First, this Sunday afternoon, Apr. 19 from 6-8p.m. I'm doing a fundraiser for an amazing Indiana lady running for U.S. Congress representing the Indianapolis area:  Sarah Janisse Brown https://www.votesarahbrown.com/events

                  She's a home school mom with 15 kids--yes, you read that right--only 4 are still at home.  They run an agritourism homestead farm and the rally is titled FARM, FAMILY, AND FREEDOM.  That's my kind of headline and I'd love to see it well attended.

                  Knowing the few trolls on this blog who apparently get their life's energy from making erroneous assumptions and accusations, let me say straight up that both of these events are gratis:  I'm not charging a dime.  It's my way to tithe toward truth.

                  If you're in the Indianapolis area, I hope to see you at the rally. 

                  Number two is Monday, Apr. 27 from 9-12 noon, a MAHA rally on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. to support folks wanting to preserve the freedom to sue businesses who poison them.  It's the Bayer glyphosate case, to determine if a business selling a product deemed safe by the EPA bears any liability obligation if it kills people.  This is not about the right for the government to determine safety; it simply means a company who buys government cover isn't indemnified from liability. 

                  I have a short speaking slot and simply appreciate being asked to lend my voice in a public way to defend the people's right to hold products accountable.  It seems strange to come alongside tort attorneys, which in general I find despicable, but the overarching issue here is the power of the federal government to absolve fascist business allies from accountability.  That cannot stand.

                  I tend to stay away from politics but not issues.  In these two cases, I'm pushing myself a bit past my comfort zone to encourage folks who dare to question the big government narrative.  We sure need more of them. 

                  How do you separate politics from issues?

                  For the record, if you ever want a day of flying to fly by, assuming you don't have work to do, nothing speeds time like a good novel.  I don't get to read much fiction so when I find myself in these valleys kind of caught up with work projects and without an information-dense nonfiction tome in my satchel, a good novel, especially a thriller, gets my attention.

                  So I go over to WHSmith and in order to get in, you have to insert your credit card in a reader for the gate to open.  I know I'm a dinosaur since I don't yet have a smart phone.  But am I the only one in this airport who views being able to enter a store without giving them your credit card a jarring entrance policy?

                  As someone who has one of the only farms in the world with a 24/7/365 open door policy for anyone anywhere to come and walk around to see anything anytime unannounced, this "enter by credit card only"  seems like a despicable, dehumanizing, discourteous, mercenary howdy-do.

                  After trying to walk through without inserting my credit card and the gate denying my entrance, I came over, sat down, and decided to write this missive.  Am I alone in the world at being offended and incensed at this kind of reception in a place allegedly courting my interest and business?  Do people just assume this is the new matrix?  Is the blue pill that much of our diet these days? 

                  It makes me fear for everything human and biological.  Yesterday at my farm consult near Pittsburgh the family and I talked about our throw-away society.  It strikes me that as a culture, we've embraced throw-away materials, then throw-away agriculture, and now throw-away people.  What is the highest value of people?  Getting their credit card information.  No wonder our teenagers are binging on suicide.  No wonder depression and loneliness are our highest psychological states. 

                  I'm appalled and dismayed that I sit here and watch person after person, without hesitation, come to those gates and stick their credit card into the reader.  Wouldn't it be wonderful if person after person, all day, like me, balked, bent the gate, then backed up and walked away?  On this Good Friday, I feel like we've crucified and buried common human decency.  Will it exist again?  

` The hotel I stayed in last week speaking at a conference proudly displayed a "CASHLESS" sign at the registration desk.  That means nothing in that hotel could be purchased with cash. So long, legal tender.  Hello, the machine.

                  Digitization and reducing all of us to numbers is frightening.

                  Or am I the only one that thinks this way?

We don’t do any grants or government programs—they’re for people who like to check boxes and do paperwork and follow rigid bureaucratic orders.

Bootstrap it.  Live in a tent.  Never eat out.  No Netflix.  Shoot deer for food.  Drop your living expenses to $1,000 a month.  Sell automobiles and have only $10,000 tied up in vehicles; better yet, $5,000.  Get a trailer you can pull with your beater car instead of a pickup truck.  Go to flip phone; forget the smartphone.  It’s a money and time sucker.

Borrow and rent all infrastructure.  Have neighbors over to dinner and build relationships with them; help them build fence and they can donate a day of tractor work.  Decide on one or two enterprises and concentrate on them.  Diversity will come one successful enterprise at a time.

Buy the smallest place you can find to save your nest egg for infrastructure development. Value adding is the secret sauce.  Sell chickens in pot pie for $200 instead of whole for $20.  Make homemade convenience food; that’s where the money is.

Love and embrace the slog.  Hardships are the stuff of memories and laughter and accomplishment.  Dive into them with gusto.

Is this too harsh?

                  The same is true in the U.S., which is why I'm well into writing FOOD EMANCIPATION:  UNSHACKLING AMERICA'S SUSTENANCE, but I don't think it's to such a degree as it is in Poland and perhaps all of the European Union.

                  As one farmer said yesterday, "we've traded Communism for the EU."  Another one chimed in "they've killed everything.  It's a disaster."  After 47 years under the thumb of the Soviet Union, the culture became more intimidated, more subservient, and just scared. 

                  My day-long seminar yesterday was primarily a pictorial virtual tour of Polyface and it was constantly interrupted with "we can't do that here."  It seems to me like what American face at the processing end of food the Polish farmers face at the production end.  In other words, in the U.S. we farmers can pretty much do whatever we want in production.  But try processing, cooking, packaging--anything value adding to garner the convenience food dollar--and that's where the draconian food police crack down. Not so in Poland.

                  I think the difference is because the U.S. does not have a food culture.  Poland does.  Of all the 30 countries I've been in doing ag seminars, Poland for sure is number one for food.  Wow, what a wonderful week of dining pleasure.  America, in contrast, doesn't care a lick about food and therefore has no cultural desire to protect heritage food options.  Poland does.  America is all about production; Poland is all about dining.  These starkly different cultural preferences dominate the regulatory climate.

                  In Poland, if you can jump through the production stuff, the processing and kitchen requirements aren't nearly as bad as they are in the U.S.  Goodness, you should see the eggs in stores.  It's illegal to sell a washed egg.  And they don't refrigerate them.  So in the store the eggs are filthy.  In the U.S., one speck of anything renders it "inedible."  Again, America is way more interested about cosmetic perfection than dining quality. 

                  The production regulations start and end with animals.  Plants are generally outside the scope of any control, except you can't cut a tree without a permit, even on your own land.  Patrolling veterinarians in Poland visit farms and have broad authority to determine infractions.  Anybody who knows me knows I'm all about complex animal relationships.  Eggmobiles, pigaearators, stackable rabbits, pigs, and chickens--it's all a beautifully complex and pathogen-confusing natural diversity that encourages overall health. 

                  Not so Poland.  You can't mix species.  "The veterinarians won't allow it," I was assured over and over during various moments of the Polyface pictures.  A building with cows can't also have chickens, or pigs.  A building with ducks can't also have sheep.  All species are heavily segregated to prevent contamination.  But the greatest contamination occurs when you have mono-species without dead ends from other species.  It's such a basic ecological principle that species diversity creates immunological stability that you have to wonder what it would take to get through to these European veterinarians how nature works.

                  I'm a lover of pole barns due to their easy construction and low cost, but I saw not one in the week of driving around the country.  I asked these farmers why and they said "building inspectors won't allow it.  Every farm building must be enclosed so whatever is inside is protected from outside air."  As if the air is somehow a nefarious element committed to hurting your animals.  Really?  As a result, our Polyface winter protection for cows and subsequent carbonaceous diaper for pigaerator compost--it's all out of reach due to veterinarians and costly building requirements. 

                  In our county, we can build virtually any farm building without a permit.  It's your land, your cows, your place; who cares what a livestock shed or barn looks like?  As a result of the Polish overbearing regulatory environment, experimentation with different ideas becomes stigmatized.  When I concluded the day with them, I encouraged them to aggressively question the why, with both bureaucrats and elected officials.  How do you know building compost with pigs behind cows is harmful?  Has anyone done an experiment? 

                  Therein lies the worst cost of regulatory tyranny:  prohibiting breakthroughs from today's problems.  The government officials are paranoid of African Swine Fever and Avian Flu, but the farmers I talked with saw both of those problems as symptomatic of industrial chemical confinement farming.  I agree.  But their hands are tied by the farm police to offer an alternative.  Most breakthroughs are break-withs--leaving entrenched paradigms to embrace new thinking. 

                  In the entire week and traversing much of Poland, I saw exactly three cows outdoors--all in a barn corral on the same farm.  I only saw 3 or 4 farms with any fences whatsoever.  Animals are simply not outside; this is consistent with what I've seen throughout Europe.  All animals are confined in tight, masonry barns that stink to high heavens and are cold, damp, and dark (no windows).  I can't imagine a worse way to raise animals, and yet this is the protocol and it's not a suggestion; it's administered by an army of government veterinarians and inspectors. 

                  Outdoor chickens must be completely netted to eliminate any possible interaction with Red Winged Blackbirds or Robins.  Can't have chickens commiserating with feathered cousins.  Tut tut tut.  Pigs can't touch noses with any other animal, so require two fences--the outside being a physical, non-electric one--to protect them from touching any animal outside their paddock.  Consequently, almost nobody invests in pastured pigs and those who do find it nearly impossible to move them as frequently as they should, which creates moonscapes, which isn't good. 

                  I finally looked at the group, which couldn't have been more enthusiastic and gracious, and said "It's time for a revolution."  They agreed.  I hope they can succeed, not just for themselves, but for the health of their animals. 

                  Wouldn't it be nice to get the farm freedom of the U.S. with the culinary freedom of Poland?

                  I've been here a week and am still trying to suss out the Polish and EU rules for value adding; as you know, that's where the money is and also my personal interest in food emancipation.  And the ultimate secret to integrity food.

                  Here's what I THINK I learned yesterday after talking to Piotr, my host and interpreter at the farm where I'll be today.  Poland has an almost blanket exemption from government inspection and all taxes if you meet two criteria.   

                  First, your net profit needs to be under $25,000 per year.  Realize that any smart business person and accountant can figure out how to end the year without profit.  You can rent things to yourself, pay yourself more, buy things--lots of ways to bleed off money to show no net profit; multi-million dollar businesses can adhere to this stipulation.  All the caps I'm aware of in similar cottage food laws in the U.S. use gross income, not net.  So this is pretty cool. 

                  Second, you can only have a certain number of animals.  There are no numeric caps on vegetables, fruit, and produce; only animals.  You can have 350 laying hens and 500 broilers at any one time.  So what people do is the husband has 350, wife 350, child 350, etc.  And you each run simultaneous 500-bird batches, so if each person runs 4 batches a year, that's 2,000 birds per season. 

                  It's interesting how Poland's history as a Soviet state (47 years) taught its people how to cleverly circumvent government rules.  Socialists, of course, pile on rules but it just makes people more and more clever figuring out work-arounds.  In the U.S. the clean food producers by and large have lobbied for government grants and borrowed money to comply with regulations; here people just put their head down and practice guerilla commerce. 

                  What about chicken pot pie and other value added products?  All you need is a once-in-a-lifetime kitchen inspection, which I'm told is easy.  I saw the kitchen yesterday at Piotr's house and it was as plain as any household kitchen.  He can make ferments, canned foods, meat pies--virtually anything you want in a processed, heat-n-eat format in his home kitchen without any inspection.  He said they never come back to re-inspect.  

                  Beef and pork become a bit of a gray area regarding home processing.  Apparently the law allows you to home butcher and sell it to friends and family, but you can't transport it more than a certain distance and you can't sell it to a third party, like a grocery store.  Again, this has numerical caps but apparently that's a bit gray too.  For example, with poultry you can have birds in a brooder and in the field, but they don't count the ones in the brooder.

                  The biggest problem is that all chickens in the field must be protected from any contact with wild birds.  So even Eggmobiles must be completely netted where the chickens run, which defeats the whole purpose of the pasture sanitation behind the cows.  But then again, some farmers don't net and just risk it--they don't allow anyone to take pictures in order to stay under the radar from government watchdogs, who scour the internet looking for rogues. 

                  Vaccination is mandatory on cattle.  I haven't found anyone here who has figured out how to get around it.  All cattle must be registered with the state and apparently that's one of the more aggressively enforced requirements. 

                  If you fall under these two stipulations, even your customers don't have to pay sales tax.  It's all an interesting concession to give room for direct sales unimpeded by food police that includes escaping all taxes and measures financials with net instead of gross.  The gymnastics supposedly "first world" countries go through regulatorily to give space for market access and yet keep the consumer safety advocates and industrialists at bay is truly remarkable. 

                  Every farmer I've talked with has a different tolerance level for the regulations.  Some are cowed and others are more aggressive and savvy.  Like tyrannies everywhere, the bureaucracy appears more interested in checking a box than in actually policing things on a day-to-day basis.  And a LOT of subjectivity exists within the regulations, which then translates to quite different experiences with bureaucrats.  Get a good one and life is fine; get a bad one, and life is horrible. 

                  How much are regulations holding back the integrity food movement?

                  Perhaps the most amazing one today was learning that you can't just buy land and begin farming.  You need a license.  This license can be acquired numerous ways.  If you inherit a farm, you're grandfathered.  If you go to college and major in some sort of agricultural curriculum, you automatically get a license.  You can farm with someone else and after four years of accredited apprenticeship get a license.  You can take an on-line course, pass the test, and get the license.  The point is you can't just buy land and begin farming. 

                  I spent the afternoon today on a wonderful Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm with 85 subscriptions.  They do vegetables, eggs, and pastured broilers.  They're two years into a nice orchard spaced wide enough to graze cows and chickens underneath; the first cows are coming this year. 

                  They get half a dozen inspections a year from various agencies.  You can't have chickens outside without being completely netted so they can't interact with any wild bird.  You can't have pigs outside unless you have a double fence inspected by an agency.  If you want to cut a tree--any tree--the clerk of the local jurisdiction has to come out and certify that you can cut the tree.  I can't remember all the permissions, but they are on a scale that makes your head spin, especially if you're anywhere close to a libertarian. 

                  Farmers receive $200 per acre direct subsidy from the EU just for farming.  If you produce anything, you get the $200 per acre.  This makes farmland inordinately expensive and farmers inordinately dependent.  This is why they riot when any mention of cutting subsidies is entertained at the EU.

                  Last night on our way to the next town for the next presentation, I got out of the car and was overwhelmed with the smell of manure.  My hosts explained that it's illegal to spread manure from Dec. 1-Feb. 27, so March 1 they start pumping lagoons and spreading.  It's quite an odor.  Most farms are massive operations. 

                  After WWII, when Churchill and Roosevelt gave Poland to the Soviet Union as thanks for helping defeat the Nazis, the Soviets turned Poland into a grain production area.  What had been mixed livestock and primarily pasture became massive monocrop acreages.  Today, most of that grain is sold to the Middle East.  I'm drooling over the rich, black soils I see for miles and miles. 

                  Complete chemical farming dominates the farmscape but these soils are only into this abuse by 50 years.  They were generally well stewarded by smallholding livestock-dominated agriculture prior to the Soviets.  That protocol is now stamped aggressively on the farmscape, exposing countless acres, naked and without cover crops, to the ravishing winter climate.  While they look fertile today, they are only 50 years into a devastating regimen that another 50 years will surely expose. 

                  Pastured pigs are all but illegal due to African Swine Fever.  Pastured chickens are all but illegal due to Avian Influenza scare.  Every animal bigger than a chicken or turkey needs to be registered with the government.  Factory farming dominates the agriscape certainly as much as in the U.S. and perhaps more.   

                  Perhaps the biggest difference with the U.S. is the magnitude of the collapse of regional abattoirs and small scale livestock production.  It has been gratifying, though, to meet liberty-minded rebel farmers who either dare to be illegal or figure out work-arounds to survive.  The "go rogue" mindset is here, and I'm dumping fuel into it as fast I as I can. 

                  Many farmers lament their "no firearms" policy.  That makes handling predators a real problem.  Without guns, they can't shoot a possum that gets into the chickens.  They can't even shoot a wild boar--but they can call someone with a license who can come and shoot it.  Unlike in the U.S., these shot wild pigs can enter the commercial meat market.  I had it for lunch today; delicious. 

                  As with all societies, regulations are all over the board.  The EU bans glyphosate but the U.S. makes it necessary for national security.  The EU allows wild pigs to enter the meat market and the U.S. doesn't.  The U.S. lets anyone be a farmer; Poland gives farm permits like the U.S. gives drivers' licenses.  What's considered dangerous in one country is considered perfectly safe in another, and vice versa. 

                  What political psychology makes this whacky, inconsistent perception of safe and unsafe, anyway?

                  She started off talking about how effective all the green legislation had been over the past 20 years.  Touting toothpaste tube packaging and the circular economy as major steps forward, she was a big governmenter through and through.  Of course, she said the government needed to provide safety for everyone, including food.  I smelled a rat. 

                  In typical government-speak, she said every product needed an "assessment of value cycle" displayed on the label in a single across-EU standard.  Seeing this as a way to improve the marketing of products, she likened it to the current energy score on washing machines.  She used washing machines more than once as an example of big labeling wins. 

                  She admitted this was not as easy to do with food, noting that a value assessment of how a food was promoted muddied the waters, impact of transport, and other nuances were hard to capture compared to washing machine energy.  Can you imagine a small farmer trying to jump through such a hoop?  Get real. 

                  Fortunately, before the moderator asked me to weigh in, the researcher-professor tore into this politician with a severity beautiful to behold.  The audience rocked with applause.  "The EU is completely hypocritical."  She said the EU taxes small enterprises out of business and gives concessions to big ones.  As for safety, she noted that in the EU's view, the more biologically active a food was, the less safe.  That was music to my ears because the identical thinking pervades U.S. food safety regulations.  I loved the way she put it. 

                  Not to be dissuaded, the politician defended the EU's "product passport" plan, which would require a digitized history of every product.  This would include child labor, suppliers, and would include complete traceability.  Oh, the best example again was toothpaste packaging.  And surely this would be easy for a small farmer to comply. 

                  I squirmed enough for the moderator to call on me to respond and I said "this is crazy, talking about toothpaste packaging when what we need is a flock of chickens next to every kitchen so the food scraps can go to the chickens and the eggs can go into the kitchen without any transport or packaging required."  The audience applauded raucously. 

                  Then the professor piled on with the fascinating detail that in the last 20 years, in order to extend shelf life, Big Food, with EU food police blessing, removed 30-40 percent of the water in cottage cheese in order to extend shelf life and sell-buy dates.  This completely changed the protein, both lowering it and making what's left unable for the body to metabolize. 

                  She said the same thing has been done to meat, drying it out.  She said meat has the highest nutritional value on the fifth day after slaughter; hang times 10-12 days make it 30-40 percent worse nutritionally by changing the amino acids.  How about that for all the beef folks branding their product "long aged?" 

                  About 20 years ago, official European policy was that meat, milk, and eggs should disappear from the diet.  According to the professor, this damaged brains and made people easier to rule.  The EU representative countered that the government should require a label that "includes everything, analyzed for values, to communicate in a language based on benefit and not fear."   

                  The feisty professor retorted:  "I use the language of fear because it's more powerful."  She said she swallowed the EU narrative in the 1990s about animal fats and red meat and suffered debilitating health consequences.  She saw the light, changed back to a traditional diet, and said she now feels better than she did in her 40s.  I didn't ask her how old she was, but I'd say she was at least in her late 70s.  She was a treat and rocked the house. 

                  When I suggested farmers and their loyal patrons needed to circumvent the regulators it felt like inciting a revolution.  That's just what Poland needs; an American rogue food libertarian telling them to kiss the EU food police goodbye.  Nearly 80 percent of the EU budget is direct farm subsidies.  In Poland, since joining the EU, virtually all the cottage industry food shops and butchers are gone; there is simply not a local food scene anymore.  I met a farmer today who is the largest non-industrial hog producer in his whole region:  he has 32 pigs. 

                  But a movement is growing, and I'm excited to encourage these small farmers to take on the big guys and the EU tyrants.  What fun. 

                  Are labels the answer to food integrity?

                  The three-hour tour with an English-speaking guide ranks as one of the most memorable things I've ever done.  Off the top, I confess that many times during the tour my eyes welled with tears.  I just couldn't stop crying. I was bothered by the young people in our tour who laughed and joked throughout the tour.  I didn't see much to smile about. 

                  People who deny the Holocaust or who short-change it with being overblown or in any way minimize it have never been here.  Truck loads of shoes, suitcases, eyeglasses, kitchen pots and pans are on exhibit to show the complete pre-death humiliation and confiscation.  Every one of those shoes was worn by someone, including many children.

                  Everyone, including women, upon arrival was stripped naked--yes, completely naked in front of the SS guards and their blockmasters (prisoners who were in charge of blocks of prisoners).  The German guards never directly interacted with the prisoners, who lived on average four months before starvation, suicide, or the firing squad dispatched them.  Some just ran into the electric fence to end it.                  

                  Nobody knows the actual count, but conservative estimates are 1.3 million.  First, it was the Polish academic and business leadership.  Influential Poles threatened the German occupation, so they were the first to go.  Poland lost 20 percent of its population during WWII; the U.S. only 1 percent. Poland had the largest population of Jews in the world at that time.  They had fled Roman Catholic persecution in France, Spain, and Italy from 1600-1800.  They maintained their distinct communities so were easy to segregate once Poland fell to the Germans. 

                  At the peak, 5,000 people a day--by 1943 nearly all Jews--were being gassed.  It was cyanide crystals dropped into concrete basements that could hold 1,000 people literally crammed on top of themselves.  These bunkers, roughly 30 feet wide and 100 feet long, produced bodies faster than they could be cremated.  Ashes and bones became fertilizer and road building material. 

                  The people closest to the vents died in about 3 minutes.  Many took more than 10 minutes to die.  The 20-minute cycle ensured nobody came out alive.  Bounded by two 10-foot multi-strand electrified barbed wire fences, by the end of the war the camps held a total of nearly 100,000 people.  Auschwitz was first, and used primarily as a work camp.  Birkenau, just two miles away, was 400 acres, worse conditions, and only a holding place until the occupants could be efficiently killed.  The killing was only bounded by the limitations of the chambers and cremation buildings. 

                  A wooden building designed after German horse stables housed 700 people on bunks 3 high.  The strongest got on the top ones because the bottom ones had a rain of feces and urine constantly dripping down.  Imagine 50 of these buildings with one toilet house and one kitchen house.  The toilet house had concrete risers with holes cut in--3 risers with 2 rows of about 60 holes each.  No toilet paper.  Blockmasters allowing 15 seconds to do your business.  No water.   

                  Allowed one shower per month, but no clothes washing, the stench had to be unimaginable.  Some 3,000 babies were born at Birkenau; only 45 survived.  Upon arrival, the prisoners exited the trains and walked to one end of a holding area where Germans, with a wag of the finger, sorted them between potential workers and those destined to be gassed as soon as there was room.  Like sorting cattle.  I wonder if this will be like the Great Judgment where God separates the sheep from the goats; except that will be righteous. And it will be based on faith, not ethnicity or handicap.

                  The experiments performed on people are too unearthly for description.  The  commandant and his 4 children lived just outside the fence in a palatial house with gardens and swimming pool.  His wife wrote that it was one of the most satisfying and enjoyable times of her life.  He was eventually found and hanged a hundred yards from his house, where his last sight was his Auschwitz dominion. 

                  Numerous pictures, which were forbidden, were smuggled out and are on display at various points of the tour through the buildings and gas chambers.  What struck me was how the Nazis looked as human as anyone.  Elitism and prejudice lead to terrible places.  They didn't have two heads; they didn't look like demons; they looked like the well-intentioned neighbor next door, just trying to make the world a better place for their children and grandchildren.

                  Only 5-10 percent of the guards were ever brought to justice.  Those who did stand trial received on average 2 years in prison.  "Just doing my job" is a demonic excuse used by officials throughout the centuries.  It's used by people who confiscate food on a farm because it's missing a comma on a label.  It's used by health department officials who deny entrepreneurs the freedom to sell a chicken pot pie to a neighbor without a $300,000 quintuple-permitted stand-alone certified kitchen.

                  It started with euthanasia in Germany in the early 1930s.  By the end, it progressed to mass extermination of Jews.  Philosophical incrementalism leads to practice incrementalism.  Philosophy always precedes practice.  That's why we have to get our thinking right if we ever hope to get our activities right. 

                  I asked our guide if there was one--just one--example of an SS guard ever defecting.  Ever thinking this was indefensible.  Ever daring to stand against the system.  Answer:  not one.  It was cushy.  Nice houses, no chance of being killed in battle, double soldier pay.  What's not to love?  "Just doing my job, and it's a good one." 

                  Sorry to go on longer than normal on this, but it deserves remembrance because "I'm better than you," or "I need to tell you what to do," or "your existence is problematic" or a host of other subtle prideful thoughts can reap a whirlwind.   These prisoners almost turned into animals, as proven by the Blockmasters who agreed to go along to get an extra cup of food a day.  The lenient ones were executed by the Germans.  The tough ones were executed by the prisoners.  A fine line, that.

                  I was heartened to learn that 7,000 visitors a day tour these camps.  Every day of the year.  They do tours in almost every language and the tours literally criss-cross and stack up.  Every school child in Poland goes as much as three times.  Just to remember.  Perhaps if enough people tour these camps, they will forever notice when a society's censorship and tyranny start down that Nazi path.  It's definitely not gone from our world. 

                  At the end, even the SS guards had a conscience, seared as it was.  With the Russians bearing down on them, they put explosives in the chambers at Birkenau to hide the evidence.  Those have not been touched since that day, testament both to what happened there and the shame among these hardened SS troops.   

                  On a scale of 1-10, 1 being Unlikely and 10 being Likely, what are the chances of this happening again?

                  The comments from my yesterday post deserve some further nuance.  For brevity, I work hard at keeping these posts short enough to read in less than 5 minutes, which sometimes works against a broader and perhaps fairer discussion of a topic.                  

                  For the record, I'm deeply grateful for RFK Jr. and the MAHA movement and am glad to be a part of it, albeit peripherally.  But few things frustrate us more than hypocrisy.  Tell me you don't know.  Or tell me you can't do anything.  Or tell me you can't fix everything at once.  Goodness, I can handle telling me you made a mistake.  Most of us are pretty forgiving when someone admits a mistake.  I've certainly made plenty.

                  But don't double down on an inaccurate narrative, especially when it's diametrically opposed to your stated beliefs.  I have not seen a scintilla of evidence that glyphosate was in imminent threat of being pulled from the market. So Sri Lanka is not a fair comparison.  I can even agree that an overnight elimination of glyphosate would not be good policy.  But nobody has proved or even shown a likelihood that it faced sudden and irrevocable lack of availability.  That's a completely contrived fear and forces us to ask why this executive order? 

                  Some think it was a Trump deal with Bayer, which produces nearly 40 pharmaceutical medications, most of which are sold in America at many times the price they're available in other countries.  If Americans fear drug prices far more than glyphosate, which is probably the case, is it possible that to curry votes in the midterm Trump offered national security for glyphosate to Bayer if it would in turn dial down its prices to the American market?  Cheaper drugs in exchange for glyphosate protection.  Good deal. 

                  The frustration of this whole episode is that fact-checking the narrative (99 percent of glyphosate comes from China), adding up the numbers (roughly half the corn and soybeans it's used on are either not consumed in America or not used for feed or food), and looking at alternatives (like perennial prairie polycultures under livestock intensive management) all oppose the justification and fear engendered in the EO.  Sorry, that's a long sentence reminiscent of Herman Melville's Moby Dick, but if you'll take a breath partway through, you can make it in two breaths if you read fast. 

                  Putting myself in RFK Jr.'s shoes, I can imagine that Trump demanded his unconditional endorsement or resign.  Faced with that ultimatum, I might say "wow, we've got a lot of great momentum going at MAHA; we're really climbing a mountain here and making progress; yes, this is a bit of a hill, but it's the political cost of keeping MAHA on track and climbing the real mountain ahead of us."  That very well may be the fact, but I would hope I would give real time caveats rather than an unconditional endorsement and then having to invest myself in political triage for the next weeks.  Ain't worth it. 

                  Realize, too, that the core of the Republican base in the Senate all hails from Big Ag states:  Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, etc.  That makes the Republican party completely beholden to Bayer and friends.  We're seeing that over and over again, with the $12 billion soybean bailout for sure.  The truth is that farmers have become little more than welfare dependents, like a bunch of irresponsible addicts.  What a shame. 

                  If Trump had done nothing, glyphosate would have continued being available.  There is plenty of it.  Nobody was threatening to discontinue it.  

                  So why this sudden, unprecedented selection for a particular brand?  I'm at a loss.  Does it add up to you?

                  RFK Jr. even went on Joe Rogan a week ago to plead his case, such is the firestorm this apparent hypocrisy created.   After all, he's the attorney at the heart of the thousands of lawsuits against Bayer for glyphosate causing non-hodgkins lymphoma.  And why did he have to endorse the EO?  Other cabinet members weren't asked for an endorsement.  Why him?  I can tell you why:  because he's the only cabinet member that has gone on record calling glyphosate a poison.  None of the others has an opposing narrative.

                  The strategy at MAHA seems to be a justification based on SUDDEN unavailability.  In other words, RFK Jr.' endorsement of the EO is kind to agriculture, consumers, and farmers because a SUDDEN glyphosate withdrawal would be devastating. 

                  But the only threat of withdrawal was from Bayer itself in 2025 saying if they didn't get relief from the massive damage payouts to cancer sufferers it would need to stop producing glyphosate.  Kennedy actually lied--bold-faced--on Joe Rogan saying China produces 99 percent of the world's glyphosate.  Not true.  Forty percent is produced in the U.S., Belgium, and Argentina, which of course are friendly geopolitical allies and definitely not interested in stopping production or availability.

                  This whole kerfuffle indicates a new desperation on the part of RFK Jr.'s inner sanctum to apply political triage over what most of us consider a catastrophic lapse in judgment and conscience.  While technically this EO does not indemnify Bayer from product liability, it certainly taints the courtroom when a plaintiff is impugning a product deemed necessary for national security.  Get real; this was a home run for Bayer.

                  RFK Jr. keeps insisting this is a temporary thing.  Well then why didn't the EO put a timeline on the national security designation--like two or three years.  A sunset designation would have completely changed the order.   

                  On Rogan, RFK Jr. says the real solution to weeds is lasers.  Using AI, thermal imaging, and precision lasers, we can zap our way into crop productivity.  Of course, the machine costs $1 million and is only economical on vegetables (high value crops), which don't use glyphosate because most of them aren't Genetically Modified Organisms . . . yet.

                  On the program, RFK Jr. said there is "Zero negative effect" to the lasers.  Can anyone think of any technology ever invented that had zero negative effects?  Everything has tradeoffs.  Car crashes only occurred when we invented the car.  The whole narrative seems to be going from bad to worse.  How about suggesting that the forty percent of U.S. corn production that goes to ethanol fuel and the fifty percent of the soybean crop that gets exported be terminated?  We don't need it.  What we need is cows. 

                  Half the corn and soybeans would terminate fast without federal subsidies.  And what of those farmers?  Well, maybe they'd start producing cows on perennial prairie polycultures.  Maybe those acres could begin building soil instead of losing soil.  Maybe those acres could be chemical free instead of doused with chemical cocktails.  And maybe America could be healthy again.

                  Really, folks, this whole national security status for glyphosate makes no sense no matter how you look at it.  No imminent threat of glyphosate withdrawal.  Half its use is on crops that are either not needed in America or have nothing to do with food or livestock feed.  How stupid do these elites think we are?

                  In the same program, RFK Jr. said in the near future we'd have apps on our phones with all our medical records so when we went shopping, it would tell us if what we picked up off the shelf was okay for us to eat.  Are you kidding me?  And who's going to be the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain feeding the algorithms?  The same people who told us not to eat butter?  I wonder what medical condition I would need to be told that buying Coca Cola is good for me.  If I'm depressed, does it tell me to buy ice cream? 

                  All of this--every bit of it--endorses poisons on our farms and in our food, large scale-dependent technologies, and unquestioned loyalty to Wall Street.  If anything gives people a kick in the seat of the pants to get out on homesteads and disentangle from the chemical-industrial cartel, this is the incentive.

                  We're wandering off into la-la land, folks.  Do you feel betrayed?

                  Kudos to Bayer for pulling off this publicity stunt.  As Monsanto, originator of Roundup, began staggering under thousands of lawsuits alleging cancer consequences to the notorious weed killer, it sought protection under the skirts of the EPA.  How can a product deemed safe by the EPA be liable for health problems?  That defense eventually broke down, partly thanks to RFK Jr.'s legal expertise.                 

                  Losing in the courtroom, Bayer, which had acquired Monsanto by this time, sought legislative relief.  Last fall Bayer and friends attached a liability indemnification (modeled after vaccine protection) to an appropriations bill, granting protection for any product deemed safe by the EPA.  The backlash was severe enough to strip it out. 

                  Well, if you can't find friends in the judicial branch or legislative branches, why not try for the executive branch?  Bingo.  In Trump, they found a lackey to elevate glyphosate to national security status.  While RFK Jr. argues in his reputational triage X post that this does not protect Bayer from liability lawsuits, it surely tilts arguments in their favor if continued lawsuits dare to impugn an item of national security.  How stupid does RFK Jr. think I am? 

                  This all gets me to thinking about items of national security.  Of all the products and issues that could be elevated to national security protection, Trump chose glyphosate.  I can think of a bunch of things that are more important.  Before offering a list, realize that nearly half of the corn grown in America goes into ethanol for fuel, not food.  Half the soybeans are exported.  In other words, the fear mongering about food and the importance of growing these crops is absurd.  Nothing about the official justification or necessity makes sense, except that this is a naked public relations and legal slam dunk by Bayer.

                  Okay, here are some suggestions for items of higher national security: 

1.  Overgrazing on private and public lands by poor cattle owners/manager.

2.  Chemical-laden water, especially in America's corn belt.

3.  Public schools who fail to teach 47 percent of kids how to read.

4.  Foreign U.S. military bases.

5.  Federal agents in cities who don't want them.

6.  Prohibiting my ability to sell a Polyface Chicken Pot Pie to a neighbor. 

7.  The IRS

8.  Fraud in welfare, Medicare.

9.  The bloated federal budget and national debt

10.  Taylor Swift 

11.  Foreign aid of any type, period

12.  Prisons

                  I'm smiling and hope you are.  If you were going to elevate something above glyphosate as an item of national security, what would it be?  Humor is appreciated.

                  Today I did my last in-field pasture walk presentation on a farm not too far from the ancient city of Shiloh, where the Tabernacle stood for 369 years.

                  With this group of farmers, I learned about a new and increasing problem:  wild boars.  That has unique consequences in a nation that largely steers clear of pigs.  These have only become a problem in the last 20 years.  From my perspective, I don't see what they eat since the land is generally barren, but there are enough gardens, field edges, and orchard nut and fruit drops that the resourceful pig can survive.  Professional hunters come to shoot them when a farmer calls in a problem.  Due to lack of forest, the pigs don't have good hiding places like they do in other areas. 

                  Dining on 8-year old beef cooked on a charcoal grill (it was delicious), I learned the Jews don't each much lamb.  Most of the Israelis living here came from Europe and the U.S. where lamb is not a major meat.  The top animal protein is chicken.  That's the everyday meat and seldom eaten in restaurants.  KFC has tried numerous times to gain a foothold here but so far has been unsuccessful because if you're going to dine out, you eat beef. 

                  The first time I came, three years ago, my big takeaway was the rocks.  It seemed nearly hopeless.  But this time, I've met farmers conquering the rocks with pocket masonry drills for electric fence stakes and a can-do spirit to intensively manage their stock.

                  This time I have two big takeaways that I shared with the group in the field this afternoon.  The first is stopping surface runoff.  A corollary is slowing down water in the deep ravines.  All over, deep gullies--really deep, like 50 feet--are everywhere.  Why not take the rocks and place them in these gullies as a permeable dam to slow the water and drop all the silt on the uphill side? 

                  We did that on our farm in the early days, not with rocks but more with tree branches shoved into the bottom of gullies.  In no time, a little terrace developed on the uphill side because the water slowed down enough to drop its load of silt.  Like many things, the goal is to achieve multiple functions with one action.  They tell me that field preparation for vineyards costs about $10-12,000 per acre.  Instead of just piling up the rocks on the edge of the field, placing them in the gullies would yield a second benefit from the action. 

                  Worldwide, average surface runoff is 1/3 of all raindrops.  They either come too fast at once or too much at a time for complete absorption.  Surface runoff devastates the land through erosion and flooding. Here, the farmers say it is 50 percent.  Slowing that needs to be objective number one. 

                  The second big takeaway this time is more a strategic plan, and it applies everywhere.  All week I've been receiving pushback (always with a smile) about the most difficult areas.  I go on a farm with a beautiful green valley of 50-100 acres but after listening to my managed grazing ideas, the farmer points at his highest, farthest, most terrible spot and queries "what about that?  What do you do there?" 

                  Finally it came to me today after dealing with this for the umpteenth time.  We were out in the field at the top of a beautiful green valley with hills, desolation, and rocks--did I mention the rocks?--all around.  I pointed down the valley and said "develop the easy land first.  Make it perfect and then work on the rest."  I don't know why it took my all week to put this together, but we should always pick the easy fruit first. 

                  We tend to imagine the most difficult aspect and demand an answer for it.  What's the recipe for the hardest thing?  Strategically, we need to develop the easiest first and let that finance the harder.  I showed them how they could gross in $28,000 per acre with stacked enterprises on these easy acreages.  That got their attention.  For now, forget about the difficult parts.  This is a great life lesson for all  

                  When we're hearing a new idea, though, our tendency is to look at the most difficult aspects first.  Then we're intimidated and we never make progress.  These farmers really warmed up to the idea.  Many left committed to do just that.  I told them to never be ashamed of little projects.  Nature scales by duplication, not consolidation. 

                  The crowning joy was a lady who came up to me after I did my "May all your carrots grow long and straight . . . " blessing.  She said "love from afar for us means more than you can imagine right now.  You've brought love to us, and it's life changing."  I wiped tears from my eyes.  Shalom, Israel.

                  I've been running into these 18-19 year-old volunteers at the various farms I've visited; they are an enthusiastic, even boisterous lot and this young lady filled in some dots for me.  

                  Israel has a mandatory military service for all young people.  But they also have an option for young people who would rather give a couple of years to volunteering.  Unlike the U.S. Job Corps program, this is relatively unregulated.  A young person can kind of chart their own volunteer activity in lieu of the military requirement.

                  Apparently many of them pick farm volunteering.  As a result, many of these farms have 2-6 18-19 year olds driving machinery, building fence, pruning vineyards, learning shepherding skills and all sorts of manual labor and practical work.  To show how Gen Z is thinking differently, when I asked during the seminar "what attracts a young person to farming?" the older folks said "profitability" and a 14-year-old girl sitting on the front row said "healing ecology."  Folks, that's a good sign for the future. 

                  I don't think these volunteers get paid (hence the term volunteer rather than intern, apprentice, or any other designation), although they may get some sort of stipend.  The point is that the culture encourages this post high school and pre-vocational period to expose young people to manual labor and a connection to the land.   

                  These young people actually carried many farms through the war (Oct. 7) when many farmers got called up to service.  During the war, 5 percent of the Israeli population was called up; for perspective, that would be equivalent to 15 million U.S. citizens.  It was a major drain on everything.  

                  The U.S. does not have a strong youth volunteer ethic.  Most of the time when Americans talk about volunteering it's retirees looking for something meaningful to do.  But imagine if finding something meaningful to do were inculcated into young people so as they enter adulthood, they would have these memories of what bringing a cluster of grapes or a lamb chop to the table actually entailed. 

                  The U.S. doesn't have this on-ramp to prepare high schoolers for gratitude and understanding in their adult life.  We're indulgent to the point of abuse.  As I think about teen suicide and mental health problems, I can't help but wonder if every American pre-20 year old were required to devote two years of life to society doing the actual hard work if it wouldn't bring more humility to life.  Whether it's the military or manual labor, such an interlude creates a prelude to personal accomplishment, self-worth, and the intimate friendships that naturally develop from hard core volunteerism.

                  Interestingly, I've run into numerous farms here already that provide a platform for emotional therapy.  Many are PTSD farms.  Something about getting your hands in the dirt or spending the day tending animals reconnects the emotional pathways toward healing.  In my book YOUR SUCCESSFUL FARM BUSINESS one of the future farm enterprises I predicted there was what I call "the therapy farm."  I first encountered these in a big way in the Netherlands.

                  From physical to mental problems, the society goes out of its way NOT to institutionalize anybody, but to place people into affirming places where they can thrive as part of a team.  Perhaps one of the biggest contributions good farms can offer is a haven for the hurting.  Of course, the best farms for this are the ones with a variety of plants and animals, that don't douse everything with chemicals, that smell nice and are beautiful. 

                  Bottom line is I salute any culture that invests attention on making sure its young people enter adulthood with an appreciation for hard work and what it takes to put food on the table as well as to defend those who put food on the table.  

                  True, I don't do many things gratis; when I do I'm fairly picky about the recipient.  But this has been a joy to give.  Now we'll see if all the people who accused me of benefitting financially from this trip will comment with apologies.   

                  Today I had breakfast with the governor of Mt. Hebron, which is the largest jurisdiction in Judea and Samaria but the least populated.  About 75 percent of the people in Israel live within 10 miles of the coast along the Mediterranean.  This afternoon we drove through what seemed like millions of acres of barren, uninhabited land that was all forest during the times of David the king.  A corner of it was where David fled during Absalom's rebellion; to imagine Absalom hanging from a tree by his hair takes every creative ounce you can muster because it's nothing but rocks and weeds.  For many, many square miles. 

                  The 1995 Oslo Accords gave 40 percent of Judea and Samaria to Arabs and 60 percent to Israelis.  That was a treaty the whole world pretty much agreed with.  Since then, Israel has only gotten its footprint on 6 percent of their land.  Whenever a farmer moves onto another piece of it, terrorism drops and peace increases.  I'm here trying to get the few farmers already farming to be more successful and encourage new ones to take the leap. 

                  One of the biggest problems in Israel is that the Jewish people today have no agricultural heritage.  For centuries they've not purchased land or farmed; they've been jewelers, clock fixers, and bankers--all services and crafts that are portable.  That way whenever they were chased out of an area, they could flee with their stock in trade.  That meant that in 1948 when Israel was established, they had precious little experience to launch good farms.

                  So who did they turn to for advice?  Their friends in the U.S.  And what did their friends in the U.S. tell them to do?  Build chicken factories, use chemicals, feed chicken manure to cows and every other anti-ecological thing you can imagine.  I'm here as much to undo the horrible advice from my country as much as to encourage these new farmers.

                  As if that isn't enough of a headwind, these farmers face constant and continuous threat from terrorist neighbors.  In a wonderful breakthrough partnership between my hosts, Hayovel, and the Mt. Hebron government, a surveillance trailer is now ready to go with a new farmer to offer protection while he's getting established.  I got to see it today and it's quite a beauty.  It has a heat detection camera and regular cameras that can zoom in up to three miles away to monitor a breach in the perimeter.   

                  Two awnings with solar panels unfold to make it completely self-powered.  The monitors can be tied in with the IDF forces or the farmer.  We drove by a farm this afternoon where a 16-year-old shepherd was stabbed to death by Arabs from a nearby village.  When the youth failed to show up at the end of the day with the sheep, a search party went out.  While they were searching for him, the Arabs shot at the rescue team.  To be sure, many Arabs, especially those living in Israel proper, are friendly and peaceful.  But in Judea and Samaria, it's a different story and these farmers trying to live on Israeli land face constant exposure to violence.  This trailer represents a brand new initiative to protect these farmers as they establish their operations.

                  This afternoon I spent a couple of hours at the Farm at the City of David.  The 36-acre farm in Jerusalem is an attempt to grow every plant and every animal known to exist during Israel's Davidic period.  They asked me to come and counsel them on their disease and odor problems.  I introduced them to the carbonaceous diaper (it was fun trying to get them to say that in Hebrew) and rotating the animals around the pens to break host pathogen cycles.  The team there was incredibly receptive; it made immediate sense to them and they wondered why this isn't common practice.

                  Well, truth isn't common practice.  Tomorrow is my third and last all-day seminar and I'm eager to see who I'll have the privilege of meeting this time.

                  He couldn't have been more enthusiastic.  To say these farmers are dubious about managed grazing would be the understatement of the year.  Water.  Shade.  Dry season and no grass.  Boulders in the fields.  Difficult terrain.  You name it, managed grazing just won't work here.

                  But this young farmer--probably about 30--strode up to me with a confident demeanor and began telling me his story.  He acquired his land and bought about 35 ewes that were in poor shape.  He immediately began putting in fencing and moving them in tight paddocks every day.  I've mentioned rocks--some softball sized, others basketball, and plenty the size of a wheelbarrow--so thick it looks like somebody was trying to plant the field with rock seeds.  Intimidating.

                  With a laugh, he said he carries a cordless drill with a masonry bit and it only takes about 30 seconds to drill a hole in a rock big enough to accept a 7/16 inch rebar stake with an insulator.  He's trained his sheep to respect a single wire--almost an unheard-of feat-- and leaves them out at night.  Again, that's generally considered impossible at night due to Palestinians stealing them.  But he has a guy who stays with the sheep all night for security.

                  He thinks he might have found an answer to the security issue with a Speedrite energizer that notifies your cell phone if something breeches (cuts) the perimeter fence.  So he's installing a 5-wire perimeter fence around his property that would need to be cut in order for someone to steal sheep.  He'd get the notification and be able to go out to check on things.   

                  He said the sheep have become incredibly healthy and the grass is responding remarkably well.  It was a day of vindication for me after so much naysaying and pushback.  He's going to be the rising star, I think.  He even invented a collapsible A-frame shade protection he moves around.  He takes a paddy of hay and places it on rocks to concentrate manure and urine and focus disturbance to stimulate new grass germination.  He says it's working perfectly as a pasture pump primer.  Everything about him was magnetic so we're off to the races. 

                  I also visited a young couple's farm just north of Jerusalem.  They're growing probably a half acre of produce in beautifully manicured garden beds on an abandoned army tank parking lot.  The vegetable roots are slowly loosening the gravel underneath the shallow topsoil.  To think that a tank lot could be repurposed this beautifully is redemption at its highest. 

                  In today's group of seminar attendees, perhaps ten carried semi-automatic rifles.  I'm in Judea and Samaria where many Israelis carry weapons for protection.  Like Prime Minister Golda Meir said half a century ago:  "If the Arabs would put down their weapons we'd have peace tomorrow; if Israel put down its weapons there would be no Israel tomorrow."  Truer words were never spoken.

                  Oh, one other great thing I learned in the last day:  Israel has pigs.  Up to 250,000 of them.  It's illegal to import pork and also illegal to let a pig touch the dirt.  But pigs are raised here primarily for the nearly 1 million Russian Jews who emigrated after the Nuremburg trials.  This discovery has given me far more emotional freedom to explain the benefits of pigaerator composting to replace fuel, machinery, and labor.  With no trees to speak of, I thought wood chips would be expensive, but they aren't too bad:  about 50 percent higher than the going rate in Virginia.  That's doable for a carbonaceous diaper.  The ability to duplicate ecological livestock farming principles are increasing daily and I can get more comfortable telling my story.  It's a great time to be in Israel.

                  Often they stutter, meaning they start and the grass begins growing, but then the second rains don't come quick enough to keep the grass green.  It withers and turns brown until the second rain comes.  This gives new impetus to the "early and latter rains." 

                  Politically, the country has adopted the techno-fix to everything.  That includes a full endorsement of pharmaceutical and industrial solutions.  I'm continuing to sleuth whether pastured poultry is legal.  Yesterday during my day-long seminar when farmers pushed back on pastured poultry, they said it was because if any fresh chicken manure goes on the soil the government thinks that will contaminate streams in runoff. 

                  I asked them what they did with the manure from industrial chicken factory farms.  Most of it, they said, is fed to cattle.  Cattle who eat the chicken manure and poop on the ground apparently do something to purify it; cattle manure, according to government-think, does not pollute streams.  So dear friends, in America, we are not the only country where bureaucracy runs amok.

                  This morning I spent time on the only farm in the country that sells grass-finished beef.  Most of their beef goes wholesale to the feedlot, but they do finish some.  This was up near the Syrian border at Golan--as in Golan Heights.   It's an 800-mama-cow operation on about 6,000 acres.  When the dry season comes, fire is always a huge hazard because everything turns brown.

                  During the recent war, Hezbolla drones managed by Iran came across the farm and when the Israeli defenses shot them down, everything would tumble into the fields and start fires.  During the heaviest fighting, several would come down each night.  How would you like to farm with burning missiles raining on your tinder-dry fields?  This is not an easy place to farm. 

                  So we have extremely tedious government regulations, the constant threat of missile attack, and two more:  stealing and killing livestock in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) from adjacent zone A ( designated Palestinian areas) to zone C (designated Israeli areas) farms.  Cattle farmers bring their animals into a corral near the house each night to protect them from human predation.  How would you like to farm knowing your neighbors wanted to kill you and your animals?

                  Finally, the rocks.  You can't imagine the rocks.  For millenia, civilizations have been fighting over this little strip of land.  The Ottoman empire taxed trees, which resulted in complete deforestation.  The land has been plundered for a long time.  My hosts, Hayovel, help farmers build fences and one-third of the T-posts need a hole bored through solid bedrock due to the lack of soil.  A drill bit costs about $200 and lasts for several hundred holes before it wears out or breaks off, but it's tedious work. 

                  These rocks are everywhere, dominating everything.  Rocks.  Rocks.  Rocks.  Lack of soil and rocks make this the most seemingly uninhabitable land on the planet.  But that's exactly where restoration can appear the most dramatic.  Who could love it but God?  Who could want it but God?  It's a perfect example of unconditional love and divine redemption. 

                  I'm sure a handful of you reading these posts will go ballistic reading this.  The Abrahamic covenant is still in place:  "I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you."  If you despise these posts, I only have one thing to say:  "I'll see you at the judgment seat." 

                  The fact that these farmers are trying to make a go of it in these circumstances is testament to faith and tenacity.  We can all learn from that.

                  The Mediterranean climate means they start getting rain in November and by December grass is growing well and they can begin grazing.  The Golan is quite different than the lower parts of the country so everything here is compressed by perhaps a month.  The rains stop by the end of May and vegetation turns brown by early July. 

                  Today I was at a Savory Hub (named after Allan Savory); the land is managed by a kibbutz and consists of about 7,000 acres running a herd of 800 mama cows.  Numerous military bunkers dot the landscape and a dozen wind turbines capture the pervasive wind across the plateau.

                  The Golan is a high plateau and was captured by Israel in the 6 day war of 1967; in the most recent Oct. 7 fighting, it is where Hezbollah lobbed missiles.  The fields are grass between rock boulders; some the size of wheelbarrows and others more the size of basketballs.  It would be nearly impossible to traverse the fields with an ATV.  Ancient stone fences, bulwarks, buildings, Stonehenge-type installations cover the fields. 

                  Permanent fences are universally barbed wire on T-posts or a kind of square panel wire; no wooden posts exist.  Trees are almost nonexistent.  Due to the rugged boulders, they believe they can't subdivide fields with portable electric fence.  But after walking a couple of the fields, I assured them that they could wiggle through the rocks and greatly increase their management. Fences don't have to be in straight lines.  Because the land isn't owned outright, the government controls everything the farmers do, which means you have to get approval (it's hard) to build a pond, add a different kind of animal, build a structure, ect.  And of course, like all bureaucracy, the entrenched agents are not prone to authorize innovation.

                  The average calf crop as a percentage of mama cows is 60 percent; in other words, 100 cows only bring 60 calves to weaning.  The farmers at today's pasture walk were uncertain whether that low percentage was due primarily to low conception or calf mortality from pneumonia, predators, and sickness.  They have wolves and jackals.

                  For the uninitiated, in America a cattle operation would be considered failing if it didn't wean 80 percent of its cow numbers.  The Israeli government gives cattle farmers $300 per year subsidy per cow; the farmers said this makes them reluctant to cull nonproductive cows.  Interestingly, this farm today said their better management in the last 5 years has greatly increased herd health; I didn't ask what their weaning percentage was prior to beginning a rudimentary moving system.

                  The farmers today peppered me with Israeli farming regulations.  Poultry is difficult due to quotas.  There seemed to be a bit of disagreement about whether a person could raise more than 30 chickens; one farmer said you could raise 800.  In general, all poultry is raised in confinement houses and much of the manure is fed to beef cows.  This particular farm discontinued that practice a couple of years ago due to the changes toward grass.  I'll try over the next days to ascertain what the poultry situation is.  When you have a roomful of farmers answering your questions it's a bit chaotic.

                  Bull calves are never castrated into steers here.  They are weaned and go straight to feedlots to be fattened on corn; grass fattening is virtually nonexistent.  Of course, pigs are nonexistent; government regulations require that if you raise pigs, they cannot touch the dirt; they have to be on concrete.

                  Israel's climate zones change dramatically from tropical to temperate in extremely short distances.  This morning we went from banana trees around Tiberias to Golan, where even almonds are too cold.  As a result, regional food systems are probably more doable here than almost any place on the planet.

                  I'll be here for another week; not sure I'll post every day, but will try to offer insights as I learn them.  Hope this is interesting to everyone.

                  I'm reminded of Lyndon Johnson's WAR ON POVERTY in the mid-1960s, which has spent more than $1 trillion, resulting in more people living in poverty today than when that initiative started.  Pardon me for being cynical about this one. 

                  But it got me to thinking about different ideas to combat this problem, which led me to some "what ifs."

What if the government exited education so searching kids wouldn't be told girls are boys and boys are girls and girls are cats and boys are dogs? 

What if the U.S. closed all its foreign bases, quit giving money to any foreign government, and brought the flower of our youth home and quit meddling in other peoples' affairs?

What if the government didn't subsidize wheat, corn and soybeans to make high fructose corn syrup, Cheerios, and seed oils the most affordable foods in the country?

What if the government got out of health care meddling and cut the budget by half and let us all keep half of our taxes to spend on what we wanted?

What if we didn't have a CDC and Anthony Fauci to lie to us, close our schools and nursing homes, and drive us into despair?

What if the government didn't subsidize and demand kids get 7 dozen vaccines in cocktails never tested?

What if anyone who wanted to build a house could build it however they wanted without asking the government's permission?

What if the government  went back on the gold standard, had to balance its budget and couldn't borrow, thus eliminating inflation and making money believable?

What if the government quit interfering in employer-employee pay so businesses weren't so desperate to get rid of people?

What if no college received a dime of government assistance and had to market itself based on real life performance instead of teaching stupidity?

What if we created a national objective to enable families to survive with one wage earner so one parent could actually be there to love on their children?

What if we eliminated property taxes so nobody would lose their home?

What if we let property owners build whatever they wanted to on their own property, thus producing millions of living quarters?

                  Okay, enough, but you get the drift.  Our epidemic of drug addiction and homelessness, I submit, is a societal problem, indicative of massive dysfunction; we don't have a drug and homelessness problem due to the government's financial stinginess.             

                  Two questions:  

                  1.  Do you think this $100 million will make any difference?

                  2.  If you wanted to add a "what if" to this list, what would it be?

                  This year, Dr. Eric Berg, leading holistic health and nutritionist and close insider to the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement will be here along with Jeffrey Smith, perhaps the most iconic guru in the Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) space.  His book Seeds of Deception was THE explanation, early on, regarding the GMO problem. 

                  Other presenters are Dr. Alexis Cowan on quantum light biology, Dr. Scott Jackson, leading guru of microbial testing, and Dr. Leigh Frame, named one of the top 100 health care leaders in the world, who focuses on the gut-brain immune interface.

                  A youth and teen track gives youngsters lots of fun and interesting things to do during the two days.  Of course, Sina will add her always profound and enlightening presentation to both to youngsters and adult.  

                  The June 12-13 event kicks off with a VIP dinner Thursday, June 11 to let folks meat and interact with the cast of characters with a full-stop meal provided by Polyface.  To facilitate fellowship, we've added a Friday night live fireside hot dog gala to make sure no child grows up without roasting a hot dog (from Polyface, of course) over a fire.

                  We took a year off from this event to let Sina and family resettle to Georgia.  I'll do some farm stuff and maybe yak too.  I don't use this space to advertise much, but this event, with Sina's connections and effervescent personality in the health space, promises to be a must come.  And it's worth coming just for the Polyface meals.

                  Click https://www.drsinamccullough.com/store/p/two-days-of-truth-health-summit-2026 for tickets and information; our goal is to fill up the Lunatic Learning Center.  Will you help us get these great speakers a full house?  Thank you.  Anybody who has attended one of these, feel free to comment on your experience.  Looking forward to seeing you this summer.

THAT THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE TO ACQUIRE THE FOOD OF THEIR CHOICE FROM THE SOURCE OF THEIR CHOICE, WITH MUTUAL CONSENT, SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED.

                  Delegate Eric Zehr has put the bill in as HB699.

                  This is the most bold offensive tactic yet by this small by dynamic organization, whose mission statement is simple:  to promote and preserve unregulated direct farm-to-consumer trade that fosters the availability of locally grown products or home produced food.

                  Here are instructions:

We will meet up in the main lobby of the General Assembly Building, located at 201 North 9th Street, 23219. The public entrance is located on the East Broad Street side of the building. We will meet in the General Assembly's main lobby at 8:00am and start lobbying around 8:30am. HB699 is not on the docket to be heard yet, and currently it is in the House General Laws Committee, but could be moved to be heard as early as tomorrow. We will be adjusting our visit to that information. Call your Delegate and Senator and make an appointment to see them. 

We are scheduled to meet with Delegate Zehr at 2.30 pm. 

Please contact Suzi Croes at 540-419-6571 or Dan Lafever, 484-318-3789 with any questions  

                  Unfortunately I am in Florida on a farm consultation and unable to be there, but I hope others can be there or call your delegate to show support for this measure.  This is part of a nationwide groundswell at the state level to free farmers from industrial-scale food regulations that deny consenting adults exercising freedom of choice to give their microbiome agency from having to ask the government's permission to engage in a food transaction.

            The opposition says this freedom will create an epidemic of sick people due to unregulated food and dirty farmers selling to their neighbors.

            Do you think this food would be safer or less safe than government-sanctioned fare?          

                  For the next 6-12 months, I'm bullish.  The year 2025 is all about the U.S. being expensive and things are ready to deflate.  BUT there won't be any change in land prices for the next 10 years--they won't go up or go down.

                  America is a consumption-based economy; 68 percent of GDP is consumption, which is why the AI bubble won't continue driving GDP.  Our current cash-driven cycle from the Trump-Pelosi $3 trillion stimulus and Biden's $2 trillion is fiscal profligacy that drove GDP the last five years.  That fiscal engine is over, and it was 500 percent more stimulus than the EU gave.  So how does Trump keep it going?

                  Answer:  by unleashing home value, which is tying up $15 trillion.  Trump will declare a nationwide housing crisis and lower interest rates.  He's already changed estate capital gains, which is why baby boomers are holding onto their houses.  So 2026 will be about extending the $15 trillion tied up in house equity to create another bubble to drive things through his presidency; it will collapse after he's out of office.

                  The weird thing is that we don't need this; things aren't bad; we're okay; things are picking up.  But if you're going to buy a house, buy it right now.

                  None of us has lived when the world was multi-polar; the only thing Americans alive today can remember is a uni-polar world run by the American empire.  So we assume multi-polar can't happen and can't imagine what it would look like if it did. 

                  A schoolyard with one bully is fairly peaceful and stable.  With two bullies, it's still not too bad as long as both sides stay on their end of the playground. The most unsafe playground is when there are no bullies; everyone's fighting.  That's multi-polar.

                  Uni-polarity is what drove modern wealth because rules and norms were clear.  Multi-polar is messy, and that's where we're headed right now.  The U.S. and China are NOT carving up the world into two camps.  Look at the concentration of military stockpiles diversifying in many nations.  What we've seen in military stockpiles in the U.S., Russia, and China before now will proliferate around the globe.  And the U.S. is concentrating everything into the Western Hemisphere.

                  The only big debtor nation is the U.S.  And we're the biggest buyer, so we've been able to bully everyone into line.  We're seeing the end of American exceptionalism.  The world will move away from U.S. bonds, U.S. markets, and U.S. dollars; this is why tariffs were seen as a way to bring things into balance and why gold is going up.  The only reason we dumped $5 trillion into the economy is because voters wanted it; we can only blame ourselves. 

                  As the dollar devalues, it'll make U.S. commodities more competitive.  The funny thing about Venezuela is that normally presidents lie to us about why they engage in military activity; Trump didn't lie; he said plainly "we're taking the oil."  As all this happens, physical things will go up in value and non-physical will plummet (Facebook, Netflix, etc.). 

                  The U.S. will have five years of bad performance and then we'll be fine.  We're priced too high on everything and we're seeing our comeuppance.  Once things balance, we'll come out okay.  Tariffs will come down in 2026.  Trump is burning through equity with his tariffs because it's not wanted by most Americans.  Nobody wants to pick their own strawberries; they want cheap labor to pick them.

                  The U.S. can do whatever it wants with Greenland.  The diplomatic problem is that Denmark has been a true friend, so we have a lot of political equity not to alienate our other friends by being difficult with Denmark over Greenland.  If it were France, which is an undependable friend, we wouldn't be so careful.  

                  Crypto is an asset, but on the speculative spectrum.  Be careful.

                  There you have it; one big fascinating day with people who live in a different world than I do.  I saw enough graphs to make me bug eyed for a week, but data is really interesting when you put it in pictures.

                  Hope everyone enjoyed these reports.  What did you find most interesting?

                  Ron Diamond is founder and chairman of Diamond Wealth, which consults with some 150 family offices.  A family office is a euphemistic way of saying "we're filthy rich and want to invest our money somewhere."  It used to be only the Rockefellers and Carnegies and a couple other well-known names were in this camp, but with wealth disparity it is growing fast. 

                  Roughly 68 percent of family offices today have only been created since 2020.  To be a family office, you almost have to be worth at minimum $1 billion.  Right now, all U.S. family offices combined share $10 trillion in equity.  In the next 10 years, that number will jump to $124 trillion.

                  The most interesting thing about this money is that it is patient.  It's completely different than venture capital and any other investments.  These are wealthy families wanting to leverage their money for good things; they are already wealthy; they don't need to earn high returns.  Families move in and out of this category.  Only 5 percent of family offices will survive four generations.  About 70 percent don't survive two. People are constantly moving in and out of this category, but it's growing as the rich get richer and poor get poorer.

                  Ron said until Tuesday he didn't think he'd ever met a farmer.  He grew up in New York investment banking and investment funds.  But suddenly farmland, which is one of the best hedges against inflation, is showing up on the radar of family offices as a place to invest.  This will fundamentally change farm land ownership in the future because instead of available real estate going to other farmers or individual buyers, more and more will be snarfed up by family offices.

                  More farmers will lease and manage unowned land.  Joel's note:  Some 35 years ago my mentor Allan Nation, founder of Stockman Grass Farmer, told me the U.S. was moving to a European style of agriculture where the wealthy owned the land as an economic defensive mechanism and farmers managed it as a wealth-gaining offensive mechanism.  So farmers who know how to make money on land will be a hot commodity. 

                  Okay, next speaker:  Ed Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research Inc. and nicknamed "The Wall Street Seer."  "I don't think we'll have a recession."

                  "I predict the S&P at 10,000 by the end of the decade."  Don't let your politics prejudice your investing.  If you had been depressed in 1920 about WWI and the Spanish Flu, you would have missed the Roaring 20s.  "I've been married three times and have five kids, so I guess I'm an optimist."

                  Baby Boomers are the richest retiring generation in history, holding $85 trillion in assets, much of it in their paid-off homes, which is why President Trump is trying to move real estate sales, to get this money re-circulating.

                  In the 1960s technology accounted for only 10 percent of national spending; today it's 60 percent and will drive the economy going forward.  Productivity is making a big comeback.  The shortage is in the trades, which won't be replaced by Artificial Intelligence.  Trump's campaign against Fed chair Jerome Powell will backfire.  Stupid move. 

                  Smoot-Hawley tariffs created the great depression.  The fact that we didn't go into depression with what we've been through in the last five years shows the resilience of our economy.  These are good times.  People have been screaming economic collapse because of the deficit since the 1980s and it hasn't happened.

                  The Japanese bond market is soaring:  they're in trouble.  Foreigners are still buying U.S. securities at normal rates; the dollar is stable and the U.S. is still considered a secure safe haven to hold wealth.  A little gold in your portfolio is a good thing.  Colleges are ridiculously expensive.  There's no reason to lower interest rates as long as consumer spending is moving.

                  Let the good times roll.  Are you happy?

                  In fact, here's my idea:  somebody needs to start a newspaper called UNCENSORED.  Every week you publish on paper selected things that social media platforms censored.  Who wouldn't pay for that?  Okay, entrepreneurs, there's my million dollar idea; you're welcome.  I'm really a farmer-news junky.  So thank you all for affirming I can still report interesting stuff.  I love you all.

                  Okay, here's the second presentation, from Stephen Vaden, USDA Deputy Secretary. 

                  In the 2022 Agriculture Census, 880 million acres are classified as farmland in the U.S.  Of that, 40 percent is leased and 46 million (4 percent) are under foreign ownership. The number one foreign ownership is Canadian, but the main concern is Chinese. The 1978 Agriculture Foreign Investment Disclosure Act has been largely shelved since then and the Trump administration will be bringing it front and center with penalties on the way.  Failure to disclose is an automatic fine of 25 percent of land value.  Early processing is already under way.

                  The Big Beautiful Bill permanently locked in estate tax exemptions and allow 100 percent capital expensing, including increasing the limit to $2.5 million per year.  That means you can now expensive your capital expenditures instead of depreciating them.  Tractors, trucks, farm machinery, pond building, farm buildings. 

                  The USDA is housed in two main buildings; one fronts on Independence Ave. and the other, known as the South Building, is behind it.  It has a backlog of $1 billion in maintenance, was built for 7,500 employees and has never seen more than 60 percent occupancy.  "The taxpayers are getting bilked, so we're shrinking our building footprint to full occupancy."  That entire building will be abandoned and repurposed for the private sector.

                  The reason the USDA is moving offices to Raleigh, Kansas City and other areas out in farm country is because the cost of living is so high and the commute is so long getting into D.C. ("we require people to come to the office") the USDA can't hire competent people to live there.  "The only way to preserve expertise is to move employees to places they can enjoy living, buy a home, and raise a family."  And this puts offices out where farmers live. 

                  The monstrous Beltsville, Maryland agriculture research station (where the double-breasted turkey was developed) covers some 1,000 acres with 400 buildings.  Of those, 250 are so decrepit they're in line for demolition (mold, blown sprinklers, peeling paint, trees growing up through them--really!).  Eliminating them will save $2 billion per year.

                  The two most common things we hear from farmers:

                  1.  Input costs

                  2.  Foreign trade competition, especially from Brazil.

                  We're doubling down on pushing biofuels and looking at mandating ethanol nationwide, moving from E10 to E15 (percentage of ethanol in the mix), and this "will really help our corn farmers."   Joel's note:  don't kill the messenger; I'm just reporting. 

                  When you enter a Federal Service Agency (FSA) office and see all those files, they hold paper documents of every farm client in the area.  The USDA has brought in top flight IT folks to digitize everything and link all the agencies so they're interconnected and can process funds in less than a week.  In fact, the $12 billion bailout coming up, primarily for soybean farmers, will be pre-filled out by USDA workers so all farmers have to do is sign from their home computer and watch the money appear in their bank account in 3 days.  The USDA is going to operate like an efficient business for once.

                  And yes, he did have security agents with him.

                  That's the word from the USDA.  Everybody still with me?

                  The speaker lineup was world class and I want to share a couple of highlights from the day.  I'm a prodigious note taker from my old debate and journalism days so the day gave me lots of tidbits to enjoy. The first one was Peter Zeihan, geopolitical strategist, and here are gleanings from his opening remarks. 

                  Industrialization moved people to cities, and urban living made children a liability instead of an asset. This explains the global drop in birthrates in every industrialized nation on the planet.  The Zoomers have shrunk America's labor force by nearly a million.  Two options:  more babies or more immigrants. 

                  Millenials delayed family development by 7 years.  Now 78 percent of Baby Boomers have retired but they represent $175 trillion in assets.  America's economy is completely structured and dependent on consumer spending.  As people age, they spend less. 

                  China is the fastest aging population in the world.  Some 100-300 million Chinese are missing.  Nobody actually knows their population, which now average 57 years old.  Question:  can the U.S. build out our manufacturing base faster than China fades away?  We have 10 years to do it. 

                  Xi Jinping's dramatic purges in his advisors is due to corrupted data that he's now realizing has made many of their decisions incorrect.  The Chinese spy balloon was the biggest intelligence bonanza in history for the U.S.  President Biden wanted to shoot it down when it was first seen, but the generals and CIA said "no, Mr. President, let us follow it with drones above and below and suck all the data out of it so we know every node in China feeding it, the buildings where they're sending data, etc."   

                  Over the 9 days, that's exacty what the U.S. did, creating the biggest hack in intelligence history.  That's why Xi shut down everything for 4 months after we shot it down because he realized what the U.S. had collected.

                  Agriculture was the last to join globalization and will be the last to exit as we reshore everything.  It looks like we're going to go through a duplication of the 1980s farm crisis. I returned to the farm fulltime Sept. 24, 1982, and that's when we launched Polyface.  I remember the farmer suicide hotlines, but for me, it was a time of exhilaration and launch.   

                  All U.S. military power around the world is being concentrated in the Western Hemisphere as de-globalization develops. "Prepare for a time when South America is cut off from the rest of the world."  U.S. farmers have a good long-term future because unlike South America, we produce our own inputs, from fertilizer to infrastructure.

                  The more complex the supply chain, the more it offshores.  Automobiles, aerospace, and heavy vehicles have complex supply chains.  Plastics, chemicals, and energy have simple supply chains and are reshoring as we speak. 

                  America needs 50 percent more energy just to power up as China falls, and that's not counting data centers.  Globalization was always going to break; President Trump just brought it forward.  As globalization falters, we're on the verge of a mass nuclear arms proliferation.

                  And that was just the first speaker.  More tomorrow. 

                  Is this interesting?

                  The Dietary Guidelines form the foundation for school lunches, institutional meals, military commissaries and any public assistance for food.  Most of us, I think, don't appreciate how much these guidelines impact perceptions and practice within the institutional culinary community. 

                  For the first time--get that?--for the first time the guidelines call out ultra-processed foods, added sugar, pre-packaged and ready-to-eat highly processed foods.  Instead of Cheerios and Fruit Loops on the foundational bottom, we see animal proteins, eggs, and whole dairy (not skim milk).  For the first time our government acknowledges the difference between foods.

                  Livestock farmers and the animal protein industry is celebrating.  Ritz Crackers, not so much.  And perhaps the breakfast cereal aisle can be chucked out the back door of the grocery store.  As well as the soft drink aisle and the potato chip and Triscuit aisle.

                  For the first time in our nation's history, the government recognizes that calories from Lucky Charms are not the same as calories from a boiled egg.  This is a major step toward truth in nutrition and I think it's helpful to appreciate the win.  

                  If we want to find fault, of course, we could complain that these guidelines don't recognize plants grown in good soil and animals grown in a healthy habitat.  The Bionutrient Food Association has found that you have to eat about 80 carrots of the poorest-grown quality to get the same nutrition as one carrot of the best-grown.  That's a pretty big difference.

                  Turning to animal proteins, grass-finished beef has 300 percent more riboflavin than corn-fed.  So yes, we can find fault that it doesn't recognize enough differences . . . yet.  But let's be charitable and appreciate this step.  I think it's a big deal and am grateful MAHA is having such a positive impact in the nation's ivory towers.

                  Next week I'll be addressing about 1,800 conventional corn and soybean farmers in Des Moines, Iowa at a big conference.  These new Dietary Guidelines must have the corn-bean folks shaking in their shoes, and rightly so.  I'll be promoting conversion of these native prairie lands, which built the soil crop farmers are still mining, back to the original perennial polyculture soil-building prairies to feed cows.  Our nation is awash in corn and soybeans; we need grass-finished beef.  And so does the soil.

                  Positives from the federal government come seldom.  Let's give credit where credit is due.  Imagine the lobbying and push back form K Street's industrial base that RFK Jr., Dr. Oz, Marty Mackey, Brooke Rollins and others had to endure to re-imagine our nation's official food recommendations. 

                  The next big question, of course, is how this gets implemented.  With thousands and thousands of dieticians and culinary directors steeped in cheap ultra-processed carbohydrates, how do we move that ship?  The good old boy network, with kickbacks from the industry for buying their junk, exert unimaginable influence.  Is the administrator really going to give up free Caribbean Cruise tickets from Duncan Hines to start ordering beef? The Devil's in the details, isn't it?  So I'm happy, but mutedly.  Is that fair?

                  What do you think?

                  As a result, I've sat on a developing story that has changed so rapidly it's hard to keep up.  The story is about Bovaer.  Here is the official AI information:

AI Overview

Bovaer (active ingredient 3-NOP) is a revolutionary feed additive for cattle that significantly reduces methane emissions by blocking the enzyme that creates it in the rumen, with studies showing average reductions of 30-40%, making it a key tool for sustainable livestock farming

. Approved globally, including by the FDA for US dairy cows, Bovaer is safe, quickly broken down into natural compounds, and doesn't transfer to milk or meat, ensuring consumer safety while helping farmers meet climate goals.

            The only problem is it's killing cows--lots of cows.  Side effects include fertility issues (sperm counts), inability to stand, lack of appetite.  Mortality. 

            You can look up more about it at your leisure, but Oct. 1, 2025 it became mandatory as a feed additive in dairies in Denmark.  Numerous sources as early as 2023 began sounding the alarm about its health consequences, both in cows and humans, but as is generally the case, these early skeptics were branded conspiracists and "nothing to see here."  As you can see in the above glowing global narrative, it's a wonderful product. 

            Manufactured by DSM-Firmenech, a Danish company, and Elanco, Bovaer had two primary goals. First, it reduced bovine flatulence, which was supposed to save us from climate change.  Second, it offered an option to dairy farmers to sell carbon credits for loving their planet.

            Approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) May 28, 2024 for U.S. use, I have no idea how many dairies are using it, if any.  But FDA has no problem with it, including entering the food supply via milk.

            This must be one of the shortest lived farm mandates in history.  Highwire reported today that Sweden terminated its pilot program yesterday.  Norway's largest dairy coop suspended its use nationwide to all its member dairies this week. Danish farmers are circulating petitions to get rid of the mandate. I expect Denmark to follow suit with the other Scandinavian countries quickly.

            On the way to the airport this morning taking one of our steward checkouts to her flight, she asked "do you think the industrial food system will ever come around?"  This Bovaer fiasco is just another proof that no, they will never get it.  They will keep tinkering, keep listening to paranoia, and try to solve the maladies they cause with additional anti-biological manipulations.  It never ends.

            The lesson here is to never, ever, ever trust the official narrative.  Something is always hiding behind the curtain.  Covid, avian influenza, African swine fever, mad cow, foot and mouth, screw worm--name the malady and know the official message is fabricated nonsense.

            On a percentage scale, who is more responsible for changing our food and farming system:  farmers or consumers?  I say 50/50.  What say you?

                  President Trump's re-election was facilitated by numerous things, not the least of which was President Biden's bullying of Trump throughout his tenure.  It was a never-ending cascade of lawsuits and aggressive posturing that gave Trump underdog status.  Who doesn't want to pull for the underdog?  We're all sympathetic to the underdog.

                  If two football teams play and one has a 10-0 record and the other a 0-10 record and you have no affiliate loyalties to either team, which one are you going to pull for?  This is just human nature.  And if one team gets chippy and starts throwing punches, you're always going to cheer against them.  Nobody likes bullies.

                  Unfortunately, Trump is eroding the underdog equity he garnered while being out of office now that he's returned.  And he's quickly being perceived as a bully.

                  Few things are more bullyish than sticking your nose in places that don't want you.  As we approach this Christmas season, consider how unbullyish the Christ child was.  Born to humble peasants, away from home, in a crude stable.  It was the most unassuming entrance you can imagine 

                  Even today, His entrance into a heart comes after He "stands at the door and knocks."  What a wonderful example of how even the God of the universe waits for an invitation.  To be sure, He doesn't always and won't always, but that's a story for another day. 

                  With that in mind, I submit that Trump is destroying his political equity by invading cities with ICE agents.  These cities don't want him.  He says he wants to help rid America of crime, but we have police and sheriff's department to do that, and if they don't want outside help, then be a gentleman and let them solve it their own way. 

                  Let these cities implode.  Who needs a Chicago, New York, New Orleans, or Los Angeles?  Can our country survive their demise?  Absolutely.  If they can't govern themselves and become unlivable as a result, let them collapse.  When things get bad enough perhaps people will change the way they vote.

                  Ditto blowing up drug boats in the Caribbean.  I don't trust the government an inch.  They say these are drug boats; are they?  And why are drugs illegal?  A government that can deny me taking cocaine can also deny me drinking raw milk.  When the government gets between my lips and my throat, I call that an invasion of privacy.  Legalize it all and along with that eliminate ALL government involvement in health care, including mental health. 

                  Our nation right now suffers from DECISION DEFICIT DISORDER.  Few people have to suffer the consequences of their decisions because somebody will always come and bail them out.  Profligate bankers get bailouts.  Bankrupt car manufacturers get bailouts.  Soybean farmers get bailouts.  Illegal trespassers get bailouts.  Dysfunctional cities get bailouts.  Drug and Coca Cola addicts get bailouts through government health care. 

                  The first rule of decision integrity is to suffer the consequences, or enjoy the benefits, of your decisions.  Those of us who make good decisions get taxed and regulated to death while those who make poor decisions have a safety net of goodies. 

                  When I was a teenager I supplied a restaurant in Staunton with eggs.  Owned by a wonderful Greek family, behind the cash register was a big sign:  A GOOD MONKEY DOESNT MONKEY WITH OTHER MONKEY'S MONKEY.  Somebody needs to hang that around Trump's neck. 

                  If the current federal government is at 100 percent size, what do you think its constitutional and appropriate size should be as a percentage of today's 100?

                  My monicker is long:  Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer.  I created that handle years ago in self-defense after my umpteenth speech to an environmental organization (this includes organic farmers) where everyone assumed I was a flaming liberal since I didn't use chemicals.  After all, Christians are conquistador rapist exploiters, don't you know.   

                  Unlike greenie-weenie tree huggers who exploit Congolese children to dig lithium and build batteries about as hazardous as nuclear waste.  So here we are in these ever-changing hypocrisies.  Isn't life full of them?  Try as we might, we can hardly escape practical hypocrisies.  I'm guilty; we're all guilty of philosophical inconsistencies. 

                  I've talked with some in-the-know republicans in the last week.  They all agree on one thing:  "we're getting shellacked at mid-terms."  Bernie Sanders' haranguing about the 1 percent is permeating our culture dramatically. 

                  The Wall Street Journal recently doubled down with an Op-Ed about the value of CEOs who make hundreds of millions of dollars a year.  We're in football season--look at coaches' salaries, both professional and college. 

                  Here is an amazing statistic I saw recently.  In 1965, the average ratio difference between CEOs and employees was 20:1.  In other words, if you worked for an outfit making $30,000, the CEO got $600,000. Do you know what it is today?  300:1.  In other words, if you work for a company today earning $40,000, the CEO gets $12,000,000 (12 million). 

                  I realize this is average and not your small community mom-and-pop businesses, but these are the figures that dominate the news because these global outfits own the news organizations.   

                  May I ask a simple question?  Does anyone need more than $500,000 a year in salary?  Really?  Now before you capitalist-libertarian readers think I've gone to some Marxist dark side, I would never advocate for a legal cap or any involvement whatsoever from politicians to interfere with these ratios. 

                  What I think is valuable is to challenge anybody making more than $500,000 per year, especially here at Christmas, to think about what massive compensation packages look like to regular folks.  If I ever make that kind of money, I want to give it to my team members--yes, that's employees.  Share.  Give it up. 

                  This is a moral and ethical position.  The rich must realize that when this level of disparity exists in a culture, it foments resentment and eventually vengeance.  Self-preservation, it seems to me, demands a more charitable and gracious outlook toward amassing wealth.

                  How much is enough?  Does it always have to be more, more, more?  I can't imagine stepping onto an elevator in a big company knowing I'm making $12 million and the guys and gals around me are making $40,000.  I couldn't look at myself in a mirror.

                  I challenge our culture to adopt a more gracious posture.  What if all these high paid individuals divested their incomes to people under them?  Would young people be as vituperative about inequality?  Would they scream as much 1 percenters and affordability?  I don't think so.  Folks, we don't have a political and legislative problem; we have a moral and ethical problem.  

                  Ben Franklin, as America's envoy in France, talked up the new country's greatest identity versus the European model as enjoying an egalitarian sense among the populace.  Think about Versailles compared to the common peasant.  Franklin lauded the American counterpart where he said the rich were not so rich and the poor were not so poor.  That's our country's founding and if we don't return to it, morally and ethically, we will destroy ourselves with vengeance. 

                  Does anyone need more than $500,000 a year?

                  While soybean farmers are projected to lose $100 per acre this year, beef prices are at an all-time high.  President Trump's first response was to blame farmers and ranchers for being greedy, but it didn't take 24 hours for the backlash from his conservative rural base to make him change his tune and blame collusion and corruption from the Big Four processors that handle 85 percent of U.S. beef markets.  

                  In 1980, those four only handled 36 percent.  While this is certainly consolidation, concentration, and centralization, corruption is hard to prove and has been an ongoing debate for years.  I doubt anyone will get charged with anything, even if they're guilty. 

                  What I want to point out is price relativity.  In 1961 when my mom and dad purchased the core property that eventually birthed Polyface, it was $90 an acre.  An acre would carry half a stocker calf.  At that time, stockers sold for about $180 apiece, liveweight, meaning half would be $90.  Looked at another way, an acre would feed about a fifth of a cow and her calf up to weaning.   

                  The calf was worth $180, so one fifth would be about $35 per acre.  That means in three years the production would equal the market value of the land ($35 X 3 years = $105).  Today, that land is worth $9,000 per acre.  In order to have the same ratio of production to market value (a third of the market value per year)  would require a calf worth $15,000 (one fifth is $3,000).

                  Right now these calves are selling for $2,000 and everyone is flipping out. To be fair, our property was a gullied worn out rockpile.  Let's assume the price of farmland in our area, if it was decent, was double what our family paid for ours.  Suddenly our same math brings equivalence to $7,500, which is still nearly four times what farmers are getting for these "walking gold" calves right now.

                  This, my friends, is what decades of USDA market interventions to guarantee cheap food eventually creates.  Why are we losing farmers?  We can blame a lot of things, but in general the price of food has not kept up with overall farm expenses.  This same ratio analysis  could be applied to labor, machinery, buildings, insurance.

                  If we had similar ratios to expenses today, ground beef would cost more than $25 a pound.  That, by the way, would re-create historical normalcy in pricing.  In 1980, Americans spent 18 percent of their income on food.  Today it's 9 percent.  In 1960 it was 25 percent.  Here again, the ratios work out to about 3X:  if ground beef right now is $8, 3X would be $24 and as 4X (1960) would be $32.

                  You can play around with the numbers all day, but they point to similar conclusions.  When a culture worships a cheap food policy in order to accumulate stuff and entertainment, their food turns to junk and their relationships turn to mush.  Only when we restore farmers--good farmers--to a place of prominence do other societal ills begin healing.

                  Question:  if burgers were 3X their price, what would be the big changes in Americans' spending?

                  This is a promotion for this week only, through Sunday, for substantial ticket savings as a Holiday Special and to get some buzz going for the event.  If you've never been to one, all I can say is they are like drinking out of a liberty-minded firehose.

                  What's different about Rogue Food is that we don't sit around and complain about government agencies not doing their jobs.  We don't think government should even have most or the jobs it's assigned. Our motto is "Circumvention, Not Compliance." Virtually every agriculture conference you attend, from conventional to regenerative (or whatever buzzword you want to use), conducts workshops on how to get licenses and grants for various activities.                   

                  At Rogue Food, we're all about NOT talking to bureaucrats and doing your own thing.  If two consenting adults want to exercise freedom of choice in giving their microbiome customized agency, why should anyone have to ask a bureaucrat's permission?  We feature people who practice guerilla marketing and offer numerous ways to disentangle from the system.

                  We don't whine about bureaucrats; we just ignore them.  It's quite a welcome change in spirit and attitude, real therapy for frustration.  Because of the location, we're doing some things we've never done before.  Those who want to can attend a genuine western rodeo.  Mt. Rushmore is nearby.  A ranch tour on Dry Creek Farm and Ranch led by Shawn and Kirsty Freeland is all part of the festivities.

                  I'm planning to be there to give whatever updates and encouragement are current, along with John Moody and Clay Conry.  

                  Additional lineup:

                  Ellen Bench on homeopathic livestock and human health, which counter USDA pharmaceutical requirements and recommendation.

                  Steve Campbell on the soil health, human health connection, which is of course something the USDA doesn't understand.

                  Bart Carmichael on regenerative livestock management as opposed to complying with USDA vaccine and pharmaceutical protocols.

                  John Haskell, financial wizard on taking control of your money, as opposed to Centralized Digital Bank Currency and dependency on the Fed. 

                  Here is the link:  https://roguefoodconference.com/rapid-city-sd-rogue/

                  "I can't" is by far and away the most common response I get whenever a do a marketing presentation.  Whether it's butchering animals, value adding to heat-n-eat foods or building structures, we've been acculturated to assume what regulation bureaucrats say is gospel.  It ain't.  At worst, you can ask forgiveness instead of permission. 

                  The Rogue Food idea is not to talk down or express vitriol toward bureaucrats; our idea is to just ignore them.  Make an end run to our own goal posts.  So yes, this is a come-on to look at your schedule and invest in those tickets this week during this holiday sale.  I look forward to seeing you there.

                  Does going rogue sound lusciously tempting?

                  The airport is exactly 55 minutes away from our house, across the Blue Ridge Mountains from the Shenandoah Valley and into Virginia's Piedmont.  Interstate 64 is the path to Charlottesville and offers spectacular views below as you crest Afton Mountain.

                  During that 30-minute interstate commute, three tractor trailers carrying turkeys to poultry processing plants in Harrisonburg passed me going west as I traveled east.  With Thanksgiving coming up and having processed our own turkeys over the last few weeks, I noted how filthy looking these turkeys were 

                  Ours are brilliant white; literally snow-white.  They look shampooed and spotlessly clean.  The turkeys on these trucks are the same genetics as the ones we raise--broad breasted Nascar race car high octane whites--but their production is abhorrent.  Living their whole lives without benefit of fresh air or sunshine and packed in massive houses on their own toilet breathing fecal dust, unable to ever escape to clean ground and never allowed the joy of chasing down a cricket or grasshopper, their plumage becomes infused with fecal dust.  The feathers looked dull yellowish-brown.

                  What a terrible blight on stewardship to take a magnificent bird like the turkey and never let it achieve its turkeyness.  If you've ever had the privilege of seeing a flock of happy turkeys on pasture, you know what I'm talking about.  Their vibrant eyes and brilliant red heads bobble on top of snow white plumage as they scamper, prehistoric-looking, from grass blades to grasshoppers, joyfully chirping and clucking.  A turkey, I'm told, has some 31 vocal options compared to a chicken's 16. 

                  Rather than feeling Thanksgiving gladness, I felt embarrassed sadness that American agriculture has stooped this low and that American buyers are this nonchalant about the expressive beauty of a vibrant turkey in a natural habitat.

                  These musings led me to notice, for the umpteenth time, the tangled mess of trees along the highway and in the median.  In Europe, one of the most striking highway edge characteristics is carefully pruned and manicured trees along public transport areas, whether they be rail lines or highways.  Our country's wealth, I think, has made us unappreciative of resources. 

                  These transport edges could be improved exponentially to grow good trees instead of junk trees.  We could chip the dead, bent, diseased and overly dense biomass for chips to use for fertilizer via composting.  We could even grow orchard trees along miles of public roads.  In Italy, every highway clover-leaf is full of vegetable gardens.  People sometimes overnight there on weekends and tend their veggies.  I have no idea how they allocate who gets what, but it makes an abundant and beautiful landscape everywhere you look. 

                  We Americans just don't care.  During this Thanksgiving season, I challenge all of us to ponder how blessed we are with good climate, abundant water, and abundant resources.  Do we appreciate it enough to caretake it?  To work in it?  To get callouses on our hands from visceral stewardship and participation in God-given wealth? 

                  Or are we so busy getting to our soccer games, checking our TikTok feed, and keeping up with Taylor Swift that the bypassing deplorable turkeys and the jumble of junky trees never enters our consciousness?  After writing SALAD BAR BEEF, I had readers tell me "you ruined our Sunday afternoon country road drives because now we see overgrazing and erosion around every turn.  What we thought was beautiful we now see as destructive." 

                  I can't imagine a higher compliment to a stewardship preacher.  Opening eyes and newfound awareness are the beginning of cultural change. 

                  What do you notice about stewardship threats and opportunities where you live and commute?  Do you care?

I thought of giving you some context about Brazil, just in case you become curious about the larger cultural and economic patterns.

- 0.9% of rural real estate is composed of large properties (over 1000 hectares) working under the agribusiness chemical package. This 0.9% alone owns just under 50% of the productive land in Brazil. 

- Compared to the 1990s Brazil is using 5x more chemical fertilizers, 8x more agro-chemicals (herbicides, pesticides and fungicides), that are now costing 4x what they did in the 1990s.

- From 1985 to 2019, Brazil lost over 87 million hectares of native vegetation, 70% of this area to the agribusiness GMO-chemical package.

- just under 70% of all water available is used in irrigation (under the agribusiness model).

- the agribusiness model is receiving over 400 billion Reais each year in federal subsidies (talk about agency capture!)

- it varies in different states, but usually below 50 hectares is considered a family farm business (with about 13 billion subsidies each year). However, although very romanticised in Brazil, family agriculture pretty much works as a microcosm of the agribusiness model, with GMOs and chemicals, only on a smaller scale. 

- ecological production tends to be politicized and usually (but not always) lies with peasant farmers linked to agroecology and Via Campesina. 

- I believe the greatest challenges for small ecological farmers are the agencies capture (laws are made for big players), bureaucracies to process and sell directly (the overheads are too high for most small farmers to sort or circle the red tapes), lack of marketing and accounting skills, a sort of rural inferiority complex and pretty much 500 years of primary production set up to please foreign economies.  

                  As I read through this preparing for the podcast, I'm struck by the number of times in the last two weeks I've heard about an "American farm crisis."  I remember the crisis of the 1980s when farmer suicide hotlines became common.  I'm sensing the same kind of hysteria right now from the conventional farm community.

                  These Brazilian statistics are remarkably similar to American and show the squeeze farmers are in.  That one line about 5X more chemical fertilizer and 8X more agro-chemicals is telling.  The main culprit in all the conventional farm crisis reports I've read is higher inputs without commensurate sales income.  

                  An older farmer in our area several years ago told me that in the 1960s when he was a young boy starting on the family farm, you could take a straight truck (single axle) load of cattle to the sale barn and with the proceeds buy the biggest new tractor available from any of the several ag equipment dealers in the county.  Today, that truck load hardly buys a tire.

                  Consider this.  In the past 80 years, the farmgate percentage of the retail dollar has dropped from about 50 percent to about 8 percent.  The USDA budget is now bigger than the farmgate value of all commodities produced in the U.S.  

                  The most important thing farmers need to do is to extricate themselves from everything conventional.  Fertilize with compost (and its many cousins) instead of chemicals.  Quit filling out subsidy reports and start growing something besides what the government gives you money for.  Quit exporting and start direct marketing right here in our own country.

                  If farmers wait for the government to change their circumstances, they're going to go out of business.  Farmers need to quit assuming someone from the government is going to save them.  As Kit Pharo says, be a "Herd Quitter."  In other words, quit following the herd and do something different.  Radically different.

                  Should the USDA exist?

                  Rarely do I see eye-to-eye with these folks, but boy howdy, this one is spot on.  When I find a point of agreement with the other side, I try to applaud and this is one of those cases.

                  If you missed it he essentially excoriates Trump's tariffs for damaging agriculture.  He writes "steep fertilizer costs and low soybean prices have made it hard to make ends meet this year.  We're on the verge of the nation's worst farm crisis since the 1980s.  Mr. Trump's trade wars are a big part of the problem.  They've cost me and other farmers dearly."

                  I guess I should excuse his ungrammatical inversion of "me" in the last sentence--you always supposed to put yourself last.  But he's probably addicted to country music, which constantly makes this ungrammatical inversion and generally uses "me" when "I" should be used.  I think more words rhyme with me than with I.  But that's a rabbit trail. 

                  He goes on to write that "most of mine [soybeans] will sit unsold in a warehouse" compared to the 275 million bushels China is going to buy from Argentina.  And then he goes on to write "much of the media is describing the potential relief payments to American soybean farmers as a 'bailout.'  I see that as a slap in the face.  The money won't come close to making up for the hurt in farm country." 

                  At this point in the piece, I view it as typical conventional whining.  But my goodness howdy the last paragraph is a zinger:  "The government should get out of the American farmers' way and allow market forces to work.  Don't give us handouts.  Let us sell what we grow to the people who want to buy it, at home and abroad." 

                  Be still my beating heart.  Does he want to end subsidies?  End subsidized ethanol that eats up half the American corn crop?  End food regulations that won't let me sell a chicken pot pie to a neighbor?  Or homemade corn bread? 

                  Could it possibly be that all this brouhaha in farm country is making even the Devil want to dance with libertarian angels?  It seems too far out to imagine, but all we can do is look at what the guy says and say "Amen, brother."

                  Do you think the Global Farmer Network would sign on to a FOOD EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION?  Really?

                  The foundation of my information comes from a year or so ago when I had the privilege of speaking at the Ron Paul Institute annual gala.  I'm definitely not a political animal, but I spent that day with several hundred political animals. 

                  Attendees were primarily folks who live, eat, and breathe political theater.  Whenever I get around people  with interests and skills outside my own, I try my best to just ask questions and learn what I can.  I don't spend my days rubbing shoulders with political geeks, so this was a real treat.

                  Here is what I learned.  With today's data collection ability, political geeks can literally pull up any street in the U.S. and by tapping into what a household watches on YouTube, what they look at on social media, and what they buy on Amazon or put on their credit card, you can pinpoint 100 percent what their political persuasion is.

                  In other words, from a computer you can go down 35th Street in Anytown, USA, and know whether number 24 votes liberal or conservative.  Ditto house number 25.  Ditto house number 26.  Ditto house number 27.  In other words, you don't need to ask; you can tell with almost perfect certainty.

                  Once you make that determination--and certainly AI will be able to do that if it doesn't already--you can simply overlay a map on voting districts and draw lines from street to street to carve out liberal and conservative districts.  The accuracy is uncanny and relatively simple to do.

                  If you, like I, have wondered why redistricting is today's front line political battle, this is why.  As a society, we've never been able to determine with such precision how a household will vote.  But with Big Data now, a hovering umbrella can see through our minds and houses to predict our voting position.  This makes redrawing voting districts a fairly simple academic exercise. 

                  All this is happening behind the scenes, quietly and without fanfare, and literally destroying our society's capacity to select leaders.   Engineering outcomes is now the frontier of political selection.  As leaders huddle to redraw voting districts, a diabolical level of censorship is the result--regardless of which side does it.

                  What's the answer?  It seems to me like we should "square up" districts.  The new requirement should be that they be as square and tight as possible.  I'm sure you've seen these districts, drawn-out and linear with little tangents off one side or another.  These lines make a mockery of geographical proximity, voting efficiency, and regional authenticity.  These odd-shaped districts accentuate prejudice and lock thousands out of the political process.  It's hard to care to vote when the outcome can be this precisely orchestrated by entrenched powers.  Perhaps this is the ultimate objective:  an apathetic  populace.

                  As frustrated as we may be about gerrymandered districts, it seems to me like the culprit, or enabler, is Big Data coupled with zero stipulations about geographically square districts.

                  Is it possible to reverse the juggernaut of data collection?

                  As a side note, you do realize Trump doesn't have any money to give.  The U.S. is bankrupt.  The government can only print money, borrow it, or steal it.  So whenever the government says it'll give someone money, it's not like a business that produces something and with earnings for product or services can make payments to various outfits.  The government produces NOTHING. 

                  Okay, with that out of the way, what will be the result of a soybean bailout?  Those farmers won't even think about pivoting to some other enterprise.  They'll cash their millions satisfied that regardless of market conditions, good ol' Uncle Sam will take care of them.  

                  Now here's the insult.  Trump has the unmitigated gall to complain about high cattle prices, reprimanding farmers for being greedy, and then threatening to bring in cheap Argentinian imports to crash cattle prices.  According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump's social media post a week ago, "tariffs on Brazil were the reason cattle ranchers were making more money.  'If it weren't for me, they would be doing just as they've done for the past 20 years--Terrible!'"  What an arrogant idiot. 

                  He went on to post "It would be nice if they (farmers) would understand that, but they also have to get their prices down, because the consumer is a very big factor in my thinking, also!"  Just for the record, as an English major and journalist, I don't trust anyone who puts exclamation points behind their sentences.  It's sensationalism and unprofessional. 

                  But back to soybeans and cows.  If Trump were thinking reasonably, he would realize that the best way to bring U.S. cattle prices down would be to increase the production.  How do you increase production?  You stop growing soybeans and grow grass. 

                  A rational policy would be to quit propping up soybean acreage and let the acreage adjust to prairies.  The high cattle prices are a combination of many things:

1.  The 2.5 year drought in the southern tier of the U.S. liquidated thousands of animals. When the prices bottomed out due to mass liquidation, nobody bailed out the cattle farmers.

2.  Aging farmers.  Many don't want to expand at any price. 

3.  Tariffs--hard to tell the exact impact of that.

4.  Protein-rich diets as a cultural movement:  paleo, carnivore, keto, primal, etc.  That's driving up demand right when there's a shortage.

5.  Processing regulations that don't allow neighbor-to-neighbor commerce, which prohibits community-based commerce and the natural friendly economics of local transactions.

                  Once soybean farmers adjusted to the true market need, their prices would increase which would increase prices of omnivores (pigs and poultry).  As acres returned to grass, cattle numbers would increase, dropping the price.  This is economics 101, folks.   

                  One of the most amazing things in farming is how rich people forget all their common sense that brought them their wealth as soon as they step on a farm.  Their business acumen goes out the window and their brains quit functioning.  The best thing to do is get the federal government out of the market manipulation business.  Period.   

                  Why do rich people in power think they have to micromanage everything or that they even have the capacity to know the solution to every problem?

                  Covering a broad range of subjects both practical and philosophical, this book preserves some of my best writing (I think) and is for sure the most eclectic book I've brought to the public.

                  It's just in time for Christmas and until then, available only at our Polyface gift shop.  After the first of the year, we'll release it to the regular book trade through our friends at Chelsea Green publishing and distribution. 

                  In the past I've kidded Wendell Berry and Allan Nation (founder of the Stockman Grass Farmermagazine) that they cheated when writing books because they'd just wait until they accumulated enough interesting essays, pick the headline of their favorite for the book title, and compile them in a book.  I chided them that when I wrote a book, I started with a blank page and began writing.  Not fair.

                  Well now I've cheated. I guess it's taken me a lot longer to accumulate enough independent essays to cheat than it did them.  Or perhaps you need to get old enough to realize preserving a legacy of essays can only happen in a book; very few people have a good way of saving favorite magazine articles.  If you want it preserved for the ages, bring out the glue and perfect binding and put them in a book.  So I don't know whether I've left integrity or joined wisdom.  Ha!

                  You wonderful regular readers know I'm always loathe to use these posts as an advertisement, but I don't know how easier (and cheaper) to get the word out about this latest contribution to the integrity farming and homesteading space than in this blog.  So in shameless mercantilism and capitalistic greed, this is a come-on for you to add PITCHFORK PULPIT to your collection.  Thank you. 

                  Instead of responding to a question, click HERE to get it.  In fact, go ahead and get a couple for friends who need to hear what you’ve been preaching.

                  I haven't heard a single soybean farmer say "I'm going to do something else."  The chorus coming to Washington sings one thing:  "find us markets, bail us out, build more biodiesel plants, etc."   They're all expecting taxpayers via government policy to keep them in business.  President Trump and Sec. of Ag Brooke Rollins are huddling to figure out whether to give $10 billion or $12 billion to help them out.  What's $2 billion among friends? 

                  As I've listened to the calls crescendo, I'm struck by soybean farmers' inability to consider alternatives.  This cropland is some of the richest in the world--you don't grow soybeans, or corn for that matter, on rangeland.  The best, most fertile soils are where we grow crops. 

                  That means they can grow anything.  Ground that will grow decent crops of soybeans will grow unbelievable amounts of grass, clovers, and forbs.  In fact, all these acres used today to grow soybeans not long ago were the heart of perennial polyculture prairies supporting more nutrition through bison, wolves, elk, prairie chickens, passenger pigeons, bear, and deer.  We've regressed in abundance, not progressed.

                  The deep soul-level reason why soybean farmers can't imagine pivoting is because they've allowed themselves a narrow, regimented identity to what they produce.  Rather than being seen as overall caretakers of a niche of God's creation, we farmers tend to stamp our identity out of the item we produce.  This becomes a mental and emotional straitjacket when markets and circumstances change and reason demands adaptation. 

                  We farmers should get in the habit of giving our vocation first in terms of stewardship rather than through what we grow.  I'm a caretaker or steward of X number of acres; I'm responsible for its health, long-term flourishing and overall resilience FIRST.  After that, yes, I produce this and this and this.

                  But when a farmer introduces himself as "a soybean farmer," it confines the mind with a narrow label.  This is especially acute when we have simultaneous shortages screaming for attention.  Right now, U.S. cattle numbers are the lowest they've been since the 1940s.  The shortage is a result of numerous things:  drought in the bottom half of the country from 2021-2023; an embargo on Mexican imports due to the screw worm; aging and dying farmers exiting the business. 

                  At today's prices, converting soybean acreage to well-managed perennial polyculture prairies could swing profitability form NEGATIVE $200 per acre to a POSITIVE $1,000 per acre.  On a 1,000 acre operation, that's a pretty dramatic shift.  But in order to do that, a farmer needs to view his vocation as an overall steward of land.  Anyone who diminishes farming to a commodity label automatically and inherently reduces options. 

                  We could blame tariffs.  We could blame crop subsidies.  We could blame biofuels subsidies and tax concessions.  We could blame the Chicago Board of Trade, China, Argentina, and U.S. foreign policy.  But blaming doesn't get us out of a rut; only clear-headed alternatives get us out of a rut.  While my heart breaks for these soybean farmers, what I really want to see is someone breaking out of the mob and saying "I'm going to quit soybean farming and go to prehistoric caretaking."   

                  When people ask me what I do, I respond, "I get to massage a little piece of God's creation, and that's a real privilege."  Like all massage, the soreness needs move around.  I need to be ready and willing to move with it.  Which means the more diversity I have in my farming operation, the easier it is to pivot when contexts change.   For the first time in 

American history, our nation imports 20 percent of its food.  That's one in every five bites.  Meanwhile we're in spasms over soybean exports.

                  What other things could soybean farmers grow?

                  While 11 states have outlawed this protocol, California and Massachusetts went a step further and outlawed the sale of pork sourced from piggies born to sows in these despicable gestation crates.  Roughly 40 percent of the industry still uses the crates; many operations have voluntarily remodeled to eliminate them.  But that's not enough for Big Ag. They're trying, through the upcoming (always upcoming) Farm Bill, to stick the federal government's nose in state governance by overturning these laws.

                  At the National Press Club yesterday the organizers asked me to be one of the six speakers and here are my comments: 

                  Polyface farm raises about 800 pastured pigs per year in a habitat that honors their pigness--digging, running, discovering, fresh air, new salad bars--the respect in life creates sacredness in their sacrifice for bacon and pork chops.  A nation uninterested in happy pigs, or honoring the pigness of pigs, soon loses its moral and ethical framework to honor the Tomness of Tom and Maryness of Mary, or how to ensure happy people. 

                  Our culture is in a crisis of trust.  We raise pigs on pasture not because of Prop 12, but because our patrons don't trust factory farming.  If Big Ag thinks it can engender trust by promoting a mechanical inanimate view toward life, it's mistaken.  Life is not inanimate piles of protoplasmic structure to be manipulated however cleverly and obscenely hubris can imagine.

                  But as much as I appreciate our farm's pastured livestock, I want to focus on something different:  the ability of a group to determine its own governance. 

                  The Bill of Rights constrains the federal government from infringing on numerous freedoms.  Animal production systems are not an enumerated purview.  In case we've forgotten, the constitution is silent on most things because the objective was robust experimentation--the 50-state experiment--and putting governance as close to the citizenry as possible. 

                  The reason our nation is in the throes of amplified partisan acrimony is because we continue arrogating regulatory intervention to the federal level.  This creates an unnecessary and unprecedented winner-to-all environment, which raises the stakes on every policy issue to aggressively partisan levels.  If we are ever going to reduce the rage temperature it must start by reducing federal meddling at the state and local level.  Remanding governance to the states does numerous things:

1.  Reduces partisan hostility by lessening the number of people affected by legislation.

2.  Increases diversity by encouraging people to think about how they want to live without demanding everyone else conform.

3.  Allows choice in the marketplace exercised at a level more at human or community scale.

4.  Enables experimentation in marketplace governance easier to reverse or correct due to scale and scope.

5.  Creates a check on industrial/government prejudice against self-governance and local agency in an effort to cater to interests who care not a whit about hog happiness. 

                  Today is day two.  We're meeting with elected officials all day.

                  Is this effort worthwhile?

                  One is an effort to eliminate liability for pesticides and herbicides as long as the EPA says the material is acceptable.  It would be modeled after the vaccine liability exemption worked out by Ronald Reagon and Teddy Kennedy that facilitated skyrocketing vaccine use and mandates.  Big ag is trying to soften the blow to Bayer over glyphosate suits, which have cost the company billions already.  And it's still on the market. 

                  Another is the effort by big ag to prohibit states' ability to regulate commerce within the state.  California and Massachusetts are the first two states to prohibit pork raised from piggies and sows in farrowing crates from being sold in their states.  Right now, pork sold in those two states must be certified compliant with these state animal rights laws.  Big ag says these interfere with interstate commerce and therefore should be prohibited.  The states argue that's what their citizens want and the state should be able to regulate sales within its state. 

                  The 50-state experiment envisioned by our nation's founders can be inconvenient, but letting people control their own food systems keeps it out of the hands of the federal government.  I'll be in Washington D.C. next week with about 100 other farmers lobbying  against this federal usurpation of states' rights.

                  Another fight is brewing in North Carolina, where legislation to outlaw milk herd shares is developing.  Justification is the potential for bird flu to be carried in raw milk.  It's being pushed by Republicans in bed with big ag.  Related issues are also being considered there and jeopardizing small farm viability. 

                  One farm is striking back.  Yesteryear Farm in Shiloh, North Carolina is hosting a North Carolina Food Freedom Festival November 15  from 3-8 p.m.  I'm giving a day to go and meet with legislators and others to bring awareness to these issues and how damaging food prohibitions can be.

                  I don't like to use this blog to publicize events necessarily, but I'm hoping to pack out this event so politicians can see an outpouring of sympathy for food freedom.  Lots of music, games, and entertainment will be in the mix, in addition to my speechifying.  I hope if you can get there, you can.  Here is the link:

                  Why is big ag so afraid of food freedom? 

                  Let's look at the last two weeks:

1.  Charlie Kirk's assassination

2.  Bombing alleged fentanyl boats heading to the U.S.

3.  Copycat (from Kirk's assassin, bullet writing) shootings at ICE.

4.  Acetaminophen (in some 500 brands, most prominently Tylenol) links to autism

5.  National Guard deployed to cities for crime control

6.  National reading studies:  half of Americans functionally illiterate.

7.  AI partners induce psychosis and suicide

8.  Illinois honors student sues public high school for her illiteracy.

9.  RFK Jr. fires and reorganizes ACIP board

10.  Florida stops ALL vaccine mandates

                  I irritated conservative friends a few days ago by disagreeing with Trump's bombing of alleged fentanyl boats.  What happens when the government decides compost-grown tomatoes are dangerous?  Bombing compost piles?  A government that can keep me from ingesting fentanyl and methamphetamine can keep me from ingesting raw milk or homemade charcuterie.

                  As I head downhill in this societal wilderness, I find commonalities in our lostness.  More than 80 percent of first-time illicit drug use occurs in public schools.  We're paying $16,000 per student per year and getting a 50 percent functional illiteracy rate.  And now we have pregnant women jiving on TikTok binging on Tylenol and my taxes are supposed to pay for the consequences of that irresponsible behavior?  And I'm supposed to pay for the dysfunction of failing public schools?  And AI-induced psychosis?  And assassins inspired by "gestapo" and "Nazi" and "Fascists" spewed from the mouths of Godless pagans?

                  How do we find our way home?  I suggest it starts by changing our governmental obligations from care to responsibility.  How do you develop responsible people?  You do it by making them bear the consequences of their decisions.  You don't exercise discernment muscles by make decisions for them or promising to pick up the pieces for bad-decision collateral damage. 

                  My heart breaks for dysfunction, but as terrible as it is, we can't find our way home if we keep wandering without a plan.  So here's a plan.  

1.  Eliminate all government funding for education, from kindergarten to college; no college grants; that drops 80 percent of first-time drug use.  Colleges have to fund themselves.

2.  Eliminate all government health advice; let folks find their own path. Yes, eliminate the Dept. of Health and Human Services; let us find our own way, thank you very much.

3.  Eliminate all government involvement in health care; folks can decide what they want and shop, learn, and share their own findings.  Wouldn't it be neat if TikTok shared various positives and negatives about competing therapies? Think how informed we'd become.

4.  Legalize all drugs; if you mess up your life with drugs, you can suffer the consequences.  No government agency will help you pick up the pieces. No medicare; no medicaid; no doctor licensing; it's all privatized on the free market; no government manipulation, corruption, fraud, and extortion, no prescription licenses.

 5.  Eliminate the IRS and go to a 10 percent flat tax. If 10 percent is good enough for God's tithe, it should be good enough for society.

6.  Cut the federal government by 90 percent; pay off the debt; bring back sound money backed by gold; no more government borrowing, period.  Like a business, government must live within its means.

7.  Eliminate prisons and institute Singapore caning punishment; fast and cheap.

8.  Shut down every foreign military base; bring our boys and girls home.

9.  Food Emancipation Proclamation--let neighbors transact food commerce without asking the government's permission.

10.  Eliminate zoning laws so folks can generate income from their properties without bribing government officials.

11.  Eliminate all government grants, loans, aid, etc.  Foreign and domestic, from agriculture to ammunition.

12.  Extend voting privileges ONLY to folks who pay more to the governnment (taxes) than they receive in benefits; these are the true stakeholders of a culture and the only ones truly invested in its overall functionality.

                  This is not a comprehensive list, but you get the overall drift.  What we need is MARA--Make Americans RESPONSIBLE Again.  How do we do that?  We make ourselves live with the consequences of our decisions.  That's the way home. America was great when government was smaller.  The bigger the government, the smaller we as a people become. 

                  What I see instead are rabbit trails of little tweaks here and there but the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and the sick get sicker and the have nots proliferate because nobody ever told them it's up to them.  Sometimes the best hand up is a swift kick in reality's seat of the pants.  No free lunch.  Make your own destiny.  I'm glad to help you, but pick up your feet if I'm carrying you. God don't make no junk, so quit acting like you're junk.  And government, quit incentivizing junk behavior and junk decisions.  

                  What do you consider the first "downhill way home" path?

                  Bryson Lipscomb called me yesterday to inform me that the state has withdrawn the suit in its entirety.  No courthouse showdown Monday, Sept. 22.  It's all done. 

                  Apparently this blog and other efforts generated enough attention and heat that the  Virginia Department of Health backed off and has decided to not pursue penetrating their PMA model.  This is a fabulous win on our side and we can all thank God for cooler heads to prevail. 

                  The issue here was singular, regardless of any other things you may hear about the farm or other relationships.  As I see it, the issue was that the state of Virginia did not and would not recognize a duly created Private Membership Association. 

                  Nobody needs to like what the farm produces.  Nobody needs to like the farmers.  Nobody needs to like how the farm does things.  I'm not endorsing anything except the right to set up a PMA and operate in the private space.  Certainly one of the most important elements of freedom is the freedom to operate outside the governmental space.

                  So kudos to anyone who helped in this cause and kudos to the government agents who retreated.  Thank you.  One thing we can learn from this whole kerfuffle is that ultimately, all these battles are political.                  

                  For all their innuendos about protecting the public from raw milk, the sickness and hazards to safety engendered by drinking raw milk--it all caved when enough people disagreed. If I really thought raw milk was deadly, I wouldn't back off for any reason.  But the fact that such a deadly public nuisance could be switched to a non-issue shows there was no real heart conviction, no courage, no backbone behind the suit.  It was bureaucracy posing as power, and when the power looked like it was going to be a liability, retreat became easy.

                  When it comes to bodily agency, I think it's paramount to keep our eyes on the real agenda.  Like Congressman Thomas Massie says, I can't disagree more with a flag burner, but I'll defend to the death for the right to burn it.  You can disagree with raw milk.  You can even think a farmer is a scoundrel.  But the right to create an entity that asks for no government protection, no government intervention, and the ability to engage in food commerce without asking the government's permission, is a bedrock of human rights.

                  Let's celebrate.

                  Around the country I'm seeing Private Membership Associations (PMAs) being attacked by government regulators in the newest permutation of the freedom-of-food-choice battle.  We have freedom of choice in the bedroom, bathroom, and womb, but not in the kitchen. 

                  Triple Oaks Farm in Long Island, Virginia is operated by Bryson and Mackenzie Lipscomb.  They started three and a half years ago as a herd share operation but due to its clunkiness upgraded to a PMA about a year ago.  In December, 2024 they received a cease and desist order from the local health department which they ignored but now they've been petitioned for an immediate and permanent injunction by the state.  Bryson is a military veteran who willingly put his life on the line to protect America and is now in a war with his country over the right to sell his farm products.  Every vet should descend on this court battle to support this family. 

                  No attorney will represent them because lawyers can lose their licenses to practice if they dare to defend PMAs.  The Lipscombs will be representing themselves pro se although their PMA documentation was drawn up with the counsel of ProAdvocate, one of the leading PMA developers in America.  In a PMA, members pay a membership fee which then entitles them to the benefits of the PMA.  They operate outside public commerce. They were started in the deep south after 1964 to enable white-only country clubs to prohibit blacks from their golf courses.  They were successful.  These precedents are now being applied to keep government agents from intervening in private food transactions like they were prohibited from enforcing the Civil Rights Act half a century ago.

Plank 15 and 16 of the petition are as follows:

15. Triple Oaks and the Lipscombs produce, provide, sell, offer for sale and stores (sic) milk and milk products without a valid permit issued by the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (VDACS) in violation of 2VACS-531-50.

16.  Triple Oaks and the Lipscombs also offer to sell, sell (sic) barter, trade, or accept goods or services in exchange for unpasteurized, raw milk and milk products intended for human consumption in violation of 2VACS-490-75.

                  Issued July 9 by Jason Miyares, Virginia Attorney General, the petition is titled Shelton, Commissioner of VDH vs. Triple Oaks, LLC et. al.  Put yourself in the Lipscomb's shoes.  How would you like to face down the entire legal apparatus of the state without legal counsel at your side?  Go ahead, think about that for a minute.

                  Wouldn't it be wonderful for 1,000 people to descend on that little county courthouse at 10 a.m. Sept. 22 to let our government know food choice is a basic human right.  The government wants nothing more than to proceed quietly through these deliberations.  If the Lipscombs lose, it will be a significant legal precedent that ALL PMAs are a charade for retail sales.  The right to pursue private contractual agreements, enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, is under attack here and this represents yet another aggressive move by government to steal property and deny food choice.

                  Worst case scenario, the Lipscombs revert to the herd share model.  Isn't this all silly?  Their 300 members have, are, and will continue to get raw milk, regardless of the outcome.  If raw milk is so dangerous, as the petition claims in Plank 29, it should be categorically outlawed.

29.  Consumption of raw, unpasteurized milk or milk products can expose people to harmful pathogens such as campylobacter, cryptosporidium, E. coli, listeria, brucella, and salmonella.  Then it cites CDC reports as evidence.  Right.  The CDC--we all trust Fauci and company, don't we?  What a joke.

                  Notice the state doesn't care a lick about the people procuring these raw milk products.  They can acquire them, eat them, feed them to their kids, give them to neighbors.  The ONLY prohibition is on the farmer who sells them.  Clearly, this is not about food safety; if it were, parents would be enjoined from acquiring these hazardous things and certainly prohibited from feeding them to their children.  The seller is the only one in jeopardy; how handy.  Because the buyers are many; sellers are few.  Much easier to pick off the sellers.

                  Food freedom is the revolution of our day.  In 1776, it was taxes and representation. In 1860 it was federal versus state's rights.  In 1960 it was civil rights.  In 1980 it was home schooling.  Perhaps I'm missing some, but you get the idea.  Today it's food. Next might be health care, but right now, it's an enslaved food system.

                  Are you in?

                  Of course, the problem never was crime; it was 24 year-olds treated like juveniles and a completely lackadaisical view by district attorneys and city council toward crime.  The criminals aren't the problem; the leadership is the problem.  But you have clout in the District of Columbia, so it's fine to intervene.  Thank you. 

                  But Chicago, Baltimore and other cities are not the District of Columbia.  Let them implode.  Few things are as disliked as much as unsolicited advice and help.  You ran on a platform excoriating a meddlesome federal government. 

                  So why do you need to meddle?  Let these dysfunctional cities implode.  Let them collapse.  Send no aid, no federal money, no nothing.  Let them figure out their crime, their water, their sewage, their business regulations on their own.  They'll get real creative when they sink or swim on their own protocols.  

                  If 1,000 people a day die in Chicago murders, it's their problem.  Again, the problem is not crime.  The problem is not too few police.  The problem is bad guys get more concessions than good guys, and that's a problem with leadership and public policy.  If Chicago collapses under its own dysfunctional weight, fine.  

                  Out here in normal America, we don't have enough income to pay the taxes to rescue these cities from their own dysfunction.  They got themselves into their mess; let them get themselves out of it.  That would be a great lesson to folks who still believe taxing, regulating, and bleeding hearts for crime are the way to paradise.

                  We desperately need object lessons for young people and idiots to see what poor governance is and what it does in a city.  As these cities collapse, a lot of people will wonder why and that will stimulate a search for answers.  But if you meddle, no matter what happens, you'll be accused of making things worse.  Don't you have enough headaches without unnecessarily adding more? 

                  The worst that can happen if you just stay away is the cities will accuse you of being disinterested.  That's a lot better than being blamed for atrocities when you meddle.  Often it takes far more courage to let dysfunction run its course than to intervene.  Most of the dysfunctional problems in our country, from federal education to medical care to mandatory social security to food regulations are because some well-intentioned public servant wanted to help. 

                  Federal government help hurts far more than it helps.  President Reagan's famous "I'm here from the government and I'm here to help you" line as the most notorious line in America is still true.  Don't fall into the quagmire.  If you send troops to cities, what's next?  It's a slippery slope, Mr. President; don't overestimate your goodness.  You can't override the animosity and hate from these cities; let dysfunctional leadership fully reap what it sows.

                  When the citizenry in these cities are fed up, they'll elect a different kind of leadership.  That, too, will be an object lesson in good governance.  Be content to let the cycle play out.  Paul Harvey used to say "civilization at its most accelerated pace is agonizingly gradual."  If these cities have devolved into an abyss, let them wallow in it until they evolve to a different understanding.  That's the way to be truly helpful.

                  This is my admonition to Trump.  What do you think?

                  Here is the proposal:

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

REQUEST FOR INTERIM STUDY PROPOSAL

DATE:   6/26/2025

BY REPRESENTATIVE(S):          

Rep. Rob Hall 

TOPIC OF THE PROPOSAL:

 Impact of Food Safety Laws and Regulations on a Healthy Food Supply

EXPLANATORY COMMENTS ON THE SCOPE OF THE STUDY PROPOSAL:

We have a health crisis in our state.  The rates of chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer are at all-time highs and still rising.  One of the root causes of our health crisis is unhealthy food. One of the root causes of unhealthy food is a food safety paradigm that focuses solely on preventing foodborne illness, which incentivizes highly processed and preservative-laden foods, which leads to an increase in chronic diseases.

This study will make the case for a new food safety paradigm with a dual mandate: 1) Managing the acute risks of foodborne illness & 2) Managing the chronic risks of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and other diseases and disorders.  This dual mandate would ensure more natural, healthful food offerings are not preemptively excluded from the marketplace because of misguided food safety laws and regulations.

This study will explore legislative and regulatory changes that would make sense under this dual mandate.  The ultimate goal is a more healthy, happy, and free society where citizens can balance both the acute and chronic risks of their food as they see fit.  Proposal 25-087. 

Folks, this is the kind of thoughtful stuff we need to be encouraging.  He makes a great point that cigarettes are sterile, but not safe.  We have lots of sterile foods that the current one-sided system views as safe, but they are extremely dangerous.  As he says, Oreo cookies are considered safe but raw milk isn't.  He and I agree that an Oreo is a more unsafe food than raw milk. I think lots of folks would concur.

                  What are your top 3 sterile foods that are unsafe?

                  He doesn't charge a dime and does this to commemorate his growing-up hardships in a way that helps others less fortunate.  He's been doing this homespun charity work for decades, to the delight and gratitude of many.  But last week he got a cease and desist order from the Manchester Health Department.

                  City officials say he must have a permit and commercially licensed kitchen even if he's giving his food away.  To his credit, Mowery says he'll continue with his free food charity work; he has no intention to stop what he's been doing. 

                  When he responded to the cease and desist order that way, city officials doubled down and threatened additional cease and desist orders coupled with fines and violations.  Looks like we're heading toward a showdown at the pickle corral.

                  First, I want to publicly thank Mowery for not bowing to Baal.  The "kings of the earth" prowl around every day seeking obeisance, and when someone doesn't bow it's a win for righteousness.  Bless him.

                  Second, realize that this is not a federal or state ordinance; it's a local ordinance.  While I am not a fan of federal government rules, this is why we have a Bill of Rights.  Our country's founders realized that some rights were God-given and not subject to any power putting a lien on them.  A lien is what someone puts on a possession when it's not free and clear; when some debt is still outstanding. 

                  After adopting the Constitution, the founders realized that some locality might take away the right to assemble or bear arms or warrantless search and seizure.  Later, the right to vote was codified, along with civil rights in 1964.  Things were added at the federal level that were so inherent to human freedom and thriving--life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--that our nation guaranteed it at the federal level.

                  This ensured that no local outfit could deny folks these basic human rights--hence, the bill of rights.  As I've promoted a federal FOOD EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION, some folks have said it's overreach and should be done state by state.  That's fine with me, but philosophically, shouldn't being able to grow, can, and give away your own food to friends and needy be a basic human right?

                  Remember, no human right exists if it costs someone else something.  That's why you can't have a right to medical care, food, housing, education, or retirement income.  A basic human right only exists if other humans don't have to pay for it.  I can't have a basic human right that costs someone else anything. 

                  In this case, the freedom to grow, preserve, and give away food doesn't cost anyone else anything.  It's an obvious basic human right.  And if Manchester, New Hampshire can't see it, we need a federal guarantee, a codified additional human right, added to the bill of rights to preclude any lower authority from overreach. The fact that food is now in the crosshairs of bureaucratic tyrants should make us all shudder.  Religion is one thing.  Speech is another.  Right to bear arms is yet another.  But food?  Really?

                  Do you agree with Daniel Mowery's position to defy the local authorities and keep canning and giving?

I received the following email and thought it compelling enough to share.  Normally I would simply comment on it, but this is well written and stands alone in its defense.  Folks, anyone who things we need more government oversight in just about anything is actually a friend of tyranny.  Read and weep.

From: Amie Brunkow
Sent: Tuesday, August 19, 2025 12:37 PM
Subject: Fight for Small Locker being threatened to get inspected pulled for Food Transparency

Dear Mr. Salatin and Everyone at Polyface Farms

My name is Amie Brunkow, and I own and operate Alta Vista Meat Co., a small, female-owned federally inspected locker plant in Kansas. I work hard every day to provide transparency in how food is produced.

I recently became federally inspected, but for the 8 months, while I was still state inspected, I regularly streamed educational livestreams showing our processes and answering consumer questions. These livestreams have been a powerful tool for transparency. They are interactive, educational, and allow me to walk people step by step through what happens when their animals are processed.

In this time, I’ve had one-on-one conversations with dozens of individuals across the country, helping them source meat directly from local farmers. I’ve educated people about mobile butchers, on-farm production and processing, and shown that these options are just as safe — if not safer — than large industrial facilities or even smaller lockers like mine. My journey began as the owner of Brown Kow Farms LLC in Paxico, KS, processing meat birds for on-farm sales. When I couldn’t find a butcher I trusted for my larger ruminant animals, I became that person — and since then I’ve been advocating for education and transparency in our industry. With a B.S. in Biochemistry, I quickly built a large social media following under the name Butcher_with_the_Braid, where I emphasize the science of meat. I’ve gained trust by answering the harder questions consumers have about food safety from a biological perspective, while showing why meat sourced directly from farms is not only safe, but also a higher quality than anything they could buy in a store.

Recently my personal social media account Butcher_with_the_Braid has been directly linked with my business, Alta Vista Meat Co. — and that was the immediate trigger for USDA pushback. Shortly after my business became federally inspected and my online presence more visible, I was told my livestreams had to stop. What makes this even more confusing is that my on-site inspectors have repeatedly told me they don’t care about the livestreams and have not raised objections. Instead, I’ve been informed, but can't verify and am not being provided any documentation of, that a federal inspector outside of our region reported my account and raised concerns to the district office.

Their stated concern is that inspectors cannot appear on livestreams, and that the public should not see what inspectors are doing during their official duties. They have gone as far to state that if I go live again with an inspector present in the facility, they will pull my inspection. But this logic runs directly against the First Amendment. Federal courts have consistently affirmed that citizens have the right to record government officials performing their duties, provided it does not interfere with those duties (Glik v. Cunniffe, Smith v. City of Cumming, Fields v. Philadelphia). Inspectors, like other government employees, have a reduced expectation of privacy when carrying out official responsibilities. Transparency is not a threat — it is a constitutional guarantee.

To say that consumers cannot see inspectors doing their jobs, even peripherally in the background of an educational livestream, undermines both public trust and the very principles of openness our government is meant to uphold. If inspectors are enforcing laws fairly and consistently, then there should be nothing to hide from the public eye.

As you and I both know, industrialization has been the root cause of many food safety concerns for decades. Small, local, transparent operations like mine are part of the solution, not the problem.

However, USDA inspectors are pressuring me to stop livestreaming. Their concern is that inspectors sometimes appear in the background. But here’s the reality:

• There is no FSIS regulation or USDA directive that prohibits livestreaming inside a federally inspected plant.

• In fact, FSIS Directive 5000.9 explicitly acknowledges and encourages the use of video monitoring by establishments.

• The First Amendment protects the right of citizens to record government officials in the course of their duties, so long as it does not interfere with those duties.

This leaves small lockers like mine in a bind. We are told to be transparent and educate consumers — but when we do, we’re silenced under the weight of agency pressure.

As a female-owned small business, I don’t have the lobbying power, the political connections, or the industry clout that the big packers enjoy. My voice, and the voices of small lockers like mine, often get lost. That’s why I’m reaching out to you.

You have spent your life defending food freedom and calling out government overreach. I believe this is another front in that same battle. Consumers deserve transparency. Small processors deserve to educate their communities without fear of retaliation. And the USDA should not be able to quell speech when there is no law to back it up.

I would be honored if you would consider lending your voice to this issue — whether that’s sharing my story, offering advice, or connecting me with others in the food freedom community who can help bring attention to this.

Thank you for your lifelong work in championing liberty, transparency, and the dignity of small producers.

 Is Annie a hero or villain?

                  The staff was gracious beyond belief and highly professional.  The Who's Who attendance from the non-chemical ag community was profound.  Lively discussions, of course, kept the day moving along at breakneck speed.

                  Without divulging names, places, and specifics, the day did confirm for me my greatest concerns about where the healing movement and the classic disruptors in the non-chemical agriculture movement are focusing their attention.  Everyone seems to have a way to take spending from here and spend it over there.  Add millet to crop subsidies to spread farmers' options for other crops and cover crops.                  

                  One idea was a $300 billion school lunch, prison, and military program to start 125,000 new farms.  Another is to take half a trillion from health care and give it to farmers transitioning from chemical to non-chemical techniques.  You can't imagine how many ways the government could re-allocate expenditures and shower them on new projects. 

                  A long-road theme surfaced throughout the day, that this is just a start and we have years of undoing ahead of us.  What also surfaced was the real tension between folks who want to move fast and those who don't want to burn down everything and risk alienating strategic allies.  One idea was to make a bold executive order to ban all non-organic food by 2036.  I rolled me eyes when I heard that one--can you imagine the bureaucratic tyranny over such a mandate? 

                  Oh, and don't forget certifications.  This one versus that one; confused consumers.  Wouldn't it be nice to have one big fat beautiful certification for REGENERATIVE agriculture to replace everything?  I rolled my eyes again.

                  My overall assessment of the day is deep gratitude that conservatives are starting to talk about food.  Maybe we can actually get churches to quit putting fish crackers and gummy bears in their nurseries for snacks.  Calley Means, author of the book Good Energy and confidante of RFK Jr., addressed the group in an opening welcome, noting that Americans' life expectancy is now 6-8 years less than all our western nation counterparts.  He noted that 38 percent of American teens have pre-diabetes.  Some 30 percent of the U.S. budget is spent dealing with metabolic diseases. 

                  Wouldn't it be interesting if the $50 billion budget at the National Institutes of Health were used to get to the bottom of these problems rather than helping pharmaceutical companies get vaccine approval? These are ideas MAHA is floating, and it's truly a breath of fresh air compared to what's been going on for 50 years.  All these discussions are threatened by the upcoming mid-term elections, Means warned.  If Republicans don't make gains in 2026, MAHA is essentially dead in the water; that was the tenor of the day.

                  After listening and discussing for the day, here's my take:  I'm concerned that the wave of interest we're riding on will be completely squandered by factions within our movement arguing over what initiative to implement, what devil to tackle, and who to shower with government largesse. 

                  I come back to my theme:  FOOD EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION.  All this Mickey Mouse argument might be moot if we just let farmers sell to their neighbors without having to ask the government's permission.  Why do we need to fumble around with herd shares to get a glass of raw milk?  Why do we have to exchange unpermitted goods in dark parking lots like some sort of contraband?  Why do we need multi-thousand-dollar Private Membership Associations to exchange homemade canned beef stew? 

                  Instead of arguing over this program or that program, how to spend this billion or that billion, how about we just unleash thousands of farm/food entrepreneurs on their neighborhoods and let market choice determine winners?  While we're at it, we could eliminate ALL government involvement in health care.  The combination of opportunity and responsibility could overflow the American psyche with freedom's healing.  I'll put cures with liberty over cures with bureaucracy any day.

                  Are you pleased or frustrated with the pace and performance of MAHA?

                  I do believe the similarity between America's food system and early American slavery is identical.  The plantation slave owners were equivalent to Tyson and Monsanto/Bayer--same mentality and same objectives.  The government bent over backwards to protect the plantation overlords by passing things like the Fugitive Slave Law.  Abolitionists, perhaps equivalent to many in the MAHA movement today, demanded legislative relief; they cared not a lick about the interests of the plantation fat cats and elevated everything to a moral level.  They wanted this terrible thing outlawed.  Period.  

                  Just try selling a quart of homemade tomato soup to a friend at church and see how many federal agents show up on your doorstep.  Our food system and food choice are shackled by a plethora of regulations just like the slaves' freedom to choose their vocation and livelihood were shackled by regulatory intervention. 

                  The notion that neighbors should be able to engage in unregulated food transactions, however, elicits cries of concerns. "Who's checking farmers to see if their food is safe?"  "Who protects a farmer from liability if there's no licensing compliance?"  "What if somebody gets sick?"  These and a host of other qualms paralyze even entertaining the notion of food choice.

                  The Underground Railroad was a clandestine and largely illegal conduit to shepherd slave escapees from their condition.  Those of us in the food choice business often feel like drug dealers, meeting folks in dark parking lots to transfer some raw milk or unlicensed lard.  I wonder how many hushed conversations occurred among slaves regarding their escape. 

                  And how many responded to the one who said "I'm leaving" with a fearful "but what if you get lost?"  "What if you get killed when the dogs find you?"  "What if you starve or can't find water?"  "What if you can't find work?"  I'm sure a host of fears surfaced during these conversations; most slaves stayed home.  Just like today.

                  But some chose to leave.  And those who participated in the Underground Railroad did not tell them to go back because they might get lost, or get sick, or get killed, or starve to death.  No, they applauded the savvy and burning desire to escape.  This led me to wonder if our modern mentality existed in 1855, would there be an Underground Railroad? 

                  Sad to say, I think it would not have existed.  Back then, the intrepid freedom-loving risk-taking DNA of Americanism had not succumbed to the nanny state.  The USDA had not yet been invented (no thank you, Abraham Lincoln).  Normal people were far more intrepid. 

                  If slavery existed today, the Underground Railroad would be demonized as too dangerous, too risky for the large plantation employers (who will pick the cotton?  who will pick tomatoes?  who will gut chickens?).  The whole concept of fleeing to freedom would be  considered too risky to imagine.  As a culture, we've become scared of our own shadow, and that fear keeps us shackled to government taskmasters.

                  Health care, social security, the Federal Reserve, public education, minimum wage, food regulations--all of these indicate a timid fetal-position culture too freedom fearful to launch initiatives that require risk, personal responsibility, and self-reliance.  We blame the government for every personal and social malady, refusing to look in the mirror and step up to personal agency.  I'm frustrated and sick of it.  Let's grow up.  Let's spit out the government pacifier, potty train ourselves, and launch joyfully into risky freedom.  Let's embrace faith in freedom, not fear in shackles. 

                  I'm thinking maybe I need to write a book titled FOOD EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION to dig deep into these ideas.  Should I?

                  In that sense, Lincoln was not an abolitionist; he was simply trying to break the strength of the Confederacy and break the will of the southern powerful and political elite.  He was trying to say "enough, and I'm going to take away the stranglehold you have on your labor."

                  Many people don't realize that numerous delegations went to the White House prior to the Civil War begging the federal government to just buy out the slaves.  That's what Great Britain did, and numerous other countries.  That averted war.  But the radical abolitionists wouldn't hear of it:  "that's blood money; we aren't paying these southerners for their abhorrent behavior." 

                  Today, we have a similar situation with food.  We have a plantation-owning elite determining what can and cannot be sold in the marketplace.  Our food system is enslaved to a certain kind of thinking.  Coca Cola is safe; raw milk is unsafe.  Canned meat in the grocery store is safe; home canned meat is unsafe.   

                  One of the distractions of the MAHA movement is to become abolitionists, to use newfound political clout to keep chemicals, factory farming, drugged animals and the like from creating any profit for their owners.  Even to eliminate them from the marketplace. The radical abolitionists in 1860 who favored killing 500,000 Americans over a buy-out should give us pause to consider what we demand.

                  As much as you may not like the food slavery we're in, extricating ourselves can be tricky.  That is why I think the idea with the least chance of collateral political and societal damage is a viable Underground Railroad.  We don't need our culture to outlaw factory farming and chemical agriculture; we need only to offer a viable alternative for those who want to escape. 

                  Now, think of the slaves who utilized the Underground Railroad.  Many were illiterate.  They didn't know what they were going to do, where they were going to go . . . except north.  Follow the moss on the trees when you move at night.  They didn't have homes waiting for them, or government benefits.  They launched on their own, risking everything they knew, to escape to freedom.

                  The Food Emancipation Proclamation is like jet fuel for a modern food Underground Railroad.  It says if you want to escape, we will not pursue you.  We will not send tracking dogs to bring you back to your master.  It doesn't attack Monsanto et. al.  It simply offers a choice for those who want to take responsibility for their lives and not be dependent on conventional food masters to be able to do so.

                  Is this scary?  Absolutely.  When a federal bureaucrat doesn't demand licensing, HACCP plans, and meddlesome peering-in, a freed food option carries lots of risk.  But after more than a century of plantation owners controlling the food system, I'd suggest the current system carries lots of risk.  The Children's Health Defense Fund and Moms Across America are only two of many organizations that the current system's risk has germinated.

                  Life is not risk free.  We all choose our risk.  Those who want to stay enslaved to chemical food risk the "government approved" stamp being wrong.  Those who want to patronize an independent transaction take another risk:  what if that farmer or culinary crafter runs a dirty shop?  Take your pick. 

                  Let's acknowledge that the route North is full of unknowns, but freedom is worth it.  What's the alternative?  Try to abolish Tyson?  Try to abolish the USDA?  Really?  How about we give agency to those of us who want to escape American food slavery and see what happens?  If most people are worried about freedom, it will come to nothing.  But what if it opens a floodgate, an Underground Expressway, utilized by millions of Americans yearning for personally chosen food?  The masters of our food system would collapse in the face of freedom and it wouldn't take a war. Adam Smith's "invisible hand of the market" would determine our future, not politics, courts, bureaucrats, or lobbyists. 

                  Do you trust neighbors more than federal government agents? 

                  In other words, we constantly hear about the need to protect the public, but seldom about the need to protect the private.  What if I want to organize a group outside the government's watchdog purview?  Is that not as important an option to protect as what falls under the "public" banner?

                  As tyranny escalates and compliance with every regulation becomes more onerous, many people are searching for a way to escape.  They're becoming "sovereign individuals" and invoking "maritime law," "natural law,"  and other paperwork constructs to create some kind of entity outside governmental control.  

                  While I'm all for circumventing, those of us looking at these options need to understand their fragility.  Case in point is Bear Creek Acres Dairy in Iowa.  The owners have been arrested and are facing criminal charges for selling uninspected canned meat. 

                  The Cliff's Notes particulars are these:  small dairy, multi-generational, have complied with all licensing for many years to make and sell cheese and  milk.  Wanted to make and sell canned meat; mom went through all the government classes but they could not get a license and learned small outfits simply won't get a license.

                  Fed up with all the hoops, they cancelled ALL their licenses and established a Private Membership Association, where customers join the PMA in order to get product.  It's a contract, or agreement, that all members (buyers) sign to join the private association.  They began canning meat and going on with their dairy operation in the new regime.

                  A man came by the farm and asked to buy canned meat; the daughter explained the PMA to him and handed him the paperwork.  A week later he came back; she wasn't there, but dad was.  The man explained the daughter (mother of 6) had given him the paperwork so dad assumed it was signed and the man was a PMA member and sold him the canned meat.  Immediately the father and daughter were arrested under criminal charges.

                  It was clearly a set-up by the government to trap them.  As much as many of us yearn to sell outside government oversight, think what a PMA does:  my employees are missionaries and therefore not subject to workmen's comp, withholding, social security taxes, minimum wage, etc.  We are not a business and therefore are outside much if not all IRS jurisdiction.  Folks, when you tell the IRS, Social Security, Fair Labor agency and every other government outfit to take a hike, they don't like it.  And you'd better have every i dotted and every t crossed ad nauseum to avoid a slip-up. 

                  At the Rogue Food Conference two years ago we had the nation's best PMA gurus on stage to discuss protocols.  As much as they loved PMAs, the bottom line was "if you start a PMA, you've painted a target on your back.  So you'd better do it right." 

                  We are in a war for freedom.  Liberty is under attack in our society.  Those of us who think people should be left alone as long as they don't attack someone need to be strategic and judicious about how we wage our freedom war.  Intentional communities that thumb their noses at building inspectors, zoning, property taxes, sewage regulations and the like need to realize how threatening and infuriating this is to bureaucrats.  Yes, everything I want to do is illegal. 

                  Which is why we must carve out exemptions.  That is why I'm putting all my energy in the FOOD EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION.  All this PMA effort, sovereign individual, maritime law and natural law stuff would be mute if consenting adults exercising freedom of choice for their bodies' microbiome agency didn't need government permission to engage in a food transaction.  For me, this is a winnable argument and if everyone who loves freedom--including the NRA, health consent, homeschoolers, and dope addicts--would sign onto this idea, we'd get way farther faster. If someone has a better idea, I'm all ears.

                  Can you think of a better approach?

                  But after the post on Friday and seeing the comments, I realized this one needs a bit more fleshing out.  I try to keep all my posts within a less-than-5-minute read; that means sometimes nuances get missed in the cryptic post. 

                  I don't think for a minute the inability to listen before telling is uniquely American; or even Western, for that matter.  I think it's human nature.  However, wealth does create an inordinate capacity to help. Because of that, wealth puts a greater burden on the philanthropist because the aid can be extremely detrimental.  This is the burden of helping.                  

                  The Apostle Paul went to Macedonia because, in his vision, they asked him to come.  My brother, who served in New Tribes Mission in Indonesia for many years, said the mission had a policy of only going to tribes that asked them to come.  Help is a two way street.  You can't help when someone spurns your help.  Or when you refuse to ask what people need. 

                  For example, another story Pete Turner told in this podcast I guested on was how an Iraqi governor begged the military to quit giving stuff to the farmers because it created fights.  He said all his governing time suddenly was taken up by feuding farmers who accused beneficiaries of American infrastructure of being unfairly enriched.  He begged to be the one to dispense the goods because he knew who the workers were who could leverage things and who the lazies were who wouldn't use it.  And a tractor?  Terrible--people kill over that. When he wrote his report to change the help conduit to the governor, he said his American superiors spat on the idea because an Iraqi would be the one making decisions.   I know enough about these kinds of things to know, too, how much governors in these situations hoard and then sell gifts like this.

                  Incumbent on helpers is the responsibility to invest enough in the situation to know what is helpful.  Giving advice or even gifts can be liberating if done with all parties mutually respected, heard, humble, and seeking.  I'm certainly deeply appreciative of gifts I've been given, but the best ones came AFTER the giver asked "would this help you?"

                  For the record, this discussion is not about conflict and war.  This is about how a person or nation shows itself friendly.  Most of the time, the friendliest thing you can do is let people mind their own business by keeping your nose out of their affairs.  Period. 

                  But sometimes we have expertise, tools, or money that can help and we should be big hearted to offer, but only within mutually agreeable terms.  I was speaking at a conference a few years back and sat down at a banquet table next to a guy who loudly announced:  "I hate Christians."  Seated next to him, I didn't argue.  I simply asked why.  He had just returned from a month of filming work in Africa and he explained that missionaries consistently brought containers of clothes to the impoverished tribal people.

                  All this free material displaced local and indigenous business people, who then turned their entrepreneurial spirit into being warlords.  They just changed their business from positive to extortion.  This is the problem with government subsidies, welfare, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, public education, subsidized universities, housing, student loans--the whole nanny state paradigm that assumes people are too stupid to take care of themselves.  By taking responsibility away from people, you make them irresponsible.

                  Even Jesus asked the blind beggar:  "what would you like me to do?"  It seemed obvious, but Jesus waited for the answer:  "to make me see."  On our own farm team, we've learned not to assume what someone wants for help.  Some people like me don't want to make a lot of money.  We have other objectives. I'd be happy for half pay if government bureaucrats would quit meddling in everything I'd like to do.  You can't pee without permission.  But that's another rant for another day.  All the bureaucrats assume without their help we'd all be poisoned, poor, or pathetic.

                  One other issue here:  help cannot be financed by violence or extortion.  That means taxes can never be the financial source of credible help.  Ever.  Honest help cannot be financed by coercion; it must be independent voluntary charity.

                  Who or what helped you in a time of need that honors credible help criteria--mutual consent and no coercion from others?

                  The upshot of his career was this:  American help was bad, not good.  Well intended, to be sure, but completely misguided.  Two poignant lines stand out:

                  1.  You can't improve the condition of someone when you refuse to understand their situation.

                  2.  We'd prescribe the problem and solution before we even arrived on scene.  We predetermined the problem and already had the answer. 

                  Pete said the overall mentality of the U.S. advisors from the military, USAID, and USDA was that these farmers were stupid.  In a couple of illustrative stories, the U.S. folks decided the farmers needed greenhouses but assumed they were unfamiliar with plastic.  Pete took a short helicopter ride to survey the countryside and saw miles of plastic strategically placed on the ground to channel water to gardens and orchard trees.  They definitely new about plastic. 

                  In another, American advisors devised all sorts of equipment and schemes to harvest pomegranates.  The farmers said there was no such thing as a crop so big their families and extended relatives couldn't harvest it.  "We didn't even know how to communicate with them," Pete said.  One recurring problem was failure to understand a theocracy.  When clerics determine practice, Americans don't have a place mentally or politically to go appreciate religion-based requirements.

                  I won't go into all the conversation, but you get the drift.  I pointed out to Pete that this kind of arrogance and condescension did not start in Bosnia, Afghanistan, or Iraq, or even with the U.S. military.  I'm reminded of my hour-long visit decades ago with George Wythe during a wonderful visit to Williamsburg.  Wythe was Thomas Jefferson's professor at William and Mary.  A costumed period-player, this modern day incarnation was about as close as anyone can get to the thinking of the day.

                  I asked him about the Natives and he replied quickly:  "they're just savages, uncivilized barbarians."  When I countered that the Natives had language, treaties, councils, hierarchy, religion and amazing canoes, he replied "but they don't wear powdered wigs, drive stage coaches, or know parliamentary procedure."  I argued that they had talking sticks, peace pipes, and tribal councils toward consensus.  After much thought, and with a twinkle in his eye, he resigned himself to this:  "history may prove me wrong, but that's what I think."

                  Methinks history has proven him wrong, but this kind of disrespect and dishonor toward the Natives permeated American thought and is still expressed in how "we help people."  The notion of help is a euphemism for "I have it figured out and you're stupid."  

                  My prayer is that I be humble enough and charitable enough to respect and honor people who think differently.  Can we help each other?  Of course. And we should.  But don't cancel, censor, demean and name call in the process.  I'm embarrassed and apologetic over this continuing arrogance.   

                  Why do we tend to tell rather than listen? 

                  Have you been to a rogue food conference?  John Moody and I launched these back in February 2020 to showcase farmers who bucked compliance and successfully implemented circumvention instead.  We've held two of these per year, moving them around the country to enable more people to attend in their backyards.                  

                  They are like drinking out of a freedom fire hose.  The movement is growing with more and more farmers taking ideas and implementing them to skirt malicious insane corrupt regulations.  When tyranny progresses to a certain point, circumventing becomes easier than compliance.

                  Generally, the models being used are mechanisms that keep the transaction from being legally "in commerce."  How do you transact food business without it being a legal "sale?"  This and numerous other models are the backbone of the Rogue Food Conference. 

                  The next one is at Aberlin Springs agri-community near Cincinnati Sept. 25-27, with the main event on Saturday, the 27th when all these luminaries will be there.  A soft kick-off starts Thursday with a tour of Farm on Central, where Michael Kilpatrick's seven-figure urban Private Membership Association has had both success and now intense government harassment.  

                  Friday features workshops and a tour of Aberlin Springs agri-community, brain child of Leslie Aberlin, who created an integrated residential-farming community model to save her family's farm from development.  This is currently one of the most successful agri-hoods in America and she'll explain their successes and failures in launching this novel approach to shared-responsibility living.

                  I'll be speaking along with John Moody, co-founder, and food activist Max Kaine.  Both of those guys, I can attest, could be stand-up comedians.  So could Congressman Thomas Massie.  I guarantee you tons of side-splitting laughter in a group that loves a good time rather than bureaucratic-induced bad times. 

                  This might be the strongest line-up of presenters and schedule we've ever had and I hope you'll join me.  If you've ever wanted to know if Americanism's liberty is alive anywhere, this is the place to confirm it still burns bright in the hearts of some. 

                  Here is the link to learn more and get tickets ROGUE FOOD ABERLIN SPRINGS  Thank you. 

                  Have you ever felt like "everything I want to do is illegal?"

                  While the new decisions have some good points, they're kind of like moving around the deck chairs on the Titanic.  Here are the four pillars of the new policy:

                  1.  downsize USDA to match finances (15,000 employees took early retirement)

                  2.  move USDA offices to 5 cities besides Washington D.C.:  Kansas City, Fort Collins, Salt Lake City, Indianapolis, Raleigh

                  3.  consolidate redundant support functions

                  4.  eliminate management layers and bureaucracy

                  Did you know the USDA has the largest firefighting contingency?  I wonder if they'll release the chainsaws and chippers to turn all that fire fuel into compostable biomass to eliminate all chemical fertilizer in the nation by going to composting?  Not on your life.

                  The big push right now is to exempt all chemical companies from product liability as long as the pesticide, herbicide, insecticide is endorsed by the EPA.  This will do for the chemical companies what vaccine liability protection did for the vaccine industry.  The conservatives and Republicans are lining up behind this effort.  Anything to protect the ag-industrial complex, which is far more powerful than the pharmaceutical complex.

                  The big news surrounding all these initiatives is that the U.S. now has deals to ship beef to Australia, Ireland, and the UK.  Have you been following the U.S. beef shortage story lately?  And goodness, I've been to Australia 16 times.  They don't have enough population to eat half the beef they produce.  Why in the world do we need to be shipping beef to Australia?  And why would they buy it?  None of this makes sense.

                  Unless those countries have a conspiracy to eliminate their domestic cattle industry, I can't imagine why this new freedom to export will result in any additional sales.  And that actually makes sense.  Get somebody to agree to buy our stuff knowing they won't buy our stuff so we can put out press releases touting our good deeds that really don't amount to anything but hot air.  Now that makes sense.

                  This is all much ado about nothing.  Let's imagine some initiatives that would really accomplish something:

                  1.  A FOOD EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION so a producer and buyer could engage in a food transaction without asking the USDA for permission.

                  2.  A famer who substitutes compost for chemical fertilizer gets a tax break. 

                  3.  SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) pays for no ultra-processed food. 

                  4.  The school lunch program buys only compost-grown whole foods.

                  5.  All food safety regulations move to empirical benchmarking using infrared camera technology to eliminate scratch and sniff politics and subjectivity.

                  6.  Legalize surface runoff farm ponds and prohibit aquifer-sourced irrigation.

                  What is one initiative you'd like to see from Rollins that would indicate true change at the USDA (besides eliminating it).

                  How do you leverage the juvenile growth spurt in grass?  How do you feed earthworms and build soil with on-site material?  And one of the biggest ones:  how do you capture manure and urine generated by grazing animalss? 

                  As we began moving cows from paddock to paddock with his portable electric fencing system, he saw a desperate need to mate portable shade for the herd's comfort and especially to spread pasture droppings around.  On hot summer days, animals, like people, look for shade.  Historically, this means trees.

                  But trees are not everywhere and trees don't disperse the fertility.  They instead offer campsites for cows, concentrating the droppings instead of spreading them, and turn into incubators for parasites and pathogenic organisms.  Besides, the deep-rooted trees don't need the manure; the pasture needs the benefit of animal droppings.

                  Thus began a project to create a shademobile that could act like a portable tree.  As early as 1820 John Taylor of Caroline, a friend and neighbor of Thomas Jefferson's, in his book Arator mentioned the need for an "ambulatory shade structure" for cows to strategically place their droppings in the field.  But no one had done it until Dad built one.

                  He found a burned-out 50-foot mobile home, towed it to the farm, and began retrofitting it into a 20 foot wide by 50 foot long tricycle shademobile.  Big enough for about 100 head of cattle, it literally drove our fertility engine.  In those days, with poor soils and lots of brambles and woody weeds, the results were dramatic.  We could park that thing on some Devil's Shoe String and the next year that rectangle was solid white clover.  No seed; just heavy impaction and manure. 

                  The green rectangles had a 5-year effect and began transforming our worn-out pastures into lush vegetation.  For many years that shademobile sheltered the cows and enabled us to strategically place their droppings where they were needed most.  The shade also reduced ammonia vaporization from urine and manure.

                  Over the years, however, that rigid 50x20 design became problematic because it was too big to go down tree-lined farm lanes and certainly impossible to take down a public road.  When Polyface began renting nearby properties in the early 1990s, as part of our ongoing expansion, we needed something that could be transported down a public road. 

                  At Polyface, we began experimenting with smaller models on retrofitted and extended hay wagon chassis.  We've built several and could hook them together to accommodate a larger herd.  But hay wagons are hard to tow down the road and the knock-down to 8 ft. and subsequent re-furling of the shade cloth canopy takes a couple of people and some time.  They work, but not efficiently enough to say "we've arrived."

                  Around the dinner table, then, we brainstormed many ideas.  One was a light conduit grid held aloft by helium weather balloons.  In typical brainstorm-running humor, we imagined attaching it to a cow.  Wherever she walked, that's where the shade would be. 

                  Currently, we are working with a fellow in Missouri who has designed a glorified umbrella.  It works just like an umbrella with a center pedestal and crank-up tension.  He's built several and we have Gen1, Gen2, and Gen3; a total of 3 prototypes we are using in the field to test functionality and durability.

                  We don't know if this is the optimal design.  We've discussed rigid inflatables and horizontally collapsible trusses.  It's all on the table, but we believe in the next couple of years we'll arrive at an affordable, efficient, durable model to take dad's original concept to the next level.  

                  The bottom line is this:  at Polyface, we never stop refining and innovating in order to do what is right better.  Our commitment is to come alongside biological processes and enhance them.  Conventional industrial agriculture cares not a whit about natural biological processes.  It views all life as a mechanical issue.

                  At Polyface, we view life as fundamentally biological.  Our mechanics are not supposed to override biology with disrespect, but caress ecological needs with our ingenuity.  This brings inherent in-situ abundance and immunological vibrancy.  Be assured your continued interest and patronage enable our ongoing innovations into the future.  Thank you.

                  How do Americans think about food?  Answer:  most don't.  This is quite a revelation.  In our house, during the summer we think about what vegetables and fruit (apples) to grow or buy in bulk to squirrel away for winter.  During the growing season we look at what's available in the garden or on the trees and plan meals around availability. 

                  We (wife Teresa in our household case) write out menus a week in advance based on who's here for dinner, what's available in the garden and freezer, and our schedule (is it a busy day or a not-so-busy day?).  When we butcher stewing hens, we put half a dozen in a big roaster pan and at 350 degrees for 4 hours they are as tender as anything.  We pick the meat off, save the broth, and freeze the meat in quart freezer containers.  Precooked and ready for a casserole on a hectic day--ultimate convenience. 

                  Other surveys indicate that more than half of Americans at 4 p.m. have no clue what they're going to eat for dinner.  Nearly a quarter of all food consumed in America is eaten in automobiles.  We are a culture that simply does not think about food.  This is not good.  When food is relegated to life's footnote, our life's essay falters. 

                  One of the themes in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is constant mental activity.  In his imagined world of baby-incubators and mental capacity manipulation, the goal of society and government was to keep people occupied with entertainment and games to eliminate thinking.  Thoughtfulness makes you engage with the profound questions of life.  

                  Huxley imagined constant theater, entertainment, and sex.  He did not foresee the computer, TikTok, YouTube and the ubiquitous in-pocket mental occupation of the smart phone.  But in principle, we've arrived at what Huxley imagined:  a programmable work force pre-occupied with mental stimulation and no room to contemplate. 

                  When we look at cultural crises, I submit that immigration, economy, health, and teen suicide are not as important as the fact that most Americans literally do not think about food.  It's not on their to-do list, not on their to-find list, and not on their to-know list.  Food in our culture is a distraction from life. 

                  People who struggle with food addiction like the morbidly obese as well as the ones who struggle with food abhorrence like anorexia sufferers actually don't think about food.  They have all sorts of mental and spiritual issues in which food is an unfortunate bystander but becomes a tool in dysfunctional existence. 

                  Finding healthy provenance, meal planning, cooking from scratch all take mental energy.  You can't see food as a sidelight of your life.  Eating should be intentional and the product of vetting, sleuthing, knowledge, scheduling, and prioritization.  It can't be just a comma in the sentence of life.

                  Our nation has numerous issues we define as crises:  cost of housing, pharmaceutical dependency, mistrust of virtually all institutions, government spending.  With all the pundits  op-eding about these things, when will one deal with how little food occupies the mind of the average American?  We buy shiny bright objects and complain about the price of food.  We go to Disneyland vacations and complain about the availability of healthy food.

                  Healthy food is definitely not as expensive as ultra--processed food.   Intellectual contradictions are profound.  In the Pew survey, 90 percent of Americans believe home cooking is much healthier than take-out or delivery.  If people actually acted on what they believe, Door Dash and UberEats would not exist.  Talk about expensive.  Clearly we believe one thing but act differently.  This is intellectually contradictory.

                  In our home, we don't have a TV.  We don't have a smartphone.  We don't have Instagram.  Food occupies a lot of our discussion, planning, and actual daily work.  Unless and until folks prioritize food--actually think about it . . . a lot--we will continue to blame other things for our problems.  Single ingredient and scratch cooking have never been easier, but never as profoundly neglected as in modern day America.

                  How do we get people to think about food?

                  The biggest error I've ever made in predictions was 30 years ago when I routinely told media interviewers that local food and eventually Michelle's White House garden and the "know your farmer, know your food" movement were ushering in a new domestic culinary era.  I predicted that within 30 years the local food and relational provenance themes would drive Americans into their kitchens in droves.

                  We'd be cooking from scratch, from locally sourced single ingredients, yadda, yadda, yadda.  I couldn't have been more wrong.  I was 180 degrees wrong.  Instead, we have Hot Pockets, Lunchables, and 75 percent of food Americans eat is ultra-processed.  Cooking from scratch has never been easier.  We have ice cream makers, bread makers, timed bake, Instapots, crock pots, blenders, slicers, dicers and every techno-glitzy culinary contraption you can imagine.  But we've never been this profoundly separated from participatory provenance. 

                  Why?  TikTok cultures and Instagram addicts don't have time for domestic culinary arts.  We don't have patience to cook.  Kitchens can't compete with gaming, gambling, and going.  Our frenetic frenzied hurried harried pace embraces Aldus Huxley's Brave New World, where the number one fear is being alone.  Everything is about efficiency and constant activity.  That world is here. 

                  Those of us in the local clean food movement have been preaching "get in your kitchen" for decades now and to no avail.  Convenience food overtook the American food system like a tsunami.  Here's my revelation:  quit preaching that sermon.               

                  Instead, let's embrace convenience foods, but let's discuss how to have GOOD, NUTRITIOUS convenience foods.  In other words, the convenience horse has already left the stable.  We aren't going to catch it or pull it back.  What we want to do is ride it to a good place and not off a cliff.

                  The MAHA movement has addressed and exposed the devastating results of a convenience food culture that laces all this processed food with 10,000 questionable additives from industrial sources.  Full of antibiotics, pesticides, herbicides and devoid of nutrition, this debauched processed food system fills our hospitals with its results.  

                  What we desperately need right now is to open the flood gates of GOOD convenience food.  A chicken pot pie does not require monosodium glutamate (MSG) to be tasty.  It simply requires good ingredients.  So how do we flood the market with authentic convenience food?

                  My answer:  A FOOD EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION.  If two people exercising freedom of choice as consenting adults want to engage in a voluntary food transaction, they should not have to solicit government permission.  Period and amen.  You and I should have agency over our microbiome.

                  Unshackling our enslaved food and farming sector from the plethora of industrially-scaled food regulations would enable thousands upon thousands of entrepreneurial farmers and their culinary craft sidekicks to bring choice to the table.  Eaters don't have choice at WalMart--it's different labels on the same stuff from the same processing plant.  Where's Aunt Alice's chicken pot pie?  Uncle Harry's homemade summer sausage? 

                  Historically normal food is illegal to sell in America.  That's a fact.  Our food system is enslaved by scale-prejudicial licenses that criminalize the sustenance that fed generations for millenia.  I'm not an abolitionist asking to prohibit Monsanto and glyphosate and Tyson.  I am demanding a functional Underground Railroad to enable people who want to escape the shackles of the industrial system to be able to do so.

                  We must yield to the convenience food culture.  But in doing so, we must launch a new option: GOOD convenience food.  That won't come from Nestle's or Kelloggs and their repurposed tobacco company laboratory cohorts.  It'll come from thousands of neighbor-minded producers and kitchen crafters who care more about their community than New York's bankers.  

                  Are you in?

                  I'm tired of working hard every day and having half my income confiscated to give people too lazy to work free medical, free food, and free housing.  Enough already.

                  I propose a new movement to augment the other Make America whatevers and we have a MAKE AMERICA WORK AGAIN initiative. 

                  This brouhaha to protect farmers and hotels from a dragnet scooping up illegals does not indicate a problem with growing our food or making beds.  It's a glaring indictment of our entitlement culture that rewards people who refuse to contribute to their own welfare. 

                  What's the cure?  At the risk of sounding heartless, we need to eliminate ALL public welfare and transfer payments.  Yes, every single one, from Medicaid to food stamps to basic welfare.  

                  What is more heartless?  Rounding up hard working illegals who have picked tomatoes and cleaned toilets in hotels for many years, showing up to work every day, paying taxes and earning their keep?  Or kicking lazies off their government sugar daddy? I suggest rounding up hard working illegals is far more heartless and insane than demanding the rest of us support lazies.

                  Offering society an exit ramp from work is moral and ethical debauchery, and this currrent hand wringing about how to make sure chickens get butchered and hotel beds get made indicates a profound unwillingness to confront the real problem.  The real problem is not that we're going to have dirty laundry and starve to death.  The real problem is we've raised millions upon millions of people who think they can go through life without personal responsibility.

                  Enabling such freeloading isn't fair to the lazies because they never grow up and realize what responsibility means.  It isn't fair to those of us who work hard who see half our income confiscated through taxation to pay for the lazies.  And it isn't fair to entrepreneurs and business people who have to depend on non-neighbors to get things done.

                  In all this tension, I have yet to hear one person say "maybe if America quit paying people not to work, more Americans might suddenly find a work bone in their skeleton."  No, that's inconvenient.  It's considered unloving.

                  Let me tell you what's unloving:  encouraging irresponsibility and laziness, financed by people working their tails off to provide for their own families and then drug into the financial ditch trying to pay for families too lazy to work.  The Make America Great Again slogan hearkens back to a time when folks didn't have public assistance, when no safety nets meant everyone had to buck up to their obligations.  You can't be MAGA when you pay people unwilling to work.   

                  What about those unable to work?  That's where philanthropy comes in.  For those truly in need, plenty of us would contribute charitably, especially if taxes were cut so we could keep a little more of our hard earned money.  The fact that this discussion can't be had in the public square shows just how debauched our nation has become.  This should be front and center in policy worker discussions.  Not only does it not exist; it seems taboo to even suggest.

                  Why is it taboo to suggest MAKE AMERICA WORK AGAIN?

                  I cry because I'm grateful to have been born in America.  For all its warts and bumps, it's the most freedom-minded nation on earth; it's in our DNA.  If you travel around the world and say difficult things where no Bill of Rights exists, you find out very quickly what a liberty-minded DNA means. 

                  I cry because our military is used for so many horrible things.  From the CIA subverting and conniving on foreign soil to foment discontent and agitate for cultural change to meddling in foreign bases all over the world.  Bring 'em home and let's hoe our own garden.

                  I cry because the might of the U.S. is used to encourage other countries with more qualms to use our level of chemicals, food additives, vaccines, and drugs.

                  I cry because I've been blessed with a noble, sacred, righteous mission building soil, encouraging earthworms, and honoring the pigness of pigs.  Few people get to viscerally act out their heart's yearning this practically and interactively.

                  I cry because the founders of this country, for all their prejudices and faults, envisioned a tiny federal government and citizen-led policies but over the years this idea has eroded into a top heavy bureaucratic tyrannical burdensome federal government.

                  I cry because our children who used to know how to grow vegetables, split wood, and shoot guns grow up on screens without self-worth because they aren't needed and don't know how to do important practical tasks. 

                  I cry because the freedoms I enjoy were purchased by people who answered the call to defend liberty, many paying with their lives.  My debt to them can never be repaid, but I can bow my head and say "thank you." 

                  I cry because half my income is taxed away to support lazy good-for-nothings who milk the public teat and will cry for more until they destroy our nation.

                  I cry because presidents like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Joe Biden added top-down federal market and financial intervention, stealing hard-earned money by making it worthless through inflation.

                  I cry because even though I love the farmland I own, I actually don't own it because if I fail to pay my property taxes the government can confiscate it so I'm on a never-ending treadmill to pay the government for the right to keep using the land I bought and worked.

                  I cry because the most powerful people in our society think I'm a bioterrorist, starvation advocate, and Typhoid Mary because I refuse to adhere to the vaccine, pharmaceutical, factory farm, chemical fertilizer, Genetically Modified Organism mentality.

                  I cry because I'm excited about tomorrow's opportunities but afraid they'll vanish due to societal dysfunction. 

                  I cry because I'm old enough to know the pain of failure and exhilaration of success, knowing how many people want to be spared pain on their way to gain and feeling exasperated that they feel entitled to privileges I've spent a lifetime finding. 

                  Do you cry, and if so, why?

                  Darren Doherty is unquestionably the foremost landscape planner in the world.  He's done projects--some massive--in 40 countries around the world and spent a lifetime studying landscapes and helping farmers leverage them, regardless of rainfall, climate, and topography.

                  His Regrarians platform is one of the most cutting edge landscape design repositories in the world.  He's one of my significant mentors in how to think about solving erosion, water storage, access engineering (lanes) and integrating ecologies on a property. 

                  This summer he's coming to Polyface to do a 4-day intensive seminar.  He was here last year for the Stockman Grass Farmer gathering and wowed people with his overlays.  Did you know you can plug in a piece of land, from one acre to 10,000, and get the actual annual run-off from that area?  

                  What he does is show you how to use space-age topographical, geological, and hydrological overlays to literally build out ponds, roads, woods, pastures and infrastructure and then see what it does. What happens if I put this pond here instead of there?  How much water can I expect to collect from that hillside?  Where would the ideal pond be located?  What's the ideal spot for frost-free berry bushes or apple trees?

                  Yes, this is high tech, space age stuff, but the amount of information and computational ability available is beyond astounding.  The problem is we don't know how to use it, to tap into these incredible resources.

                  What if I build my cow shed here instead of there?  You can literally watch the rain come down, see the runoff, and determine to the inch how a building will affect hydrology.  That's pretty cool.  It's like watching your property come to life in front of your eyes, to be able to offer numerous scenarios and see what affect they have on the landscape.

                  Okay, here's the commercial part:  Darren is coming to Polyface to do a 4-day seminar on these techniques and tools Aug. 25-28.  He's limiting the group in size in order to make sure everyone gets full-on attention.  The idea is to get you to bring your own computer and create your projects, to learn about your land, while he's over your shoulder coaching you on the software.  We'll use our farm for some field work exercises.

                  My mentor Allan Nation used to say "the most consistent guaranteed return on investment is information."  People who know things that others don't always move to the head of their class, and this is one of those times.  I can think of few things as worthy of my unconditional endorsement as any Regrarians intensive course.

                  You can see more about it and register  at https://www.regrarians.org/rexi-polyface-2025

                  Okay, somebody in my vast universe (ha!) of readers must have encountered Darren somewhere--what did you think?

                  Right now, my neighbor can't buy a pound of sausage from me unless the pig leaves my farm, goes up the interstate, out of the county, to a federally inspected processing facility, and then I re-import the meat back to my farm.  Right now, not a single pound of sausage, T-bone steak, or lamb chop can be sold in our county without being exported outside the county to a federally inspected processing plant and re-imported.

                  Furthermore, if I want to make and sell lard to a neighbor, it's illegal.  At most farmers' markets, you can't slice a watermelon to give a taste to a customer--that's food manufacturing and illegal.  I can't make a quiche or chicken pot pie and sell it to a neighbor without a zoning special use permit for a certified kitchen and a plethora of licenses including bathroom and septic field even if the kitchen is 20 feet from my back door.

                  These are absurd hurdles that deter at best and prohibit at worst the access of entrepreneurial prototype food innovators (including both farming and culinary) from accessing neighbors with provenance. I'm not asking for unfettered access to WalMart or the export trade; I'm not an abolitionist asking to outlaw Monsanto and glyphosate; I'm asking for a functional underground railroad for people who want to exit the government-industrial-chemical oligarchical food and farm shackles.

                  Amazingly, most Americans right now don't want this because they're paranoid of unsafe food from unregulated sources.  Here are some Socratic questions for folks to ponder, to break through this logjam.

                  1.  Are farmers valuable in a society? 

                  2.  How can a society show it values farmers?

                  3.  Is affordable, authentic food valuable in a society?

                  4.  What are the biggest reasons why American food is poor?                 

                  5.  Do you trust the government to make our food system better?

                  6.  If not, how would you make it better?

                  I've got a slew more of these types of questions, but I think you get the drift.  The problem is that the local, clean food side has been preaching when we should be asking questions.  I'm learning a lot from Callie Means, RFK Jr.'s right-hand man in the MAHA movement, whose mantra is "curiosity."  Did you know not a single vaccine in America has been subjected to a placebo trial?  Wouldn't you think the pharmaceutical industry would be curious to run this most basic of all scientific studies?  But no, if you ask, you're vilified as an anti-vaxxer, murderer, or worse.                   

                  As a nation, are we too TikToked, celebrity focused, sports addicted, and social media stupored to be curious enough to solve the most basic dysfunctions of our day?

                  The single most common pushback is ALWAYS about safety.  What if someone gets bad food?  It reminds me of my conversation more than a decade ago in a break during a Virginia General Assembly hearing about food freedom.  Our state Commissioner of Agriculture at the time, J. Carlton Courter, came over to me during the break and nicely admonished:  "Joel, we can't give people freedom to choose their food.  We couldn't build enough hospitals fast enough to handle all the sick people from bad food."

                  I've learned to always take folks in good faith.  In other words, I don't think he hates small farmers, freedom, or food choice per se.  He truly believed he was in the right to fear what he considered a Wild West in food commerce.  It's reminiscent of the education establishment 40 years ago writing a plethora of op ed pieces for major media claiming that if we allowed this aberrant home schooling movement to continue, we couldn't build enough hospital psych wards fast enough to deal with the unsocialized kids.

                  Of course, not only was that wrong-headed, but it has now proved, 40 years later, to be the opposite of reality.  The teen suicide rate, which is through the roof, is largely a product of institutional educational social pressures, screen logistics, and dysfunctional parenting.  The homeschool community is immune, for the most part, from these trends. So the demon they fingered is actually the cure for their own demon.  Funny how that works.

                  Kind of like folks who start drinking raw milk and feel better.  Or shift from veganism to carnivore and suddenly get healthy.  

                  When the naysayers jump on bad food from unwitting eaters buying directly from farmers, they act like the food buying habits in America today are as healthy and pure as the wind driven snow.  If Bobby Kennedy's MAHA team has uncovered anything in the last 100 days, it's how deplorable America's government-sanctioned, certified, and approved food system is.  For anyone, at this juncture of information, to say with a straight face that buying food directly from a producer is more dangerous than buying  from Tyson, Nestle, and Kellogg's is unmitigated stupidity.

                  The fact is our hospitals are already filled.  We're already short of beds for people eating government food.  I think it's time to start differentiating freedom food from government food.  When the federal government approves food, the matrix is a labyrinth of creative tobacco-company lab manipulation to make it addictive and nutrient deficient.

                  Our food system right now is enslaved in the shackles of the corporate-government-industrial oligarchy (Bernie Sanders' favorite word).  But unlike his solution, which is always a big beautiful federal agency to ride herd on the bad guys (how has that worked for the last century?) the real answer is emancipated food producers accessing the marketplace and competing with the oligarchy.  It's such a simple solution, and yet the push back any time you mention food freedom is long, shrill, and powerful.

                  Two final thoughts:  do you really think we should trust a bureaucrat more than a farmer?  Second, how can you have freedom without risk?  You can't.

                  Why do most folks think farmers are dirty and want to hurt their patrons?

                  When I got to the Charlottesville airport, without even thinking, I entered the TSA Precheck line but when I got to the screener, it noted I didn't have precheck.  Oh bummer.  Decision time:  do I go through the non-precheck hassle for this whole out and back, 4 legs, or do I go to the American Airlines ticket counter and get it changed? 

                  How quickly positioning goes to your head.  I could proceed as it was, or go back and get it fixed. All was consistent and valid for me to go, but in stubbornness, I decided to get the precheck put on the ticket.  Since the ticket counter is only about 50 feet from the TSA screening at this small airport, I opted to go back and have the ticket counter fix the ticket for both outbound and inbound.  Easy peasy.  

                  Of course, the guy ahead of me at the ticket counter had a convoluted issue that took 10 minutes to fix.  Finally the agent waved me over and fixed the ticket.  With new precheck boarding pass in hand, I headed back to the TSA screener.   

                  Suddenly, the system kicked me out.  The TSA screening agent said my ID birthdate, in 1957, was put on this new precheck boarding pass as 1975.  So I could get on with my old ticket, which I'd left with the agent, or go back to the counter and get this new boarding pass fixed.

                  Back to the AA counter I went.  "Oh, I'm sorry, my fault.  I transposed the 57 and 75 when I redid your boarding pass."   She fixed it but then couldn't print a new boarding pass. The printer at the counter was acting up.  No problem.  Since the TSA computer is looking only at my ID and the AA electronic data, I could get on with the incorrect paper boarding pass but the TSA would think the ticket was okay.  

                  Back to the TSA screening stand I go.  Sure enough, a smile, a wave, and I was on my way through precheck.  With the old boarding pass in hand, I should be good to go.  

                  But this got me to thinking.  With this many protections in the system to guarantee consistency, what if we had this kind of interest in ecological consistency?

                  Like what if our menus matched consistently with the needs of earthworms?  Like what if our food matched consistently with the needs of our microbiome?  Like what if our investments financed organizations that build soil and create more potable water?

                  Isn't it fascinating that we have this level of consistency insurance in the airplane seat but can't even match breakfast with the needs of pigs, chickens, and earthworms?  What a crazy incoherent world we live in when our sense of balance importance is this skewed.

                  We create a dead zone the size of Rhode Island in the Gulf of Mexico (America) and call it agricultural prowess.  We drink Coca Cola and eat at McDonald's, creating a 40th ranking in national health statistics among the 40 wealthy countries of the world, and call it dietary progress.  Are we insane? How many things in our society could you say "you know, you're not matching ecological and biological needs with that decision?"

                  What would change if ecological consistency were as desirable as matching birthdate to plane ticket?

                  I'm flying back today from Palm Springs, a desert city with 120 golf courses that each use 1 million gallons of water a night.  No worry, say the locals, "we have an ocean of water under us."  And they vote.

                  On the way out, a couple sat in A and B seats (I was in C, on the aisle) and the wife was wearing a mask.  Oh boy.  I don't know which is more concerning these days:  a morbidly obese person coming down the aisle ("Please don't let them sit next to me"), a crying infant, or a mask wearer.

                  The mask wearers come with all sorts of paranoias.  As soon as this couploe got situated, they began wiping every possible surface--even the seat belt buckle--with sani-wipes.  She was nice--asked me if I wanted to wipe my stuff down.  "No, I want your germs," I replied, with a smile that she accepted.

                  I know some folks will think me judgmental--offering that perhaps they have immune problems or some compromised health issues that make them especially concerned.  That may be, but what followed is the crux of this blog.

                  As soon as they got wiped and situated, out came a bag of Doritos.  Both were quite overweight.  Needless to say, I didn't have access to my left arm rest; I had to hang out in the aisle the entire flight.

                  After the Doritos, they opened a multi-unit tray of Reese's cups, tilting the tray into their mouths I guess so they wouldn't touch the wrapping.  By that time, we were airborne and here came the service cart.  Coca-Cola next, of course, along with a purchased meal pack of carbs.

                  Half an hour later, in that lull of the flight when people are fed and watered and all is quiet, they rang their flight attendant bell.  She came running and the husband said "my wife is having trouble with her sugar; could you bring us some juice?"   A few minutes later, the attendant delivered a cup of apple juice.

                  Does this story need any explanations?  I don't think so; you can draw your own conclusions.  They're probably on medicare.  And they vote.

                  How can we raise the common sense of people who vote, or barring that, keep them off the roles?

From Jen Gamerdinger of Bear Creek Acres Dairy in northeastern Iowa…

Last night (Monday)just before 6pm, there was a knock on my door. Standing outside was a sheriff deputy. He had come to serve an arrest warrant on me; me, a wife, a mother to 6 children, a daughter, a sister, a friend, a farmer, etc. I was in utter disbelief! After I was arrested, they also arrested dad.

How did this all start? It all began when we saw our food freedom slipping away.

At one time, we were an LLC. We had all of the licenses and permits that we thought we were required to have to operate.
1. We had a milking permit that allowed us to milk our own cows.
2. We had a milk hauler license so we could legally sample our own milk in order to test it for antibiotics before we made it into cheese(even though we have been an organic farm for over 20 years and don’t even have antibiotics anywhere on the premises.)
3. We had a license to test our milk for antibiotics before we could make it into cheese. (Again no antibiotics are used on our farm.)
4. We had a manufacturing permit in order to make cheese from our own milk.
5. Our milking facilities were inspected every 5 months.
6. Our cheese room was inspected every 3 months.
7. Our cheese was sampled by the state every month.
8. Our pasteurization equipment was tested and inspected every 6 months.
9. We had a license for a scale so the weight of the cheese packages were “accurate”.
10. We had a license for a certified kitchen, which was also inspected yearly.
11. We tried to get a license for canning meat. Mom took all of their training. We bought all the equipment. The certified kitchen that we had a license for was built for this purpose. In the end, a license to can meat was unobtainable.

When we talked to a retired canning inspector about how to finally get this license, he told us, we will never get it because they won’t issue them for anyone anymore. So for a few years, we hired one of the only 2 people in the entire state of Iowa to can our beef for us, so we could resell it to customers.

We jumped through a lot of hoops because we thought it was the only way to operate.

The final straw for me was when the milk inspector informed me that we were required to register our manufacturing plant(the cheese room) with the FDA. That registration would give the federal government permission to come to our farm at any time for any reason. Their example was that if there was a terrorist attack, food plants would potentially need to be shut down and they wanted a list of all of them no matter how small they were.

NO THANK YOU!

I asked our inspector to provide the law that said we were required to register with the FDA. She provided me with a link, from which I quickly found that our operation was exempt from such registration. She then referred me to her superior, who we will call J. J then informed me that we were indeed “required” to register with the federal government, so I asked him to provide the law that said we were required. He then sent me 60 pages of information of why we were required to register. After reading through everything he sent me, I started to think that we actually would have to register with the FDA until I noticed that at the top of each page were the words ”Contains Nonbinding Recommendations” not mandatory regulations. I brought this to J’s attention. Shortly after this, raw milk became legal in Iowa. I did not hear from J about this issue again.

Fast forward a year. I began learning about Private Ministerial/Membership Associations.

A PMA is a private ministerial/membership association where products are not available to the general public, but only to private members. It is not a corporation or an LLC, but an unincorporated association. A PMA has Constitutional protection from both State and Federal Government. It is lawfully recognized and operates in the private realm outside of governmental authority.

Our purpose is to provide the highest quality food according to God’s standards for our family and yours! Our founding fathers knew and understood our natural rights. The Constitution guarantees those rights, and that has never changed. However, over time, the government has engaged in massive fraudulent business. We can not continue to support a government that has gone haywire.

We are NOT anti-government, but we ARE anti-corrupt government.

A PMA operates in the private domain which is completely separate from the public domain where the government enforces statutory rules and regulations such as mandatory animal vaccines and chemical processing. These regulations do not apply in the private domain.

At one time we believed that the LLC and all of the licenses and permits that we had were the only way for us to operate. We didn’t realize that there was another lawful way, a better way.

In the summer of 2024, I revoked ALL of our permits and licenses. Every agency but one ignored me. Guess who I heard from? J. J and I sent letters back and forth a couple of times. In the end I politely declined his offer to chat on the phone.

Within a few weeks, a man, we will call him B, called my cell phone and told me he had tried our canned beef at a friend's house and now he wanted some for himself. We had a conversation on the phone that day about our PMA.

The day he stopped out, I put an agreement in his hand and let him know that only members could have our products, so if he returned it would need to be signed. My father was not present the first time B visited our farm.
On January 22, 2025 the same man visited our farm again. I was not there this time, but my dad was. B told my dad that he had spoken to me, and since I had previously given him an application and explained it to him, my dad reasonably believed that he was a member of our association. He was not. He purposely deceived us knowing full well that only members were allowed access to our farm products. It was a covert operation to entrap us by trickery, misleading, and strategic planning and tactics. We now know that he was sent by J as an undercover agent because the last letter that I sent to J was in the search warrant paperwork. It is clear to me that we are being targeted and retaliated against because of our choice for food freedom.

We have decided that we will NOT back down. They are trying to intimidate us and are dangling some serious prison time over our heads. They are trying to make an example out of us and they are not playing nice. Even so, we are confident that we have been called to take a stand against this government overreach.

https://www.facebook.com/Bear Creek Acres Dairy

                  What I remember were totally engaged teens, firm handshakes, and direct eye contact.  That's unusual these days.  When I was scheduled to do presentations out there, I decided to add a day and spend it at the school.  What a treat.  We need a thousand of these.

                  It's a Roman Catholic all boys boarding school with about 65 students grades 9-12 located on a farm.  These boys hand milk half a dozen grass-fed milk cows each morning for their roughly 20 gallons of raw milk they consume each day.  Only 7 years old, the school is still in its toddling stage, but carries a significant waiting list of parents who want to invest in this for their sons.

                  The school has four objectives:

1.  Nurture authentic masculinity

2.  Awaken Wonder

3.  Heal the imagination

4.  Develop attentiveness.

                  The curriculum includes liturgy, academics, farming, sports, recreation and music. The motto is "cast out into deep waters."  No screens are allowed on campus.  None; zero.  Everyone plays rugby and the school team just Saturday went into a three-peat state rugby championship over rival St. Thomas Aquinas 50-0.  Until three years ago, St. Thomas won the state championship 13 years in a row.  St. Martin's now rules the roost.  Every student learns to play the dulcimer.

                  Of particular interest to me was getting to meet the first student in their seven-year history to accomplish the Deerslayer badge.  That means he went to the woods, cut a branch, used a drawknife to shave it into a bow, twist a string from thread and kill a deer with it.  He spent four years making bows, trying to get them perfectly balanced, perfectly symmetrical, and perfectly carved (wood fibers must go from tip to tip).  What an amazing accomplishment.

                  And wow, could these guys sing.  They serenaded me when it was time to leave, with harmonious parts and gusto.  Juniors get to wear kilts once a week.  Their academics center around the classics.  

                  Wednesday is work day.  They have pastured chickens and an eggmobile.  They butcher chickens, lambs, and pigs.  Every single boy had the demeanor and eye sparkle you'd want as your partner on a project.  Some may think this is a step back in time, but I think it's a step forward into human flourishing.  Oh, whenever a woman walked into a room, they all stood up and offered a chair.  

                  As an example of their learning, they re-create the Battle of Preveza from 1538, a decisive naval battle between the Ottoman Turks and Holy Roman Empire.  The boys receive cardboard, duct tape, and something like Crisco, using these three things to build boats to re-enact that battle in the farm pond.  When I visit a place like this, my overwhelming thought is a tearful yearning that every child could have an experience like that.  We need a thousand of these schools.

                  Is farmwork and learning a Biblical timeline contradictory to academics?

                  The one posted this week examines whether our trade deficits are due to tariff cheating, or lopsided tariffs, as President Trump claims, or something else.  It's a slog to get through; lots of charts and lots of number comparisons.  Would it surprise you if the analysis reveals American trade deficits have nothing to do with tariffs?

                  Here is the bottom line takeaway for me:  China's wage for workers versus the U.S. wage for workers averages a $34 per hour pay gap.  Think about that for a moment.  It costs $34 more dollars to pay someone to do something in the U.S. than that same job in China.  That's comparing dollars to dollars (yen converted to dollars).  

                  Here is the other bottom line factor:  U.S. welfare payments (transfer payments) amount to $12,000 per capita per year; in China, it's $1,200.  In other words, when you take the federal transfer payment budget and spread it out over the entire U.S. population, it's $12,000 per person. Yes, you read that right.  Those dastardly Chinese communists expect their people to work and don't dish out freebies to freeloaders.  Fancy that.

                  He examines several blocks, from the EU to Asia to Mexico and Canada and debunks the whole myth that our trade deficits are due to other countries cheating on tariffs.  No, it's that the U.S. doesn't require anyone to work.  This is moral bankruptcy on a cultural scale.

                  Whenever I hear people say we need those immigrants to do things Americans won't do, like gut chickens and pick green beans, my first reaction is "quit paying people not to work and see who's willing to do the dirty jobs."  The only reason Americans have lost their work ethic is because we've enabled people to go on the dole.  It's easier than working.

                  This is not a trade problem.  It's not a technology problem or resource problem. It's moral debauchery.  You simply cannot have a functioning society when millions of people spend their time playing rather than working.  

                  The best thing Trump could do for our economy would be to eliminate ALL welfare tomorrow; bang, cut it off.  Yes, ALL of it.  Churches and philanthropic organizations would step up to help the truly needy but it would be voluntary relief rather than compulsory relief.  You cannot offer charity originating in violent compulsion (taxes). 

                  The problems we as a culture face are not primarily due to other people taking advantage of us; we have dug our own grave with overspending creating inflationary pressure on wages and making it easy to escape productive work.  These are rot and moral decay in a culture, but we'd rather point fingers and blame someone else, play the victim, than look inward to our own missteps.

                  To be sure, we can't and shouldn't police the world.  We can't afford it empirically or morally. I can't work hard enough to protect Germany with U.S. military bases or fund layzies who would rather shoot up fentanyl than engage in productive work.

                  The one thing we could do to cure food/farm issues is a FOOD EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION--cure oligarchy with freedom.  The one thing we could do to cure our cultural and financial depravity (and yes, spending more than you take in is financial depravity) is to eliminate ALL government transfer payments.  When Jesus said to help the poor, the admonition was not to the government; it was to individual charity.  Neighbors helping neighbors.

                  Would you help someone if the government didn't?

                  I had a fascinating discussion recently with a social services manager.  She works closely with the school system, foster care, and other government aid agencies. 

                  Here is a story she described.  A child comes to school on a chilly day without a coat.  Somebody notices and flags the student to the school nurse or other administrator.  By the end of the day, the child is called in for interrogation. 

                  "Do you not have a coat?"

                  "If you do, why didn't you wear it?"

                  "Who is at home to make sure you have a coat?"

                  "Can your family afford a coat?"

                  You can see the line of questioning.  Within a day, a case worker shows up at the child's home to continue the sleuthing with adults.  The family indeed is poor and the domestic situation is not ideal.  The parents are divorced and stepdad isn't a saint.  The case worker observes the stepdad knocking down three beers during the visit.

                  Suddenly, Child Protective Services swoops in and extracts the child from an alleged "abusive" home.  The little boy's mother cries as she hugs him goodbye.  He enters the foster care system.  Since a foster family can't be found immediately, he goes to a holding place, where he misses his mom, misses his home (as non-ideal as it may have been), and spends hours with older, hardened misfits.

                  Finally a foster family is found and the boy is placed, but it's not home.  It's not his bed, his toys, his yard.  He didn't know he was a misfit.  He thought this was just his life and he was getting along, perhaps not thriving to full human potential.  But now, branded "poor" and isolated from familiar surroundings, he develops anger, vindictiveness, and self-worth plummets.  He starts failing in school.  He gets into the wrong crowd, starts experimenting with drugs . . . 

                  She said this scenario happens more than you can imagine.  The numbers she shared are startling; even shocking.  And then she said she wonders to her team "are we actually helping in this situation?"  A little bit of love is better than ostracism.  Kids are resilient.  Look at biographies of countless famous people who through hardship became overcomers.  From slaves to immigrants to abject poverty and orphanings, the human spirit can gain victory over difficulty.

                  I've often asked myself what it would take for me to intervene in a family--even a dysfunctional one.  Indeed, who doesn't have a dysfunctional family?  Is a rich spoiled brat better off than a deprived hustler from a single parent situation?  Lots of things in life have a massive subjective component.  What I consider abusive may be just the ticket to bring out creativity in an individual.

                  Child rearing I may not agree with must go a long way before being classified a crime.  Would I intervene if a child is being raped?  Yes.  There are places I would intervene, but they have to be absolutely heinous.  A child not wearing a coat should not upend his life.  That we have so many bureaucrats watching and documenting such things does not make me feel safer; it makes me feel violated.

                  Is protecting kids from anything short of criminal activity a proper role for government?

                  The number of fingers in the public pie is being exposed by the day, but that exposure also shows how hard it is, or will be, to remove the pork at the public trough.  With every discovery of how many people belly up to that trough my heart sinks that we can ever shut it down.

                  Organic farmers are crying the blues over USDA grant shutoffs.  Colleges are crying that these subsidies fund critical research.  Our civilization would collapse and crumble if these elite centers of learning didn't have this flow of money.

                  What's crazy is that the Trump administration is only cutting off, or threatening to cut off, subsidies to colleges who don't protect Jewish students or who still have DEI departments and woke agendas.  Why?

                  Where is the North Star of public fiduciary responsibility that takes the politics out of this discussion?  Picking and choosing colleges for public largess based on liberal agendas keeps people from having the adult conversation about whether ANY college should receive taxpayer subsidies. Instead of coming to a clear understanding of whether higher education is a responsibility of the government or not, the whole discussion devolves into a petty partisan temper tantrum.

                  With interest on the public debt approaching $1 trillion and eclipsing all other components of the national budget, it's time for serious adults in the room to have a serious discussion about whether colleges should receive any taxpayer subsidies;  period.

                  Forget the partisan pettiness.  Forget the finger pointing.  Like many of these budgetary battles, failing to address the core issue muddies the water.  It keeps the populace in discordant never-never land where foundational principles of liberty and governance never see the light of day.  In the end, it deprives the average person of ever having to wrestle with consistency. and responsibility.

                  Instead of having a public discussion about freedom foundations and the core responsibilities of government, we piddle around puddles instead of draining the swamp.  The way all this college funding debate is going, I'm deeply disappointed and frustrated that nothing big will change.  We'll keep raising taxes, throwing money away, and finally devolve into bankruptcy, both morally and financially.

                  We made a lot of strides in technology without any government funding.  Edison didn't need a grant to invent the lightbulb.  Instead of corporate executives being paid $20 million a year, how about they drop to $1 million and invest the $19 million in research?  If the government is involved in research, it will be politicized and agenda driven.  Plenty of money exists in the private sector to do research; we don't need to impoverish the populace with confiscatory taxes in order to conduct research.  

                  And why are student loans more worthy of public support than entrepreneurial investment in a new energy source, for example? Picking winners and losers in what should be an individual marketplace is a fool's game.

                  Let colleges stand on their own.  If they generate meaningful content that folks can monetize into salaries, great.  If they can't, let them fail.  We need to quit propping up ANY private institutions, from farmers to colleges.  But college subsidies seem the most egregious because they serve the elite and often impoverish societal sectors their graduates control.  

                  Would we collapse as a culture if taxpayers didn't subsidize colleges?

                  The conversations can be heartbreaking.  Like the lady who asked me, with tears and pleading in her eyes, "how do I get my husband to quit dousing our farm in chemicals?  We have 500 acres and he thinks people like you are laughably foolish to think you can grow things without chemicals."  

                  Or another one:  "I'm wanting to farm our family's 3,000 acres but my dad won't even consider a non-corn/soybean approach, much less a nonchemical approach.  What do I do?"  I spent the day Saturday with these kinds of salt-of-the-earth folks who want to take their land in different directions but are stymied with conventional-think.

                  They all hope I have some sort of magic potion I can sprinkle on their loved ones and make them change their minds, or at least entertain a discussion.  Of all the books I've written, the one I call "my soul book" is THE SHEER ECSTASY OF BEING A LUNATIC FARMER.  It was written specifically for the naysayers.  As such, it's by far the most humorous of my books, laughing both at me and at conventional chemical thinking.  It has lots of satire.

                  When I mentioned it to one lady, as perhaps an entry point to talk to her naysaying husband, she quickly responded "he doesn't read."  Contemplate this tragedy.  Here's a guy who owns and controls several million dollars worth of agriculture equity and he won't read.  He just follows instructions.

                  My mentor, Allan Nation, always said "nothing is as unappreciated as unsolicited advice."  That sentence has a lot of negatives, but that's the point.  It reminds me of his other stories regarding folks who called him for advice about farming. He'd start in with ideas and they'd shoot each one down.  After about the third one, he'd say "you're right, it won't work for you."  

                  As thousands of spouses, sons, and daughters of farmers wake from conventional-think and view the land they love with new redemptive yearning, the perverse incentives in the system persevere to make sure a different approach never sees the light of day.  I talked with another man this weekend who was approached by a land grant college to design a sustainable agriculture curriculum.  He and his team finally quit after a couple of years of grinding bureaucracy thwarted every creative effort.

                  As pessimistic as it may sound, broadly accepted systems require catastrophic upheaval before people in those systems will even look at alternatives.  That's why the USDA won't even do a trial on the multiple antidotes to bird flu; the only possibility is a vaccine or vaccine-like material.  

                  It's not just farmers, of course.  It's food buyers who reach for ultra-processed food 75 percent of the time.  It's SNAP benefits that reward soft drink companies $10 billion a year for their high fructose corn syrup beverages.  It's the green energy folks who subsidize about 40 percent of America's corn production to go through government-funded ethanol plants for automobile fuel.

                  Imagine being locked in a marriage, on a farm, with a husband and kids, unable to even have a discussion about compost versus chemicals.  Or grass versus corn.  Dear folks, we need a catastrophe in America's heartland to jolt farmers into a land-redemptive conversation.  I suggest we eliminate ALL government intervention in agriculture.  All grants.  All subsidies (crop insurance).  All export manipulation.  All CREP, EQUIP and every other acronym that inhibits systems examination.

                  What catastrophic cultural change would you suggest?

                  Today I received the following letter and request to add my signature.  

April 29, 2025

Commissioner Martin Makary

U.S. Food and Drug Administration

10903 New Hampshire Ave

Silver Spring, MD 20993

cc:          Secretary Robert Kennedy, U.S. Health & Human Services

                  Director Tracey Forfa, Center for Veterinary Medicine

Dear Commissioner Makary,

On behalf of the undersigned organizations, we write to urge you to respond to the recently filed petition for reconsideration and ban or restrict ractopamine in meat production. Ractopamine is a dangerous drug used to rapidly grow muscle in cows, pigs, and turkeys that also causes animals’ bodies to suffer tremors, lesions, and deterioration, elevates meat consumers’ heart rates, and harms the environment.       

Ractopamine is banned or restricted in meat production in at least 160 countries, including China and all countries in the European Union. Nonetheless, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved ractopamine for use in cows, pigs, and turkeys raised for meat in the U.S. and continues to allow ractopamine residue levels in meat that exceed those adopted by the United Nations’ food standards body, the Codex Alimentarius Commission. The FDA’s approval for ractopamine relied primarily on safety studies conducted by the drugmaker itself.

Animals given beta-agonists such as ractopamine face increased likelihood of experiencing painful injury, inhumane treatment, and extreme stress. Evidence, including that contained within the FDA’s own files, also links ractopamine to human heart and respiratory issues in meat consumers and farm workers, increased risk of pathogen contagion, and intensified environmental pollution through seepage and runoff to ground and surface waters. Still, ractopamine usage has been estimated in 60–80 percent of all pigs raised for food in the U.S. 

To better protect human health, animals and the environment, we urge FDA to respond to the petition and immediately reduce or eliminate allowable levels of ractopamine in farmed animals.

                  Okay, here's my problem.  Would these people sign my petition asking for a FOOD EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATAION to allow unregulated food commerce between neighbors?   Neighbors, acting as consenting adults to engage in freedom of choice, should be able to engage in food commerce without a bureaucrat between them.  This freedom would launch thousands of entrepreneurial farmers and culinary practitioners on their neighborhoods, decimating the industrial food oligarchy and bringing better nutrition, pricing, safety, security, and stability to the marketplace.                 

                  The problem with signing this letter is that it spends our tribe's political and emotional equity on additional regulation rather than making it easier for farmers who grow hogs free of ractopamine to sell to their neighbors.  So the whole discussion centers around a new regulation rather than a new level of liberty.  If farmers were free to sell to their neighbors without bureaucratic prohibitions, perhaps nobody would buy pigs with ractopamine.

                  If I don't sign, friends will call me a traitor.  If I do sign, I'm adding my support to a regulatory solution for every societal malady.  We have to get beyond asking government regulatory relief for everything we view as wrong.  Releasing people to exercise personal agency in their freedom of choice is another remedy.  Let freedom ring. 

                  Am I being unnecessarily antagonistic by not signing?

                  Several years ago I had the privilege of visiting a 3-acre school division farm in northern California.  The school district incorporated the farm into its middle school curriculum and hired two farmers (women) to work with the science teachers with symbiotic educational experiences.  Every student spent half a day a week at the farm.

                  A worm box about 8 ft. X 3 ft. X 3 ft. provided unlimited opportunities for the students.  One assignment was "bring food and let's see what the worms like."  The students brought gummy bears, twizzlers, oreo cookies, Velveeta squeezable cheese, Doritos and such.  The kids placed their "food" in one end of the worm box.  The teachers put in an apple, banana, pieces of beef, boiled eggs (peeled), and some fresh green beans they'd picked from the farm garden in the other end.

                  A week later, when the students returned, they swarmed over to the box, lifted the lid, and pulled out their twizzlers, gummy bears, Velveeta cheese, etc.  In the other end, the farmers' contributions were completely eaten by the worms.  The object lesson was simple:  "why would you eat something worms won't eat?"  It made an indelible impression on the students. I've never forgotten this dramatic, yet simple, experiment.

                  Every time someone in the MAHA movement disparages Red Dye 29, glyphosate, monosodium glutamate, and Coca Cola, the food industry howls about freedom, choice, and their favorite "nothing proven." Remember, the EPA says Roundup (glyphosate) is perfectly safe--based on Monsanto's tests.  

                  You've got scientists on one side screaming "poisons!" and scientists on the other side screaming "no proof!"  Meanwhile, taxpayers pick up the tab for both sides to do their agenda-driven studies to continue arguing.  And meanwhile, farmlands and supermarket shelves are full of who knows what. The industrial food complex doesn't want to give up a single one of their 9,600 food additives prohibited in Europe.

                  So here is my simple solution.  I think we should have a worm farm with 100 worm beds and subject every single thing applied to the soil and food to the worm test.  If glyphosate is so innocuous, put some in a worm bed and see what the worms do.  If Coca Cola is so innocuous, put some in a worm bed and see what the worms do.  

                  Each bed would have one week to indicates its delight with the product or its aversion.  We could test 100 items a week.  In one year we'd test 5,000 items.  In two years, 10,000 items.  Everything the worms rejected would be prohibited in America.  Everything the worms liked would be accepted.  This test would include everything from chemical fertilizer to Red Dye 29, high fructose corn syrup, and everything in a chicken McNugget.

                  If the worms didn't like it, you couldn't put it in food, on the soil, or feed it to animals.  I just met a farmer-scientist-inventor from Nevada who developed a bio-fertilizer he sprays on his fields (2,000 acres).  In just a few years it has increased his organic matter 3 percent and the soil crawls with earthworms.  See, worms don't watch TV, don't run for election, don't receive corporate sponsorships.

                  If we're going to make decisions like this, as a culture, we need a true north test to eliminate politics, money, and brand protection from the equation.  I'm a libertarian and not a friend of government prohibitions, but if we as a society decided to submit everything to the worm test, I think I could be persuaded to go along with a green light and red light list.  This would put worms in the policy and decision-making driver's seat.  I'm ready to let the worms vote; I trust them far more than people at this point.

                  This would be an empirical test.  No bias, no prejudice, no nefarious agenda.  The new American mascot would be the earthworm, not the eagle.  Teresa and I built some new garden beds last year and when I went out to them last week preparing to plant spring veggies, I scooped into the loose soil with my hand and it was crawling with earthworms.  I felt a surge of joy and affirmation:  they like what I'm doing.  That beats Wall Street.

                  What do you think?

                  Of course the most famous storyteller in this genre is Homer, who wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey, codifying these stories into a narrative that is as exciting as any modern thriller.  The romance, vengeance, battles and connivances of the gods and their half human offspring encompasses every emotion and tribulation imaginable.

                  It all got me to thinking about modern mythology.  We moderns, ruled by science, think we're above all this mythological silliness.  That people for centuries actually believed these tales as the explanations for things seems outlandish to us.  And yet as I look at beliefs today, I'm struck by our current mythologies.

                  Imagine thinking a mask could stop a virus.  Imagine thinking factory farmed chickens have nothing to do with bird flu.  Imagine thinking Ozempic is the cure for obesity.  Imagine thinking glyphosate doesn't have any negative residual effect on the land or our food.  Imagine thinking an egg from caged factory chickens is just as nutritious as one from GMO-free pastured birds.

                  The superstitions of our day are no less outlandish than mythology, and yet government policy, the medical community, and most people cling to them cultishly as if they were divinely given. 

                  Isn't it interesting to see how long myths can linger before being discredited?  How long did people think sickness came from spirits?  Galileo and Copernicus were tortured for suggesting our solar system revolved around the sun; their discoveries took 100 years to find credence in academic circles.

                  Look at hydrogenated vegetable oil, margarine, Crisco, anti-microbial soap, DDT and subtherapeutic antibiotic feeding in livestock.  As official USDA policy, we currently believe exterminating bird flu survivors will eradicate the problem.  We believe chemical fertilizers are the only way to feed the world.  We believe 100 U.S. military bases scattered around the world are necessary to keep us safe.

                  We believe the government owning half the west is better than private enterprise.  We believe if neighbors interacted in food choice freedom with each other outside government regulatory oversight we'd fill our hospitals with poisoned people.  We believe government intervention in health care and education are necessary to deliver health and education.  We believe taking the 10 commandments down from our public school classrooms makes better people.  And according to Stacey Abrams, we believe heartbeats of unborn babies are manufactured by nefarious spirits to make women contemplating abortion rethink their position.

                  And certainly we think McDonald's is okay to feed your kids and a quart of Coca-Cola a day is safer than a teaspoon of raw milk.  In our techno-sophisticated modern culture, have we progressed at all beyond the mythology of the ancients?

                  What's your favorite modern myth ?

                  In my Shenandoah Valley, we certainly have gullies from erosion, but  even our worst ones are not as bad as the ones in Iowa.  Blessed with 30 feet of loam soil, Iowa did not present me with a single rock the 70 miles from Des Moines to Lamoni.  The rich, black soil is the envy of the world.  But it's fragile and 20 foot deep gullies cut into the landscape are not unusual.  It's heartbreaking. Our farm has gullies left over from erosive plowing, but by 10 feet down you hit solid rock.  Not so Iowa.

                  This is corn and bean country.  Savage said between 1995 and 2023 Iowa alone received $24,552,000,000 in USDA crop subsidies.  That's just one state and the system is rigged against small and mid-sized farms (small is less than $350,000 gross income per year; mid-sized is $350,00-$1 million gross income per year).  Because I don't participate in any of these programs, I don't understand them, but I can certainly appreciate the scale-prejudicial aspect because that's consistent throughout all government market interventions.

                  The nearly $1.5 billion in bird flu extermination payments have largely gone to 3 major companies.  By the way, these payments don't go to farmers; they go to the corporations that own the birds.  In the vertically integrated poultry industry, farmers own the land and houses but not the animals.  Of course, that gives the farmer no say in who comes on their farms, what decisions are made about the chickens, etc.  Farmers voluntarily sign up for this serfdom.  Duh.

                  The more than $1 billion annual crop subsidies to Iowa, of course, only go to a couple of things.  The program covers 6 things:  corn, soybeans, wheat, sugarcane, rice, and cotton.  Iowans don't grow sugarcane, rice, and cotton.  They grow corn, soybeans and a little bit of wheat.

                  "Farming the government" is now a rural pastime, with farmers' decisions dominated by intrusive and perverse government programs.  Anyone who thinks America's farmscape demonstrates free market capitalism doesn't have a clue about what is actually going on.

                  Iowa imports 95 percent of its food.  Only 5 percent of what Iowans eat is grown, processed, packaged, and sold in the state.  I did a live audience-driven economic comparison between growing corn and cows and cattle beat corn by about $200 an acre. This is one of my favorite exercises when I get into the heart of cropland, America.  Without the subsidies, which have pushed raw farmland higher than $20,000 an acre in Iowa, farmers might start making better decisions.

                  From a policy perspective, the most important thing we can do as a society is to incentivize good decisions.  The worst thing is to incentivize bad decisions.  Even supposed conservation grants hurt the ecology.  Stationary water systems rather than mobile.  Permanent fencing instead of mobile fencing.  It's all negative.

                  What a difference it would make if every government action started with the question: "How can we encourage good decisions?"  Clearly, if $10 billion in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits are buying high fructose soft drinks, the program is not encouraging good nutrition decisions.

                  Can you think of ANY government program that encourages good decisions? 

                  Whether it's grants to build hoop houses or grants to fund personnel in organic type programs, the screams are loud and long.  "How are we supposed to continue helping local non-chemical food systems and farmers when the USDA cuts funding?"  The helplessness and frustration are wild.  

                  For the most part, they're unhappy that I don't join the letter writing, petitions, and phone calling to get these monies flowing again.  Sorry.  I've said all my life that if our side ever gets into the driver's seat, the worst thing we can do is act like the industrial system that we've accused of feeding at the public trough.

                  I've consistently opposed ALL grants, ALL subsidies for ALL agriculture my whole life.  I advised these friends filling out grant forms many years ago not to do it.  Becoming dependent on taxpayer money is not only unfair, it rides your charity on the back of confiscatory taxes.  You cannot build charity on a foundation of violence.  Stop paying taxes and see who gets violent.

                  Unfairness comes from the inherent demand that people pay for things in which they have no interest.  If I'm a vegan, what philosophically-justified argument can you make for taking my hard earned wealth (taxes) to pay for livestock watering systems or tall tunnels for winter housing chickens?

                  If I can't stand vegetables, how can you justify taking my wealth via taxes and paying for produce development on farms?  The problem with government assistance is that it inherently makes people pay for things they dislike.  That breeds contempt and resentment in a culture.  Paul Harvey used to say government should only do for those people the things they cannot do for themselves, and only that.

                  Not many things exist that we can't do for ourselves.  If an organic outfit wants to help farmers build tall tunnels, pass a hat.  Or better yet, do some business and marketing promotion so farmers understand margins and profit to pay for the development they need with their own earnings.  That's the way to build a meritocracy and keep people from being mad at each other.

                  The first restaurant I supplied with eggs in the early 1970s when I was a teenager was owned and operated by a Greek family with a wonderful sense of humor.  They had a big sign hanging behind the cash register:  A GOOD MONKEY IS A MONKEY THAT DOESN'T MONKEY WITH OTHER MONKEYS' MONKEY. Now that, folks, is as succinct an adaptation of the Golden Rule as any I've seen.

                  The urge to have public monies not used for greedy, selfish interests must be balanced by the urge not to be accused of similar greedy gain when political winds change.  If our side is just as quick to demand goodies from hard working taxpayers as Tyson and Monsanto, we're operating from the same political ideology.  "But our stuff is good and their stuff isn't," I hear.  In politics, what is good and bad is completely subject to the whims of the mob.  Let's rise above that and be courageous enough to say "how about we let folks keep their hard earned money?" 

                  This is why the most defensible and consistent position is to eliminate ALL public transfer payments:  universities, farmers, pharmaceuticals, foreign countries, health care, housing, education, retirement . . . .

                  Can good farming continue without government funding?

                  But like church denominations, it's like herding cats to get an agenda consensus.  While RFK Jr. seems committed to addressing toxins, many of us realize it's not enough to just get the bad stuff out.  We need to get good stuff in.

                  In other words, if we took all the chemicals out of a Happy Meal, would it be nutritious?  That means you take the antibiotics out of the chicken.  You take the artificials out of the breading.  Is that enough to so change a Happy Meal that it couldn't exist?  I can see the argument that such a policy might be enough.  

                  Some foods are toxin-heavy to the point that eliminating them would simply take them out of the American marketplace.  I don't know how many food items that would be.  Surely getting the toxins out is easier than getting nutrition in.  An argument could be made that whatever has been deemed harmful in Europe should be deemed harmful in the U.S.  That would be an interesting starting point and dramatic:  it would immediately eliminate about 9,600 additives/toxins from America's food supply.

                  But that wouldn't reduce factory farmed animals.  It wouldn't eliminate poisons in vegetables.  It surely wouldn't stop chemical fertilizers and bring in compost.  Therein lies the rub.  When discussing deplorable American food, nobody knows how much of the deplorableness is due to toxins and how much is due simply to not caring about quality.

                  Historically, the USDA has never cared about quality.  The only question is quantity.  How nutritious are apples?  We don't care as long as boxes are full.  How nutritious is corn?  We don't care as long as it fills grain silos.  A broad-based caring about nutrititve quality would be a game changer.

                  What if every chicken killed in the bird flu eradication program had to lay eggs at a certain nutritional benchmark?  In other words, if your chickens were laying inferior eggs, the taxpayer won't pay you when we kiil them.  You're not making eggs worth saving anyway.  Can you imagine if in order for a corn farmer to receive crop insurance he had to submit his corn to a nutritional analysis to determine benchmark?

                  The American Beverage industry is having a fit over the notion that taxpayers should not pay $10 billion per year for Coca Cola, Dr. Pepper, and Mt. Dew through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP--formerly Food Stamps).  This is a no-brainer.  This stuff has zero nutritional value.  To make it an option in a program with "nutrition" in the title is absurd.  But this is surely low-hanging fruit as we brainstorm policy changes consistent with a MAHA agenda. And try to go beyond simple toxicity and address nutrition.

                  I don't have answers.  But if we don't figure out what questions to ask, we won't get to a policy that leverages this moment in history. So today's question has some depth to it; think it over; put some real effort into the answer.  I'm really curious:

                  If you could offer a suggestion to move the nutrition needle in policy, what would it be?

                  He just emailed me the following (I've taken the liberty to clean up some grammatical issues due to German-English idiomatic differences):

I follow your blog and liked your blog article about the poultry disease opinion not to kill all but leave the healthy ones.

Here in Hungary and Slovakia, FMD (Foot and Mouth disease) was found and they already killed thousands of cattle. In Europe we have a 0 tolerance policy and on any affected farm, all animals are killed. (Pigs, sheep, goat, cattle, alpaca)

It has not come to Austria yet, but farmers get nervous.

The message is to run the farm like a biosafety facility - no visitors, disinfection entrance, etc..

That is definitely not what a farm should be like. Only 5% of cattle die if FMD infects them, but it's EU law to not treat them or vaccinate them. 

            There you have it folks, straight from a farmer in Austria who deals with this every day.  I visited him a year ago when he organized one of my masterclasses for farmers.  The biosafety requirements suppress outdoor pigs and poultry especially.

            All visitors and vehicles having to sanitize in and sanitize out creates a de-facto "No Visit" policy for farms.  That further divides the rural and urban.  It also adds social isolation to farmers, who are already struggling to find fellowship opportunities and cultivate relationships with other people.  

            Realize that according to him, if you have an animal with Foot and Mouth disease, all your animals are killed--all species.  This is mandatory extermination without judicial recourse; I've been there, and I can tell you farmers are terrified of offending EU regulatory bureaucrats.  They don't have a Bill of Rights like we have in the U.S. 

            When you put all this together, you see a broad net being spread to capture people, food, commerce, property, and public opinion.  Captivity is a wonderful thing if you hold the key.  This is why I'm tireless about trying to get thousands and thousands of people to grow food, to own a piece of land, to befriend maverick farmers.  We need more of us than there are people who want to control.  

            Don't be fearful and don't be despondent.  Let's be engaged, active, and doing all the things to create a parallel universe.  Let's stand tall into the agenda and make sure righteousness wins.

            What would you do on your farm or homestead if government policy was "No Visitors?"

                  The 400-ostrich farm switched from meat and eggs  three years ago to a research facility collaborating with a Japanese scientist trying to develop covid 19 antigens.  Their experiments yielded robust antigens in the egg yolks that were processed into nutraceuticals administered as a pill, lozenge, or nasal spray.  It totally neutralized covid 19 without any injection.  One week after the discovery, the Japanese lab was purchased and everything shut down. Interesting.

                  In 2022  the farm lost about 60 ostriches to a rare bacterial infection.  But an amazing thing happened:  they stopped dying and within a month, nothing was dying and all the droopy birds looked robust and healthy.  Tissue samples confirmed that it was njot bird flu.  Some 300 wild mallard ducks virtually live at the farm.

                  This past December, two ostriches died and an "anonymous informant" called the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to report a possible bird flu situation.  Officials came, ran a PCR test on the carcasses that were 48 hours old, and discovered bird flu.  Immediately the government put the farm under quarantine and demanded extermination of all the remaining 300 ostriches.

                  Because this farm has connections in the research community, it sent blood samples of the birds to a lab.  Guess what?  All the birds had antigens to bird flu.  In fact, Katie, the farm owner, is carrying bird flu antigens in HER blood.  The government didn't like this testing, and threatened a $200,000 fine if they tested any more animals.

                  An extermination order Dec. 27, demanding that the farm kill all the antigen-carrying, healthy birds, demanded immediate responses.  One option was to qualify for a "distinct unit exemption package."  Because the paperwork was written for commercial poultry operations, none of it applied to this special ostrich place.  A "no" in any box meant automatic denial.

                  Right now Katie and Connie and friends are desperate to save their birds.  They've filed an injunction in the courts that will be heard April 15 and 16.  The Judicial Review will determine if the Dec. 27 cull order can be overturned and to determine if an exemption request has merit.

                  A tidbit that's too strange to omit is that the main CFIA agent in charge of the case is "Case Worker 007."  You can't make this stuff up.

                  Connie's sleuthing has turned up an interesting thing about the one Canadian farm that has received the unique exemption, meaning even with bird flu, they don't have to kill the surviving healthy birds. Only one farm has ever been granted an exemption from bird flu extermination:  Hybrid Turkey Farms on Mar. 27, 2022.  It's owned by Hendrix Genetics from the Netherlands.  Remember my post from a few days ago noting that the Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands was one of the 3 labs doing gain-of-function research on bird flu, according to Dr. Peter McCullough.

                  Who owns Hendrix?  Paine Schwartz Partnership, which lists the Canadian Government as a partner.  This outfit is doing Turkey Trac development, which injects trackers into eggs so a bird can be monitored for its whole life.  Some 90 percent of turkeys eaten on Canadian tables come from Hendrix.  What happens when you eat these tracking devices? Can someone track you?

                  CFIA officials have told Katie, the ostrich farmer "every outdoor animal poses a risk because it's exposed to migratory birds."  The ostrich farm has been completely bird flu symptom free now for 90 days and counting.  The birds have the antigens.  They're healthy.  But the government agents have one goal:  kill everything.

                  On the zoom calls with me, Katie sobs for her birds and the stress she's under.  What's crazy is that as soon as all their birds are killed, they can repopulate with new birds, according to the government.  "What are they going to do about the 300 mallard ducks?" Katie asks.  Nothing, of course.  The CFIA agents laugh at the question, she notes.

                  Folks, this is outrageous.  Here we have documented examples of immunological adaptation and nature's antigen wisdom, but government agents show positive symptoms for insanity. I'm relaying this story to the best of my ability the way Katie the farmer told it to me.  My heart breaks for her and I told her I would try to get her story out to a wider audience.  Have mercy.

                  If you want to help Katie hang onto her birds and farm, you can do it by going to www.saveourostriches.com.

                  What would you do if government agents told you to kill your healthy birds?

Fret Not Thyself Because of Tofu

By Tim Shell, April 1, 2025, Ganghwa-do, Korea

                  After reading Joel's article about finally getting solid data on soybeans, my response reflex was triggered and I penned a comment which I couldn't post on the website because I don't have a Facebook account to log into to post it, so here it is.  

                  A  few choice thoughts on soybeans from a long time agrarian disciple of Joel's.  

                  Fret not thyself because of tofu!

                  Our family has had the incredible privilege of living among Asian people since 2003 in China, Korea, and Mongolia, and the experience has been enriching beyond description.  One of the greatest pleasures has been the Asian cusine.  The food!  Oh, how we love the authentic Asian food here.  Even after all this time, we constantly encounter new items and flavors.  And all this time we've enjoyed our soy based food completely guilt free, the soy products here are simply wonderful!  

                  Just last Sunday I was served what was a new soy item for me at a chuch potluck, a soup made with boiled soybean grindings.  We were informed that after the beans are ground and the milk taken for making tofu, the bean grindings are added to soup.  When the Korean grandma asked me if I wanted seconds, I happily complied.  It was so good!  I've been in Asia twenty years and never had that dish before.  Nice!

                  So I tell myself, something this many people, have eaten this much of, for this many thousands of years, while being this healthy, can't be bad for you.  So what's the problem that all the foodies in the West are so against soy?  It doesn't make any sense.  The simple reality is that everyone here eats soy all the time, every day, probably every meal in one form or another.  

                  We raised our five children here with soy and they have phenomenal, robust health, no allergies, no medications, never sick, never go to the doctor, and they've eaten lots of soy and love it.  Our boys developed normal masculinity and our girls have normal femininity and good hormone balance too.  No issues.  

                  The only problem we've found is that all the soy sauce stains our teeth brown.  

                  The Korean and Chinese foods we've eaten in Asia for two decades are full of soy, chock full of soy, in every meal, in many forms, but all minimally or naturally processed or fermented.  There's nothing better for breakfast than grabbing a full-sized, one pound square of fresh, warm tofu from a street vendor and running in to douse it in soy sauce and eat it with some hard boiled eggs for a side.  You haven't lived till you've tasted that.  Soybean oil, soy sauce, fresh soybean sprouts, cooked soybean sprouts, fermented soybean sprouts, fermented soybean paste, fresh tofu, grilled tofu, fermented tofu, tofu in seaweed soup, soup with fresh ground boiled soybeans, and on and on it goes. It would be very difficult to avoid soy here, and there's no need to.  

                  There is nothing wrong with soybeans, it's just a bean, like Navy, Pinto, or Great White; or do we accuse God of making a mistake?  They are a staple in the Asian diet.  The problem with soybeans in the West is that they are sent to a factory and highly processed into sterile, nutritionally bankrupt products like everything else.  I promise you, no one eats soy burgers over here, I've never seen them or been served them.  Don't be afraid of soy but chose carefully like you do with the rest of your food, with understanding and discernment.  All soy is not created equal.  

                  The Chinese have used soy in their diets to the same degree we have used dairy in the West.  The things we make with milk, they make with soy.  Soy bean paste is basically soybean cheese and some of it tastes exactly like Blue Cheese because the mold that ferments them is identical.  Tofu is basically fresh soy milk cheese, not fermented.  The beans are boiled and ground, then the soy milk is curdled into curds and whey, and the result is tofu, bean curd.  To claim this is bad for ones health in the face of several thousand years of Chinese tradition seems astoundingly uninformed.  

                  We can also ask the opinion of our animals, they love fresh ground roasted soy beans, but they refuse to eat hexane solvent extracted soybean meal after one sniff.  You can't make chickens eat the solvent extracted meal unless it's in a pellet.  They can be very hungry and they won't eat it.                  

                  Soy beans are good, it's all about how they are processed.  If soybeans really are so bad, why are so many millions of people and animals that eat large volumes of them far more healthy than the majority of Americans?  

                   Our family has always had a zero tolerance politcy for hydrogenated oils of any kind.  We use animal fats, lard, tallow, etc, gladly and guilt free.  Guests at our table are  regularly embarassed to see how much butter our children put on their bread.  The guests are embarassed, not the children, they like showing how it's done!  They crave butter so there are no limits on butter at our table.  There are few fats more life giving.  

                  When it comes to soy bean oil, there is such a thing as hydrogenated soy bean oil which is an industrial factory product no one should ever eat. Period.  But there is also such a thing as fresh pressed soybean oil from ground, roasted beans, which is what the Chinese have traditionally used.  The two oils are just as different as fresh, full cream, raw milk from pastured cows is from processed pasturized, homogenized, 4% white fluid also sold as milk.  

                  I'm so glad for soybeans and the privilege of eating them all the time with no worries in Asia.  Fret not thyself because of tofu!  The soybean is a blessing, not a curse.  

                  Educating ourselves about the nuances of the soy issue, just as we do with all the other food issues, will help us greatly to sort out fact from fiction regarding soybeans.  It may be possible to convince Western consumers to avoid soy, but I doubt it could ever happen in Asia.  Soy is foundational to the diet here.   

                  The only issue I see with soybeans is the glyphosate used to treat them when grown commercially.  But trying to get glyphosate out of our diets will be nearly impossible, it is reportedly found now in all mother's breast milk that is tested.  So, in addition to embracing the ancient motto, "Let your food be your medicine and your medicine be your food.", our family has embraced the position that, "It's not the toxins that get in that kill you, it's the ones that never get out."  (This goes along with the parallel axiom that, "It's not what happens to you that destroys your life, it's the things you never tell anyone."  But that discussion will have to wait for another day.)  The point is, that our family has embraced fasting as a regular part of our phycial and spiritual health maintenance in place of being overly concerned about what we eat.  Fast and fret not!  

                  Realize that even if you were to eat the best possible, beyond orgainic foods on earth, your body would be confronted with toxins just from the normal metabolism of that very good food.  Metabolism yields waste.  Your body's key to long term health is excretion.  All the naturopaths proclaim the foundational to proper health starts with proper elimination and without it they cannot help you; hence the enemas, saunas, etc.  This is why most of the West is in poor health, the body is never given time to take out the trash.  A pause in eating is all that's needed.  Fasting is turbo-charged excretion.  

                  Thirty years ago there was very little information about the benefits of fasting online or in literature, however, this has changed.  Fasting and intermittent fasting are being understood and promoted like never before.  A favorite promoter, especially for women is Dr. Mindy Pelz.  There is no excuse for anyone in the West to be uninformed about this healing modality any longer.  All we have to do is stop eating occasionally for the body to cleanse.  If we adopt fasting as a lifestyle, we no longer have to worry so much about glyphosate or what's in things we eat, drink and breathe.  Remember that no creature in nature gets to eat all it wants all the time, they all go through cycles of feasting and famine, and we would do well to do likewise.  

                  While our family definitely leans into the healthiest foods we can obtain, we have left behind the majority of our food concerns.  In Asia there is no telling what we are eating anyway, regardless of how it's labeled.  It might even be radioactive!  So when we eat out we follow two rules, we don't look in the kitchen and we enjoy our meals.  We also believe that when we give thanks for our food, the bad things can be transmuted into good things by our Creator.  He's perfectly capable of turning glyphosate into vitamin C for us. Faith over fear! 

                  Fasting can also be applied to our livestock that eat soy.  We should be investing all this money, research, energy and angst about soy into learning how to incorporate fasting into our livestock production.   There are reports of cattle living productive lives to thirty years of age by fasting them regularly.  Even our family milk cow, Heidi, that lived under Polyface style management in the hills of Bath County, Va on an exclusive grass diet and birthed twenty-two calves only lived twenty-five years.  What if we had fasted her regularly?  There is no way letting an animal go without food for a day will hurt them.  What if hospitals incorporated this into treatment programs?  

                  Eat anything, fast regularly.  Live free!  Enjoy your soy!

                  Fret not thyself because of tofu!

No question today; just thought this was good information to add to the body of knowledge.

                  That non-endorsement wasn't good enough.  They wanted commitment to agreement. Yesterday Dr. Sina McCullough and I recorded another of our weekly BEYOND LABELS podcast and I think might have uncovered some helpful reconciliation on this topic.  

                  She's been diving into the biofield and electricity in the body.  The first pace makers were developed in 1957.  I have a friend whose ticker was a little off; he went in, got some tweaking to his heart rhythm, and suddenly felt 20 percent more energetic and is doing well.  Supposedly this will last a long time.

                  Sina has also uncovered how this electricity organizes light.  Numerous studies are looking at running personal devices on the body's energy.  We're learning more and more about electrical impulses in the body and the role of light in the cells.  Red light therapy is now a recognized thing for many of us.

                  The no-virus, no-cell, no-DNA crowd routinely cites dynamism as a reason to deny these things exist.  In other words, as typically described by the western science orthodoxy, these things should behave like concrete blocks.  But they don't.  

                  Looked at another way, how do these elements know what to do when?  How do they know where to go and how they need to interact?  What chemistry to unleash?  What enzymes to access or transport?  The sheer unpredictability of physical structures makes some folks dismiss them as nonexistent.

                  "If cells exist, then why don't they act like a cell?"  "If viruses exist, why can't you track them, see them, and watch them act like a virus?"  These are legitimate questions and I've listened to these arguments, read the books, and tried to conclude that it's okay to escape my 10th grade biology microscope that certainly seemed to show me cells.

                  After my biofield education from Sina yesterday, I had a bit of an epiphany.  Perhaps both camps--the conventional viruses, DNA, and cells exist, and the unconventional--that they don't; perhaps both camps are right but incomplete on their own.  In other words, viruses exist but don't act like anything real.  And the fact that they don't act with precision, like something real, doesn't mean they don't exist.

                  According to Sina's research--and you'd better have your ducks in a row if you argue with her (my co-author of BEYOND LABELS)--electricity is what drives the activity of these physical things.  In other words, the body's internal energy flow is what organizes these physical elements.

                  I'm now freed from having to irritate my no-virus friends with incredulity. At the same time, I can question typical western assumptions about how all these things stack together. Just because a study determines viruses act one way in a certain environment doesn't mean they'll act the same in another environment, or a body, with a different electrical, energy, light function.

                  Now I can be both irritant and friend to both camps at the same time.  The physical blocks are there, but electricity determines their function.  And what drives the body's internal energy?  Primarily, emotions.  Forgiveness, faith, gratitude, mission, patience--these create our internal powerhouse to arrange the physical functionality. Joy and happiness.

                  Imagine if instead of spending billions looking for vaccines we invested in emotional and spiritual therapy to change our internal energy flow.  With bird flu staring at us, how about we figure out how to make chickens happy instead of heavier medicated? How about our young people learn the joy of gardening rather than the disappointment of TikTok?  On social media, except for the handful at the top, you're never as smart, beautiful, wealthy, or talented as others.  Leave the screen and join the game of life.

                  On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being low and 10 being high, where would you rate your emotional powerhouse?

                  The program has two cohorts a year;  the second one visits later in the summer.  The hay ride farm tour went fairly normal until our last stop at the Millenium Feathernet when bird flu became the discussion topic and one of the attendees pushed back on my notion that U.S. bird flu policy was dysfunctional.  The back-and-forth quickly moved to the government's jurisdiction over the issue.

                  What exactly is the government's responsibility to investigate, monitor, and enforce a remedy?  Here was my line of thought.

                  How do you determine responsible stewardship?  When government prohibits individuals from making decisions about their affairs, two things happen.  First, no one has to think about whatever the issue of the day is because someone else is doing all the thinking.  Discernment and judgment are like muscles that need to be exercised, and depriving decisions is the quickest way to create lethargic decision-making capacity.

                  Secondly, it deprives society of the diversified decisions minority views might bring to the table.  This is not only the definition of tyranny; it is the definition of mob rule and mob action.  What turns a group into a mob is passing the brink of thoughtfulness.  Destruction takes no thoughtfulness; construction is hard.  That is why in formal debate the affirmative, seeking a change in the status quo, must win both the case (what's wrong with the current system) and the plan (their solution). 

                  The only way to know who the competent stewards are is to let people make decisions and then see the consequences of those decisions.  Looking at all these military officers, I asked them how they knew who the slobs are; who the lazies are; who the no-cares are?  You determine that by letting people make decisions and then watching how their decisions play out.

                  If I can't make a decision about my own chickens, then I'm absolved of responsibility for their care.  As long as I follow the government's dictates, I'm free of decision-making and society can't tell what my level of stewardship is.

                  As soon as I'm responsible for my stuff, my property, my chickens, and their care is in my hands, then I'm forced to sleuth the best options.  I'll need to read, ask counsel from eclectic sources, and pursue a truth path for me.  What's more, everyone, in addition to me, can then see the consequences of my decisions.  Over time, people with good track records naturally rise to the top. This is how you build a meritocracy instead of a technocracy.

                  In farming, who builds soil?  Who doesn't need veterinary care?  Who has healthy plants?  Who has more pollinators?  Who has more earthworms?  When we have government standards, they inherently preclude both individuals and society of studying diverse decisional outcomes.  In short, that makes auditing stewardship difficult if not impossible.  Instead of measuring performance, we measure protocols, and that never moves us toward truth.

                  These are my chickens, thank you.  And I'll gladly accept responsibility for their care.  Everyone, including me, can see the consequences of my decisions.  In freedom we have exposed idiocy.  In government intervention, we have entrenched idiocy.

                  What role should government play in determining, mandating, then enforcing bird flu policy?

                  This friend's elderly parents, in their 80s, are becoming needful of care so he and his wife sold their home in another city and put that equity into a monstrous RV, moved it next to his parents' house a couple of years ago, and have been providing elder care since.

                  Every parent in the world would covet this kind of filial honor from a child in later life.  The RV is not visible from the public road; it's adorned with flower beds and is in every way attractive and ordered.  But someone complained.

                  And beginning last fall, this couple, the parents, and the county zoning department have been in a conflict.  It turns out, in or county you can't live in an RV as your domicile.  You can park it.  You can park 40 of them on your property; you just can't live in one.  

                  Many people in our county live in RVs, but as long as a busybody neighbor doesn't complain, the county powers that be leave them alone.  They only enforce the regulation if there's a complaint.  To watch these appeals board members condescend and pontificate to this couple was obscene.  "You have enough land there to build a house."

                  But why?  If I'm happy to live debt-free in an RV, by what authority can anyone tell me to build a house? My friend does not want to live there after his parents pass; they'll sell the place and move back to where they've been living.  To saddle them with debt and complicate a land sale is unreasonable. The kind and charitable care this son and wife are providing for their elderly parents exemplifies care and familial responsibility.  But the board is willing to send the sheriff with guns to evict them because of the technical violation.

                  The couple presented 17 letters of support from neighbors.  "There's nothing we can do because the law is the law," said the county attorney and the appeals board.  It is unconscionable that our county would turn this couple out on the street, after they've put all their life equity into a plan to keep the parents out of an institution.  

                  The Biblical reason for government is clear:  a terror to evil and an encourager of righteousness.  In this case, our local government is a terror to righteousness and an encourager of evil.  This is the kind of jack-booted heavy-handed thuggery that makes people despise the government.  And if it's a bad law, it should be changed. Or defied.

                  The appeals board members, who are there to mitigate situations that technically go against the county code, all expressed their sympathy for the situation, but "our hands are tied."  No, they're not.  They could agree to call off the zoning dogs.  They could demand the elected supervisors to revise the law, or grant an exception.  These appeals board members will all go home this evening and enjoy dinner while this couple returns to their RV, facing eviction and a fight to care for their aging parents.

                  After the "NO" decision came down, the elderly mom stood and addressed the board, noting that she and her husband have lived in the county all their life, always paid their bills, helped neighbors in need, and never had to "grovel for anything.  And now, at this stage of our life, we have to grovel."  

                  I advised my friend to remain in their RV and dare the county to evict them.  I'd be willing to practice civil disobedience to protect these folks; not sure what is right now, but we don't know how messy it'll get.

                  The zoning administrator said "as long as we see you trying to work with us, we'll be lenient."  I asked her if that included trying to get the ordinance changed.  She smirked and said "well, we'll give a few months, but certainly not a year."

                  By what authority?  

                  They said they couldn't tell if I'd been exposed because we have two levels of immune function:  internal and external.  They said if my external was strong enough, it would repel covid and never get in far enough to be detected in the blood.  I never had covid--still haven't (remember, I drink out of cow troughs) and their fancy blood tests couldn't tell me whether I'd been exposed.  All they said was it hasn't gotten inside.  If it had, supposedly they'd be able to detect broken pieces of viruses and antibodies.

                  I talked yesterday with a farmer whose family for years raised 40,000 turkeys a year in the commercial industry.  "We always had bird flu.  Sometimes it would cycle up and you'd lose 10 percent of the flock, but never more than that.  Most of the time it just never expressed itself.  Now they're checking cows to see if they have bird flu.  It's like 'wow, this is a healthy herd; let's test them for bid flu and see how many are sick.'"

                  We're back to the Russians:  "Show me the man, and I'll show you the crime."  In other words, if we want to pin something on someone, if we look hard enough, we can find some infraction and put him away.  That's the way bird flu seems to be right now.  

                  With the USDA now giving $50 gift cards to veterinarians for every cow they test for bird flu, they're turning over every rock, with a fraudulent PCR test at 45 cycles, by the way, to find bird flu detritus in healthy cows.  Wild ducks and geese, the narrative says, are spreading this contagion.  Folks, these wild critters have had this for years.  And if you leave it alone, this thing, whatever it is trying to kill, encounters animals that adapt and morph their immunity to counteract it.

                  Like Dr. Zach Bush so eloquently says, this unseen world wages an ongoing fight; both sides try to outdo the other.  To think that animals are defenseless against a viral bogeyman is simply to deny the magical adaptive capacity of immunological function within living things.  The adaptation toward virulence happens on one side; the adaptation toward defense happens in the attacked critter. Guns, Germs and Steel verified this on a macro civilizational scale.

                  Our responsibility is to provide a habitat to give immunological defenses a fighting chance.  That's why we start chicks on deep, composting bedding, not wire mesh or concrete.  It's why we keep our animals sanitary and hygienic, not living in their poop or constantly inhaling fecal particulate to create abrasions in their tender respiratory mucous membranes.  It's why we feed non-GMO feedstocks and compost-fertilized forages.  It's why we move animals to a fresh spot routinely and even daily.

                  Killing survivors, which is the current USDA policy, is certifiably insane.  But it whips the nation into fearful frenzy, ready to buy eggs from Turkey so we won't starve to death.  The conventional narrative wreaks of anti-science and fraud.  Sounds like covid to me.  And new Sec. of Ag. Brooke Rollins appears to be completely owned by the pharmaceutical-industrial complex.  I predicted she'd be a lightweight.  Turns out, she is.  Owned by the drug cartel--the legal drug cartel.  What a shame.

                  Interestingly, Brooke Rollins is the only secretary Trump didn't name Tuesday night in his joint speech to Congress.  He named all the others:  Marco, Bobby, Pete, Tulsi, etc.  What buttons got pushed to get an industry shill in there?  Hmmmmm?  

                  Here's my newest wish for policy:  let the owners of the poultry determine their treatment.  Right now, government agents with guns can come onto any farm, without a warrant, and kill all your chickens.  We're back to mandated covid jabs.  Same play book.  Same boat crossing the same river.  What if I have a chicken that tests positive for bird flu?  What if I say "no, don't kill the survivors.  Let it run its course; I'll absorb the cost and risk of how many it gets, thank you very much.  Nobody has to pay me for anything.  Now leave."

                  At least that would give those of us who have chickens some freedom of treatment.  Anybody for informed consent?  The two words go hand in hand--informed and consent.  It doesn't do any good to be informed but not have consent.  I think before government agents kill my healthy chickens, I should be able to consent to their prescription.

                  Agree?

                  First is a big headline in The Wall Street Journal "McDonald's Sales Bruised by E. Coli Fallout."   Remember back in October onions from a farm in Colorado that has 25,000 employees (I posted about that at the time) caused an E. coli outbreak that killed one and hospitalized 34 people in 14 states.

                  Total damage to sales was estimated at $200 million but recovery due to a chicken sandwich rollout and broad low-cost meal items brought folks back.  The bottom line is this:  in 2025 McDonald's plans to open 600 new stores in the U.S. and 1,600 in foreign countries, for a total expansion of 2,200 new McDonald's sites.  Does that sound like a business in trouble?

                  I've said for many years that we'll know our side is starting to win when McDonald's starts posting ongoing losses and quits building new outlets.  For all the hoopla about MAHA, this litmus test is far from being achieved.  We have plenty of work to do.

                  Second, the sheer power of the pharmaceutical industry.  Two easy solutions to bird flu seem apparent.  One is Chlorine Dioxide Solution (CDS),  an antimicrobial safe enough for both animals and humans to drink.  Several studies, especially in Japan, show its antiviral efficacy.  The other is hypochlorous, another non-toxic anti-microbial used in organic certified slaughter houses as a disinfectant and, again, drinkable.  

                  Both of these have nearly 100 percent efficacy against bird flu in many trials, but the USDA won't even consider them or study them.  They're simply ignored in favor of vaccine development.  So far, any bird flu vaccine developed has the unfortunate side effect of making bird flu more virulent.  Fancy that.  Why can't alternatives get a seat at the table?

                  Third, and related to number two, I did a podcast recently (I do a lot of those these days) and the host said pharmaceutical companies own everything:  the USDA, the mainstream media, the research institutions.  Roughly half the ads on TV are pharmaceutical companies.  He said those ads aren't to encourage people to buy the drugs; they are to make it clear to the media who butters their bread.  In others words, the media is completely beholden to the pharmaceutical companies.  I remember well during my short stint as an investigative reporter at a daily newspaper how many stories got spiked (journalist lingo for buried, nixed, or killed) because the corrupt, fraudulent individual was a member of the publisher's Rotary Club or a big advertiser. It was obscene.

                  Fourth, and finally, I did a podcast with Dr. Ben Edwards this week; he's the guy in Texas who treated those Mennonite children with measles.  He said in 1950, when the measles vaccine was developed, deaths were extremely low.  At today's U.S. population, the equivalent deaths would be about 100 children per year.  Right now, 900 children die each year from the MMR vaccine.  Did anybody say "do no harm?"

                  If we tie all this together, McDonald's, pharmaceuticals, bird flu, vaccines, we see a showdown looming, a cultural OK Corral moment, when the forces of truth confront the forces of untruth.  I think bird flu is COVID 2.0.  The dry run of covid is now being leveraged in bird flu.  The conflict of paradigm, pragmatism, and policy held by two diametrically opposed camps is being fought in real time right in front of our eyes.  We're in, part of, and watching this war unfold.  How exciting.

                  So don't sit back.  Lean in.  Don't hunker down.  Charge forward.  We have a nation's heart and soul to rescue from untruthful power and growth.  Our communities need us, each of us, to participate in this great struggle.

                  Are you in?

Whereas many food buyers desire to purchase alternative foods not sanctioned by food regulations, and

Whereas licensing and regulatory oversight is prejudicial against small and innovative processors and marketers, and

Whereas this interventive scale prejudicial culture inhibits market choice, and

Whereas personally choosing your microbiome’s fuel is fundamental to human agency, and

Whereas much government licensed food contains chemicals, ultra processing, and unpronounceable ingredients of questionable safety, and

Whereas the collusion between food regulators and the industrial food complex incentivizes existing dominant players to the detriment of possible start-up competitors, and

Whereas America’s dominant food industries are centralized, concentrated, and interested primarily in price and profit rather than nutritive quality, and

Whereas these issues deprive people of competitively priced options in the marketplace, and

Whereas personal responsibility for decision consequences coupled with an Uberized capacity to monitor quality publicly and in real time ensures integrity, and

Whereas food safety, security, and stability are enhanced by neighbor-to-neighbor food options, 

Be it therefore resolved that the right of people to purchase the food of their choice from voluntary sellers shall not be infringed.

What do you think?  Would this new administration get behind this?

                  Of course, that option, in the plan, hinges on developing a vaccine.  The current vaccine increases the virulence of bird flu, but that's what's being done experimentally right now.  The poultry industry is pushing back hard on a blanket vaccine because it'll stop exports--many countries won't take products from vaccinated birds because they think it makes the strains mutate faster and become more virulent.  Duh.

                  Vaccinating chickens isn't like vaccinating cows--giving millions of chickens a shot is a nightmare logistically.  So the academic experts are hoping for a drinkable vaccine, which isn't really even discussable yet.  Who knows how far away it is?

                  The first point of the strategy is the most scary.  It clearly wants to prohibit any visitors to farms, and any vehicles going in and out must be hosed off both directions.  If this became policy, it would destroy on-farm visits and sales, a devastating development for all of us who have an open door and people-centric philosophy.

                  They're looking at importing eggs from foreign countries.  Delightful.  Interestingly, they're looking at stopping the animal welfare cage-free requirements of California.  This has nothing to do with bird flu; they're blaming cage-free on high egg prices.  That may or may not be the case, but for the federal government to involve itself in the marketplace to this extent indicates a dramatic top-down mentality with bureaucrats running the show.

                  I thought that's what Trump was elected to stop.  Not more government, but less.

                  Here are the facts as I know them:

1.  Waterfowl are not transporting the new highly virulent strain, which was created by gain-of-function research labs in Netherlands, Wisconsin, and Georgia (see Dr. Peter McCullough's expose on origins).  Ducks aren't dying and they aren't transmitting.

2.  Of the 160-million plus chickens exterminated in the last 24 months, a tiny fraction was sick.  The lion's share were perfectly healthy; they were killed because they lived near the sick ones.  No respectable, thinking, reasonable farmer destroys survivors.  We use them to breed the next vibrant generation.  

3. The PCR  test at 45 cycles, which is the official protocol from FDA and USDA, is labeled fraudulent by a healthy contingent of scientists.  At that magnification, you can find bird flu on your dining room table.  It makes you wonder if there is an agenda.

4.  Zero studies are being conducted to find out why some birds are immune, why this hits some areas and not others, and other natural and flock immunity options.  The paradigm of mass extermination limits the questions bureaucrats ask.

5.  By and large, farmers do not own the birds being killed.  The industry owns the birds being killed.  Farmers don't get compensation.  But they still have mortgages and maintenance bills to pay.

6.  The federal government, by words and action, believes your chickens and mine are part of the "national flock."  This terminology swept into the government verbiage about a decade ago.  Your chickens belong to society, to the state.  This means government agents can trespass to conduct tests, take your chickens with violence, and incinerate them even if they show zero symptoms of illness. This change in mentality rode in on the back of mad cow and the hoof and mouth outbreaks in Great Britain.

                  Will Rollins' solutions bring down egg prices?

                  To say this was a diverse group representing the fringes of libertarians would be an understatement.  When I arrived, the speaker on the stage curled my hair with his tirade against Trump and Israel.  He said there was no Israel, that there is no Jew today, that Trump will end up being a tyrant.  You get the picture.  It was a staggering tirade.

                  The next day, another speaker couldn't have been more opposite.  He said Trump represented a revival of everything that is decent, righteous, and freedom-oriented.  But then he went on, in his euphoria, to say that Trump was going to use Bitcoin to leverage the world economy and wipe out the U.S. debt with cryptocurrency.  

                  I asked another speaker who is a crypto guru, his own podcast, etc. about that and he said the guy was nuts, that such an idea is impossible and preposterous.  At the main VIP dinner one evening, everyone at my table (7 of us) said the Trump assassination attempt was completely fake.  Trump had a packet of Hollywood ketchup-blood in his hand and smacked it against his head to make it look like blood.

                  They couldn't answer for the alleged shooter, who hundreds of people saw being killed by security.  "I guess he drew the short straw," said one of them.  The big public debate I missed because I flew home before the end of the conflab was a formal debate on whether the earth is flat or round.  Or something else.  Oh, we haven't been to the moon and the twin towers of 9/11 were an inside job orchestrated by George W.

                  As I saw the various beliefs and narratives, I decided to not argue but do my farm thing and not get into heated discussions.  For sure, I found great commonality regarding limited government and the basic libertarian pitch calling for closing down all foreign U.S. military bases and interventions.  All foreign aid.  Even marriage licenses.  Marriage is not the state's business.

                  Two years ago Ron Paul was there.  What seemed universal were anti-semitism, non-public schooling, and the notion that all taxes are stealing.  I did an interview and took the position that taxes are not stealing.  I'm not an anarchist; we need protection from evil and bullies.

                  The government stands in the place of God to execute judgment in societies.  Both Romans and I Peter give the reason for government:  to be a terror to evil and an encourager of righteousness.  Pretty simple, actually.

                  Like many of society's fringe elements, sometimes you need to let the completely weird stuff go.  Flat earth, we never went to the moon, covid didn't exist, Trump wasn't shot at--all this stuff eliminates your credibility in the big scheme of things.  We have plenty of things to work on that aren't as weird; I say pick the low fruit first. 

                  I was glad to go, to be invited, and my message of non-chemical farming and self-reliance was universally well received, so I don't think I made any enemies there, but lots of friends.

                  What's the weirdest conspiracy theory you've ever heard?

                  A few days ago I had the distinct pleasure of spending time with Andy Caygeon Junkin, author of Stubborn and guru of succession and restorative farm family harmony.

                  His main mission is to save family farms by helping them work together better.  His stories of family farm breakups due to relational tension are vivid and heartbreaking.  This post is not about that primarily, as big a problem as it might be.

                  The profoundly striking comment he made to me centered on the emotional reality among successful commercial conventional fulltime farmers.  These are the kinds of operations where he spends most of his time.  These are the backbone of America's exceptionally productive agriculture, who makesus the number one commodity exporter in the world.

                  These are not homesteaders.  They're not newbies.  These are the heart and soul of our nation's mainline farmers.  They operate relatively large scale farms; they're the ones featured in pictures and articles about American agriculture.  The ones that make politicians and the USDA swell with pride.  "Look at us, world, we feed you and we're the best."  

                  He asked me to name what I thought these farmers worried about most.  I took the bait and answered "weather, price, pestilence and disease."  My mentor Allan Nation used to call these the farmer's "four horsemen of the apocalypse."  When you think of what farmers lean on their pickups and complain or consternate about, it's always weather, price, pestilence and disease.

                  Any one of these things, at aggressive scale, can sink their operations.  These are what every article about agriculture focuses on.  Droughts, floods, hurricanes--all weather anomalies.  Then the price; the poor farmer never gets a fair shake and the middleman makes it all.  Pestilence--fungus, molds, grasshoppers.  They never end.  And finally, disease--the average farmer lives in abject paranoia that the next epizootic will wipe out his crop, herd, or flock.  Bird flu is the current bogeyman.

                  According to Andy, I was wrong.  He spends days, literally, sitting with these families at their kitchen tables.  They call him at crazy hours in emotional crisis.  If it's not weather, price, pestilence, and disease, I queried, what could it possibly be?  Andy is a wise man.

                  Here's the answer, and I'm putting this in quotations although I may miss one or two words:   "These guys average 60 years old.  They're running this supposedly efficient operation, at scale, pleasing all the industrial ag experts, featured in publications and sitting on commodity boards, but they're paranoid about the future because their kids want nothing to do with the farm.  Their kids are either in the process of leaving or already left and the empty nest screams to them 24/7/365.  And their workers hardly speak English.  They have no one to talk to.  No one understands.  No one to share with.  They are emotional islands."

                  Wow.  My heart broke.  Why have we come to this?  How did we get here?  We got here because commercial conventional farms don't work.  They're fragile, ugly, stinky, unattractive places to be.  And what's the result?  This will infuriate some, but the result is that the conventional commercial farm kids who are staying on the farms are the least thoughtful, least mindful people in the culture.

                  Only dimwits would want to take a dead-end commercial conventional farm.  The action is on the fringes, where compost replaces chemicals and where diversity replaces monocrops.  The excitement in agriculture today is not on the conventional commercial large scale operation, the obsolete aircraft carriers of agriculture.  No, it's in the speed boats and small hand-crafted yachts in our farm sea.  These smaller vessels are easier to turn around, quicker to change course, much more responsive to course correction.

                  Unfortunately, America's farming bloodbath is happening right now.  Weather, price, pestilence and disease occupy the headlines, but the real story is about our allegedly most successful farmers becoming lonely islands in their sea of plenty.  This is probably the biggest tragedy and failure of modern American agriculture.

                  What would you tell a 60-year-old depressed and frustrated commercial conventional empty-nester farmer?

                  Does that sound strange?  I'm reminded of Jesus' benchmark principle of hospitality that "if you give a cup of cold water in my name, you've given it to Me."  Not a cup of cold water exists in this entire massive airport in the midst of this mass of humanity.

                  I'm not trying to condemn Mexico, but I can't help but notice this dramatic cultural difference.  Even the smallest airport in the U.S. has water fountains.  Many of them.  What does it say about a culture when its heart is this far removed from the most basic benchmark of meeting needs of travelers and guests?

                  People who condemn America as an evil or humanity-hating culture haven't traveled much.  This is not to dismiss the many things the United States has done that are wrong.  But when you take a composite look at the culture, at the civilizational kindness and elevation of the nation as a whole, few things demonstrate the position as much as how hard it is to get a simple drink of water.

                  Next to air for breathing, water is the most basic component of life.  But it's nowhere to be found here in the Mexico City airport.  Think about what that says regarding love for life or love for death.  The commitment of a nation to deliver the most foundational ingredient of life.

                  As Paul Harvey used to say, "we aren't all equal."  Nations aren't equal and neither are people.  Priorities vary.  Protocols vary.  Getting the essentials done varies.  What does it say about the priorities of a nation that can't offer a cup of cold water where millions gather?  I deeply appreciate that in America anyone going through our airports can get all the water they want, for free.  That is true hospitality and charity.

                  Few things make me tear up quicker than when I've traveled abroad and enter the U.S. airport bearing that beautiful flag across the entry tunnel.  It breaks my heart to know that many in our nation today think we're the most evil culture in history.  They're either ignorant, prejudiced, or suffer from ingratitude.

                  Something as simple as a cup of cold water says a lot about the values and overall achievement of a civilization.  We modern Americans stand on the shoulders of people who cared about what really matters.  Yes, we had and have our rapscallions.  But on balance, I'm proud to be an American and deeply grateful to have been born here, at this time, enjoying the values of a gifted nation.

                  Think about all the other places and times you could have been born.  Most of history is full of struggle, suffering, tyranny, poverty, fear, and difficulty.  But here, in America, you are guaranteed a cup of cold water.  I'll take it, thankfully.  And thank you George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin and a group of wise visionaries the like of which our world has not seen in one place, ever.

                  My heart hurts for people who can't look at the broad spectrum of history, their luxury at getting a free drink of water in the airport, and appreciate America, warts and all.

                  If you're an American (I know I have people from other nations reading these posts), what are you most grateful for about living here today?

                  Ever since the covid debacle, I've become dubious of ANYTHING the government says--er, way MORE dubious.  The official narrative is wrong 90 percent of the time.

                  So a bunch of things suddenly fell into place for me today when one of our staff, who just returned from visiting family in Michigan, came with stories of signs over vacant egg shelves in the supermarket saying: "Egg shortage due to cage free chicken production."    She didn't have pictures; I'm hoping someone reading this blog can take some pictures.

                  I'm not sure she quoted the signs exactly right, but it brings to mind conversations I had several years ago when Burger King announced that within 10 years they would use only cage-free eggs.  The food writer for the Washington Post called me to get my comments about such an earth-shattering announcement.  Of course, she assumed I'd be thrilled and have all kinds of wonderful things to say about it.

                  My response was "why 10 years?  We have a Burger King 15 minutes from our farm; we could supply cage-free eggs today.  In fact, we can do even better and offer pastured GMO-free, vaccine-free eggs right now.  Why the long runway?"

                  I began doing some sleuthing on the issue, talking to folks friendly to the industry.  They were quite surprised at my naivete.  "Don't you realize the plan?  The long runway is to give time for the industry to prove the superiority of caged hens so they don't have to go to cage-free. "  Industry folks were adamant, and are right now, that caged birds are healthier than cage-free. And they will fight tooth and nail to keep caged production systems.

                  It actually makes sense.  Cage-free means the birds live in and on their poop and stir up far more fecal dust to inhale.  Caged birds, although they can't move around, at least don't live on their poop and don't have fecal bedding to stir up and create pathogenic dust.  The industry position is that cage-free is harmful to laying hens, period.  And the industry has a lot of money tied up in caged infrastructure, from housing to egg collection to feed distribution.  That's the train, and it doesn't like to be derailed.

                  Those old conversations from several years ago suddenly popped into my mind when I learned today that supermarkets are putting up signage blaming cage-free chickens for the bird flu.  "See, we told you, you dimwit animal welfare folks.  You're such idiots and now your cage-free rules and prejudices are destroying the egg industry." This could be a great win for the caged laying hen industry.

                  Could it be that the entire bird flu epizootic is an industry plan to discredit cage-free eggs and tilt the public toward caged laying hens?  Is that possible?

                  Some 20 years ago when Slow Food asked me to be part of the U.S. delegation attending the International Slow Food Convivium in Turin, Italy hosted by Carlo Petrini, I went with Michael Pollan.  Every time I wasn't speaking, I attended presentations by a delegation from an African country.

                  Every single one started with something like this:  "We have plenty of resources.  We can feed ourselves.  You western countries need to leave us alone.  Your cheap food dumping displaces our farmers by lowering prices to the point our indigenous agriculture can't compete.  These displaced entrepreneurial farmers and food system folks then get bored and become warlords and gang leaders."

                  I was stunned.  It was such a blanket indictment, over and over again, that I spent the entire multi-day stay apologizing for being an American.  It made me realize this "aid" was about empire-building leverage, creating dependency, and just about anything except real help.  It also made me paranoid about traveling abroad to give advice.  Since then, we invite folks from there to our farm and give free admission to some of our educational seminars.  That way they can see it in our context and adapt it to theirs.  Much better. 

                  Story number two.  After Chernobyl blew up and rained radioactivity across the dairy region of Belarus, the country faced food and economic deprivation because they couldn't drink their milk.  The radioactivity settled in the mammary glands of the cows.

                  The U.S. sent hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid to help.  How kind.  A couple of months later, a delegation from Belarus came to Washington D.C. to meet with U.S. officials.  A former deputy ambassador who was friendly with me asked if  he could invite them to Polyface to see a non-chemical farm.  A couple days later three black limousines arrived at our house bearing the three top officials from Belarus:  their equivalent to our Speaker of the House, Secretary of Agriculture, and a third I can't remember.  They were all number two under the Prime Minister.

                  I took them on a farm tour and they were completely engaged, interested, and gob-smacked.  In short, they got it.  We ended on the porch with hot tea and homemade zucchini bread.  Here is what they said:  "The day the U.S. aid landed in our bank, every hotel in the capital filled with U.S. corporations selling equipment, seeds, chemicals and material.  We spent all that money in a couple of months on equipment we didn't need, seeds that wouldn't grow, and material too expensive to keep up.  It was a circle:  all the money went straight back to U.S. companies.  If we had spent that money on what we've seen here at Polyface, not only could we have fed our people, we would have had enough left over to export."

                  I could tell more stories, but these are average.  U.S. foreign aid is all about enriching big corporations with taxpayer dollars.  Ultimately, it impoverishes the peasants by enriching the lords of the culture.  Meanwhile, it hurts the countries getting the aid.

                  As I've traveled the world and interacted with people like this, I've come to the conclusion that the U.S. should not send any foreign aid to anyone anywhere anytime for anything.  Period.  Even to Israel?  Yes, even to Israel.  They can buy stuff.  So can Ukraine.  Bring all of these meddlesome outfits home; disband them.  As Paul Harvey used to admonish, why don't we hoe our own garden instead of hoeing others?  

                  No military aid.  No food aid.  No construction aid.  No nothing.  Enough already.  Close down all foreign military installations.  Become like Switzerland.  Don't give a penny to a single NGO.  Let them raise their own money.  This doesn't mean philanthropy stops; it means charity won't come from coercion.  Try not paying your taxes and see how voluntary that deal is.  You can't build charity on a foundation of coercion. 

                  How do we stop government foreign aid?

Weekly Disease Update 2/4-2/10

POULTRY CASES

2/4/25: Dauphin Co., PA, Commercial Egg Layer, 1,975,300

            Adams Co., PA, WOAH Non-Poultry, 30

            Mercer Co., OH, Commercial Turkey (x3), 27,300

            Mercer Co., OH, Egg Pullets, 88,300

            Mercer Co., OH, Egg Layers, 96,700

            Darke Co., OH, Commercial Turkey, 5,400

            Queens Co., NY, Live Bird Market, 1,100

            Bronx Co., NY, Live Bird Market, 100

            Newton Co., MO, Commercial Turkey, 13,600

            Lawrence Co., MO, Commercual Turkey Breeder, 14,300

            Jasper Co., MO, Commercial Turkey, 49,500

            Alpena Co., MI, WOAH Non-Poultry, 8

            Worcester Co., MD, Commercial Broiler, 201,600

            Harvey Co., KS, WOAH Non-Poultry, 50

2/5/25: Cumberland Co., PA, Commercial Broiler, 26,400

            Mercer Co., OH, Egg Layers, 174,600

            Mercer Co., OH, Commercial Turkey, 8,900

            Auglaize Co., OH, Commercial Turkey, 11,000

            Queens Co., NY, Live Bird Market, 520

            Kings Co., NY, Live Bird Market, N/a

            Larimer Co., CO, WOAH Non-Poultry, 10

            Stanislaus Co., CA, Commercial Turkey, 30,200

            Pinal Co., AZ, WOAH Non-Poultry, N/A

2/6/25: Lebanon Co., PA, Egg Layers, 86,000

            Lancaster Co., PA, Commercial Duck, 40,000

            Lancaster Co., PA, WOAH Poultry, 14,900

            Mercer Co., OH, Egg Layers, 232,600

            Mercer Co., OH, Commercial Turkey (x2), 30,000

            Darke Co., OH, Egg Layers, 522,200

            Queens Co., NY, Live Bird Market, 200

            Bronx Co., NY, Live Bird Market, n/a

            Newton Co., MO, Commercial Broiler, 44,400

            Lawrence Co., MO, Commercial Turkey, 9,500

            New London, CT, WOAH Non-Poultry, 20

2/7/25: Lebanon Co., PA, Commercial Broiler, 53,500

            Lancaster Co., PA, WOAH Poultry, 610

            Mercer Co., OH, Egg Layers (x2), 485,200

            Mercer Co., OH, Commercial Turkey, 4,100

            Calcasieu Co., LA, WOAH Non-Poultry, 10

If you're still with me, you realize that even a cursory look at this list indicates we are in a strange place with agriculture and food.  As far as I know, here is the situation:

                  The USDA head of the bird flu program now says it's ubiquitous--in the air, everywhere.

                  The USDA is using the widely discredited PCR test (yes, the same as for COVID) to determine what chickens and turkeys (and now dairy cows) have it.

                  The PCR test is a bit like a virus microscope and you can adjust the magnification (called "cycles") to find smaller and smaller bits and pieces.  Massachusetts Dept. of Ag, to my knowledge, is the only state that has officially and publicly said anything above 30 cycles is fraudulent.  In other words, you can magnify until you find parts anywhere--on your eating utensils, in your hair, and certainly in feathers.  The USDA is using 45 cycles.

                  In other words, when you get particle size low enough, you can find almost anything anywhere.  Kind of like the Russians who said "show me the man, and I'll show you the crime."  In other words, if you want to arrest someone, we have enough rules to find something he offended.

                  Finally, realize that anyone who grows plants and animals knows that to strengthen genetics, you save, cultivate, and breed the survivors of a disease; you don't exterminate the specimens with immune systems vibrant enough to overcome the disease.  The blanket extermination, even of the immune chickens, is probably one of the most asinine protocols ever foisted upon the food system.

                  I'm not suggesting a conspiracy or some nefarious agenda.  I'd rather be naive than inappropriately accusatory.  But for the life of me none of this makes sense, and the numbers are overwhelming and shocking.  And not even in the news. 

                  What do you think is going on?

                  First, I'm waiting for someone on the left to defend the line items being brought to light.  Why won't any liberal defend paying $10 billion in SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program--formerly Food Stamps) to soft drink companies?  Why won't anyone defend spending a third of Medicare assistance on able bodied people too trifling to get a job?  Who will tell me why $50 million for condoms to Hamas was good foreign policy? 

                  The revelations are shocking, but nobody in the opposition dares defend them.  These people voted for these things for decades and now the only thing they can do is attack Trump.  Defending the indefensible is political suicide, and they know it.  So rather than defend their game plan, they attack the referee.

                  When I spend money on something, I'm proud to own it.  I'm glad to explain why I bought an item, gave to an organization, or invested in something.  Why don't these liberals defend these expenditures?  Cowards all, they won't defend any line item; they just assassinate the character of a referee who dares to expose violations of public trust.

                  Second, I'm appalled by the conservatives who refuse to admit their own culpability in the spending debacle.  One and all act surprised by these revelations, like this is all new information and they were totally ignorant. Where is the conservative who says "I'm sorry, folks.  I repent in sackcloth and ashes for being asleep at the wheel. I voted on this stuff because it was easier and these corrupt entities contributed to my campaign.  Please forgive me; I'm going to find the drain, pull the plug, and dry out the swamp."

                  The conservatives hide behind the excuse "we didn't have time to read it."  That's negligence.  Washington is full of ninth hour 1,200 page document crises demanding a vote.  If nobody would vote for something they haven't read, it might shorten the federal register by 50 percent.  And if the mainstream media would applaud and honor a politician who refused to vote until reading the bill instead of screaming "troublemaker" and "disinformation advocate" maybe folks would feel more liberty to read the bills.

                  Sorry, conservatives, you don't get a pass for being asleep and lazy.

                  This whole situation reminds me of the tension between the greenies and the church goers.  California's lack of water and biomass control, facilitating catastrophic fires, are a direct result of greenie environmentalists' foolish policies.  To not now own these policies indicates an arrogance beyond comprehension.  But church goers who care not about happy pigs or juicy tomatoes, who vindicate cultural and ecological devastation in the name of dominion, are equally guilty. 

                  Just because greenies worship creation rather than the Creator does not give license to the faith community to abuse God's stuff (creation).  So where are the greenies repenting of their foolish land and water policies that facilitated catastrophic fires?  And where are the conservative church goers repenting of all the atrocities done "in the name of God?"  Crusades and Conquistadors.  Hmmm?  

                  My observations indicate we can all share some blame for the fixes we're in.  I'm guilty; you're guilty.  But the first step to repair is repentance; it's owning our flaws and dysfunctional thinking.  Then we can roll up our sleeves and fix things.

                  Yesterday, I asked what people spend money on unnecessarily; today, I'll ask what does government spend money on unnecessarily?

                  How about we connect the dots?  At $6 a dozen, that's enough for 216,666,666 dozen eggs, or enough for every American household to have about 3 dozen eggs.  At $8 a dozen, it's enough for every household to have 2 dozen eggs.

                  And that's just on the betting.  It doesn't count the pizza, soft drinks, Doritos and beer, which surely is far, far more. 

                  The point is anyone who spends anything on these frivolous, meaningless and even poisonous things has no right to complain about eggs.  So whenever the news person interviews someone complaining about the price of eggs, I want them to preface the egg question with these:

                  1.  Do you buy lottery tickets?

                  2.  Do you drink alcohol?

                  3.  Do you buy take-out?

                  4.  Do you buy soft drinks?

                  5.  Do you bet on ball games?

                  6.  Do you consume tobacco?

                  7.  Do you subscribe to a streaming service?

                  8.  Do you have any video games at your house?

                  9.  Do you buy any Doritos or potato chips?

                  10.  Have you ever bought a Taylor Swift concert ticket? 

                  If the answer is "no" to all these questions, then I'm ready to entertain a discussion about the price of eggs.  I've refined these questions through experience.  Several years ago I framed this by asking an audience "what do people spend money on that's not necessary?"

                  I quit asking such an open-ended question when, on a college campus, a student yelled "Underwear!"  Leave it to college students.  ha!  That's when I edited my question with a bit more specificity. 

                  I was just in the car running an errand and listened to the "News at Noon" hour where our local station broadcasts commodity prices each day.  Listening to the prices for wheat, corn, soybeans, and cattle, I was struck by how little they've moved compared to historic averages.  Since 1920, they've generally doubled while land, cars, houses, labor literally everything else has gone up by a factor of 30 and 50.  

                  If food prices had kept pace with everything else in the economy, today a hamburger would cost $40 and a dozen eggs would cost $20.  Our food prices are not high; they are obscenely low.  Disrespectfully to farmers low.  Dishonorably to the soil low.

                  If food prices honored farm/food integrity, we'd have a lot fewer of many things.  Football players would earn 10 percent of what they earn.  Ditto all entertainment sports.  And we'd think twice about spending for things on my list of question above.  And maybe we'd have smarter farmers, better soil, and more nutrient dense food.

                  What is the silliest thing people spend money on?

                  I'm certainly a fan of reading, but your perspective takes on a new understanding when you actually see what you read about from thousands of miles away.  It's similar to USAID, which has come under fire from Elon Musk and the Trump clearing-house team.  For decades, as I've traveled the world, the one U.S. agency receiving the greatest vitriol from other nations is USAID.  The damage this program has done, culturally, environmentally, agriculturally is almost unspeakable.

                  For years I've said if I could eliminate one agency, it would be USAID.  When you get on the ground in a place where it has devastated the society and ecology and where the people scorn Americans as a result, you become embarrassed to say you're from the U.S. When you're surrounded, in a locale, with people railing on the U.S. for our arrogance and hurtfulness, it's far more real than just seeing it on the news.

                  So here I am in western Oklahoma where after two good years of rain they're enduring a fall drought.  The irrigated cotton crop was destroyed by weather anomalies like wind and hail, which is fairly usual.  This is prairie; cotton isn't welcome here ecologically.  But because of crop insurance, farmers continue to grow it to receive the government check.

                  As if that's not bad enough, here's the kicker.  The rules of the crop insurance program require irrigation application, from precious and dwindling underground aquifers, in order to receive compensation.  Even though the cotton was destroyed, farmers had to continue irrigating in order to receive the check.  In other words, farmers are required to pump water onto cropless acres to do their part in salvaging it, even if there isn't anything growing.  This is insane on every level:  economics, ecology, energy, labor.

                  The six crops in the crop insurance (subsidy) program are cotton, sugar cane, rice, wheat, corn, and soybeans.  Those are the six picked winners in the farm commodity program.  The rules are highly regimented, administered from Washington, without regard to what is actually beneficial or appropriate.  As a result, farmers continue to grow cotton in a hostile environment, destroying the land and water, when any reasonable person would shift and do something different.  The farm programs push agriculture into madness.

                  We drove by an operation where Farm Service Agency (another USDA program) paid a massive grant to a young farmer to get started.  He bought cows and cobbled together a couple thousand acres of land and it's the most despicable set-up you can imagine.  But he's got easy money, thanks to a farm program and the American taxpayer, and is as uncreative, filthy, wasteful, and conventional as it gets.  Thousands and thousands of acres here, like everywhere, have been turned into wasteland due to farm subsidy programs and farmers who don't need to run a business like a business.

                  It breaks your heart to see the square miles of destroyed prairie turned to compacted soil and briars.  This deserted and destroyed land could be verdant prairie, producing abundance and hydrating the aquifers.  This is why North America today produces less food than it did 500 years ago.  Shame on us.

                  Like the 1979 Food Pyramid that launched a generation of sickness, we would have a far more productive agriculture and better land stewardship had well-meaning but addle-headed meddling President Lincoln never germinated the U.S. Department of Agriculture.  Had the government never told us what to eat with dietary laws, we'd be much healthier.  Had the government never told us how to farm, we'd have much better agriculture.

                  Do you think there's anything worth preserving at the USDA?

                  A middle-aged farmer told me his 18-year-old go-getter entrepreneurial son in 2022 wanted to install a slaughterhouse.  This family has a serious farming operation and the son spearheads a deer processing facility on their property.

                  He takes in, breaks down, and packages 1,200 deer in the fall.  Those deer do not need any inspection.  He can do this without ANY government oversight.  The hunters who bring in the deer do not have to submit the carcasses for inspection.  The processing facility need not meet any requirements.  Since this is game, it's completely unregulated except for the hunting licenses purchased by hunters if they aren't hunting on their own property. 

                  This meat has no refrigeration requirements and is often dragged hundreds of yards through squirrel dung, sticks, and rocks on its way to the transport vehicle.  These deer often are outside refrigeration for many hours until they're cooled down.  I hope everyone is tracking this.  Zero government oversight.  And this meat can be eaten, fed to children, used at church dinners and neighborhood gatherings.  The only stipulation is that it can't be sold; it can be given, cooked, used and fed to anyone without restriction except being sold. 

                  This enterprising young man called the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (VDACS) division that oversees meat processing plants and expressed his interest in moving his facility to inspection so he can do beef, pork, and lamb for farmers who could then legally sell it to their neighbors.  He's already doing more than 100,000 pounds of venison.

                  Realize, for you uninitiated in these affairs, that in the U.S. you cannot sell a single pound of ground beef or a pork chop unless it's processed in a government inspected facility.  You can give it away.  You can buy it.  You can feed it to your children, all without inspection.  But you just can't sell it.  Obviously if someone buys it, that would be an illegal sale on the black market.  And yes, it does happen.

                  The VDACS administer (yes, I have her name) told this young man, who was eagerly ready to comply with all licensing and permits in order to build a community abattoir, that there was no sense in building it.  He incredulously asked why, since this is an extremely needed business service to the local food community and our nation is desperately short of these kinds of facilities.

                  Her answer:  "you can comply with everything we ask, but WE WILL FAIL YOU." 

                  The young man, taken aback, asked why.  The answer was simple:  "We don't want these small plants.  We don't want to mess with them." 

                  I told the dad, as he related the conversation to me, that I'm not surprised at the prejudice but to admit it this boldly was surprising.  This is the elitist arrogance of these government agencies.  Another dream destroyed by tyranny.

                  Whenever people begin defending bureaucratic regulators, these are the stories that come to my mind.  I know, sometimes someone in these agencies wants to help, but the prejudice is alive and well even if it's unspoken.  

                  The fact that he can process 1,200 deer and they can go into the food chain (unsold) without a single government regulation but he can't do even one cow, lamb, or pig for a farmer who wants to sell a pound is outrageous.  This is clearly not about food safety.  It is about controlling market access so the entrenched bigshots don't have to suffer competition.

                  This is why we need a FOOD EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION.  

                  If farmers and ranchers could sell uninspected meat from their livestock, do you believe hospitals would be full of sick people who ate filthy meat?

                  I think this defines the liberal mindset:  a total lack of curiosity.  If one thing permeates the theme of homeschooling and alternative education in America, it is an unflinching desire to stimulate curiosity.  In my dealings with the public school systems, it seems like the one thing it hampers is curiosity.

                  To be clear, I'm not a registered member of any organized party and have hewed to various sides of issues throughout my life.  I've even changed positions.  I've even said things I wish I hadn't.  I come to this process having been battered and disappointed, experienced in how devious politics can be.  I can't imagine ever running for an office, although throughout my life I've been recruited by Democrats, Republicans, Socialists, and Libertarians.  Quite a resume.

                  But what strikes me most about these RFK Jr. hearings is how NONcurious the Democrats seem about the health epidemic plaguing our culture.  The U.S. has even fallen out of the top countries on the "Happiness Index."  Since the early 1960s we've gone from 3 percent obese to 60 percent.  Food allergies, autism, auto-immune disorders and teen suicide were practically nonexistent.  Bird flu, E. coli, Salmonella, and camphylobacter were not in the lexicon and certainly not part of public discourse.

                  I disagree with some of RFK Jr.'s answers.  He said the Centers for Disease Control is important.  It's not.  He said Medicaid needed to exist.  It doesn't.  They didn't ask him about Medicare, but I would suggest it, too, should be on the chopping block. In fact, the entire HHS should go, but that's not doable yet. Two things strike me most about these hearings.  The first is how enslaved Americans have become to government programs, especially in health care.  It is a tangled web of interventions and regulations and dominates most decisions about personal health.  

                  Any indication of cuts or service boundaries receives howls of outrage.  Our country survived and was definitely much healthier prior to ANY government management or manipulation of hospitals and doctors.  I would argue that one of the biggest catalysts for the processed food industry is the lack of personal financial responsibility for health care.  Most folks don't give a care about food and nutrition because they depend on the government's system to fix them.  You cannot encourage personal responsibility with government babysitting.  

                  The second striking element is how disinterested the Democrats are in exploring any of RFK Jr.'s ideas.  I'm reminded when Teresa and I decided to homeschool our kids in 1982, long before the homeschool movement gained momentum, nearly all educators, both government and private, vilified the notion.  Newspapers carried headlines like "homeschoolers jeopardize mental health services."  The universal belief among academic elitists was that homeschooling would create massive psychiatric care from the "unsocialized" kids.  In all my conversations with these folks, I asked them "have you ever read John Holt?  Ever read Raymond and Dorothy Moore?"  Of course, they'd never heard of these folks.  We now know that it's the public school creating massive psychiatric intervention, not homeschoolers.

                  Ask any conventional chemical farmer "have you ever read Sir Albert Howard, Louis Bromfield, Ed Faulkner, J.I. Rodale, or Charles Walters?"  Of course not.  They've never heard of these names; completely oblivious and completely uncurious.

                  That these Democrat senators can't even imagine entertaining a question like "this is interesting, Bobby; I've never seen the studies or research you cite; can you tell me more?" indicates a profound fraternization with Big Pharma, Big Food, and Big Ag.  They all go hand in hand.  The Democrats have not only become the party of lawlessness and moral shock, but are now firmly in bed with the drug companies, insurance oligarchs, and sickness perpetuation.  How sad.

                  So I called both my senators yesterday, Kaine and Warner, both Democrats, to register my endorsement of RFK Jr.  It takes about 5 minutes to do both your senators.  I urge you to make time today to do that.  And yes, you should have all your elected representatives posted somewhere for quick access. 

                  What's your take on the hearings?  I'm curious.

                  The reason I'm in the mix is they want to offer a clean food dispensary (this is medical, so you can't call it a grocery store) on site so patients can find and acquire real food as part of a doctor's visit.  The doctor team wants me to help them find good food. 

                  Having just returned from speaking at the Tennessee Health Summit, I pushed him to explain how a wellness-oriented medical clinic works when the American health care system only incentivizes sickness. He admitted this is a hard nut to crack, and will eventually be cracked when insurance quits paying by the episode and pays by the patient per year.  He said this would become widely accepted by 2030.

                  In other words, each insured gets a certain amount of annual expenditure; when that cap occurs, no more money.  Period.  End of discussion.  He said right now in the alternative medical community this is the most accepted protocol to let doctors get paid for wellness.  Right now, the system only incentives sickness; doctors don't get a royalty or commission from insurance companies for keeping you well.  If it were an annual limit where the doctor shared in your non-use of the allotted amount, then suddenly doctors would be incentivized to keep you OUT of their clinics instead of IN.

                  This led to brand new information for me:  RISK ADJUSTED FACTOR SCORE (RFAS).  Ever heard of it?  I hadn't either.  We're all familiar with credit scores that determine your loan risk.  

                  Every medical procedure has a code.  When doctors submit your medical procedure for reimbursement, they pick a code for whatever it is that they did.  Those thousands of codes have extremely specific definitions.  Over time, those codes accumulate your medical risk, or the complexity of the doctor's decisions regarding your care.

                  If you've ever wondered why doctors and hospitals can't give you a price for a procedure, this is the quickest explanation:  they don't know.  All of your procedure codes add up to a RFAS.  The higher your RFAS, the more money the doctor gets for whatever procedure occurred that visit.

                  This means all procedures are on a sliding reimbursement scale depending on your RFAS.  For example, a patient with Type II diabetes who goes in for a toe infection will have a higher RFAS than a patient who has nothing else wrong except the toe infection.

                  If you're thinking along with me, you quickly realize that this system incentives additional procedures and additional diagnoses--even complex, difficult diagnoses--in order to raise the RFAS.  This perversely incentivizes doctors to over-label illness and to keep you coming back for additional issues.  The rationale for the system was to reward the doctors who saw more complicated patients--reward the difficult decisions and difficult treatment.

                  But without further stipulations, it in fact operates as an economic incentive for doctors not to really get you well and for you to maintain dependency on the health care system.  The more sick you become, the more money they make.  Everybody with me on this?

                  Maybe I'm late to the game and maybe I'm just an ignorant peasant, but as soon as he explained the RFAS to me, the health care business became painfully obvious.  I never heard of the RFAS until Saturday.  Now it all makes sense.  I don't know whether to be depressed, frustrated, or angry.  Hopefully this will be something MAHA addresses.

                  Do you think American health care can be improved?

                  It was made during the summer and is the most thematically accurate capture of my life and work here at Polyface Farm.  Everything from the cinematography to the music is first class.

                 Angel Studios does these documentaries as part of a kind of master-crafts series in which they highlight people who do things, makers.  Many documentaries showcase activists and famous speechifiers, but few honor people who work with their hands.  

                  In our techno-sophisticated culture, calluses and splinters don't rank as high on the social ladder as people who sit all day in front of a computer.  But somebody has to clean the toilets and fix the brakes on the car.  And gather eggs and butcher chickens.

                  I'm extremely grateful that somebody with as much story-telling professionalism as Angel Network is taking an interest in this side of our culture.  If you ever wondered what this Joel guy is really like, this is the video that spans history and future.

                  We’ve graciously been given a 15 minute preview to share with you.

Thank you for watching.

                  Teresa and I had the unprecedented privilege to attend the MAHA Inaugural Ball at the Waldorf-Astoria in Washington, D.C. last night, guests of Dr. Eric and Karen Berg.  Some 500 revelers converged in one spot to celebrate Trump's victory, but perhaps more importantly, the prospect of RFK Jr. ascending to head the Federal Department of Health and Human Services

                  By a show of hands solicited by Highwire founder and celebrity Del Bigtree, at least 100 attendees were moms--and a few dads--who for decades have spent their life energy dealing with vaccine-damaged children.  That moment of raised hands suddenly brought it all into focus and meaning for me.

                  What's all the fuss about?  It's about thousands and thousands of families ostracized, marginalized, censored and deplatformed who have exhausted their money, emotions, and time searching for answers.  The pharmaceutical fat cats and their corrupt colluders in federal agencies ignore, condescend, and deny such dangers exist.

                  For decades now the statistics and stories accumulating in the vaults of these agencies and the drug companies have been locked, protecting the public from adverse vaccine information.  Meanwhile the juggernaut of agency capture, cronyism, and corruption proceeds unchecked, casting thousands more families and their children into a lifetime of immunological dysfunction and sickness. 

                  Last night, I saw the pent up frustration released in unspeakable gratitude, appreciation, and celebratory euphoria.  Kennedy pledges to unlock those vaults.  Those piles of protected secrets hiding behind agency and corporate company walls will be released to a public desperate for answers and information.  The tea is about to be cast into the harbor, folks.

                  Cinderella, banished to society's sidelines, cast out of parties, never offered a seat at the table, is now suddenly in charge.  The MAHA movement is primarily an expression of desperate people, denied remedy, denied a hearing, willing to risk all and expend all to find the truth.  The truth seekers now have the upper hand.

                  The drug company fat cats who made trillions on covid, who enjoy the only product liability protection legally guaranteed in America, are on the verge of being outed.  These neighbors and friends ostracized from society are ready to storm the Bastille.  When the data vaults spew their contents, it'll be like slaves granted their freedom.

                  RFK Jr.'s relentless and lifelong pursuit of the truth locked in government and corporate vaults has achieved the unthinkable--a possibility to expose the lies and conspiracies, bringing transparency to an opaque labyrinth.  If this trajectory proceeds, the power, privilege, and profits of the entire pharmaceutically-dominated health industry will collapse.  Shares will drop.  Commercials will decrease.                  

                  Name any other product in America indemnified from liability protection.  Not cars.  Not toys.  Not paint.  The special status enjoyed and leveraged by this runaway vaccine industry is about to change.  For the parents and prophets praying, crying, yearning for truth, last night's gala represented the euphoria that always follows when righteousness vanquishes evil.  As parents of healthy children and grandchildren, Teresa and I confess to being emotionally disadvantaged at the pain and suffering in families dealing with vaccine damaged children. 

                  After last night's outpouring of affection for people who have pounded on the gates of information prisons, I will forever empathize more deeply with the MAHA movement.  For this conversation to happen at this level in our culture required wandering in the wilderness.  The devotion of thousands to bring the wellness conversation to this point in our national psyche and narrative is paying off.  Today, I honor and salute the dedication, the pain, the vision and commitment of these RFK Jr. supporters who gave, rallied, and pushed when most didn't care. Yes, euphoria is deserved and warranted.  Now let's ride this wave to corrective action.

                  What should RFK Jr.'s first action be once he's confirmed as head of HHS?