Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: We are witnessing a repeat of 2020 and a reminder of just how fragile our supply chain really is.
[00:00:07] Speaker B: Welcome to the Duster mud podcast, where we talk about food, freedom, and farming.
[00:00:11] Speaker A: My name is Rich, and I'm Shelley.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: After spending 25 years in the United States Air Force, where I was a fighter pilot, and then I got a master's degree in military strategy, we decided to come here to the Ozarks and of Missouri and start a regenerative farm. One of the reasons we did that is so that we could have food security. That's what we want to talk to you about today.
[00:00:37] Speaker A: On October 1, the longshoremen on the east coast went on strike. And the implications of the strike that is currently happening is, I believe, going to be very far reaching. And let's discuss a little bit of why. I think that. Let's go back to the 1970s.
[00:00:57] Speaker B: That was the last time the longshoremen went on strike, or at least our dock workers on the east and Gulf coast went on strike. 1977, they went on strike. That strike lasted for 44 days. So although the US Department of Agriculture and Department of Energy are both saying nothing to worry about here, history really doesn't support those assurances.
[00:01:25] Speaker A: Right. Right now, the strike is from Texas to Maine. The ports that bring in the, all of the goods from the atlantic side of the United States come through there, whether it be fuel, food, goods, parts, holiday supplies that are coming.
Everything comes through there on that side of the country. So to us, it would make sense.
[00:01:57] Speaker B: Half of our imports come from that side of the country.
[00:02:03] Speaker A: So to me, it's ludicrous to believe that if it goes on for any much more than about a week, to think that we don't have problems, that is ludicrous. They being 45,000 members of the International Longshoremen's association, and they are currently in talks with the maritime.
[00:02:25] Speaker B: The US Maritime Association.
[00:02:27] Speaker A: Okay. And the failed negotiations with them have left the ports not moving.
[00:02:37] Speaker B: Right. They exempted cruise ships and military from their strike.
[00:02:43] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:02:43] Speaker B: So the cruise ships and the military ships continue to be operated as normal. And the Department of Energy's assurances are because the longshoremen that are associated in this strike aren't dealing with the oil tankers and such. It is container ships, cargo containers. Yep.
[00:03:03] Speaker A: Okay. According to JPMorgan Chase, this is going to be very costly per day.
[00:03:11] Speaker B: JPMorgan said anywhere from like three point eight to four point five billion dollars a day. I've seen other analysts say 2 billion, saw one that say 1.2 billion, saw another one that said 5 billion.
[00:03:25] Speaker A: You said a day.
[00:03:26] Speaker B: A day. Per day.
[00:03:27] Speaker A: Whatever the billions are, it's per day that it's going to cost the us economy.
[00:03:31] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:03:31] Speaker A: Okay. That's substantial.
[00:03:34] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:03:34] Speaker A: It's in the middle of inflation situation that we've got in the middle of a struggling economy. Now we're going to add to it. It's going to cost us billions a day.
[00:03:44] Speaker B: Right. And in the middle of a hurricane relief effort that's ongoing.
[00:03:50] Speaker A: Right.
[00:03:50] Speaker B: Which just caused billions of dollars of damage.
[00:03:54] Speaker A: And it's on the east coast.
[00:03:55] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:03:55] Speaker A: And they need those supplies potentially. Okay, so I mentioned 2020. In the opening during the pandemic, we saw supply chain issues around the country because we just, we couldn't get the stuff moved. We didn't have the people to do it. So we've had a good practice run of not getting supplies.
[00:04:16] Speaker B: We certainly have to people. Yeah. And, you know, for some of us, that made a lasting impact. And we'll get into what, what that meant for us as we experienced the supply and chain issues.
We have acquaintances in Washington state. So west coast of the United States shouldn't be affected by these dock workers currently. Right. Acquaintances. There are sending pictures of shelves in the store that are already bare of essentials like toilet paper on the west coast already seeing shelves bare. So the idea of the supply chain not really being affected by this is, as you say, ludicrous. And it really got us to thinking about 2020 and the experiences that we had then. Not just us, but across the country. The experiences that we saw, we happened to be, I was stationed at the Pentagon at the time, so we were in the suburbs of Washington, DC, and we got to see the supply chain issues from the big city perspective.
[00:05:29] Speaker A: Right. We tell some of our local friends here in Missouri, our pandemic situation was different than your pandemic situation because we were still in the city and we would go to the grocery store and even to the commissary at the air force bases, and we were limited on how many. And I know many of you experienced the same thing where we were rationed on how many packages of meat we could get. We could get two packages per family.
So we saw, yeah, of course there were toilet paper shortages and paper towel, all the paper goods as well as people fighting over a pack of chicken. So we witnessed that.
[00:06:07] Speaker B: I had, I had a, what did they call it? Kyunessential. Basically, I had an essential personnel letter because I had to go to the Pentagon. Our classified work I could not do from home. So I was traveling when the majority of Washington, DC was not. So I was able to go to different places to try to find food on my way to and from work. To include the commissaries.
Yes. You were rationed to, depending on the store, one or two meat products.
That was if it was there.
[00:06:43] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:06:43] Speaker B: So the store shelves were just empty.
And the feeling as a person trying to bring home food to a family, that feeling of they're just. Isn't food.
A few months in, you know, two to three months in, the food started showing back up.
[00:07:10] Speaker A: But it took a minute, it took.
[00:07:11] Speaker B: A while, and food started showing back up. And then the rationing really, you know, was a factor. But until then, it just wasn't there.
[00:07:20] Speaker A: No, it wasn't there. And they did start trickling it in and it began to flow and rationed. I. But so as we go forward with this east coast strike, one of the things that they can do is reroute, because the west coast, they. They're not striking right now. They came to their agreements with their contracts some time ago so things could be rerouted. But what's that going to cause? Backlogs.
[00:07:51] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:07:52] Speaker A: Spoilage, potentially, and definitely higher costs.
[00:07:56] Speaker B: Yes, absolutely.
[00:07:57] Speaker A: So it's going to backlog it where things are sitting in ports before they can even leave. So that's going to cost more storage. It's going to cost more to ship it around the entire well through the Panama Canal.
[00:08:11] Speaker B: If it's already in the Atlantic, then it's. The only option is to really, the only option is to bring it through the Panama Canal, which is typically packed anyway. Right. Like, you have to schedule that passage well in advance. And now we have ships, cargo ships, that are either sitting off the coast of ports or steaming towards Panama, and things will start backing up there.
[00:08:36] Speaker A: So one of the primary things that we like to talk about is food and farming. And so how is this going to affect food and farmers in this country?
Us specifically, we farm. We farm because we saw what happened and bringing it back home. Bringing it back to us and to you at home.
What can we do? Where are we going and what can we do in this situation?
[00:09:09] Speaker B: For us, the experience that we faced in 2020 was, I would say, significantly different than many of our neighbors. So I described the situation that we were in in the big city.
What I didn't say is we had just like three weeks prior, picked up a whole beef from a local farmer, local to us. We drove about two and a half hours away. We had to get over into the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia to find what we were wanting. We had just picked up a beef, and about, I don't know, a month before that, we had just picked up a whole hog. So we had pork and beef, two freezers full of meat.
When the nation shut down, we fairly quickly transitioned to a carnivore style diet. We were already eating a keto diethouse, so very low carbohydrate to begin with. We basically took salads out of our diet and existed on the meat that we had in our freezer. So when I talked about the shelves being empty of meat and families not being able to get meat, that didn't apply to us. We had just put meat into our freezer. And watching, watching what happened there, it was a significant emotional thing for me. I know thinking of myself as a provider for the family. Having chest freezers full of high quality protein for our family that we could make last for a long time if we needed to, was a completely different feeling than, say, our daughter felt where she was standing in the grocery store aisle in Washington state, in Spokane, and crying because her choices were dried beans and grits. That was the only food that was in the grocery store.
[00:11:13] Speaker A: And she was grateful that she knew what grits were. Cause she's from the south and she knew how to cook a dried bean, but that was. She cried.
[00:11:20] Speaker B: Right, right.
[00:11:21] Speaker A: It was very impactful.
[00:11:22] Speaker B: So that experience, while not the only factor, was a main factor in us deciding, we're going to grow our own food.
We want quality food, we want the best quality food, and we believe we can do it ourselves. It made enough of an impact on us that we said, we're going to do this for our life. This is what we now do.
Upon retiring from the United States Air Force, we started a farm. We now have a regenerative farm where we grow beef, pork, lamb, poultry, eggs, dairy, like all of those staple products for us. We do have a garden. We have things like some herbs and spices and peppers, and we grow a few tomatoes and okra, you know, like. But the garden is not our mainstay. It's not our staples.
[00:12:21] Speaker A: Yeah, I was thinking about this as we were preparing for this podcast, and all I could think was, wow, my supply chain is so short.
You went and milked a cow this morning and brought in milk and go outside and get the eggs.
The freezers are full of meat. There are still animals out there alive on hoof, stored on hoof. And the food security that I felt was palpable, and not only for myself, but because we decided to do this lifestyle and start this business in this farm, also for our customers, for our. Our farm family, as we like to call them, and ensuring that those people are also taken care of right here.
Local food. And we get back to that in almost all of our podcasts because it's so important.
Our food sitting in containers in the middle of the Atlantic is not useful.
[00:13:19] Speaker B: No, not at all.
[00:13:22] Speaker A: And how can we. How can we mitigate that?
[00:13:26] Speaker B: Yeah. For us, our local community is so supportive that we've been able to start another business, air to ground meats, and open a store in our local town, Nava, Missouri, where we have now our products even more available to our local community. And folks are able to come in and buy high quality beef, pork, lamb, chicken, eggs. Right. We're not allowed to retail dairy, but we do sell it off farm and make deliveries. So the fact that we've made this decision for us has also affected our local community as well, that we've been able to have enough product that we can offer it locally also. And that supply chain, like, if the grocery stores stop getting their supplies, which.
[00:14:20] Speaker A: Could happen in a matter of weeks, not months, because we are. They call it a just in time inventory and supply chain. Right?
[00:14:30] Speaker B: Like our. Our local Walmart gets two semi trucks of groceries a day.
[00:14:35] Speaker A: Right. So you can see how it can break down pretty quickly.
[00:14:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:14:41] Speaker A: If it doesn't last very long, we'll all be fine. If it goes on for any period of time, then we're going to all need to look to our local growers.
[00:14:53] Speaker B: There are resources, and that's what happened in 2020. The homesteading movement exploded. The local butcher, the local abattoir, the local meat shop, however you want to call it, their businesses exploded. You couldn't get a cow in to be processed. You would have a year's wait time.
But it doesn't seem that there was an actual change in behavior. It was an explosion of these things. But I don't know that it didn't come up and plateau or increase as people more and more wanted food security.
[00:15:35] Speaker A: The further and further you get away from 2020, the closer you get to 2019.
[00:15:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:15:40] Speaker A: And so as we. As we've gotten further away from the thing that caused the problem, like, we're all over that now, but the problem is the system that we're reliant on, not the thing that broke the system in this instance.
[00:16:02] Speaker B: It was not the pandemic that was the issue. It was the supply chain. The reliance on a just in time supply chain with food and goods that are coming from all over the world. Having it is fine. Relying on it as the only source is not fine. As soon as that supply chain, which is fragile, we're seeing it again. How fragile that supply chain is. The reliance on something that is that fragile means that the entire system is fragile. And if that, like, I can't imagine people being comfortable with that fragility. Like, seriously, where does your food come from? And the answer isn't the grocery store. Right? Like, it comes from somewhere else. That is an intermediary stop from somewhere to you, where does it actually come from?
[00:16:56] Speaker A: If you're waiting on cheap beef to get here from Brazil, that's coming from the east coast, from Texas and Florida ports, it's going to. It's gonna, it could pose a problem.
[00:17:07] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:17:08] Speaker A: If you are waiting on inexpensive anything to come from outside of the country, it could pose a problem.
However, there are resources.
There are farmers in this country growing local food. There are resources. Realmilk.com. go on there and find somebody who's making milk. Let's talk about a few alternative sources to food for your family, because there are a few. Toplocal.com, that is an organization that has put together different farmers in different regions, and you can kind of go shop like you're at a farmer's market and order meat. Meats.
I think primarily it's meats on that one.
There's local line. Local line is another website conglomerate that puts together farmers and all sorts. You can, I think you can even get veg in different places delivered to you.
[00:18:09] Speaker B: Well, in our area, we have the little farm store, right, which is an online farmers market. And they're not alone. They're not the only ones doing that.
We will ship meat.
[00:18:20] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:18:20] Speaker B: Like, there are small regenerative local farms that you can tie into. And it doesn't have to just be, well, I live next to a farmer, thus I can get some, some products, right?
[00:18:35] Speaker A: Google regenerative farmer near me. Google local food sources near me. There are people out there doing it. Tap into that. Think alternatively, whenever the grocery store is looking like, it might not be the thing that you can rely on.
Butchers. There might even be a local butcher near you.
[00:18:56] Speaker B: Our local butcher, they will sell you a whole cow or a whole hog. They work with local farmers to supply them with meat. So there, it doesn't have to be. Well, my local grocery store shelves are empty, thus I can't eat. There are other options.
I guess our, I don't know, the feeling that I have our urge to you is like, we're on day two, I guess of this strike and USDA Department of Energy is saying, no need to worry folks. And I seriously hope they're correct.
[00:19:36] Speaker A: I'm afraid that is true.
[00:19:38] Speaker B: I hope it's over in no time and this was a minor blip on the news cycle. However, if it's not correct, we have seen where these supply chain issues can lead and our urge to you would be don't wait. Don't wait for it to become an issue for you to go. Try to find where you're going to get your food. Like do that now. Find your local farmer. Get to know your local farmer. Find yourself an avenue for food before it becomes an actual issue.
[00:20:14] Speaker A: In fact, leave it in the comments. Once you go and find it, leave it in the comments for somebody else that might be watching and reading in your area. Hey, give a shout out to quote, air ground farms or freedom farms. If you're up in the New York area, in the New England area, seven Sons farms, they're up in Indiana.
[00:20:33] Speaker B: We know Susie Q. Martin comments all the time on our videos about she has an Amish, a local amish market nearby her where she's able to find local foods. But we would love to know what's near you. What solution have you found that is not reliant on the international, the very fragile international supply chain?
[00:20:58] Speaker A: We look forward to hearing about the farm near you. And until next time by y'all.
[00:21:03] Speaker B: Bye.
