The Dr. Hyman Show - Why Eliminating Meat From Our Diet Isn’t The Solution To Climate Change with Anya Fernald

Starting point is 00:00:00 Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Animal wellness is a crucial part of human wellness, right? Not just when what goes in our mouths, but when we have unwell animal systems, the impact on the environment. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Hyman. Supplements are one of those things that I'm always being asked about.

Starting point is 00:00:21 Is it worth spending money on them? Do we need them if we really eat well? And can your body even absorb them? And the answer to most of these questions is it depends. There are definitely certain supplements I'd never recommend taking because they aren't made in a way that your body can take advantage of and you just won't be able to use them. And there are definitely some supplements we can benefit from because our food supply, even if we're eating whole organic foods, just doesn't provide enough of certain nutrients that we need for optimal health. Now, a major one of those nutrients that I suggest people supplement with is magnesium. And see, most soils have become depleted in

Starting point is 00:00:55 magnesium, so it's a tough mineral to get enough of through diet alone. And between 40 to 60% of Americans are deficient or insufficient in magnesium. And since it's a crucial mineral for hundreds of reactions in the body and impacts everything from metabolism to sleep, neurologic health, energy, pain, muscle function, and lots more, it's really important that we get enough of it. Magnesium also plays a role in our stress response, and everyone I know could use a hand in better managing stress to promote their overall health. I like to call it the relaxation mineral. Now, our new favorite magnesium is from a company called BiOptimizers.

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Starting point is 00:01:57 Plus, they give back to their community. For every 10 bottles sold, they donate one to someone in need. Right now, you can try BiOptimizers Magnesium Breakthrough for 10% off. Just go to bioptimizers.com slash hymen. That's B-I-O-P-T-I-M-I-Z-E-R-S dot com slash hymen and use the code hymen10 and you'll get 10% off this really great formula. I think you'll love it as much as I do. Starting the morning off right has a huge effect on the rest of the day. Personally, I love having a super nutrient dense gut healing smoothie for breakfast so I can feel energized, focused, and balanced all day long. I like to use a ton of green leafy veggies, healthy fats like avocados, nuts, and seeds,

Starting point is 00:02:42 a handful of antioxidant rich berries, and then some good gut foods like prebiotic fibers and collagen peptides. Now, you might have noticed that collagen has gotten a lot of hype lately, and I know a lot of nutrition trends come and go without the science to back them up, but collagen is one we can all actually get excited about. It's great for supporting healthy bones, nails, skin, and joints. And as we get older, collagen production slows down. So I love using collagen peptides to support connective tissue and my gut health. But quality is key. My favorite collagen is from Primal Kitchen because it's grass-fed and it doesn't have any fillers, artificial ingredients, dairy, wheat,

Starting point is 00:03:26 or soy. I get Primal Kitchen collagen peptides at an amazing discount through Thrive. Thrive Market members save an average of $32 on every order when compared to other retailers and they have a huge selection of natural and organic and even regenerative foods. They make it easy to shop by diet type, get frozen bulk grass-fed meats, wild-caught fish, or even skincare products and cleaning products shipped right to your door, all at a huge discount. And right now, Thrive is offering all Doctors Pharmacy listeners a great deal. You'll get an extra 25% off your first purchase, plus a free gift when you become a Thrive Market member. Anytime you spend more than $49, you'll get free carbon neutral shipping.

Starting point is 00:04:12 Just head over to thrivemarket.com forward slash hyman to use the offer. That's thrivemarket.com forward slash hyman. And now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and that's pharmacy, then F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. And today's conversation is going to really matter because it's about a conversation between farmers and doctors, between what we need to be talking about right now, which

Starting point is 00:04:45 is how to regenerate human health and planetary health. And that is the conversation today. And it's with an extraordinary woman, Anya Fernald, who is the co-founder and CEO of Belcampo, which is a regenerative ranch up in Northern California at the base of Mount Shasta, they have 27,000 acres of organic farmland, and they process also the livestock for sale. It has its own butcher shops and restaurants, which is very unusual. So they've got the whole supply chain. Belcampo in Italian means beautiful field, and it is definitely beautiful up there at the base of Mount Shasta.

Starting point is 00:05:19 She's for two decades been leading this field of regenerative organic agriculture, focused on meat and leadership within the meat industry. She's been profiled in the New York and New York Times. She's been a judge on Iron Chef and the Food Network since 2009 and recognized as one of Inc. Magazine's 100 female founders in 40 Under 40 by Food and Wine and was named a Nifty Fifty by the New York Times. So she's one of the pioneers in this field of regenerative agriculture, which is often a male-dominated field, agriculture in general. And you are breaking all norms in many ways. And I'm just so happy to have you on the podcast. So welcome. Welcome, Anya. Thank you for having me. Okay. So let's get into it. I think we were just chatting a little bit before the podcast about the importance of having dialogue between farmers and doctors, ranchers and healthcare, and between agriculture

Starting point is 00:06:11 and healthcare. Why? Because, you know, it's all about food. And as we know, food is really driving so much of our global crises today. Obviously, chronic disease is making COVID worse. And, you know, just a little fact, which I think is staggering to me to sort of explain why America is leading the pack. We don't want to be number one in COVID. And we are number one in deaths, number one in cases, number one in the growth and spread. And, you know, there are many reasons for that. But one of the key reasons, I believe, is our poor metabolic health, which has to do with our crappy diet. And in China, there's three deaths per million population. In America, there's 500 deaths per million population. Oh my goodness. Right. And in China, the obesity rate is 2.6%.

Starting point is 00:06:58 In America, it's 42%. So it's related. And your whole work and your effort has really been to link both flavor, deliciousness, nutritional quality with the health of the animals, the health of the planet, and the health of humans. And it sort of reminds me of a quote from Sir Albert Howard, who wrote Soil and Health, which I read 40 plus years ago, where he said the health of soil, plant, animals, and he said, man, but I would change it to humans, is one great subject. And I think you have nailed it with your work at Belcampo and understand those linkages and have created an extraordinary thing. And I just like to dive into your background a little bit, because you grew up, you know, in doing all kinds of interesting things and went to work on a dairy

Starting point is 00:07:49 farm in Bavaria. You lived in Greece and parts of Europe and you saw a different way of raising animals, a different way of cooking. And in getting in there, you really had a different view of really what we need to be doing in terms of agriculture and particularly in terms of how we raise animals. Because now you actually are running one of the largest meat production companies in the whole regenerative agriculture space. And I refer people to all the time too. I've eaten in your restaurant in Santa Monica. It's fantastic. And tell us about your story and how did you get started? Because you were like a vegetarian and all of a sudden you're running a regenerative ranch raising animals. I think I was driven by a curiosity around food that was fundamentally motivated by feeling well, right? So we all have kind of like an origin story

Starting point is 00:08:36 for our passions in life. And for me, being a good cook was a way that I helped my family early on. My mother really struggled with anxiety and would get overwhelmed easily. So I remember diving in as a young girl, and it was a way that I could just, I sort of had this ability to hustle and to think on a lot of different levels and plan out and get a lot of different things done. So the initial kind of genesis for me around cooking was absolutely the role that you play in your family unit. And I then, as I grew older, I loved the manuality of it. I loved the history of it. So I pursued a real passion for baking, took a year off during school and during college and was a baker. And that's when I went to Greece. And then as soon as I graduated from college, my biggest instinct was just to go somewhere and do something with food

Starting point is 00:09:24 that wasn't being a chef. I worked for a hot minute in New York at the time, a very fashionable food magazine called Sever. And it was like champagne and caviar. And I was like, this isn't my world. I'm not into... And I still, to this day, really don't like chef culture. And chef culture is fundamentally... If I think back on it, you have such a great lens on your choices when you look back at 2020. But it was also that there was no concept of wellness. And I think that, in general, the whole kind of chef culture in America is like this egregiously flaunting wellness and health. And if you look at Europe, the chef culture is much more about – now, in France, there's these famously super obese gourmands and stuff. So it's not totally true. But there's a bit more of a balance in the

Starting point is 00:10:09 culinary world around wellness. And there's less of this drive towards overindulgence. But in general, I was sort of turned off by fancy chef culture, loved farming. And I moved to Europe. I got a fellowship at the time. It's kind of a funny story. But I'd read about this fellowship in the Smithsonian Magazine. I'm obviously a big nerd and I loved reading Smithsonian in high school. And so this fellowship was like, you could, they'll give you like 15 grand to go do whatever you want. That's not academic for a year. And I told my parents, I was like, I'm going to get this fellowship. And, and this is my plan for after college. And they're like, well, knock yourself out, but it's like very competitive. And I didn't have any other plan. And I, fortunately I landed that fellowship because

Starting point is 00:10:44 thank God I don't want to otherwise, but it got me, you know, so I moved to Europe with that like 15, 18 grand from this fellowship and I, and I went there with a carry on bag and I came back like eight years later. Eight years later. And during that time I started out as a cheesemaker. I mean, I can visit my parents and stuff back and forth, but you know, I, I, I,

Starting point is 00:11:04 I, when I went there, I worked initially. I used that money to support myself. I had a folding bicycle. I had a huge amount of chutzpah that I'm like, let me draw that energy forward to myself today. But I charged out there. I traveled around by train. I visited over a hundred dairies. I worked for longer periods of time in three different dairies. And it was a, it was incredibly challenging time. I mean, I remember being, you know, desperately lonely and stressed out and it was in foreign countries and different languages. This is a time I didn't have a cell phone. I didn't have, I mean, that was before cell phones. I was traveling on traveler's checks. There's no ATMs, right? A different sort of world.

Starting point is 00:11:42 I remember that. I remember that. You got your Ural pass and a map. Exactly. And my folding bicycle. Yeah, there were no Ural's, right? Different sort of world. I remember that. I remember that. You got your Ural pass and a map. Exactly. And my folding bicycle. Yeah, there were no Ural's, right. So it was a really different, it was just learning on so many levels. And it's actually now when I get young people approach me and say, I'm like, what do I do? And I'm like, put yourself in a tough situation and figure it out because it'll guide you well in life. So much of what I learned about thinking on my feet and just kind of hustling and finding the path forward was in that time. And it was about, about facing struggle.

Starting point is 00:12:10 Now I call that out just on the personal development side, but what happened to me in terms of my learning was really tied to my health. Okay. So I grew up in the low fat nineties. I graduated from college in 98 and I was a competitive athlete and, you know, it was like snack wells and Entenmann's fat free brownies is what the girls would like before meats and stuff. And we'd have like spaghetti feeds with like no fat spaghetti. So I moved from that environment and I'd been a vegetarian on and

Starting point is 00:12:38 off to, I actually had stopped being a vegetarian because when I was a competitive rower, it was difficult for my body to get the energy that I needed with a vegan diet. So I started eating eggs and some meat. But I moved to Europe in dairies initially, and I started eating not just a little meat, but a lot of meat. This is a place where I would get up at 2 in the morning, typically for my dairy jobs, and have some espresso or coffee and then milk animals until about five and then make cheese until about 11 and then eat probably like 2000 calories of animal products. So it was a mix of like introducing intermittent fasting, introducing all sorts of different patterns and then a very, very kind of proto keto diet. And when I was eating bread,

Starting point is 00:13:23 it was like locally made and small source. And I had this really, really powerful kind of transformation in my mood, my attitude, my overall health, lots of different things. And in that time also, you know, it's like when you look back, it was that my desire to stay there was as much about learning as it was about continuing to feel good. Okay. So you connected to food and your health in a way that you hadn't. Absolutely. And I wanted to continue to feel that way. I didn't want to go back to America. I felt like I had more to learn, but I also was like, from a health perspective, it was like, this is amazing. And I got a job then. I got a visa. This is very funny. In 2000, I got a visa from Italy for an independent work permit that was based on me being a cheese expert. So I had to go to the consulate in New York City and explain to them that this 22-year-old American was a cheese expert. Because you have to show that you have a job. Italy is very protectionist, obviously. And you have to show that you have a skill that nobody in Italy has. So I had to go there and do an interview claiming that I was like

Starting point is 00:14:25 a cheese. I mean, I knew a lot about cheese, do still know a lot about cheese, but that was definitely a lucky chance that I got this visa. And I was hired then to work in a rural development project in Southern Italy that was basically doing economic redevelopment via helping small scale cheese producers scale up, get exported, build their whole marketing and packaging. And then from there, I moved to Northern Italy and did a similar set of works, but on a little bit of a larger scale with a larger group of producers via a foundation funded by the region of Tuscany. So I ended up having a very professional progression after that year of cheese making, starting from that base knowledge and the how-to of actually working in dairies. But you also learned there are things that I think were probably subliminal

Starting point is 00:15:09 because my guess is the animals that were on those farms were heirloom animals, that they were not consuming industrial food products from commodity farms like in America, that the quality of their milk and the nature of what you made from that was quite different. I mean, we've lost 50% of our livestock species. The homogenization of animals and breeds for human consumption is just staggering. And through that process, we've lost a lot of the quality, right? So what did you learn there about the type of animals and the way to raise animals that resulted in better food and better nutrition? So all of that really was the substance of my life in Sicily.

Starting point is 00:15:59 So I lived in Sicily for two years. And the group that I work with. So jealous. Well, they made a cheese that was from this breed called the Modicana. You can Google it. That produces less milk than sheep does. So, I mean, very like, like you're talking like a liter and a half or two liters of milk a day, which is infinitesimal.

Starting point is 00:16:17 You know, a Frisian will produce 18 to 30 gallons in a commercial operation, depending on the cycle of life. So, you know, enough to feed a baby. Okay. So tiny amount. So you might ask, well, like why on earth would anybody keep a commercial dairy cow around with that low, low level of production? And the answer is that the milk is extremely high in protein, but more importantly, these cows can live off of like thorns and bark. Okay. So they're extremely robust in Sicily. It's over a hundred degrees, two or three months of the year, and there's no irrigation where we, where I was living.

Starting point is 00:16:49 Right. So it was adaptive to the environment in a way that really made it very, very suitable. It's kind of like an all terrain vehicle, right? So it could handle periods of drought and famine effectively and just keep on, keep on keeping on. And you put a Friesian there. And I think I've seen the same thing with the introduction of these Friesian operations into tropical countries where the US will pump in millions upon millions of dollars in aid to establish large scale industrial dairies. And the animals will just wither in months due to just they can't handle the parasitic load, right, in a tropical environment. And so actually the low yield Brahma cross varieties are actually a much better fit for that. So you see this again and again, where it's like these large kind of luxury,

Starting point is 00:17:33 high production, high volume animals aren't suited for all environments is one key piece of things. And then, you know, additionally, there's a different quality to the actual product they produce. Everything's slow growing. In my experience, in the animal world, it tends to be, I won't say, you know, I don't have the science to say it's better, but it's of a different caliber. And you see this in density, the way that's been documented is protein density in free range, slower growing animals. There's a really solid data point that's pretty well documented, which is that animals that grow slower have higher protein and have in general, higher micronutrient density, right? So in all of these, these kind of low and slow,

Starting point is 00:18:14 I think of them animals, you know, it's the Tyson chicken that's coming to full weight of close to three pounds and two and a half weeks for being a chick to a chicken on our farm, taking eight to 10 weeks to achieve that same market weight. So that trade-off in speed is what I saw again and again, is that these products made from local breeds that produce at sort of like shamefully inefficient levels, producing great taste quality, and then offering farmers much more resilience and flexibility on a small scale. So you basically took all these insights from being in Sicily and Italy and all these different farms and practices you saw and the different animals and something inspired

Starting point is 00:18:57 you to create this 27,000 acre regenerative ranch in Northern California. How did you get to there from being this young woman with a boating bike and a backpack? Right. Well, so keep in mind that in the eight years I worked in Italy, the final chunk of it was doing, I ran a microfinance fund for small scale food businesses. So I basically assisted, this is around the time of the European Union. I assisted in small scale food businesses coming up to speed, helping them get in line with the European Union regulations, et cetera. So all of that was really crucial to my kind of understanding of business development, market compliance, you know, all the different aspects of like food safety, et cetera. Now, in the time that I, when I returned to the U.S.

Starting point is 00:19:41 You learned the art of farming and the business of farming. Yeah. And my inclination is more into the business side of it, right? I'm intrigued by the potential to not just do something beautiful, but do something powerful, right? So it's one thing I've seen frequently in the kind of regenerative and small-scale ag world. I desire to create a small, perfect microcosm that's available to very few. And I think that's why the elitism kind of claims have stuck and been a perennial issue in the space, right? Because they are like, they're like beautiful gilded, small microcosms that actually are not very accessible, even though the majority of the products that we're talking about fundamentally are the food of the poor, right? These are the foods that we developed in subsistence economies to eat by because we

Starting point is 00:20:28 couldn't afford the mainstream products, right? So it's kind of an interesting lens to look at things now. I think that it's all been sort of now viewed as this really, really high end. So for me, the idea of like creating something small and beautiful and perfect is less interesting than creating something larger and transformative with some nicks and tumbles along the way, right? So I get the scale idea. We're going to get back to that because it's a very important question. This is great. It's wonderful. You can have an heirloom cow. Okay. It'll feed like six tech billionaires in Silicon Valley and like, who cares? We're going to get to why it's important and how to scale it. But before we do, I want to sort of address the elephant in the room, which is the conversation about meat itself.

Starting point is 00:21:09 Is it good for you? Is it bad for you? Is it bad for the planet? Is it good for the planet? Is it bad for the animals? Is it OK to eat animals? Because the conversation that's really emerging in many, many circles is that we should all become vegan in order to save our health and save the planet. And you put up a very different conversation about this. How do we come to understand that beef is the enemy? And why is it not? Absolutely. I mean, there's a series of cultural conversations that happened after the industrialization of beef production that shifted the optic and the lens we view beef. You know the narrative well. I'll repeat it.

Starting point is 00:22:00 The broad brushstrokes of the story. After the Second World War, we had a major consolidation of agriculture. Many of the ammunition factories were converted to fertilizer factories, which made, we had basically a vast infrastructure of fertilizer factories that were ready to go. We started to make fertilizer much, much cheaper. We had a bigger industrialization of agriculture. At the same time, we had a different approach towards food security, is what we call it today. But the government after the second world war and around that time was very concerned about America's autonomy, understandably, and invested in systems that ensured that we had

Starting point is 00:22:36 enough corn, wheat, rice, soy, those key crops, and a few others, cotton, sorghum, tobacco, that we had those produced in volumes sufficient to feed the American public in the US. The confluence of those two things is an overabundance of food crops starting in the 50s that we began to, understandably, re-divert to beef feed. And we developed the world's first- We started producing too much food, and so we had to feed it to something else, right? And the thing is too, Mark, it's a bunch of rational things that we did, right? We were like, okay, we don't want to have another, you know,

Starting point is 00:23:12 victory gardens and terrifying end of the world scenario. Understandable, right? We have all these huge factories that we need to do something else with. Understandable. Like these were all kind of rational economic decisions. It was good intentions with bad consequences. And longer-term consequences. These were sort of short-term pivots and responses to things. I think sometimes, and I do agree with some of the broader kind of conspiracies at times around

Starting point is 00:23:36 big ag, but the way that it's been built up, I think was a normal reactant to a bunch of social and economic forces. And so what we ended up with though is by the 50s, we were realizing we could get fatter beef faster feeding it human food. Right? And then about 10 years later, Diet for a Small Planet was one of the first books that hit around this. But then about 10 years later, people started to say, but wait a second, this is devastating for the environment, right? Because we're basically producing resource-intensive crops that are maladaptive for beef diet, right? And are also bad for the planet being produced at the scale for this usage. And effectively, we created a very unsustainable beef supply system.

Starting point is 00:24:20 So the way that it happened is that we pivoted how we produce beef from a natural regenerative traditional system to the modern industrial factory farm. Yeah. And then we started to understand, I'd say the response to that was for many people, well, we're going to be vegan. Now, why wasn't the response? Well, like food was like, oh my God, look what's happening in these factory farms. And then of

Starting point is 00:24:45 course all the literature came out that meat is bad for you it's got saturated fat we shouldn't be eating it it causes heart disease right yes yes and i think a lot of the you know they the conversation around beef and how bad it is a lot of it i agree with directionally um in that confinement beef is really bad. Yeah. So just to clarify, what happens is this conflating of traditional, let's say heirloom, regeneratively raised animals and their impact on health and the planet versus feedlot beef and their impact on health and the planet and the,

Starting point is 00:25:27 in fact, on the animals in terms of the horrific conditions they're raised in. And yet the conversation about meat doesn't often distinguish those two things. And just like, and even the health effects is fascinating. We've talked about this before on the podcast, but you know, there's studies that need to be done more on this and we're working on how to do those. But in Australia, they looked at wild kangaroo meat versus feedlot beef, gram per gram of protein, when consumed, have profoundly different effects on human biology. So the feedlot beef raised all the inflammatory markers. The kangaroo meat lowered inflammation in the body. Same amount of protein, both meat, but profoundly different effects on human health, not to mention the effects on planetary health.

Starting point is 00:26:11 So it's a dangerous through line to draw at times, but you look at the confinement system and feedlot beef, it is an inflammatory system, right? The way that these animals are fattened up is by giving them a fundamentally inflammatory maladaptive diet, right? The way that these animals are fattened up is by giving them a fundamentally inflammatory maladaptive diet, right? Which triggers a lot of different reactions in their bodies. And it also is putting them in confinement, which creates, you know, competition for mates and foods and resources, unsanitary conditions, highly stressful. So it's cortisol. So, you know, there, there's sort of two factors, maladaptive diet that's inflammatory and then a highly inflammatory stressful context that they're living in. So those two together, now you're the doctor here, so I'm going to leave it to you to understand like what's, you know, eating meat from an animal that, you know, effectively is highly inflamed, inflammatory for us.

Starting point is 00:26:59 That would make sense to me. And I'm always troubled when I see, you know, people in the culinary community, in particular, posting pictures of like Kobe and Wagyu and it's highly fatty meat. And I just think, you know, you wouldn't put a picture up on Instagram of a 350 pound four-year-old and be like, look at how cool this is, right? You'd say like, this is an abomination, right? Like help us help this child. And when you're putting that kind of picture up of those steaks, it's effectively what you're doing is saying like, here's a deeply diseased and troubled organism. And we're,

Starting point is 00:27:28 we celebrate and fetishize it as opposed to looking at it, like what it is, which is inflamed and it has inflamed tissue. Well, it's interesting that the diet we're feeding the animals that's inflammatory is a high carb diet corn. That's the same diet that Americans are eating is a high refined carbohydrate diet that makes us inflamed and sick and more likely to get COVID and many chronic diseases. So it's

Starting point is 00:27:52 actually an interesting parallel that you draw. And as Russ Conzer says, it's not the cow, it's the hound. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. It's no surprise that sleep is a huge part of optimizing our health. All of us should be focused on getting the best sleep possible if we want to maintain a healthy weight, feel energized, and stay sharp. And that comes down to several different factors. Now, something we have the most control over in terms of sleep is our physical environment and the type of light we're exposed to. After spending more time at my computer when working on my recent book, I noticed my eyes always felt dry and heavy and wasn't sleeping so good or as long as I used to. The screens we're surrounded by all day long are sources of artificial blue and green light that disrupts melatonin production. That alters our delicate circadian rhythms and impacts all our

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Starting point is 00:30:48 And how does it impact climate and the environment in a different way than traditional feedlot? And how ethically is it different? I mean, there's a lot of questions in there because it's ethical issues, environmental issues, and health issues, and they all get conflated. And it's important to break them out because they're quite different. So around the ethical issue, I do need to state the kind of, for me, the elephant in the room is that an animal dies to make meat. Okay. So that's a fundamental choice that we have to be comfortable with as humans. What I've tried to do is to answer all the questions apart from that one, which I can't have an answer for. But what I've tried to build in our systems is the same as, I think, the thinking of many people

Starting point is 00:31:30 in the regenerative movement, which is to create an evolutionary system for the animals to grow up in. Now, to put the question around the high carbs, I need to talk about that. There is a little bit of a difference in terms of our inflammatory response and the beef's inflammatory response. I agree that we're both inflamed, but keep in mind that beef are ruminants. And so their evolution is for eating large volumes of extremely low calorie, high fiber, nutrient poor food, which is forage. So they're amazing, kind of like they're like the compost pile of the animal. They're upcyclers of nutrients that we couldn't eat. We're the predators. We won out in the evolutionary battle,

Starting point is 00:32:09 right? We got to eat kind of everything. We're a monogastric other animals that we eat that are monogastrics are pigs and chickens, right? Monogastric means we have one stomach and we are able to, to, because of that, we need, and we seek out nutrient dense foods. So if you or I were to eat only grass, we would be in the hospital in a week, right? It would be extremely difficult for us to extract enough nutrition from something that high fiber. Cows, on the other hand, are suffering when they eat nutrient dense food because they have these five stomachs, which become gassy and inflamed when they're pounded with a lot of grain. The question too is like, well, all, you know, natural grasses would have seed pods on them, but I can say from being in the farming industry that it's like one half of 1% when you have a, you know, a large field of grass and how

Starting point is 00:32:55 much these animals are not scraping the seeds off like bears pick blackberries. They're eating volumes of grass and there's a little bit of seed at different phases of the life cycle in there. Okay. So that's a very different system. So an evolutionary system means that we're trying to create key aspects of how an animal exists in the wild. And in the case of there's no wild cow, but there are bison and there's oxen, right? And the plant step oxen from Russia are the original cows. And what we do that is to focus on diet, breeding and mothering. Those are the kind of the key life points for animal wellness. So in the diet is what we talk about the most. I just want to stop you for a minute there. You just said something

Starting point is 00:33:35 that I don't think anybody talks about. Animal wellness. Animal wellness. That's a very new idea that brings into the conversation a different way of thinking about how do you raise animals for their health and for our health and how they're connected. So it's very important. Thank you for pointing that out. Well, I think animal wellness is a crucial part of human wellness, right? Not just what goes in our mouths, but when we have unwell animal systems, the impact on the environment. And that's not even just the big picture, your grandchildren, polar bear stuff. That's literally if you live two miles from a confinement agriculture farm, you have something like double the chance of having a miscarriage or a low birth weight baby.

Starting point is 00:34:18 So it's not just like it's also quite near term here and now in wellness issues. Okay. So in, in our systems, and I want to clarify, I point out that there's dozens of farms across the U S maybe in the hundreds. I don't really know, but like of that, I know of there's dozens that practice this. We're not unique in this. And there's a lot of options now to, to buy regenerative products, but our system, the word regenerative is like looking to the long term. So thinking many generations out in terms of the health of the soil. And that means that we're trying to actively sequester carbon. That doesn't exactly relate to the, there's not like a regenerative practice specifically around beef, but beef are part of a regenerative system.

Starting point is 00:34:59 In environments like where I am right now in the Belcampo farm, we are, it's a brittle grassland environment. That's where we farm, it's a brittle grassland environment. That's where we farm. That's where most regenerative farmers- You couldn't grow crops or vegetables there, essentially. There's not enough water. Correct.

Starting point is 00:35:12 Yeah. So this is an area that 150 years ago was heavily grazed by elk and deer, right? There are massive herds of them around here. And this is an environment that evolved in concert. So in concert with ruminants, right? With these big, heavy hoofed foot animals with lots of stomachs that could take all of these massive volume of grasses and a little bit of seeds, basically mulch them and poop them out, for lack of a better word in a, so the seeds, seeds are actually passed entire through the digestive tract of these animals. And then they're deposited on the prairie,

Starting point is 00:35:49 on the ground, packed in its own great fertilizer, right? And while the animals is dropping these mature seed pods packed in fertilizer, they're also lightly aerating the soil by walking across it with their heavy, heavy bodies and sharp pointed hooves, kind of creating a light like tilling effect as well. That allows that the next time the rains fall, there's indentations where the rain pools, creating greater saturation of the water. So those that whole process of the beef, I'd say, are in support of a regenerative prairie management system. That's the way that beef are part of the system. Well, that's a very important point you make because what people don't understand is that if we wanted to say, let's just eliminate animals from the planet, eliminate agricultural animals because they're the enemy. And there are many people who are saying this, that we should just

Starting point is 00:36:39 get rid of animal agriculture. What you're saying is that it doesn't actually make sense because 40% of our global agricultural lands are not suitable for growing crops. They're suitable for grazing animals. And if we do it right, and there are many ways to do it wrong through overgrazing, which destroy the environment, lead to desertification, which has happened all over the world, but doing it right, like you're doing it, you're actually restoring the ecosystem. You're increasing biodiversity. You're building soil carbon. You're drawing down carbon out of the environment. You're conserving water in the soil. You're actually creating healthier animals, which then creates healthier humans. You're creating this virtuous cycle, which require

Starting point is 00:37:17 animals, is what you're saying. Yes. And the challenge here is that there's a really widespread assumption now that animal agriculture in and of itself is the problem, not the current manifestation of animal agriculture. We've got plenty of examples in history and some good research being done right now that shows that when you remove, as you mentioned, ruminants from a traditional prairie system, that system collapses. And the great example in American history is the Dust Bowl. And so there's many, many stories about this and documentation of it. But I'll give the short version, which is that we took, we removed the bison from our prairies through massive kill offs. We then fenced in those prairies. And for the first couple years of farming, it was, it remains today, unbeaten levels of wheat production. That land was so fertile, right? So fertile. Within two years, it cratered, cratered, and it's,

Starting point is 00:38:18 and then the dust bowl happened. And what happened is the topsoil, which had been built up slowly through generations of animals walking, dropping manure and seeds, et cetera, aerating, et cetera, all of that evaporated and turned into, it's literally called the dust bowl. And you wouldn't see the sun for days because of the amount of dust that had come up through erosion. It went all the way to Washington, DC, which is why the government actually started to create the soil conservation program. So carbon in soil, the reason we want carbon in the soil is that it supports microbial growth in the soil. Microbial growth then supports the growth of mycorrhizomes and root systems. That's a virtuous cycle. Then it further sequesters carbon, right? So carbon is like, it's kind of like, think about it in your own body too. It's like having a healthy microbiome is the first step to making sure you don't get the

Starting point is 00:39:08 flu. And then getting the vaccine is like sort of on the outer levels of what you want to do, right? So there's a lot of similarities to how we look at the human body and whole body wellness and how we approach agriculture. Like we have a very consistent systemic approach in America to those two kind of problems or opportunities. But here at Belcampo, you know, we've been surveying the soil since 2013 and we are carbon positive. So we we're probably a decade away from the tide really turning on this issue by farms like ours showing concerted long-term shifts. But in our farm, in seven years, we turned the tide. We changed the

Starting point is 00:39:56 direction. That's a very important point that we actually can sequester or store carbon that's in the atmosphere into the soil and draw down carbon in a way that can help stop or even reverse climate change. And it's a conversation that's starting to happen in many circles, certainly happening in Europe. It's in certain conversations that are happening in the government. It's not certainly far enough in my opinion, but what people don't realize is that we have the biggest carbon capture technology ever discovered. It's available everywhere on the planet. It's free. It's something that is available everywhere and is called photosynthesis.

Starting point is 00:40:32 Well, so it's interesting to me too, too, because people think like carbon sequestration is important because we want carbon out of the environment. And this way we put it into the ground where it's stored. But then that's just the beginning. Because what happens when the carbon's in the ground is that there's better microbial action, there's better mycorrhizal growth, and then you limit erosion, right? So it's like, it's a totally virtuous cycle, and then you build more microbes, and then you're able to sequester even more carbon. So it's not just about putting things in the bank. It's actually that there's interest on

Starting point is 00:41:00 that in the bank. You know, there's actually like a really healthy cycle that carbon creates. And we do a very good job with industrial ag at killing the microbiome of the soil. So that's something that's really painful about, for me particularly around glyphosate and Roundup, a very, very common chemical, is that it kills the microbiome of the soil. So as you know, it's a broad scale. It's on 70% of crops. It's hundreds of millions of pounds. It's the most abundant. It kills inches and inches of topsoil. So when you see these flash floods in the Midwest on farming communities and whole towns are underwater and mudslides and stuff like that,

Starting point is 00:41:36 that's because we've completely killed the microbiome of the soil through the use of the most commonly used agricultural chemical. It doesn't just kill what's above, it kills what's below. So that's another like double whammy in terms of carbon sequestration, because then you're killing the ability of those plants to sequester carbon. Yeah. You know, as a doctor, it's also important to me because when you put carbon in the soil, you build the microbiome of the soil and the microbiome of the soil is what allows the nutrients to be extracted from the soil to go into the plant that will enter us and make us healthier, right? So when you look at industrial farming, whether it's growing

Starting point is 00:42:18 vegetables or animals, one, the nutrient density is lower in factory farm animals, but the nutrient density is far lower in industrial produced crops. So you've got 50% less nutrients and minerals in some crops over the last 50 years just because of the destruction of the soil. So it's such an incredibly virtuous cycle. It's hard to argue with regenerative agriculture. And yet, you know, many people still do i mean we talk about uh you know the the the sort of fake meats out there that are being promoted like impossible burger and you know i went into starbucks the other day and i bought a coffee and i saw in the cabinet the impossible burger cheese sandwich you know i mean it was like and i was like what and then i was like what you

Starting point is 00:43:01 know the the people don't realize one it one, it's a highly industrial food product. It's made from 47 novel proteins. It's got more glyphosate than you require to kill your own microbiome because it's GMO glyphosate sprayed soybeans. And three, it is better than feedlot beef for the climate environment in terms of greenhouse gases, but regeneratively raised beef actually draws down carbon while the Impossible Burger will add three and a half kilos of carbon. So you literally have to eat one regeneratively raised burger from Belcampo Farm to offset an Impossible Burger's carbon emissions.

Starting point is 00:43:39 That would be a good marketing play. It's actually validated science through Qantas, which is a life cycle analysis company from Australia that looked at both approaches. And it was kind of shocking to me. I thought, wow, that's pretty impressive. So I think it's not the cow, it's the how message is really important to get out there. It's a message that's so radical in terms of the modern thinking about protein, that animal protein, that it's a difficult one. You say it, people are like, but can I really believe this?

Starting point is 00:44:10 This is so different. But, you know, Mark, in the past, what, five years, we've seen a radical shift in people's understanding of the role of fat in their diets. There's still plenty of holdouts with margarine in their fridge out there, but the tide is turning. So I'm optimistic that good data and good advocacy can make that shift. I know and I do what I do with integrity because it's the right choice for the planet. I also know, though, that the levels of meat consumption, the way we consume meat are not sustainable, right? So I'm not saying this is just sort of a carte blanche to continue what we're doing, but change the input, Right. And, you know, we, we throw away almost, I hear somewhere between 35 and 45% of the meat that's

Starting point is 00:44:50 produced in America goes into the trash. So I think there's a lot of, well, when you have a really cheap product, you're not very conscious. I'll trust, you know, trust me that the numbers on like caviar usage in American restaurants are not nearly as egregious. People don't throw away stuff that's expensive. Meat's very, very cheap. And so we feature it heavily in buffets. We feature it in, it's a giveaway effectively. We make it, we do abundant portions that people don't finish.

Starting point is 00:45:20 So food waste in meat's egregious. And so we raise animals in torture. They die in torture. It's bad for the environment the way it's produced. And then it ends up in the trash can. So tell me that. You know, we're feeding them human-grade food the whole way, right? There's just elements of that that are so broken and wrong.

Starting point is 00:45:38 So I think that there's, you know, the kind of the big piece that we need to talk about is that raising beef the way that I raise it is three to five times more expensive than the conventional method. And one of the great privileges of being American is cheap meat, you know? And so we've evolved. Is it really cheap though? Is it really cheap? Because when you look at who's paying the cost of a factory farm animal, who's paying the cost of the destruction of the soil, the pollution of our waterways through the production of food that goes into rivers, lakes, and streams and kills our fish supplies, like 212,000 metric tons in the Gulf of Mexico, the loss of pollinators, which have dropped 75%, half of all birds have gone from America because of our agricultural

Starting point is 00:46:21 industrial system, the incredible damage that's happening to the climate as a result of destroying the soil and the way we grow food. Who's paying those costs? I don't think we're actually paying the real cost of the food. What about the antibiotic resistance and the 700,000 deaths a year from antibiotic resistant organisms, much of which is coming from farms that cost trillions of dollars? Who's paying that cost? It's not the price you pay the checkout counter. It's what I call socializing the cost, meaning we as citizens, as countries pay the cost while the corporations who produce those meats actually privatize the profits. Yeah. And if you look the way that the locations of the factory firms

Starting point is 00:47:05 are increasingly in disenfranchised areas with high density of people of color, California passed the proposition, which basically made the worst actors just leave the state and go to places that were less regulated, right? And where the citizenship was less active and disenfranchised, right? So, I mean, it's a pretty, it's a pretty disproportionate impact on the poor as well in terms of the actual immediate bad effects of, I mean, if you look at, for example, chicken farming, it's primarily new Southeast Asian immigrants and Latino immigrants that are in that industry, right? So it's, it's disproportionately health impacts in terms of who's actually working there. Well, the farm workers and the food workers, but also the people

Starting point is 00:47:43 who live nearby, as you mentioned, the amount of pollution is driving asthma and chronic illnesses that are really well documented in terms of their impact. Well, here in California, back to the COVID thing, when you started to see the death rates in the Central Valley spike, you notice that how the death rates per thousand were so much higher in near the agricultural communities because the general you call it like metabolic health indicators are so much worse there i mean there's three times the incidence of asthma in fresno there is in oakland right i mean an equally polluted california city but it's the ag right that's driving that asthma level so i mean that you're this is the point though the question for for me is I often get the dollars and cents rationale of like I'm a working single mom and I can't afford this and I understand that. Directionally, there is going to need to be, I think, to implement rigid gender of agriculture, a broader understanding of that, of those bigger picture externalized costs. But I don't think in the US we have a great track record of understanding the sort of like nuanced, bigger picture impact of good short-term economic decisions for individuals, right? So I don't have a ton of confidence in people grappling with that bigger picture negativity. It seems like what the decision is, is like, well, let's just pivot to

Starting point is 00:49:01 this highly processed soy-based or grain-based industrial ag off-put and just buy into that if I'm going to be activated around this. So the pathway to getting consumers to stay with meat but demand better meat is going to be a more laborious build, I think. But that's what I've been leaning into. It's like trying to find a demographic that's ready to convert or is open to the message and has, you know, maybe not massive resources, but enough to have a little bit of optionality. Yeah. I mean, there are ways of buying in bulk. There are ways of buying at scale. You can buy half a cow. You can buy with your neighbors. I just bought half a lamb from the local farmer

Starting point is 00:49:38 here. I put it in my freezer. It'll last me a long time. And it wasn't that expensive compared to, you know, it's all local. How do we scale this? Because, you know, as you're talking, it's really clear to me, and I think it's clear to many people in high levels of policy around the world that regenerative agriculture is a key solution to so many of our problems, right? Water problems, climate problems, food problems. And the UN said that if we took 2 million of the 5 million hectares of degraded land around the world and convert to regenerative agriculture, we could stop climate change for 20 years and would cost $300 billion, which is less than we spend on diabetes in this country, the government

Starting point is 00:50:11 spends, and is basically 60 days worth of military spending around the world. And compared to the 4 trillion whatever dollars we spent on COVID relief, it's just a drop in the bucket. And yet, nobody's really talking about how do we build and scale this? Because a lot of the conversation, well, this is great, it's elitist. You know, if you have money, you can buy it. It's not really scalable. But there's a lot of challenges to that theory.

Starting point is 00:50:34 And guys like Alan Williams have talked about if we took all the degraded land, if we took all the land that's being used to grow corn and soy for animal feed, if we, or some of it, if we took the conservation lands that the government has, we could actually scale this up, and that would bring the cost down. It would improve our entire ecosystems, increase biodiversity, conserve water, help deal with

Starting point is 00:50:56 the droughts and the floods and the fires and the weather instability and climate. I mean, it's sort of an interesting concept, but how real do you think it is that we could actually move this at scale? Because it's only 1% now of our agricultural system. How do we get it to 10, 20, 50%? I'll tell you from an organizational capacity management. So we built this operation here. I started the business with my co-founder in 2012 with 6,000 acres, and we've scaled it to close to 30 through the acquisition of three other large ranches and also acquired and built a land for and built a slaughterhouse.

Starting point is 00:51:31 So in that time, what I've learned is that regenerative agriculture is much more reliant on human know-how and intelligent engagement with data in a series of decision-making points. So unlike in a feedlot, you can have kind of anybody show up with the bag of feed or a computer and put the feed in the bucket. And you buy the feed from one of three consolidated companies, and you buy that based on price and proximity. So that's sort of your decision tree is like, where's the bucket go? In regenerative ag, I'm looking at our pastures right now, and I can tell a story about every single one of these. Did we decide to irrigate ever? If so,

Starting point is 00:52:24 what's the system that we use that's most efficient? When we're planting, we do no-till planting. What and how are we planting and where to optimize sunlight and natural water flow? How are we handling hedgerows and biodiversity? How are we handling biodiversity management? And then how are we rotating the animals over the years? How are we handling fencing or any type of containment? So these, I could just like rattle off, but there's like hundreds of these decisions and they're made by highly skilled ranchers, right? Whereas agriculture on the whole has been de-skilled and put into, there's sort of like an autocratic class and then there's endless workers who don't even need to speak the language

Starting point is 00:53:01 of their bosses, right? Literally don't need to even speak the language, right? There's so little need for any real knowledge transfer and there's no skill gain through the work. My jobs here at our firm are careers. People are learning really sophisticated information about how land is managed, how we increase fertility using a lot of subtle kind of EQ type skills around animal management. It's really hard. You understand every day why people don't do this anymore. So scaling this, the challenge here, Marcus, and this is our scale. So Belcampo now, we are, by the grace of God, growing in COVID, our restaurants have actually grown year on year in COVID, I believe due to the wellness message and the wellness experience that many of our customers have of just real significant physical and wellness goals being met through our product.

Starting point is 00:53:56 I'll just hypothesize here, but we are actually growing in our restaurants, which is very, very unusual. My category is down 70% year on year due to closures. We're up 15% at this point. We did close two of our restaurants that are in enclosed malls, but the remaining five, those statistics are true on. And then the rest of it with our e-commerce growing and our other channels are growing, we've been in a really fortunate position. But as we look at scale, we're scaling through partner

Starting point is 00:54:20 firms. And part of it is capital. I mean, and if I think about the real challenges, I've had a significant single investor for eight years. We're now raising capital for the company in the upcoming months to fund really our e-commerce expansion, our direct-to-consumer mail business. But the privilege of having an individual committed investor and the long-term approach to returns is enormously important. And then also, as I scale, I've never been an advocate of, let's just buy 250,000 acres. I mean, A, where the money comes from, that's this kind of patient capital. But also, from a management and logistical perspective, it becomes untenable. These are systems that are better built for medium and small-scale operations.

Starting point is 00:55:04 I consider Bo Campo medium-scale. We have a herd of 3,000 beef currently. So we'll be expanding next year. About 25% of our production will be coming from partner firms that we then certify to meet not just certified humane and organic, which are our base criteria for Belcampo, but then also our own regenerative practices. So the scale, and I bring up my story is relevant to the degree that it reflects an experience of scaling and regenerative agriculture and failing more than I've succeeded in many, many ways, right? And saying, okay, I don't really want to do this

Starting point is 00:55:37 four times as big. I'd rather be a coach on the regenerative practices, a certifier and a marketing arm. And so that maybe in 10 years, our own, where I'm sitting, this farm right here is maybe 10 or 15% of our production and the remainder of it's coming from many partners. I want to call out something too, Mark, that I think, I don't know if consumers are aware of the amount of frustration in the farming community about industrial ag as well. You probably are aware of this. Traditional farmers. Exactly. So, I mean, the challenges are, I mean, if you were to start a farming business right now in industrial systems, you're basically, you sign up to, you're buying all your baby animals from somewhere. You have to fatten them in a certain sense in the livestock industry. So, you're buying

Starting point is 00:56:22 them at market set prices. You're buying what you feed them at market set prices. And then you sell them at market set prices, the commodity prices. All three of those commodities, none of that's differentiated. Whatever you do doesn't matter. You just need to come in under those commodity prices. It's terrible. It's not entrepreneurship. There's no ability to differentiate. It's bad for the farmers. If those commodities don't line up great, you're just out and you're just in the red that year. And you have nowhere to go. You have nowhere to go. I mean, we saw this in COVID, right? Where those farmers like up a creek all of a sudden and killing, aborting baby pigs and throwing away eggs and stuff. So when you're squeezed, you are squeezed in

Starting point is 00:57:05 conventional farming. And then also what we're seeing in the case of the crop industry with glyphosate, they're actually, they are mandated to buy the chemical from the farm. They're mandated to buy the seeds from that same company, Monsanto. And then they also, then they can only sell the commodity. Again, if those three things on a pricing basis don't align one year, who's paying the price? The farmers are, and they're taking out the funds. And that's something that the USDA does a ton of. It's just basically bridge financing for farmers that are sustaining losses on behalf of agribusiness. Yeah. You know, like the small farmers have become this giant bank that's funding misalignment in the commodity pricing structure. That's right. Just to break that down for people, the farmers are not the bad guys. They're caught in a squeeze between the banks who give them money to run their farms, which then goes to the seed chemical companies,

Starting point is 00:57:56 and they're stuck in this vicious cycle and have to buy crop insurance for the downside on their farms. They can't get loans unless they have crop insurance. And so they're stuck in this vicious cycle, which is a trap, and they often make very little or no money. And what you're saying is that farmers are getting sick of this, and they're looking for new ways. And I've seen, you know, had Alan Williams and Gabe Brown on the podcast, and they really talked about how as they go around the country, more and more traditional farmers are sick

Starting point is 00:58:24 and tired of the way things are happening and are looking for a new way and are coming out in droves to really learn about regenerative agriculture and understand how to implement these. And they're profitable in the first year, which is interesting because, you know, when you think, you know, the people who are making all the money in the system are not the farmers, it's the seed and the chemical companies and the banks and not the farmers. But this turns all that upside down. And I imagine on your farm, you had a private investor maybe for the land, but basically you're not having to buy chemicals.

Starting point is 00:58:52 You're not having to buy seeds. You're not having to buy antibiotics. You're not having to buy hormones. You're not having to sell your products in a commodity fixed price system that lowers the price so you can't actually have a profit. So it seems like this is a model that's going to regenerate rural communities, that's going to reinvigorate farmers, that's going to actually increase profits for them and have all these side benefits, just as our

Starting point is 00:59:15 traditional farming system has all these negative benefits, it's the opposite, right? Better food, better for the animals, better for humans, better for farmers, better for climate, better for biodiversity, better for water resources and the soil. It's all a win-win-win-win-win. The key thing we've done is to build a direct relationship to the consumer. That's another thing where, although with small farms there are farmers markets, those often require a lot of driving, getting up early on the weekend. If it's raining, you don't sell anything.

Starting point is 00:59:43 The problem is there's really no consolidated market where if you have a differentiated product, you can sell it into. So there's not really the channel to support any scale on regenerative. And I'll be clear too, that our farm has cost us significant investments. So although we don't spend on antibiotics and glyphosate and things, we've had to scale up the herd. We've bought thousands upon thousands of animals and breeding stock. We have seven species that we raise here commercially, all the infrastructure around that. So it's a significant lift to get an operation like this up and running. But I think the longer term challenge for regenerative as well is that there's very

Starting point is 01:00:20 little left in the way of rural, small-scale infrastructure to support. So if you do get a farm up and running, it's difficult to find slaughter and further processing. So making things like beef jerky on a small scale or just getting your animals killed, that's what we have done. We built our own slaughterhouse down the road about 20 minutes from the farm that's certified humane and certified by CCOF as organic. So having those pieces has made all the difference for us to be able to build actually a brand. But the scale issue for regenerative, it's a different model than how the agriculture is scaled currently. And that's a question that I kind of muse on a little bit, right? Which is that truly regenerative, I see it as a patchwork of medium scale operations that scale up in concert. But it's, it's difficult to, there's,

Starting point is 01:01:06 there's not really like a, an easy acquisition pathway for a large, you know, well-resourced kind of agribusiness to come and inquire a bunch of these. So I do think there is an opportunity around investment to, to look at, you know, longer term. This is a, this is a field. Well, there are billions of dollars. There are billions of dollars flowing into regenerative ag from private investments and funds. Okay. So I know you're, you're, there are billions of dollars. There are billions of dollars flowing into regenerative ag from private investments and funds.

Starting point is 01:01:25 Okay, so Anya, we have a new administration. You're called by President Biden to lead an initiative to transform agriculture in this country. Maybe you're the Secretary of Agriculture, maybe just advising him. What are your top three recommendations or five, whatever you want to share

Starting point is 01:01:40 that would really move the needle and make us move forward faster to solve these big problems of human health, animal health, planetary health, and really move things forward? Flattening the subsidy system. Flattening it. So making it- You mean killing it or what do you mean by flattening? I mean making it equitably distributed among all types of farmers. So instead of having a huge subsidy go to eight crops,

Starting point is 01:02:05 have a small subsidy go to every crop. If we're going to subsidize farming, let's subsidize all farming in the US. And if we're going to subsidize any type of farming, I don't think it's fair to say we're going to massively eliminate subsidies to large scale farms or corn or wheat or those different things, but we need to have a flattened subsidy. So a subsidy system that isn't differentially favoring crops that are bad for human health. So incentives for regenerative agriculture? Well, in other countries, there are simply tax breaks for farmers as a category. Okay. So that's something to consider. Instead of saying we're going to give an operational subsidy to producers of this one specific crop, we could say we're just going to give an operational subsidy in the form of tax relief to all farmers.

Starting point is 01:02:54 That's a big idea. That's a big idea. I mean, that to me would say we're going to incentivize food production in interest of food security, which I agree is a national priority, but we're not going to specify that it has to be these specific eight crops that also happen to be pretty unhealthy. Yeah. I mean, if I were king for a day and had autocratic power, I would essentially put in one rule, which is that any food produced in this country must have as its requirement that it's high quality. And we can define high quality, nutrient density, promotes health, promotes a healthy environment. You know, it's all the things we would say in terms of food and food production, but you know, quality has to be king.

Starting point is 01:03:37 And I think if we did that, it would make a huge difference. I don't see that happening, but you know, for example, we give school lunches, we have quality standards, we can improve those, obviously. But for SNAP, there's no quality standards. For procurement for food and purchasing in the government, there's no standards. For what we grow, there's no standards that has to produce quality food. I mean, to produce corn and soy the way we're doing it, that gets put into industrial food products that make us sick and fat and cost the government huge amounts of money and Medicare, Medicaid. And I mean, it all falls apart when you focus on quality. And that's really what Belcampo is about. It's about producing quality for the earth, for humans,

Starting point is 01:04:18 for the animals, in all levels of the system. Yeah, I agree with that. It's difficult with the word quality because it's qualitative, right? But I think broadly, if I was to look at what could lead to better quality, it's, you know, right now we actively subsidize the worst quality foods, right? And we don't have any incentivization or any kind of structure or rigor around assessing that point that you brought up earlier, which is the bigger picture impact of our choices in agriculture. So those are the kind of the two areas that I think are the most interesting to explore from a policy perspective is like,

Starting point is 01:04:54 how do we change subsidies to equally, not disincentivize the other stuff, but maybe equally incentivize all the stuff. I would disincentivize the bad stuff. I would actually have the costs not be so externalized. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. I mean, looking at ways to bake in those costs is a very interesting idea. cheaper significantly cheaper to chemically grow corn harvest it mechanically store it usually in a modified environment truck it then to a cow and then feed it to it that it is to just let a cow out on a pasture and let it eat till it's full yeah that's nuts it is that's the major sticky point for me is like let's's make that. It should be easier to just let a cow out onto grass. Granted, if that's organic grass and it's like all the groovy species, whatever. But like, even if it's just regular old grass, it's still cheaper to

Starting point is 01:05:56 chemically grow corn, mechanically harvest it, truck it, store it, truck it again, store it again and feed it to a cow than it is to just let the cow out into your backyard. That really doesn't make sense. And that's the fundamental diseconomy that we've got. And it's doing us a disservice on so many different levels. That's the fundamental issue is that cost basis. And so it's interesting when I hear all of this vigorous resentment of the beef industry. I'm like, you realize this is just all in the service of agribusiness. You know, it's a pretty fundamentally like pro agribusiness angle, like to just embrace veganism. Because that's actually, I think you're just

Starting point is 01:06:36 supporting the same aggregating corn base. I mean, they see the right end of the wall too. They're like, people are eating less granola bars. They're eating less highly processed cereals. There's this vast infrastructure built to make all that garbage. So now they're just getting ready to pivot to something that feels better. And it's vegan protein. That's the thing. It's like the next highly processed plant-based garbage that they're going to convince you to eat. So I think it's fundamentally an agribusiness-backed message to effectively kind of kill one of its own. I think you're right backed message to effectively kind of kill one of its own. I think you're right. That's a very

Starting point is 01:07:09 important insight. To like push us too, because what are we going to do with that? You know, we stopped eating as much, you know, as much Cheerios and we stopped feeling good about giving, you know, like Twizzlers and snacks to our kids. So there's been some shifts recently. So how are they going to get us back, you know, from this whole foods kind of migration? And, and that's gotta be, that's a lot of people are thinking about that right now. And to me, they kind of, yeah, the composition of those products is too similar to the garbage. It's too similar to the garbage to make me think that it's not connected, you know? It's a bait and switch. Yeah. Yeah. So if people want to get more involved in learning about regenerative agriculture or eating those products, where should they start?

Starting point is 01:07:49 So regenerative is an unregulated word, right? Just like grass fed and finishes. But starting with a farm that at least claims to be regenerative and doing some research into it is a great place to start. Now, if you're looking for regenerative from a local farm, it's probably going to be at your farmer's market. It's unlikely that any of your grocery stores are going to be stocking it unless it's a really small kind of alternative shop. For people that ship nationally, Belcampo, of course, is available nationwide. There's a few other regenerative operations like White Oak Pastures is one of them. Porter Road down in the Southeast does an amazing job with sourcing. So you can look for those words. In other words, you want to see, or you could see in place of regenerative is climate positive. And if you're not seeing the word regenerative, climate positive, the three things that would suggest that that's the kind of operation is grass-fed and finished, right, is one claim, organic certified, and then some type

Starting point is 01:08:41 of certified humane or animal welfare association approved. So those three together are pretty much a proxy for the regenerative approach. That's great. And if people are interested, they can go to belcampo.com. They can learn about what you're doing. Can they order belcampo meat there? They can do everything there. You can find out about restaurants in California, and then we ship nationwide now a free delivery over a hundred bucks. So it's very accessible. It's usually two-day shipping. And we're filling out of the East Coast now as well. So it's speedy and delivered frozen. That's something that's really blossomed for us

Starting point is 01:09:11 during COVID and it's been amazing for the business. It's just a huge, huge way for us to grow, to control margin, to manage the customer experience. So it's a great way. I mean, supporting Belcampo that way or any firm with direct purchasing is huge. Many people don't realize that when you go into a grocery store and buy,

Starting point is 01:09:31 there's a couple layers of people taking a percentage. You know, so it ends up usually being about 60% of what's on top of their farmer costs. So if you're buying direct, you're basically giving 60% more to the supplier, which is really crucial for operations like ours. Incredible. Yeah, direct, you know, just cutting out the middleman is a great idea and you know that's sort of what

Starting point is 01:09:48 you're talking about in regenerative agriculture cutting out the middleman which is all the farming and the corn production the soy production that has to go into feeding the animals you're just like let me grass right um and and for people want to learn more about regenerative agriculture there's also an incredible report by the rodale institute it's called regenerative agriculture in the soil carbon solution and you can just Google it in Rodale Institute. It's really a wonderful detailed understanding of how to actually use regenerative agriculture to solve so many of our problems in terms of human and planetary health and actually in ways that are good for animals. Anya, you are an incredible inspiration to me and so many people, I think, by what you're doing. You've really gone

Starting point is 01:10:24 and created something unique, remarkable. And I encourage everybody to check out Valcampo. Just go to the website. It's beautiful. You'll learn all about it. You can learn more about regenerative agriculture. Watch Kiss the Ground, which hopefully you've seen. I'm in it, but I'm just a small bit part. But it's an incredible movie that talks about regenerative agriculture. And I encourage everybody to watch that. And Anya, thanks so much for being on the Doctors Pharmacy podcast and helping us learn more about the nuances of regenerative agriculture and grass-fed meat and why it's so important to our health and planetary health. Thank you so much for having me.

Starting point is 01:10:59 Yeah, of course. And if you love this podcast, please share with your friends and family, share it on social media, leave a comment. We'd love to hear from you and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey, everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast.

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The Dr. Hyman Show - Why Eliminating Meat From Our Diet Isn’t The Solution To Climate Change with Anya Fernald

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