American Thought Leaders - Canning, Compost, and Chickens: How to Stop Relying on Others for Food | Special Episode

Episode Date: November 5, 2025

In this special episode of American Thought Leaders, I visited the Food Independence Summit, an annual event dedicated to homesteading, sustainable living, and reclaiming food autonomy, in Walnut Creek, Ohio. The 2025 summit, with a theme of “Seed to Spoon,” took place in mid-June earlier this year in the heart of Ohio’s Amish country.Homesteaders, farmers, gardeners, educators, and healthy food advocates spent two days together participating in hands-on workshops, listening to keynote presentations, and networking with like-minded people.For many Americans, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the fragility of supply chains, including the food supply chain. The summit’s focus was on learning how to grow, preserve, and prepare homegrown food.While at the summit, I spoke with organizer John Miller to learn about the philosophy behind this growing homesteading and self-sufficiency movement. I also spoke with renowned farmer Joel Salatin about what new trends he’s seeing.I even got some hands-on practice pressure-canning beef tacos with the help of Sarah Thrush, a canning expert and social media influencer.“There’s a lot of reasons people can, but one of them is so they can decide what goes in the jar, like if you have health concerns, or if you want to know what your food is sourced from, or you just like your chili recipe and you want it in bulk,” Thrush said. “It’s like the ultimate meal prep.”I also spoke to physician Julian Douwes, who flew to Ohio all the way from Germany. Dr. Douwes is the director at Clinicum St. Georg in Bad Aibling, Germany, where they developed the first known cure for Lyme disease. Many people in the Ohio Amish community suffer from Lyme disease. Miller himself was cured from an awful case of the disease through this therapy, called whole-body hyperthermia.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Well, hello everyone. We're here at the Food Independence Summit in Walnut Creek, Ohio. I interviewed now my increasingly good friend, John Miller. John came on the show a little while back and was excited about this event. We talked about manufacturing. We talked about food freedom. And he said, you have to come to our summit. And so here we are in Walnut Creek. Thank you for having us, John. Well, thank you for coming. It's really an honor. We've been blessed. with pretty decent weather, actually.

The weather forecast was questionable as we approached it, but we had just enough rain to not be too hot. I don't have an exact count yet, but we're somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 people were expecting today. That's fantastic. Well, so what would you say is going to be the big highlight of the day? Like, what is the thing that people really come here for,

if you had to pick one point? I mean, the people come here. here to learn how to be less dependent on other people, particularly for food. And we showed him everything from seed to spoon, that's kind of our motto, on how to do that, whether you're planting gardens or whether you're conserving food, you can find out how to do it here.

We've got 48 concurrent workshops this afternoon. When we do something, we do it with all our might. Well, please show me some of what you've got happening over here. Okay, let's go. Woo. That's a mighty fine looking sausage. It's powered by the two burner propane burner on the bottom with literally a slab of apple firewood right on top. Oh wow, that's fantastic. We were really intentional about bringing people from outside the community here because homesteading is part of our culture here.

When we say our community, it's not just Amish. I mean, there are other people in the community that basically have the same values as well. Chol Salatin talks about a homesteading tsunami that has come about, particularly since COVID, when people realize the supply chain is very fragile and if it gets interrupted you can be out of food very quickly so i think part of that has also helped make us successful because whereas a generation ago people raised the garden and grew up that way some of that has gotten lost so we hope to bring that back for people that are interested. homesteading for me? Homesteading is one of those things that can mean a lot of things to a lot of people.

What it means in this community is that I've got a home and I have maybe two or three acres and I have a garden, a couple of fruit trees and maybe some chickens. So you have a homestead where you are to a greater or lesser degree self-sufficient. So what are these magazines? You know, we were walking through one of the tents, and you pointed these out to me, plain values. What are these about? So that's a local publishing company. It covers everything from some of the philosophical underpinnings of the whys, why do we do different things and what are the principles. And then there's just a lot of practical stuff in the magazine about how to live life. So what are the principles? What are the plain values? I ascribe to the fact.

that organizations should be modeled around the tree. So if you go to my company and the different organizations that I have, we don't have a pyramidal top-down chart like most organizations. We have a bottom-up chart where the leaders are at the bottom supporting the people. And I think it's consistent with this thing of the difficulty to scale. So a tree teaches us, and you might have noticed this, that aside from the sequoias out west, most trees are only a couple hundred feet high.

So there is, whatever you do, there is a level beyond which if you try to scale it, you almost have to have a tyrannical corporate structure to keep it from completely getting out of hand. So I think what the tree teaches us is that, you have smaller units. If you're going to be a natural organic organization, there's a size beyond which it can't grow.

So what you do, instead of building a tower, you plant trees and you create a forest that collaborates. I think nature teaches us a lot of different things. And for example, the Amish, their church, districts that are governed by a bishop and two ministers typically are no bigger than say 30 families and if it grows larger than that they divide it in half separate and it's probably a practical thing because if you get beyond that you're not able to have church services in a home the walnut creek mennonite church which we still have here just

down the road, they separated over the issue of whether you have church services in your home or whether you create a church house where you meet on a regular basis. And that was the dividing factor back in the 19th century. Give me a picture of what we're going to do here. So we're pressure canning. There's two different types of canning. There's a water bath canning, pressure canning. So today we're doing pressure canning of beef tacos.

And this is actually really super simple. My family has been doing this for hundreds of years. You just fill the jars, you put them in the canter, and you put the lid on, and then you run the canter. And so what that does is it creates an environment inside the jar where then you can put it on your shelf and you don't need any refrigeration. How long does this last? I mean, can anything go in these jars? Practically anything.

I mean, there are a few caveats and a few things that you need to be aware of when it comes to food preservation. But your fruits, your vegetables, all of your meats, your game. I love the canned meats and the meals in the jar because then what I do is I batch can everything. So, like, I'll do up 40 pounds of taco beef. I'll do all of that all in one day. And then I don't cook tacos for, like, an entire year. Well, you're inspiring me here because let's say, you know, if you're someone who likes to try the, to do the keto diet from time to time,

which I do, right? You actually, it's like to do it, you know, sort of piece by piece can be troublesome. But here, you can make food for a month almost or something like that if you're alone, right? I call it the ultimate food prep. I mean, that's really what it is, especially there's a lot of reasons people can, but one of them is just so they can decide what goes in the jar. Simplicity, you can do it at home. All you need is a device like this. You can actually start with a pot. So you don't need any special equipment. You can actually start with any large pot that you have as long as it's tall enough to submerge the jars. The most important part, though, is to actually have a good canning book because the canning books will tell you,

what you can put in a large water bath canter and what needs to go in a pressure canter. So the food dictates which process is needed. Oh, so there's things that can go in here but can't go in here and there's things that can go in here but can't go in here. All of our food falls on an acidity level. So things that are more acidic like apples and oranges and fruits and fruit juices, jams, jellies, they only need to be heated to 212 degrees. So that can go in this large pot because we can boil water in here, 2002 degrees. But our low acid foods like meat, meals in a jar, beans, fish, vegetables even.

If you don't want your vegetables pickled, say you just want them in water, then you put him in here, that temperature is 240 degrees. So it allows us to cook it at a higher heat, making it safe for no refrigeration. You know, it's incredible. I'm thinking about your life trajectory here, learning a little bit about you right you you taught in the past you taught in the space of you know a surgery surgical techniques and and this kind of thing and then you of course you had the canning from you know you're as you described a multi-generational canner so it was almost in your blood to do this kind of stuff it wasn't a big leap and and then COVID comes and you go viral about canning because you know

all sorts of people are worried about their realities being locked down being isolated and so and watching video. So, and here you are with millions of people learning how to camp from you, including me. It's wild because I retired from medicine with the intent of bulking up on our homestead, like getting more food on our food plots, hunting more fishing, like doing more things that were self-sustainable for us. And in that process, somebody just asked for a video and I was like, let me show you what I'm doing. And boy, my life changed every sense. I thought I was retiring and now I think I work more. Yeah, well, no, it's funny.

I mean, even my own kind of journey entity, I never thought I'd be doing anything remotely on camera in my life, but it turned out that people wanted, it turned out I was helping people understand the madness of our times. I was just trying to figure out myself and you know, I ended up doing it on camera. But there's such an appetite for people to learn.

And I understand a lot of young people who didn't even know that this is even possible. Yeah. We're watching. I think, I often say it's like we're waking up from a grocery store coma. It's like we, over generations, over time, we have just come to rely on a grocery store. That's the easiest thing. It's the food's right there.

You know, you work, you pay for the groceries, take them home. They're done. But this isn't the norm. This isn't how we have lived in this country for the existence of the country, right? grocery stores are actually a relatively new thing if you look at our history. So my family, while we've always canned and we've always preserved our food, there was generations of people in between there that didn't get to experience that. And so I don't think it was ever lost. It just became less popular. And I think now that people are starting to look at their

foods and our fragile food systems, you know, like during COVID, and they're starting to go, Oh my gosh. I mean like what happens if I do go to the grocery store and I can't get my whatever What am I going to do? Then they start like oh, I could do this myself. So it's making a it's making a comeback But I don't want to say like it was dead. I don't think it was dead. I think it just became unpopular for a little bit Well, I mean it's very popular among the Amish, right? It's no surprise that it's kind of the Amish who came to John Miller and asked him, hey, can you make some lids that work for us, you know? Right. Yeah. So Can we see the next step? I know it's super simple, but...

It is. I'm going to get some lids and some rings. So here in North America in Canning, now canning is done globally. This isn't just something that just Americans do. It's done globally. But here in America, we use like a two-piece lid system on the average. And here's your superb lids and your superb rings. So the flat part of the lid is called a flat. That's pretty easy.

And then it has this sealant on the bottom of it that creates a seal onto the jar. And then you have your rings. And this is a placeholder for the lid while we're processing. So what we do in canning is the next step would be we put the lid in the ring on. And the flies have just really come out in full force today. But we just put that lid and that ring on. And then once it goes into the key, canner the lid will actually kind of bounce up and down and it will push all the air out of the

jar it will push all the oxygen out of the jar because we're heating it under pressure because i notice you didn't do it particularly tightly doesn't need to be this is just a placeholder so once this jar comes out and this lid is sealed this comes off and you just put it on your shelf like this oh the lid is what holds the suction to the jar not the ring so yep i would just wipe these down i would just use a rag with a little bit of vinegar or water and I would just wipe these down make sure that I've got a good clean rim you want to do it absolutely we've got this now what if I've I think I may have touched the body the base of it it's okay these have all been this is a great fun fact this is a sterilizer so you can also use this to sterilize things that's how hot it gets

I see so these have been cleaned with hot soapy water they don't touching them is okay They're going to go in the sterilizer. Okay, wow. Well, there we go. I just learned something new. Then on top of there like that. And I don't even need to push it down too hard because it's gonna.

Nope, just make sure it's centered on the jar. And note that ring won't work. You need this one. Thank you. Okay. Now, wait, wait, wait, bag up. Okay. Three fingers like this.

Okay. Just use one hand. And as soon as the lid starts to engage and turn, the jar starts to turn, that's tight enough. Okay, let me make sure I got it. There we go. That's it. Okay.

Beautiful. Now that water's hot, so careful, I'm going to give you, come back out again. Let's do it safely. I'll give you one of these. Okay. And you just pick it up. Yep, use two hands if you need to. And that goes in here.

This protects you and keeps you from getting burned. Great. And then you just repeat that process for as many jars as you have going into the canner. You know, the thing about this, which is so amazing is like I often would make a lot of basically something very similar to this actually. You know, basically ground beef with some with some, with some. But I often end up eating it really quickly because I didn't actually keep it. I didn't set it up to keep it, right? It just lasts a few days, but you end up kind of consuming it.

But this also kind of keeps it kind of away from you a little bit for a while. Yeah, for sure. We save on average about $10,000 to $12,000 a year in groceries by canning. That's astonishing. I have friends that have, you know, herds of cattle and so forth. And it's hard, but I don't, I, it's just my wife and myself, right? It's hard for me to buy the side of a cow. How quickly can you consume that?

But maybe you can, when you're doing, using it this kind of way, you can really do some things involved and have them kind of sitting there. In the last, do you say, a couple of years? Yeah. So we like to rotate everything in one to three years. Okay. So I always like to have enough to take us from harvest to harvest. So like if it's corn, I want at least 52 quarts because I know we're going to eat one jar of corn a week.

Right. That 52 takes me to the next harvest year. But they will last on the shelves as long as they're in a good environment, away from the sun, cool, dry, they'll last for years on your shelves. That's astonishing. Yeah. Wait until I tell you about freeze drying. Next time.

Hey, listen, thanks so much. Are we allowed to shake hands? Oh, yeah, I think so. Yeah, it's going to go into sterilizing. Okay, beautiful. Hey, Sarah. Thanks so much. That's amazing.

Yeah. You guys have been coming here for years. So tell me about this, the evolution of this place. And frankly, Jeff, actually your own evolution as an Epoch Times reporter covering this event. I've been with Epic Times with about three and a half years. But I just started to develop an interest in a more sustainable lifestyle and i didn't even know anything about that because i grew up in cities and suburbs and suddenly that changed a lot of things changed started starting towards covid instead of

purely politics i was starting to cover more sustainable living homesteading type features and that's how i learned about this oh fantastic well melissa tell me about this the background here i grew up um and acquired city for our country we lived in the city because that's where our family owned a business, but we had a large farm, and we spent many hours hunting and fishing, and my grandmother passed on, like, five generation of canning skills and and baking and baking from scratch and really full food. And you really didn't understand at a young age, the, you know, the importance of that. And so when COVID happened, and the shelves began to go bare, and food was hard to get, especially with the child that has multiple allergies.

So I went back to my old roots and said, I know how to fix this. And not only, Do you have a reliability of what you're going to purchase and what's in your food? But you also can save money by doing this because you're not, every time you get ready and you're a hectic mom and you're running kids in every direction and you don't have to run through the nearest drive-through because you already have something on the shelf ready to put into another recipe. And so you learn how to preserve food, whether it be in mylar, with oxygen absorbers or cany like Sarah's teaching here.

People say, why do you do this? You could just go buy it for $2. Why do you spend two hours canning something when you could buy it for $2? And so I'm like, well, I enjoy it. I'm teaching a, you know, generations of skills to my children, but we control the ingredients and we control the product that's on our shelves when we are ready for that product. As a single mom coming here, there was a lot of fear and a lot of open doors that opened it once.

But, you know, you have to be strong enough to walk through them and see like a vision. and I had the vision and we just decided to go. And clearly you were a really important part of our reporting here because you opened the door for this gentleman. Yes, it was exciting. I said, this is a collaboration you cannot miss. And he's like, I don't know anything about this. I said, well, this is the best way to learn.

Like, just jump in. And it coincided to April 2020, RFK Jr. decides to enter the race talking about what's in your food, removing chemicals and dyes. before the term Make America Healthy again happened pretty universal message like who wouldn't want that right

so that really impacted me personally because it fostered my growth and my interest and now I get less from the grocery store I'm trying to grow more but I take more herbs I know a lot about herbs now that I didn't know before I look at ingredients

where I never used to look at ingredients and I can't even pronounce or spell half of them And so it's, and that's what this does. It changes your perspective where you can make little steps. You don't have to be like I'm still growing. I'm not at a level where Millis is because that's been her lifestyle. But I'm able to incorporate positive changes.

And I can't say enough of how this event is impacted me. This is my favorite. I mean, I've covered several homesteading events now, but this is my favorite. What I love about the Amish lifestyle is what we're getting, back to a return to the basics where you know where your food comes from, you know what's in your food. It starts with the soil and then having the right seeds or the second step and knowing what to do with that. But then preserve, it doesn't matter what you grow if you can't preserve it. You know, you've got to understand like everything starts from the soil and it involves

your clothing and it involves your food. It involves everything. So it's not just about, it's a lifestyle and a mindset that you take on as a whole because when you realize the whole, you know, the conference in some of it here is seed to spoon. So seed to spoon is from all the way to that seed into the earth, all the way to what you wear, what you eat, how you experience your world. And when you realize that everything starts at seed and that soil and affects all of your life, it's really a cool concept to see how big that grows with your lifestyle. And then you change your lifestyle once you start to learn. Because education is powerful, right? And he's bringing those stories to people and educating the masses. So that's an exciting thing.

Well, thank you very much. This has been wonderful. So what a beautiful little calf we've got here. You've got a few calves in the cow in the trailer. They brought him here just to show people what it's like to have a cow. And Doherty, they have what they call the one cow. You know, what does it take to have one cow in order to have a supply of milk and then also beef? And then over here we've got a sawmill where you can cut your own log. I mean this is classic homesteading. He's drying a band saw. As you can say, see, it's improvised.

You have two tires and you're running a bandsaw and he's cutting up logs. So if you want to be really self-sufficient, I mean, this is an example of what you can do. My name is Julian Dauas and I come from St. George Hospital in Germany and we treat chronic Lyme disease and other chronic infections and also cancer. So what are you doing here at a food independent? Pendent Summit. One of my patients was John Miller and he invited me and he's one of the co-founders of this event and he told me, Julian, you have to come. You actually cured me of Lyme. He came to our clinic, was very sick. He passed out several times and he couldn't basically take part in life. And then he came to us for three weeks and now he's cured. You know, my father is the one who

detected the treatment and established the first thing. Now I'm one of the main people for the new research. Hold the presses. You cured him of Lyme disease. It's not generally understood that Lyme disease can be cured. Yeah, so we're also the only known place where that is possible. Because we mechanically kill off the spirochetes. We heat the body to 106.8 Fahrenheit, so that's 41.6 degrees Celsius.

And it has been shown that the spirochetes, the bacteria behind Lyme disease, actually dies off at that temperature. And you somehow managed to get the person to survive this. Yes. Actually, so my father was one of the pioneers of this treatment for cancer treatment. So actually, we researched this treatment for stage four cancer patients that actually receive chemotherapy while being under that heat. Everybody can withstand this high fever.

That's the maximum our body can fever spike too without taking damage. The main fundament behind this treatment actually comes from the year in 1927. There was a guy professor, Julius Wagner Yaurek, who, treated syphilis patients who came back from war and syphilis is actually a very simple simple but this bacteria is from the same family

as Lyme disease it's also spirochietal disease and back then we have to remember there were no antibiotics so he wanted to treat that and he actually decided to take the blood of malaria patients injected the syphilis patients with the blood of malaria patients. So they got severe fever spikes and they were cured. So 18, these were in that study, what he received a Nobel Prize for, for his malaria therapy.

He had 18 patients and 16 of them came out of a wheelchair. Nowadays we don't need that treatment anymore because we have antibiotics, but the thing is in chronic Lyme disease, we can't actually affect it anymore because, it's in the brain, it's intracellular, they have a lot of immune evading mechanisms. And the only known way to actually get rid of it and not just putting in the state of remission is by killing it mechanically. Well, I'm absolutely going to have to invite you back on the show to talk about this because this is groundbreaking.

And I actually have, you know, having talked to John, I looked at some of the research related to your work. And it's frankly astonishing. super briefly as we finish up what has been the reaction of the crowd here because as I understand it there are a lot of ticks in the area people get Lyme disease what was the reaction I felt like a superstar I couldn't walk to two seconds without someone approaching me telling me

oh I have Lyme or someone in my family has Lyme this community is severely infected I think basically from my subjective reality here almost everyone has Lyme disease and it's super sad because these people struggle they don't have any answer and the problem is they're ignored and tossed away they actually have a positive lab test and people still tell them your symptoms are not valid your symptoms do not exist chronic Lyme doesn't exist and this is very sad so bottom line are there like a whole bunch of people flying to germany tomorrow or because i understand

that this is only available at your clinic and it's not something that's not a treatment that can be done in the united states so what you can do is you can put lime into a state of remission also with a lot of home therapies herbal treatments but you will always have ademically sore it over your head any new infection even if it's a common cold can put you over the edge again but so the only known to basically be done forever is to do the treatment. And if you're severely sick, you don't even have to try any of the home options because you'll probably not succeed. But if you're asymptomatic or have slight symptoms, there's a lot you can do about that and basically keep yourself healthier for longer. But you have to keep a close eye on it. And as soon as your health starts to deteriorate,

you know where to find us. Okay. Well, Julian Dauas, it's great to speak with you. Thank you for joining me here briefly. It's a pleasure to meet you. It was a pleasure to meet you too. You're here keynoting at this event here, the Food Independence Summit. A lot of people seem to know you. Yeah, so I've written 16 books, 17 is coming out, and there are essentially, there are some

broad cultural books, but most of them are very practical how to, how do we, how do we make a living on the farm? We see it in our apprentice and stewardship program. I think there is no lack of people who would like to farm, but they don't believe they can make a living at it. And so I've, I've drilled into that. Let's make a living on a farm. How do we do that?

It's very inspiring to people who would love to have a piece of property, make a full-time living with their family, and serve their community with good stuff. So is there any aspect of what you've covered in your 16 plus 17 books that you haven't seen here anything new that has appeared as you've kind of wandered around here at the summit? The thing that is new in, I think, in this movement more than, you know, one big thing is biofertilizers. So we're talking about compost tea, foliers, algae. Problem is some of it's good and some of it's not. And we don't have any good testing mechanism that's actually pitting these against each other. What we did, because we have all these chickens in shelters, we are perfectly set up to run side-by-side audits, and we found that there was some really good stuff and some really

nothing stuff. And that's how we arrived at what we used today. Let me see if I just got this straight. You basically ran an experiment. You said, okay, I've got the same sort of set up here, but we'll use this different additive, right, bioaditive, right? exactly right and you saw these ones worked spectacular yeah we used immuno boost here we used willard's water here we used fur trail here and then over here nothing of control all right so you can

run and and and i mean nobody because you're mid-sized so you can do that right exactly exactly yeah we're so we're raising you know not hundreds of thousands but thousands of chickens and so we can actually run you know comparisons of you know 400 to 400 to 400 to 400 and actually have a statistical credential a deal. The problem is nobody's doing that with all of these biofurts because they don't want to compare to the competitor. They want to compare it to nothing. I do believe that there have been some pretty dramatic developments in what we call biofurts. That's one of the new frontiers that we see that we want to play with. Well, It's great to speak with you again, Joel.

Thank you, John. Yeah, so there's this kind of amazing diorama that I've been hearing about of the kind of origins of the Anabaptists and then leading all the way up to the beginning of the Amish and the Mennonites and then finally into the present day. Oh, you're talking about beheld the cyclorama. You should go and see that because when people come visit me and I have people from Europe and Mexico come and visit our company. I always take them

there because in the space of about 20 minutes you get a visual of the history of this beautiful painting and you've got some very good tour guides that are going to be able to narrate through the history and give you a context for understanding some things here. Wonderful. Thank you. You're welcome. where the Amish came from. Their origins are in the Reformation. During the Reformation, people all throughout Europe, educated individuals were reading the scriptures. There was renewed interest in it. And a group of bright young men apprenticed themselves to one reformers Wingly in Switzerland. But they differed from their reformer in one particular way. They wanted

to put reforms into place immediately. And he wanted to wait to on the approval of the city government. And so eventually their relationship became so strained that one night, January 21st, 1525, it's 500 years ago this year. They met in Zurich, Switzerland, to discuss what their next move should be. And the issue that they differed from their leader is that they wanted to be baptized as adults to show voluntary commitment to the church. They felt like Jesus is a person of invitation.

Christians should be nonviolent. And so they decided one night by themselves to be re-baptized. When authorities found out what they'd done, they called them Anna Baptist. And today, Anna Baptist is the umbrella term for Amish and Metanites. That's just absolutely fascinating. This is like such a powerful moment standing here. It is. To us, it's very special to celebrate the 500th anniversary because this night was followed.

up with not a century, but about a half century of intense persecution. Within four years, all three leaders died. Two thousand followers were martyred, but the movement also spread rapidly. One of their beliefs is that we are all brothers and sisters together. Therefore, anybody can be a priest. And that ended up creating a lot of missionaries. They spread throughout Europe. rapidly despite the persecution. And so what is your personal connection to this? So I'm a Mennonite. My roots are Amish.

And that describes nearly everybody in Holmes County that isn't an Amish person. We all come from the Amish. One of our three core beliefs is in community. The Amish, for the most part, interpret community as local. Mennonite seal a broader community, and so we integrate more into the surroundings and into the surrounding society. So we adopt a lot more technology. Our faith is the same.

It's just this sort of intersection of community and freedom is something that fascinates me. It's often through community that people are able to maintain their freedom. Yes, that is exactly right. John, this has been an unbelievable event for me. I've learned so many things. I learned how to can.

I actually think I'm going to do a bit of it for a whole bunch of reasons. I've learned about cures for Lyme disease, which I didn't even know existed, but it's very real. I've actually looked into the background of it now. I mean, just such a breadth of knowledge that I gained here as well. So what have you seen here that's been unique this year? Well, I'd like to address the why. I mean, this has been organic.

We don't have a huge team to put this all together, and there are just so many people coming together. And I think this year was a pivot point. We, I mean, a lot of times you say, okay, you can start something and then do it another year and another year. So this was the fourth year. And the question was, do we have momentum? And when I looked at where the people all came from, we literally have people here from sea to shining sea. Obviously, a heavier concentration here.

And from Germany. And from Germany. And we sold a ticket to Saudi Arabia. I need to check that data. So the takeaway from me, and we're not done yet, is we had, I don't have the numbers yet, but the tent was full this morning. And what really surprised me,

we just stepped outside for a moment, the tent is still full, mostly full tonight. So we've got a whole day of exciting things to do tomorrow yet. But we're here to celebrate our fifth Food Independence Summit next year. And what is the vision for the future now that you've seen what can happen? this year? So the vision hasn't changed. It's really just a question of we want to help people become more independent or sustainable all the way from seed to spoon. And to be able to do, even on a fractional basis. You know, I live on a 1.5 acre lot, and yet I've got pear trees and

plum trees and apple trees and my wife has a garden. So people can do, you don't have to go and buy 10 cows and seven sheep and all of that, you can do what you can with what you have where you're at. John, this has been absolutely fantastic. Thank you so much for arranging everything for us to be able to kind of insert into every part of the event. It's our pleasure. The fact that you came out here means so much. Well, thank you everyone for joining John Miller and me here in Walnut Creek, Ohio for this very special episode of American Thought Leaders at the Food Independence Summit. Thank you.