Dhru Purohit Show - Whistleblower Sounds the Alarm: Organic Food Is Under Threat with Dave Chapman

Episode Date: January 29, 2024

This episode is brought to you by AquaTru and Sweetgreen.  The quality of our food is one of the fundamental pillars in building our health and longevity. With all the food labels, it's hard to differentiate between what truly matters and what is solely a marketing strategy. Lifelong farmer David Chapman is a whistleblower sounding the alarm on the certified USDA organic label and the practices behind the companies using that label. Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru sits down with David, a lifelong farmer, Co-Director, and Board Chair of the Real Organic Project, to discuss how the certified organic label has been hijacked and how consumers are being misled. Dave shares the truths about the hydroponic process, the differences between smaller farms and large-scale operations, and the government's shortcomings in regulating the organic farming industry.  Dave Chapman is a lifelong organic farmer who runs the Long Wind Farm in Vermont. He is the Co-Director and Board Chair of the Real Organic Project, dedicated to reigniting and connecting the organic movement. David also leads the Real Organic Podcast and co-founded Vermont Organic Farmers. He serves on the Policy Committee of the Organic Farmers Association. His latest project is the creation of the Tomato Masterclass, a training for farmers working to create a strong economic base for their market gardens. In this episode, Dhru and David dive into (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): The top ways consumers are being misled when buying organic (3:58 / 3:58) The impact of these misleading statements on our climate (13:40 / 12:06) Dave’s mission and raising awareness (16:14 / 14:21) What is hydroponic and what it misses (19:27 / 17:50) What kind of eggs we should be eating (29:11 / 27:40) The government’s role in protecting consumers and what is lacking (40:07 / 36:36) Careful and skillful efforts by small farms versus industrialized farms (50:38 / 47:05) The inability of farmers to become certified organic and the importance of trust (55:35 / 52:20) Requirements for grass-fed beef (1:02:58 / 59:25) Dave’s journey in becoming a farmer (1:07:22 / 1:03:53) How the Real Organic Project started and what their certification stands for (1:11:25 / 1:07:48)  The Non-GMO Project efforts (1:29:50 / 1:26:17) The certification process by the Real Organic Project (1:37:10 / 1:33:32)  How you can help and where to learn more (1:59:17 / 1:55:50) Also mentioned in this episode: Real Organic Project  Hydroponic debate Alexandre Farms AquaTru is a countertop reverse osmosis purifier with a four-stage filtration system that removes 15x more contaminants than the bestselling water filters out there. Go to dhrupurohit.com/filter/ and get $100 off when you try AquaTru for yourself.  Find out more about Sweetgreen and their newest protein plates at www.sweetgreen.com. New Users of the sweet green app can use the code "Dhru5" for $5 off.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We're the guinea pigs. Nobody knows this. Nobody knows what's the impact of eating this food-like substance that wouldn't have been food before. Looks like food. Tastes not quite as good as food, but we're starting to lose our sense of taste anyway. We're very confused right now about how do we even tell what's nutritious. Today we have a whistleblower on the podcast from the real organic project here to talk to us about why the organic movement is under threat and what we can do to protect it. Hi everyone, Drew Prode here, and today's guest is Dave Chapman, a lifelong organic farmer running Long Wind Farm in Vermont. And Dave Chapman is here today to talk to us about why the organic movement,

and specifically the certified USDA organic label, is slowly being hijacked and turned into something different that isn't really truly organic. Now, we're going to get into that in the interview, but let me tell you a little bit more about Dave. Dave is the co-director and board chair of the Real Organic Project, which is dedicated to re-igniting and connecting the organic movement. He leads the Real Organic Podcast, providing a platform for many organic farmers, eaters, scientists, authors, educators, and activists, and even chefs. He was a co-founder of Vermont Organic Farmers and was amongst those initially certified by the USDA's Organic National Program. He served on a number of different committees,

including the Policy Committee for the Organic Farmers Association. His latest project is the creation of a tomato masterclass, a training for farmers working to create a strong economic basis for their market gardens. Now, before we jump into today's interview, I want to share something important. While I'm a huge fan of buying organic, especially when I can, it's not the absolute first priority in my health journey. I care about other more basic. basic pillars. I do care about organic, and that is something that I try to do. But first and foremost, when it comes to food, I'm focused on eating a whole foods diet that adequately gets enough fiber, has the right amount of protein, and it most importantly minimizes

ultra-processed foods. Greatly minimizes or reduces ultra-processed foods. In all of my research and experience and talking with clinicians, that is the most important thing. A tomato or even a piece of steak that's not organic is going to be a million times healthier than ultra-processed food that's out there. So the goal of today's podcast is not to make everybody feel, and I know Dave would agree with me because he talks about it there, is not to make everybody feel that if you don't eat organic, you can't be healthy. No, no, you can be healthy and you focus on whole foods. The goal of today's podcast is for those that have the time, effort, energy to give love and attention to protecting a movement, to educate them and tell them that,

maybe what we're buying isn't always what we think we're getting. And I think it's important to talk to individuals who are whistleblowers and who are trying to protect us, even if some people think, well, that's deep in the nuances and most people are just struggling to put food on the table. Both are true. Yes, most people are just struggling to put healthy food on the table, trying to cook for their kids while working a couple jobs that are there. And they're not listening to podcasts like this.

But that doesn't mean that we can't fight the good fight and protect something that's important to us. Both priorities are true. And with that understanding, let's jump into today's podcast with Dave Chapman. Dave, welcome to the podcast. A pleasure to have you here. We are here today talking about how many of us who go to the grocery store, who are trying to do the right thing for our family and buy organic produce, are being misled

and in some cases intentionally deceived. Let's talk about that. What are some of the top ways? that those of us that are buying organic actually may not be getting what we think we're buying. Okay. I just have to say, first, Drew, I still go to the store and buy organic if I don't know the farms. So I don't want to, it's like your child who has broken some laws, is wandering off the path. You don't want to just send them to jail forever.

You want to bring them back to the path. Yeah, so buying organic is good. So buying organic is good. We have to celebrate that. It's wonderful that it's growing and growing. But we're going to have to fight for it. We're going to have to fight for it. It's not going to be easy.

And it's the nature of anything that might succeed in the food system. If it is successful, the sharks are going to come. And the blood in the water is money, our money. So we're going to have to fight for integrity and transparency no matter what, in any innovation that's going to lead to better food. Okay. So are people being misled? Yes, they're being misled if when they go to the store,

and they buy certified organic eggs, if they think that those eggs came from a pasture, you know, with chickens running around happily, most of the time now in America, they're being misled. Probably 80% of the eggs being sold are coming from large confinement operations where the chickens never go outside. If they do, they go out to a little concrete yard

that's like a prison exercise yard. Yeah, you actually have a great image from a presentation you did. this is where what people think buying eggs from an organic farm looks like and then right next to it here on the screen here we've placed you know what the typical type of place growing these chickens and raising eggs these eggs are which are called again these you said confined uh the confinement operations they're often called kphos kaphos kaphos stands c a foe it stands for a concentrated animal feeding operation it's a USDA term to define a certain kind of farm and yeah, these are large confinement kphos.

And they're not nice. You wouldn't like to be in one. You'd probably you'd stop eating eggs. Or if you go to a large confinement kifo dairy or beef operation, you might stop eating meat at all. Yeah. Even if it's organic. Even if it's certified organic. Even if it's certified organic, we're still being misled.

So that's number one, kphos. What's another way that people who are buying organic are being misled in terms of what they think they're getting. Well, the second big one would be things that were grown without any soil at all. They're grown hydroponically. And their roots, sometimes they're in water and the fertilizer just run in the water. And sometimes they're in shredded coconut husks. And the fertilizer is dripped in. But there's no soil involved. And a whole miraculous cycle of fertility that makes really superb quality food is missing. It's a whole different thing. And when we're getting food that's hydroponic, even if it's certified organic, what are the potential implications, right? I've heard you say that it could be

in certain instances less nutritious. Is that accurate? Like less vitamins, less nutrients compared to being grown in soil? It's certainly different from what's grown in soil. There's no, nobody questions that. We know when you change the soil, how you manage the soil. It changes. changes the nutrition. And we know that if you do a totally different system of growing stuff without any soil at all, it changes the nutrition. Drew, you know, as well as anybody, how complex nutrition is. We barely know what is good nutrition. We know pretty well what's bad nutrition. We know Doritos are bad nutrition. But to really understand the complexity of 100,000 secondary plant metabolites, we don't even know what most of them do.

We don't know what their impact on our body is. But we're learning more and more all the time. And we know that some of those are potent anticarcinogens. And when we eat food that's got those, we're less likely to get cancer. So the nutrition is a real thing, but our science is limited. So to test that stuff, we barely know how to test for those 100,000 metabolites. and we don't understand the impact of one being higher than another and how they blend and how one inhibits the uptake of another.

So it's complicated. And that's why to some degree we have to start trusting Mother Nature, which is what real organic does. There's a belief that if we follow as closely as we can the practices of nature, which all farming is some compromise on that. But as close as we can get it, we're going to get the benefits of nature. We're going to get food. We co-evolved, right, with plants and this system.

And that's how we are nourished. That's our natural way of getting nutrition. So when we start playing with that, thinking we're smarter than Mother Nature, we aren't. We're stupider than Mother Nature. We're clever, and we can do some things and make it work for a little while. but not for a long period of time. This episode is brought to you by Aquatru. I've talked to so many experts

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Right now, Aquatru is offering my community an amazing deal. Just go to Drewfilter.com, D-H-R-U-Filter-E-R-T-E-R-R-com and get $100 off when you try Aquitru for yourself today. That's Drew-D-H-R-U-Filter.com to get $100-1-1-1-1-1-1. dollars off when you try aquatrue for yourself. You know, part of the message that you're sounding alarm on is that the organic standards are getting hijacked because the industry has gotten so big. There's so many lobbyists and groups and individuals that are trying to make organic,

which originally started off as this pure intention thing. They're trying to, in a way, bastardize it to make it easier to produce things. and to sell things to the public that may be called organic, but are not as good for you as how organic started. Is that a fair way to present kind of what you're saying? I think that's fair. I think that industry has come in and they do what industry does, which is try and simplify the systems as much as possible.

They want to make it as close to McDonald's as possible, where the hamburger in Iowa is the same as a hamburger in Florida, and it takes exactly the same time to cook and on and on. So it's a simple system. They've taken out as much of the complexity as they can. So they're trying to do that with agriculture. Hydroponics is a perfect example of that. Right now, Peru is being taken over by hydroponic production of berries, especially blueberries. And they're doing that because they don't have to worry about the variability of the soil or whether there is soil. They're just rolling out the plastic, putting the plastic pots on, filling them up with a shredded coconut husk, and then putting a drip stake into it. And they put all the feed through that drip state.

So they've got a simple system now. And okay, but what do you give up with that? You give up complexity. You give up the things you don't even begin to understand that are going on in a living soil. What makes a living soil alive is all the microbial life in there, all the, bacteria and the fungi and the many many other things many little animals it's not it's not just microscopic and there's this complex ecosystem and it's really cool and out of all that complexity and everyone's eaten everybody else and all good things are happening you get this

food that is so nutritious and delicious it tastes just as good as it is for you it taste good to eat. So not only is this a problem for people, and even if you're somebody who eats meat, right? Yes. You still want animal welfare. You want the animals to be, you know, raised in the best way that doesn't cause, you know, undone suffering, you know, before the point of slaughter, but also some of these ways that we're being lied to about organic, they're also bad for the planet. Can you chat about that? Sure. You know, there's a lot of conversation going on right now about something that's called Climate Smart Agriculture. That was a term I believe that Monsanto came up with, climate smart agriculture. Same thing. Big corporation coming in and saying, rather than change our practices, let's change our image. Let's change the story we're telling. So we're going to say that what we're doing is climate smart. Now, there are ways to farm that our climate.

smart, but I wouldn't use that particular expression to describe them. But there are ways to farm in which there's more carbon sequestrations of the plants through the process of photosynthesis are pulling the CO2 out of the air and turning it into their bodies and into the fruits, but they're also exuding it through their roots and feeding all that microbial life. And so over a long process of time, you start to get more. more organic matter in the soil, more carbon. Less carbon in the air, more carbon in the ground, where it's all coming from. Our whole problem with high CO2 is that we're mining old carbon, mostly in the form of oil and coal, and we're burning it and releasing it into the air.

So farming can help with that, can help to sequester and put back into the ground through this beautiful, complex biological process of photosynthesis. How does that work best? That works best in forests and in permacultures and in grasslands. So grasslands is where in all, I would say, good agriculture, there is some way in which animals are integrated into it. It might not be on your particular farm, but it's part of the cycle of some living animals are part of this system.

They can be animals that you're eating or animals that you're taking eggs from or milk from, or they could be wild animals in a wild ecosystem. In Yellowstone, you've got elk and wolves and all these animals participating in the ecosystem. So when you see everything that's happening right now, right, why do you feel you and your group at the Real Organic Project, right? Why is it so important for you to raise awareness by coming on things like this podcast, right? What's your hope and what's your mission by sounding the alarm about how things are headed? What are you trying to avoid? Yeah.

I'm trying to avoid organic becoming a dead brand out in the marketplace that doesn't mean anything. like natural or sustainable at this point or meaningless terms in the marketplace. I got into this, I first got into this because I saw that hydroponic produce was being certified as organic. And I thought that's not right. We know that's not organic and we decided it in the USDA

six years earlier than I got into this. I'm like, what's going on? And I thought, surely somebody's made a mistake. And I discovered it wasn't a mistake. mistake, that they'd been quietly being lobbied for some years at that point to allow hydroponics to be certified as organic. What's wrong with it is that that's actually not what people want to buy. It's not what hydroponic is not what organic stands for. It's not what people think it stands for. As I got into it, I discovered there was all this confinement

livestock. I had no idea. And most people don't have any idea. They don't have any idea. They don't have any idea that hydroponic is being allowed. So I realized that we were losing the actual essence, the soul of organic. Just as a brief diversion, Organic has kind of two traditions that made it. And one is Rachel Carson, Silent Spring. And she sounded the alarm in 1962 maybe about the fact that we were poisoning ourselves with this just widespread use of pesticides. And that's nothing compared to what we're doing now with pesticides, right? It was still relatively moderate. We've changed some of the names of the pesticides, some of the pesticides we use,

but herbicides now are off the charts for how much we're using compared to back then. So that was one thing that helped create the organic movement. But the other came from England, a writer, two writers, Albert Howard and Lady Eve Balfour. And they were writing about the difference in the quality of the food and your health because you're eating food grown in really fertile soil that is tended in a particular way. And that was actually where the term organic came from. It was about organic matter in the soil.

So Howard wrote soil and health and he wrote an agricultural testament and they became popular books. And Rodale, J.I. Rodale, read his books and studied with him and said, this is really important. And he brought it back to the U.S. So we've got these two forces coming together to create the organic movement. And it became a movement because people got excited about it. People were concerned about the quality of their food. And they were excited that there was another way. Can you explain hydroponics and, like, actually,

what exactly it is because I think a lot of people, they have a big picture idea, but they don't understand, you know, what's the incentive for big farms to want to use hydroponic? How does it work? And, you know, again, just to reiterate, what are some of the things that it's missing? Yeah, yeah. So the kind of slogan or catchphrase of the organic movement was feed the soil, not the plant. So a chemical farmer would synthesize some fertilizers in a processing plant and bring it out, and it's potent stuff. It works. You add that nitrogen to the soil, and the plant gets big and green in a hurry, much like eating a big Mac. You get big and red in a hurry. So in the organic philosophy, instead of going, well, I know the plant wants nitrogen, you feed the things that are living in the soil, and you create more life.

You create a community in the soil, a very diverse microbiome. We now start to have more understanding of microbiome. Soil's got a microbiome, too. It's like New York City in a healthy, rich fertile soil. There's so much going on. There's so much diversity, so many species living together, and it gets ramped up. And things that grow in that are very good for us to eat. So healthy soil, healthy plant, healthy animal, healthy human, right?

In chemical agriculture, the philosophy is feed the plant, not the soil. In hydroponic growing, there is no soil. It's just feed the plant. And so they go through processing to get fertilizers that they can that are very available to the plant to just take up. It's like an IV. You put an IV into somebody and they're just getting the nutrition. They're not really healthy, but they're alive, right? They're not getting sunlight.

They're not getting movement. They're not getting everything else. But they are getting the basic nutrition to keep them alive. They're not dead. They're not healthy. And it might be a wonderful thing in a certain very difficult situation. I had a group of students from Dartmouth come to me and they're doing a project to how are you going to feed a colony on Mars, a space station on Mars. And they said, we're coming up with hydroponics are the only way because the soil is literally toxic, poisonous there.

And I said, okay, well, you know, this is how you do hydroponics? And they said, but do you think everyone will get sick? And I went, well, not for a while. how long are they going to be there? They said 10 years. I said 10 years, well, don't necessarily count on having kids, right? Because we don't know. We're the lab rats here.

We're the guinea pigs. Nobody knows this. Nobody knows what's the impact of eating this food-like substance that wouldn't have been food before. Looks like food. Tastes not quite as good as food. But we're starting to lose our sense of taste anyway. We're very confused right now about how to do.

we even tell what's nutritious? What percentage of the organic produce that's out there right now is grown through hydroponic? A lot of the tomatoes, a lot of the tomatoes, both big and small, are grown hydroponically. A lot of those, all the peppers probably coming from Holland, and a lot of those big, beautiful peppers from Mexico are often hydroponic. A lot of the blueberries are hydroponic. Not so much yet inorganic, but all those were inorganic. In conventional, even the strawberries are becoming more hydroponic. And I'd say in 10 years, that's going to be dominant. It's not yet. The greens are the mixed greens, things like that, lettuce, are starting to be more and more hydroponic. So unless you know the farms and know which ones you

choose not to buy from, it's pretty hard to tell. They won't tell you. This is the sign that people don't really want hydroponic, because what producer brags about it? Nobody. Nobody says, oh, we're so proud we grew these hydroponically. If you go to the major producers who are selling something through organic that's actually hydroponic and asking them if they grow anything hydroponically, they will say no. They've just redefined the word. So you can't even get the truth by asking the people who are doing it. Because they know that you and I don't want hydroponic when we go to buy something that's certified as organic.

We want something grown in soil. Why is it that certain countries, even if they grow hydroponic there, don't allow for that same produce to be sold in that country? Only in the U.S. that I can think of is something that's grown hydroponically allowed to be sold as organic. So we are the pirate ship here. The leading, the greatest producer of hydroponic produce in the world is Holland. They've got thousands and thousands of acres of greenhouses. And they grow a lot of tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers. virtually all hydroponically.

The only thing that isn't grown hydroponically in those greenhouses is stuff that's grown organically. However, there are a small number of acres, 50 acres or something that are grown hydroponically. They can't be sold as organic in Holland or anywhere in the EU, but they can be sold as organic in the U.S. And that's where they're shipped to. and if they for some reason don't have a market here, they have to sell them as conventional in Holland.

And is that simply just because those countries like in the EU, they just have higher standards of what organic means and they're willing to uphold that? Yeah, they have the same standards we had when we started. So we have a good law in this country. It's called the Organic Food Production Act. And honestly, Drew, it's a miracle. They got this thing passed. They got it passed in, I don't know, 1990. And a couple senators and congresspeople with a lot of vision pushed it through. At that point, there was no organic market to speak of in 1990. So there wasn't a lot of resistance.

It's like whatever, you all are doing what you're doing. And it's a good law. And it talks about soil and soil health and taking care of the soil, tending the soil, stewarding the soil over and over and over. And in around 2000, the USDA created the National Organic Program to actually create a certification program. And its job, it's a little branch of a huge thing. USDA is huge. National Organic Program is very small program.

Their only job was to protect the consumers and the farmers who wanted real organic and to protect the integrity and transparency of that product. process. Now, guess what they failed at, the integrity and the transparency of that process. That is falling by the wayside. We're fighting for it. We should fight for it. We've got to keep fighting for it. But in the meantime, we're going to have to do some labeling of our own so that people can find the food that they want. And it's a huge task because organic's pretty big now, which is wonderful. That's a sign of the fact that so many people want organic. They want an alternative to that chemical system, to that chemical industry.

And organic is where they're turning. And it's where they should turn. It's the right thing. What organic means is the right thing. That's the food we should be eating. We're just going to have to fight and claw back to get that integrity and transparency. Is there anything good about organic hydroponic in the sense that it's not being exposed to maybe certain types of pesticides. Yeah. Yeah. Same as true of the certified organic kphos. So the certified organic hydros and the certified organic kphos are better than the conventional hydros and the conventional kphos. So that's better. Let's consider it a transition step to real organic, right? The problem isn't that it's so bad. It's that it's not good

enough. And the problem is that it changes the marketplace. So if you want real organic eggs, good luck finding them unless you know a farmer and you know I'll buy their eggs. I'll buy Alexander's eggs. Alexander Farms has real organic eggs, right? And they're, you know, happy hens down in San Diego. They've got real organic eggs. But if you just walk into the Vaughns or Whole Foods, you better bring your detective magnifying glass to try and figure it out. It's going to be very confusing. Let's talk about eggs for a second because I think that's a perfect category, you know? A lot of people eat eggs.

I love eggs. Ground zero. So eggs, you see this explosion in the last couple years where there's a lot of brands that are saying that, hey, we're pasture raised eggs. And generally speaking, I've told my audience here that, great, you know, first of all, eat healthy. We don't want to make healthy eating so tough and expensive that people just don't do it. And they're like, I'm just going to eat ultra-process foods, right? We want to get away from ultra-process foods. Absolutely.

And move towards whole foods. And then within side of that, if you can make shifts and move towards organic, fantastic. So with eggs, we'll say, hey, listen, go get pasture raised eggs. Now, it's my understanding, and correct me if I'm wrong, because I'm in this field and this could be how confused I am. So there's a few different types of pasture raised eggs, right? There's pasture raised, right? Just so the audience is clear, we're not talking about pastureized. These are chickens that are supposed to have some access to pasture, right?

To be able to eat insects and whatever else they might be eating. Then there's organic certified pasture raised, which, for you. from my understanding means that the feed that these chickens are being given is organic itself. The chickens aren't certified organic. Like as a chicken, you're not certified or not certified organic, but the feed you're being given is organic. Is that accurate that there's pasture raised, which is you have access to a pasture? And then there's organic pasture raise, which would mean that there is some blend of either having access to pasture, whether they eat things from it or not. So maybe that's an animal welfare thing, but you're still eating organic feed like corn, soy, whatever it might be.

Okay. Okay. So a lot of stuff there. Yeah. First of all, as far as I know, there's no legal definition of pasture raised. Yeah. We all think we know what it means. It means something to you.

It means something to me. It doesn't necessarily mean the same thing to the egg company. So, you know, it doesn't necessarily mean the same thing to the distributor or the retailer. So we have to be careful. there are a lot of terms and eggs is one that's just swimming in terms. And as soon as a term comes up, we go, okay, what we meant was pasture raised. And they go, great, past your raised, right? So what does that mean to the producer you'll have to find out?

Yes, it's true. I don't think it's true that you can't certify a chicken. I think animals are certified as organic. But it's true that for a chicken to be certified, they have to be fed. certified organic grain. Chickens are not like cows where they can just live off grass. They need some grain. And that grain needs to be certified organic.

I say that. I don't use the word organic unless I mean real organic. So because I'm sorry to say there's also a fair amount of fraud in organic grain, certified organic grain. And we know this. It's been big stories in the Washington Post. This is mob. activity. So this is different from, I've lobbied the USDA to change the definition of, you know,

now they're allowing hydroponic. This isn't allowed. It's simply corrupted. And the Washington Post ran a series of stories back around maybe 2017, a writer named Peter Warriski. Fantastic job he did. He did the same about confinement dairy cattle, very well done. The grain fraud was that these mobsters based in Turkey, it was the address given, would bring a giant shipload of grain. And magically, over the voyage, it would turn into organic grain. It was chemical when it was loaded. It was conventional when it was loaded. And when it was unloaded, it was organic.

And they just changed the paperwork. And this was going on on scale. So many millions of dollars worth of so-called organic grain that wasn't organic. This is the fight. This is the fight that we're in. You know, we can rend our clothes and gnash our teeth. But let's get real that we are willing to pay for something. And we're going to have to fight to make sure we're getting what we're paying for.

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The hot honey chicken plate I get has 49. That's right, 49 grams of protein, which is perfect for me, especially after a tough workout. And by the way, I'm a huge fan of Sweet Green's mission. They're a big purchaser of local farmers and suppliers, which I think is incredible. And their food tastes great, which I mentioned. And by the way, big news, I love that they don't use vegetable oils anymore when it comes to cooking their grains, their proteins, and their veggies. Now they use extra virgin olive oil or avocado oil in some instances.

That's a huge win for anybody who's trying to minimize the exposure to cooked vegetable oils in their diet. I really look at Sweet Green as pioneers in the space of eating well in affordable way and making health accessible for everyone, especially those who are busy. Visit your nearest Sweet Green. There's a ton of them out there or find out more information about Sweet Green by going to sweetgreen.com. And new users of the Sweet Green app, yes, they have their own app, by the way. You can order pickup or delivery through it. You can use the code Drew 5 for $5 off. That's D-H-R-U-5 for $5 off your next order through the Sweet Green app. What is the best type of eggs we could be eating?

The best type of eggs you can be eating are coming from a small farm where the chickens run outside every day. And, you know, they're eating a combination of grain and bugs. And they're eating a little, you know, grass and Forbes. And they're not super crowded. And they're going to be more expensive. So just because they're expensive doesn't mean that they're really organic. But the real thing is going to cost more than an industrial egg. And that's something that we have to acknowledge is that real food is always going to cost more than industrial food.

And by industrial food, I mean where they've just figured out how, on a really massive scale, to push out something that looks like an egg, feels like an egg, and tastes okay, right? If the hydroponic community would be sort of making their argument for why they should be certified organic and what they bring to the table, what would they be saying? Right? Not saying that you agree with this, but what would they say? Steel man their side of the argument. I can do their side of the argument. I have pretty good friends who are hydroponic growers. Yeah. And until recently, they rolled their eyes at organic. They're like, oh, yeah, you're organic. guys, you know, you're with your cowhorns and your, you know, manure. Now they're all entering the market. It's like, it's like in California where suddenly marijuana became legal and all these people who

were staunchly opposed to the use of marijuana were going, well, I guess we're going to start growing it, right? The world changed. Money. Money. Money. So these people who are skilled growers in greenhouses, very heavy Dutch influence, and they knew they could make money doing it conventionally, but they could make even more money if they could sell it as organic, much better market, much, much higher price. So they figured out how to process some, some, you know, hydroly soy protein and things like that. And, and, and, feed the plants still in the same bags of shredded coconut husks that they were using when they were using just chemicals. Now they're using natural fertilizers that are unnatural. So what would I say if I was them

in order to justify it? I would say, well, I think that we have higher levels of NPK than people in the soil. What's NPK? Sorry, nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus. And because they know exactly how to dial that stuff in. I asked one of them when he said he tested better. I said, well, have you tested the other 100,000 elements, you know, not elements, compounds that would be in food? And no, he smiled and said, of course, we haven't. And we don't know what it should be. And we don't know how to add it.

One person said, if you added everything that there was in soil to a hydroponic solution, you'd end up with soil, right? It's complicated. So going back to their side of the argument. Okay, back to their side of the argument. What they would say and what they have said and they put it out is everyone deserves organic. And what they mean by that is we can do it cheaper. And if we do cheap food, then more people can afford it.

And doesn't everyone deserve to be able to eat organic? And I would say, yes, everyone does deserve to eat organic, except that's not organic. So the problem there is a little bit more social than horticultural, which is that some people can't afford to eat good food because they don't earn enough money at their work because their pay essentially hasn't gone up in 30 years. So maybe we need to make it that people get paid a little bit more

and then they can afford to buy good food and then they could afford to buy real organic. What is the government's role as the chaperone of USDA organic when it comes to maintaining the integrity and getting consumers ultimately what they think that they're buying? What's their responsibility? Yeah, what's their responsibility? And what have they done a good job in? And what have they done a not great job in? Okay.

As is related to the things and the topics that we're bringing up in this conversation. Let's start about what they've done a good job in. job in. I'm trying. I'm trying. Because you mentioned that even getting this act passed in the 1990s was pretty amazing. It was. The USDA hated this act, by the way. They did not want to create a national organic program. They hated organic, honestly. They did. The USDA is also known as the United States Department of Agribusiness. And their role is really to promote the development of an industry. And that industry is about chemicals and it's about equipment. It's about Bear Monsanto and John Deere. That's what the USDA's primary mission is. So what they've done that's good is they've

made it that food is cheap. There have been tremendous costs to all of us in order to accomplish that. but they have made it that you can go to the store, although it doesn't feel cheap, but it's relatively cheap, and it's a lower percentage of the average person's income than in other countries. So that's what they've done, and they're proud of that. I think that they're actually proud of having gotten rid of a lot of people on the land who are farmers, and they're now living in cities, and they've made, they would claim that these farms are now more efficient. I would say that they're now simpler, which makes them more brittle and fragile and more prone to serious disruption if things go wrong. But that's a whole other conversation, right?

But that's what they've done. And, okay, we can celebrate that people can now afford calories in this country. They can afford to go and get food. Interestingly, a lot of people, including a lot of low-income people, go to, fast food restaurants to get their calories to eat as opposed to the store. We saw what an upheaval it was during COVID when suddenly all those restaurants were shut down as an option. And then you went to the store and there wasn't enough food on the shelves, right?

There wasn't enough toilet paper on the shelves. Like, how is that possible? Did we suddenly stop making toilet paper? No, we didn't stop making it. But the distribution channel wasn't set up to have two rolls of toilet paper and a cell wrap on a shelf. It was set up to have a case of it delivered to a McDonald's or a Burger King. So the same is true for food and milk. Instead of coming in a jug, it came in a giant squeeze bag.

Yeah, okay. So can I talk about what they haven't done now? Yeah. I mean, I mean, that is an amazing achievement. but there was so much collateral damage to pulling off that affordable food. And tremendous damage to the farm community, tremendous damage to the soil, tremendous damage to the water. You can't drink the water in Iowa. And if you have the misfortune to be down around New Orleans, you're in Cancer Alley.

Cancer Alley, everyone there has a really elevated rate of cancer. That's from agriculture in Iowa. That's the runoff of all of that way of farming. plus the soil in Iowa, there's getting to be less of it all the time, and it's more depleted of organic matter, so it's more fragile. And at some point, it stops working. It doesn't hold water, so you either get too much water or not enough water. The hydrological cycle gets changed.

California, oh my God, it's getting scary out here. I got a number of friends who had to flee fires. from their farms, they had to abandon them and hope that, you know, they didn't burn down. And some of them did burn down. And that's because of the hydrological cycle. And that does have something to do with how we're farming, how we're using water. The way we're farming, more of that chemical nitrogen, less of that organic matter. That organic matter holds a lot of water.

It holds it and it gives it back. But if there's nothing to hold it, the water runs off. into the river, into the ocean, and it's not there to rain down again. So these things really impact the world and nutrition. Very important. What happens if you eat bad food? You get sick. You get sick much easier.

We know that. And we all pay for that. Everybody, the society, pays for it. Of course, the individuals are severely punished by the choices that they've been encouraged over and over to make bad choices, another bag of Doritos, another can of something. All right, so that's, those are some of the consequences of USDA not being able to keep up with, you know, organic. If it were protected so that it was real, it would cost more, but it would open the door to there being much more high-quality food available,

and it would open the door to bringing that price down ultimately. It would, you know, because we would get better and better at it. Right now what's happening, let's say that you're a small dairy farmer. You don't have to be tiny. Let's say that you've got 300 cows, 500 cows, and you're trying to compete against a farm that has 10,000. thousand cows in confinement. And just as with hydroponics, that confinement stuff will pay in the short run. That's why they do it. It's like, we're just going to have the cows stand there. It's a

great deal like McDonald's, a giant McDonald's for cows, except that the bathrooms are all broken. And so the manure is just piling up in the lagoons. It doesn't go into a nice, you know, leach field. And the cows are eating, and they're eating food that's engineered to make them, get big as fast as possible and to grow milk as quickly as possible. So they're all burned out after two or three years, right? I mean, this gets very depressing after a while, right? But that's what it is and that has terrible consequences. And one of the consequences is that 5008 cow dairy farm can't survive

because the price of milk drop below what their cost of production is because it's very efficient, cost-effective to do it the other way if you're not paying for water quality, air quality, health care, animal welfare, worker welfare. So that's already happening right now when you look at conventional versus, let's say, real organic. Yes. Right? There's already that great divide in terms of conventional can so much more, quote unquote, efficiently, Right? Not in a good way, but quote-unquote efficiently produce these calories.

Yes. Your concern, if I'm understanding correctly, is that consumers want organic. The organic industry has exploded. If we don't help them figure out what's healthy and what's not or what's real and what's not, then this small dairy farm is going to get cannibalized by the organic dairy. They're both organic. certified. They're both certified organic, they're both certified organic and the small farm that's trying

to do things the right way is going to end up getting priced out and closed down. Is that, that's the concern? That is true. That is true and that's happening today. That's happening. Yeah. It's happening very quickly. There's a company called Horizon, a major organic milk brand.

Yeah, you see them in Whole Foods and all sorts of places. They're owned by Denone, which owns Stan and Yogurt. and they're for sale right now. They're about to sell them off. And they decided to drop a whole bunch of small farms in Vermont. All the farms they bought from in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, and about half the farms they bought from in New York State in order to become more efficient and consolidate themselves.

So they got rid of all these small farms. And the farms faced bankruptcy because they lost their milk contracts. So Danone felt they had to do it. that because the cost of milk is so low. And by doing this, they're going to make the cost of milk even lower. Okay, we lose those farms, but those farms are doing the right thing. They're a benefit to the community. There are a benefit to the landscape. They're a benefit to the animals having a decent life, right? The quality of the milk is better. All these things are good and we're going to lose it. And yes, it is about money. We're not just talking about this to protect the farms.

to protect the farmers. Yes, we want farmers to be able to make a living, but we want them to be there to feed us, right? We're doing this for ourselves and for our children and for our nieces and nephews. So if we don't fight and make, I hate to say fight, it's always like, do we have to fight? But if we don't take a stand and take the extra mile to make responsible, I hate to say fight, it's always like, do we have to fight, but if we don't take a stand, to make responsible choices, these farms go away and they might not come back. And the new normal will just be the industrial kphos. Give us a little bit of a compare and contrast, right? What is that small farm doing right?

Just again, just to drive at home so that people really get it. Sure. Compared to these big industrialized farms. I'll pick just one small farm because I happen to know him pretty well. It's called Radiance Dairy. It's in Fairfield, Iowa. It's run by Susan and Francis Tickey. And they're really high-level, high-skill farmers.

So they're doing very careful, skillful rotation of the pastures. So they might move the cows twice a day from one block of grass to another block of grass. And they might not bring them back to that grass for a month or two. I don't know. It depends on the season and how much rainfall there's been and so forth. And they're doing that to optimize the growth of the plants in that paddock, in that fenced-in enclosure. And it's kind of a neat thing. But, you know, if you have the grass a certain height and you just graze it to a shorter height, that stimulates a lot of root growth. And the more carbon sequestration, more root growth, quicker regrowth. If you graze it all the way down so it's like a putting green, now you've really set that plant back.

It takes it a long time to come back. And you'll see some places you go, oh, the cows are out on pasture, but the grass is all this tall. So that's not a very skilled rotational grazing. And normally in those cases, you'll see the cows are just laying there chewing their cud rather than eating the grass. because that's because they're chewing their cut from the grain that they got in the barn. So they're putting them out there. It's nice. They get to be out in the sunshine and all.

But it's different from cows that are eating, eating, eating. And that's a very productive system. A few other little differences on Radiance Derry. There might be two people working with Francis and Susan, and they have a nice little economy going. A lot of people actually moved to Fairfield, Iowa, in order to buy their own. milk because it's that good. So you've got this real, and they sell it directly. You've got this real, they'll sell in stores too, but it's their milk. It's, it's, it's, it's radiance dairy milk.

You've got this community building thing where they become kind of the beating heart of the community, that farm. It's a wonderful thing. Okay, so let's compare it to Aurora Dairy. They've got, I don't know, three or four of them, but there's one in Colorado, the cows, stand in a shed, And shit. Waiting for the food to come. The food's always coming. They're always eating. They never go anywhere.

And that's their life, except for milking time. And, you know, the people who work there are paid very poorly. It's not a good job. It's not a nice place to work. It doesn't smell good. It's not nice. So I think they're very different. The milk has been tested from these places.

We know it's different nutritionally. We know it. Go back and look at Peter Wuriske's article in the Washington Post. Fantastic. The Post did the testing. They tested the milk and they said, according to the test, this milk is not from animals on pasture. Because we can tell.

There are things like conjugated linoleic acid, and it's very low in cows that live in a kifo and very high from cows that are on beautifully rotated pastures like Francis and Susan. You know, there's this whole movement right now where people are becoming more aware of where food comes from. They're more interested, which is also, you know, the reason why your organization, you know, real organic project has been getting the attention that it is because people want the truth about their food. They care about it. They care about the animals.

They care about the planet. You know, even if there's debates about certain specifics about climate change that I've seen out there. people still generally understand that we do not want to make the planet toxic, right? That's not a good thing. We don't want to make the planet, forget about carbon for one second. You know, a lot of the things that are bad for the planet that we're talking about here, they make the planet toxic. You know, they're actually contributing more toxins to the environment, like these big, you know,

these, these centralized feeding lots. Yeah. Kphos or CFos. It's Kphos or CAFOs. That's how it's pronounced. Cafos or CAFO. So one of the things that's there is there's also this awareness that sometimes you're a small local a farmer that you might meet that has a booth at the farmer's market or a representative

or as part of some sort of, you know, farm delivery box. You'll hear things like, hey, we use organic practices, but, getting certified organic is actually very costly and or there's a transition period so we haven't hit that. Is there truth to that? What can you share about that aspect? Because I see more and more people are hearing about this from small farmers if they're getting from their local farmers market. Yeah, yeah. One last thing, Drew, just about the other, the benefits, biodiversity, which we can't, we can't neglect that. It's like if you go to Francis's place, there's a whole ecology. It's a whole jungle of creatures living there because he doesn't have a 4,000 acre monocrop of something that he's

cutting to take back to feed the cows. And so a lot of insects life living there. Okay. So what about these small farmers who are not certified, but they say that they are organic or beyond organic. And look, many of them are telling the truth. And we have many non-certified organic farms who support what we do. And they say, well, we're not getting certified, but we support what you do. We know that there's a problem, and we know that you're fighting the good fight. One of the most famous, well, the most famous organic farmer in America is a man named Elliot Coleman. And he is like the grandfather. He wrote the first books, and he's inspired hundreds of thousands of people to go and become organic farmers or organic gardeners, you know, or organic

eaters and he's not certified organic and he never would be because he does not respect the USDA and what they've done and I respect him for that that's fine so we shouldn't confuse certification with being organic you can be organic and not be certified and you can be certified and not be organic however is there a place for certification yes it's important does it should we fight to defend it? When I became certified, for the first time it was before the USDA was involved, it was just something called the Vermont Organic Farmers. And honestly, there really wasn't even a market yet,

but we did it because we were building a movement. And I think Real Organic Project, more than building a brand, an alternative brand, which we do need to do, we're building a movement, which is why I'm here in L.A. talking to you instead of staying in Vermont on my farm, because we need to talk to each other and we need to come together and ask questions. And we do need to build a movement. This is so important.

This is our survival that we're talking about. This is whether we like to live in our communities. Are they good communities or really damaged communities? So those farmers, if you know the farmer and you trust them, that's enough. That's enough. That's good. That's great. If you don't know the farmers, so you go to the Whole Foods or you go to Vons,

then you go, well, I do need a label I can trust. And most people in the country don't have the benefit of having a local farmer's market available where they can buy their food. California is a special place, but in Oklahoma, that's harder to find. And frankly, even in Vermont, we have great farmers markets for, four months of the year, but in January there's no farmer's market. And we go to the store. Let's talk about the store just for a minute. So I tell this story sometimes a couple of years ago. I was here. And it was August, height of tomato season. I just spent the night at full belly

farm, which is a fantastic organic farm up in Gwinda, California. And I went over to Mill Valley to the Whole Foods. And I walked in to see, I always go to sea, because I grow tomatoes. I want to see what they had for tomatoes. And the only certified organic tomatoes in the store were from hydroponic from Mexico. I knew they were hydroponic because I knew the brand that they were coming from. And I thought, what the hell? I was just there. The fields are teeming with tomatoes. And I talked to the farmer and he said, yeah, we used to deliver directly to that store, but we're not allowed to anymore. The stores, not only have the farms become more consolidated and thus centralized, but so have the stores. And what we find is that big consolidated stores, distributors, and farms all kind of

speak the same language. And so a big consolidated store doesn't want to have a farmer pull up with their truck and offload a pallet. They want to be able to order it through a distributor and order it all from just whatever the distributor gets. And the distributor wants a farm that can just give them everything they need and they don't need to mess with diversity. They don't need to mess with complexity. So this is the problem that we all face. And it's not just in food, but food is essential to all of us, which is that as everything becomes more centralized, I believe that our democracy is in danger. And it's interesting.

Before we started, you said, you know, we have a very mixed audience politically. So is the real organic movement very mixed politically. But what we all agree on is corporations are not our friends in terms of getting to the world we want to live in. And, you know, I interviewed a guy on my little podcast. He was a great, great interview with this dairy farmer in New York. and he had spent five years on the advisory board to the National Organic Program. And he gave this beautiful story about when he became organic and he started to move the cows out of the barn,

instead of just feeding them grain, they were getting pasture and lots of it, he said, you know, the vet used to come once a week, every week to come, we had problems. So the doctor was coming every week to deal with sick cows. And he said, after a year or so, the vet wasn't coming at all. Those cows were healthy without medicine, without being treated. He said it was the most amazing and startling demonstration that organic is real and that it works. And he said, as the price has been depressed, and we've had to milk more and more cows just to stay alive and in business, they're moving back into the barn.

We have to to survive. And the vet is coming again. And this guy was very conservative politically. And I said, is the problem capitalism. He said, oh, I don't like to say that. The problem is corruption. The problem is fraud. The problem is people aren't following the rules and the government's not making them.

I want to talk about your origin story. But before we get to there, just like we did with eggs, right? Yeah. I want to talk about beef for a second and cattle. Sure. There's this big movement inside of the sort of health care. community, for people who do eat, let's say red meat, beef in particular, to want to seek out grass fed, which is a whole thing. There are different individual certifications that are out there.

Like there's entities out of Europe that are called like truly grass fed that look at primarily like cheese products, way, other things. But you know, organic doesn't sort of state that's something that has to be grass-fed. Is that right? Is that accurate? Organic requires a certain percentage of the diet must come from the pasture. Right. Now, if people are looking for primarily grass-fed, what's the best way? Or is there a way to actually know that you're getting grass-fed beef? There are certifications for grass-fed, and, you know, I'm not tracking them closely. but I'd find one that I trusted and go with that

or get to know the farms that you can trust. And, you know, one of the farms that we certifies is a very famous farm. It's called Elzinga's Ranch, Alderspring Ranch in Idaho. It's the Elzinga family. And they were kind of the heroes of a book called Steak by Mark Shatsker.

Mark is one of my favorite authors. to get him on the show sometime. He also wrote the Dorito Effect and the end of craving. So three great books. Dorito Effect was just an amazing book and it really went into what is processed food doing to us and how did it happen? He's a brilliant writer. So at the end of steak, he comes to the punchline, which is that the best ranch he could find, the best source of meat and the best tasting. That was his interest. I just want a good steak was Alder Spring Ranch. And, you know, so that's one of our farms that we certify is Alder Spring.

There's is entirely grass-fed. They just herd the cattle all summer over 40,000 acres that they lease from the government, most of it. So it certainly can be done and it is done. There's a cost to it. It costs more than to feed grain, right? If you put the cows in a barn and feed them grain, they'll get bigger, faster. That's why people do it. And when you do grass fed, can it also be certified organic?

Oh, yes. Lots of grass fed is certified organic. And if you don't feed them any feed, and it's like 100% grass fed, where does the certification of organic come in? Like where is that? The land has to be certified as organic. Okay, got it. So they're grazing on organic certified land.

That's right. And if he's grazing on like federal land, is that? It's still got to be certified. Would the federal government certified their land? No, the rancher that's leasing it would. The rancher that's leasing it. Yeah. Got it.

Yeah. So we certify. Dalzinga's ranch and much of it is on leased land from the government. It's got to be organic for three years before it can be certified. But no, that's real. And a lot of beef is grass-fed. It's probably the easiest thing to do. It's a little harder to do dairy, 100% grass-fed.

Some people do it. That's a little bit harder because a little bit of protein goes a long way for making milk. but they do that with beef. The place it can get a little dodgy is they finish the beef in a confinement operation. And that can be done under organic certification. So one needs to be a little careful with that if that's something that really you care about. Let's talk about your story and how you got into farming because you had your own farm. Right?

I still do. But you didn't want to be a farm. farmer. You didn't have a interest in wanting to be a farmer growing up. Okay. So where did that start off? Yeah, so I did grow up on a dairy farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. And most of our neighbors were Amish. And in fact, the farm I grew up on is now owned by an Amish family, and they're farming it. I grew up in Delaware, so I'm very familiar. Okay. Yeah, yeah. So, right around the corner. And it's a beautiful, beautiful farmland. It's considered one of the two most naturally fertile soils in America as Lancaster County. And it's got this perfect climate

for plants growing. It's not the sweetest climate for people. It's awfully hot and humid, but in the summer. So I grew up there. It was a dairy farm, 50 cows, which back then was a big farm in Lancaster County. And I left when I was young and I had no intention of ever farming. I was off to other adventures. And when I eventually, you know, when I was, I don't know, 24 or something, I went to Vermont. And I was part of a large group of young people going out to the country for more urban settings. And it was called the Back to the Land Movement. And there were people who wrote books that inspired a lot of people to go out and try homesteading. And after some years, I decided to try my hand at farming, and I had a team of oxen, you know, instead of a tractor.

I had raised them from calves and trained them. And they were pretty handy. So, you know, they could pull a plow. They could pull a manure spray. They could pull a discarrow. And I just did a small, two-acre intensive market garden. And it was a full. financially rough. I did other things in the winter to pay for it. I didn't know what I was doing.

I learned. And it's funny because now I have two and a half acres of intensive market garden, but it's covered by a large glass greenhouse. So my scale hasn't changed, although it has. We're much more intensive than we were then. We produce a lot of tomatoes out of two and a half acres. It's grown in the soil. It's very fertile. They taste delicious. And they're very popular. And what else do you grow besides tomatoes?

That's all I grow. It's all you grow. Yeah. We went from having a very diverse farm with lots of crops in the field and flowers and perennials and herbs and cut flowers and all that to just growing tomatoes. And there's a story about how that happened. But, you know, we don't have to go there. And who buys? Do you sell directly to people? Do you sell to grocery stores, restaurants, all above? Mostly grocery stores. Certified organic tomatoes? They're certified organic and they're certified

real organic also. So we are certified with a real organic program. And they go to Whole Foods, a lot of the Whole Foods in the Boston area. They go to Fresh Direct in New York City, which is this wonderful delivery service. They go, you know, to all the co-ops, we can get our hands on. We love to deal with the co-ops. We've experimented with CSA. It was difficult because everybody could always go and buy them in the store because they're always there.

So it's a little hard to make them special enough that people chose to make that commitment to buying them a special order. But, yeah, it works. So take us on the journey from starting a farm to, you know, give us like the highlight. What was the pivot point where the idea came between, you know, you and your colleagues that you ended up saying there's a need for this organization, the real organic project? Okay. So I was farming, running a small market garden, which got a little bit bigger. And we started to have employees.

And that was called Long Wind Farm. And I just worked all the time. I was a typical farmer. I worked all the time. This is really typical for almost any kind of farming, but certainly for vegetable farming. And I had two kids, and I raised them, and I very seldom left the farm.

I did not come to L.A. I did not appear on podcasts. I was completely anonymous. Our tomatoes weren't, but I was. and there came a point where back around 2014, where I noticed these beautiful, perfect tomatoes, certified as organic, showing up in the marketplace, very inexpensive, very tasteless.

And I'm like, what are these? And I did a little research, and I know a lot of people, and I learned that they were hydroponic. And I thought, well, this is a mistake. Somebody's screwing up. And so I didn't know what to do about it. I wasn't a connected person. I really didn't know anybody.

I knew a small number of people. And we decided to start a petition so that we could do a farmer petition and a consumer petition and submit it to the USDA saying, please fix this. And our petition got people like Michael Pollan and Dan Barber to sign. And they are quite prominent in the food world. And also a number of organic pioneers, the people who really started organic in the U.S. And so it was hard to just ignore the petition. And so we started a conversation, a dialogue, with the National Organic Program.

And I went in, and my goal was to reform it. Let's fix this. And I went through, I met at a lot of meetings. My kids had left home, so I had a little more time. And our farm was pretty mature. We had established markets. So I had a little more time to wander the world and try and write or wrong. And this culminated in 2017 at a climatic meeting of the National Organic Standards Board.

And we lost the vote. And seven years earlier, the same issue would come up and we won the vote by overwhelming majority. We didn't lose it by so much that a decision was made to support hydroponic. We just couldn't reaffirm that 2010 decision. And as a result, we realized the whole movement, and a lot of farmers, 60 farmers came from around the country to this town in Florida and showed up at this meeting. And farmers don't come to these meetings. Just lobbyists come normally. All of a sudden, all these farmers were walking in.

And they were testifying. They were eloquent. and we didn't move the needle an inch because we're up against some serious lobbyists and they are good at their job. So out of that, out of the ashes of defeat, I went back to Vermont and there were probably nine farmers from Vermont that came

and we had an impromptu meeting a few weeks later and said, what are we going to do? We're going to just shut up and say, well, organic is broken, but we're going to use it for the market. marketing, Pinoch, and write it out as long as we can, or are we going to create another label, another standard? And complete consensus that we would do something, that we would create something. And it was divided about whether it would be an add-on label or a standalone label,

meaning standalone would mean you don't need USDA certification, you can just get certified with us. I was a little overwhelmed at the thought of the amount of work and money it would take to do that nationally. So we ended up as an add-on label. Fine. We built on what we had built. So if you're certified with the USDA for no money, it's free to get certified by us, thanks to the generosity of people who eat food and care about it. We're able to certify. We have 1,100 farms certified now, which isn't bad for five years. It's just a beginning. But it's a start. So if somebody listening to this podcast sees a website with the farm and they see the logo,

real organic project certified, or they see a product in a store that has this certification, what can they understand that to be? Before they go and buy that product, eat that product, what do they know the real organic project certification is going to mean? It's perfectly named, Drew. It means it's really organic. And what that means is that we're inspecting to make sure that somebody is stewarding the soil, is being a protector of the life in the soil, feeding that life,

and you feed it with organic matter so you grow things like green manures, and you till them in or you mow them and let them rot on the surface. And that's food for all those microbes, and that's food for all those fungi. It means that the animals get good amount of pasture and get outside. Even the chickens get to go out every day and they're not too crowded. It means that it's real. We've got little standards and we address things as they come up. But what it really means is it's what organic was when it began.

And I think that organic had it when they began. And, you know, I got to say the hippies were right. It was like that is the right way to farm. What we've seen since then that we now understand better is the impacts of agriculture on climate and the impacts of climate on agriculture. So people can debate climate change all they want, but the farmers all know climate change is happening because they're struggling with it. They're really struggling. It's hard out there. So we're trying to do things that will help. I would say that we are not created to address issues of social justice, but in my mind, those were always issues that were integral to the creation of organic in this country.

It was always meant to be an alternative to a system, a system of injustice, a system of not caring, a system of pushing off problems for another day. So it's an attempt to address all of that. Yeah, you know, just because you mentioned it, I think on the climate change side, you know, from the people that, you know, I like to listen to my audience and kind of hear where they're coming from, I think it's less about, you know, debating whether or not climate change is real. And maybe more about for the folks that I feel that have different viewpoints, how maybe the climate agenda can be used to usher or push in,

a level of fear mongering that doesn't really take into account innovation in society or putting out sort of proclamations that are, hey, you know, if we don't change the climate by this date, the entire world is going to be upside down. And many of those big sort of statements have been, those deadlines have sort of been passed. So it's more to sort of understand that, hey, we want improve our environment, you know, generally pumping a lot of excess carbon into the environment is not a good thing that's there. Innovation as a rule, like people who think that, hey, tomorrow, let's break free of oil. We'd have an economical collapse if that happened, right? And most smart people would say, no, we need to gradually end through innovation, get off of these things. It's not

good for the environment. It's not good for people's health. It's not good for air pollution. But to magically think that there's gatekeepers that are just preventing us from not switching to an oil-free environment tomorrow, that is, I think, where sometimes people have a challenge with that narrative. That is not as simple as that. Absolutely. Look, climate is about as complex as it can be. It's also proving itself to be true, you know. And, that we are seeing things change and they're not going to be easy to change back. So I do think our future looks scary. But the truth is you could disbelieve that.

You could go, well, I think that guy's a little crazy saying that. It doesn't matter. If you just address your own nutrition, if you just address the purity of the water that you're going to drink, you're going to come up with the same answer. Right. Those roads all lead to the same thing. They all lead to the same thing. Cleaning up the environment, cleaning up the soil. And if you, you know, a lot of my audiences, fans of like the books like drawdown. Yes. Absolutely. One of our great supporters, Paul Hawkins. Paul Hawkin, incredible guy. I have had a chance to meet him a few times. I haven't had him on the podcast. But, you know, one of the top ways to address the sort of factors where human beings are obviously tipping the scale in the wrong direction. There's, you know, billions of us. us, eight billion of us, of course, we're going to have an impact on the climate. One of the best ways to do that based on his, is it top 50 in the book? It's top 50 different ways that you can,

you know, strategies you can implement tomorrow to immediately start removing some of the carbon. One of them is, of course, you know, sequestering through regenerative agriculture, which is a big part of what you're talking about, taking care of the soil in the right way. His next book was called regeneration. And it is, a deeper dive into what does that mean. I will caution that I don't think that just calling something regenerative agriculture means it's what Paul is talking about when he says regenerative. So we have to be very careful with their language here. It's very easy to go, yeah, I'm with them. I like that term. I'm going to use that term too, and that's happening with regenerative.

Now, every major corporation in the food space is using that term. And they didn't dramatically change what they're doing. They just change the story they're telling about what they're doing. So, you know, we have to understand that we are dealing with powerful economic forces that don't necessarily have our well-being at heart. They have their profit at heart. They have their stockholders at heart. But, you know, we have to take some responsibility for our own protection and for our own well-being. I think that, I think it's amazing in the degree. to which if you do things right in an organic sense, really right, then anything that anybody would say you should do for climate, you're already doing.

It's already there. And it's, these are complex issues, Drew. We know that. That it's amazing. The complexity of the conversation, the sophistication of the conversation right now around agriculture and food systems is so beyond what it was 20 years ago. and that's good. Now we have to take that

ever more sophisticated understanding and translate it into action. How do we actually change the food system so that it serves us instead of having us serve it? So you know, you're on this mission to not let organic get hijacked. We don't want to turn organic into all natural.

Yes. Right? That's right. And I also, I 100% agree with that. And I also believe humanity's ability to come up with other solutions. And by the way, what you're doing is another solution. That's part of that. It's both the innovation that always happens in society because when people care about a subject, they demand a better alternative. And you're out here actually doing the

work to create a better alternative. So we know that with organic, there's been a bunch of different statistics that are there. But generally, consumers, when they see the organic label applied, they're willing to pay a little bit more money. Yes. Have you guys seen the same impact with the real organic project that farms and groups or products? Is it only farms or you certify end products as well too? We don't, well, we're starting to look at certifying processors. Processors. But right now we only certify farms. Farms.

And that's because we're certifying organic systems, not organic practices. If you see the difference. So the system is the wholeness, the gestalt of the thing. And so a farm that said, well, this field is certified organic broccoli. And that field is conventional broccoli. which happens all the time under National Organic Program, we would not certify either side. We would say, you know what,

we want you to convert the whole thing to build a system where your world becomes organic. And we, in fact, want a whole neighborhood, whole community to become organic so that it starts to build on itself. That's our goal. That's our goal. And that was always the goal in organic.

It wasn't a branding project. It wasn't a marketing project. Marketing was needed in order to help it happen, but it wasn't the purpose. This wasn't a business plan about, I think we could make some money because people want this, so let's do it. It was really started by people who weren't very practical that way about making money. Who weren't practical that way, but they weren't necessarily from like impoverished communities. No, they weren't.

No, they weren't. So they naturally had the, they were naturally from. from populations that said, you know, they were generally probably educated. That's right. Right. That's right. And so they were a self-selected group of people that said that, you know, we want this because we're educated enough to know that organic matters.

Right. Right. So it wasn't created to be a business play, but it was created by individuals that have the resources. And I don't think that's a bad thing. Right. Right. That's a great thing.

God bless them. God bless them that you want to create something for people who have the means to because when system scale, then it starts to attract money. and when done the right way. And sometimes it's not done the right way, but you've got to fight for it, which is what you're saying here. That's right.

Then it attracts the right investment dollars and then things become cheaper over a period of time because economies of scale. That's right. Or economies of replication of really brilliance. So not just scale. Scale can be, it's really hard for things to be big scale

and still be good. It just is. But they can be happening on a big scale by replicating so you can have this teaming diversity working together to make something really good as opposed to a oneness out there that I think often leads to its own problems. And when we get a concentration of power inevitably, we end up with corruption. It just is. So going back to a real organic project, do you do is the motivation that, hey, if we draw up enough

noise and we maintain fantastic standards and a good reputation, people are going to start seeking out these farms. Yes. When we started, I looked at, I looked at, we had all these amazing components. We had thousands and thousands of real organic farmers, not certified, but real organic farmers in the U.S., right? And we had millions of eaters who wanted to buy that food. They wanted to buy real organic food.

go to the store, when they buy organic, that's what they think they're getting, and that's what they want. And they're willing to pay a premium for it. So all we need to do is get them together, and we've got a powerful movement. Let me tell just a story. The EU also has a big organic movement, and the U.S. was always bigger in terms of gross sales. Last couple of years, the EU has exceeded the U.S. in gross sales of organic food. Wow. Right. And they've done that without corrupting their standards. This is an important thing. Like they didn't say, well, everyone deserves organic, so we're going to change what organic means, right, so that everyone can get it. It's like saying everyone deserves the Mercedes, so we're going to put a Mercedes logo on every VW in America. Instead, they kept it real,

and they saw that people wanted it, and they built that up, and it's growing beautifully. So it shows the lie of saying you've got to corrupt the thing in order to feed the people. That's not true. That's not true. There might need to be some changes in how our economic system works to make sure that everybody can get organic because I think everybody does deserve it. But you don't need to do it by corrupting it. You don't need to do it by watering it down so it isn't really organic anymore. It can succeed.

We can do this. What do you think about, separate from like, more from an organizational and a label standpoint, and then I'll ask you what you think about the actual certification. What do you think about the non-GMO project certified, right? How have they done in terms of getting the word out? Just kind of looking at it, right? And the label and the sort of awareness. And then we'll talk about what your thoughts are about non-GMO.

They've done an amazing job of marketing it. Yeah. Is it a nonprofit or a for-profit? I don't know, but I assume it's a non-profit. And I know some people who are involved in starting it, and they've got that beautiful logo, and, you know, it's become very powerful. And I could answer the other part of it. Okay, let's go number two.

Yeah. Well, I think that it's a little bit dangerous. You know, I'm not against it. It's, again, its success is a reflection of the fact that people do not want to eat GMO food, and they want to know what they're eating. By the way, all organic, certified organic is non-GMO. You don't need a non-GMO label. You could just buy organic and you would get non-GMO.

And you would also get no synthetic pesticides. Because I think when people buy non-GMO, they think, great. We're not getting pesticides. It's non-GMO. And this is one of the things that the ways in which people are confused. confused because there are people who are paid to confuse us. And it's very easy to say, it's non-GMO. And so people go, great, I'll take that and they go, but it's sprayed with glyphosate. You go, what? No way, whoa, you know, I thought it was non-GMO. Well, it is non-GMO, but it's still

us herbicide. Okay, so what does it mean? I don't think people fully understand what it means. It means that the seed is not genetically modified. But it does not mean it does not use synthetic pesticides. Could people say the same thing about organic in the sense that, hey, there's a lot of junk food that is certified organic. Oh, yes. Right. Right. So you're certifying this thing.

I saw organic gummy bears. Right. Now, whether or not they're actually made in a standard that you think is real organic or not. But I can imagine there's probably some small manufacturer that is certified organic that is putting out, you know, food that we would think of as a sometimes food or would be in this classification of ultra processed or junk. Yeah. Right? Yeah. And so isn't that going to come with all aspects of anything?

Anything can kind of be used in that way, even organic seal? Absolutely. Look, that's what I've been trying to say is that we're going to have to fight for anything. The idea that, well, now we got it and it's done just isn't true. We shouldn't even get worked up about it. Yes, the pirates are coming to board the ship. That's what they do. We're a ship.

We're carrying a lot of wealth here. Our wealth is our health. It is the promise of good food. And, of course, people who make money out of the market are going to go, people want that. We see that. We've done studies. And we don't actually want to do that. We don't actually want to produce that food, but we can find a way to seem like we are and claim the title. And we're going to have to fight for that. We're going to have to say no. And look, a lot of the fighting, Drew, is just what you and I are doing. It's educating ourselves. It's spreading the word saying,

well, look, let's be aware that things are creeping in. And so we're going to have to be more sophisticated in our decision making. And I think in the case of non-GMO, there's a big loophole there because people really think it means no chemicals and it just does not. It just does not. And that's part of the awareness you're trying to raise. That's right. Which is why you wanted to create the real organic project.

Is I like, hey, listen, there's a lot of things, but at least let me fight to put out my vision and your group, right? It's not just you. It's you have a whole team, right? And board members and other stuff. Many, many. Right? And supporters.

It's like, hey, this is a different vision, right? We're going to share our commentary. Like, I've seen you participate in different debates, right? They're great. We'll link to them in show notes. This is our vision of what healthier looks like. And we're not going to, you know, people can fight for their vision. Yes.

You're fighting and you're creating. what you feel is the right, you know, approach that ultimately ends up trying to look after the consumer. Yes. And the planet. And every, you know, it's looking after all of us. I want to say one thing, because I've maybe said some things that were harsh about regenerative. There's some great people, great farmers who call themselves regenerative. And I respect them. And I just, keep waiting for them to stand up and say, wait a minute, we're not with bear, we're not with Pepsi, we're not with General Mills, we're not with McDonald's, all of whom claim to be regenerative companies.

Or are trying to incorporate more, buy for more regenerative farms? Like I never heard McDonald's saying that they're a regenerative. They do. They do. It's on the website. That we are a regenerative. We commit to becoming a regenerative company. Okay.

Right? Yes, we will buy from regenerative sources. They all do. Cargill, ADM. I mean, you almost have to be some kind of knit with if you're a big food company not to claim to be regenerative. Or not to claim to buy, you know, promise to buy. It's all promises of future action. Yeah.

Right? But it's there. Syngenta, the Uber chemical company's got a beautiful page on their website on regenerative. And it makes you want to cry. You get down to the very last part. paragraph says, of course, we believe in the responsible use of certain chemical inputs in order to achieve this, which is what they do for a living. They sell chemical inputs, pesticides, and fertilizers. So again, this is all becoming, it's, you know, the term is becoming bastardized.

Yes. We're not exactly sure what it means and it's turning into all natural. And I'm waiting for the real regenerative movement. That's all. I'm just saying, you don't think there's players that are inside of it that are trying to lead that? Like, who's doing it right that you want to maybe acknowledge. Anybody? Lots of them are doing a great job. Again, I don't want to show disrespect to the farmers who are the pioneers of this. And what they

mean by regenerative is actually pretty much what I mean by real organic. And, you know, we are brothers and sisters in this, but I think they're so thrilled to become such a big movement. I'm waiting for the real regenerative movement. And when they

see it, I'll be there with them. But until then, I go, come on, you know, you don't want to be identified with those other players. That's not what you believe in. I know it isn't. So when you send somebody, when somebody, when a farm comes to you and says, hey, we want to get this adjunct. Yeah.

Certification. Real organic project, right? What's some of the checklist that you walk through? And do you actually have somebody physically going there to the farm? Yeah, yeah. We have a checklist. it's not super complicated. Again, we're already assuming they've been certified, not assuming, they have been certified

with the USDA, which is 95% of it is very well done and 5% is horrendous. Hydroponic. Confinement livestock. How is that possible to have these chickens who live in a two-story building? There's no grass in sight and they're being certified as organic. And I don't mean a little bit. I mean like 80% of the U.S. egg market, certified organic egg market is coming from something like that. So that is an abomination.

We all know it's an abomination. I get my eggs from often like vital farms. I have no relationship with them. Yes. Do you know anything about them? Definitely not the worst. Definitely not the worst. Right?

But I would get them from Alexander if I was you. They are sort of, the Alexander eggs is certified real organic. And we're tough on eggs because, you know, we have to be. So our standard would be, you know, those chickens have got to be literally outside, and they can't be outside in just a lot where the ground gets completely poisoned by hen manure. They've got to be moving those chickens around so that the ground can use that manure to grow. And they have a beautiful thing where they have these big portable hen hen coops that they move with a tractor, and then they move the fencing around.

They're good. They're good at what they do. So, yeah, I would pay the money for those gladly if I were out here. I have my own solutions in the East. And look, if I ate some vital farms eggs for breakfast, I'm not going to weep, but it's not going to be my first stop either. How much more should I expect to pay for, you know, the Alexander eggs? In my opinion.

From like, let's say, regular organic or quote unquote pasture raised eggs, which could mean a lot of different things. How much more am I going to pay? What are you paying for your pasture raised? Oh, man, I'm like the worst at this. I don't look at the price always when I'm at Whole Foods. I understand. Look, I have the luxury when I go shopping of just buying the food I want to buy. I know a guy. He said it beautifully. And this is not my story. This is his story. But he said, you know what? I'm actually kind of a poor person. I drive a crummy car. And I live in a very, very, very, um, functional apartment. I don't have a lot of money, but I eat like a king. That's where I spend my money. Right.

Because I believe in it, and I was getting sick before, and I knew I was getting sick. And when I discovered that when I ate this way, all of a sudden I was healthy and I felt good. All right? So we make choices about where we spend our money. It's not like Doritos are free. Right. It's not like can cola or whatever is free. Right?

We spend money on all these things. So, yeah, I'd rather spend money on premium eggs than a large Frappuccino or whatever. Absolutely. And my God, I just bought a decaf mocha across the street. And it was great. It was a good drink, but it was $7, right? And, you know, so $7 get you a lot of eggs. In my opinion, we're not paying enough for the good eggs.

The guy I got eggs from, and I said, John, this is not enough. You should be charging more. He goes, no, no, that's enough. I'm going, no, isn't. I know your economics. You need to make a better living. So sometimes you're going to have to argue to pay a little more for your eggs for what they should cost. Because someone is really doing it right with real organic grain, and those chickens are out just happy as they can be moving around in the grass and having a good time with the other chickens.

It's a joyous thing. And you go to the other end of the spectrum, and it's not joy. There's no joy in Mudville there. It's pretty grim in those big, big factories. I mean, it's horrifying. Yeah. I mean, definitely all this is in the context that every single year since the last, you know, pretty much since like I think the 50s, 60s, I'll have to go back to the graph.

The consumption of processed food has gone up every single year, ultra-processed food. So the vast majority of people, they're not getting diabetes. they're not getting, you know, all sorts of chronic diseases because they're having, you know, maybe not the premium egg. They have a large source of concentrated ultra-process calories, liquid calories. They're having Coca-Cola. They're having other drinks like that. And they're having ultra-processed refined foods that are super highly concentrated in all sorts

of different chemicals and preservatives. They're eating too much of the wrong calories. So I definitely recognize that obviously this conversation that we're having is a conversation that some people may say, well, this is a luxury for you two guys. But really, there's a deeper layer. And the deeper layer is this, is that this is all part of the movement of people waking up and becoming healthy. And when you start to become educated and you start to question where your food comes,

that's the first sign of agency in your life. And when you have agency and you have the means to have agency, you start to make it easier for other people. You know, people forget that throughout history, every major innovation that has massively improved the quality of life, think of electricity, right? Think of indoor plumbing, right? These were things that were first only available to those who had means.

It wasn't like indoor plumbing, which now a lot of the world has and has been a huge contributor to lifespan in the world. it wasn't like everybody had access to it in the beginning. No, the people who had means and could afford it and the people that then had the means to be able to invest and create companies so that more people can do it. It tends to start off like most things, people who are educated or have means in some capacity

compared to the rest of the world. And organic and real organic is not too different. Like who the hell else is going to be championing this? Right. When you are just struggling to even put, food on the table. When you're struggling to even have health insurance, you don't have the time to even listen to a podcast, right? You don't have the time to be questioning, should you get this egg or that egg? So I actually see it as our responsibility that we should be the people that are talking

about this. You should be on this podcast here educating my audience and educating me because we actually have the resources and the know how to care. And that's actually what moves innovation forward. That's right, Drew, as well said. You know, just to say clearly, cheap food is not cheap. Yeah, you pay for one way or another. You pay for it. I don't even see this stat. I'll just interrupt one second. Yeah, please. Tell me. In most health systems of insurance, right, the 90% of the cost is the top 10% of the patients. So you have 10% of the sickest people that are using up and are driving a lot of the cost.

Many of them that are unknowingly suffering because they are individuals that either didn't have the education or are brought up in an environment that they only have access to certain types of foods that are there. They're on dialysis, which is extremely expensive. They're getting cancer. They're doing this. but this is expensive.

One way or another, somebody's paying for this. That's right. Somebody's paying for it. And it costs a lot. It costs a lot to get anything done in a hospital. Just anything, right? You go and look at the bill, you go, oh, my God, right? Okay, maybe insurance pays for it.

Maybe they don't. But it's expensive. So if you spent more on the food, and I agree with you, you take whatever, the working mom, working two jobs, she can't buy good food, maybe. It's just all she can do just to put any food on the table. Okay, she has no choices. But that doesn't excuse everybody else who does have a choice from making a better choice. I don't mean to make it a moral judgment.

I'm just saying practically for your own health and happiness, if you can eat well. And I agree with you completely, look, a bad egg is better than a good Dorito. Right? It's like, okay, that's the first step up. That's food. Doritos is not food. That's food. Dorado's drug. You get up to food. Okay, then can we get better food? Can we get a good egg? And I think we can. Is there a health difference? I think there is. Right. Is there a moral difference for the chicken? Absolutely there is. Is there a difference impact on the environment? Absolutely there is. So the more that we can keep trading up, and doing a better job, it's actually cheaper for everybody. You know where they know this is in Denmark? It's a fascinating place, Denmark. They have, right now, I think about 15% of their food is certified organic.

Right now in the U.S., it's like 6 or 7%. So they got twice as much. And in some products like milk, it's 50%. So they've got a government commitment that is huge. if our government made this same commitment in terms of dollars per taxpayer, it would be $19 billion towards converting us to organic as quickly as possible. And that's seen as not just as a benefit for the people who choose to buy organic, and they're not subsidizing the price in the store, but they're subsidizing training the growers,

they pay for the certification. I know that sounds like a lot of money, but in America, that's not that much money. I agree. Considering all the crazy that we pay for in our budget, right? That's not that much money, $19 billion. It's not. And the impact of that $19 billion, talk about an investment because the benefits that would come back to us would far exceed that. We have a challenge. It's a serious thing. I know I come off like some evangelists. I'm not. I'm just a person. But I think it's okay, it's okay to be an evangelist too, right? Sometimes you need an evangelist to be out there. There has to be a larger reason. We all are an evangelist for something. The only question is, what do you want to be an evangelist for? I know.

I just don't know how this happened to me. But I am excited. You're getting me excited about this, you know? It's a real thing. And we can do it differently. One of the things that you see if you're on a real organic farm is it works. And it solves problems. It solves so many problems that we have.

And we don't know how to deal with them. This is a way that works. We can do it. People want to farm this way. They just can't afford to. We have to make sure that they can afford to. In fact, economically, we should make it it's crazy not to. It should make it that any farmer goes, I'm going to do that.

And once they start, they're going to go, this actually works. It works really well. And it just becomes a virtuous cycle. And it can be done, but it's going to take our engagement, our the eaters. The farmers too, of course, and I think the farmers are going to have to lead. but boy, we need to come together. It can't just be farmers. That doesn't work.

Is one of the farms that you've certified a blueberry farm? Oh, yes. That apparently has the best tasting blueberries in the world. They're famous. Can you talk about that? Sure. I met Hugh and Lisa through this project, and we had a mutual friend, and they got in touch and said,

we'd like to talk with you, and I said, sure. And I discovered that they were just doing this, amazing job down in Florida, Eustis, Florida, and they grow blueberries. They have like a six or seven week, you know, harvest period every spring, April, part of May. And God, their berries are good. They're not just sweet. They're good. They have a depth of flavor. And I started sharing them with people and sending them to people. And I sent them to Michael Paul. He loved them. I sent them to Dan Barber. He raves about them. Dan Barber is this rock star chef who runs Blue Hill at Stone Barns. I sent them to Alice Waters at Chapin. And all these people are going, whoa, these are really good. And I go, I know. And this farm is struggling. We don't know if they're going to make it. We don't know if they're going to make it. But they sure ought to make it. This is what should make it. And as I have, as I learned about why they weren't making it, it was like the whole world was conspiring for them not

to make it, to go out of business. They were being denied shelf space. They were being denied a fair price. If they were given shelf space and that fair wholesale price, they would have flourished because people would buy them. Why can I not order it in California? There was something about that. And I'm like, these are the best blueberries ever. You know, we have a mutual friend that connected us and is like, okay, I'm excited. I'm waiting to order them and all of a sudden I can't get them in California. What's going on with that? Looking at it from the most optimistic point of view, California is trying to protect itself from the importation of any pests. Looking at it from a more pessimistic point of view, California is trying to protect itself

from competition. Really? I didn't know. And is there some sort of like people will send me like two years ago, it was crazy. I was getting this organic fruit of the month club, and I had like 15 different people send it to me. And so, you know, there's pears in there, there's apples in there, other stuff. Is that some sort of regulation with blueberries in specific? You know, I don't know.

I know a lot of places they have this crazy thing. So my daughter lived in Hawaii, and I flew to visit her. Right. I know Hawaii, New Zealand. Yeah, well, I brought her a couple pints, right, of our little guys, which are delicious. And I knew that you would love it. And what's the name of the farm, if you wouldn't mind mentioning?

Long wind farm. Long wind farm. We'll have the link in the show notes. If you can get it in your area, please buy it. That's right. And so I went to her and they have a thing that you fill out on the plane saying, I am not bringing in any kind of food. And I was like, I lied.

I said, yeah, okay, I'm not. And then I get to the airport. And there's this big sign. Last chance to not be a bad person. Throw out your food here. Don't destroy our agriculture. And I'm like, okay, I don't have any incident. on these. I know I don't, but okay, I'll be a mensch. I threw them out. And I go to the Whole Foods,

and what do I see? Mexican hydroponic tomatoes certified as organic. And I'm like, well, what did they do about protecting from these? Maybe they fumigated them, in which case, are they organic anymore? I don't know. So some sort of arcane rule or whatever. Some kind of rule. I'm sorry about it, because California is being cheated of this great pleasure, really. You know, there's a lot of people in California. I know who want to get these. I'm like, I'm sorry. Is there one or two other stories of a couple farms that you've certified

that make a best in class product? You know, you've shared a little bit about eggs. And that farm was called Alexander. They're up in Northern California. Okay, great. So we'll link to them. We talked about this long wind farms as well. Is there another farm that comes to mind?

that you might want to tell the story of? I told you about Radiance Derry in Iowa. Yep. Right? So that's good. Okay, let's go to California. We got three farms who are famous. The one that I believe is most famous is full belly farm.

Full belly. Full belly. They're in Gwinda, California. And, you know, they are just the most amazing farm. They're like 500 acres and they're so diverse. They have livestock. They've got almonds. They've got every kind of vegetable.

They've got fruit. It's really, and talk about heart true. It's like they have this hosedown festival where thousands of people come, listen to music, and celebrate organic, right? And it's part of their mission that they do outreach to help many things. One of their owners is on our executive board and has been forever. And Paul Mueller. and they're so respected and beloved in the in the bay area as they should they go to many farmers markets they do some wholesale uh so to me those are that's a truly hero farm

um beautiful yeah for the people who are listening today that are also fired up about this and like you know what i care about this i thought i was making the right decision and i realize this is a fight right i'm not going to major in the miners in the sense that you know access if I'm shopping organic, whether it's at Whole Foods or somewhere else, you know, generally, like you said earlier, if it's organic, you're not going to know necessarily if it's the standard that you're talking about or not, unless if you go to the real organic project. So in general, we're not trying to dissuade people from shopping organic. We're trying to help them elevate their game.

That's right. Right? We want to help them elevate their game. Well said. So for those people that are listening who are, you know, making the best choice, trying to move to a more whole food diet and also work out and do all other good things that are there that are good for our health. You know, what's one thing they could do today to help further this movement? Okay, great. Great question. Well, first, find us. So go to our website, realorganicproject.org.

And sign up to be a real friend. Make a small donation. Make a big donation if you can. but start getting our weekly letter, which is you learn a lot. I got interviewed by a guy who's writing a book, and I was so impressed by it. And I said, wow, you really have a very sophisticated understanding. How did you get that? He said, I read all your letters. Okay, that's good. Listen to our podcast.

This is a great podcast. We have a great podcast, too. We've got 150 episodes. And we interview Michael Paul and Al Gore, Alice Waters, Von and Asheva, all these farmers. chefs, scientists, it's a very good thing. And you'll learn an unbelievable amount. So I think education, self-education, and then neighbor education and family education, community education, this is what we got to do. We can't possibly pull off a real change alone. That's where we start. We start with ourselves. But we need to bring some friends along. We're going to show up at a fight.

we better bring some friends along. And we don't have to think of it as a fight, but we do have to think of it as how do we create transformation. And we need more than one finger. We need all the hand to work to do this. And we need to educate ourselves. And then we need to start talking to our retail outlets. And we've got to say,

you need to change what you're doing here or I'm going elsewhere. And start asking them questions, and they won't know the answers. Say, are these tomatoes, hydropos? Are these blueberries hydroponic? We did this as a test, and one guy, many people went and did it. And one guy said, he went to a Whole Foods. And the guy said, well, let me find out. And he Googled it.

And it happened to be Driscolls. And he said, nope, they're not hydroponic. Well, a lot of Driscoll's berries are hydroponic. I'm sorry, that's just simply an inaccurate statement. But on their website, they say they aren't. So that's not going to be enough. But you know what? If 50 people went and asked that produce manager, whether those berries were hydroponic,

they'd do more than just Google it. They'd start having meetings about it. They really would. So for example, the tomatoes that you grow in your farm, when they sell them at all the different places like fresh direct and whole foods, do they write that these are real organic projects certified? Well, we have a big label on the front of our little. pint. So you can't miss it. You can't miss it. No. But, but, but a lot of them don't yet. We got to work on that. We got to get the farms. Because they're concerned sometimes about having a contrast, like these say real organic. These other ones don't. Consumers are going to start asking questions.

Is that part of it? Yeah. Some of the, some of the stores are a little bit like, we don't really want to talk about this in public, do we? Because what does that mean about something that isn't? Yeah. So, and certainly what does it mean about a major brand like Driscolls, which by their own claim is 70% of the U.S. organic berry market, which technically would be illegal, right? That's called a monopoly. We have antitrust laws about that. So these are going to be complicated, bumpy conversations, but we need to have them, and we need to have them with each other, and we need to have them with the stores, until the stores are going, oh, my God, people are driving me crazy. what are we going to do about this? How can we get some of this real organic stuff in here?

How can we promote it? If that's what they want, let's give them what they want. So we have to start having more public conversations, and it's going to be a little bit complicated. So I'm a little bit complicated when I go and have this conversation with some people that go, you're hurting organic. I interviewed Michael Paul in a couple times, and we talked about this, And he said, well, it's true that by questioning this and talking about the truth, you are damaging organic because people are going to start to question. But if you don't, then we're going to lose organic. So we have to accept, we're going to have to take a hit here, but let's make sure that we try and bring everybody off the battlefield with us. You know, our goal isn't to destroy anything, but let's heal things.

Let's help them become what they should be, what they could be. What's that famous poem, you know, about, you know, make America the America it should be. It could be. Right? Not the America it ever was, but the America it could be. It's such an important reminder because anytime somebody tells you, we can't have this discussion because it's going to derail X, Y, and Z, always be skeptical of that motivation. Yes.

Because so many of the beautiful things we have in our life right now are because somebody challenged the status quo and was willing to have a discussion, a debate, stand up for something that other people told them not to. That's right. And that's actually how we move forward in this process. That's right. I have learned. So, you know, I came in kind of a little bit fiery.

And somebody said, you know, you have to be very responsible, but what you say, you have influence. And I'm like I do. But I thought about it, and it's true, that we have to be careful with our words. That's why I try to be careful. It's like, I'm not saying don't buy organic. Please buy organic. That's our salvation. But let's accept that sometimes we're being misled, and we can fix that.

We can fix that. So let's fix it. Tell us about the website again, and then also, is that how people keep in touch with you? Is the best places to go to the Real Organic Project website? Yeah, the Real Organic Project website, realorganicproject.org,org,orgia.orgia. Is a treasure trove. I mean, there's so much there. There's so many letters.

There's so many videos. There's so many. We have these symposia that we do, Drew. So every year, we used to have real in-person conferences. And we had a big conference plan, a symposium at Dartmouth College back in the first year of COVID. And it was planned before COVID. And then three weeks before the conference, the whole Dartmouth campus shut down and everything was canceled. Paul Hawkin was going to be our keynote speaker.

And we had a bunch of farmers coming in. And we're like, well, what do we do now? We're all about educating and connecting, and we can't even see each other anymore. So we started a virtual one, and it was incredibly good. One of the things we discovered is that, you know, when we do this virtually, we can get anybody, right? We can get Von Anasheva in India, and we can get Al Gore in Tennessee, and we can get Alice Waters in San Francisco, and we can get Michael Pollan in Cambridge, and all these people that we talk. to, and then we edited clips together from these interviews and put them together. It was very compelling. So we've got four years of those symposia, and they follow different themes. So anybody who wants to

make a deep dive, you can make a deep dive, and it's all free. Everything we do is free. So, okay, you have to pay to go to an in-person conference, a very modest fee. And we have those, like we're going to have one again this coming October probably at Churchtown Derry in the Hudson Valley. But all of our letters are free. All of our podcasts are free. All of our symposia are free. All of our certifications are free and we only survive by the generosity of strangers and friends. And, you know, in Denmark, the government pays for all this. Well, our government's not going to pay for it. So we're going to have to do it ourselves. And I think we can. That's the beauty of it. It's not like, well, we can't do this. When the USDA came in and took over the certification of

organic, I was in the movement before, and I saw a certain kind of life go out of it. It's like the twinkle in everyone's eyes went away. And we no longer were in charge of setting the standards. So what was the purpose of meeting even? We would still have conferences, but we used to have these meetings once a year. We'd all bring a bag lunch, and we'd spend all day working on, well, what do you think about this? And we'd vote. And then we just stopped doing it because what was the point? It wasn't up to us.

And we saw how we lost some of our sense of agency, because we didn't have agency. And it's coming back. The real organic project was an attempt to re-ignite a movement, not to build a new corporate brand. It was to reignite a movement. We need a movement. These are big issues. And they're bigger than a brand, and a brand can always be stolen. But if people are educated, they're not so easy to fool.

So that's what we're trying to do. And yes, there will be a brand, there will be a logo, and we will use that for now. It's important. It's not nothing. It's very important. but underneath it that's the foundation this is the foundation these conversations people come out and they'll start to understand what's going on and they'll start to go that's not what i want this is what i want how do i make this happen in the world powerful Dave it's been a pleasure

to have you on and chat all about this I feel super excited about real organic project everything you guys are up to. And I feel excited that, you know, our audience is also more educated about the ins and outs and the nuances about our food. What could be more fundamental to our health. That's right. Than the food that we consume on a daily basis. And we have to protect it. And sometimes that means fighting with grace, right? And that's exactly what you're doing here. So thank you for coming on the podcast and sharing your knowledge with us. Thank you so much, Drew, for having me. It's been a real pleasure. Hi, everyone. Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you. so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the subscribe

button on your favorite podcast app. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me. And it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share it with a friend, share with a friend who would benefit from listening. Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on that I'm super excited about. It's my weekly newsletter. And it's called Try This. Every Friday, yes, every Friday, 52 weeks a year, I send out an easy-to-digest protocol of simple steps that you or anyone you love can follow to optimize your own health. We cover everything from nutrition to mindset to metabolic health, sleep, community, longevity, and so much more. If you want to get on this email list, which is, by the way, free and get my weekly step-by-step protocols for whole-body health and optimization, click the link in the show notes that's called Try This or just go to Drew Perot.com.

That's D-H-R-U-P-U-R-O-H-I-T dot com and click on the tab that says, try this.