Food Emancipation Proclamation | Free Our Food!

[00:00:00] Speaker A: There are a lot of things that two consenting adults can do legally within the United States of America. However, buying a pork chop or a ribeye or some ground beef that I've grown and processed right here on our farm is not one of them. And Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms believes that it is time for a food Emancipation Proclamation. And we agree. [00:00:26] Speaker B: We're going to talk about that today. We've broken the conversation down into five parts. Stick around with us for part two where we discuss why the local farmer is locked out of that processing step. And then later, we're going to reveal just how many cents of your food dollar makes it to the farmer. [00:00:48] Speaker A: Welcome to the Dust or Mud podcast. I'm Shelley. [00:00:51] Speaker B: I'm rich. [00:00:51] Speaker A: After 25 years of rich being in the government, working for the United States Air Force, we bought a couple of acres out here in the Ozarks and started farming. We have a first generation regenerative farm, and boy howdy, have we learned what we are not allowed to do. [00:01:08] Speaker B: The list is long, Very, very long. [00:01:12] Speaker A: I don't know how many times it has been said, yeah, we can't do that. [00:01:17] Speaker B: No, we can't do that. [00:01:18] Speaker A: Oh, sorry, we can't sell you that either. There are so many things, and it makes no sense to us because there are many things that are out there that are perfectly legal for two people to do if they both consent to the activity. You can buy and sell a lot of things legally here, but food, man, it is so regulated that it. And we're talking about food here. [00:01:46] Speaker B: Yeah, right. Really? Yeah. [00:01:50] Speaker A: So Emancipation Proclamation is a big, big term. [00:01:55] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:01:56] Speaker A: So in 18 carries a lot of weight. Yeah. [00:01:59] Speaker B: 1863. Then President Lincoln made an executive order that freed the slaves in all states. [00:02:09] Speaker A: Federally, the end. [00:02:10] Speaker B: Federally, the end. Right. So the idea of proclaiming emancipation, proclaiming freedom. I understand why Joel calls us back to that event and that action taken by the President to free. [00:02:32] Speaker A: Yeah. While we're not slaves, it's more of a soft servitude that we as the American people are under. Whenever it comes to food regulation and the food industry writ large, we are dependent. And they have built a system and we have all been, we have succumbed to the system, basically. And we are now wholly dependent upon this regulatory system that has created these behemoths of companies. [00:03:07] Speaker B: Yeah, it's this whole government controlled system. Right. Like you think that when you go into the grocery store, well, look, I'm free. I. I have all of these choices. And it does look like that, but the idea of Total and complete food freedom is not there. And Shelley. Well, we'll get to that. [00:03:32] Speaker A: Okay. [00:03:34] Speaker B: So the history here. How did we get to this huge regulatory system? Because it didn't used to be that way with food. [00:03:45] Speaker A: Well, in 1906, author by the name of Upton Sinclair wrote a book that went back in that day. They didn't know the word, but it went viral. [00:03:57] Speaker B: Yeah, the Jungle. [00:03:59] Speaker A: The Jungle, yes. And his. His reasoning for writing the book was to shed light on what was going on in the. What had become very monopolized and very icky situation within the meatpacker industry today. [00:04:17] Speaker B: I think we would call it like an expose by an investigative reporter. Right. [00:04:23] Speaker A: And he would totally be on X, right? [00:04:28] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [00:04:29] Speaker A: He'd probably be on my feet. [00:04:30] Speaker B: Yeah, probably just probably. Sure. [00:04:33] Speaker A: Yeah. Anyway, the. So he writes this book to expose what's going on in the meatpacking industry. Then it did a fantastic job and it got the attention. [00:04:45] Speaker B: Yeah, the stuff was just gross. Right. There was no oversight. And the companies were all about making money and they didn't care. And so it didn't matter what got into the ground. Whatever the meat was like, it was. It was bad. And he exposed that it was bad. And so what happened was there were. Who was it? Eight companies. [00:05:07] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:05:08] Speaker B: That were controlling about 50% of the. The meat production that was happening in the United States at that time. [00:05:17] Speaker A: And they called that a monopoly. Yeah, at the time. [00:05:20] Speaker B: And what they saw, their sales just plummet. [00:05:25] Speaker A: And after he wrote the book. [00:05:27] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, okay. Yeah. As a result of him writing this book, their sales just plummeted. And there were, as I see it, and as Joel talked about it, there were. There were a couple of different options. Like, where do you go from here? One option would be, look, we got it. We know we've messed up. We're going to make things better. We're going to invite newspapers and cameramen and reporters in, maybe customers. Customers, come on in. We're going to show you what we're doing. We're going to show you how we're changing. Look, we've made things better. [00:06:02] Speaker A: That would be cult transparency. [00:06:04] Speaker B: Right, okay. Transparency would have been one option. The chosen option, though, was not transparency. The chosen option was, hey, government, we need you to come up with a way to certify that what we're doing is okay to calm these people down so they'll start buying from us. [00:06:25] Speaker A: Well, they knew they needed some sort of certification. Right. They knew they needed some kind of, like, seal of approval or stamp of approval. Now, they could have Gone also with a third party accreditor. Colleges are accredited not by the United States government. They're accredited from outside sources. They could have gone to some sort of exterior third party accreditation that they would have paid a fee and said, you know, we get our accreditation from abc, whatever, and that's where you get your seal from. Right. But they didn't go that way. Well, that would have cost them more money rather than. They got into business with the, with. [00:07:03] Speaker B: The government, which ended up costing them way more money. Well, I'm sure, well, think of all of the rules and regulations, all of the things. [00:07:10] Speaker A: But see, I don't think had the foresight at that time. They were just trying. They're putting out a fire. [00:07:14] Speaker B: Right. [00:07:15] Speaker A: In my, like, that's just my opinion. They, it was seemingly like they were putting out a fire. And the best way to do that would be to get the government involved. We need some, some sort of seal. [00:07:27] Speaker B: Yeah. And they looked to the government to give them that, and it ended up with, you know, a little ways down the line, the fsis, Food Safety and Inspection Service. And from there now we have all of the rules and regulations that we're dealing with today. So the, what happens with these rules and regulations? And you know, a lot of people would say, well, look, it's just about safety. Right. Consumer protection. But what happens with a lot of these rules and regulations and these, these large companies actually are in favor of these things because what it does is it locks small producers out of the industry. So if you have to spend, I don't know, $500,000 on a waste treatment system because they're, you know, the, the meat processing process has wastewater. So if you have to spend a half a million dollars on a waste treatment system before you can get your certification, that locks out a whole lot of people. [00:08:40] Speaker A: Well, because it's a one size fits all rule, right? [00:08:45] Speaker B: Correct. [00:08:45] Speaker A: So if they make a rule at the USDA level, they say, well, you have to have the wastewater treatment system and it has to be able to handle X amount of volume. Well, if you're a small producer, let's just say instead of 5,000 head of cows going through in a day, you do 50 head of cattle a week. That's a, that's completely different water volume and waste volume. I can put in a system that would handle that or mimic the bigger one. But there's this one size fits all kind of concept. And by the time the small producer meets all of the requirements, they, they're. [00:09:27] Speaker B: Broke, they're out of business. Because they're not doing the volume required in order to do that. Right. So that takes us into part two, which is the small processor problem, which is exactly that the system was, that was built to protect consumers. Has the result of that system actually punishes small processors because of the rules and regulations that are in place for consumer protections are prohibitive to that small producer? Right. [00:10:00] Speaker A: We have a small producer. And we just keep hoping that they aren't regulated out because there have been some new regulations come down the pipe and they're, they haven't all fully kicked in, I don't think at this point. Or, or maybe they didn't pass. But there's always this like, oh, no, are they going to do something to make it to where our small processor can't stay in business? Right. And that it, it. We're, we're grateful to have them, yet we worry that they're going to get to stay in business. But it's still very expensive. [00:10:31] Speaker B: The, the processor where we had our chicken done this year is a USDA inspected processor. And they do a few hundred birds a day on their processing day. And they have a USDA inspector that is there. And that inspector is able to see those few hundred birds. Right? Well, the big chicken processing plants, like the Tyson plants, they have a USDA inspector and they're doing thousands and thousands of birds a day. [00:11:02] Speaker A: So the, I mean, even if I think ours can do a couple of thousand a day, they do about 600 an hour, he said. But, but that's still very, very small compared to those. Those inspectors are watching. They're watching a thousand birds fly by them in, like minutes. Right? [00:11:18] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:11:18] Speaker A: And they're supposed to, they're inspecting them, by the way. [00:11:21] Speaker B: Yeah, correct. Their, their eyes pass over those birds as they, as they flew past them on the lines. Right. And so the, the idea even of inspection is geared more towards that big guy. Right. So, like, it has to be something massively wrong for an animal to be, you know, pulled from the line by an inspector in those types of situations just because of the volume that's passing by that inspector. [00:11:51] Speaker A: Yeah, they like, they, they, they do, they do spot like, they pull back like one every however often to, to check it for, you know, know, whatever bacteria, salmonella and whatnot spore it. But that's out of thousands and thousands that are passing. They'll pull one. [00:12:09] Speaker B: Yeah. So let's just say that we, we wanted to process those birds on our farm. [00:12:17] Speaker A: Okay. We have processed birds on our farm. [00:12:19] Speaker B: We have. Last year we processed 550 birds, we wanted to do more birds. Lots of reasons. We ended up doing 1500, raising 1500 meat birds on our farm this year, which meant that in the state of Missouri we were no longer under the poultry processing exemption. That's on that. That only allows 1000 birds to be processed on farm. So we could not, we could not process 1500. We couldn't process 1001 birds on our farm. So we could not process 1500 birds. Right. Unless we became an inspected processing facility. So if we said, you know. [00:13:08] Speaker A: If you requested and went through the process to go to the federally, already federally authorized 20 because it's state by state, 20,000. Federally, it's 20,000 birds on farm. Right. So if we wanted to go to the federal plan poultry inspection level in the state, in our state, we would. [00:13:28] Speaker B: Have had to have built, built a facility. And it has to have pass throughs and impervious walls and bathrooms and like all of these things, all of these rules of what you have to have for your facility. It has to be a license certified, you know, all of this septic tank or septic field for your facility. You have to have an inspector come out and know, write up your, your paperwork. You have all of the paperwork to fill out even to start the process, like it is prohibitive for an operation as small as we are to say, I want to process 1500 birds on my farm. Like, yeah, we're, we're locked out. You know, if we said we want to process 20,000 birds on our farm, at that point, maybe, you know, now you're becoming like more of a medium sized processor. You're still under an exemption. So not all of the rules apply to you and maybe at that volume you could afford to build the facility out. But the, you know, the small farmer that says, man, you know, I did pretty good with 500 birds. I want to take, I want to take that up to 1500 birds. No, you can't, you can't do that. Yeah. And you know, the idea that I just want to process that bird and you know, even, even if we had neighbors around us that just wanted to buy our birds, it still thousand is as high as you can go with poultry. And you know, heaven forbid we had a neighbor ask us, hey, do you know how to process hogs? Why sure I do. Well, I tell you what, I'll buy that hog from you. Would you process it, cut it up for me and put it in some. [00:15:27] Speaker A: Do an on farm kill, which is a thing. [00:15:29] Speaker B: Would you, you know, just, just process it? You, you said you know how, right? Yeah, I know how. Well, would you just process it for me and put it in butcher paper or I'll pay you. Oh, no, can't do that. We cannot do that. [00:15:41] Speaker A: That would get us in really big trouble. [00:15:44] Speaker B: Right. Except that the way the system is designed, the neighbor wouldn't get in trouble. Right? So it's not like other illegal substances where it's illegal to sell it, it's illegal to buy it, it's illegal to have it, it's illegal to transport it. Right. Like other substances. When they say it's illegal, it's actually illegal. Right. [00:16:11] Speaker A: Everyone involved is going to be in trouble, Right. [00:16:14] Speaker B: In this case, were we to sell a pork chop that we processed ourselves on our farm, if we were to sell that to our neighbor, our neighbor would not get in trouble for buying it. Our neighbor would not get in trouble for carrying it back to their house. Our neighbor would not get in trouble for consuming it. We would, though, get in trouble for selling. That's right. [00:16:41] Speaker A: You would get in trouble for selling it. [00:16:43] Speaker B: So it's, it's not in, in my. [00:16:46] Speaker A: Hang on. [00:16:47] Speaker B: Can I ask you a question? Yeah. [00:16:48] Speaker A: Could you give it away? [00:16:49] Speaker B: Yes. [00:16:50] Speaker A: Could you, could you do all of that and could you like cook it and take it and donate it, like to the, like give it, you know, the high school barbecue, you know, or a benefit or something. Hey, I've got a whole hog. We're gonna do, we're gonna kill it. We're gonna bring the whole hog out and do the thing and, and do a hog picking or whatever, a big smoke thing for like the high school or something like that. [00:17:16] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:17:16] Speaker A: Oh, you can. [00:17:17] Speaker B: Yeah. So that's my assertion. This isn't about safety, it's about restriction from the market. If it was about safety, like the whole thing is illegal. The things where we are serious and say this is not safe, those substances are illegal. So they say it's about safety and consumer protection. But the only one who is legally liable is the seller. In our case, in the case of food, the only person that's legally liable is the seller. The buyer is fine. So how is it about safety and consumer protection? [00:18:00] Speaker A: It's not. It can't be. [00:18:05] Speaker B: So that's our point here in part two, that the government says it's about safety, but what we feel like is it's actually more about them being afraid of acting actual true independence, true freedom. And it is absolutely restricted. You called it soft servitude. You know, the idea of emancipation from slavery though is valid, I think in this section, because we are enslaved to the government's system. Right. Like you, we cannot process a pork, beef, lamb. If we had goats, we couldn't process them. We can't process that. I can't process it on my farm and sell it to somebody. We are enslaved to the government's system. [00:19:03] Speaker A: And what a, what a world it would be if small producers, medium producers could raise and process and sell right from their farm straight to the person, our neighbors. Our neighbors, neighbors, our church community could begin to build what a community of that. That's self reliant? [00:19:40] Speaker B: Yes. [00:19:41] Speaker A: Oh, that, that, that doesn't need outside sources trucked in twice a week. [00:19:47] Speaker B: Right. [00:19:49] Speaker A: Like we could, we could actually begin to somewhat take care of ourselves. [00:19:56] Speaker B: Right. And the naysayer would say, well, what happens if, if you sell a bad product, there's nobody there to enforce the, the rules or enforce the law on you. To which I say in this current era of instant social media justice, a farmer that is messing up would not survive because it's known immediately. It would be known immediately. Right. So as long as you're being transparent, then I don't see that there's any issue with the same problems that were happening when Upton wrote the jungle. Right. Like, because you're being transparent and word gets out immediately you are, you are. [00:20:46] Speaker A: Closed for business at that point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the world is different. We have instant communication. [00:20:54] Speaker B: That's right. [00:20:55] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a really great point. [00:20:59] Speaker B: Free market would take care of this. [00:21:00] Speaker A: Right. [00:21:01] Speaker B: We don't need government regulations for this type of transaction for, for a local, small farm, two consenting adults kind of transaction for food, you don't need the government in that if it goes bad, everybody's going to know about it immediately. And then if we need, I'm not saying we don't need something as far as oversight goes for the processing plants, but like, let's size it for the plant. Right. [00:21:30] Speaker A: Okay. [00:21:30] Speaker B: So if, you know, there are four producers now that produce almost 85% of the beef in this country. [00:21:41] Speaker A: And we're okay with that. By the way, apparently the United States. [00:21:44] Speaker B: We are not. [00:21:45] Speaker A: No, we're not. [00:21:46] Speaker B: United States government. [00:21:46] Speaker A: United States government is okay with that. Absolutely. Or they would bust it up. [00:21:52] Speaker B: Right? Yeah. [00:21:53] Speaker A: 50% of which are owned by foreign international companies. [00:21:57] Speaker B: Yeah. Two of those companies are Brazilian companies. Two of them are US companies. Together the four of them make up almost 85% of the beef production. There's no resilience there at all. [00:22:13] Speaker A: At all. That is a national security problem, period. [00:22:18] Speaker B: Yeah. So point being for those companies, I think we should probably have some fairly strict oversight. The number that you're producing, the effect that that could have across the entirety of the population. Take Tyson Beef for example, which makes up 23% of the beef produced in this nation. If Tyson were to just start sending out yucky beef, right. 23% of people eating beef could become ill or sick or whatever. [00:22:54] Speaker A: So if you want to be that big and you want to supply that much food to that much of the country, then you're going to be more regulated. Yeah, but if you're maybe small and. [00:23:06] Speaker B: You'Re doing a couple, like a pork processor that does, you know, maybe 50 or 60 beef a week, you shouldn't have to have that same kind of oversight and regulation. And like all of the nitinoid things that somebody that's producing 23% of the nation's beef is producing. [00:23:29] Speaker A: So our processors, USDA process and if they want to do the things to come under the USDA stamp. Okay. But what we're really, really getting at is the freedom to be out from underneath the stamp. Yeah, we're talking about neighbor to neighbor, friend to friend, community to community, to be able to do food production on our own without asking someone else's flipping permission. [00:23:59] Speaker B: Yeah. You know, we had a meat cutter call us the other day because we own air to ground meats in, in town in Ava. And we had a, someone who was new to the area who called and said, hey, I'm a butcher, I've been cutting meat for about 30 years. Was just wondering if, you know, somebody cut meat, if you need somebody to cut meat. And we're like, well, no, we're not a, we're not actually a butcher shop. We grow the meat and then we take it to a USDA processor and then we sell those cuts out of our store. But if there wasn't all of this rules and regulations, then we could take the product that's grown on our farm, I could, you know, kill, eviscerate, turn it into quarters, pay somebody that's a 30 year veteran meat cutter to come to our farm, turn those into beautiful cuts right here on the farm, and then we sell it out of our meat store to the community. Like that would be an amazing thing. And all of the monies then are right here. Right. Like our farm would have an employee that we would pay. All of the money stays right here. [00:25:21] Speaker A: On our farm that's called vertically integrated. [00:25:24] Speaker B: And we'll get to the amount of, of dollars that stay or don't stay where they form and where they go. One thing that we wanted to mention in part three, you've heard us maybe mention a couple of times, people say this one is replication over scale. And one of the negative comments oftentimes about this idea of, you know, local small farm, resilient food structure is you can't feed the world with that kind of system. [00:26:06] Speaker A: They do. But I think that they feed the world is. First of all, it's a myth. And it was a. It was a phrase that they came up with when they were pushing big, aggressive. We feed the world. Right. We have to go big or get out. I believe that was in the 1970s when they went around to farms and they pushed get big or get out. [00:26:33] Speaker B: The USDA did that. [00:26:34] Speaker A: Yep. Because we are. We gotta feed the world. Feed the world, Feed the world. And we don't feed the world. We do export some of our stuff, for sure. [00:26:45] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:26:46] Speaker A: Yes. But, but the idea that my community needs to feed the world, it's not true. [00:26:58] Speaker B: Right. So our idea here is Instead of having one farm that has 10,000 cows on it, why don't we have a thousand farms with 10 cows? [00:27:11] Speaker A: Right. And then if that farmer with those 10 cows can actually do something with those cows other than pass them off at the livestock market to the people who. [00:27:24] Speaker B: To the commodity. [00:27:25] Speaker A: To the commodity system. Because that's what we have. We have. Well, I can farm and I can have 10 cows, but it's not really going to pay very much because I can raise them for a little bit and take them. But then I got to pass them off. I got to pass them off to somebody. And it's going into the commodity system. [00:27:42] Speaker B: Right. [00:27:43] Speaker A: And so that farmer is getting, well, just a few dollars. A few. Just a little bit of that farm dollar. Because now we're going to go through the livestock market and then that cow is going to go somewhere else and then somewhere else and somewhere else. [00:27:58] Speaker B: And this isn't new. In the early 1900s, America had over 6 million farms. [00:28:04] Speaker A: And as of 2022, I think they had. We had less than 2 million. [00:28:09] Speaker B: That's right. [00:28:12] Speaker A: So. [00:28:14] Speaker B: So we are consolidating and consolidating and the. It just keeps feeding on itself. Right. And our idea is let's reverse that whole thing. Let's. Let's stop this consolidation push. [00:28:28] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:28:28] Speaker B: And let's actually spread things out. When, when every county can feed itself, the nation as a whole is stronger. [00:28:42] Speaker A: Yes. [00:28:43] Speaker B: Right. Like if you didn't have to rely on the rail system and the interstate system and huge processing plants and all, like, if you didn't have to rely on that to feed your county, just take a county. And if. If your county had enough farmers with the ability to process the products right there on farm, and then that then fed to the county, one county at a time, the entire nation is stronger. [00:29:16] Speaker A: Doesn't it seem like that would be something that the progressive side of the country would be really into? That sounds very green to me. I'm going to use air quotes here. That sounds like a very green concept to minimize the movement, reduce the energy usage, reduce your carbon footprint by being able to produce and keep the food where it is and then thus reducing the food miles that that particular item has had to go. It seems like both sides of the aisle right here, you got one side of the aisle who's like, we're all freedom. Don't tell us what to do. And then you got the other side of the aisles, like, you know, stop burning gasoline and diesel and all this stuff. And it seems like those two could come together and go, hey, why don't we let people buy and sell their own food? Solves two problems. I mean, I would be. For both sides, you know, I. All of that. Right. It seems a very bipartisan issue. [00:30:30] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't think it is, though. Yeah, it is. Yeah. [00:30:37] Speaker A: But, you know, we don't. It isn't about regulating or banning things. Right. And the MAHA stuff was that. [00:30:49] Speaker B: We'll get to that section. That's part five. [00:30:51] Speaker A: Oh, what part are we on? [00:30:52] Speaker B: We're. I'm transitioning us from part three to part four. [00:30:56] Speaker A: I'm sorry, it's getting a little ahead of you. I've got things to say. [00:31:00] Speaker B: So we've teased a couple of times now how much of your dollar. How many cents of your dollar makes it to the farmer. [00:31:10] Speaker A: So how many? [00:31:12] Speaker B: A 2023 study is the most recent government study. It's from the USDA. It says that 7.9 cents out of every dollar spent is returned to the farmer. [00:31:30] Speaker A: Less than eight pennies. [00:31:31] Speaker B: Less than eight pennies. Okay. Less than. [00:31:34] Speaker A: Okay. [00:31:35] Speaker B: Wow. [00:31:35] Speaker A: So we don't know that. Like, how do y' all feel about that, about your food and your farmers? That you. We all. We're all backing our farmers. [00:31:43] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:31:43] Speaker A: How do we feel about that? [00:31:45] Speaker B: Round up to 8 cents. So the. The idea here is that if the farmer got nothing, everybody is very, very concerned about their grocery bill. And the last I saw, I think it has gone up like 12% this year. So everyone is very concerned with the price of groceries. And oftentimes the farmer is villainized for the price of groceries. So for a thought experiment, let's just say the farmer gets zero cents from your food dollar. That reduces your food bill 8%. So for every dollar spent, you would not be spending 8 cents. So it's an 8% reduction on your food bill. It doesn't even keep up with the amount that groceries have increased this year. Wow. [00:32:49] Speaker A: So, and I don't want to. What I was going to say farmers don't want to work for free. But let's all be real. Most farmers are losing money. They. There are some statistics out there. Well, yeah, we've talked about in past podcasts. [00:33:08] Speaker B: Farm inputs have gone up with the rate of inflation. Right. So like as everything has become more expensive, but the amount of money making it back to the farmer continues to decrease. [00:33:27] Speaker A: And, but I'm just saying 90% of the 90 plus percent of farmers have off farm jobs. It's like they're working and they're working for you. [00:33:35] Speaker B: Correct. [00:33:36] Speaker A: So the farmers that are out there, the majority of them are volunteering their time and their capital and their land to grow us food. And then we complain about the price of the food and then. And of course you were saying villainize the farmer. [00:33:59] Speaker B: Yeah. The face of that complaint is a guy in overalls with a straw hat on. Right. Like the face, the brunt of that is farmers. Right. Like the farmers are just trying to get rich. I was, I was, you know, because we care. I was looking at some, some different videos and posts about this, this topic and the comments in there were just like very, very rude. And it was all about how, you know, my, my grocery bill is high and I can't afford groceries and yet these farmers are out there getting rich. And these farmers and these like I was, I was appalled at the vitriol spewed about farmers getting rich on the back of the working class Americans grocery bill. And I'm just like, man, that is so far from the truth. Right? [00:35:18] Speaker A: Yeah, it is. We have to educate people, you know, like it. [00:35:26] Speaker B: Who's. [00:35:27] Speaker A: There aren't very many people out there talking about it. [00:35:30] Speaker B: Yeah. So 92 cents goes to marketing, packaging, transportation, the grocery store, you know, like the processing. Processing. [00:35:41] Speaker A: Right. Like everything in between. [00:35:44] Speaker B: Yeah. 92%. [00:35:46] Speaker A: Yeah. What's the price of diesel right now just to haul it back and forth across the country? [00:35:50] Speaker B: 92% of your food dollar goes to everybody else for all of the other stuff. [00:35:58] Speaker A: That's right. So about part of that cost, whenever we have a beef processed, it costs us. Right. Around $1 per pound of the railway, which is the hanging weight. That's the carcass. So it's going to cost. Let's just say it weighs about a thousand pounds. It's going to cost us about $1,000 to have that beef processed. How much is it costing Tyson to run or JBS to run one beef through? What would their. What is their cost? I know they were losing money. Tyson was. Yeah, but what is their cost per carcass, per kill? [00:36:47] Speaker B: I don't have the exact data. The last I read, it was somewhere around $100. [00:36:53] Speaker A: So that's like we pay 90% more to have hours processed, small guy, a small processor than those guys do. Because of the cost being so high, because of what it takes for them to stay open. We have to pay more, Right? [00:37:14] Speaker B: Way more than 90%. It's. It's a lot. [00:37:18] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay, well, 100 versus the point is. Yeah, it's a lot more it. And it's because of the regulatory bureaucracy that is keeping that. That cost up. [00:37:35] Speaker B: Right. [00:37:36] Speaker A: And so why is. Why is small producer meat so expensive? Well, the fact that it costs a thousand dollars just to have it processed. The cost. The cost is just exorbitantly higher. [00:37:52] Speaker B: Right. And we can't afford to lose money on our beef because we make it up with our chicken. [00:38:01] Speaker A: Right. [00:38:01] Speaker B: Like Tyson, we did a podcast the last quarter, reported lost $300 million on beef. But that's okay because they're making it up with chicken. [00:38:13] Speaker A: Right. [00:38:14] Speaker B: Like the. The small producer, the small farmer can't afford to lose $300 million on beef. You know, like, we can't afford to lose $3 on beef. [00:38:26] Speaker A: But what. But you could sell your beef for less to your community if you could not have to pay that thousand dollars or more. It's probably more than that. All told to. To get that beef to the end of the line. [00:38:43] Speaker B: Yes. [00:38:43] Speaker A: And be able to sell it. And so there is the farmer keeping more of their money, at least occasionally. [00:38:51] Speaker B: But even, like, even. Even with all of the. All of the stuff that we just discussed. Buying local. More than 8% of your dollar. When you buy meat from our store, more than 8% makes it back here to us. [00:39:12] Speaker A: Oh, yes. [00:39:13] Speaker B: As the farmer. [00:39:14] Speaker A: Yes. And 100%. [00:39:21] Speaker B: Roughly. [00:39:22] Speaker A: Let me just go ahead and say like 95. Because there's a sundry of things. 95%, that is our control stays in Douglas, Ozark and the state of Missouri. The money, it's process local, the feed is local, we bank local. Everything is as local as we can make it in order to keep the dollars circulating here. [00:39:50] Speaker B: They're certainly not going to Brazil. [00:39:54] Speaker A: No, they're not going to Brazil. [00:39:56] Speaker B: That we know of. [00:39:59] Speaker A: No, we didn't give them to Brazil. [00:40:00] Speaker B: They're staying right here. [00:40:01] Speaker A: Yeah, that's why I said 95%, because, you know, we have other things. But for the most part, we try to keep everything right here in house. And that just keeps our local economy moving. Anyway, onto the. [00:40:16] Speaker B: Okay, part five. [00:40:18] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:40:19] Speaker B: Now we can. [00:40:19] Speaker A: My Maha stuff. [00:40:20] Speaker B: Your maha stuff. Yeah. So the Make America Healthy Again initiative led by RFK Jr. Yeah. Is really focused on our food and the, all of the processes to make food more healthy. [00:40:39] Speaker A: Yes, it is. And getting dyes out of food, like just the. All, all the. But what it, but it doesn't talk about any food sovereignty. It doesn't talk about personal choice and food choice. We have. I don't think they've gone there, have they? [00:40:54] Speaker B: There is a slight nod, I would say, toward the sale of unpasteurized milk. So there's a little nod about maybe making things easier for dairies. [00:41:10] Speaker A: Well, one thing they really focus. They kind of sort of seem to be like, leaning towards or hinged or whatever is like banning things. Making th. Making things to where? Making it to where, like, say, Roundup glyphosate. We should ban glyphosate, right? Or we should ban red dye and all. Ban thing. Ban, ban, ban. And okay, fine, ban. But I, I, I'm set. We're saying, I, I don't need you to ban that. Let the consumer decide. If that's what the consumer wants to buy and those people want to do that, you go do it now. You gotta ban it. If that's the only option. Right. If that is the only. If that's the only thing that consumers can buy, then you have to regulate that way. Yeah, but if you said the consumers can go buy what the consumers want to, and if they don't want to buy this meat, this store, which, by the way, they're now having. They're putting natural flavors and ground beef. I don't even understand why you have to do all that, but it's weird, but they are. And the, the fact is, if I don't want to buy that, I would like to buy this over here. I should be able to go do that. [00:42:28] Speaker B: So I get what you're saying. I don't mind the bands, really, on the, the things that they're saying are not healthy. The things that they're saying are making people sick. Like the petroleum based Dyes, the coal tar based colorings, you know, like those types of things. If they want to say, look guys, that's not food, stop putting it in food. Right? Like, okay. I'm like, okay, fair, fine. But I tell you what, while you're doing that, let's say, you know what, we're going to just open it up and we're going to say as part of this make America healthy again, we're going to allow food choice. [00:43:17] Speaker A: That would be wonderful. [00:43:19] Speaker B: If you want to buy a pork chop that was, you know, born, bred, born, raised, processed and sold on air to ground farms, then go right ahead. [00:43:34] Speaker A: Because we're about informed consent, right? We. I want to know what the people who are making food put in it. Okay. And if you're buying it from me, I'm going to be transparent and tell you how I did it. Open doors or I wouldn't buy it from you. That's right. And when you're talking about consenting adults, remember I'm not your only option. Right. You can go get your meat wherever you want to. Oh, you would like to buy some for me? This is how I do it. [00:44:08] Speaker B: Oh, sweet. [00:44:09] Speaker A: Let's do a deal. All right, Handshake. Let's go. [00:44:12] Speaker B: Yeah. And the reason I say that I think this should be done federally is you don't want what you have right now with unpasteurized milk, natural milk, raw milk, whatever you say, whatever you want to call it the interstate commerce. So the sale of unpasteurized milk from one state into another state is federally prohibited, but it leads the federal government leaves the sale of natural milk inside the states up to the states. So what you have now is 20 states where it's not legal at all, except that maybe there's a pet food work around in 30 states where it's legal in some crazy manner of different from all the way from. Yeah, it's legal. You can buy it in the grocery store. [00:45:15] Speaker A: California. [00:45:16] Speaker B: Yeah, there's actually like six, eight. Yeah, there's several states where you want retail is fine. And then some of them will. You have to own a percentage of the herd. Like a herd share workaround. Like why even have that as a workaround? Like that doesn't even make sense. Like you obviously don't own the cow, right? You know, like the, the Can I. [00:45:41] Speaker A: Buy it or not? [00:45:42] Speaker B: Right. Can I buy it or not? Well, you can buy it as long as you can only buy a, a certain percentage every week. You can't ever go above or below that percentage. [00:45:51] Speaker A: You want to know why? Because the milk mafia wants to control the volume. That's why. Again, you got to go back to Big Ag. You got to go back to who's really calling the shots and the money flow. It is all about distribution. It's about how much are you putting into the system that will take away from theirs. [00:46:18] Speaker B: That's it. The idea, though, here is I would not want another instance like that with a Food Freedom Act. A Food Emancipation Proclamation to. To me, should be federal. It should not be state by state. [00:46:36] Speaker A: Right. [00:46:37] Speaker B: Like, if we're going to say, look, you are free to transact when it comes to food, don't. Please don't make it state by state to where some people are and some people aren't. And those people could do pork but not beef. And, I mean, can you see how this is going to turn out? Like, even the poultry exemptions, the federal government says you're allowed to process 20,000 birds on your farm. But states can regulate that more if they want to, but not less than a thousand birds. So a lot of states have taken that all the way down to a thousand birds. Some states have 10,000 birds. Some states say, yeah, we'll give you the thousand birds. But you still have to follow all of these rules and regulations as if you have an inspective facility. Like, it just. It turns out that as a nation, you're still not free. You're still under all of these rules and regulations, and you're still enslaved to a government system. It's just not national. It's local government. Right. And the idea here that we're trying to throw out the. That Joel has talked about, that we're saying we agree with Joel. The idea is actual freedom. And in so doing, Joel even says he thinks we need an underground railroad for food. And I disagree with Joel on this one because the underground railroad was not a legal way of transacting. Right. Like, they were transporting humans illegally across state lines. Right, Right. And I think if you ended up. If you did this state by state, you might end up with something along the lines of we have to transport these things illegally underground kind of thing. I'm saying federally. [00:48:42] Speaker A: Right. [00:48:43] Speaker B: Emancipate us. Free us. We don't need an underground railroad if we're free. So I don't often disagree with Joel. I do disagree with him on this one, though. I think we need actual emancipation, actual freedom in order to transact in food. [00:49:03] Speaker A: Yeah. A road system would be more a better analogy. Put the big guys out on the interstate. Right. You've been through on you know, up I75 through Atlanta. Put them out there on that, right? [00:49:20] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:49:21] Speaker A: Put us over here on the county roads. [00:49:23] Speaker B: Right, but. [00:49:24] Speaker A: But I'm legal to drive there. The same driver's license, the same tag. What? I'm legal to be over here because it. The federal government said I can be on the roads. You know, maybe I don't have a CDL and I can't be over there. But that's for the cdl, guys. I don't. I don't have a cdl. I don't want to drive a big truck like that. That's for you. But, you know, I just got my little car over here. You know, maybe, maybe even that's a better analogy. But the Underground Railroad. I see what he's saying. Like we should be able to transact. They were transacting, but they were doing it under the COVID of night. We don't want to have to hide. [00:50:02] Speaker B: Right. [00:50:03] Speaker A: We want to just be able to Duke. [00:50:05] Speaker B: Right? Yeah. [00:50:08] Speaker A: Without fear of the federal government or the state or local governments beating down your door to pour out milk. [00:50:17] Speaker B: We believe that America should recognize the right to food choice as fundamental. Just like freedom of speech, just like freedom of peaceful assembly, we have food choice. Freedom to choose what food we want to eat. Not forced on this. So to sum it up in closing, three foundations. In our opinion, the three foundations for an Emancipation Proclamation for food. Number one, would be legalized consenting food transactions. [00:50:58] Speaker A: Absolutely. Two, right size regulation. If we're going to regulate, and we should regulate, it needs to be appropriate to the size of the operation, right? [00:51:13] Speaker B: Yep. And number three is reclaim the food dollar for the farmer. [00:51:20] Speaker A: Yes. Or not going to have any farmers. We're going to have a government that is growing our food. And if we do not take care of our farmers and keep them in business and keep them growing food, they. A farmer should be able to work and grow food and provide for their family with a real working living and keep the lights on. And if we do not keep our farmers with the lights on, guess who's going to grow your food? It's going to be subsidized such to the point that it will be government controlled and it will be government food. And the United States food system as you know it will be even different than it is now. We have to keep our farmers in business because that is our ultimate freedom. [00:52:15] Speaker B: And a food Emancipation Proclamation is a step in the right direction in order to keep our farmers. That's right. That's it. [00:52:27] Speaker A: Let us know what you think in the comments. Hey, if you haven't done so already, make sure to hit the subscribe button and the thumbs up and let us know what you think. Thank you so much for hanging out with us today. And until next time, bye, y'. All. [00:52:40] Speaker B: Bye.