The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – A Bold Return to Giving a Damn: One Farm, Six Generations, and the Future of Food by Will Harris

Episode Date: November 25, 2023

A Bold Return to Giving a Damn: One Farm, Six Generations, and the Future of Food by Will Harris https://amzn.to/3QU5V9s Whiteoakpastures.com "If I could have one wish it is that every eater in America would read this book." —Ruth Reichl From a pioneer of the regenerative agriculture movement, a memoir-meets-manifesto on betting the farm on a better future for our food, animals, land, local communities, and our climate Raised as a fourth-generation farmer, when Will Harris inherited White Oak Pastures he was a full-time commodity cowboy who played hard and fast with every tool the system offered – chemicals, antibiotics, steroids, and more. His ancestors had built a highly profitable, conventionally-run machine, but over time he found himself disgusted with the excess, cruelty, and smalltown devastation this system entailed. So he bet the farm on forging a different way of doing things. One that works with nature not against it, and bridges the quickly widening delta between consumers and their food. Armed with tenacity, conviction and an outsized tolerance for risk, Harris called his approach “radical traditional” and it made him the pioneer of regenerative agriculture long before the phrase existed. At once an intimate, multi-generational memoir and a microcosm of American agriculture at large, A BOLD RETURN TO GIVING A DAMN offers a pathway back to producing food the right way. At a time when food supply chains are straining, climate-induced catastrophes are playing havoc with harvests, and concern around who owns America’s farmland are more prescient than ever, Will Harris urges us to consider where the food we eat really comes from, and to re-connect to the places and people who raise what we eat each day. With keen storytelling, a good dose of irreverence, and an unflinching willingness to speak truth to power, Harris shows us why it’s never been more important to know your farmer than now.

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We certainly appreciate you guys being here. Thanks for tuning in. As always, when the Iron Lady sings it, the show has begun. For 15 years, we bring you the smartest people, the people that can change, impact your life, improve your life, give you what we call the Chris Voss Show glow. The CEOs, the billionaires, the Pulitzer Prize winners, the great authors, people who have shared a lifetime of experiences,

and they bring it condensed to you in a very short time on the Chris Voss Show and give you that beautiful Chris Voss Show glow that you can walk around with every day going, I'm really darn smart because I listen to the Chris Voss Show. Help share the love. For the show, your family, friends, and relatives, go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisvoss, linkedin.com, 4chesschrisvoss, youtube.com, 4chesschrisvoss, and chris Christmas1 on the tickety-tockety. We have an amazing gentleman on the show.

He is an author who just wrote the book that came out October 10th, 2023. A Bold Return to Giving a Damn, One Farm, Six Generations, and the future of food will harris is going to be joining us on the show today and he'll be talking about his amazing insights in his book and he also has website white oak pastures.com welcome to the show will how are you i'm good chris lucky to have a meal there you go thank you for coming sir and so i gave the dot com the white oak pastures dot com is there any other places on the internet you want your people to come check you out and look you up no white oak pastures is it there you go simple and easy as it were so give us a 30 000 overview of what you put into the book

the book is the story of my family's farm in Bluffton, Georgia, White Oak Pastures. My great-grandfather founded the farm in 1866, and I am the fourth generation of my family to run the farm. My daughters and their spouses, two daughters and their spouses are living on the farm and really doing a lot of the operation today. And they've got five children who are the sixth generation on the farm. There you go.

And so you talk about being raised as a fourth generation farmer, inheriting white oak pastures and what it was like to be a full-time commodity cowboy so what was tell it to give us some in-depth that of how you grew up and and and came about the work your wares well the book is about the farm from its beginning but i think that to a great extent it's uh the history of food production in this country. The way that my great-grandfather and grandfather ran the farm would have been multi-species with a lot of focus on the land, the animals, and the community. My dad took over the farm post-World War II, and under him, it became a commodity cattle farm, monocultural cattle farm, only cattle. And he ran it successfully. I took over the farm.

I went to the University of Georgia, majored in animal science. It had previously been animal husbandry, but it had become animal science. I ran the farm very industrially for 20 years. In the mid-90s, I started a transition to a model that actually resembles what my great-grandfather and grandfather did more than it resembles what my dad and I did. I didn't set out to emulate that. I just started making changes. And one day I realized how much it looked like the previous model. Oh, there you go. There you go.

And so you go through these changes. And I imagine you and your family have seen, you know, a lot of farmers have given up the business. A lot of family farms have died off. There's, you know, these new, I forget what they call them, these industrial type farms that, you know, they're these giant, expansive things that service the thing. And so how have you guys survived all the different changes and challenges that have gone into farming over the generations? Well, when everybody industrialized, commoditized, and centralized

starting at the end of World War II, we did too. We followed the exact same model. It's just that 50 years into it, we started back the other way. We made some really radical changes and went back to the more multi-species natural production model that the first two generations of my family had adhered to. So why is it better to have a multi-species? So give us some description of that so people can understand what that means more well when when my father embraced the industrial model he embraced that very linear production system like a factory that's the way agriculture went in that era and it's continued to go it was a very again linear as opposed to cyclical system you know nature operates in cycles industry operates

by in a straight line so philosophically what we did is is move back to that closed system in my in my mind in my opinion nature abhors a monoculture nature will not tolerate a monoculture. Nature will not tolerate a monoculture. I don't believe that you can come up with a single ecosystem, natural ecosystem, that is a monoculture. Nature thrives and produces an abundance when there are many species of plants and animals and microbes living in symbiotic relationships with each other. When we have that happen, it spins off a bounty. You know, all that coal and oil and natural gas in the ground, that is the bounty, the abundance of nature that spun off in the era of the dinosaur.

When it was really rocking. I mean, it was operating optimally and so on ice ages and such but what happened to us in the last 60 or 70 years is a very human induced system we moved it from the cyclical system of nature to the very linear system of industry. There you go. And so do you have, so at one point you went to cattle, I think you said, as a linear model. Now, what does the farm look like?

Who's on the farm? What sort of animals do you have on the farm? We pasture raise cows, hogs, sheep, goats, rabbits, and poultry. Oh, wow. We have, and they're, again, living together in symbiotic relationships. We have organic vegetables. We're vertically integrated. I built a USDA inspected red meat processing plant on the farm and a USDA inspected poultry processing plant on the farm.

The waste from those plants is composted and put back onto the land. Again, very cyclical. And I'm just really pleased with the impact it's had on our land, the water that comes off of our land, on the economy of this little rural town we're in, Bluffton, Georgia. And so you focus on a lot of different things. You've got artisan goods.

You've got some events that you hold there and lodging that you do there on the farm. And it looks like you ship out meat that people can order that are from from the farm directly and yeah i'm looking at the photos and like there's a mix you know normally i see what you talk about a monolith sort of linear farm when you look at it you know i'll drive by a farm here in utah i'll just kind of see cows or something but you guys have the cows mixed with the goats it looks like and i can see all the chickens running around between them so everybody's everybody's having a party on the farm there and it's benefited our land these numbers probably don't mean much to you but the organic matter in our soil over the last 20 years has gone from a half a percent to five percent 10x improvement in the organic matter in the soil.

And the organic matter is a direct measure of the life in the soil, the microbial life that occurs there. And we've also had an economic boom for the community. When I started, when I was an industrial cattleman 20 plus years ago, I had four minimum wage employees. And today we've got about 170 employees. Holy crap. We're the largest private employer in this county. Our payroll is over $100,000 a month. And that money stays here in this Clay County, Georgia, where I'm sitting right now in 2020 was the poorest county in the United States of America.

Wow. Not Georgia, the United States. Wow. So having a home-owned entity pumping $100,000 a week in payroll back into the county means a lot more here than it would in a more metropolitan area. There you go. And you guys, I know in the book, you talk about how there's farms that, you know, they use chemicals, antibiotic, and steroids. Have you guys found a way to get around that? We have. In fact, that's kind of what pushed me into moving

from the industrial model to this kinder, gentler model is I was a very heavy-handed user of pesticides, antibiotics, all the technical tools

that reductionist science had given us to increase yield was kind of my playground yeah and i just reached point that i said you know this is too much yeah there you go and so now people can ship meats tell us about some of the offerings you do on the website here that i see there's a a lot going on. It looks really cool. It's supporting your local farm. Yeah, I built this as a wholesale company. Again, I'm in a very poor, very remote rural area. I don't have a local clientele.

We produce $25 million worth of product a year, so I needed to get it to consumers somewhere. It looks like We found wholesale grocery as our market and we're still in wholesale grocery of Publix and John Eagle and a number of grocers support us. But really, we struggle in grocery.

The grocery companies are geared to deal with big multinational companies that can provide a lot of product in a short period of time. They're very good to us, but we have found that selling direct to consumers through our website. We have our own order fulfillment center here on the farm so we we pack boxes five days a week and ship it to 48 states my hope had been and still is that this would emulate what we do and there's been a little of that there's some really good places around the country that are doing what we do but it hadn't caught on as well as I had hoped. And I had hoped that we would be able to sell our volume goal, $25 million in

Georgia, Florida, Alabama. But sadly, we're having to reach out to 48 states to do it. But you're doing it, though. We are doing it. I just really want to see food become more local. And to do that, you've got to have more local producers. And doing what we did 20 or 25 years ago was difficult, and it would be even harder now. Things have – the market has matured.

A lot of imported product comes in. You probably didn't know, you probably did not know this, but in 2015, the rule was changed and grass-fed beef can be brought into this country from 20 plusplus countries. Holy crap. And labeled as product of the USA. Really?

Legally and properly labeled as product of the USA. Wow. As a result, most of the grass-fed beef that people buy, unless they really know the story, is coming from New Zealand or Australia or Uruguay or other places. And it's really made it hard for others to do what we did. We made our change before that horrible change came to the world. So people can order. I'm looking over the stuff here.

They can order goods, grass-fed beef, grass-fed lamb. That makes me hungry. Heritage pork, Iberico pork. Iberico. Iberian hogs from Spain. There you go. Pasteurized chicken and poultry, pasteurized rabbit. If you're into that.

Organic vegetables, farm store, and pet stuff as well. And people can order it right off your thing. They can get the steaks, the ground beef, the briskets, ship right to them, even sell bone broth. That's good for you there. Would you call this organic or just grass-fed? Grass-fed. I was certified organic.

I gave that up somewhat in protest i don't know if you know this or not but under the usda organic certification rules you can buy organic vegetables that come from a hydroponic greenhouse with artificial light never touch the vegetables never touch the soil and never see the sunshine. And I don't want to be part of that program anymore. There you go. Well, this is pretty amazing, and people can order all this stuff. Now, tell us about the lodging you do and the events.

That sounds really cool, too, as well. Yeah. We've been invited to go to some places around. My daughter will tell me where to go and when to leave but we're trying to to help the book get started and and it's it's actually been beyond expectation promising at this early moment i don't i don't think you know and and financially we don't make a lot of money on the book. We sold the book rights to Penguin Viking. They're very nice people that helped us, but we, we're not promoting it for profitability.

We're promoting it. We're promoting it because it helps. I think people understand what's wrong with the food production system in this country definitely what can be done to correct it different sauces you can order jars and pervert uh jars and um you know i think i think there's a renaissance coming in this country i live here in utah and i you know i i i try to eat fairly well you know veganese ifese, if you will, is what I call it. And I try and get organic. I don't really go for organic too much, but I try and get good, healthy food.

And here in Utah, we have local farms. And a lot of the farms used to do like what you said, sell to wholesale to retail. And when COVID came around, a lot of the restaurants shut down that were buying from the local farms because no one was in buying food. And so they set up retail shop to sell their own food. And now that's pretty much where I do all my own shopping. I go there and I support them. And you know, what's funny is there's a ton of people that go there, and I pay a little bit more, maybe a little bit more, a little bit more than what I would pay at the store. But the food, the salads, everything that comes from the farm,

the vegetables and stuff, they look so rich, and the taste is so different than the stuff that's being imported. My salads will last way longer than they would, you know, if I bring something home from the store, you know, and, and it's just the, the quality food is so good. And you actually eat healthier because you're eating good food that isn't, you know, chemicalized up as opposed to, you know, what you find in the store these days. I'd like to address that cost and more. And that is a fact.

It does. Food raised properly in a cyclical manner does cost more. But I just want you to know that the reason is because so much of the cost of the industrialized commodity food is spun off. Yeah. commodity food is spun off yeah there's a there's a i talk a lot about my the my the water from my farm drains into the river that goes into the gulf of mexico there's a dead zone in the gulf of mexico where they don't oyster anymore it was a very bountiful oyster harvesting area. There's a moratorium now on harvesting those oysters because so much pesticide is washed down the river.

Oh, wow. Impeding the production of the oysters. So that's a cost. That cheap industrial food wrought on society, those people won't pay. We all pay it. I can go through and give you dozens of examples of economic costs that industrial food spins off to the rest of society, which is why it's so darn cheap when you buy it. Yeah. And to me, it is why it's so darn cheap when you buy.

Yeah. And, and to me, it's worth it. I mean, we have the, the, the place that I go, that's my local farm. That's right down the block from me. I pretty much do all my shopping there these days and they're busy as a bee. There's a lot of soccer moms that come by and buy from them. I think there's a, I mean, it's, they're so busy there that I go over there early in the morning because if I go over there in the afternoon, they'll be sold out of a lot of

stuff. And, you know, they're a farm that they can only open their shop between Wednesday and Saturday. And most of the time they're picking and doing this stuff on the farm. And then here in Utah, we have raw milk farms. And the raw milk here sells so quickly in Utah. It's in such demand that they can't even keep up with it. And I think there's a return to what people want.

They want to buy from farms like yours. They want to buy higher quality food. They recognize that these processed meats, these chemicalized things, the stuff that God knows what's in them, especially when they're coming from around the world, they want something better. And they realize that health is wealth. I'm really glad to hear you say that in your area the needle is moving. I think it is in some areas. But now, big food has really done a great job green washing product and taking our

messaging and brilliantly using it on products that are not the same and it it has hurt us again my and we're able we were able to stay in business because we started earlier than most. But I've known a number of other farms all over the country that have moved in this direction and couldn't afford to stay here. Yeah, you definitely have to do some volume. And then I think what you guys are doing, where you have the regenerative farming and, you know, not doing the linear thing. And, and you're running like an old time farm that we had a farm used to, farms used to run. And it's sad, but you know, this is the education part is this is where we have you on. And what we're talking to people, this is so that people can get educated that there's

better food out there and higher quality food. And when it comes to cancer rates in this country, for all the chemicals that are in our food and the processing that goes into, you know, when you go to fast food, I mean, half the stuff you buy in the freezer section is just junk or blanched, salted food. When you eat live, good, healthy foods, it makes all the difference. Your body loves you so much more. Well, thank you for those kind of words.

We, uh, certainly what we believe. I'm a big supporter, big supporter of farms. I got, I got two different farms working for me. You're not working for me, but you know what I mean? And I buy the raw milk. We get eggs. We get the eggs that are, uh, they don't have, you know, they, they, they're free range chickens. Like the ones I see, I see in your farm.

They're not fed like certain things like corn and stuff. They're fed like, I don't know, whatever you should feed chickens. And so we get those eggs. We get, I think the farm's got some meats we've gotten in the freezer too. And I know I feed my dogs the hamburger that comes from the farm. So I suppose my dog's pretty rough. So this is really important. I think there needs to be this renaissance move forward,

or as you put on the title of your book, a bold return to giving a damn. And we need to support local farms and rebuild our farm thing in the nation. Does the government need to do more to support farms and independent farmers like yours that are trying to do this sort of work? The short answer would be yes, but I don't think that's forthcoming. The big ag, big tech, big food companies are so powerful with their lobbying efforts that I think that probably the amount of help we'll get from the federal government is very very limited it's a

shame I don't think we'll get help from the land-grant universities I don't think we'll get help from Wall Street I don't think we'll get help from see I think that the only help we will get and and it's the only help we need, is the consuming public. There you go. If people just find a farmer and support them, it'll be fine. It will be fine, just fine. But if consumers want to take the most convenient and cheapest route to feeding themselves, it's not going to be fine, just fine. Yeah.

And, you know, that's what I talk about. I show off all my farm food that I buy from my local farms and I brag to people. I'm like, find your local farm and support you. And I have all my friends on Facebook. They write me and they go, my God, that food looks oh my god look how green it is look and i'm like yeah the taste is amazing the concoctions you know they do stuff like looks like what you guys do on your website they make different little recipes up and concoctions of different things i just recently got cranberry cranberry sauce from that's really good but good. But, you know, supporting your local farms,

supporting what's going on. And the great thing is, is they can order your stuff from 48 different states around the nation you ship to, right? They can. And we love having people come to see us. We actually, we've got a farm store here on the farm and a restaurant. And we serve three meals a day, seven days a week.

Oh, wow. And we have lodging. We have cabins. We're about 50 miles from a nice hotel. So for people to come see us, we had to be able to accommodate them. And we want people to come to

see us because that's the real deal. Our voice, our message is best when you come and look and see what we do. Our shield and sword. There you go. And people can, looks like people can tour about the property. You've got some tours and events you put on for that. We do.

We founded a nonprofit, a 501c3, a couple of years ago called CFAR, Center for Agricultural Resilience. Oh, wow. And we put on sessions to train. Well, originally my thought was to train people who walked the farm. But there have been, I think, probably as many consumers and food people and restaurant people and other associated folks come to those sessions. We have sessions about once a month. It's on our website. Or CFAR has a website, Center for Agricultural.

There you go. Or I thought, well, CFAR has a website, Center for Agricultural Food. There you go. And then you've got, let's see, the farm tours, cooking tips. This is something my favorite local farm does too. They do like little events to teach people how to cook, how to, you know, utilize healthy foods that they sell. And, you know, try and get back to the world where people cook more and, or, you know, prepared their food as opposed to, you know, just trying to get it either frozen TV dinner.

We've struggled in food service. The restaurant really has got to be leading out with their claims on regenerative to pay the extra for food. It just puts food, puts them at a disadvantage with food costs. And then you guys have bundle boxes and subscription boxes. People can buy and order different grass-fed meats. We do. There's, and there are things that are very much in demand, like bull testicles for one. Are they really?

Yeah. We can't keep them. So we would, we now have, I guess, a ranking system. If you buy a certain amount from us, I don't remember the amount. You're a mayor or you're a councilman or you're a citizen. Uh-huh. And these really scarce items. We're not a mass producer.

We don't. Yeah. If you're an IBP or a Tyson or one of these big multinational food companies, quantity is not an issue. If you don't have enough, you just import it from Australia. Yeah. And here, when we're just import it from Australia. Yeah. And here, when we're out, we're out. Yeah. So we stayed in so much trouble. When we went to that system, that system of ranking customers,

happened during the pandemic. We had faithful customers who had been ordering for years, and we'd serve them. During the pandemic, we sold out of everything. And we sold out complete strangers that just called and ordered. So I was probably more embarrassed about that than anything I've ever been involved in. People would call and say, you know, I've been vying for you for 15 years,

and now I really need what you got, and you're out. So that's when we, I don't like elitism, but I needed to protect those people. So we sat down, and my daughter and her staff sat down and came up with that ranked system so that the things that are really in great demand but limited supply, we can reserve it for the people that support us 52 weeks a year. There you go. That makes sense. I see on your website, I can order half of a cow.

That is funny. A whole cow. Can I get a whole cow? Wow. A quarter of a cow or an eighth of a cow. There you go. I don't really look at these figures very closely, but I would tell you that probably our biggest sellers are those cow kits.

We call them eighth, quarter, half, or whole cows. Wow. You know, that's, that's what my, when I grew up, the local farms here in Utah, you know, everybody kind of had a farm and had a couple of cows on them. And my best friend, they would buy one or two cows every year and they'd let them pasture around the yards. And then, and then they would, when, you know, butchering time came,

they would, they would, they would take the cow and turn it into meats and then they would freeze it all and the family would share in it. That was kind of, kind of the way everyone worked when I was growing up. There's a lot of that. There's a lot of that. There's a lot of that still going on here through those kits. You know, everybody, different size families, different budgets, you know, a cow costs several thousand dollars if you buy a whole cow. And so we broke it down to smaller and smaller units to make it more

affordable and storable and practical for people that they want to do that. And then you've got all the different various cuts of meat all year round too. Yeah, you can choose. If you don't want a kit, you can choose whatever you want. Ground beef, ground beef to fillets. There you go. Same with the pork and lamb and goat. And it can just get sent to you.

It's certified non-GMO, certified humane, ecological outcome verified in the Land to Market Program. The cattle are grass-fed, certified by the American Grass-Fed Association, certified humane, ecological outcome verified. There you go. So anything we haven't touched on about what you guys do at the farm and what you guys offer to consumers? Well, we've been doing it 150-something years,

so we haven't covered it all, but I think you did a mighty good job. Thank you. We do enjoy having people here. I do hope that you'll come and visit us or not you know the social media is you know one thing that i really appreciate and i'm not i'm not certainly you can look at me and tell i'm probably not real strong on social media but i really do appreciate the fact that that is a medium that we can uh tell people who we are without them having to journey to Bluffton, Georgia, which is not easy to get to.

Yeah. They're great venues for storytelling and sharing stuff and everything else. And, you know, it just, it just makes all the difference. But the, the more people I think can get educated, the more people, you know, they can be, you know, I didn't know my local farm was just down the block from me until my mother-in-law came by one time and she's like, she's a very big, you know, vegan, healthy person. And so she'd found them and she brought me a bag of their, of their lettuce. And I was like, this lettuce looks like nothing I've ever seen before.

It's spectacular. It's rich. It's greeny. Wow. I really want to eat this. And then I went over there and discovered their thing so i highly recommend people get back into farm food and the taste is so different from a healthy farm like yours uh as opposed to the store it's like night and day you can taste the difference in the quality the fullness of the flavor it's like night and day i mean it

really is like i i go even i'll go eat vegetables from the store i'm just like this taste guy is half dead and he usually dies within a day because they've you know there's there's all sorts of tricks they use i read once that they they you know when they import tomatoes from like mexico or other countries they use methane gas on them to heat them up so that they somehow grow faster and ripen faster so they can get them to stores.

And you're just like, they're really mucking with our food. And then we wonder why we have cancer and all these other issues. I appreciate you making those comments. You know, when I first started dealing direct to the public, selling to the public on my website, I put a bunch of stuff in there about the flavor and the taste, the nutrient density, the health, and all these other things that I genuinely believe, but I'm not an expert in it.

And I realized, I saw other people doing the same thing, and I realized how stupid they look, and I realized I look just that stupid because I was doing the same thing. So we went through our, I had my people go through all our marketing material. I told them, you know what? I think I'm an expert on regenerative land management. And I think I'm an expert on animal welfare. And I think I'm an expert on regenerating this local rural economy.

And I know I'm not an expert in nutrition and food safety and health. So we took everything in there off of it and we don't talk about it, but it doesn't mean we don't believe it. And those things you just said, I'm very grateful to you for saying, but we don't, we don't say that about ourselves. We talk about three areas that we can bring you here and show you we're good

at. There you go. I think it's so important. I mean, you, you know, I, I've had, my dogs have suffered from cancer. There's been, you know, there's all this cancer that comes from processed foods they're finding and all these weird chemicals. They're, they're starting to, they're starting to ban a little bit here and there now, but you know, knowing where your food source from, you know, one of the ways I lost a hundred pounds was I started eating what I, what's called live foods,

where I would eat, you know, foods that were alive in the, in the, in the, in the, you know, the out, the outside of the store, the, the, the salad section, the produce and stuff like that, instead of frozen foods. And the fact that they're alive makes a difference to the taste and taste is everything. I mean, people don't realize half the reason you go to McDonald's and these stores that are chemically induced to give you, you know, severe chemical dopamine hits and make you addicted to them. There's no nutrients in them really.

That's why you're hungry after you eat McDonald's and you want more because your body's going, well, you just fed a bunch of junk in here, but can I get some nutrients here? Can I get something to help? And this is how we grew up. We grew up on farms. You see a lot of people even now that have peanut allergies and all these different allergies. They're having them because they don't grow up on farms. You see a lot of people even now that have peanut allergies and all these different allergies.

They're having them because they don't grow up on farms anymore, and they're not exposed to all these things. And so when they finally are, they have a lot of issues with them. We talk a lot about the cycle of life. One of the things we say is that everything that's ever lived has died or will die microbes insects you and i big sequoia trees everything that is over lived will die and everything that any living thing ingest used to be alive and that's that's still that's true with people and the highly processed foods we eat, but it's not nearly as alive as I think it's probably supposed to be. It's not as alive as that tomato you picked out of the garden or that pork chop that was walking around in the lot yesterday. It's just a different level of living food.

Yeah. And, you you know being fresh too i think the freshness really makes a difference in the quality you know going from farm to table is there like uh is do you find there's are there any organizations you know because like i said i we have a lot of farms here in utah and kind of have. I think we've been a cattle state for a lot of years or decades, probably a hundred years. Is there any sort of overarching council or group that's trying to promote farms like yours around the country that are doing all these cool things? There are several. The American Grass-Fed Association is very good.

There are several others. I'm afraid to start naming them because I don't want to miss somebody. Oh, yeah. But there are great organizations out there that are, some of them are farmer-based, some of them are people that are nutrition-focused based. And you can find them. There you go. One of the reasons I brought up McDonald's too,

and the fact that I lost 100 pounds when I started eating well, is a lot of times you're addicted to that because it tastes so good. And it's chemically built, actually. It's like cocaine. It's chemically designed to give you a dopamine hit and make you addicted to it and give you these synthetic chemicals that will make you addicted to it and give you these synthetic chemicals that will make you attracted to it. But when you eat really good live foods, I found,

and this is what I found when I was losing weight, and I think I got it from, what's his face, Penn Jillette's book, Presto. When you eat live, high quality food that tastes well, that's nutrient rich, that your body's going to go, oh, thank you. That fills me up. That's really good. It makes all the difference in your experience with that. And it gets you off of eating this other stuff that you're eating because it seems to taste good to you, but it's not good for you. And when you eat live, nutrient rich, dense foods, foods that are farm to table, think you you know your your body thinks you so much more you're eating good high quality foods and that taste is there that was one of the things i had to learn as a going veganese was was just making stuff taste good

and just you have to do a little bit more five five minutes of prep or maybe get you know learn to season stuff right and all that sort of good stuff. But you can taste the difference, and that's really what matters in the end. Thank you. Sadly, the only two attributes that have moved the food industry in the last 70 or so years are price and flavor. We want food to be cheaper, cheaper be cheaper cheaper cheaper cheaper and taste better better better better and brilliant people worked on those those goals and made incredible progress and today food is just obscenely cheap i mean look how much we waste it's obscenely cheap. I mean, look how much we waste. It's obscenely cheap. Yeah.

And look how good it tastes. And we have made it so good that most of us are obese. So, you know, it's, I want food to be cheap and I want food to taste good. Yeah. That's not all that matters. And so you guys engage in all the other different things that matter in making sure that the land is taken care of and everything else. So this has been really insightful. And the more we can educate people, the more people can learn that there are better ways to eat. There are better ways you can live your life. There's ways that you can live healthier so that you have less of a chance of getting cancer.

And processed foods are just so gross. I mean, they're just. So give us your final thoughts as we go out and pitch out to people to get to know your farm better, order up some supplies, order up the book, Will. Well, I guess my final thoughts would be that I would just ask people to really give the consideration to your food that it deserves. What you eat is such an essential part of your health and well-being and the well-being of the planet and how we interact with other species that inhabit the planet. And the messaging from Big Food is not telling you the whole story.

You've got to open your eyes and look. It's what we tried to do with the book that I wrote. And there are other messengers out loud, and please, please listen to them. People are so darn busy that, and then food is so taken for granted that we just and people just simply under the wrong impressions and they got to correct for us to have any real improvement people have got to correct that and hopefully our book and the messaging that messaging that other farmers are putting out will help that. And I do appreciate you having me on today to help put that word out, Chris.

Thank you. I appreciate you coming on. We're going to order some food from you guys because the meat looks great and stuff. You've got pet stuff on there. My dogs are big. I literally feed them hamburger from the local farm. And they don't get a lot of it, but they get little bits of hamburger every day. And, and we actually give them goat milk too.

You know, my, my dog judge is beautiful. He's just a generic, you know, back alley bulldog, but he is beautiful. And people ask me, what does, what do you feed him? What does he eat? Cause he eats nothing but ground meat. That's meat he finds on the ground. It's never been on a grinder.

It's ground meat. He literally walks around the plant and eats what he finds. I'm going to tell you now, he's beautiful. He is. I found years ago, my dog was dying of cancer. She had anal sac cancer and she was dying of cancer. And we, we had found that giving dogs that are in that state, a raw diet,

where they get raw meat, usually something that's high fat, we could extend their life because cancer doesn't like fat, it likes sugar. And so we were able to extend her life from three days they gave us to the vets to a year and a half, almost two years. And it was actually her arthritis that got her in the end. We extended her life, slowed down the cancer growth. And she had quit eating when they gave her the three-day sentence. And we started feeding her just raw hamburger with, I think we had to cook it at first, but then eventually just raw hamburger without high fat, you know, nasty rolls that you would get at the local store. Don't buy those, they're nasty.

But at the time we were buying those for her and she lived she started eating again she started living another year and a half and so let me give you something to think about so you know i told you what my dog eats we sell a pet grind and the pet grind i think is better for my dog dog than ground beef or other just muscle meats. I don't know if you're much of a naturalist or not, but if a coyote, coyotes kill

a calf, the first night, they eviscerate it from its throat to its sinus and eat all the organ meats first. If nobody finds it, they'll come back later and start with the muscle meats, which is where that hamburger comes from, that ground beef. But these animals crave those organ meats,

and it is incredible what it does for them. I mean, they just become unbelievably healthy and beautiful. I was going to check those out on your website. You've got the duck pet grind with bones. You've got the chicken pet grind with bones, the turkey pet grind with bones. And we feed our dogs raw. I've got, I got stuff that I buy that's frozen. It's supposed to be some of the best foods that I can get, but sometimes they're a little finicky and they're probably after the organs that you're talking about and i give them raw goat's milk i get raw cow's milk and then you guys sell raw hides as well looks like raw hides that dogs can have in different parts we do and i don't know too

much about the pet shoe business but most of it is important we have about the pet shoe business, but most of it is important. We have a big pet shoe business. We take those hives and we don't tan and make pet shoe, raw high pet shoes out of them. And nothing is put on those hives except when we soak them. I mean, you get the hair off. Most of the pet shoes in this country are imported from other countries. And, you know, all I know is what I've been told, but I'm told that people really need to learn more about what's in those

imported rawhide pet shoes, chemically. Yeah. There's people that have been poisoned, stuff that's come from China. It's awful. Well, thank you very much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. And the more we can educate people will the better. And, and I'm a big, you know, I'm always talking to my Facebook, support your local farm.

And I have people all over around that drool over what I, what I show them, my, my local farms getting, and they're like, I want that. Where's that farm at? And I'm like, it's a local farm. It's like McDonald's. You can't. So you got to go find your local farm, support them. Everyone can order from your farm in 48 States. So there you go. But if I think it's more important, we need a Renaissance of food and, and we need to support our local farmers that are doing the work that you're doing

and keep everything in business. Cause you know, the more we can return to that good stuff and put our dollars where our mouth is, I think that is real important. Thank you very much for helping me get my message out. There you go. So, guys, check it out. You can order it up and check out the website, learn more, maybe send a corporate event out to the thing. Take a corporate event out to a farm for a change.

There you go. You might learn some stuff about the land and innovate. Whiteoakpastures.com. Go there and check it out. You can also order Will's book wherever fine books are sold. A bold return to giving a damn. One farm, six generations, and the future of food, and probably the future of food is important for the future of us as human species. Thanks to everyone for tuning in.

Go to goodreads.com, Fortunes Chris Voss, LinkedIn.com, Fortunes Chris Voss, Chris Voss1 on the TikTok and Chris Voss Facebook.com. Thanks for joining us. Be safe and we'll see you guys next time.