well, we farm about 7,000 acres. | ||
| We've got a 600,000 bushel granary. | ||
| It's very hard to keep that stuff isolated. | ||
| So I made the push to go organic in four years, which I would not recommend that, but I understood the value of getting there as soon as we could. | ||
| And I wanted to start really zeroing in on building soil health and building human health. | ||
| David? | ||
| So I'm really the second generation organic farmer. | ||
| My father made the choice to switch to organic and regenerative. | ||
| Both words really weren't very popular at that time. | ||
| He did it for health reasons also. | ||
| I was very, very ill, was not expected to live. | ||
| And my parents made some health choices with diet change, which I regained my health. | ||
| And my father became convicted that the conventional agriculture was what was destroying my life and his health and our family. | ||
| And so in 1973, way before it was cool, he switched to organic agriculture. | ||
| And initially, the original transition that he did actually took a long time. | ||
| I would say it was close to 10 years before the soil regenerated enough. | ||
| We are not, we're in a dry area, so we're nine inches of rainfall a year. | ||
| So it's a little bit longer to get soil microbes going in the drier areas. | ||
| But since then, you know, he originally transitioned about 2,000 acres. | ||
| We've added another 2,400 since then that I've transitioned over in various ways. | ||
| But I've learned a lot and our team has learned a lot. | ||
| We use soil microbes, we use tissue testing, we use a lot of different things that we're able to use and we've been able to transition those places much faster. | ||
| In fact, we almost don't have yield loss in the transition now. | ||
| Now, there's a lot to that. | ||
| I can't say that it's a simple button. | ||
| It's very difficult to do, but it can be done. | ||
| And so we transition in the three-year mandated period by the organic standards pretty easily. | ||
| So that's. | ||
| So what I'm hearing is it's not for the faint of heart, right? | ||
| It's going to take some grit, some perseverance. | ||
| So Joel, I'm kind of curious, and I think a lot of people are, is there a place for both conventional and regenerative agriculture? | ||
| And can you be regenerative without being organic? | ||
| Are there some compromises or inputs that farmers may make maybe to the transitional full regenerative that might make them feel more comfortable with it? | ||
| Yeah, well, you certainly can be compatible as far as whatever the world is concerned. | ||
| I mean, we, you know, we don't ask for the elimination of conventional farms. | ||
| What we do is by being able to produce what we do, a lot of it is not, doesn't have anything to do with chemicals like controlled grazing for cattle, for example. | ||
| We run about a thousand head of cattle and we move them every day, you know, little little, we call it mob stocking, herbivorous solar conversion, lignified carbon sequestration, fertilization. | ||
| Yes, I do practice that in front of the mirror. | ||
| And what that does, that's not conventional or organic. | ||
| That's just mimicking nature the way herbivores run in nature. | ||
| But what it does is it increases our production by like 300% over the conventional people who don't do that. | ||
| So, you know, other things that we do, one of the reasons we're not organic certified is because we couldn't do a lot of the things that we do. | ||
| For example, we make compost with pigs. | ||
| Rather than using expensive equipment and petroleum to turn compost, we use pigs to do it. | ||
| And that's not allowed under organic certification. | ||
| So there are a lot of issues that we have with the organic certification that keeps us locked out of it to be actually more profitable and more ecological. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm going to, my last question is your one policy change, and I have a funny feeling that that would feed into that. | |
| But I'll hold it. | ||
| Anybody kind of who wants to answer this, what would your response be to those who contend there's no difference in nutrient density between food grown organically or regenerative via conventional? | ||
| Essentially, who might think, well, organic's kind of a scam. | ||
| That was just another way for the government to make money. | ||
| You know, how do we know for sure that these are more nutrient dense? | ||
| Anybody have a. | ||
| I mean, the tests are incredible. | ||
| I mean, just what the Dan Kittridge at the Bio-Nutrient Food Association has done in the preliminary work of measuring these, but we've done independent studies. | ||
| For example, our eggs have the USDA label on eggs is 48 micrograms of folic acid per egg. | ||
| I'll just pick one, 48 micrograms per egg. | ||
| Ours averaged 1,038 instead of 48. | ||
| These are not little 10% changes. | ||
| Grass-finished beef often has 300% more riboflavin than corn-fed, which is a calming essential. | ||
| So yeah, the studies are pretty obvious. | ||
| Conjugate alinoleic acid, I mean, you could just go down the line. | ||
| There's no comparison. | ||
|
unidentified
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Anybody else want to see? | |
| The same thing with our products. | ||
| The testing is there every time. | ||
| So it's not just magic that happens. | ||
| It's real. | ||
| And not only does the testing work, which we've done the same thing, but I will give from a personal standpoint and dealing with hundreds of thousands of customers throughout the country that are living this. | ||
| In my personal life, I grew up the sickly kid, my wife as well. | ||
| When we changed our diet, speaking to a little bit what Callie spoke about just a little bit ago, we changed our diet completely to an organic, regenerative-based diet, 100%. | ||
| We raised 11 children without ever having to have one of them see a doctor, except for one broken femur. | ||
| It makes a difference. | ||
| Proof is in the pudding. | ||
| That's Anne's. | ||
| I think another prominent question is, I can't remember if it was Roger or Pally who mentioned it, is, you know, how, right now all of these things are considered a luxury good, right? | ||
| Healthy food, organic, and it does show at the checkout, at the grocery store. | ||
| David, I want you specifically to speak about this. | ||
| I'll give the other two a chance first, but because you, that's kind of your claim to fame with Azure, is that it is affordable. | ||
| But is there a way to scale that? | ||
| Is it just a matter of scaling it so it's more available? | ||
| How do we scale? | ||
| I think, Rick, you might have the largest amount of acreage, if I'm not mistaken. | ||
| You've done it on a very large scale. | ||
| So why don't you talk to how you've been able to do that and then what you see in the future? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's going to be like everything else. | ||
| We have to understand that we just cannot come in and have a wrecking ball just destroy everything. | ||
| We have to make this slow and methodical like Callie was talking about. | ||
| This is going to be, this is going to be, in my opinion, a movement that needs to move across administrations. | ||
| And for that to happen, it's going to take all of us. | ||
| And that's how I view what we're trying to do with the products that we're raising. | ||
| You have to make easy, easy transitions. | ||
| You get the consumer aware of what you're doing. | ||
| And then honestly, word of mouth is your best friend. | ||
| And I know that sounds a little sixth grade, but it's real. | ||
| And that's how we're trying to. | ||
| We have an online meat market. | ||
| We do sell meat online. | ||
| You always get the same customers back every time. | ||
| And then there's always a few more that come from word of mouth after that. | ||
| Seems like simple business practices work no matter what. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Either Joel or which one you want to go next? | ||
| Being an elitist. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, elitist, thanks. | |
| Well, that's exactly, that was exactly my thought at the very beginning, is how do we create healthy food that's affordable to the average family? | ||
| Because, you know, and I, so after we started farming organically, it became, and we're trying to sell the crop, we would see our product four or five times the price that we got for it. | ||
| And it was, you know, by the time it got into retail. | ||
| And so when I started delivering food to retailers primarily, so it's very hard to get into distribution nationally. | ||
| That's a really tough space. | ||
| And so I had to basically cut that out. | ||
| I was kind of young and stupid and didn't realize it was almost impossible. | ||
| So I started distributing. | ||
| That's exactly what has to happen. | ||
| We have to have farmers connected with the consumers. | ||
| And that's what I've spent my entire career doing. | ||
| Azure has become the distribution network to connect the regenerative growers with consumers. | ||
| And that's exactly what we have to have. | ||
| And no, it doesn't have to be more expensive. | ||
| You know, I just had a customer tell me a few days, well, a couple weeks ago, that they did a huge price comparison with conventional from their local grocery store. | ||
| And Azure's Organic, compared it side by side, and after some things were higher, some things were lower, but after adding it all together, that they were able to eat organic food at about 5% less than they would have eaten standard conventional fare bought in standard American packaging in a major grocery retailer. | ||
| So, no. | ||
| It's the beginning. | ||
| I mean, think about the reduction of medical expenses that come with this. | ||
| Yeah, which is what I was going to bring up: that in the last 50 years, the average per capita expenditure, household expenditure on healthcare, has gone from 9% to 18%, and the average per capita expenditure on food has gone from 18% down to 9%. | ||
| Those two numbers have directly inverted. | ||
| Is it possible that there's a relationship between the two? | ||
| And as far as the pricing, right now, one of our polyfaced, pasture-raised, beyond-organic chickens is less per pound than boneless breast at Walmart from Tyson. | ||
| Bonus skinless breast is a luxury item. | ||
| And goodness, you know, lunchables. | ||
| You know, lunchables are $14 a pound. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Ultra-processed food is not cheap. | ||
| I want to go buy these shopping carts that are half full of Mountain Dew and Coca-Cola that isn't food anyway, and people complaining about the price of food. | ||
| And let's take out all the stuff that's junk and not food. | ||
| And let's actually look at the price of food. | ||
| And processed food is very, very expensive. | ||
| If you take the ingredients for DiGiarnio's frozen pizza and make that yourself from your own Azure standard grains, and if you make that, you can make it for way, way less. | ||
| So we actually run, we actually post comparisons in our retail store and in our website with other things. | ||
| And very, very price competitive, very price competitive, if not on a lot of things, lower. | ||
| In fact, during COVID, we were half the price of the meat in the grocery store. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I think that's too with policy. | |
| We always talk about the hidden costs, right? | ||
| What are the hidden costs of subsidies and things like this, health care? | ||
| But you do bring up something interesting because you mentioned, you know, if someone cooked their own pizza. | ||
| So what part of education, and you know, I'm thinking of an inner city family, right? | ||
| The mom, it may be a single mother that's really just trying to make the ends meet. | ||
| What other, I guess, what other circumstances or what other changes need to be in place for that to happen, for there to be time and the capacity to understand this stuff, just the educational component. | ||
| And I guess what I'm getting at is maybe a little bit of what Callie's talked about is this more cultural revolution, this spiritual reawakening, right? | ||
| of a return to the the deeper things the the first principles and things like that as a culture we don't put we don't put attention on food uh food is basically a um uh a problem pit stop between what's the important things in life and you go to any other country in the world and they've got you know food cultural food icons, | ||
| you know, and you can go and eat squid and all sorts of things. | ||
| But in America, food tends to be looked at as just bodily fuel to power you while you go, you know, do your business. | ||
| And we do not have that kind of sacred honoring food culture in our culture. | ||
| We just don't. | ||
| And so once we can change that, or once people understand that, and it's one awareness at a time, like the stories that we hear, one awareness at a time, and people finally get it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I do think that that's actually happening, at least from what I've seen, especially when COVID happened and lots of people began to cook at home. | |
| And I think the vast majority haven't gone back away from that completely. | ||
| And at least, you know, that's what we're seeing amongst our, you know, our base is that cooking at home has become a new, really cool thing to do. | ||
| And absolutely, you can save a ton of money cooking at home, plus get a much higher nutrient content. | ||
| And that education piece is going to be a big key to this revolution, not to mention force restaurants and such to change into healthier options. | ||
| Yeah, excuse me, Joel. | ||
| And then that, in my opinion, is what's going to drive the farming community to make the change. | ||
| This is all going to come through Maha. | ||
| And it's going to be driven through Maha. | ||
| It's going to make a generational change in society to demand that we want to know where our food's coming from, how's it being made, what's it being processed with, what are all the ingredients, and then that's going to trickle down to the USDA. | ||
| Now, this is just Rick Spitball in here. | ||
| This is going to trickle down to the USDA, and that's what's then going to drive the implementation change to the farming. | ||
| May I just say one other thing about the price, especially because we're in livestock, I think, more than and one of the big things that we talk about at our farm is that at least for livestock, pastured livestock, you're moving them around, you know, and we run, you know, we run 1,000 hogs, 1,000 head of cattle, you know, 30,000 chickens. | ||
| I mean, this is not a backyard operation. | ||
| But we have zero vet bill. | ||
| I mean, no vet bill, nothing. | ||
| But it does take people. | ||
| It takes people. | ||
| And so we have strategically chosen to substitute energy intensity, capital intensity, pharmaceutical intensity, chemical intensity for people. | ||
| And one of the problems is, and even equipment intensity. | ||
| And one of the problems is that U.S. tax code does everything possible to make it difficult to have people. | ||
| That's why every company is trying to get rid of people, going to robots, going to machines, getting you know, you can go abuse your tractor and claim it as a depreciation and replace it as an expense and get a you know, help your tax situation. | ||
| But we have all sorts of withholding and minimum wage requirements and OSHA requirements. | ||
| And I'm not saying I want to abuse anybody, but I am suggesting that when you tax and people and employment policy is all written to make people very, very expensive and energy, pharmaceuticals, equipment, chemicals, all those things very, very cheap. | ||
| And that creates a skewed market price point when we come to market. | ||
| And that's, I think, something that a lot of people don't appreciate. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I think that's really important that you pointed out how policy can really affect stuff that you wouldn't think about. | |
| Labor policy, right, affects the family farm and things. | ||
| So, you know, this is, we say it's an apolitical movement, but I will get a little political because we are a political organization in some ways. | ||
| How much does this green revolution narrative hurt you in that cow farts are the problem, you know, this very anti-meat? | ||
| Because from what I understand with regenerative, it's using all of God's resources, animals, soil, microbes, right? | ||
| So if you have a farm without animals, pigs creating the fertilizer, it's going to be harder to be regenerative. | ||
| So how do you combat that kind of anti-animal, you know, humans are the problem, cows are the problem. | ||
| Everything God has given us is the problem, which tends to be, yes, a more of a leftist narrative. | ||
| Well, one acre of healthy perennial pasture generate has enough methanotrophic bacteria to suck down the methane generated by a thousand cows per acre. | ||
| So again, when Diana Rogers wrote, you know, Sacred Cow, it's not the cow, it's the how. | ||
| And so, you know, you can do almost anything, you know, education, investment, recreation, cows, you can do it well or you can do it poorly. | ||
| You can make it a liability or an asset, and it all depends on how you manage it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's one of the things with modern agriculture today is that, okay, you have a whole bunch of cows together, and then they create waste that now has to be dealt with. | |
| In regenerative, you're the one dealing with your own waste. | ||
| That goes into the soil. | ||
| That becomes the fertilizer for tomorrow. | ||
| There's no you and then you don't have to take all this petroleum inputs to put on the soil to try to make the crops grow because it's a circle. | ||
| It's the circle of life, as it's been for thousands of years. | ||
| We just help it along a little bit and try to get things in the right spot at the right time and making sure that all the, you know, all the nutrients and the minerals and everything are in place for the microbes to really work. | ||
| We're really talking about the microbes pulling. | ||
| You know, the soil that we have transitioned from organic has gone from humus content sometimes of less than 1%, typically up to 5% and greater. | ||
| That's like, you know, five to ten times the amount of carbon in that soil that conventional agriculture has in. | ||
| It's not a mystery. | ||
| Agriculture is probably, you know, the biggest factor when it comes to changing the environment. | ||
| You know, like it or not, it's the reality. | ||
| Yeah, and if I could go a little bit further with the row crop aspect, we do have livestock, but not to the degree that these guys have. | ||
| We have to understand that what's available to us. | ||
| Do you realize that if you go out outside, there's about 30,000 tons of free available nitrogen above every acre of ground? | ||
| 30,000 tons. | ||
| And how much does a farmer need to raise corn? | ||
| About 125, 130 pounds. | ||
| So we need to educate the farmer on how to implement the practices that retrieve and pull that nitrogen into the system to where you no longer need inputs. | ||
| And that's what we're doing. | ||
| We're doing, you know, these guys have cattle grazing. | ||
| We've got our livestock are the microbes under the ground. | ||
| Those guys are working all the time. | ||
| And you need to have that. | ||
| Right now at home, for example, we are raising organic corn with zero inputs. | ||
| No nitrogen, no P, no K, no chemistry, nothing. | ||
| But you can't do that, right? | ||
| You can't do that. | ||
| But you can. | ||
| So we have to understand, though, the next phase to push this thing is education. | ||
| We have to understand how to educate the educators to then teach the farmers. | ||
| And that's why I like this event because you folks are open-minded. | ||
| You're not arrogant to the point to where we already know what to say in public. | ||
| No, we're learning what we're going to say in public because we have to say the right things. | ||
| And another thing, I'm going to assume a consumer is very similar to a farmer. | ||
| You give a farmer one chance of changing something. | ||
| If it doesn't work, they're never coming back. | ||
| And I'm assuming the consumer is probably the same type of buyer. | ||
| If that product did not meet their expectations, that's a big thing right there. | ||
| It's not so much what we say it could be, it's what their expectation of what that product is. | ||
| And if it doesn't meet their expectation, they're not going to come back. | ||
| So we have to be very cautious of how we move forward here. | ||
| And that's why this is such an important gathering today. | ||
| Yeah, the beauty of biological systems is that scale creates synergy through relational complexity. | ||
| The liability of chemical systems is that it regresses at scale, creating ecological competition through relational simplicity. | ||
|
unidentified
|
See it every day. | |
| See it every day. | ||
| I'll throw out another little tidbit here. | ||
| Hopefully we're not going off the rails here, but maybe that's where you got to go sometimes. | ||
| When I drive around my community at home and I look at our neighbors' fields, there's one weed that always raises its head to the top. | ||
| And that weed is called water hemp. | ||
| It is an offshoot of red root pigweed. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Now, 19, does anybody know what year the GMOs were started? | ||
| Does anybody know? | ||
| 1997 was a soybean. | ||
| From 1997 to 2008, That's all it took on our farm. | ||
| We had water hemp that was resistant to Roundup. | ||
| Think about that. | ||
| You think we're going to go out here and tell Mother Nature how to do her job? | ||
| In 11 years, the plant figured out how to be resistant to the chemistry. | ||
| Okay, so back to where I was going with this. | ||
| When I drive around to the community that I farm in, and none of our fields have had chemistry on them in at least 10 years, some 12, do we have any water hemp growing on our farm anywhere? | ||
| No. | ||
| Water hemp grows in all the fields that have chemistry sprayed on them. | ||
| Why? | ||
| But the farmers don't have, they don't know, they don't, they've not been told, they don't understand. | ||
| They see a water hemp, they see a giant ragwood. | ||
| We got to go spray another pass of chemistry. | ||
| That's the mentality. | ||
| So we have to understand that this is the heritage of the farm. | ||
| This is their livelihood. | ||
| This is how they were taught by their father, how their father taught them. | ||
| So we can't just go in with a wrecking ball and expect change. | ||
| So I think you need folks like Joel with Gabe Brown. | ||
| You need teachers that are really pushing the limits here. | ||
| Anybody want to add anything? | ||
| No? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So last question. | ||
| Doesn't have to be a lightning round. | ||
| We have some minutes. | ||
| But if you could wave your magic wand, maybe not take a wrecking ball, maybe just a slight, cast a slight spell. | ||
| A little pixie dust? | ||
| Yeah, that's fine. | ||
| We like, yeah, pixie dust. | ||
| What policy change would you make that would make this easier for someone to transition or just for our culture to understand the whole principles and then make them successful and viable? | ||
| Who wants to go first? | ||
| You want me to go? | ||
| I'm not, I'm not. | ||
| This is a tough question for me because I live in a different world than where policy is being made. | ||
| But we need to have the tools available to the teachers and the farmers. | ||
| All right, I'll just go ahead and lay out what I would do. | ||
| This is what I would do. | ||
| I would regionalize the United States. | ||
| I'd have nine regions. | ||
| And within each region, I would have an ambassador that implemented the principles of soil health within that region. | ||
| And then that ambassador is teaching other teachers below them to then go out to the workforce, the farmer, the gals and the guys that are getting this done every single day and show them how to implement the regenerative practices in the proper way in the context that they're in. | ||
| You're not going to farm the same way in New Mexico that you're going to farm in Iowa. | ||
| If you do, there is havoc is coming in a major way. | ||
| The system is going to crumble. | ||
| So we have to understand how to do that. | ||
| So I guess my policy change would be to stop looking at farming as it's this way or not that way. | ||
| You've got to make it contextual to where the farmer is not only in their journey, their landscape, the topography, and how thick is their skin and how willing are they to take on risk because there's risk involved. | ||
| I also think that that's a big part of it is the risk factor. | ||
| The average farm, the average conventional farm, at least in our country, they actually make more of their profit on crop insurance and other government subsidies than they actually do on selling the crop that they have. | ||
| So they're tied, they feel like their hands are tied, they're tied into the program, the commodities program that they're in, because if I am not in this program, then I'm going to lose my livelihood. | ||
| So there has to be a bridge or some kind of a gap. | ||
| Now, you know, I'm not risk-averse, so I went out, but basically, I haven't received an agricultural government subsidy in my lifetime. | ||
| Our farm has never received them some land with CRP ground on it, and they won't pay it to me. | ||
| So I have to keep it out of production until the end of the contract, but they won't pay me. | ||
| So that's because I'm changing, because I've changed the way that we do agriculture. | ||
| And we are not doing standardized best practices. | ||
| But yet, from a financial perspective, now, you know, economically, our farm makes five times as much as any of their farms, but that transition was not, you know, that was not easy. | ||
| We had to eat pretty slim for a few years during the transition of the original farm. | ||
| And so if there's a policy that can change, if we could spend 1% of the money that's spent on farm subsidies and medical subsidies on regenerative agriculture, | ||
| even research, how do we actually research how to deal with, you know, biological changes? | ||
| How can we affect the biology in our soil? | ||
| How can we change, create biological transformation to change weeds that were, you know, he was talking about. | ||
| That can all be done biologically and without any budget and just doing backyard research, we've come tremendous light years ahead. | ||
| We can do that. | ||
| In the last 40 years, that's progressed, but it's all been in farmers' garages, which is good. | ||
| It's made a major difference. | ||
| But that's, you know, I think the policy has gotten the farmers stuck. | ||
| If we can unstick that so that they're not locked into the commodity, that's probably the biggest change. | ||
| Mine is real simple. | ||
| How do we unstick farmers? | ||
| We give a food emancipation proclamation so that farmers can sell to their neighbors without asking the government's permission. | ||
| I to thousands and thousands of wannabe entrepreneurial small farmers who are ready to access their neighbors with chicken pot pie, charcuterie, raw milk, name it, kefir butter, but they can't because it takes a half a million dollar licensing compliance process with 10 bureaucrats hanging over their shoulders. | ||
| That's the answer to urban food deserts. | ||
| It's the answer to everything. | ||
| It doesn't take a dime of taxpayer money. | ||
| It doesn't take a government agency. | ||
| It only unleashes liberty and freedom in the food system. | ||
| We have an enslaved food system that is shackled by a plethora of government agencies and bureaucracies keeping neighbors from being able to do business with each other. | ||
| You shouldn't have to ask the government's permission to sell a bowl of tomato soup to your neighbor. | ||
| That should not require a government position. | ||
| And so, as Callie was talking about the successional issue right now with aging farmers or aging out, young people coming in, the way that you bring young people in is creating entrepreneurial opportunities that they are creating. | ||
| We don't need government subsidies. | ||
| We don't need government agencies. | ||
| All we need is to unleash the power of entrepreneurial practitioners around the country to access their neighborhoods with food. | ||
| And we will accomplish what Bernie Sanders is running around asking to stop the oligarchy, stop the oligarchy. | ||
| Well, the way you stop it is not with a bigger bully government program. | ||
| We've tried that for 100 years, and look where it got us. | ||
| It got us to centralization, consolidation, and concentration. | ||
| What we need is to unleash the American entrepreneurial spirit on our neighborhoods and let us interact in food transactions without asking the nanny state permission. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I knew I could... | |
| 50 hertz. | ||
| No, that's the next one. | ||
| So I knew I... | ||
| That's the next one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I knew I could count on Joel to end it with the bang. | |
| please join me in welcoming all of our guests today. | ||
| I'm thanking them. | ||
| This morning, security experts examine the recently released warfighting framework from the U.S. Space Force, which outlines operational planning for conflict and combat in the space domain. | ||
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| We'll have live coverage from the Atlantic Council at 10 a.m. Eastern on C-SPAN. | ||
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