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Aug. 19, 2023 - RFK Jr. The Defender

01:00:46

Farmers Speak with Elizabeth Kucinich

Elizabeth Kucinich and Robert F. Kennedy Jr host a panel of farmers to discuss solutions to many issues in American agriculture. Ben Dobson, Gail Fuller, Will Harris, Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin, Kerry Hoffschneider, John Kempf, Bob Quinn, Wayne Swanson and Judith McGeary share their visions for how to revitalize American farming with RFK Jr.

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	I would like to welcome Mr.
	Robert Kennedy and I'm thrilled that he has such an interest and such a dedicated passion to the environment, to land stewardship and to food systems and health in general.
	And many of us have been engaged with food for many years in this space.
	It's an area that connects all of our lives.
	It connects everybody to each other.
	It connects us to our environment.
	But it's seldom that we have the opportunity to meet the farmers who grow the food for us, who steward the land that keep us alive.
	With that, over to you, sir.
	Thank you very much, Elizabeth.
	I'm really thrilled to be in the presence of so many amazing farmers today and leaders in healthy, wholesome agriculture and regenerative agriculture and good soils.
	I'll just tell you very briefly that I actually was a 4-H kid growing up.
	I began litigating against Against big agricultural interests, I probably have more lawsuits against the chicken industry, the poultry industry, industrial fat, poultry farming.
	But in the early 80s, Wendell Murphy, in particular against hogs, on hog production.
	And in the early 1980s, Wendell Murphy, who was a state senator in North Carolina, looked at what Frank Perdue and Bo Pilgrim and And John Tyson had done the chicken industry where they put a million chicken farmers out of business in our country and began raising chickens in battery cages and big warehouses and tiny cages, dosing them with sub-therapeutic antibiotics in cages where they couldn't even turn around or stand up straight.
	And hormones that caused them to literally lay their guts out over a short and miserable life.
	And they had all made themselves billionaires, those three men.
	And Murphy looked at that and said, I can do the same thing with hogs.
	And he was a senator at that time and he passed 28 laws in the state of North Carolina that made it almost impossible to sue a factory farm.
	And at the same time, he went into partnership with Smithfield, which moved 30,000 a day head hog slaughterhouse into North Carolina.
	And they dropped the price of hogs from 62 cents a pound to 2 cents a pound.
	And it cost a farmer 32 cents a pound at that time to raise a hog to kill weight.
	They put out of business every farmer in the state, except for 1,800 factories, which, you know, Murphy invented, left the Senate and invented this thing called Murphy 1100, which is a warehouse for hogs.
	And 80% of those 1,800 hog farmers that were left were either contracted to or owned outright by Smithfield.
	The farmers who ran them were allegedly family farmers, but they had no say over Any decision that happened in the way they managed their farms, and they had to mortgage their farms to buy the Murphy 1,100 warehouses, and those cost $120,000 to $250,000 a piece.
	And they only got five-year contracts from Smithfield, which allowed Smithfield to renegotiate in five years.
	And at this point, there's nothing else that can be done with that farm except for the hog.
	They were indentured servants.
	These serfs, they were not family farmers anymore.
	If you think of a family farmer as somebody who makes decisions about their property, they weren't doing that.
	And by dropping the price so precipitously, they forced all the other big hog-producing states like Iowa to adopt the same model.
	Nobody wanted to do it.
	And as you know, a hog produces 10 times the amount of fecal waste by weight as a human being.
	So you have a hog farm with 100,000 animals.
	Or a million animals, like the Circle Four, the one in Utah, in Smithfield, Utah.
	That produces the same amount of waste as 10 million human beings, so more than New York City.
	New York City has 14 sewage treatment plants to treat that waste, and each one of them costs a couple billion dollars.
	But Smithfield never had to build those, and it just dumps the waste into the environment, onto the fields, into the water.
	And that's a subsidy.
	And, you know, they survive on subsidized grains, so the whole thing is topsy-turvy.
	And I watched it happen.
	I watched the whole thing happen from beginning to end.
	And I, you know, did whistle-stop tours with the Farmers Union all over Iowa and Nebraska.
	And as they were moving it, I went to Alberta, warned the farmers up there what was coming their way.
	And I ultimately went to Poland And debated the head of Smithfield Foods in front of the Polish parliament, and I was sued in Poland by Smithfield for libel.
	And what I didn't understand is that in our country, I said the same thing in Poland that I said it a hundred times in this country.
	They had people following me.
	They had a guy called Trent Luce, who's a hog farmer, factory farmers, who followed me to every single speech I gave and recorded me all over the country.
	And I was saying the same thing all the time, so I said the same thing in front of the Polish parliament.
	And they filed a criminal case against me.
	In this country, truth is a defense to libel.
	But in Poland, it isn't.
	So if you just say something bad about a corporation, they have a defamation case, and it's criminal.
	Like, put you in jail.
	Well, I had to flee Poland.
	I couldn't go back for about 10 years until the Statue of Limitations ran on that.
	Part of my tall tale with the farmers.
	I'm so happy to be here at the other end of the spectrum with all of you.
	We're actually, you know, creating real food and healthy food and wholesome communities that all of us can be proud of.
	So I'll shut up and start listening.
	You're amazing.
	I remember, Mr.
	Kennedy, when we first met, was in Congress at the screening of the documentary Pig Business.
	We had an absolutely incredible panel there of farmers and your stories are extraordinary and your life experience.
	Thank you.
	I would like to welcome Ben Dobson.
	Ben, would you introduce yourself?
	Good evening, Mr.
	Kennedy.
	It's an honor to join you tonight.
	My name is Ben Dobson.
	I come from New York's Hudson Valley.
	We've already had a pretty profound impact up there.
	I'm a farmer, the founder of Hudson Carbon, and I serve on the steering committee of Regeneration International.
	And for the last 20 years, I've grown and sold organic and natural foods and researched the impact of regenerative organics or systems on ecosystems and the climate.
	I've come to believe that the American landscape, shorelines, and waterways are really the most critical element to an American revival And the survival of all the life in our environment.
	We really feel, with your leadership, this could be possible.
	To really rebuild an ecological, economic, and social fabric of this nation, we farmers have been pushed into a spot where we see the way, but we really need leadership to help us get there and bring our health and prosperity back to the 890 million acres of farm and ranch land in our country.
	The land is so important not only to our country, but to all the many people around the world we feed.
	And the last 80 years, our system and many of our policymakers and special interests have turned food into commodities.
	And a lot of us here tonight, all of us represent food as food and not as a commodity.
	And tonight, I think we all want to talk with you about how we need to move on from, as you know, intensive agro-industrial techniques and chemical inputs and genetically modified crops, and really rebuild the critical life system of our American landscape and the communities in it, and also the ecosystems these food-producing areas sit in.
	Lastly, I think it's really interesting that as we need to rebuild our own agricultural communities around food and not commodity production, and we need to connect directly with eaters, but we need to do so internationally as well.
	There's a really interesting example right now where Mexico is demanding non-GMO grains from the United States.
	The Biden administration is actually taking them to trade court.
	And in the meantime, in a free and fair market system, if we had one, there are farms and grain elevators and businesses and even seed companies that want to meet this demand of Mexico.
	And imagine the opportunity that would be for Mexican eaters, but also for us Americans in our communities here to do something different that could be healthier.
	So we're really, really thrilled as in the farming community to see you running for president.
	And we need your leadership to take these issues head-on and inspire, and we need the deeper form we need in farm country.
	Because what happens in farm country results in what we eat, and we the people really are what we eat.
	So thank you so much, and I appreciate you including me.
	Can I just ask you one question?
	You said that what is the issue with the Mexican corn, that we can grow it here, but they won't let us export it?
	No, it's not so much that.
	It's that Mexico, the president of Mexico, has banned GMO corn and soy and glyphosate.
	And he's being taken to trade court by the USTA because we want to make them take the GMO crops.
	In the meantime, there are American intermediaries and growers and seed companies willing to meet this demand.
	But our government itself is actually opposing it.
	And that's like a 7 million acre opportunity for American farmers to grow something with a premium with no GMOs in it.
	And our government's actively pushing against it.
	So it's just a key example.
	And there's something we could do at home that would help us here and probably help them there too.
	So we actually grow enough Mexican corn, non-GMO corn, in this country at this point to meet that demand?
	We don't, but we can.
	We grow enough right now to meet a portion of the demand, but the seed companies to supply the seed, the producers, elevators, transport companies, are all ready to scale up over the next couple of years.
	Which would coincide with the timeline Mexico has laid out.
	So we have the potential and the willingness, is my point.
	And in a more free, fair market situation, I feel our government would link us up with this opportunity as opposed to opposing it.
	I got it.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Thank you, Ben.
	Can you remind us again of how many acres that would be if we, in America, actually met the demand of Mexico for non-GMO corn?
	What transition that would agree to?
	The demand right now is 17 million tons.
	Depending on corn yield, this could be between 3.5 and 5 million acres.
	Which will be an incredible boost to helping our farmers in America to meet a market demand that right now our government has put their fist on a scale, saying that another kind of seed has to be exported instead.
	Will Harris, I would love to welcome you to the table.
	Thank you, Elizabeth.
	I'm Will Harris and my farm in Bluffton, Georgia is called White Oak Pastures.
	I'm the fourth generation of my family to run the farm.
	My daughters are the fifth generation.
	They have my five grandchildren who are the sixth.
	We embrace three basic tenets on our farm.
	Regenerative soil management, compassionate animal welfare, and the re-enrichment of our impoverished rural community of Bluffton, Georgia.
	I chose to exit the centralized, industrialized, commoditized food production system 25 years ago.
	We built our own small standalone food production system.
	When I was an industrial cattle farmer, I maintained three or four minimum wage employees.
	I now have 160 full-time employees who are paid well above the county earning average.
	My farm is in one of the poorest counties in America, Clay County, Georgia.
	And my payroll is over $100,000 a week, every week.
	We're the largest private employer in the county.
	I'm also proud that my employees have subsidized health benefits on a 401k.
	An example of a politically created problem for my farm and others like it Is that imported grass-fed beef can now be legally labeled as product of the USA. Even though the cow was raised, born, slaughtered in Uruguay or Australia or New Zealand or any one of a dozen other approved countries.
	I believe that this legal perspective misleads American consumers and it's just plain wrong.
	I hope you do too, Mr.
	Kennedy.
	Thank you for having me on here tonight.
	I absolutely do, and I will fix that as fast as I can if I get in there.
	I hope you'll come visit me at the White House and make sure I do that quickly.
	Thank you.
	Will, the points that you bring up around economics and productivity, the lives that are being peddled, that you have to be an enormous entity with very few people working there and looking at the economic vitality that you're bringing to your community is really extraordinary.
	Thank you so much for your work.
	And I would like to introduce Kerry Hofschneider.
	And Kerry's going to share with us a little bit more of a view on Really, what the rural communities are experiencing in contrast to perhaps the incredible experience that Will Harris' community is.
	Thank you so much.
	It's an honor to be on this call.
	I am really encouraged by the farmers speaking to my area of the country.
	I'm from York County, Nebraska.
	I'm a descendant of homesteaders on a farm that is a descendant of homesteaders.
	And my focus is with the Grays Master Group, is a creation that a friend of mine and a group of close friends started about 10 years ago, and I would like to talk about education and the social ills I'm seeing, and also the hope in rural that I am seeing.
	My greatest influencer was my grandmother Ruth Heine, born in 1907, the first of 13 children to go to college.
	And who was very progressive-minded about the role of women in not only agriculture, but in all industries and businesses.
	If we look at on the landscape now today in New York County, we have fewer and fewer farms and ranches.
	And those farms and ranches, unlike Will Harris's, are not employing a payroll of $100,000 a week to their employees.
	We have such a great opportunity.
	This week I met with a couple friends who very much recall the 1980s farm crisis.
	And how often do we discuss that crisis?
	How often do we hear from not only the sufferers of that crisis, but also the indigenous community, the 80,000 Indian Country farmers and ranchers who are still serving our country's agriculture today.
	The Graze Master Group has partners of all political parties, all backgrounds.
	Among them, of our friends, are the Pawnee Seed Preservation Project, Deb Echo Hawk, the keeper of the Pawnee Seeds.
	We are proud to partner with them.
	We are also proud of our urban neighbors because we all eat.
	And we need everyone at the table.
	We have industries, businesses, members, like Ward Laboratories, Dr.
	Ray Ward, his wife Jolene, who started in a garage in the 1980s.
	Dr.
	Ray wanted to be a farmer, but there was not room for him back on the farm.
	They started with testing soil, water, forage feed samples, about a thousand samples when they first started.
	Most recently, they tested 450,000 samples of that across the world.
	There are people in this industry who know the state of our soils and that they are depleted nearly everywhere.
	There are people in our group that understand the water crisis.
	There are neighbors near me that do not.
	We will run out of water.
	Fresh water is a core issue of our time.
	Not only the fresh water and the amount, but the quality.
	And we can clean nitrates out of the water, yes, but how are rural communities going to be able to afford the multi-million billion dollar facilities when they can barely keep a shop open in some of these towns?
	So I want to extend now back to the group and to the farmers that I am praying are heard by people in my community.
	I just need to talk about a little bit more.
	The GrazeMaster Group has added four more farmers to our efforts.
	Farmers change because other farmers change.
	We used to be at each other's kitchen table helping each other out.
	The 80s did a great divide in agriculture and is a great hurt, but there is a great hope.
	And that hope, we hope, is Mr.
	Kennedy and his presidency.
	I believe that he truly does care about the women Indigenous, the homesteaders, the people who eat, the people who don't have enough to eat.
	It is a crying shame that in Nebraska and across the country there is a hungry child and family tonight when we see all across this land plenty of room to grow real food for all of them.
	I am for a free market economy but I am So for the farmer's heart.
	And I know he can share a little bit more.
	And so I can't wait to hear from all of you and learn.
	Because every day I need to be learning.
	And tonight is a big deal for our country.
	And I know it's going to yield great, great things.
	Thank you so much, Carrie.
	Thank you.
	I'd like to welcome Bob Quinn, please.
	Thank you very much.
	Well, Mr.
	Kennedy, I was told I only had four minutes to be with you and talk about what we're doing in Montana, so I decided to write a book.
	It's called Grain by Grain, and that's the rest of my story that you can read at your leisure.
	Anyway, I was raised on a 2,400-acre wheat and cattle ranch in north-central Montana.
	After 10 years of college, I returned home to our farm as many of my neighbors were leaving and going broke.
	In those days, the cost of our inputs often exceeded the value of what we grew in our crops.
	So we had to have an operating note with the bank.
	But it increased nearly year by year, and soon we're not able to pay it off before we had to renew it for the next year.
	My banker informed me that this was not going to be able to continue, and we too would soon be going broke.
	I've been selling some wheat to whole grain bakers in California.
	One day, one of our biggest customers called me and asked for organic wheat.
	That was not too easy to find in 1984, but I was able to find some.
	I was quite skeptical of organic at the time, but after visiting organic farms and hearing organic farmers tell their stories, I decided to try it myself.
	I started with an experiment of 20 acres, comparing winter wheat grown on a field that had been in alfalfa for a few years, so the soil was high in nitrogen, to an adjoining field that used chemical fertilizers and herbicides.
	Both fields produced nearly the same yield and were high protein.
	We had reduced the inputs on our farm And they're organic fuel by two-thirds and increased the value of our wheat by 50% because it was now certified organic.
	The next year, 15% of our farm was organic.
	It was 1988, a year of drought and grasshoppers.
	We sprayed our chemical fields with malathion, which killed everything in just a few hours.
	But after a week or so, the malathion had dissipated and new grasshoppers invaded.
	It was already a poor crop and we couldn't afford to spray it again.
	And at harvest time, the field was loaded with grasshoppers.
	I spread wheat bran, inoculated with a protozoa, which killed grasshoppers around the edges of my organic fields.
	And as the grasshoppers ate that, They got sick, and then their friends came and ate them.
	It's just like politics in America today.
	And what happened is that infection then spread throughout the whole group of grasshoppers.
	At Harvard's time, there were almost no grasshoppers left.
	So even though the yield was poor, but because we had better grain prices and were able to reduce our inputs, we broke even on most of those organic fields, while we lost tens of thousands of dollars on our chemical fields.
	After that, I decided to end my chemical agriculture on my farm and completely go to a regenerative organic system.
	We began to grow all of our own fertilizer using legume cover crops for green manures and using rotations of a wide diversity of crops to break up cycles of weeds, insects, diseases, which ended our need for chemical pesticides.
	After three years, we no longer even needed an operating node.
	Our convergent organic led us to another opportunity, an ancient grain, which you can read all about in Chapter 5.
	This delicious, nutritious wheat was sold on our own brand called Kamut.
	It could be eaten by most people who were wheat-sensitive, and our published research showed us that it improved health and reduced inflammation.
	We went from our first half-acre planted in our farm in 1986 to over 100,000 acres 30 years later, which was sold all over the world.
	We were then contracting with over 200 organic farmers in parts of Montana, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and the Dakotas.
	Not only have we abandoned industrial ag treatment of our soil, we also abandoned the industrial ag treatment of our farmers.
	Instead of owning the seed and charging farmers extreme high prices for it, and high prices for the chemicals required to raise it, we loaned the seed to our farmers at no extra charge, and they returned it to us at harvest time.
	We required them to grow it in a regenerative organic system, which lowered their input costs.
	We work as a community sharing the benefits of good years and working together on to solve problems.
	So from my experiences, I've come to the conclusion that farmers should be paid for nutrients produced per acre rather than pounds per acre.
	Buyers should know the nutrient level of their food.
	It's time to reconnect food and health so that we can have new hope for prosperity for our farm communities as well as to the 60% of our population who are now sick with at least one chronic disease.
	To me, that is the only future that really makes sense.
	Thank you very much.
	Let me ask you one question.
	What do you think it is that is causing the gluten and celiac allergies?
	What's your theory?
	I think it is a big change in the way we have bred those grains with the sole purpose.
	Well, there's two purposes, and that is to increase yield and to make the grain cheap.
	And so the farmers weigh with increased yield by having shorter wheat.
	So they would have more bushels in production.
	They would Become resistant to disease, to insects even.
	But the bakers wanted an increase in yield also.
	They wanted to make more bread with less wheat.
	And they were able to do that because the gluten was changed.
	And the gluten was changed so much that for 20% of the people in this country, it can no longer tolerate it.
	They cannot digest it.
	And so I think that's one of the biggest problems that we need to really look at.
	Or we need to go back to where we started in the first place.
	Thank you, Bob.
	Rehi, Haslip Marrakeen, maybe.
	Let me just ask one thing.
	So if it's traditional, like heritage seed, wheat, you think people won't be allergic to it?
	Yes.
	When you talk to people who go to Europe and they say, I don't have any problem eating the bread there, those people, when they come back to America, if they would eat heirloom grains or ancient grains, anything that was in production probably before World War II, there's a very big chance they would have no problems here either.
	They should look at organic, too, because glyphosate, for example, causes some of the same problems that this gluten causes in your system.
	And so sometimes it's an effect of pesticide contamination.
	It's also giving people trouble with wheat.
	So if they would look at organic, they don't have to worry about that part, but they should also look at ancient and heirloom grains.
	And if they're eating bread and they still have trouble, look at sourdough, which is a long fermentation, which is also a change the bakers have made.
	We're going to sort fermentations and not having that anymore to pre-digest what we're eating.
	Thank you so much, Bob.
	Rehinaldo Haslet-Merkeen, one of my greatest teachers.
	Welcome to the table.
	Thank you so much, Elizabeth.
	Hello, everyone.
	Mr.
	Kennedy.
	I am from Guatemala.
	I'm a first-generation immigrant in this country.
	I'm also an agronomist.
	I grew up in the rainforest among the ancestors' trees and our ancestors who taught us A lot about how the world actually operates.
	And that is something that I bring into this profession in the regenerative agriculture landscape.
	But most importantly, I'm a farmer here in Northfield, Minnesota.
	I am in this panel to speak on behalf of farmers who are bearing the brunt of our collective inability to see through that in the name of food, we're destroying the very foundational ecosystems on which we depend to feed the world.
	Agriculture is not the only sector where these things are happening, but we're still, in this space, we are driven to extract the wealth of nature, the rural communities, the consumers, and nations.
	In fact, it now has resulted in a systemically and verifiable We're good to go.
	Well, we need government, in government, those who understand that being an environmentalist, protecting our rivers, our remaining rivers, the land, the lakes, the soil, the forest, the clean water, is not only a priority, but something we have to collectively stand for.
	As a farmer, I utilize farming methods that incorporate ancestral ways of thinking, of relating, of living systems, what we call indigenous ways of thinking, of knowing, of connecting spiritually, physically, and intellectually with the magnificent side of creation itself, of working within it.
	Now, it may sound philosophical, but this is exactly the foundation of what we are engaged in when we call ourselves farmers.
	Along with all the competent and capable people I work with, we have found ways to merge this thinking with modern scientific advances in technology so that we can engage the natural design And the most efficient ways of working with the land.
	Our end purpose is to ensure that we deliver nutritious foods, free of animal confinement and toxic chemicals, free of guilt and dishonor of treating the soil like dirt and the living systems of the planet as expendable or extractable solely for profit.
	Food, to me and to all of those I share this world with in this space, food is sacred.
	The act of eating is a spiritual act, and food sharing and ensuring everyone has it must be the end result of a successful agriculture system, and the policies that go behind it must understand, must be done, developed without full understanding.
	From my standpoint, as a farmer, I am not engaged in production of anything.
	From this perspective I come from, as a farmer, I am engaged in the business of stewarding the naturally occurring energy transformation processes that defined by biological, physical and chemical processes deliver us the stuff we harvest out of the ecology, out of the physical and chemical processes deliver us the stuff we harvest out of the ecology, out of
	Processes perfected by the evolutionary process of the planet itself, systems that ensured our evolution as humans and are responsible for the stability of the planet's climate, the nutritional density, and the health of ecosystems, and the food that we eat.
	There is a sector of humanity that is in danger of extinction that I would like you to watch over.
	And that is government officials who are willing to codify it into a way of living.
	Government and corporate accountability.
	Systems that incorporate the fact that we have no right to steal the right to future generations to feed themselves.
	Or the right to poison current generations and destroy the planetary living systems in the name of food.
	That's where I come from.
	That's why I'm here.
	That's what I stand for.
	That's what I'm fighting for.
	And I know you'll be doing that among the other folks who understand this crossroads we are in.
	Just to close up, I also wrote a book since I got that opening.
	It's called In the Shadow of Green Man.
	And in there, you can read a lot more about where this thinking comes from and how we are going about building the agricultural systems of the future.
	Thank you so much.
	Thank you very much.
	John Kempf, I would love to welcome you to the table.
	Thank you, Elizabeth.
	It's an honor to be here this evening with all of you.
	I'm really honored to be able to have this conversation with you, Mr.
	Kennedy.
	I grew up on a family fruit and vegetable farm in Northeast Ohio in an Amish community.
	Many people might be surprised, but within the Amish community, we were actually using insecticides and pesticides very intensely in the 1980s, 90s, early 2000s.
	In the early 2000s, we had very severe crop loss.
	2002, 2003 and 2004, we had three consecutive years that we had greater than 70% crop loss in spite of intense pesticide applications.
	It seemed the more intense that we applied pesticides, the worse the problems became.
	And we had some very interesting experiences on the farm where we began renting a new field that didn't have the historical pesticide exposure and the crops on that soil We're completely resistant to the diseases in insects when the same varieties planted and managed the same way on the soil with the pesticide exposure had major disease susceptibility to the point where we lost most of the crop.
	And this was a real eye-opener and I wanted to learn what are the differences between two plants, one plant that is resistant to a disease and the second one that is not What I learned in its simplest essence is that plants have an immune system much the same that we do, but in order for that immune system to function, it needs to be supported with nutritional integrity and microbiome integrity.
	When you have those two things, you can produce plants that have functional immune systems that are resistant to diseases and insects.
	Then, I learned that when you have these really healthy plants, Two things happen.
	First, you can regenerate soil health while you are growing a crop.
	So we have this paradigm in agriculture today that agriculture is somehow by its very nature inherently extractive, that we're extracting nutrients and we're depleting our soils.
	And that's true if we manage it in that manner.
	But it's possible to manage agriculture and crops and agronomy in such a way that we regenerate soil health while we're growing a crop.
	But the second piece that happens When we grow plants with these robust immune systems, they also have the capacity to transfer that immunity to the livestock, to the animals, and to the people who consume those plants as food.
	All of a sudden, we can have a legitimate conversation about growing food as medicine.
	Today, we stand at a threshold where Agriculture has the opportunity.
	There's this phrase of regenerative agriculture is kind of having its moment in the sun.
	And regenerative agriculture is so commonly defined in the context of regenerating soil health.
	But it needs, there are two other pieces that really need to be included.
	The first is the opportunity that we have to regenerate public health, to regenerate our own health systems.
	We have this epidemic of degenerative illnesses, which you know better than I.
	And agriculture is certainly not the only contributor to that, but agriculture is a significant contributor to the fact.
	The fact that we are growing food that is empty calories, empty of nutrition and empty of microbiome support for our own microbiomes.
	But there is another issue that is perhaps even more fundamental, and you spoke to it so eloquently in your introduction.
	We have the farmers of today, for the most part, are being farmed by agribusiness.
	We have, as you described them, feudal serfs.
	And if we really want to regenerate landscapes and regenerate agriculture, the fundamental piece that needs to be regenerated is we need to regenerate the capacity for stewardship.
	We need more people who care deeply for the land on the landscape.
	We don't have enough right now.
	I think that we're good to go.
	That is deeply in our minds is when we have these entrenched interests, which have this extensive framework of laws passed in their interest, what is the pathway to regenerating the capacity for stewardship?
	Thank you very much.
	Thank you, John.
	Thank you, John.
	I'd love to welcome Gail Fuller to the table.
	Please welcome Gail.
	Thanks, Elizabeth, and thank you, Mr.
	Kennedy, for inviting me here tonight.
	Quite an honor, and what a panel, you know, just to sit with these other farmers that I've been admiring for years.
	And being this far down the lineup, you know, I'm certainly going to echo some of what they've already said, and I just want to, you know, give thumbs up to what's already been stated earlier.
	I agree wholeheartedly with almost everything that I've heard tonight.
	I'm in southeast Kansas.
	I grew up on a pretty typical family farm in Kansas, and Like most family farms, as we were told to go big or go home, we became specialists.
	We grew the farm very rapidly after we survived the 80s.
	We survived the 80s because my father took a job in town.
	That was basically how we survived that.
	By the year 2000, I had taken over the row crop side of the operation and my brother had taken over the grass operation.
	I had grown the farm to 3,200 acres.
	I was the fourth largest farmer in my county.
	And I had gone from seven crops in the rotation to two crops in the rotation, Roundup Ready corn, Roundup Ready soybean.
	About that time, I started to realize that I knew very little about farming as my farm became a bigger and bigger disaster.
	It seemed that the harder I tried, the more erosion we had.
	The more pesticides we used, the more pesticides we had to use.
	And it just turned into a blizzard, turned into an environmental disaster, a financial disaster.
	And we started making changes in the early 2000s.
	We brought in cover crops.
	And it was also about that same time that I found out that soil was a living entity.
	You know, I'm almost 40 years old and I've never been taught that soil was alive.
	As Reggie said, I was treating it like dirt because that's all we were taught.
	So we started making some major wholesale changes on the farm, bringing in the cover crops, trying to understand soil life and things like that.
	And the farm responded quickly.
	Tremendously.
	We started becoming more profitable.
	We brought more crops into the rotation.
	We started to cut our dependencies on pesticides and fertilizers.
	And in 2012, which was our second hottest rice year in Kansas to 1936, I was denied my crop insurance claim because of my management of my cover crops.
	And so after some discussion, we decided to take on the system and we jumped through all the hoops there.
	It made us jump through.
	We took 20 months to take on this battle.
	During that time frame, I lost my operating line of credit because without crop insurance, you can't get an operating line of credit in the U.S. In 2014, I won a major decision.
	We won all three counts that was against us, but I had gone bankrupt in the process, so I'm not sure who really won, but we had that victory in our pocket.
	So, at the end of, you know, I guess the end of the story is, or not the end of the story, but the next chapter was, we lost the farm, we spent years fighting, trying to stay afloat instead of just walking away, lost friends, family, and depression set in, which isn't hard to understand.
	At the time, I didn't even accept that either.
	When we sold the farm, after years of hard work and paying property tax and income tax on gains, we then had to pay estate taxes on the sale of the property, which just added insult to injury and left us almost nothing to start over.
	You know, you look at crop insurance, and because of my case, there was a major overhaul of crop insurance rules and regulations.
	A lot of them have been relaxed because of my case, and there's been some very positive changes made.
	But it was a small step.
	Crop insurance Today, a question I like to ask or a comment I like to make is, would you be able to buy car insurance if you had three DUIs?
	Why are we allowed to have crop insurance if we're losing five, six, seven, ten of soil per acre per year off of our farms?
	Crop insurance is incentivizing bad management.
	We incentivize tillage.
	We incentivize pesticides.
	These are all called best management practices by RMA. But this is all taxpayer funded.
	So, you know, even their battle against me, they had nothing to lose because it wasn't going to come out of their pocket at the end of the day.
	It was going to come out of the taxpayer's pocket.
	But then what do you expect when industry writes the farm bill and is in charge of agriculture?
	And we've been told for years that we're supposed to feed the world, and this is how we do it.
	But as Kerry alluded to, we're talking about feeding the world, which we aren't doing, by the way.
	And in Kansas, one in four kids tonight is food insecure.
	So, feeding the world, we're not even feeding ourselves.
	And what we are feeding them has already been stated as low nutrient quality, high toxic food-like substances.
	So, Bob talked about his organic farm.
	Organic no-till is, there's more and more farmers all over the country doing organic no-till and at very large scale.
	This is something that we can do.
	It's very possible.
	Some of the things I would like to see, I think it's really all boils down to the monopolies that are controlling agriculture today.
	And I don't care what you want to talk about, whether it's beef, pork, or grain farming, you know, the top four industry, top four companies are controlling 60, 70, 80% of the income, whether it's seed, chemicals, processing, whatever.
	That makes it extremely difficult.
	I think it was, someone was talking about the non-GMO, I think it was Ben was talking about Mexico and the demand for non-GMO. I know many farmers that have walked away from GMO corn and soy and their yields did not decrease, but their profit did go up because the seed was cheaper.
	The problem is it's much harder to find because the seed companies obviously make less money.
	So, you know, finding quality non-GMO seed is very difficult to do.
	And besides, you know, the monopolies controlling us, they're also controlling FDA, EPA, USDA, Congress, higher education, and even the ag lobby groups that claim to be working for farmers.
	They're controlled by industry.
	And along those lines, we get the silencing of scientists that has been going on for years, and that needs to stop, obviously.
	I think, for me, the big question is, going forward, you know, we've got 100 years, 100 plus years of policy of subsidies, you know, starting pre-World War I with wheat.
	NRCS come along in the 30s because of the plowing of the prairie turned us into a dust bowl, and so we brought NRCS, and as my good friend Ray Archuleta-Alexa says, all the lakes, streams, and rivers in the USA are just full of conservation programs.
	That's all we've done.
	So, What have we learned in the last hundred years and are we going the right direction?
	You know, I think we can do better.
	You know, have we improved food?
	Have we improved health?
	Have we improved water?
	Have we improved communities?
	Have we improved farmer welfare and quality of life?
	You know, the majority of farmer income in Kansas is from subsidies.
	How do you feel when you're relying on the government to make a living?
	That's not what farmers are about.
	Farmers are, you know, we're the greatest people on the planet and that's what, you know, we want to be responsible for our own livelihoods.
	I'd like to thank you and thank you.
	I've gone over a little bit over time, not trying to do this as well, but Wayne, I think, is going to be able to pick up on some of the points where maybe you would be heading to, but Mr.
	Kennedy, did you have any reflective points on that?
	I'm very grateful for everything you said, and I actually would have liked to hear you go on for a while because I like just hearing that.
	You know, I'd like to talk to you guys at another time about what you think a transition would look like and how do we transition the country to...
	Something that is wholesome, nutritious foods.
	The USDA was set up to protect small farmers and to make sure that we have a wholesome food supply.
	And instead, it's become a sock puppet of the chemical and big ag industries and industrial agriculture.
	And it's doing the exact inverse of what it was designed to do.
	It's giving us poison instead of food.
	And we're the sickest country in the world.
	And there's all these perverse incentives that we need to unravel.
	But as you pointed out, the entire lobbying infrastructure is controlled by corrupt actors who are making money poisoning the American public and corrupting our democracy.
	Thomas Jefferson's vision of democracy, which I think holds true, is that it relied upon the existence of tens of thousands of yeoman farmers, each with their own Independent freeholds, each with a stake in our democracy.
	And without that, democracy is going to wither and die.
	And now we're increasingly seeing the landscapes controlled by and the food supply controlled by these big corporate interests, either outright controlled through ownership of the property or effectively controlled through control of the inputs and the subsidy systems that lock everybody into this corrupt system of producing poison and pretending it's food.
	I think a lot of it comes down to asking better questions going forward.
	And, you know, what are your goals for rural America?
	And let's set some goals.
	We obviously need healthier, happier farmers.
	We need more farmers.
	More farmers means more kids, more kids, more schools, more schools, more demand for small grocery stores in these rural towns.
	And I didn't get to talk on mental health, which most of you people know is a big thing of mine, is healing the farmer is every bit as important as healing the farm.
	Yeah.
	The farmers, you know, I've seen this, you know, when I travel on these farms in Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, and many, if not most of the farmers that I talked to could not drink water from their own wells because it was poison.
	And, you know, these are among the dispossessed Americans.
	Yeah.
	Kansas farmers are killing themselves at a higher rate than any other occupation in America, and that, you know, it's just a direct reflection of what we've become, sad but true.
	Thank you very much for your time, Mr.
	Kennedy.
	Thank you.
	Thank you, Gail.
	I'd like to welcome Wayne to the table.
	Thank you, Wayne.
	I think you're working on a little bit more hopeful spaces and have some...
	Well, good evening, everybody, guests.
	Mr.
	Kennedy, thank you for the opportunity to speak here.
	My name is Wayne Swanson.
	I am the son of community activists and entrepreneurs.
	I am the grandson of tenant farmers, what we used to call diverse farmers.
	They raised 18 kids on a farm.
	My parents moved to the city.
	I grew up in the city.
	I grew up like a Cosby kid.
	It wasn't until 2018 that I purchased the farm.
	Had no intention of farming it.
	I just wanted a bigger yard.
	I had gardens and wanted chickens.
	And one day my dad, who grew up on the farm, showed up and said, man, we got fencing.
	We should get some cows.
	Got some cows.
	Got some Georgia Piney Woods.
	They're a land-raised cow.
	And I followed those cows around for a couple of weeks just watching what they ate.
	And I know the extension office thought I was crazy.
	I'd pull up the grass, take it in there, and say, what's this?
	The cows like it.
	And they'd say, well, that's onions.
	They don't really want to eat that.
	You want to plant something else.
	And I said, nope.
	They like it.
	They look good.
	I want to plant this back.
	So I fell into having Piney Woods cows.
	And what I didn't have was me today.
	And I'm going to list off what I do.
	But my main goal is to be the help that I was looking for in 2008.
	So as a farmer, I own Swanson Family Farm.
	We sell direct grass-fed, grass-finished beef to consumer.
	We're not on any shelves or any menus.
	I work with a K-8 agricultural school.
	It is Tri-Focus.
	We are agricultural art and entertainment under the stewardship of Principal Patrick Muhammad.
	We teach kids to farm.
	We are solution-minded.
	We're not looking for anybody to give us anything.
	Or to send us in a direction.
	We know the direction.
	I'm also a consultant with the state, and we're coordinating African American and farmers of color on the LFPA grant to get the small farmers into the food system.
	I'm also a consultant for new and emerging farmers.
	And one of the things that I help them do, or several of the things I help them do, is one, find revenue streams on their farm, but also to win their zip code.
	I think that it's important that we focus on the zip code.
	If everyone is trying to make it to the main market, we're going to flood that market and we're going to go home with a lot of waste.
	But if I can teach farmers to supplement their income and how we scale is we'll take six months to eight months and I just want you to pay one bill on your farm.
	If your farm can pay for one bill with your all-farm job, but the farm, we can scale.
	But what we're doing now is we are training farmers on the administrative side.
	The farming is easy.
	A lot of us are gifted and talented and working in our gifts and talents, but a lot of us don't know Excel.
	A lot of us keep receipts in our dashboard.
	So we're not getting the benefits of everything that the corporate farmers are getting.
	So my role is to help the local farmer become a force in his economy or her economy.
	And we look at it and we look at what's in demand.
	We talk about numbers.
	We talk about adding an Airbnb to the property.
	We talk about doing tours and silent tours and walks and getting with Audubon.
	We try to find as many ways to make profit on that farm as possible while using conservation practices, while being regenerative, and while offering people a tour on a farm that doesn't smell like anything but Mother Nature.
	So we go out, find these farms.
	Right now, I try to do five a year.
	And then we, oh, I'm sorry, another job I have is I'm the president of the Georgia Black-owned Farm Tour.
	And what we do is we take buses of people to these farms I'm talking about that are in small rural Georgia or they're in blighted neighborhoods, but they're growing.
	We bring customers to them, we bring politicians, we bring stakeholders, and we help people understand production agriculture.
	And I don't want to see your pretty farm.
	I want to see your working farm.
	And I had to explain to some people why one of the farms we visited on Sunday had tomatoes on the ground.
	So I asked the farmer, can you explain what you're doing by putting those tomatoes back on the ground?
	And he said, well, I got to return it to the soil.
	I can't compost everywhere.
	We're very busy.
	And I can't do it all at one time.
	So the cover crops are going to grow up.
	They're going to cover it.
	We're going to terminate that cover crop.
	And just having people hear this from farmers.
	Now I get a new appreciation of what a farm looks like.
	Because one of the reasons I tanked as a farmer is because as a beef farmer, the first question people asked me was, how many head do you have?
	So in my mind, that meant success.
	No one ever asked me how much forage Do you have on your place?
	And how many head can that forge sustain?
	I had to go broke first.
	Then once I went broke and couldn't afford hay, had to sell a bunch of cows, my grass started to grow.
	So now the cows that I had were a bunch a lot happier.
	And when I took those cows to the butcher, the butcher called me and said, hey, you got yellow fat in your cows.
	Do you know what that is?
	And I didn't.
	So he had to educate me.
	So again, it's back to me being who I would love to have met in 2008.
	So I'm also on the Regenerate America Leadership Council with the esteemed Mr.
	Harris.
	I also am a corporate trainer.
	We train using behavioral sciences, the ag professionals, on how to reach new agricultural audiences.
	So we want to be unique and dynamic in our approach.
	We don't just want to reach the regular group.
	We want to reach everybody.
	But we want to reach you in a way that is comfortable to you.
	So one of the things we'll do if we were going to do a training for Mr.
	Kennedy is I may set up a call with Mr.
	Kennedy and ask you for pictures and for insight onto words or phrases that you use and that will be familiar to the group that you hang with.
	And that's what we're going to put in the presentation.
	So that they can be a part of the presentation so that they don't feel like they're being preached to or taught to.
	We want to teach.
	And it's important for us to teach because if we don't, we're going to lose the planet.
	So we're excited about the work that we do.
	I'm excited about what's going on in the state of Georgia.
	I have one of the things that we do on our farm tour Is we give every person an opportunity of the farmers to speak about their FSA or their NRCS experience.
	Those experiences have been getting better and better in the state of Georgia because of relationship building.
	So I went in that zip code.
	Now I want my farmers to go down to the FSA office and meet the front clerk lady.
	You don't necessarily have to go in there and ask for anything.
	Meet the clerk.
	Find out if her son plays baseball with your grandson.
	Talk about it.
	Make sure that we get back to creating relationships because a lot of the issue that we have, some of it is historic discrimination, but some of it is just relationship.
	I don't know you, so I can't recognize that your folder is on number six, and maybe your folder needs to be on number one.
	It's relationship.
	I'm not saying that's the right way to do it, but this is the real world, and we try to have real world solutions.
	With that farm tour, we also pay every farmer $500 just for stepping foot on their farm.
	Whether we're there an hour or not, And I'm not sure where this comes from, Mr.
	Kennedy, but why we think farmers have to struggle.
	I don't understand that.
	We don't have to struggle.
	One of the mottos that we have on our farm is less is more, and we can do more with less Especially my farmers who have off-farm jobs, and I'll give you an example of that.
	I had a client down in Brownwood, Jordan.
	I just want to say, Mr.
	Kennedy, could you have an extra five or ten minutes?
	I would like for Wayne to be able to finish, and then we have Judith, who's our final speaker, and she's...
	I was speaking on a farm policy particularly, so I think feeds beautifully into what you're saying, Wayne.
	Sure.
	The big takeaway I'd love if you were in office, Mr.
	Kennedy, I'll get right to it, is to have some parameters around who can apply for these grants.
	These large grants that are used to help farmers.
	And then I would love to hear if we can make people stick to what they wrote the original grant from versus changing it once they get their reward or award so that they can pocket most of the money.
	And I'll pause there so that other folks can have an opportunity to speak.
	Thank you, Wayne.
	Yep.
	Judith, thank you.
	Welcome.
	It's an honor to be on this roundtable with some amazing farmers.
	I am a small farmer in Texas.
	I'm also an attorney and the founder of a non-profit called the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance that focuses on policy reform.
	Some of what I'm going to say is going to be pulling together pieces of what others have already said.
	We work to do policy with People from both parties, every end of the political spectrum.
	And that is both a really positive thing.
	We have opportunities with people from both parties.
	It stems in some ways, though, from a fundamental problem we have, which is that both parties for decades have promoted a get big or get out philosophy.
	That is, the others have spoken to have led to really control of our entire food system by a handful of companies.
	Everyone here is doing amazing work at different scales.
	And all of them are limited by working within this system that we have right now.
	And there are several key factors that this plays out with.
	One is the infrastructure, because all of our infrastructure on how to grow, how to process, how to distribute our food is geared for mass production, not even on a national scale, but on an international scale.
	The other key problem is that the regulations have been intentionally designed to support large-scale extractive agriculture.
	And therefore, it affirmatively, actively burdens small farms and regenerative farms.
	So if we want this type of food in ag to become the norm, we have to rebuild our infrastructure.
	We have to change the regulations so that they are scale appropriate.
	And part of that is reining in the power of large corporations.
	And there's often a misunderstanding, and people think we can shop our way out of the problem.
	And buying from producers like us is vital, but we can't shop our way out of the problem.
	It takes policy reform.
	So I'm going to give a few examples of reforms that we're pushing for.
	There's a longer list that needs to happen, but these are some ones that are key for us.
	So one of them is something called the Prime Act, which would allow small farmers to use custom-exempt processors to sell their meat.
	Now these processors are regulated, they're just not regulated the same Same way that the mega meat packers are regulated, who are processing hundreds of animals every hour.
	Those big meat packers hate the Prime Act.
	They claim it's because of food safety, but these small processors have a better track record for food safety than most of the large meat packers.
	What it's really about is the question of market opportunities for small farmers.
	The big operations don't want market share going to small farmers.
	They don't even want Americans to know where their meat comes from.
	Most people don't realize that the meat that they're buying in the grocery stores that have the USDA label on it, a lot of it's coming from Mexico or Brazil or Australia or any one of half a dozen other countries.
	We need country of origin labeling for meat so that consumers can choose to buy from American producers.
	There's a bill called the Fairness for Small-Scale Farmers and Ranchers Act that includes country of origin labeling along with multiple provisions to address corporate consolidation And rebuild our regional infrastructure.
	Ironically, at the same time that the big meat packers are saying, hey, we can't have country of origin labeling, it's too hard to tell people what country their meat comes from.
	At the exact same time they're pushing to require farmers to put electronic tags on every cow so that supposedly we can track the movements.
	of every single cow in this country.
	The purpose behind that is to promote international trade and deal with trade barriers while they move the financial burden, the cost of it, onto the farmers and ranchers.
	And this is their pattern.
	So we see this, let's put the cost on the farmers and ranchers with something called the checkoff program, where farmers actually pay a tax on everything they sell within these checkoff programs to fund advertising campaigns.
	Those advertising campaigns Help the bottom line of the companies that are selling The meat and grain products.
	They don't help the small farmers who actually raised, actually the farmers of any scale, who raised those products but are paying for the check-off.
	So there's another bill, the Opportunities for Fairness and Farming Act, that would reform the check-off programs.
	Because one of the things to add insult to injury is a lot of that check-off money goes to non-profits.
	Someone else referenced this.
	There are a lot of these non-profits that represent agribusiness interests And actually lobby against many of these same reforms that farmers like us want to see.
	The reforms I've mentioned, the bills I've mentioned, are coming from both Democrats and Republicans.
	But because there are so many powerful corporate interests behind the status quo, we need a lot more people speaking up for the policy reform that enables farmers that are already doing this, like myself and other farmers tonight, and thousands more who are interested In better ways to farm,
	in ways to husband their soils, to steward the ecosystems they want to, they just don't have realistic options because of the way our system is set up.
	With policy reforms like this and others, there's not a simple silver bullet to change this system, but we can have policy reform that creates something where the value isn't just how much shareholders make.
	It's resiliency and human health and long-term food security Through farmer prosperity.
	So thank you very much for the opportunity to speak tonight.
	Thank you so much, Judith.
	You are always so welcome to every panel and every room that there is in Congress.
	I absolutely have adored working with you over the years, your clarity and your vision for agriculture moving forward.
	I really welcome all of your guidance and advice, and thank you for being here.
	Mr.
	Kennedy, our guests have completed their presentations to you.
	I don't know whether you have anything else you'd like to ask or share.
	Perhaps towards the end, maybe Rehi could close with a mindful prayer for the land.
	I would appreciate that.
	I'm very grateful for all the wonderful things I learned from this incredible group of farmers.
	And I'm going to consider you my brain trust as I continue to work on this issue.
	If I get into the White House, God willing, I'm going to try everything in my power to wrest USDA away from corporate agriculture and the chemical industry and start making food, start allowing farmers, incentivizing farmers to make food in this country again.
	Thank you so much.
	Rehi.
	Thanks.
	And it's been a day of growth today, mentally and spiritually.
	And intellectually, I feel very pleased with where this is going.
	And good luck with the campaign and all these other amazing things that you will keep doing.
	But I want us to depart with a clear understanding of who we are.
	And at least from my perspective, this is who I am.
	I am simply an expression of the energy of the universe with which I am interwoven.
	I'm indigenous, indigenous to the planet.
	I'm a carbon life form.
	I come from the people of the corn, the corn, the ancestral corn that knows how to fix nitrogen and to survive and evolve.
	That I owe my existence to.
	As an expression of energy of this planet, I'm blessed to have had this day, this moment, to share with you and with everybody who's listening.
	And I hope that we will walk away understanding this interwovenness Thank you.

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