Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark - The Chicken Industry Is Clucked Up | Pasturebird Founder Paul Greive

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

Farmer Paul—Marine vet, Christian, and dad of four— went from battling joint pain to accidentally starting Pasturebird, now one of the biggest pastured poultry farms in the U.S.! 🐓 He’s expos...ing factory farming, fighting for clean food, and changing ag for good. If you care about what’s really on your plate, don’t miss this!Thank you to our sponsors! 😊Cowboy Colostrum | Use code “ALEX” for 15% OFFMasa Chips | Use code "ALEXCLARK" for 20% OFFPrimally Pure | Use code “ALEXCLARK” to get 15% OFFTooth Pillow | Use code ‘ALEXCLARK’ for FREE video assessmentKettle & Fire | Use code ALEXCLARK for 20% OFFOur Guest:⭐️ Paul GreiveInstagram 🐓PasturebirdInstagram Website🎀Follow Alex🎀Instagram |⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@realalexclark⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram |⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@cultureapothecary⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook |⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@realalexclark⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠X |⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@yoalexrapz⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube |⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@RealAlexClark⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify |⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple Podcast |⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠New 'Culture Apothecary' Merch OUT NOW! Glass tumblers, weekly wellness planners, hats, crewnecks and more. Use code "Alex Clark" for 10% OFF at⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠tpusamerch.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Join the Cuteservatives Facebook group to connect with likeminded friends who love America and all things health and wellness!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Join the CUTEservative Facebook Group!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Subscribe to ‘Culture Apothecary’ on⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. New episodes drop 6pm PST/ 9pm EST every Monday and Thursday.This show is made possible with generous donations from listeners who believe in our mission to heal a sick culture.You can support our show by leaving a tax deductible donation⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ HERE⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ or by subscribing to⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ @RealAlexClark⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ YouTube for FREE!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠#cultureapothecary #alexclark #poultry #meat #health #wellness #podcast #food #regenerativeagriculture #chicken

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 Does it really matter to eat fruits and vegetables seasonally? Three days after an orange has been picked, it could be like a third in nutrient disson. How do you know that the eggs in the grocery store are truly pasteurized? That's the problem. People don't know. There's no way to really know other than knowing your farmer. So it becomes really, really tough for the working mom who's rushing through the grocery store with three kids hanging on in the shopping cart and they're like, I want to feed my kids the best I can.
Starting point is 00:00:25 I'm going to grab the pasture raised, but they're paying extra for a label. After battling debilitating joint pain and arthritis in his 20s, Paul Greve found relief through the paleo diet, which sparked his passion for clean, healthy food. Frustrated by misleading labels and factory farming practices, he started raising his own chickens. And what began as a joke turned into pasture bird, one of the largest pastured poultry farms in the U.S., now found in Sprouse nationwide. Pasterbird is on a mission to change agriculture by focusing on regenerative farming, animal welfare and nutrient dense food. In this episode, farmer Paul Greve shares his journey, challenges, and vision for disrupting the factory farming system and creating a more transparent
Starting point is 00:01:29 sustainable food future. If you're passionate about clean food and ethical farming, this conversation is a must listen. Plus, navigating chicken in the grocery store. Watch this episode on Spotify and the Real Alex Clark YouTube channel. Have you been listening to the show for a while and you just haven't taken five seconds to leave a five-star review? Just tap the heart or write one sentence about why people should listen to culture apothecary. This show is free, and you doing that helps out immensely. If you really believe in our mission to heal a sick culture and want to take things to another level, you can become a financial donor of the show with a tax deductible donation through the link in the show notes.
Starting point is 00:02:05 Please welcome farmer Paul Greve, founder of Pasterbird to Culture Apothecary. Pasture Bird is now the largest pasture poultry producer in the U.S., and this all started because you were super sick in your 20s. Yeah, I mean, it's been a journey. It's sort of 50 birds in the backyard, and we are where we are today. That sounds cooler than it probably is. Like, the largest pasture raise is still pretty small on the national scale compared to a lot of the big companies. But it's been a lot of growth.
Starting point is 00:02:34 It's been really, really fun. So what was going on? Like, when you say that you were sicker than you've ever been, what was happening? After college, I joined the Marine Corps. And when I was in sniper school, I got Lyme disease from a tick bite in Virginia, like in the backwoods of Virginia. started getting weird brain fog and fatigue and like at 22 23 just feeling like crap basically and I'd never thought about how food affects the way you feel or perform or anything like that but I don't know if you've heard of like paleo but paleo was getting really big back in the Marine Corps
Starting point is 00:03:04 and they were like dude you've got to try this you got to get the inflammation out of your diet and I was like I can't breathe through my nose and my back hurts really bad so let me give it a shot and literally two weeks later I could start feeling the impacts and it woke me up to like wow, food actually does matter what you put in your body. When you grew up, what were you taught about food in your house? Like, what was your family like? No, my mom was amazing, but it was like a standard 90s childhood of McDonald's and like going out for whatever and just she would cook at home sometimes.
Starting point is 00:03:32 We're like really busy, hyper sports family. And so we would eat out a lot. And like we never thought twice about it. I'd never thought about, oh, it's really important what you feed yourself because you may, you know, not perform so well. And so paleo means you're basically eating what type of? a food for somebody that isn't familiar? Think of a like a whole foods diet. So meat, nuts, seeds, you know, fruits and vegetables. That's basically it for paleo. I don't necessarily eat exactly
Starting point is 00:03:58 like that now, but that felt like a way to just knock out all the potential inflammatory stuff in your body. And I just started to feel like great really quick. And how long did you stick strictly to paleo? Probably like two years. And after I came home from my rack, my wife got really into it. My whole kind of family got into it. My whole kind of family got into it like my brother and father-in-law both lost like 50 to 100 pounds. And I felt like the whole family was just like, oh my gosh, like there's something to this. Do you think it's really just about cutting out ultra-processed food when you're doing that? And that's like what's really holding people back? There's so much more than that, but it's a big one. Like if you grew up as a
Starting point is 00:04:36 McDonald's kid, just literally changing your diet could be a huge impact. I think there's a ton more with being outside and mental wellness and spiritual and everything else. But like the food piece, if you're really far, like, messed up on the food piece, changing your diet will have a huge impact. So how do you go from Marine to I'm going to become a chicken farmer? Man, that was where it got weird, you know? That's where I got weird. My wife and I were like these normal people living in Newport Beach. I was an accountant. She was like an interior designer, just living a normal life. Very Newport. Yeah, totally Newport Beach lifestyle. I came back from Iraq. We were sort of joking about getting some chickens for my in-laws backyard in the rural part of Southern California
Starting point is 00:05:15 to mecula. And my brother-in-law, Rob, that runs primal pastures now, he kind of disappears from the room. He comes back like 10 minutes later and he's like, hey, those chickens you guys wanted to order, like I just got them. And we're like, no, bro. Like, we weren't saying you should order chickens. Like, we were just joking about getting some for the backyard. What did you, just get them on Amazon or what? Went online. I don't even know where he got them from. Two weeks later, 50 little fluffy white chicks show up and we had no experience in food or farming or anything. So how'd you find out? Like, were you just YouTubeing stuff? So one of your past guest, Joel Salatin, wrote a book called Pastured Poultry Profits.
Starting point is 00:05:49 And we geeked out on his YouTube. We read his books and we followed like everything he said to do by the letter. And that's how we got going. Which was what? What was Joel Salatin saying to do that conventional farmers don't do? So you went and visited his farm. You saw his little poultry like mobile enclosures. His whole premises, animals are meant to move.
Starting point is 00:06:09 They're not meant to be in one place. So his whole thing is about building floorless mobile houses that you, move the animals to a new spot every day because then their manure fertilizes the land and then they get to forage for bugs and worms and grasses and seeds and they're not like living indoors in their own filth so we just copied that word for word and then we set up like backyard processing and bethany from primarily pure and my wife the interior designer were like out there you know harvesting chicken and cutting up chicken and the family got baptized into it really fast but it was meant to just be for us and our family. And then all it took was like a couple social media posts back in the day. And
Starting point is 00:06:46 pretty soon it was sold out. And we were like, oh, we better order 100 next time. What were you saying on social media? It was really resonating with people you think. We said like we've been looking for pasture raised chicken for a long time. We have not been able to find it in the grocery store, even the farmer's market. This is like 2012, 2013. And we're going to raise some birds. And if you want some, just hit us up and we'll reserve them for you. And like, people love that, you know? You say that nature set the standards that we should be abiding by. What does that mean? We have a lot of, you know, Joel calls at the post hole digger degree, the PhDs. We've got a lot of fancy letters behind our name, but like really our understanding is pretty small still. We understand very little of, I think, what's really truly happening at the cellular level. And so I just think nature gives us like this beautiful template. I'm not saying things need to be rewilded and like there's no place for human interaction with nature, but let's look to nature.
Starting point is 00:07:38 like the optimal template. Let's try to copy what nature's sort of set up, what God has really intended in our farming systems. And like, you're going to see lots of benefit from that. Why is it a huge red flag if a chicken or egg company says, oh, our poultry is vegetarian fed? Because chickens aren't vegetarians? Like, that freaks me out a little bit when I see that. If they're really a vegetarian chicken, wouldn't that mean they've never had a bug or never had a worm or never really been outside. To be honest, all that goes back to the days of mad cow, feeding cows to cows. And there was a big fear around that time of like, oh, we shouldn't feed any animals to animals. Well, chickens are different. Chickens are actually omnivores.
Starting point is 00:08:19 They're not herbivores. Like, they're meant to eat animals and plants. What animals are chickens supposed to eat? We have videos of them eating mice on our farm, scorpions, like anything they can, roadkill, like they'll find anything and they'll eat it. They're little T-rexes. Because I'm thinking some of the biggest, most popular pasture-raised egg brands and things like that in the store are saying vegetarian fed. So are you saying, like, avoid that with a 10-foot pole? Yeah. I mean, don't get me started on, like, the big pasture-raised egg brands because there's shenanigans going on? Tell me, please. If they're raised on pasture, why would they be vegetarians? They should not be. Like, that means they're literally not going outside if they're vegetarian.
Starting point is 00:08:59 So that's contradicting itself. The big egg brands that are saying pasture-raised, but vegetarian-fed, Those can't go together. Yeah, but there's this massive loophole that people don't realize that when they say pasture raised, what they mean is pasture access. So access is like the dirtiest word in the whole pasture industry. And it's not a small thing. Like we think, oh, that's cute, pasture raise. Like, no, it's a multi-billion dollar industry out there right now.
Starting point is 00:09:22 And all it takes is to open a few doors, whether the birds ever go outside or not, that can still be labeled as pasture raise. And it is, by and large, it is labeled as pasture raised. So you could have chickens that have never stepped foot outside of a giant warehouse building that are labeled as pasturays and sold for 10. Well, nowadays, $18 a dozen. And consumers are like working really hard. They're trying to do the right thing. They're trying to buy nutrient dense food for their family.
Starting point is 00:09:49 And they're getting tricked. And that's like the most frustrating thing. I support transparent factory farming more than the companies that are tricking people and like lying to them. Out of all of the major grocery store companies across the country, if you had to buy eggs from the grocery store, what brand are you going with? I love Alexander Farms. If you can find them. Alexander's going to go to shit. Oh, they're the best eggs. Okay, I've never seen eggs from them and I love them. They do a great job with dairy too. And they love the show. They listen to the podcast. They're the coolest family ever. They live in like this beautiful part of basically Oregon, but it's technically California. Okay.
Starting point is 00:10:25 Their eggs and their dairy are, I say they're the best in the country, like at that scale. where you could get it in the grocery store. Okay, I like that. Okay, so we trust them. They're so cool. And they're all having babies now, and they're just like this beautiful, multi-generational operation,
Starting point is 00:10:38 all pasture-based, A2A2 dairy, really, really great stuff. And you guys are only doing chicken, though. You're not doing eggs? Correct. We don't do any eggs. We've decided to stay pretty focused and try to, like, bring some scale
Starting point is 00:10:50 and some accessibility and affordability to pasture-raised meat chicken. So we're just, like, trying to stay hyper-focused on it. So here's something juicy that I want to ask you. Because this is a big thing right now with clean food companies kind of selling to bigger, big food names. Pasture birds started with 50 chicks, this passion for better food. How did you go from that to becoming the largest pasture poultry producer in the U.S.?
Starting point is 00:11:16 How can a company grow to that size without compromising food values? Yeah, and I'll be the first one to say, like, we're really proud of the partnership we have. We sold our company to the largest organic chicken company in the country. Here's like the background of it. So you start producing 50 birds in the backyard. It's super cool. Then you go 100, 200, 500. Pretty quickly, you get to this point where you're like, shoot. If I'm going to keep growing this, I need my own hatchery for the baby chicks. I need my own feed mill to make feed. I need my own slaughterhouse to basically harvest the birds and get into market. I need my own logistics and trucking to be able to get the birds that are harvested to the market. And pretty soon you're looking at this bill that's like 200, million dollars to get that all set up. We're take a step back. We're like, okay, do we want to go raise $200 million in equity financing? Nobody's probably going to write us that check. Do we want to go take on $200 million in debt? We don't have. I mean, nobody's going to give me a $200 million loan, you know? Or do you want to go find a company who already has all that stuff who may not be doing
Starting point is 00:12:19 things the way that you would, like on the actual live animal side? But they have all the infrastructure. They have all the equipment. They have all stuff. And so we made this like really, difficult but like prayerful decision that no, let's build this company to where we could partner with somebody bigger and basically like leverage all the stuff that they have and then bring an authentic product to market and make it like accessible because the other thing that happened 2015-ish rolls around. I grew up square in the middle class. The rest of my family grew up square in the middle class and we're selling whole chickens for like 40, $45. Yeah. And I'm like, that's awkward for me because my mom could have. As just a small farm on your
Starting point is 00:12:58 Yeah, because we're independent. Like, chicks cost twice as much, feed costs three times as much. Like we don't, we have off the shelf pricing, you know, and to be financially sustainable, like we have to sell the birds for $40, $45. And granted, there's a subset of people that can do that. But like most people, including my own parents, could have never done that. So we got really passionate about, okay, there's a thousand small farms doing a great job. Joel Salatin style, decentralized. I love it. But it feels like there's a gap. for somebody to go, let's do a really great job, but let's, like, do it at scale and try to bring the cost down and make it convenient and accessible for people, like, in the regular grocery store where they shop. If we want to move the needle and, like, leave it better for my kids, I feel like we need both. We need, like, the small, tiny guys doing the farmer's market thing.
Starting point is 00:13:47 And then we need, like, people trying to affect things at scale, too. Everyone clap! Please clap. I've been going to Pilates twice a week. But recovery? Yeah, that's a struggle because my body, isn't used to this movement and my muscles are crying. So whether it's sore muscles or just feeling drained the day after, I needed a solution that could keep up. So I use cowboy colostrum in my
Starting point is 00:14:10 morning smoothie every day. After adding it to my routine, I've noticed faster recovery, better energy, and a real boost to my performance in hot Pilates. No more dragging myself through post-workout fatigue. Cowboy colostrum is packed with growth factors like IGF1 and IGF2, critical for muscle repair, energy and recovery. These natural compounds help your body repair tissues, boost endurance, and keep you feeling strong throughout every workout. And unlike other brands, Cowboy Colostrum uses 100% first milking colostrum packed with all the beneficial nutrients that your body needs to rebuild and thrive. With a generous 3 gram serving size, it's designed for real results, whether you're training hard or just want to keep your body in peak shape. For better recovery and peak performance,
Starting point is 00:14:50 head over to Cowboy Colostrum.com, use code Alex for 15% off. That's Cowboycolostrum.com with code Alex for 15% off. Want to know my secret for repairing a leaky gut and improving digestion? It's kettle and fire chicken bone broth. I simply heat a cup for four minutes, add some real salt and sip it from a mug. It's that easy and it's been a game changer for my gut health. Kettle and fire bone broth is packed with collagen, amino acids, and minerals that help heal the gut lining. Kettle and fires bone broth is slow simmered for over 14 hours, which makes the most nutrient-dense bone broth that you are going to find out there. Plus, it's made with organic grass-fed beef bones and organic free-range chicken bones. Guys, this is another level bone broth. No junk, just pure healing nutrition. Each serving has
Starting point is 00:15:40 19 grams of protein, so it's incredibly filling and great for your skin, hair, nails, and joints. Also, you poop! Perfect for sipping, cooking, fasting, or as part of your keto or paleo lifestyle. you are ready to boost your gut health. Go to kettle and fire.com slash Alex Clark and use code Alex Clark to save 20% off your order. Trust your gut! We've seen other clean food brands link up with big food names like we saw sioux chips. In the last year, we saw simple mills, cookies sell to somebody bigger than them.
Starting point is 00:16:16 So what should the consumer know about clean food companies and brands deciding to sell to technically what we think of as big food? Is it possible to put things in contracts that they're not allowed to compromise ingredients or the way you're farming or what's really going on behind the scenes for people that are scared? Yeah, because I've been in big food now. And I was raised to like hate big egg. Like that's the way I came up. It's like big egg's bad. They're the devil. They're the enemy.
Starting point is 00:16:43 All of them worship Satan. You know. And then you get inside of the company. You're like, wait a second. Like these are normal people. These are like cool people. So we dated for a long time. We got to know the leadership.
Starting point is 00:16:53 I can't necessarily speak for Siette other than me and my family are huge consumers. We love the product. I feel like people snap to a very quick judgment that they're going to sell their soul and they're going to change all the ingredients. Here's my personal opinion. Big companies want to make money. And there's a huge shift in consumer demand where they want clean food now. They want regenerative food now. For like 50 years before, people demanded cheap food.
Starting point is 00:17:20 So guess what the big companies are going to do? They're going to give you cheap food. food. But now there's a big shift happening. Like we talked about it a little bit before. Like people want clean. They want healthy. They want stuff that's a little better for the environment. In my opinion, if they do it authentically, like let's celebrate that because that's amazing, you know, just because they're big. If they're trying to do the right thing and they're doing it for real, let's celebrate it. There are some other brands that have just literally sold their soul. Right. And like day two after the acquisition, they change all the ingredients. Everything's
Starting point is 00:17:51 totally different. And that's a bummer. How were you a able to keep the integrity of pasture bird and truly stay pasture raise, regenerative farming and all that, but also working with Purdue. Like, how did that work? What kind of conversations did you have? Purdue pushes us to stay authentic to it, too, because they see the consumer in the market demanding transparency and authenticity and, like, in their own way, too, they've led. So they were the first to ever do organic. They also own Nyman Ranch, which is like, in my opinion, the best national scale pork company that's out there. So they've, like, led in these other things. They've already innovated that way. I'm not saying they're sinless or perfect and neither we, but I think like the
Starting point is 00:18:29 track record, it does speak for itself. So when we got in, day one, we were able to drop our prices and take the product to be no GMO at all. Yeah. They were like, do it. Like go for the non-GMO. Like, that's great. If you can save money and we can still do it and still make money, then do it. Like, they're true believers in it. So I think you'd have to go big company by big company. And then like, for me, I'm under, I'm under no contract. I could have left the day after we sold the business, but like I really deeply believe in what we're doing. And I think if we, again, if we want to see it left better, small companies have to partner with big companies and like bring that change at scale. I like that mentality with it. And also, you know, I just want to bring up Primal Kitchen,
Starting point is 00:19:11 for example. Yeah. Sold to craft. Their ingredients have not changed. And that's been a while. I'm friends with Jason Karp, who created Hugh Chocolate. He sold. And Hugh Chocolate ingredients are great. hasn't changed. I think behind the scenes, sometimes these smaller clean food brands are putting it in the deal. Like, we're willing to sell to you, but part of that deal is that you're never allowed to compromise our ingredients. Like, I think I've heard that some of them are doing that. So I just didn't know if you'd heard the same. I've never heard of that. But I do think like, okay, you're going to spend a billion dollars on siate. What do you think happens if you go and put seed oil? Right. Like nobody buys it anymore. You lose the entire base. You just wasted a billion dollars. So I think the days of the like, 80s and 90s, acquire and smash and change. The internet like kind of disallows that now. So why would you spend all that money and then just completely change what they're doing? Like it would be kind of stupid in my opinion. You've said that you're challenging the status quo of factory farming. What's the most shocking thing that you've learned about the way the poultry industry operates today? The most shocking thing is that labels by and large like don't mean what you think. And that's
Starting point is 00:20:20 really for the worse, I would say. People are very convinced that they understand what the labels like, pasture raise means, free range, organic, and oftentimes it's not what you would think. And I think that when people start to understand that, it's a bit disheartening because they're spending a lot of extra money on this stuff. But the reality is it's just like oftentimes not what you would hope it is. Okay, so let's go through what some of these labels mean. Let's talk about what is cage-free, what is free range, what is pasture raised. Yeah. My disclaimer with this is like, I'll explain these, but it's no shade to the actual farmers. Like, these people, I don't care. I've met hundreds of them and they are the salt of the earth. They're good people. Even the
Starting point is 00:21:05 people doing factory farming, it's like the farmers themselves, they're just trying to make a living man and that's what they know and they're doing their best. And like, I respect anybody who's producing food. My cut is more like towards the marketing departments and the ivory towers that are like, oh, let's take this and spin it this way and call it something else. And I think that that's where it's jacked up. So I think there's room for everything with transparency. I like that. To me, that's the important piece. Like, let people decide. There's so many people that are on such a tight budget. Like, they just need to buy the caged eggs. Like, that's just what they can afford. And that's still better. An egg is still an egg versus, you know,
Starting point is 00:21:43 Cheetos. Nonsense or something. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Okay. So cage free. For a long time, Animals were like laying chickens especially raised in actual cages like six animals in a small little shoebox size cage That's mostly at least in California like that's mostly gone by the wayside now so you'll see cage free That sort of explains all meat chickens at least like there are no caged meat chickens in the US in Europe there actually is free range Free range means the birds were free to range outside So take kind of like an industrial style warehouse 600 foot long 40 foot wide 24,000 birds and side of there. As long as those doors open, those birds were technically free to range outside. They don't have to go outside to be free range, but they need to have the access to go outside.
Starting point is 00:22:28 Some companies are diligent about it. They're putting food out there and shade and water and they're like actually trying to encourage a birds out. Some companies are like, oh, we popped it open for one minute this year while the auditor was there. We're going to count it, you know. So it's really company by company. The problem is chickens or prey animals. They don't. don't really like just running out into an open field like your dog or a cow or something. So unless you have a lot of reasons for them to spend a lot of time outside, they'll stay. They're kind of going to stay where the food and water and their friends in this shade is, you know. So they're going to pretty much stay inside.
Starting point is 00:23:04 But I would say like outdoor access is still better than not having outdoor access. So I'm not knocking free range or anything. It's just some people have this picture of like chickens, like red chickens outside running around. Like that's not really what it is. That is kind of the case with pasture raised, right? Or no? Kind of. So I'll explain pasture raised, too, because it's not what a lot of people think it is either. A lot of the marketing has made us think like, oh, they're just these fluffy chickens out on their own, like, running around. Chickens just don't do that. Like, if you've been to Hawaii or Thailand, chickens are, like, sneaking to this bush, and then they're, like, running over to this bush.
Starting point is 00:23:38 Like, they don't want to get eaten, you know? So they want to stay protected. They want to stay close to their buddies. So in a true pasture-raised system, usually it's like Joel's place. that you have some kind of a protective shade structure that gives them, you know, a way to get out of the rain and the sun. And then it's a floorless structure. So you're moving that structure because they want to be close to their food and water and shade. The important thing is like you've got to move that structure and then the birds move with it. And you guys are doing that every day? Every single day. And that's really important. You're in national grocery stores and you're able to move all this every day. Yeah. But that's a lot of innovation and like a lot of what we spent the last
Starting point is 00:24:15 six years on is how do we like automate that? How do we build like everything has to be on solar because we're on these farms out in the middle of nowhere in the state of Georgia. So we can't just like plug it in and drive it, you know? How do we do it all automated so we're not like sitting there like moving in our cell? Like Joel's system is awesome and it's really labor intensive. Yeah. He has interns and apprentices and all this stuff. So like he can kind of do it. But at our scale, I mean, we're way beyond what he's doing. So we have to have a way to automate all that stuff. We call it the automated range coop. It's this really cool invention that we feel like it is like challenging the status quo.
Starting point is 00:24:50 And it's like a place for the birds to actually grow, but it's on wheels and it moves every single day. So it's a totally different thing. So it moves on its own or you drive it or what? It drives itself. It's like the largest electric vehicle in the world. Can I ask how much that costs? It's probably a small apartment in Phoenix for each one. That's wild.
Starting point is 00:25:10 But it has these huge benefits for the chicken and for the ones. Is it possible for other farms to be able to duplicate what you guys are doing? Oh, there's a thousand small farms doing it for real at different scales. So, like, Joles would be the small scale where you have, like, 80 birds inside of a little thing that you pull by hand. There's a lot of farms that do a greenhouse that they pull with a tractor, and there's us doing it at, like, the large scale for pasture rays, which is these huge 6,000 bird systems that are driving themselves. I mean, anybody can do it. There's no, like, protection. There's no, nothing stopping you.
Starting point is 00:25:43 The problem is there's kind of no reason to do it because that pasteurized label can be slapped on by people in a free range system. Like up until very recently, the USDA considered free range and pasteurized to be the same. Okay, so then how do you know that the chicken at the grocery store, that the eggs in the grocery store are truly pasteurized? So a lot of people would say, they're going to hear your question. They're like, well, I can tell from the yolk. Like the yolk's going to be orange in the true pasturays. No, people. Like, that is not how you tell.
Starting point is 00:26:12 the industry uses something called xanthafil, which is a feed additive. What? That can make that yolk any color they want. So whether the birds have lived out on green grass or they've never stepped foot outside, I can produce a yolk that's orange or red or bright yellow or even like shades of green. Like I can make it any color through a synthetic feed additive. That's what those guys are doing. So then a lot of people are cracking this yolk open.
Starting point is 00:26:38 They're like, oh, look at this beautiful orange yolk. And I'm like, that's a lot of. not that's not orange because the birds are outside that's from a feet additive you know so how do you really tell that's the problem like people don't know they they have there's no way to really know other than knowing your farmer which that's not a realistic solution like Joel talks about that a lot will Harris talks about that a lot I love and you've had on as well most people are too busy like they can't really do that so it becomes really really tough for the working mom who's rushing through the grocery store with three kids hanging on to the shopping cart and they're like
Starting point is 00:27:11 I want to feed my kids the best I can. I'm going to grab the pasture raise, but they're paying extra for a label. Holy smokes. Yeah, it's a bummer. That is like a massive manipulation tactic I wasn't aware of. And that's why I say, like, if you're doing free range or even caged birds, like, if you're honest about it, I actually respect it more than faking people. Like, that's what bothers me the most.
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Starting point is 00:30:35 Why should antibiotic-free chicken be a non-negotiable for families? Well, I'm not expert on antibiotics. Okay. I just think eventually you are what you eat and you are what you eat eats. And with antibiotic resistance like spiking throughout the country, we are like a family that never takes antibiotics for anything, you know. But there's a lot of people that need antibiotics. Like medically, they need to be effective.
Starting point is 00:31:06 Well, if we're using them not just in response to sickness, like in the poultry industry, they're used prophylactically a lot, which means they're fed to the chickens, whether they got sick or not, because it kind of helps them to grow faster. That's nine billion animals entering the food supply every single year. And that's going to develop antibiotic resistance, not just in the chicken, but some studies are saying in humans, too, if we're eating that chicken. So it's a very dangerous thing to just be like, stuff. nothing animals with antibiotics. And there are companies, Tyson is one company who just went back.
Starting point is 00:31:39 So they had no antibiotics for a long time. They just went back to like, nope, we're going to add antibiotics back into the feed. Why are places like Chick-fil-A, Tyson, why are they suddenly going from antibiotic-free to just adding them back in all of a sudden? Because the birds grow faster. So economically, it kind of makes more sense. They convert feed faster. Like, it's mostly an economic incentive. It's not consumer demand.
Starting point is 00:32:01 Consumers do not want antibiotics in the chicken. so it's not for that. I can't remember if it was on farm ink that they were showing these chickens. The way they're factory farming, it's like they can't move their legs. They're just laying their limp. They're growing at such a fast rate
Starting point is 00:32:19 and they're getting so huge that they can't walk and things like that just so they can be butchered and they're just creating more meat. What are some of these factory farms doing to chickens to just make a quick buck that is not actually healthy for the consumer?
Starting point is 00:32:31 So let's say like a normal chicken, the breeds that we raise are going to be of maybe five, six pounds, something like that. That animal can walk very well. It's the same breed as like what you see in a giant factory farm or whatever. It's the same breed, but we're harvesting when they're five or six pounds. And they're cruising around. They can still forage. They're doing really well.
Starting point is 00:32:50 I mean, some places are raising those animals to 12 pounds. That's like a turkey. In a couple months span. Yeah. And we talked about like being able to go outside and express the chickeness of the chicken, and like a 12-pound chicken's not going to just cruise outside. You know, there's no way. It's not walking around like that, you know.
Starting point is 00:33:07 How does moving chickens to fresh pasture every day regenerate the land? And why is regenerating land and soil important for sustainability and farming? I came to this, like, not as a farmer. I didn't care about soil at all. I didn't really understand that God's design is, like, amazing with this. So we've really separated plants from animals in Western, first world agriculture. That is not God's design.
Starting point is 00:33:34 Like God's design is that plants feed animals. Animals in return feed plants. And there's a reason animals have legs and plants have roots. So it's this beautiful, like symbiotic relationship that happens all the time. And you could go back to the days of the bison where they go into these big, big herds, they eat the grass, they kind of poop all over the ground, and then they have to move to the next spot. They're not going to return to that spot where they grazed for like a long,
Starting point is 00:34:01 time that allows the nutrition to like work into the soil build up the soil health and the funny thing is if you think about where the bison were like 500 years ago that's where that beautiful black rich soil is in the Midwest where now they're growing all the corn and the soybeans you know like that's built by bison for a long long long time so it's this awesome design this intelligent design of like plants and animals working together and then wildlife coming in and it's like this awesome thing Well, we've broken that. So, like, now our animals are raised here in these regions or these states. Our plants are raised here in the Midwest and these regions are these states.
Starting point is 00:34:39 And the two, like, don't intermix at all because of synthetic chemical fertilizers. Like, we're kind of jumping into that saying, well, we don't really need animals to fertilize the fields anymore because we have these cheap petrochemical synthetic fertilizers. And to me, that's a huge miss. Plants have roots. Animals have legs for a reason. It's a cool design, right? I really like that. The way you said that makes so much sense to me
Starting point is 00:35:03 when explaining regenerative farming and the importance for our soil. Does it really matter to eat fruits and vegetables seasonally? So remember what we're talking about, the PhDs and all the smart stuff? I think we haven't scratched the surface of the importance of like fresh local food. Really?
Starting point is 00:35:21 I don't think we understand anything about it. So there's new, brand new research coming out that says like three days after an orange has been picked, it could be like a third in nutrient density. There's also studies that say the exact same orange in 1950 is nine times less vitamin A than an orange that looks the exact same today. So like our food today looks like food. It's shiny and it's beautiful and it sits there on the grocery store shelves. It's like not nourishing us like it once did, you know? And the freshness is a big factor. bananas come from God knows where in South America.
Starting point is 00:35:59 They're picked totally green. It's a chemical process that like when they're gas to turn them yellow for the stores. And you kind of think about like to me as a consumer, because I was not a consumer that long ago. I didn't farm for my whole life. I don't really care. As a consumer, I don't care that much about the soil on some random farmer's field. But I'm a dad of four little kids and like I really want to feed them the best food I can. So to me, that's what I actually care about is the nutrient density of the food.
Starting point is 00:36:28 So when we're putting, you know, avocados and strawberries and all that on trucks and shipping it, especially times of the year where it's like it's not strawberry season and things like that, it's just maybe not as nutrient dense if you're eating things out of season. Because, you know, I love those accounts on Instagram that are like February here, the vegetables that are in season or the fruits. And so I really do try to then pick those at the store. Totally. But I'm like, for these farms that are, you know, supplying the big grocery stores, I don't even know that it really matters. You got to just do your best. Like, you can only do so much I buy bananas still. Of course.
Starting point is 00:37:00 Like, we have kids and all that stuff too. But that was our whole premise. So two years ago, we started an all organic, like, fruit and vegetable you pick farm with the idea that let's get rid of all the distribution and the retail and everything and just have people come out and get their food very, very fresh. Love. What that does, too, is think about the flavor. Like if you've ever had like a vine ripened, you know, a blackberry or a peach, like, you will cry when you eat it. It's the most different thing that you've ever tasted. And it's just like that amazing flavor is the nutrient density that you're tasting too. So like these two beautiful things that go hand in hand. And it's the saddest thing when people come to our country from basically any other country in the world. And they're like, oh, the food doesn't taste like anything here. And it's something that we notice a ton when we travel to is like, oh my gosh. These third world countries have the best tasting food.
Starting point is 00:37:55 What is your response to people who believe that organic, regenerative, or ethical farming is just too expensive? You're right. Like it is too expensive. And for far too long, amazing farmers have not stepped up to innovate to meet customers where they're at. It's not a knock against the Joel Salton's the world. We would not be here if it wasn't for him. But there's a need to like figure out how to meet people in the middle that I think some farmers have a hard time with. And it's like these awesome grassroots, small-scale backyard farmers are like, well, you're just
Starting point is 00:38:27 going to need to pay more for your food. You're just going to need to travel out to my farm to do a pickup. You're just going to need to like do this and do this and do this. That's cool. You can say that. But like if we stay with that mindset, I don't think the food system looks any different for my son, who's 12 when he's an adult. Like I want to actually move the needle.
Starting point is 00:38:45 And in order to do that, we need the small guys. But we need people focused on making it more cost effective and also making it more convenient so that people can actually have access to it. So I would actually kind of agree with those people. And then the counter argument is like, okay, you do have to spend more for getting good stuff too. Yes, a little bit. And I do want to give hope that with RFK Jr. now and this HHS appointment, I mean, that is definitely one of his core components that he wants to work on is subsidizing the bad crops that make the bad food and not, you know, the healthy crops that are making healthier organic food. And if we were able to help farmers out in that,
Starting point is 00:39:21 way that it would make organic food, healthier options, a lot more accessible and less expensive, right? Am I right on that? Well, it may make everything more expensive. Okay. Explain. Well, because like if you ended the subsidies on grain, grass-fed beef isn't going to move. The price isn't going to move. But grain-fed beef is going to be more expensive and it may match grass-fed beef. Well, now you have grass-fed and feedlot being the same price. Most people are going to choose grass-fed. The crazy chart is, if you go back, like, I'm a lot of, I'm going to 100 years, we spent 40% of our income on food and 10% on health care. And today, that's literally flipped. So we're spending 10% of our income on food and 40% on health care. So I don't know,
Starting point is 00:40:05 maybe we are spending not really enough on food and that needs to like come back into balance. But I just think my charge to like amazing, you know, small scale farmers is like, we got to try to meet these people where they're at too. Like you can't just say, well, you just got to spend more. Sorry. Like we got to innovate. What should the average consumer understand about choosing food options that say regeneratively farmed? That the term is becoming a buzzword very fast. Oh, no. Not this again. It's being bastardized. It's the way of every single label, you know? Like they all go through this process of like,
Starting point is 00:40:38 started with the best of intentions, a few earlier adopters doing it for real. Brands, you know, these marketing guys that we talked about earlier start to hear like, oh, that's what people are demanding. They start kind of putting it on labels. So sadly, just because something says regenerative doesn't mean anything, you know, it literally doesn't mean anything. It could be true. Or you could have stuff that has like the old school white butcher paper. And it could be the most regenerative thing, but the guy doesn't feel the need to put it on there because he's just doing good old school farming. Because pasture bird, you guys have like a non-GMO little picture on there.
Starting point is 00:41:12 I think a regenerative farm picture. But you don't have an organic. You don't have that on there. We're not doing organic. Organic's really cool. I'm a big fan of it. Purdue does a ton of certified organic chicken. It's awesome. But we wanted to keep it more affordable. And we felt like the tradeoff for the cost of the organic wasn't really worth what you would like get out of it. So we decided to just stick with non-GMO, no glyphosate.
Starting point is 00:41:34 We test for glyphosate on everything. We raised the birds in a way that's, you know, way in excess of organic requirements. So we just feel like that's kind of the sweet spot and trying to keep it affordable for people like we're super proud that you can go into sprouts. You can get a legitimate, authentic pasture-raised chicken for your whole family, a whole bird for like $14. And you could feed a family of six with leftovers. And like, that's half the price of going to McDonald's for something that's way, way better for the environment, for your family. And so pasture bird only does chicken. That's it.
Starting point is 00:42:05 Like I can get chicken breasts. I can get thighs and drumsticks and things like that. Yeah, and wings and all that. Are seed oil-free chicken nuggets in your future? Oh, yeah. Really? Oh, yeah. Tell me everything now.
Starting point is 00:42:17 Well, we just have to do it. I mean, that's like what I make them at home all the time. The kids go crazy. If we're talking about accessible and affordable, a big part of accessibility is like, you've got to make the products that people want. And like the chicken tenders ready made and stuff like that? For sure. It's got to be ready to eat. Like it's got to be heat and serve.
Starting point is 00:42:35 What are you going to do about breading? Are you guys going to do some gluten-free options or just automatically gluten-free or what? I mean, as long as I'm with this company, it's only going to be stuff that like I would feed my own family. You know, so anything that we do, right now, we're just. doing like raw products so you can make your own nuggets at home or whatever. But any, any product that we release will be paleo. It's going to be like ideally made with tallow or avocado oil. Like it's going to be the good stuff, you know, no question. Picture this. You're at a penguin convention. You know, full tuxedo, top hat, feeling sharp. But suddenly the penguins start
Starting point is 00:43:10 circling. They point at you and scream, cultural appropriation. You're shocked. What? It's a Toxedo! But no, apparently it's their thing, and you're out of line. You're standing there, stunned, in front of a sea of tuxedo-clad birds, all judging you like you've committed the greatest crime of the century. You know what would make everything better? Some masa chips. Oh, yeah. These chips are made with just three ingredients. Organic corn, grass-fed beef tallow, and redmond sea salt. No seed oils, no weird chemicals. Just the highest quality ingredients that make the crunchiest, tastiest chips out there. Masa chips are so much better than any stack that you've ever had. And they're way, less controversial than a tuxedo at a penguin convention.
Starting point is 00:43:49 Grab some Masa chips today and use code real Alex Clark for 20% off your first order of seed oil-free masa chips.masa chips.com code real Alex Clark for 20% off your first order. Just don't bring them to the penguin convention. They might judge you for that too. What stores can you get past your burden? So if you're in California, we're in a bunch of small specialty stores. If you're in where we are right now in Arizona or if you're in Florida, Georgia, you can get it at sprouts. Basically, you can get most of the sprouts except for the ones in California or Texas.
Starting point is 00:44:22 That's only because we're small and we're like still getting going. Sprouts needs a lot of chicken. So we're working towards it. Are there some, any other names of grocery stores that you guys are in? Oh, Jimbo's in San Diego is like our original partner. They have about five stores, amazing health food store. They do a really, really great job. I would say Lassens and Vicente Foods up in L'A.
Starting point is 00:44:43 Those are some really good ones that you could look at as well. And then up in the Bay Area Nugget and Reyes. Raleys, Sacked Foods Co-Up. Does pasture bird have any plans to expand into retailers like Walmart or Whole Foods? That's like the big thing is if we're serious about this goal of like making nutrient dense, actually regenerative, pasture-raised food, accessible and affordable, then we should eventually target Walmart because that's where real people show. But would it be possible the biggest grocery store in America, would it be possible to keep
Starting point is 00:45:15 doing your truly passion-raised chicken and have enough chickens to supply Walmart. But we don't have enough right now. But we've built the model to scale to work with partners like that someday. And here's the crazy stat. You can say whatever you want about Walmart. They're the number one largest organic retailer in the world. They sell more organic produce than anybody else in the world. Yep.
Starting point is 00:45:36 So say whatever, but like the customer is there. And I would say there's this weird melding of a lot of things right now. But the Whole Food Shopper is also now starting to shop at Walmart. And the Walmart shopper shops at Whole Foods. And like the whole world, I feel like, is sort of coming to this equilibrium a little bit on politics and kind of religion and lots of things. So it's a really interesting time to be in the game. How does pasture bird focus on transparency with consumers and prioritize it? We struggle with this for a long time.
Starting point is 00:46:09 So our number one thing from day one was farm tours. So we open up the farm twice a year to the general public. We want everybody to come out and see it for themselves. We're not like Joel where we're like come any time of day, 24 hours a day. It's like, that's a lot to plan for. And you get chatty Kathy out there that just like takes away your whole day. So we do twice a year. We want everybody to come see it for themselves.
Starting point is 00:46:30 The problem is 99.9% of people like can't make the trip out to see it for themselves. So we had this crazy idea two years ago where we're like, okay, well, let's use the internet to our advantage. So we started live streaming. I was just going to say like doggy daycare or something where the cameras is on. You can just, oh, let me just check on pasture bird. What are they doing? And then you can just see the farmer like doing stuff. That's what we did.
Starting point is 00:46:53 Wait, that is fascinating. Yeah. So we use a QR code on every single package of chicken that we sell. And there's literally a live stream where you scan the thing. It'll take you to like a, it's not glamorous. Like it's our true actual production. It's not marketing. What a good homeschool like little lesson.
Starting point is 00:47:09 Totally. That's so cool to talk about meat where your food comes from. and then let's pull up this live stream of this farm if you can't do a farm tour, you know, if you're home, you just had a baby or something. I love that. I just think like transparency is the future of food. I hope. Yeah. We talked about, oh, is pasturates just like one chicken out in an open field running around? No, it's like 6,000 birds. They're in like a protective structure. That structure has grass underneath their feet. It's moving all the time. So some people go on and they're like,
Starting point is 00:47:33 whoa, like that's not what I expected. And I'm like, great. I just want you to know what you're getting. Like, I just want it to be an honest, open transaction and, like, in the military, we said, inspect what you expect. So I want people to see it and decide if that's what you like, then buy it. If you're like, no, that's gross. I don't want that. Then don't. That's like totally fine. I just think the future is around transparency. What is your opinion on this seed oil lobbyist agriculture pick from President Trump? I was really hoping for Thomas Massey. Don't even get me started. I would have been crazy. I don't know this person. I don't know this person. I I understand their backgrounds, like, not where I come from at all.
Starting point is 00:48:13 But I would reserve my judgment until I, like, get a chance to hear what she has to say and totally hear her out. But when I heard Massey was on the docket and Joel was going to be, like, an advisor, it was like, no way. Like, with RFK and those guys, like, this is going to be insane, you know? I think it still can be. At the end of the day, like, RFK is still running HHS and that has so much pull. Well, and that's what I'm saying. I think it's okay for us to be disappointed in that pick and still be really hopeful with RFK Jr.
Starting point is 00:48:43 Exactly. For me, I'm like, okay, so we miss that one and that does suck, but we got a lot with even FDA director. You know, Dr. Marty McCarrie, we've got, you know, RFK Jr. HHS, like that is going to have tremendous impact on the future of America. So I think you win some, you lose some. And overall, with all of President Trump's picks,
Starting point is 00:49:06 I mean, my personal opinion is, We won. Oh my gosh. So if, you know, we have a couple in there. We don't or aren't that crazy about. I think overall it was still a huge net positive. I just, I pray that Massey remains tightly involved because that guy's amazing.
Starting point is 00:49:19 I know. He's my absolute favorite congressman of all time. He thinks on a different level, the science background that he has. And he's literally a pastured poultry farmer. Like he does what we do at a small scale. So he gets it at many, many different levels. And like, I just pray that he stays around and stays involved because he's a for. I would love to see Congressman Massey run for president one day.
Starting point is 00:49:41 You need to get him in here on his show. I bet he would come. I did a little mini-documentary touring Pollyface, Joel Salatin's farm. And in that documentary, I do like a short like three-question interview with him about raw milk. Oh, cool. And farmers and like the Farm Bureau and stuff. But I haven't done like an intensive sit-down long form in interview. If you guys would like to see me interview Congressman Massey, say so in the comments.
Starting point is 00:50:05 I'd be curious to see if you guys would be interested in that. actually have never, I don't think that I've ever interviewed on this show an elected official. He's different, though. I know he's different. But I just, I just haven't done that. But he actually might be an interesting choice. So we'll see. How can the average person who can't necessarily up and start a farm like you did change the food industry? Well, you vote like three times a day. It's cliche. But you vote every time you buy food. Like you're casting a vote that, in my opinion, maybe even more important than the big election that we just had. Like, that's how big food, that's how Purdue started saying, whoa, maybe we should invest in pasture raise and regenerative
Starting point is 00:50:41 because people started voting with their dollar. And they see that. And it literally changes the future. Don't just vote every four years, vote three times a day. Yeah, it's cliche. It's kind of corny. I love it. It's so true.
Starting point is 00:50:51 I like the corny little sayings and slogans. What is different about pasture bird chicken? I mean, look at the product itself. The breast size is like much smaller. You're going to see like so much color to it. I mean, the side-by-side comparison is wildly. different. We thought about having a whole campaign around small breasts and we were like, that'd be weird. Like, let's not do that one. I think that's hilarious. Maybe we will. I don't know. It's also just like
Starting point is 00:51:16 what you're feeding to your family, three times higher in omega-3s. Gosh, it tastes so good. 50% vitamin A, vitamin E. It's just a different product. Yeah, it is so much better than other chicken breasts on the market. Like, it really is. You guys have done a phenomenal job. I appreciate it. And not that everybody needs to do this, but I just feel this call like as a Christian to steward the land and steward animals under my care really well, too. So I feel like not that that's everybody's thing or they really care, but like I do feel this call as Christians that like, we need to take that seriously and take really good care of like the land that we're trusted with.
Starting point is 00:51:49 And I just think that this is a great way to do it. Like the animals and the plants and how they're meant to work together, like we've got to bring that back. There's so much pessimism about, oh, food's killing us and the vaccines are killing us. And it's like, all this stuff is killing us. It's like, there are actually like real hopeful, optimist. mystic solutions out there to a lot of these things that are like, I don't know, we can be bummed or we can be like, no, it's like focus on the great stuff that's happening. Like, there's a great progress that's
Starting point is 00:52:15 happening. Oh, absolutely. And I mean, I just want to say, too, for transparency to my audience, you guys are not a sponsor of the show. I believe in the company. I believe in the product. I buy it whenever I need to get chicken at the store and it's phenomenal. And I think it's the best option chicken-wise that we have if your grocery store carries past your bird. So I was just so interested in hearing your story and we have a ton of mutual friends. And so I just thought, man, it would be so cool to have Farmer Paul out here. For the mom listening or the person listening who's really new to all things organic and non-GMO and I need to be eating real whole food and this is just really overwhelming. What kind of encouragement can you give them or advice?
Starting point is 00:52:56 Mom, just do your best. Like this stuff is so overwhelming. I think it's one of the things I actually feel really convicted by is like talking about all these labels. and all these problems. It's like, dude, if you're just cooking at home as much as you can, I don't care what you're buying. You're doing great. Like, you are doing fantastic. So I want to leave people with like a lot of hope and encouragement. And also, it's not just about Pashabur. Like, we're just one small player in the movement. And I'd actually rather have people buy local when they can, you know, like find that awesome small farm, find the one that really resonates with you, find the farmer that you can go actually know personally. But brands like us, like we stand in
Starting point is 00:53:33 in those food deserts or those, I mean, we've got the four kids, like, we've got soccer, we've got baseball, we've got everything going on. Like, we need to have these convenient solutions too. So that's where we try to stand in. But to that mom or that dad, it's just like feeling super overwhelmed, like just all, it's only about doing your best. And like the incremental, it happens over time. Like it doesn't happen overnight either.
Starting point is 00:53:56 Obviously feed your kids real food as much as possible. But at the end of the day, too, having a dinner at home. with families sitting at the table together, having conversation, having that community, building those relationships, that's always going to be the best. So that's a really important part and reminder. So if you could offer one remedy to heal a sick culture,
Starting point is 00:54:17 physically, mentally, or spiritually, what would it be? Oh, it actually has, like, nothing to do with my business. It's just get outside, have community, like find a great local church. To me, those are three are way more important than eating pasturays or free range or cage-free. This stuff's important. Don't get me wrong. But I think being outside, having like good friends that know you and you know them and being part of a local church and understanding that life is way bigger than you. And like you were created and you're loved. And it's like so much bigger than just our own little universe that we try to build up sometimes. Like to me that stuff is true deep spiritual health that goes way beyond like, you know, what you eat or whatever. Where can people follow Pastor Bird on social media? Good question. I've been off social media for 10.
Starting point is 00:55:03 10 years. A true farmer. I do know that we're on Instagram and TikTok, if that still exists, and Facebook, all just find pasture bird. You'll find it. Yeah, you'll find it. Thank you so much for coming on Culture Apothecary. Thank you for having me. It was awesome. I love getting to know Farmer Paul. Try Pasterbird if you ever see it in stores near you. Your family will absolutely love it. Listen to my episode with regenerative farmer Joel Salatin from June of 2024 and watch my mini documentary touring his farm, Polly Face on the real Alex Clark YouTube channel. That video is called Farm Like a Lunatic. Now, let's be real. Do you love this show? If you do, please leave a five-star review and tell others why you love it and that they will love it too. We're on a mission to
Starting point is 00:55:47 Healasic Culture twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays at 9 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m. Pacific, new guests bring their own unique remedy to do exactly that. Subscribe to Real Alex Clark on YouTube and follow me on Instagram at Real Alex Clark. I'm Alex Clark, and this is Culture Apothecary.

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