You dont write books for a living that youve written several as the correct . Guest if i have. Ive written so the 12 but i may farm for a living. Pig Production Cut chicken production, farms, and a broad cultural thing like everything i want to do. If the historical normalcy we are in a time here so broad cultural things. One of my favorite books is the one i wrote this here excellency of being a lunatic farmer and that one kind of really describes the difference in our farming compared to the average. Host tell us about your farm. Guest here in virginia shenandoah valley. Think about tyson chicken houses in smithfield hog factories. Our animals are all out on passenger and every day or every couple of days to go where they want. They are controlled with hightech electric fencing that we can be very thankful. We have hightech fencing to this weekend migrate with the modern technology. And we can steer them around the landscape to get the synergistic benefits of nature offered for a long time before the domestic livestock were the norm. Host what were those synergistic benefits . Guest in america for example, the big herds of bison built the deep prairies wher buy witprairies where welive in andy in virginia. They lit fires to attract them and open up grazing areas. So there was a plant symbiosis that was quite wellmanaged by both the client and the people. And so, by looking at that template, and trying to duplicate it on a commercial and domestic models we were able to bring back the abundance of us here prior to today. People dont realize today that 500 years ago in north america grew more food than we do today. That is a pretty astounding fact, that is true. So, our desire is how can we bring back that abundance rather than the size of rhod rhode isld into the gulf of go into the erosion of soil off of the things that we have done. Host do you do any other type of harming . Guest we have cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, rabbit, ducks, shed and a lot of the forest so we di could have a forestry as well. Host that is a big operation. Guest it keeps us busy. We own about 150 acres and another 12 to 13 hundreds we are managing about 2,000 acres surface and 50 restaurants about 5,000 families and several institutions and direct marketing everything. We dont sell through walmart or supermarket. We own the customer. We like it that way. So, more of a farm to the table type of operation. Guest absolutely. Host why do you not felt the major chains . Guest because they are hardpressed to gehard pressed o live on where the margins are so small, so by those notorious middleman have all of the middleman makes the money, well if that is where the money is, sign me up so we become a distributor, the marketer can have a graphic artist, the person that answers the phone. And by doing that, we can increase our margin per pound of chicken or whatever if we can earn a nice living on a small farm because he owed that chain between the farm and consumer. Host what kind of regulations do you have to adhere to from a federal or state level . Guest there are zoning. We are in an agricultural zone and what that means is that its illegal for us example we have 500 acres of the hardwood forests into beautiful appalachian hardwood. Its illegal for us to go to the word and cut the tree. We no know it on this whole mil. That is until we make a chair and sell it and then we are illegal because chair making his manufacturing illegal i hour zo. A lot of restrictions are bound Food Processing or food value adding. Its illegal to smoke our own pork on the farm because smoking is a manufacturing process whi while. Its illegal without a attachedd kitchen and bathroom and a plethora of compliance regulations. One of the problems with these regulations is that they are not sized scalable. They are sized discriminatory. They are a lot easier. Host do you find the usda to be an ally . Guest if i were president , i would abolish the u. S. No federal agency has ever been more efficient at eliminating its constituency. Host how so . Guest most growth or constituency. Welfare, housing, they grow their constituency. The usda has almost eliminated its constituency farmers that were the original constituency where they almost had so few farmers now we actually have twice as many people incarcerated in prisons in the u. S. As we have farmers. Host how has that been accomplished in your view . Guest it isnt all the governments fault. They are complicit in that they like cheap food and spend more money on other things. So the government has been complicit in creating food safety requirements van eliminating neighbor to neighbor commerce among consenting adults because the government defines what is safe and what is allowable in the marketplace, for example is fine for me to give my child for glasses with mountain dew everyday, but one glass of whole milk, that is considered like cocaine. When the government defines what is safe and unsafe, then thats and therefore what is marketable and what is not marketable, that immediately puts the marketability into the hands of a bureaucracy which typically will work at the behest of a mindset that is primarily status quo driven the big players dont like competition. So if colluding with the government regulators can keep innovation out of the marketplace, then of course that helps. Host youve written two books coming you can farm and your successful farm business. What you just told us doesnt sound like it is an easy day. Guest there are lots of workarounds. Are we in a straitjacket whatever tierney in many ways, yes but we still have plenty of opportunities. So, rather than dwelling on the problems, these books are about dwelling on the opportunities coming into the opportunities are we can either find ways around whether it is to build a little commercial kitchen, collaborate with somebody that already had one, work with a processor that already licensed. More and more people around the country are creating direct farmer to consumer transactional models that are not in commerce. I can give you a glass of raw milk. Thats great but i cant sell it to you. I can do a backyard process pork chop or pepperoni but i cant sell it to you. If we can figure out a workaround to keep it out of commerce, we are okay. Okay. Theres a lady in North Carolina that started a food church if you joined the church, then you can participate in transactions. Instead of playing golf you get cheese and raw milk and all sorts of cold stuff. There are some really cool workarounds it will be an introductory robe conference january 25 in cincinnati next year to showcase these clever workarounds to clients. Host we often read or hear about bailout for payments to farmers. Do you accept those or take those . Guest i dont even know where the usda office is. We dont play those games. The grant, to give you a grant it to be stolen from somewhere before, so it is that the governments money. The government got it from somewhere else so we dont participate in any of those programs at all. But by direct marketing and establishing a brand into the compost instead of fertilizer and perennials and annuals and mobile infrastructure instead of theres a lot of latitude within the regulation. So that is what we are working on is in business they call it unfair advantages. What are the unfair advantages with the system. Lets leverage those and see what we can exploit. Those little cracks in the structure. Host what is your take on g. Mo and organic . Guest im against genetically modified organisms. However, i deeply appreciate the need to research a and try new things so my take unlike my friends who want to outlaw them categorically i say let the research proceed. But if one of your patented beings invade my farm and gives me for for an just as if youre bold takeover an. We are so convoluted injustice in America Today that not only a these are inherently promiscuous beings so they come over and have a giving me beings i dont want not only can i go down into the magistrate give you for trespassing, but the courts have ruled i have to pay you a loyalty for the privilege of yours coming over and affecting mine. So, it is an extremely convoluted type of justice that we have today. If your property were truly protected that way like it is for the cars and murderers that would put a brake if you will on the historical and organic brake if you will on g. And though expansion and development. At least we would be protected from them invading my space into their fist hitting my nose. Host with this book written for . Guest it is written for all of the people who dreamed of having a Pleasant Place in the country of being a farmer but theyve been told by family, friends, business associates, coworkers. Theres no money in farming. It is a hard drudgery, thats life, so its ultimately a book about how we take our Current Situation context and how we actually go from scratch and build a profitable enjoyable form. It is satisfying in the context of today. Host your successful for business. There was a whole floor filled with pianos and organs from all the close of churches just in that county alone and that was just a couple of after my own church closed. Nearing the end of 2015 to the beginning of 2016. Their third place was church and what i noticed in my own life was i wasnt going to church anymore. I was actively refusing to go like a gingrey 16yearold. I gues visits my thesis of the. Kidding. [laughter] when you have a whole community into the church is now closed or nobody goes there because they are driving 50 miles a week to church in the law or people dont go there anymore, what fills the void and i was asking about my own life and about the heartland, about middle america. All these churches were closing so was filling the void. I wrote an article for a place called standard into the beginning of 2016 before the caucuses are giving that the loss of space in america was changing us and changing us politically. You might understand what i say next when i see so many that were there in 2016 have so many embarrassing takes in our past. So many we dont want to talk about it. I dont want to talk about my own but this was my one good state so because i think i was onto something. [inaudible conversations] good evening, friends. Can you hear me . Good evening