Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: It's daily we've seen new images of farmers and tractors driving to their capital cities around the globe, protesting. Being farmers, ourselves and independent thinkers, we wanted to know why. Maybe we want to protest, too.
[00:00:15] Speaker B: Welcome to the dust or mud podcast, episode 42, where we're going to dive into the farmers around the world and their protests.
[00:00:22] Speaker A: After nearly 25 years in the US air force, we left the defense industry behind in order to start our own regenerative small farm, air to ground farms.
[00:00:33] Speaker B: And so for the past three years, we've worked tirelessly at building a farm that is multi species. Cows, sheep, pigs, chickens and some dairy cows. And we, as small farmers, want to know what's going on in the world right now.
[00:00:49] Speaker A: Within the past couple of days, the farmer protest stories have centered around Europe and India. And we wanted to know why, like, what's going on in those areas of the world that is causing such an uprising amongst the farmers? And why aren't we seeing that in the states?
Like, are we supposed to be protesting too?
[00:01:15] Speaker B: We don't know. Are you going to drive your tractor up to Washington, DC?
[00:01:18] Speaker A: When I left DC two and a half, three years ago, I was quite happy. After spending five years in the Pentagon, I was happy to be out of DC and don't really ever want to.
[00:01:29] Speaker B: Go back, especially not on a tractor. Wow. Yeah. But these guys are very committed, and they are committed, so much so that they're driving their very large tractors to the capital cities and parking them, manure and all, and letting their voices be heard. What are they protesting?
[00:01:47] Speaker A: It's a couple of different things. It's a little bit different between the European Union and India, but largely the same. So they're protesting government policies.
Typically, environmental policies in Europe seems to be the biggest thing that the policies that are coming down from the government are putting unfair pressures on the farmers and they're not going to be able to make a living. And in India, it seems to be that they're concerned that the government might take away some of the policies in that country that provide, like a minimum wage type of thing.
[00:02:27] Speaker B: A minimum price for the crop?
[00:02:29] Speaker A: Yeah, a minimum price for the crops that the indian farmers are growing. Okay, so a little bit different, but still protesting basic government policies between the two countries.
[00:02:39] Speaker B: And the government policies are affecting their living because what they're doing is trying to grow food for their country. Let's talk about the level of production that they have in those countries with these small farmers. What are they producing?
[00:02:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
As you start looking into that, it gets really interesting to me. At least. So in the European Union, there are quite a few small farms, and those small farms are producing a pretty good percentage of the food in those countries. So take France, for example.
60% of their food production is coming from small farms. Then if you look over at India, over 80% of their food production is coming from small farms.
As a group, they really do have a voice.
[00:03:38] Speaker B: That's a lot of tractors.
[00:03:40] Speaker A: That's a lot of tractors. And, you know, if you get a group of folks that big that are responsible for that much of a nation's food, their voice really starts to get heard.
[00:03:54] Speaker B: They have quite a collective voice.
[00:03:56] Speaker A: Right. If they start coming together, which is what's happening in these countries, the policies are actually changing even.
[00:04:05] Speaker B: Right. They're having to.
[00:04:07] Speaker A: Yes, yes, that's right. The governments are having to listen to the farmers in those countries.
[00:04:14] Speaker B: In those countries, yeah.
[00:04:15] Speaker A: So you contrast that with the United States.
We know large corporations and big food. We've talked about.
What is that? Really?
[00:04:27] Speaker B: Yeah. What do the numbers really look like in the United States?
What is a percentage of food grown by the corporations versus the percentage of food grown by small farmers like ourselves?
[00:04:42] Speaker A: The way it looks in the United States is 10% of the farms. Now, some of those are large family farms and non family farms being corporations. So in the United States, 10% of the farms grow 80% of the food.
[00:05:02] Speaker B: So 10% of all of the farms in the United States are huge and grow 80%, the majority of the food in the country.
[00:05:10] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:05:11] Speaker B: Whereas the rest of the 90% of farmers like ourselves, we only have a 20% share market share in the food production. In the food production, that's correct. So for 20%, our protest probably isn't going to make much of much noise.
[00:05:33] Speaker A: So as we were looking into it, that could be a reason why you're not seeing small farmers protesting in the United States. Is that really, instead of making up 80% of the food production, we make up 20%?
[00:05:51] Speaker B: Yeah. We might be the majority of the farms. We would be the majority collective of the farmers.
[00:05:58] Speaker A: Right.
[00:05:59] Speaker B: Because you're 90% of the farmers. Unfortunately, in our situation, in this country, it's only 20% of the market share. Nobody cares.
[00:06:09] Speaker A: Right? Well, yeah.
[00:06:12] Speaker B: Okay.
So as I was looking at it, I'm like, oh, my gosh, are the farmers in this country going to start protesting? We're going to all get together. What happens in Europe tends to come across the pond into the United States often. I don't think that is the case in this situation. I don't think.
[00:06:31] Speaker A: I think that we could be looking at the regulatory issues that they're having to deal with in Europe like the climate policies, the net zero and the 2030 agendas and those types of things.
The politicians in the United States are signing on to all of those things.
[00:06:54] Speaker B: True.
[00:06:54] Speaker A: Just look at or listen to John Kerry and you'll see know he's talking all over the world about the environmental agenda. And so the policies, I could absolutely see them working their way over into the United States. I think the difference is that we just make up such a small portion.
These small family farms, I believe would bear the brunt of those policies because the large corporations have the funding in order to lobby the officials in Washington DC such that the policies won't affect them as much as it affects the small.
Mean we can't go lobby in DC. We don't have the millions and millions of dollars to put towards a huge lobby that gets our voice heard.
[00:07:52] Speaker B: Right? So as a small farm, we cannot compete in the United States against the corporations? No, we cannot compete. There is no way that when we're having to buy hay at $85 a bale for the beef industry alone, there's no way that we can compete against the larger beef industry who receives subsidies for their corn, that they feed their animals to grow them faster than we can grow them. Trying to do a grass fed operation so they get subsidized for their feed and then they're so large scale that they are absolutely able to just do it super cheap. And we're paying for it as taxpayers through the taxpayer subsidies. So as taxpayers, we're paying for our food on the front end, in my opinion, through what we're giving to the corn growers and then thus to the beef growers. Well, as a small farm, if you want to take and grow a beef from start to finish, that takes far more time and far more inputs than anybody can even imagine. Hardly. And that we cannot compete with that. So what are we doing?
[00:09:06] Speaker A: As we really are having some inward thought, some introspection to answer that question, what are we doing?
We sort of came up with, I think we are protesting.
We are farmers and we are protesting. We're not driving the tractor to DC, but we are offering an alternative to the standard model. We are protesting the food production model in our country. We're offering an alternative.
You can buy food from a small farmer, you don't have to follow in line with the big food corporations, right?
[00:09:59] Speaker B: Yeah, we are. We're protesting our life through our lifestyle, through the model that we are through regenerative practices that are more sustainable as far as our land is concerned. We don't put any herbicides, pesticides, anything. It's as organic as it can come. It is a quality product that's super healthy for us and our customers. And that's why we started it was because we wanted an alternative to the food that they offer. So the question becomes, for the small farmers in this country, is it sustainable?
Is it something that we can keep going? Is it something that we can as small farmers, y'all, there are small farmers all over this country, just dotted in each state, doing farming practices very similar to what we've decided to do. They're growing beef, pork, poultry, eggs, all kinds of things to supply their local area with food. The problem is finding them. That can be a little bit of a challenge.
[00:11:12] Speaker A: Can.
[00:11:13] Speaker B: But most of them have websites.
We talked about in one of our other podcasts, the website eatwild.com. And they have all sorts of small farmers around the country who put their farm and their listings onto their website. And they're all a regenerative or organic. There are standards that have to be met in order to be able to put your farm and your food advertised on their website. We are on the website. Go and check that out if you're looking for a local farmer near you to get your food from.
[00:11:50] Speaker A: And real milk, I believe, is another one.
[00:11:52] Speaker B: Yeah. So real milk is one that. People who raise milk have dairy cows. They can advertise their farm on there for raw milk production. A lot of people are looking for raw milk to get away from grocery store milk, and that's an option and a great place to find that.
[00:12:13] Speaker A: But you posited a question. You said, can we afford it? And that's a huge question.
[00:12:25] Speaker B: It is. I think the answer is actually yes.
But we can't afford it by ourselves.
We can afford it as a community.
[00:12:37] Speaker A: Yeah, I was feeling like. No, it feels like we can't afford it.
[00:12:42] Speaker B: We, you and I and the farmer next to us and the small farmer down the road cannot. We cannot afford to grow food on the small scale in this country alone.
[00:12:58] Speaker A: Not if you're competing with the prices that the large corporations are offering.
[00:13:07] Speaker B: Right. We cannot sell 599 a pound beef and stay open for business. It doesn't work like that. We can't.
[00:13:16] Speaker A: Right now, I believe the average price of a pound of ground beef in the United States is 499. It's right at $5. That's the average price. It's gone up a dollar over the past year. But even at $5 a pound for ground beef, absolutely no way we can stay in business there.
That's not even making a profit. That's just covering the costs. No way. Not even close.
[00:13:47] Speaker B: Right. And we're not alone. We're not alone in that. That is just the facts across the board. But if we decided as communities to vote with our dollar and vote with what we're putting onto our plates and supported the local and small farmers around us, we could succeed.
[00:14:10] Speaker A: Yes, that's true.
[00:14:12] Speaker B: But it takes making that a priority.
[00:14:14] Speaker A: Right.
We've been led, and you've mentioned this in previous podcasts, we've been led as Americans to believe that food is cheap. So what we are asking for is contrary to what everyone believes. So as we're saying, we're asking for a commitment to spend more money on something that we've all been led to believe is supposed to be cheap.
It's a hard thing, I think.
[00:14:51] Speaker B: I would like to bring up the point, though. I believe that the products are wholly different.
[00:15:00] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:15:01] Speaker B: So is it apples to apples or is it apples to steak?
[00:15:06] Speaker A: Well, when you're selling ground beef and someone else is selling ground beef, it looks to the consumer like ground beef.
[00:15:18] Speaker B: Right.
[00:15:19] Speaker A: So the idea, how do you get the word out that it is actually different, that you are supporting something different?
I don't know. It's hard.
We've talked about just now, you mentioned that the government subsidies for the grain production really favors the large scale cafos.
[00:15:47] Speaker B: The beef feed lots.
[00:15:49] Speaker A: Yeah, the feed lots. Beef, pork, chicken, like all of it.
[00:15:52] Speaker B: All of them.
[00:15:52] Speaker A: Because the grain.
[00:15:54] Speaker B: Confinement operations.
[00:15:55] Speaker A: Confinement operations. Because the grains are subsidized, the confinement operations then have an artificially low input price.
[00:16:03] Speaker B: They're probably not paying forty cents a pound for their feed.
[00:16:07] Speaker A: Right.
Which is what we pay right now. We're averaging and we feed a GMO free feed. So, granted, we have committed to a feed that is about double what a normal feed is.
But with that, we're paying forty cents a pound average across the different animals that we're feeding. Between the dairy cows, the chicken, be it eggs or broilers, and the pigs, our Average is about forty cents a pound.
Yeah.
[00:16:49] Speaker B: They don't pay that.
No. Okay. That said, we keep plugging away. We love what we're doing. We love farming. We love growing good food.
I don't want to stop doing it, but each year you have to consider all of the finances that go into it. And with hay continuing to be on the rise, with feed continuing to be on the rise.
The gut wrenching thing that you feel is, are we all 100% cornholed into the food industry that the conglomerates and Washington, DC say that we have to be a part of?
That's the question.
[00:17:40] Speaker A: Whenever you start a business, we all know you don't make money for the first few years. You expect that, right? You start a business. You have to have capital in order to start the business. And then when you look at farms, the one thing you'll continuously hear is capital intensive. Capital intensive. It takes a lot of money in order to start a farm. First, you have all of the infrastructure, which was. We totally expected that you're fixing or building fences. You have to have cow pens, you have to have all of the infrastructure that's involved in a farm. So. Got it. Capital intensive there, but the capital intensive. Let's just take pigs.
[00:18:25] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:18:27] Speaker A: The capital intensive thing about pigs is you start with infrastructure, building the pins and all of the things that you have to have there.
[00:18:35] Speaker B: Okay? But we didn't have to do that this year. It was all there. It's all paid for.
[00:18:39] Speaker A: Set that aside.
You have to buy the initial pigs.
[00:18:44] Speaker B: $100.
[00:18:45] Speaker A: Okay, we paid a little more than that, but that's a fair starting for a quality piglet. For a quality piglet. Then you feed that pig for the next six months on your farm, and you have not gotten any money back from that pig yet. So the upfront cost is you buy the pig, and then you buy the feed for the next six months, and then you pay to process the pig. And I think our average right now to process a single pig is somewhere between $450 and $500.
To have a hog processed the feed, what do we average? We're averaging probably close to $400 per pig in feed. So you've got 450 or so dollars to have it processed. 400 or so dollars in feed, 100 or so dollars in the pig initially.
[00:19:50] Speaker B: So you can say about $1,000 per pig. Right now we have eight. So we have about $8,000 hanging out there in capital because they're about to go to the processor, and we don't see any of that back until it goes into somebody else's freezer, which is going to take time.
[00:20:10] Speaker A: Right. And then we won't count the cost of the freezers or the cost of the electricity to run the freezers as that pork. Then we hold it over the next few months and sell it by the cut to individuals.
That $8,000 capital investment, then it's an outlay for at least six months and then you don't make it back as one big lump sum either.
[00:20:43] Speaker B: No.
[00:20:43] Speaker A: You make it back over the trickles, back in over the next few months.
[00:20:47] Speaker B: Right.
[00:20:48] Speaker A: But in order to have pigs then for the fall, we have to start the next outlay of that same $8,000.
[00:20:56] Speaker B: Right.
[00:20:57] Speaker A: Except we normally have ten pigs, so it's normally $10,000. You start that outlay, we will buy the next set of pigs before this set goes to the processor so that they're ready six months from now.
[00:21:10] Speaker B: Right.
[00:21:10] Speaker A: So if you take just the hog operation, you are in a constant $10,000 deficit. Basically, that money has gone out and you aren't seeing it. It's not coming back.
[00:21:27] Speaker B: Yeah, it does come back, but it's not like it goes out and it comes back. And it goes out and it comes back. It doesn't work like that. No, not in this.
[00:21:36] Speaker A: No. And it's not like if you harvest your corn, you sell that harvest.
[00:21:43] Speaker B: Right.
[00:21:43] Speaker A: And here's big payday. Here's a payday.
[00:21:45] Speaker B: Go pay all your bills, put some in the bank.
[00:21:49] Speaker A: Right.
[00:21:50] Speaker B: Buy your corn for next year, plant it again.
[00:21:54] Speaker A: Right.
[00:21:54] Speaker B: It doesn't work like that.
[00:21:55] Speaker A: Correct.
So it takes a while to make that money back.
[00:21:59] Speaker B: Right.
[00:21:59] Speaker A: And then if you look at, say, poultry, the numbers are smaller, the time is smaller, but it's the same effect.
[00:22:10] Speaker B: It's the same effect. Right.
[00:22:11] Speaker A: And depending on the number of chickens that you do, then that determines how big that outlay is.
[00:22:18] Speaker B: Right.
[00:22:18] Speaker A: If you take that then to beef, the numbers are bigger.
[00:22:22] Speaker B: The time is.
[00:22:23] Speaker A: Time is way bigger. I guess lamb would be in between the pork and the beef.
[00:22:27] Speaker B: It is.
[00:22:28] Speaker A: But if you go all the way to beef.
Wow, you're talking years, literally, from the time a cow is bred to the time that that calf is in somebody else's freezer, you're looking at potentially three and a half to four years.
So the amount of capital that it takes to do a multispecies regenerative farm, where we have anything from a daily production of milk and eggs to an every eight weeks production of poultry, six month production of pork, twelve month production of lamb, 36 plus month production of beef. That outlay is big.
[00:23:19] Speaker B: It's big.
[00:23:20] Speaker A: Capital intensive is big.
The initial capital is large.
The requirement to sustain yourself before actually seeing proceeds coming back is intense.
[00:23:37] Speaker B: It is. But it is a good thing.
It can be profitable if you have the right market.
The thing is, we don't get any subsidies. We don't get any help, though. We're producing better quality food than the huge corporations, far superior food than those corporations. We get zilch help. The small farmer doesn't get anything.
100% of the proceeds of the taxpayers or the subsidies go to 10% of the farmers in this country. That to me is the biggest problem.
I don't want government help. That's not it.
They get such a massive unfair advantage with what I think it was 119,000,000,000 with a b dollars since 1995 to 2020 of government subsidies going to those large farms.
[00:24:45] Speaker A: I believe that was just in the grain.
[00:24:49] Speaker B: Corn and soy. Corn and soy, why?
Because those crops are going into the processed foods.
[00:24:58] Speaker A: Yes.
The majority of them go into livestock feed. The rest of them go into processed feed.
[00:25:04] Speaker B: That'll go into our livestock.
[00:25:09] Speaker A: We feed the pigs.
[00:25:11] Speaker B: Yeah, but it's probably, that's non GMO feed. Do you think that they're getting that? I don't know if those particular types of farmers are getting any government subsidies.
[00:25:24] Speaker A: The one thing I don't know that I do know that between corn and soy, 90 ish percent of them are genetically modified. 90% ish of the corn and soy produced in this country come from genetically modified crops. So even if the GMO free is subsidized, which I just don't know, it's a very small portion of the amount.
[00:25:54] Speaker B: Tom probably knows that is actually grown.
[00:25:57] Speaker A: Yeah. Tom, leave us comments.
[00:26:00] Speaker B: We're ready for your comments.
Okay.
[00:26:04] Speaker A: Yeah, so it leaves us in just a weird place, like coming into the podcast room, Shelly says, I just feel depressed, and I'm like, about the podcast or what? And she says, no, just about where we are with the farm stuff. Then we started really looking at the data for this podcast, and it just left us going, man, is this, is this sustainable?
I don't know.
And really led us to the. I feel like we're protesting too.
And as a protest, maybe it's worth it, but at some point it has to start paying for itself or it's not sustainable.
[00:27:04] Speaker B: Right? Yeah.
[00:27:06] Speaker A: So all of the best intentions, wanting to do something different than the status quo. Status quo, the way things are done, because we believe that what we're doing is better. We know that it's better, and we believe that we wanted to do that not just for ourselves. And we've talked about this.
We're not just a homestead, we're not doing it just for ourselves. We believed that we could do it at a small scale, such that we could offer a far superior product to our local community also. And the local community, like our local community is here. It's with us.
We are selling the product.
[00:27:52] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:27:55] Speaker A: It hasn't turned around for us yet as far as the profitability aspect goes.
[00:28:00] Speaker B: Right. Of course, this is our third year, so we're hopeful.
[00:28:04] Speaker A: But it just leaves you with that sort of gut feeling that.
[00:28:11] Speaker B: We'Ll see.
[00:28:12] Speaker A: Yeah.
I love being an independent thinker. Right. Being a person that wants to make my own decisions. The idea of protesting the big food. Yeah. I want to do something different and I want to offer something different to the people around me.
[00:28:37] Speaker B: Right.
[00:28:39] Speaker A: And then that mentality, though, meets reality.
[00:28:45] Speaker B: Yeah.
My gut depression feeling was really just great because 10% of the farms have 80% of the food. Are we all relegated to eat the crap that they produce?
Great. We have no choice. Awesome.
Is that the reality? Is it? Maybe it is.
[00:29:12] Speaker A: I don't know.
[00:29:14] Speaker B: I don't either.
[00:29:15] Speaker A: We're not alone.
[00:29:17] Speaker B: I know we're not alone.
[00:29:18] Speaker A: And there are a lot out there and there are a lot of people that do want to support local farms, family farms.
I don't know.
[00:29:31] Speaker B: Keep fighting the fight. But no, to answer the question, rich isn't going to be driving the tractor to DC anytime soon. We won't be protesting like that. But if you are also a free thinker and like to protest what's happening in the larger, big ag, big food, big everything, you're an insteadter.
Then please find a local farmer near you and support them the best that you can.
That's the way to protest around here, is to join the local farmer movement.
[00:30:11] Speaker A: Yeah.
And as we were looking at some of the different videos of the farmers protesting around the world, it was interesting to see how many comments from the United States saying, we're with you, we support you, we stand with you, stay strong. A lot of comments. Hold the line, farmers.
If you feel like that, the way that you actually do help farmers hold the line is support your local farmers.
[00:30:45] Speaker B: Right? Absolutely.
[00:30:47] Speaker A: Find a local farm and buy eggs.
[00:30:51] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure.
Yes, 100%. If you're more interested in what we're doing as a farm, you can go to airteogroundfarms.com. We do have a website. We have all of our products on there. Rich writes a blog that tells a relatively weekly basis of what's going on on our farm, how we got here and what we're doing every day.
[00:31:14] Speaker A: And we've got quite a few different YouTube videos. And the idea behind that being we want to have an open door policy. We want you to see how your food is being raised on our farm.
[00:31:27] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:31:27] Speaker A: So the best way we can do that for the largest number of people is grab our cameras and put it out there on YouTube. Here's how we raise the food.
[00:31:37] Speaker B: If I'm going to grow your food, you should be able to see how it's raised.
[00:31:41] Speaker A: So check out some of those videos. We've got some morning farm chores. You can go see all of the animals in one video.
[00:31:48] Speaker B: That's right. Thank you guys for hanging out with us. And until next time, bye, y'all.
[00:31:52] Speaker A: Bye, y'all.
