Will Harris and his daughter Jenni, who now leads their regenerative farm in Bluffton, Georgia (the poorest U.S. county in 2020), contrast healthy soil—absorbing five inches of rain—with degraded industrial land that barely holds half an inch, draining water resources like the Apalachicola Bay’s oyster grounds. Their model retains 100% of the food dollar by controlling production locally, while Tyson dominates 80% of the nation’s beef with 155,000 cattle processed weekly. Grass-fed cattle live 24 years versus feedlot cattle’s two-year lifespan due to obesity and antibiotics since 1946, fueling resistance like MRSA. Regenerative farming improves health and ecosystems but struggles against cheap, engineered processed foods and corporate greenwashing, demanding consumer-driven change for long-term sustainability. [Automatically generated summary]
I mean, I don't know if you guys can see it very clearly in the video, but one of them is very light-colored, and the other one looks rich and dark, and it's filled with twigs and all sorts of biological material.
Yeah, and we've showed many times that video of the, was it a creek or a river near your house, where the runoff from their farm is just polluting the water.
So, you know, this is, it's just strange that it's legal to just have the runoff pollute the rivers.
That it seems like someone would see that and say, well, the downstream effects of this have to be pretty substantial and pretty detrimental to the fish, to every other piece of land that's downriver that's going to encounter all this fertilizer and pesticide and herbicides, and this has to be terrible.
There's like a whole town, Apalachicola, that used to be a real thriving community because of the oystering business and industry, and the whole town has suffered, which is one thing we'll talk about with regards to rural America.
But there's like a whole city that's suffering because they can no longer do what they've done for generations.
Not you, but someone from that town, and someone from the oystering community, because it seems like that's a no-brainer.
I mean, if you were running a tire company, and the tire company was upstream of something, and the water went down and started polluting it and ruining people's livelihoods, you would think that someone would have the grounds for a lawsuit.
So it seems like that they would want to study that, though.
I mean, that seems – it's insane to me that they just allow that to continue, and it's happening every day, day by day, just constantly dumping toxic chemicals into the water.
So I think, you know, I'm certainly not answering for that whole kind of politically motivated question, but you've got to remember That the politicians who control the bureaucrats are controlled by pesticide companies and agricultural companies.
And, you know, if I were a politician running for office and begging for funding, I probably wouldn't want to be the guy that opened that can of worms.
It's such a dirty system, and it allows things like this to happen.
But then the question is, you explained how you changed your farm from an industrial farm to a regenerative farm, and that it took approximately 20 years?
Well, I mean, when you start that process, moving from an industrial farm to the regenerative farm that we run today, coming out of the chute, you see a decline in production, and it lasts for a period of time, three years, four years, or something.
Then you see a very gradual increase Until it gets back to where ours is today.
And where ours is today is not as high yielding as if we used all the crop inputs.
But it's approaching that because we don't have to buy the crop inputs.
And if there was legal or at least some sort of financial repercussions that were enacted on the farm itself for the pollution, it would seem like that would balance itself out.
Like if someone did the correct thing and said, hey, you guys are ruining the earth itself with this just so you can make a little more money, which is so crazy that that's allowed and not just allowed but subsidized.
Well, you know, the farmers are making a little more money.
You're right.
The big multinational corporations are making a hell of a lot more money because they're manufacturing these products and they're handling these huge quantities of agricultural production and turning out this industrial food that we all eat.
So the amount of money is incredible.
And don't forget, I think I might have mentioned to you when I spoke to you before, that it's a way of life that senior bureaucrats go to work for the big ag companies.
So if you're a very senior person in D.C. in the Department of Ag and probably other departments, And you're getting close to retirement.
If you've been a good boy, you can retire and get a job making twice what you were making with the government.
You know, Clay County, Georgia, where Bluffton is, was the poorest county in the United States of America in 2020. Number one, not just Georgia, the whole country.
And when that whole dollar stays in Clay County, Georgia, it's beginning to correct that.
And it seems like the problem is so complicated now because of fast food chains and because of big cities that absolutely don't grow anything.
That when you're getting food, you have to get food at scale.
You have to get massive amounts of food.
Like, say if you're living in California, if you're living in Los Angeles, which is just an insanely overpopulated place, And you want to get beef, especially if you want to get a cheeseburger from Jack in the Box or something like that.
I don't mean to pick on Jack in the Box.
Burger King, whatever.
Where's that meat coming from?
It's not grown from local cows.
There are no local cows.
You have to go pretty far out of town to find a farm that raises cows.
I mean, you can go like an hour and a half out of town and find some cows, but that's not going to feed everybody.
So 25 years ago, when Dad decided to change the way we farmed, he knew that in order to put all the cost that it was going to take to raise animals differently, he had to find a consumer that would pay for that.
And so he went, you know, looking for customers, and Public Supermarket was, you know, one of the first ones.
Whole Foods very quickly after...
And that worked out really well.
But the point I want to get to is that when Dad started selling beef, grass-fed beef, to those two grocers, the first pound of American grass-fed beef to be marketed as American grass-fed beef came from White Oak Pastures.
And that was not a sustainable option.
We can't feed the world.
We don't want to feed the world.
But fast forward 20 years, and over 85% of the grass-fed beef in the American market is imported product, not raised in America.
Isn't that nuts?
In 20 years, we've gone from being a very early innovator to just a mere meager portion of 15%.
But honestly, the erosion of this type of farming in America is completely being exported to another country because we're importing all of this product and then due to loopholes in labeling,
intentionally fraudulent labeling even, selling it as a product of the USA. Then we have to consider, if everybody's really concerned about climate change and CO2 output, think about the amount of freight, just these massive boats that are making their way across the...
Did you see this thing they did recently?
I was reading this article, and I was actually listening to a podcast.
That's what it was initially.
But the podcast was about how they changed...
I guess it was...
I don't know what governing body...
Change the emission standards for these gigantic freight ships.
And when they changed the emission standards, what they found was when they were releasing less pollution into the air, it was doing less of a job of blocking the sun.
So the ocean water was getting warmer, quicker than they anticipated.
So it is having the opposite effect.
So they're trying to come up with different methods to mitigate that now.
And some of the methods are spraying chemicals in the sky.
Some of the methods are spraying ocean water in the sky, which sounds much more natural.
So that label change, Product of the USA, even though it was imported, occurred in 2015, I think, 15 or 16. And it was a reaction to the fact that some of us had gone into the grass-fed beef business and were doing pretty good with it.
We had some really good years in the early 2000s.
And then, of course, when they...
We're allowed to bring the imported beef in as a product of the USA. The margin structure fell dramatically.
So if you're a person who wants to buy all American-made stuff and American-raised beef, and you're like, oh, great, product of the USA, I feel like I'm doing a good thing.
But they make hunting gear, they make outdoor stuff, they make jujitsu geese, they make fantastic handmade boots.
And if you want to support an American-made company, Origin's great.
But, you know, they have a limited amount of They can only make so much of it.
You know, they have one major factory that's doing it in Maine, and it's all people working on it by hand, and it's pretty cool, but it's, you know, it's limited.
What led to this decision, the initial decision, to change your farm from an industrial farm to a regenerative farm?
There had to be a lot of soul-searching involved in that kind of a decision, because it's not an easy one, and it probably cost a lot of money, and it was probably quite a headache.
It was all those things, and to be real honest with you, I went into it with a little bit of naivety.
I didn't think it was going to be as big a deal as it was, but it was.
I was a very industrial cattleman for 20 years, graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in animal science, came home and put it to work.
My dad had been a very industrial producer, using all the tools.
I had a lot of pride in my knowledge and understanding of how to raise cattle industrially, monoculture of cattle at that time.
And I think probably because I was an abuser, if it said to use a little bit, I used a lot.
And I just came to see the unintended consequences of that industrial system more clearly probably than people that were playing closer to the rules.
And I just thought I didn't want to do it anymore.
And I did not do a good job planning an alternative production program.
I just quit using stuff.
You know, I quit using hormone implants and subtherapeutic antibiotics and bad feedstuffs like chicken manure.
I quit using chemical fertilizer.
I quit using pesticides.
And it was very expensive for a while.
And it was economically painful.
But we survived it.
And from day one, I enjoyed it better.
But from day one, I made less money until I lost money.
But then, thank goodness, grass-fed beef became a thing, and it wasn't being imported.
So, free-range, by definition, you would see a brand with a grassy knoll and a red barn and a white fence, and it would say free-range.
So, free-range, by definition, is just access to the outdoors via a concrete pad or whatever.
It's not actually pasture-raised poultry.
It's just...
Maybe a little different than commodity in the house poultry.
But it's at a fraction of the price.
You know, true pastured poultry might cost two or three hundred percent more than commodity poultry.
And so you have these consumers who are very busy.
You know, they don't have time to learn the nuances and read and research like, you know, you have done and we obviously do.
And so they see pastured poultry for $6 a pound or free-range poultry for $3 or $4 a pound.
How could you expect for them to pay 50% more, 75%, or 100% more for something that is so loosely defined and, due to labeling, pretty misrepresentative of the way it's actually raised?
I mean, and it's unfortunate that they're allowed to use those loopholes.
And that should be more clearly defined.
I mean, if you would rather save money, and I understand that if someone's on a budget, you want to save money.
I get it, 100%.
But I've gotten eggs from the grocery store that say free range, and I get it, and I crack it open, and it is that light yellow bullshit yolk that I know.
I know that chicken has just been eating feed.
It's not eating grass.
It's not eating bugs.
It's not doing things that chickens do.
And when you get a chicken that is doing things that chickens do, you get that dark orange yolk.
When you say, can we produce enough food like that, can the industry produce enough food like that without doing such extraordinary damage?
We're going to pay for this.
This stuff is so cheap, not because it's really being produced that cheap, it's because expenses are thrown off And not borne by the producer or the company buying it.
That's a great example because I mean think about the extraordinary amount of money it would take to take the Gulf and bring it back to a pristine condition.
Yeah, it's really sad and it's weird how we haven't addressed this and how this is just something that just keeps going and going primarily because of the amount of money that's involved and the amount of money these companies are making by doing things the way they're doing it right now and the fact that it's subsidized.
Yeah, it's dirty business.
There's an ancient soil in the Amazon called terra preta.
So thousands and thousands of years ago, the indigenous people of the Amazon figured out a way to create this Regenerative soil, and it's composed of biological material, carbon, all sorts of different things.
They don't exactly know how they made it, and they don't know how to recreate it, but this is a self-sustaining soil.
And when you grow in it, it acts like this soil that you folks have.
And these people that lived thousands of years ago figured out how to way to make this sustainable soil.
It just seems like that is something, if there's so much money involved in all this, that's something that someone would be able to figure out how to recreate today.
This is the terra preta.
This is the stuff that exists.
So on the left you see the actual soil, what it looks like before it's treated.
That terra preta on the right is entirely man-made and entirely man-made from an unknown origin.
We know the folks, the people that live there, they're the ones who did it, but we don't know how they did it.
And what we do know is that you can grow on that indefinitely.
You can just keep going.
They're calling it biochar, terra preta, but it's a phenomenal soil for growing crops on and for growing things on.
And it seems like that should be something that someone should invest in, some sort of research.
I mean, look, if they figured out how to do it thousands of years ago and we assume that they didn't have computers and AI and all the different advantages that we have in terms of technology and knowledge, Figure it out.
There should be some sort of a large-scale project if we're really at 57 years left of topsoil in the American farmlands due to monocrop agriculture and industrial farming.
It seems like they should be able to figure out a way to do that.
And then you can see there about the subsoil below that guy's hand, which is like the degraded soil, and the good soil, which is above it, which is soil that we...
Denny, what was the story that you used to tell that scientists figured out exactly what seawater was?
You know, like, what made seawater?
And they meticulously made it in a lab, but then somehow it wasn't after they did everything that science told them that seawater was, when they made it, it wasn't seawater.
When it comes to the way we treat our land and water and air, consumers have power.
They can do something about it.
You can't depend on the government because of the lobbyist thing, the dark money.
We discussed that earlier.
It won't be, sadly, the land-grant university system because so much of that funding comes from the huge multinational companies that are profiting from industrial production.
I can list a whole lot of things it won't come from.
But if it happens, it'll be by consumers.
Consumers making the choice, this is what I'm going to support.
Well, it seems like it would take a massive re-education of the American public in order for that to take place, and then people would have to be willing to be financially impacted by their decisions because you're not going to be able to get a 99-cent cheeseburger.
Yeah, and that's unfortunate that this whole green thing has become a political movement and it's been a political movement that's hijacked by industry.
And they are trying to enforce mandates that will allow them to make extreme amounts of profit and also to control people and to control their choices.
You know, all you read is that cattle are great contributors to global warming, greenhouse gases and all that.
And we talked about before, there's a scientific study, a very expensive scientific study called a life cycle analysis on our website that shows that we're actually sequestering more carbon in our cattle side of our business than we're putting up.
So one of the differences in those two soils and the ones you showed and the one that you talked about in South America, there's carbon and microscopic life in that soil.
So, you know, the way you build those carbon-rich soils is through proper livestock interactions.
That's the way the eight-foot-deep soils in the Great Plains came about, those huge herds of buffalo going across.
And it's the reason that those two soils look so much different than the one that Jamie showed on the board there.
So I think we know a lot more about how to fix the problem And we acknowledge, but it's just going to be so expensive, especially for big food, big ag, big tech.
Because if McDonald's went purely to regenerative agriculture, if they had a large-scale effort to eliminate industrial farming and get all of their food through regenerative agriculture, there's not a chance in hell they're going to charge 99 cents for a cheeseburger.
I mean, there's a large amount of people in this country that primarily eat fast food, unfortunately.
That's where they get their calories from.
And you see it because of the health consequences.
I mean, it's a gigantic issue in this country.
If you look at the human beings, I'm sure you've seen these photographs of people on the beach in the 1950s and 60s versus 2023. 2023, it's insane how obese everybody is.
And that's not an accident.
That's a direct result of the way we eat and what we eat and where it comes from.
Those people who suffer from obesity and sedentary lifestyles that have diseases and whatever else, then we get to sell them medicine.
And then the medicine's called side effects, which then we treat with more medicine.
So I'm the director of marketing, and one thing that I love is just good old-fashioned marketing and reoccurring business and returning orders and all those things.
I see how that works.
The very idea that these lifestyles create a certain issue, which are then prescribed with certain medicines that then create more issues that we treat with more medicines.
You talked about the changes I made from what I used to do to what I do now.
And one of the...
Primary changes is, from the 30,000 foot level, is I used to go in my pastures every day looking for something to kill.
I was looking for a fungus on the grass to put a fungicide on, looking for an insect to put insecticide on, looking for another Competing weed that I put herbicide on, looking for parasites in my cattle, on and on.
Insects, on and on.
I was looking every day for something to kill.
I was a successful commercial cattleman in terms of profitability, and I was successful because I killed stuff every day.
Spent money to high-tech companies to kill stuff.
Now, since I made the change, I'm trying to keep things alive.
I believe that all these species have a role out there, and I want to keep things in balance.
That's what's crazy, you know, when you're dealing with 80 plus years of this going on.
Like, how do you unwind that and how do you...
I guess you do it through conversations like this initially to get enough people aware of how big of a problem this is and how bad it is for everybody.
And for him, you know, we had talked about him writing a book for a very long time, and honestly, nobody knew where to start.
And so...
He was approached by some folks who said, hey, we think you'd be a great book writer.
And Dad quickly told them, there's no way I can write a book.
No way in hell.
I don't know where to start and where to end.
They said, well, let us help you.
So they found a ghostwriter named Emily Grieven, who is great.
And she and Dad had phone dates every Friday for probably a year that lasted anywhere from two to four hours.
In listening to the book, Dad narrated it, and it is like a glimpse inside of his brain.
All of his thoughts are there, and I think it's so important because Dad started a business and a mission that is going to last a lot longer than him.
He's 69 this year, and the food system is not going to be fixed.
You know, by the time he is gone.
And so to be part of that and to be part of a business that's bigger than one person, bigger than one person's life that lasts so much longer, I think is so important.
And people like him have got to focus on that.
You know, he can't fix the food system.
He has to set the groundwork for people like you and I to fix the food system and then to instill it in our children to fix the food system.
So if someone is out there that does run an industrial farm and is sort of tortured by it, that they're aware of the consequences of what they're doing and they maybe admire what you've done and would like to move in that direction.
Well, you were originally brought onto that Fox News show because they were trying to figure out what a farmer thinks about Bill Gates buying up farmland.
You know, Bill Gates, who's famously said that everyone's got to stop eating meat.
Sure.
Bullshit fake meat versions, these plant-based meats.
So there's 25,000 factory farms.
Factory farms continue to take over the agricultural landscape of the United States.
There are currently 1.6 billion animals in our nation's 25,000 factory farms.
Which makes sense.
I mean, if you go to Arby's, where's that food coming from?
We've shown the footage of, someone got drone footage where they fly a drone over a pig farm, an industrialized pig farm, and you see these lakes of pig waste, and it's so disgusting.
So one in five pounds of meat, we just read that, was produced by Tyson.
But consumers have no idea that it was a Tyson product.
So if you look at the amount of brands that these big multinational meat corporations own, there's no way for a consumer to know that that's one of those products.
So it's just a really incredible system when you start pulling the layers back on it.
And that is also reflected in the health consequences of impoverished people.
If you look at people that are poor that rely upon this kind of food all the time, those are the people that have the worst health outcomes because they're eating stuff that doesn't have any nutrients in it.
It's terrible for you.
It's filled with seed oils and bullshit and preservatives.
I'm sure you've seen those.
They've done these little tests where they've taken a McDonald's cheeseburger and just sit it on a shelf for like weeks and nothing happens to it.
So Megan wants to find out whether the cheeseburger will stay the same after another five years.
So I bet it will.
I mean, what's going to change?
Five years.
Says she's inspired to carry out the experiment after seeing an old burger being showcased in her doctor's office.
And so she set this burger down and just left it out there for five years and that's what it looks like.
Hi Megan.
Kind of crazy, but also disturbing if you eat that.
Like, what is that doing to your gut microbiome?
What is that doing to your health?
I mean, the preservatives have a consequence on your health.
The eating stuff that, you know, we were talking about dog food earlier, and I feed my dog raw food, and I just started feeding him raw food about six, seven months ago, and it kind of, it's embarrassing to me that that's the case.
Because I always just thought, if you go to the pet store, I didn't think about it.
You go to the pet store, you buy healthy food, the best food that they have available at a nice pet store.
But what I was saying about my dog, he was getting fat, and we were lowering the amount of food that he was eating because of that, and increasing his exercise, and he still just...
It just didn't...
And then I was thinking, I wouldn't eat that.
Why am I feeding him what I would eat?
And so I started feeding him...
Well, I was feeding him elk meat.
So I'd shoot an elk, and I'd take some of the ground meat, and that's what I would use in his dog food, and I'd cut it up, and boy, he would just dive on that food.
I mean...
He couldn't get it in his mouth quick enough.
To him, it was what he was supposed to be eating.
Now, when we switched over to the stuff we're using right now, there's a bunch of companies that do it really well, and they sell real food for dogs.
And it's frozen.
And it's cut up into cubes, and it's just basically raw meat and some vegetables and some blueberries and stuff like that.
And it's changed everything.
Changed his coat.
His body slimmed down.
He's got way more energy.
His endurance, when I throw the ball for him, he's got way more energy.
It's incredible.
It's incredible.
But of course it is.
I mean, it just makes sense.
You think about the high instances of cancer in dogs and also the high instances of cancer in human beings that have been correlated to cancer.
Preservatives and all sorts of environmental contaminants that are in human beings' diets.
It just makes sense.
Especially since the vast majority of dogs are being fed these processed, preserved, industrialized foods.
We brought Marshall some rawhides, and I think he'll completely love it.
But, you know, there's another part of it.
And so we became fast friends with a pet food manufacturer in Atlanta, a whole dog market who also coined farmhounds.
They're really, really great people.
But they told me about the fact that, you know, puppies chew.
And, you know, you hate your puppy because it chews up all your stuff.
You know, your seat, your chair legs, your shoes, and whatever it is.
And, you know, you spank the puppy and, you know, they learn not to chew and whatever else happens.
But truthfully, chewing for dogs is soothing for them.
You know, it's something that is calming.
It relieves stress.
It's a natural behavior.
They're used to having to gnaw their food off of a carcass that they've run down or whatever else it is.
You know, it is sad to think that we have turned dog food into something, you know, little bites that can be gulfed down and we don't give dogs something to chew on and then they get in trouble for chewing on your shoes or chewing on your chair leg when that is how animals evolved.
And there's like a community online of people that have like overused their jaw muscles to the point where they develop these massive like bull mastiff jaw muscles.
On the side of their face and it becomes a like kind of a weird thing like almost like anorexia or something like that.
These people that have just have developed these because they want a square jaw, right?
So in doing that will give you a square jaw because that's where it comes from.
It comes from this muscle right here, this muscle right here and you could You build that muscle just like you can build your biceps or any other muscle.
We did a tremendous amount of education for cooking grass-fed beef and for The first several years that we had our e-commerce online store, we had consumers call and say, it's like shoe leather.
It's so tough.
And you say, well, how did you cook it?
And you walk them through.
And that has really cut down as consumers have become more familiar with it.
But the fact that it melts in your mouth, meat's not supposed to melt in your mouth.
But when I look at, like, when they slice Kobe beef and they talk about how expensive it is because of all the marbling, I'm like, that thing's dying.
Like, that is a sick animal.
That is, like, a severely morbidly obese human being.
If you took a slice out of them, it's going to look like that.
Just a deep, just fat is everywhere.
It overcomes the food where you're eating it and you just, it, like, coats your mouth.
And some people like it, you know, in, like, small pieces.
Okay, whatever you want.
If that's what you're into.
Me, I like grass-fed beef.
I like a dark, rich ribeye steak where it looks like a dark red, like a cow's supposed to look, like a bison steak.
If you eat a grass-fed bison steak and you cut into it, that is a dark red.
And that's what you're supposed to eat.
That's nutrient-dense.
It's better for you.
It's much higher in protein.
You know, that's what I like about wild game.
When I'm eating wild game, I'm eating this animal that is essentially eating and living the way it's lived for thousands and thousands and thousands of years with no input from human beings whatsoever.
And there's some companies that do that, like Certified Piedmontese has a very specific cow that's much higher in protein than other cows because it's leaner and it looks different.
It's darker, but you have to cook it differently.
And the way I cook it And the way I tell people to cook game is what's called a reverse sear method.
So I cook it very slowly until I get it up to an internal temperature of like 120 degrees or 115 degrees.
Then I sear the outside of it to give it a nice crust and it's tender that way and that way you get all the flavor of the meat.
As well as eating food that they're not really supposed to be eating.
People love a grain-fed animal because it's obese.
That's really what they like when they look for a lot of marbling.
That's obesity.
That's what you're getting, and that's what makes it juicy and delicious.
But that's also what makes it sick, and that's also why they have to use so many antibiotics.
You know, I'm sure you've seen, there was a documentary, I forget what the documentary was, but there was a documentary where they showed various cows and that these cows, all these diseases that these cows encounter because of eating that way and all the chemicals that they have to use and the antibiotics they have to use to treat these cows and the unintended consequences those have on the consumer.
I don't know that, but it's got to do with that, you know, a cow...
The way they digest is there are microbes in the rumen, the gut, that breaks down the cellulose or grain, and somehow that antibiotics enhances that procedure.
Here it says, the damage caused by antibiotics depends upon the mechanism of action, dosage, treatment, duration, and administration route.
Antibiotics given at low doses to animals have the notable effect of increasing weight, a practice termed subtherapeutic antibiotic treatment and used since 1946 in livestock.
And then also the rise of MRSA. You know, medication-resistant staph infections are huge in this country.
I mean, it's such a giant issue when people get surgery or if they get cuts.
You know, in the jiu-jitsu community, it's a giant issue.
And I have several friends that have gone through lengthy hospital stays because they developed staph infection that didn't respond to antibiotics, and it got systemic.
And it's life-threatening, and people have died from it.
It's something very scary because they're pumping you full of antibiotics intravenously, and it's not working.
The antibiotics are not killing this bacteria, and this bacteria is consuming the person.
Scary, scary stuff.
We're playing around with nature itself, and we're playing around with nature itself essentially just for profit.
You know, I mean, we don't know what the effects of this stuff's going to be.
But for short-term profits, you know, that's one of the major, I think, differences between businesses like ours and corporations.
You know, corporations are so steadily focused on quarterly reports and profits and, you know, whatever else.
And there have been so many decisions.
In fact, all of the big decisions recently, certainly, that When we get together, my wife, my sister, my brother-in-law, my dad, and he says, you know, do you want to buy this land?
I'll die before it's paid off.
Is this something y'all want to do?
And he abstains from the vote.
And, you know, my sister, my wife, my brother-in-law, we all decide if that's something we can or can't swing.
And so businesses run like that for the longevity of Versus businesses for short-term profit have completely different motivations.
Yeah, and we're seeing the health consequences of that with other things as well.
I was watching this video the other day where this gentleman was talking about farm-raised salmon being one of the most toxic things that you can consume, which is so wild.
If you think about salmon, salmon is just immediately associated with health.
But people think about salmon as being one of the healthiest things.
And so this guy holds open this fillet of salmon.
See if you can find a video on it, Jamie.
This guy takes this fillet of salmon, and it's a fresh piece of salmon, and he opens it up.
And he's like, look at how easily these bones separate from the flesh.
And the color of the flesh is very different, which is one of the reasons why they have to use dye.
When you see a farm-raised salmon and it's a dark red color, a lot of times what you're getting is people putting food coloring on the salmon itself in order to make it that color, which is great.
Because if you get a wild salmon, it's from the insects that they consume that turns their flesh that color.
When I listened to your episode with RFK and he was talking about the mercury levels in fish, I mean, I was not a huge fish eater to begin with, but after that I was like, whoa, this is incredible.
But if you think about all the ecosystems that exist on the earth, from tundra to desert to rainforest to alpine, on and on.
There's not a monoculture anywhere.
I don't believe you can find one anywhere.
Everywhere there are plants and animals and microbes living in symbiotic relationships with each other.
When you step away from that, which is what we've done in industrial farming, whether it's plants or animals, whether it's peanuts or hogs, you're fighting nature every step of the way.
And the only...
The tools we use to fight nature all have an unintended consequence.
And then we have to take another tool to fight that unintended consequence.
What she described with the medical is exactly what we've done in food production.
One expensive technological tool that we pay money for that fixes a problem but creates another problem that requires another expensive technical tool and another and another and another, and there's no wind to it.
You know, one thing that I'll say is that it has been so...
Interesting to watch nature balance itself.
And the best example that we have of that is that we evolved as cattle people.
The first generation had multi-species and continued.
And then we became a monoculture of cattle.
And around 2012, we started diversifying again.
The first non-cattle species that we introduced at White Oak Pastures was poultry.
And we got good at raising them.
And the way we insisted on raising poultry, like all the rest of the species, is in an environment where they can express their instinctive behavior.
So cattle were meant to roam and graze.
Hogs were meant to root and wallow.
Chickens were meant to peck and scratch.
So our chickens were outside, unconfined, unrestricted.
You know, they could walk to Atlanta if they wanted to.
And shortly after we turned the chickens loose out on pasture, we noticed, maybe around 2013, a few bald eagles settled in.
And dads, oh, come look, this is awesome, mating pair.
It was really neat.
We were proud of them.
How American can you be?
I mean, this is great!
And then, you know, they're migratory birds, so they left.
And the next year, there were probably eight or something.
And it was like, man, that's really cool.
You know, they went and had such a great time here.
They told their friends and, you know, brought more back.
This is great.
And then, you know, eight left.
They migrated away.
And, you know, 20 came.
And the next year, even more.
And I think at one point, there were...
We had single sightings, 84 bald eagles at white oak pastures at one time, whereas historically we had never had any bald eagles.
I mean, I went 30-something years never seeing a bald eagle, but then in a very short amount of time there were 80-something, and they put us near about out of the pastured poultry business.
But that is just a prime example of how nature will balance itself.
That wolves will just have fun and just kill 18, 19 elk.
There was an instance in Wyoming where there was like 18 or 19 cows that had been slaughtered by wolves and just left them there.
Because that's what they do.
And it's rare for them to get a chance to kill some elk, especially when they reintroduce wolves and the elk haven't been accustomed to them.
And now all of a sudden the wolves are there and the cows and the bulls don't exactly know what to do because they haven't encountered wolves before.
And they just ran right through them.
They dropped the population in Yellowstone significantly.
Which is where they initially introduced them but now they're you know there's there was an article today that I was reading about them in California that they're seeing them in you know and they're migrating into California and some of them being released in California by these wacky wildlife groups like I showed one that was in central California is near Bakersfield this lone wolf that was in a cow pasture that a friend of mine had filmed this beautiful big black wolf by himself that most likely was brought there by somebody Nature
That's one of the issues I think that some people focus on with agriculture in general is that they have these expectations that it is kind or it is Walt Disney World or it is beautiful.
We had a situation where we were kidding.
So our goats were kidding and we were We were co-grazing a paddock.
How many people have reached out to you, have a lot of people reached out to you after you've gone public with all this stuff and become sort of higher profile and wanted help and trying to figure out how they could do that for themselves?
And I think for a lot of people it's very satisfying to see, and it seems very natural and very normal, and it seems like the right way to go.
But for the vast majority of people that are getting their food, this is not going to be an option with what's currently required to feed 300 plus million people.
The price is probably a lot closer per pound when you take in the external cost than industrial agriculture takes outside of the cost of producing food.
It would take someone a lot smarter than you or I to figure out how to scale that and how to make that available for everyone and how to encourage people to do that.
I think the only way to encourage industrial farms to change is financially.
Yeah, there has to be some sort of a – like they have to be responsible for this damage they're doing.
They have to be – and then also the health consequences.
If someone started saying, hey, you know, what you're doing to these animals is having a direct effect on human beings that consume them, and you're responsible for that.
And what scares me is that that's when opportunists and people that have a lot of money and influence and people that are in positions of power are gonna try to encourage people to do something else instead that's profitable.
And they're gonna try to blame cattle.
Instead of blaming monocrop agriculture.
And they're going to try to force people to eat plant-based meat, which has really been interesting to me because that's one of the instances where people have voted with their dollar.
Because when they first started introducing things like Beyond Meat or Impossible Meat or whatever the fuck it's called, when they started doing that stuff, Initially, a lot of people were like, oh, this is great, until people tried it.
Like, oh my god, this is terrible.
And then when people saw studies, it showed that it gives rats cancer.
Yeah, cell-grown meat, which is essentially the same thing, I think, because they're taking that cell-grown meat and then they're using 3D printers to try to replicate it and artificially created ribeye.
It's bizarre.
And what are the health consequences of that?
Like, who knows what, you know, what does that do for you?
And I think they do realize that the plant-based meat is a bust.
And also, more and more people are becoming aware of the health consequences of industrial seed oils and how many of these industrial seed oils are used in the processing and creation of these artificial plant-based meats.
And, you know, these things cause...
Inflammation that cause a host of health problems in people's bodies.
Yeah, his mother grew up cooking everything in lard.
And then when Crisco came along, that was like the thing.
These vegetable oils, these canola oil, sunflower oil, it was like this very stark change.
One thing that has been interesting for me is that, you know, in the last 24 months, our suet fat and pork lard is, you know, one of the fastest moving items that we sell.
It's because people refuse to cook in canola oil and peanut oil and whatever.
Like most fried foods, McDonald's fries are cooked in canola oil.
Didn't used to be the case.
Beef towel was initially used because the supplier for the chain couldn't afford vegetable oil.
As health concerns over saturated fat grew in the 1990s.
Fuckers.
McDonald's finally made the switch to vegetable oil.
What drives me nuts about that saturated fat thing is that's a small number of scientists that were bribed what is essentially the equivalent of $50,000 in today's market.
So these guys were bribed by the sugar industry to write a bullshit article that Made this connection between saturated fat and heart disease because they were trying to lead people away from the actual conclusion is that it's sugar.
And that sugar is what's bad for everybody.
And that's what's causing the increase in all these corn oils.
And these air-quote experts, like we detailed with the FDA, how they go immediately into some sort of a cushy job in these corporations afterwards, it's sick.
It's really twisted.
And the unintended consequences for the consumer is your health.
And you don't even know what's going on behind the scenes.
You trust these experts.
You trust these governing bodies to do the right thing.
And when they make things illegal or they ban things, you think, oh, they're banning things because it's bad for you.
And it turns out, no, some of the things they're banning for you are very good for you.
But they compete with some of the things that are paying them off.
Just to tell that story a little deeper, Dad always said if a bad herdsman has a calf go down, the first night the coyote will chew through the anus and eat the most nutrient-dense parts of the carcass, the liver, the kidneys, the spleen, and it's full.
They can't eat more than they can hold, and it's not like they're going to preserve it and store it.
So, you know, they leave, they rest during the day.
And if the farmer doesn't pick up that carcass the next night, they'll come back and eat the muscle meats.
So they'll chew on the shoulder, the back legs, and, you know, they'll eat till they get full.
And then they'll retreat.
They'll, you know, sleep during the day.
And then if the farmer still does not pick up that dead carcass, they'll chew on the hide.
And, you know, there's a lot that goes into like the hair indigestion and pushing it through the stomach.
But that's the way animals evolved.
And the first thing that they eat, we so pretentiously want ribeyes and New York strips and filet mignon, when in reality the most nutrient-dense parts of the carcass are so far from that.
I mean, it has to be some sort of an evolutionary thing where they realize that that's the most nutritious, that has the best benefits, it's best for you.
If people could eat a little bit of liver in their diet, I mean, I have friends that are very health conscious that only eat it for the health benefits.
They don't enjoy it, but they'll eat one ounce of liver every day.
I had a boxer who is still to this day like my BFF. She died like three years ago and I'm still not over it.
But I trained her with liver and I would go to the kill floor at the plant, get some, cut it into little bites and I'd train her until she puked and then she'd be ready to go again.
And then you get accustomed to those foods and they become comfort foods.
And unfortunately, a lot of those comfort foods are really terrible for you.
One of the things that Gary, when we discuss these things, when I discuss these things with the experts, I'm always blown away by things that I didn't know before.
And what Gary Brekka was talking about the other day was folate and that these enriched flowers that are enriched with folate, which is very different than folic acid, which is naturally occurring, or is the opposite.
Folate is naturally occurring, but folic acid is not.
And your body doesn't process it the same.
So when you're getting all these enriched flours, They're enriched with something that your body doesn't want.
Your body's like, what is this shit?
And that's why so many people, on top of the fact that a lot of, you know, they've changed the way wheat is grown to make it more high yield, so it's got more complex glutens in it, and then it's enriched with folate.
Well, again, we're not really growing food anymore.
We're growing food like ingredients that can then be manufactured into something that's put into a package with a shiny label that may or may not be indicative of what's actually in the package, and then we serve it to people at something that they can afford.
Well, I'm very, very thankful for people like you, that you folks have, first of all, made this incredibly difficult decision to take your farm and to convert it over much cost and heartache and a lot of pain and a lot of back-breaking work to turn it into this regenerative farm.
And then you've gone out and told the world.
And you've shown that it can be done.
And you've shown, especially through these videos where people can see it and through these conversations that we've had, where people can become educated.
You don't have to eat that way.
You don't have to live that way.
And you're not supposed to.
It's not good for you.
It's not good for the world.
It's not good for the environment.
It's not good for anybody.
And that if it wasn't for people like you that made this decision, it's a very difficult decision to do this.
I think the conversations that we've had, the conversations you've had with other people in writing this book and having these people understand these things has changed the way most people think and feel about food itself.
Thank you, Jamie.
Made a little spill here.
But I'm very very thankful that you guys have done this and also Joel Salatin who's been on this podcast before has a very similar type of operation at Polyface Farms and I know there's some other ones too so shout out to them as well but if it wasn't for you folks I mean who knows who knows where we'd be at I think people would be stuck without a solution because even the term grass-fed beef when I was a kid you never heard about grass-fed beef I wasn't even a term that people were familiar with it's a fairly new understanding And I think that if it wasn't for people like
you that are out there shouting it from the barn tops, you know, I would say rooftop, but this is, you know, you're doing it the right way.
If we could move the way we produce food, consume food in this country, the consumers would be so much better off, the producers would be so much better off, the land, the water, rural landscape.
It's just win, win, win.
And today the winners are big multinational food producing corporations and high tech corporations.
You know, to be in that one click in that path of food production, food delivered from the farm to the consumer, I don't think anybody ever enjoys that.
It's just the hand that's dealt us.
But when you take control of your own tiny, tiny little food production system, it's just great.
It's just great.
And the evidence here is, I've got...
Jen is here with me, but I need to mention, I've got another daughter, Jody, who came back here.
Her wife, Amber, my son-in-law, John.
They wouldn't have come back if I was an industrial beef producer like I used to be.
They wouldn't have wanted to, and I wouldn't have encouraged them to.
But the fact that we've made these changes has created an entity that, you know, while we're not blown away with profits, it's just very, very pleasant to be part of.