An Irreplaceable Treasure

A major problem with expanding regenerative agriculture in Minnesota is the lack of infrastructure to support farmers who want to opt-out of the industrial food chain. And despite a lot of buzzwords to make consumers think they’re buying a quality product, the truth is that finding food that meets our health and ethical standards is a challenge. 

This episode of Nourish by MN350  was written, produced, and hosted by Food Systems activist Eli Crain. “An Irreplaceable Treasure” features Jack McCann of TC Farm, whose cooperative-style food group connects local producers directly to consumers who value transparency in their food system. Elizabeth O'Sullivan of Auntie Annie’s Fields shares how working in partnership with TC Farm allows her to produce food in a way that reflects her values and still focuses on what she loves about the job: tending to the land and the animals she treasures.

Transcript

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

farm, people, consumers, farmers, food, chickens, infrastructure, land, soil, conventional raised, eggs, conventional,  build, animals

SPEAKERS

Eli, Elizabeth, Jack

Elizabeth  00:00

And this industrial model, it's getting a lot of food out there. But it's not something that we can keep on like this, it's not tested against the test of time, we keep hoping there's going to be some other kind of invention, or technology that will help us get around these environmental tragedies that are happening because of our farming. But like the soil that's getting damaged by the excess nitrogen and the constant tilling and the erosion, that's like a treasure that took how many eons to build? That's like, a treasure of the world, like the treasure of Minnesota and Iowa’s soil that's irreplaceable. 

Eli  02:06

And we can start with question number one, which is basically, Jack: What was your career before you started TC farm and how did you decide to become a farmer and the progression of farming on your own to what TC farm is now?

Jack  03:50

So Betsy and I, my wife Betsy and I, we both grew up in Eden Prairie as consumers, we had no idea what anything about farming and she always says she married a computer guy and doesn't understand how she ended up on a hobby farm in Montrose. So she was kind of surprised about that life turn and so was I. But our background, we love to cook, we love really good food. But my business that I worked on was IT and computer work. We built that business up, sold it to the Geek Squad spin off, and eventually became part of Loeffler in town here. And I did consulting in heavy industry, refinery, power plants and some cool geothermal and hydroelectric plant consulting in California. But we loved learning about food, and we read all of the gateway drug foodie books like Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore's Dilemma, and all those similar books I'm sure you know about. And what we found was that we would try to find better food at the grocery store or the farmers market. And when we asked one or two questions deep, we found that it really wasn't quite what we thought we were buying as a consumer. We became a little discouraged that maybe this exists in a book, and maybe there's someone in Virginia that does a nice job, but really very difficult to if we're actually touring a farm, we can't really find anybody using organic feed, can't really find anybody doing heritage breeds and raising it the way that as a consumer we wanted it raised. You know, one of the examples I like to give now, as a consumer, we go to the grocery store and now there's all kinds of cool pasture-raised eggs, you know, that didn't exist in the store. And what I didn't know until recently is that almost all those eggs that say pasture raised in the grocery, the chickens just have access to the outside, but they're not really doing it. There's 20,000 birds in one barn. If they go outside at all, it's probably just a dirt lot. It's not what we think of as a consumer as pasture. And the way that they get those yolks looks so nice and orange, they just put colorants in the feed, to make us think as a consumer that we're getting those eggs that we read about so passionately in Michael Pollen's books. And it feels really frustrating for me, as my career has progressed to becoming a consumer advocate that people cannot really believe what the labels say, because they don't mean what we want them to mean as a consumer. And there's no agency out there, there's no grocery stores out there that are really being transparent, at least in the Midwest. We like to think local food is good. And it is a good thing. And it gives you the option to be good. But you know, we're in the middle of factory farm central here in the Midwest, and so local is maybe not better like it might be local in Maine or something. You know, if you get a local chicken in Maine, it's probably not coming from a factory farm. So as a consumer, we were frustrated about it. And we decided we would just make our own hobby farm for our own chickens, we would just raise it all for ourselves. And we would try to get - I wish I could say I went into it because we wanted to save the world or all the other reasons that are important, like animal welfare and regenerative farming and carbon capture - but to be honest, we just wanted to get the best tasting chicken that was possible. And nobody was raising the different breeds that would taste better and raising them in an organic way that we could find. So we raised our own chickens, and we taste-tested, it was totally different. This chicken next to that chicken, we just raised them outside free range chickens, you know, like you imagined it would really be. And they were amazing. And we had no idea what we were doing. We had tons of chickens and ducks and geese. It was like Noah’s Ark or something; we really did kind of get in over our heads, being a couple of suburban kids, not knowing what we were doing, but we figured it out. And over, you know, we thought maybe we can make this into a business, everybody's gonna want these great tasting, healthfully raised, everybody's gonna want these chickens that were raised, well. You know, the way that we really wanted them to be. So we decided to make a meat CSA that customers could subscribe and help support making this kind of food available. We thought maybe 50 customers, maybe 80 customers would make a kind of a lifestyle business where I could spend my time taking care of chickens instead of taking care of power plants. And so we started that, and we had no idea how much work it really was. And we learned very quickly. And now you know, 10 years later, we have a couple 1000 members who are supporting the change that we're trying to make in agriculture and in the local food system and we're supporting dozens of farms that are now able to focus on doing really good work. And it's nice to be able to connect all the people who care about this with with the farms who also care and give everybody the opportunity to know exactly how their food is really being raised. And to give farmers the opportunity to focus on the care of their soil, their animals, the plants and really take care of the things the way that they wanted to be able to do.

Eli  09:44

That is awesome. That feels like the most succinct way you could describe what the purpose of TC farm is. Yes, no, that was awesome. So - Elizabeth as one of those farmers that is part of the cooperative that is TC Farm, what drove you to start your business? And how has working with TC Farm, you know, made a difference in your style of farming. How why is it that you chose to continue to work with TC Farm rather than maybe other outlets for selling your eggs and your birds? 

Elizabeth  11:26

So I wanted to be a farmer when I was a kid. And I wanted to be that I think because of the stories that my mom told about her relatives who lived in the northwest part of Minnesota. And I think that her love for them spilled over into her descriptions of farming. And so I grew up thinking that the best, you know, way of living would be a farmer. And I think she was kind of shocked that I came away with that understanding, because her love was more directed at the people than the farming. But that's what I absorbed, in addition to loving the people. And so that's what I wanted. And I also have, ever since I was a child, have had a really deep connection with the natural world. It's been just really important to me all my life. And so when we were younger, Ian and I started off living in The Cities as he was teaching and I was writing. We'd both worked on a few farms when we were younger in high school and college. But we began our life and had a family in Minneapolis. But the idea of farming never left us and it weighed on me almost every day. And so about 12 years ago now, we left the beautiful community in the life we've built in Minneapolis and moved down to a foreclosed form of acres, and started farming. And we raised chickens because I had grown up with chickens. I like chickens, we'd had a couple dozen when I was a kid. And also, we wanted to raise them organic and on pasture. Because that felt like a really deep connection with both the family history of raising animals on pasture and without so many chemical inputs - that's a very traditional way of doing it, it hasn't been that long that people have been doing non-organic farming. And that also positioned us in a place where we could really care for the earth better by using organic feed and keeping the land planted in perennials; we hear so many more frogs than we hear on the land around us where they're just growing conventional corn and soy. And showing up in that way for the land is really important to me, because I'm just aware of the generosity that the land shows up for us every day. Every time you sit down to eat food, you are partaking in the generosity of the land and all the things that grow on it. And I really feel moved to reciprocate that in the best way that I can. And so our farming methods play that out in a concrete way.

Eli  14:18

I would love to hear about, you know, the ways that you can see that playing out; like the ways that you are giving back to the land by choosing to farm this way, 

Elizabeth  14:43

Well, we figured it out this year: we bought $50,000 of organic feed, and that means that we were able to protect roughly 70 acres in addition to our own land and that makes a really big difference for me. I'm aware of the impact that a lot of agricultural chemicals have on people's health; studies have linked them with ADHD, dementia, different kinds of cancers in people, and just the profound impact that the industrial style farming has both on their land and on the water quality. I think the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is now around the size of New Jersey. So even far away, what happens to the land here has an impact. And just because I'm really passionate about the welfare of the land, it troubles me knowing that there's so much poison being sprayed on it. Sometimes when they spray, we have to go inside because it's really intense. 

Eli  16:02

How does that feel to be choosing to take care of the land the way that you are? And then having to go inside to avoid the pesticides and things that your neighbors are spraying? You know, what does that feel like?

Elizabeth  16:32

For me, I mean, in terms of our relationships with our neighbors, it's kind of an exercise in compassion, and knowing that people are doing the best they can to take care of the land and the way that they've been taught to produce a lot of food, being told that that’s valuable, dealing with all kinds of government subsidies, everything, people are juggling a lot. And I think especially in the country, living with people coming with different understandings, you just have to appreciate them as people. You know I love my land so much. I love my animals, I love my kids. And there's so much going on in the world that we don't have control over. And so it's just such a gift for me to know that I've control over this little piece, that the frogs in my piece aren't getting sprayed. And when they spray around it, I feel it almost physically. It just brings up a more protective energy in me, like a mom, you know, it makes me feel more committed. 

Jack

You're like Mother Earth for your 20 acres. 

Eli  18:33

We want more 20 acres being protected, you know, and that's not a small thing. And as we're going to continue to talk about, there's a lot of reasons why it's difficult to imagine a future where it's a greater patchwork of 20 acres than there is now. We're surrounded by conventional farms. And that's a structure that's poisoning our food, our water, destroying our soil. You know, the purpose of farming like this is to do the opposite: it is to regenerate our land, and it is to protect it for future generations. But it's not incentivized the same way that conventional farming is. And there's a lot of things to consider about prices and accessibility to the food. So it's not an easy issue. So there's all these moving pieces and I think I want us to talk about what it takes to be a regenerative farmer and to have a lifestyle that’s sustainable as a regenerative farmer.

Eli  17:11

There's all sorts of challenges for farmers, conventional or not. And I think that's partially what TC Farm is trying to do - to make fewer barriers of entry for people who are choosing to farm in a way that is not conventional. And I'd love to hear more about that from Jack of what those barriers are, and also from you, Elizabeth - what the barriers were building your business up and trying to make a living farming this way. 

Jack  20:50

So one of the challenges to make food like this, more accessible to consumers, is like you mentioned: the transparency. Consumers need to know what they're actually buying, so they can make those choices with their dollars when they think they're buying something that's raised the way they want it to be, that money needs to go into the system they think they're supporting, not into the system they're trying not to support. So that's the key thing from a consumer perspective. But in order to make those products available to consumers to purchase the farms, like Elizabeth and Ian and others who are doing great work whether they're part of our group or not, they need access to the infrastructure that's needed to get their products from their farm to the consumers houses. And that infrastructure, frankly, just is a patchwork and very fragile and doesn't really exist in a meaningful way. It costs more money for us to process and turn Elizabeth’s chickens into food than it would for us to go to Costco and purchase a whole cooked chicken. So the infrastructure itself is just not available, and it doesn't need to be that inefficient. But if we can work on building the infrastructure itself, we can solve a lot of those cost issues. One of the things we're trying to do is allow the farmers to focus on taking care of their animals and do a really good job on the work they'd like to do. 

Elizabeth 22:36

Yeah, cuz you're letting them focus, because infrastructure is such a trip. 

Eli 

And I think that's it, like there is no infrastructure so a regenerative farmer has to be a marketer, a  business owner, a farmer, and like an educator. 

Jack  24:41

So for us, if, you know, I read all the books from a consumer perspective, but Joel Salatin and the others also have tons of books. “You Can Farm” I think is one of them. It says if you just raised so many chickens, you'll make $25,000 a year and it'll be super easy. And all you gotta do is throw some feed out there and slaughter some chickens and you’ll be fine. And what I found is that's just not remotely accurate, at all. Of all of the farms that started their farm when we did, maybe one or two of them that I was friends with, you know, are still farming. The idea of a sustainable local farming system is not realistic at all, in the way that it's being sold to consumers. None of those products are really sold in the grocery store, except for very few exceptions. What we struggled with, when we started our farm, thinking all these idealistic things, these big famous people tell us this is easy to do. All you got to do is take care of the animals and everything will be fine. You know, we got really in over our heads and were very overwhelmed. We had to survive, and we have no kids. And we work all the time. All the time. There's nothing except working, learning things, building things, breaking things and we realized that we did everything ourselves. We had a butcher's license, we delivered all the food, we organized all the food. And we were extremely lucky to have access, just even fleeting access to pieces of infrastructure. And now what we're trying to do is go back and look at all the things we struggled with. What are the pieces of infrastructure that are not publicly available to these farms that they actually need to make this farming viable and sustainable, both from a lifestyle perspective and economically? Just because you're sustainable or regenerative, that's the new term that people like to kind of apply, it doesn't mean anything if you can't survive the business or keep your family together because you're working 100 hours a week to make this “sustainable agricultural” work. So we are trying to build the infrastructure and allowing other farms even if they're not selling on the TC Farm brand, to connect to their customers in a way that is more economical, that allows them to have a lifestyle where they're not spending 20-30 hours a week standing at a farmer’s market stand or three days a week driving around doing deliveries in the back of their van, you know wildly uneconomical and in no way sustainable from a lifestyle perspective if you want to raise a family and think about having a time to yourself. So our goal is to allow farmers to focus on their passion and build it so that they're able to do that. 

Eli  31:23

I think the one tiny little piece I'd love us to circle back to his Why? Why do you want to farm this way? Like what are the benefits of farming? Like why are people choosing to break their backs working 100-hour weeks for as long as they do to farm this way? You know, I would love to have that piece talked about a little more.

Elizabeth  31:51

Like I mean it because it is really hard. It is really hard. Like we wouldn't even be doing it anymore, if it wasn't for Jack, we couldn't sell it to the Co-ops at that price that we would have gotten just made no sense that we would have been paying for the privilege of having other people eat our chickens like it made no sense. The farmers markets, although I love meeting the people, took so much time and effort and didn't didn't make sense financially, I got hurt moving these big freezers in and out of a trailer on ramps. But so why are we still doing it? Because it is very hard. And I don't know sometimes, I'm not sure it's wise. But I also feel like, in some way, now that I've been farming, I don't have to feel like I'm trying to be someone I'm not. And that goes a long way. And also, I don't know how better to have a deeply intimate relationship with the land. Like Jack said, it was a loss when we started doing his eggs. And I can really relate to that, because there is an intimacy that comes with producing your own food. And that intimacy always does involve hard times, as well as joy, like otherwise it wouldn't be intimacy. But there's just a deep connection, and respect, and nourishment that comes out of being closely involved in the animals and the plants and the weather that produces the food that nourishes us, and it's not just the physical nourishment, it's like, whole life kind of nourishment. 

Eli  34:36

It's so lucky to get to have that connection. And so many of us are so far removed from that spiritual aspect of our food and like the nourishment of nourishing your body. We aren’t necessarily always aware of that, and that is such a privilege to get to experience. 

Jack  35:00

One of the things that kept us going in the beginning was, you know, we were a pretty small, scrappy organization with just a handful of members. But you know, people sought us out. They were looking to heal their bodies, from autoimmune disease or their kids mental health challenges, they kind of were advised maybe to try to find a different diet for their kids, whether it was just getting them off food dyes, and they wanted to go more natural foods or try different types of food - food as health. And it has really been striking over the years to hear so many members share their health challenges. And what they've done using the food from our farms as part of their journey to heal themselves, whether it's a histamine issue, or food intolerance, and really have learned a lot of intimate stories and seen some miraculous healing, just from changing their overall life. Food is just a piece of it. So I would say some people are looking for a health perspective, some people are seeking out food like this from an animal welfare perspective, and I can share that, you know, as a suburban kid growing up, and you have a small farm, and these are really your pets, but at the end of the day, they're being turned into food. And that process of accepting that, going through that is something I don't know you can really understand without doing it and having a respectful transition in a cycle of life seeing that transition from, you know, animal, and then into food makes it so critical that those animals live a long, healthy, respectful life, that when you're actually part of that intimately, you really want to make sure that everything you can be done to take care of them is there; and then that sense, when you're working with farmers who view their animals as individuals and not as 50 cents here and $10 there, all of a sudden, you can know that the humanities, they're looking after your interest as well. It can be pretty hard; the finances are part of that. If you have to raise an animal for $1 profit, you know, or $10 profit for a pig, they're taken care of for six months. It's really hard to view that animal as an individual, when you have to have 1000s of them just to pay the feed bill. 

Eli  38:16  

It sounds like a lot of the motivation to keep doing this really hard work and keep butting up against problems of lack of infrastructure, or that people aren't necessarily excited to pay what the true value of food is when grown this way. You know, it is like a personal fulfillment and a personal connection to the land. But I think, you know, there's also this larger picture: you guys as farmers who are farming in this way are providing a larger service to our entire community, right? By protecting water, and, you know, carbon sequestration. And I'd love to talk to you about some of those, like, kind of macro pieces of why there is a movement of people who want to farm in this way. And that there's a movement of people trying to create a local regenerative food system, that obviously is not as easy to achieve as, as some of the kind of like, pop culture around it has made it seem. I think it'd be great if we could talk about that piece of it as well. Not only is it like this beautiful spiritual-like important connectivity in nature piece but it's also like, we have to do this because the way that we have been farming is poisoning us. And there's a reason that there's only 60  years of soil left, according to the IPCC report, you know what I mean? Why do we want to shift our entire or most of our food system away from this industrial model that's artificially cheap, and has an externalized cost. 

Elizabeth  40:40

So I think what is now standard or conventional agriculture, it feels like it's just the way things are. But it's, it's really, fairly new. Right, like we named our farm Auntie Annie's Fields after my mom's favorite aunt in Northwestern Minnesota. And they had a laying flock of 700 birds, they did row crops, it was organic, because they didn't really have the option of not being organic. And so there's a tradition of sustainable agriculture that has only been interrupted in the more recent generations. Like our farm mentor, who passed away a little over a year ago, he grew up in Iowa, and he grew up where they would rotate row crops with pasture, with hay, and all the fields had a fence around them. And he would be out with his brothers and sisters in the night and thunderstorms to keep the chicks from running into the corners and hurting each other. So it's very intimate that these diverse farms that you think of as like the children's storybook farms, sustain the people that lived on them, and the community. And that's a very old way of doing things for a lot of our forefathers, you know, it got us this far. And this industrial model, it's getting a lot of food out there. But it's not something that we can keep on like this, it's not tested against the test of time, we keep hoping there's going to be some other kind of invention, or technology that will help us get around these environmental tragedies that are happening because of our farming. But like the soil that's getting damaged by the excess nitrogen and the constant tilling and the erosion, that's like a treasure that took how many eons to build? That's like, a treasure of the world, like the treasure of Minnesota and Iowa’s soil that's irreplaceable. I really think of soil as a living thing. Like if you have a teaspoon, like how many millions of living things are in that? I believe the soil has a life. And it's not just getting damaged, but injured in ways that are really serious: this ancient ancient provider of life. Every time they come around with the spray, it hurts my body, like I can feel it. And it's not just me, you know, they did a map of the degradation of soils globally, and the soil that we are on - this treasure - was some of the most degraded. It was colored red, like the most degraded. This is the soil, that like, I feel like my people hurt in this way. And I take it really personally. And I don't know how to change that or how to make up for that. But I want to keep trying a little bit. It feels silly, the amount I'm able to do compared with the scope of the problem, but also just the love that you put into a thing matters. Like even if you don't see the outcome, like no love is wasted. And this love of this soil and this love of this earth is not wasted. And as a farmer, I feel like I am the representative of many people in my love of the land, in my love of this piece of land and how it will nourish them. Like I am the representative. And I'm doing it with love, even though in the big scheme of things I'm worried it won't make enough difference.

Eli  45:33

I just want to say a moment of silence for that, like, extremely powerful.

Jack

You're all teared up there. 

Eli 

I know. I mean, that's the whole essence of like - it's a small thing in the grand scope, but it's a powerful thing in a personal interconnectedness community. You have to toggle back and forth between the big scale and the personal and like finding the motivation in each one.  

Jack  48:05

Well I think if you hear all the passion and wonderful things that Elizabeth just described about her farm and the connection to the soil, and you contrast that with what's happening for most agriculture, in especially in the grocery stores, and even at markets, and especially online - there's a lot of greenwashing happening - where consumers want to support those things that Elizabeth just described. But the dollars are probably not hitting the target. In most cases, consumers, what they need to do to take action to make a difference is ask the questions. You know, every once in a while I'll have a customer or potential customer call, or message and I'll spend probably way too much time explaining to them all of the things that we exactly do and and when they're really challenging me and saying, How are you going to prove this is the way that you're really doing it? Those are the ones that I really appreciate and respect because they're going out of their comfort zone. You know, how do you go to someone at a farmer’s market and say, Did you really raise all of this chicken? Or is it just maybe Tyson chicken that you're reselling because of the realities that we talked about earlier? This is not financially or sustainable and not a lifestyle sustainable without almost pinning from that and having consumers ask the store: Why don't you have a chart up that says exactly where things come from? And knowing what I know now the last 10 years, in most cases, the reason they don't have a chart that tells you where their food is really coming from that grocery store and how it's really raised is because they don't really want you to know what's happening. Because they don't have access, the grocery stores, as well-intended as they are, they do not have access to food that's raised the way that Elizabeth just described. And what we need to build is an infrastructure to make it more accessible through whatever channel that's there and not have that infrastructure - those choke points - in getting the food from a farmer to the consumer being controlled by two or three or four major companies. And the inability for farmers who are trying to do the right thing, to even connect to the grocery stores who are trying to do the right thing, they don't have that option. So our goal is to fix that by working with farms who want to sell direct to consumers, because I believe that's really the only way forward to make that lifestyle more sustainable. And give a level of transparency to consumers that aren't there. You asked earlier, Eli, about the cost of food, and when we were talking before with this, you asked earlier Eli about you know, cost of food, and this is more expensive, and how does that really work. And one of the things we can do to lower the cost is to get more dollars flowing into this better, truly better solution, and lower the cost by building this infrastructure. But at the end of the day, it's going to cost more to purchase food that is not externalizing those costs: that is not releasing carbon from the soil, but capturing carbon from the air and sequestering it in the soil. That's just going to cost more money to have somebody actually care for the animals, instead of viewing them as products that they're shuffling through their system. So if you have people who actually care and spend time, it is going to cost them more. But if you look at it from a macro economic perspective, even the most expensive food out there is less expensive as a percentage of our economy. The real issue with quality food is really income inequality. If we just had the income inequality, back in the great old days of the Reagan era, you know, you would see if we had all the wealth distributed the same way it was then, none of these really expensive foods would seem expensive to anybody in an even lower-middle class level of income because we have so much wealth right now being created and is not being distributed in a way that allows people to purchase everybody to have access to this quality of food. So I think for those of us who are fortunate to have the option to afford chicken that maybe costs twice as much money, or eggs that are 50 cents more than the greenwashed eggs at the grocery store, those of us have a responsibility to spend that extra 50 cents, or that extra dollar to build the infrastructure up so that it becomes more accessible to others. And we can as a group, kind of snowball that impact and get more farms, building things in a way that heals the soil, heals our bodies, and takes care of animals and the plants with respect that are feeding us.

Eli  53:16

You know, agriculture as a whole is such a big topic. And part of the reason people want to buy pasture-raised beef is because it's better for the animal, whatever. But also people are like, into this idea of it being green. It's greenwashing. Because of this. People have started to make the connection that agriculture has an ecological impact.  

Jack  55:44

The problems that we're trying to solve are extensive and it's hard to encapsulate specific things, but here are just some examples of what we've learned over the last you know, decade as new farmers from the suburbs learning what do other people do? You know, we toured Cedar Summit Farm before we were farmers, and if you walk around their pasture, they were pasture-based dairy and in the South Metro, and if you walk around their dairy, they are all grass fed rotationally, grazed regenerative before the regenerative was a word. And if you walked to the edge of their property, and you stepped into the neighbor's conventional field, you had to step down like a solid foot to get to the other person's property, because the neighbor had degraded that soil so much, washed it away, all that carbon was released into the atmosphere. But on the other side of the fence, they were sequestering that carbon, all those leaves that were growing. And so they built up their soil, and it wasn't even that long. And there's literally a foot of difference. The fence posts were just so awkward, one side of the fence posts was so high and the other side was so low. And that's what you see on our fields and our farms as well. That's being built up. And so those environmental impacts are visual, and you can see it, but some of them, you can't. You look at the chemicals that are used, a lot of the chemicals used in our country are banned in other countries, especially ones that are arsenic based. You even have in the Bush Administration, the Congress passed a law to prevent the EPA from releasing its toxicity report on arsenic. And the reason for that was because primary of some significant pesticides, herbicides that were being used in conventional farming contain high levels of arsenic in their thing. And we found in the preliminary reports that were prevented from being finalized, that arsenic was way more toxic than lead. High cancer, huge cancer causing with very small amounts of arsenic. And here we are spraying it all over the fields. It's getting into the soil, it's getting into the groundwater. And even at the time, you know, we're feeding it to chickens, because the chickens grew a little tiny bit faster if they had extra arsenic in them, because I don't even know why. But it caused them to grow more efficiently. And we're filling up the kids with extra arsenic in their chicken, which is, again, if the EPA had been allowed to release their report, you would see that it's more toxic to children than lead poisoning, I mean dramatically so. And so you have this whole industry, stopping science, stopping people from knowing what's really happening to their food, the groundwater being poisoned with different sprays very quickly going right through some of the soils, especially in Southern Minnesota. People having high levels of nitrate in their groundwater, or other chemicals that have been tied back to large rates of miscarriages in communities or birth defects and things like that. So these chemicals are not just affecting the environment, but they're affecting the people. You see the animals, the whole ecosystem is really on a knife edge because of what conventional agriculture has done to the local and the global environment. And it really isn't sustainable. I think if we stop for a minute and think if agriculture is not being done sustainably, what is going to feed us later? It isn't just a buzzword. It doesn't need to be on a label. It truly needs to be something that's sustainable, or there will not be food for us to eat. And so would you rather have cheap food now and no food later? Or a little bit better raised food now and have food for our children and grandchildren? And it really is that dire. Sure, they’re gonna come up with new ideas and make things more efficient but at some point, it's just like a Ponzi scheme when it ends.

Eli  59:56

Yes, that was very dark, but yes, that's exactly the reason why people break their back to farm in a different way once they find that out. That is why this other type of farming exists that isn't new.

Jack  1:01:14

I think it's really important, it's really important to view the conventional farmers, nobody's out there trying to do these bad things. Nobody's out there trying to poison frogs, or do whatever. Everybody is trying to do good work, whether they're a conventional farmer, or a regenerative farmer, or whatever label you want to put on them. I have met so many conventional farmers that I really respect, who do great work, and they're trying to do good work. And they may just not be aware of the impacts that we see. Or maybe they have a different perspective about those impacts. You asked about the infrastructure and I think if we can open up the infrastructure and create opportunities for conventional or organic farmers to have the space and the economics to keep doing better, and to not feel trapped by the government structure and the government subsidy and big Ag, a lot of farmers want to do incremental improvements that will make a big difference. But they don't really have a way of doing that. So building infrastructure, like distribution direct to consumers, cold storage delivery systems, that these farms can plug into, access to processing that is economical, and an pays people fairly and doesn't doesn't abuse the workers to turn animals into food, you know, what, what can we do to make that appropriate economic structure? 

Elizabeth  1:03:40

I don't know that people who are not intimately involved in farming understand the role of that infrastructure you're talking about. Like,okay, we have some chickens running around in our field. We have some eggs in the barn, but to get those eggs washed and candled and packed is a big deal and to get the chickens dressed and packaged and frozen and ready to go, it's a big deal. And it's not just chickens, but like so many other farming products like wheat - you’ve got wheat, what are you going to do with that? Or you’ve got milk: that's doing nobody good in your bulk tank. This piece of how to get what you can grow on your land to people has been pretty systematically decimated by industrial agriculture. Like there used to be Creameries all over when these old fashioned barns were full of cows, there was a place nearby that would take your milk and turn it into something that could be delivered to people in a way that was useful to them, like in bottles, I think. But now there's this old Creamery just down the road that's sitting there empty, as there are all over the landscape. Finding processing for our chickens has been huge. And I remember last year, we and my husband and Jack were on the phone calling all over because at the last minute our processor was like, I don't think we're gonna be in business this season. Our kind of farm is so vulnerable because of that lack of infrastructure. 

Eli  1:08:49

I would love it if we could find some of those positive notes of what you hope to see in the future that makes you excited to keep doing what you do?

Jack  1:09:28

I think if you look forward on what could happen if consumers make a little bit of extra effort to find out what's really happening and vote with their time and dollars to ask those couple extra uncomfortable questions from the grocer or from the farmer’s market and make sure that whatever level they're comfortable at purchasing, they're moving up a little bit every every year, every two years or finding something a little bit better; And they're encouraging wherever they're going, from wherever they’re buying, if we want to get better. I think that if we can build the infrastructure to allow farmers to do more of what they want, and not what industrial ag tells them to do, whether they're a conventional farmer or not, I think that everybody has honor in making food for other people in the way that they know how to do it. And I think giving farmers the opportunity to access markets, and to experiment and to do something better for their land, the way they see it needs to be done, whether it's exactly how we think it should be done or not. Helping people just move in the direction that they feel is better and not being locked into a system that forces them down the lowest possible cost, is the only option for a lot of these farms to survive. I think that's what really needs to change. I think that's what we can do as a group of consumers and farmers to advocate both on our individual choices and, you know, at the government level to change policy.

Eli  1:10:58

What is your ideal vision of the Minneapolis-St. Paul Area Regional Food System? What is it that you want to see, like, paint a picture of what the opposite of industrial agriculture looks like as a consumer as a person educating yourself and buying like, What is it? What is it that you are helping to further? What vision are you helping to further as the listener, reader, whatever, by choosing to buy eggs this way, or choosing to support this type of business and agriculture. What is the vision that you are trying to move forward?

Jack  1:12:02

I think what we'd like to see is all of these farms, where they're part of the TC Farm Group, or independent, organic or conventional, in the way they're taking care of their land, whether it's for vegetable production, or animal products, that all of them have a way to clearly communicate, what makes their work special to them, and makes their work worthy of a consumer making that little extra effort and time to purchase. And then allowing those farms to easily connect directly to their customers. And the customers can see, this farm is doing things this way. And I want to support them. And having it be a simple product, click on the website, and that food will show up at their house with full transparency about what they're getting, they know for sure that the product that they're ordering is what they had chosen to get, and the attributes that were important for that customer. I'd like to make that infrastructure so from a farmer's perspective, they can focus on their land, their plants and their animals and hand that food off to get delivered to their end customer and maintain control over their standards. In what work they're trying to do.

Eli  1:13:25

Beautiful. Elizabeth, what is it that you hope to see and would like to be creating and part of it in the future of Auntie Annie's? 

Elizabeth  1:13:49

A food system that really nourishes the people and the land and the plants and the animals without these huge areas where it's causing damage. So it's really building everyone up, everything up. And to the extent that we're doing something that's a little bit different than what most producers are doing. I hope that we're kind of maintaining knowledge - not just our farm, but everyone who's trying to do this. Maintaining knowledge, maintaining skills, maintaining infrastructure, and systems to a degree so that if they're needed, they won't have to be totally recreated at some point in the future. We're trying to kind of keep it alive. For the time when possibly it could become a more dominant system again, because of necessity. 

Elli:

Awesome, thank you guys, so much.