Name: Fixing the Problem with Industrial Farming and Food Consolidation
Uploaded: 2023-11-14T18:34:46.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Fixing the Problem with Industrial Farming and Food Consolidation' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-11-14. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Fixing the Problem with Industrial Farming and Food Consolidation' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-11-14. Transcript available.

the Joe Rogan experience when when dad started talking about writing a book we
were like oh there's no way you know his brain is is truly cyclical just like
the
farm there's you know birth growth death decay birth growth death decay where
do
you start the chicken or the egg who came first and for him you know we had
talked about him writing a book for a very long time and honestly nobody knew
where to start and so he was approached by you know some folks who said hey we
think you know you'd be a great book writer and dad quickly told them there's
no way I can write a book no way in hell I don't know where to start and where
to
end I said well let us help you so they found a ghostwriter named Emily Grieven
who is great and she and dad had phone dates every Friday for probably a year
that lasted anywhere from two to four hours and in listening to the book dad
there and dad narrated it and it is like a glimpse inside of his brain it is
such a
all of his thoughts are there and you know I think it's so important because
you
know dad started a business and a mission that is gonna last a lot longer than
him
you know he's 69 this year and you know the food system is not going to be
fixed uh you know by the
time he is gone and so to be part of that and to be part of a business that's
you know bigger than
one person bigger than one person's life that last you know last so much longer
I think is so important
and people like him have got to focus on that you know he can't fix the food
system he has to set the
groundwork for people like you and I to fix the food system and then to instill
it in our children to fix the food system
what was the motivation to write this
you know I felt like people needed to know what I spent the last 25 years
learning
I'm not the only one that knows it but I'm the only one that has this
particular slant on it
I knew I couldn't write a book you know I went to the University of Georgia and
majored in agriculture
we didn't read many books we certainly didn't write a book when they approached
us about
about writing it uh it it just seemed like the thing to do and I give so much
credit to this
Amy the Graven that Jenny referenced who wrote it who actually
wrote my thoughts down on the paper
and do you think this is a one-time deal are you gonna write more books
I know damn well it took me 69 years to come up with enough shit to put in that
book
it seems like another book though someone should write is uh how this can be
fixed
and uh what steps need to be taken and I think it it needs to be taken and
for sure it needs to be taken at a governmental level
there's a bunch of books out there that I've seen that farmers have written
that I
I didn't agree with there's one dirt to soil by gay but brown that's great
so you know there are others
so there's if someone is out there that does run an industrial farm and is uh
sort of tortured by it
that it that they're aware of the consequences of what they're doing and they
would like to maybe
and they maybe admire what you've done and would like to move in that direction
well not since you mentioned it uh Gabe and I are both we're both in about the
same age we're both
industrial farmers that that went this route and uh there's some great regenerative
farmers out there
but there are a tremendous number of them that used to be uh an industrial farm
it's just just it's not a lot of that
how many industrial farms are there in this country
oh I have no idea a lot I mean a lot less than it used to be because they've
consolidated and gotten so much bigger
but I don't know that number that's that's well you were originally brought uh
onto that fox news show
because they were they were trying to figure out what a farmer thinks about
bill gates buying up farmland
you know bill gates who's uh famously said that everyone's got to stop eating
meat and eat these
bullshit fake meat versions these plant-based meats so there's 25 000 factory
farms factory farms continue
to take over the agricultural landscape of the united states are currently 1.6
billion animals in our nation's
25 000 factory farms which makes sense I mean if you you just you know go to arby's
where's that food
coming from well and you know the uneven so jamie you should google this but
when we talk about that
um the centralization of the meat industry is even more stark so what is it
four four um maybe four meat
processors in at least with beef occupy over 80 percent of the nation's beef
supply
you know just gave me this before we came in here but it's uh this is in 2023
you know the united
states has imported 956 million pounds of beef so far in 2023 wow that's
imported beef wow that's crazy
jamie will you pull up that um i think i named it like food consolidation or
something i bet most
people have no idea i bet most people listen to this are blown away by that
number that most people
would if you ask the average person on the street how much meat do you think is
imported from other
countries beef they would probably say none no they wouldn't even think of it
no especially if you get to
label it a product of the usa which is so dirty yeah you and and that's you
know consumers believe
they have the impression of choice they don't actually have choice the the
image that jamie's
going to show us i'm trying to find a cleaner one oh good blurry but yep here
it is so look at all these
brands that are owned by this you know 10 or so parent companies that's crazy
so you know consumers have
the um you know the impression that there is choice but truly there is no
choice the same is true with
with meat i think on tyson's website it has uh and i gave it to jamie but one
in every five pounds of
meat that's consumed in america is a tyson product wow whoa you know so we talk
about centralized food
we talk about food security do we really want a global food supply and the
answer is yes or no but
with regards to uh fragility in food think about covid uh and the effects of of
what it did to the
grocery store there we go one in five pounds of chicken beef and pork in the us
is produced by tyson foods
wow that's proudly registered on their website yeah there's another one that
talks about how many
animals they slaughter in a week and that's another just in incredible number
and the same is the
the other four pounds are produced by two or three other companies so like it
was tyson and everybody
else right right right will you pull up that that other one jamie because i
want to draw a correlation
between the the scale of this versus the scale of what farms like us do
no there's one that says like 177 000 cattle are processed um
anyways i'll tell you a little bit about about our model and then we can
compare it to that but
so when dad decided to build the the processing plant in 2007 he built it to
process 50 head of cattle a
week and we got to that number and we were still hemorrhaging money there was
no way that was going
to work and so we made a few modifications primarily around refrigeration uh we
dropped the chill time
yep that's it so our processing plant own farm processing plant will process 25
head of cattle a day
five days a week so it's 125 head a week compared to systems like this which is
also on tyson's website 155
5 000 head of cattle or processed per week in only 14 facilities wow that's
crazy and you know the further to
the right you go so you know pork 471 000 pigs are slaughtered in a week at
only seven facilities
47 million chickens per week and i've been in the i've been in those facilities
and it's not pretty but
that that that is the scale of food we've uh we've shown the footage of um
someone got drone footage
where they fly a drone over a pig farm and industrialized pig farm and you see
these lakes
of pig waste and it's so disgusting it's just toxic waste which is sad because
that waste is what created
that topsoil right at white oak pastures it's just right we took the livestock
off of the land we decoupled what had been
coupled for millions of years so these are these lakes now here's the question
why can't they take that
waste and redistribute it into the land and use it for fertilizer and there's
some of that doing but
it's expensive that's the problem that's expensive is that what they're doing
right here yeah i think so
yeah i remember them talking about the waste was getting spread on the people's
like houses because
the wind it would be in the air and then it right of course yeah well yeah indiscriminate
because they
want to do it cheaply oh yeah and and there's a difference between a cow or pig
or chicken defecating
here and there and there right it's spreading natural way that thick yes right
well and just
just to sort of tie all that together jamie you have one more thing and i swear
i'm going to quit
asking you to pull shit up that's what he does it's okay he likes it i have to
apologize he's
probably like who invited her no no no no no but there's there's uh one more
that's like our brands
so one in five uh pounds of meat we just read that was produced produced by tyson
but consumers have no
idea that it was a tyson product so if you look at the amount of brands that
you know these big
multinational meat corporations own there's no there's no uh no way for a
consumer to know that
that that's one of those products so it's just it's just a really incredible
system when you start
pulling the layers back on it and there's demand that's the other problem it's
like you're not going
to get them to stop doing that there's a massive demand for all this food yeah
and most people
listening to this are part of that demand most people listening to this have
stopped at a fast food
burger place this week and and picked up a product of this system yeah and they
want to be able to do
that if you're hungry and you're you're on the go and you want to be able to
pull into a drive-through
get a cheeseburger and some fries and a soda bam it takes it's kind of
extraordinary the system they've
created it sucks that you can't do it in a healthy way but it's kind of
extraordinary that you just pull
into someone and get a thousand calories like that so convenient and cheap yeah
very cheap incredibly
cheap yeah for the amount of calories and that and that is also reflected in
the health consequences
of impoverished people if you look at people that are poor that rely upon this
kind of food all the
time those are the people that have the worst health outcomes because they're
eating stuff that's
doesn't have any nutrients in it it's terrible for you it's filled with seed
oils and
bullshit and preservatives and i'm sure you've seen those um uh they've done
these uh little tests
where they've taken a mcdonald's cheeseburger and just sit it on a shelf yeah
oh yeah for like weeks
and nothing happens to it yeah yeah you could probably eat it which is so
insane that's crazy
i mean you could sit for weeks but you know these companies as bad as this is
these companies have
done what the public told them to do the public has said we want food cheaper
cheaper cheaper cheaper cheaper
cheaper quicker consistent quicker and you know you know how you get cheaper
and quicker okay this is
exactly the same after five years five years way to go jamie that is wild it
doesn't look that bad
that is crazy stick a fork in me i'm done wow so megan wants to find out
whether the cheeseburger
will stay the same after another five years so i bet it will i mean what's
going to change
five years said she's inspired to carry out the experiment after seeing an old
burger being
showcased in her doctor's office and so she set this burger down and just left
it out there for five
years and that's what it looks like hi megan kind of crazy but also disturbing
if you you eat that
like what is that doing to your gut microbiome what is that doing to your
health i mean the preservatives
have a consequence on your health the eating stuff that you know we were
talking about dog food earlier
and um i feed my dog raw food and i just started feeding him raw food about six
seven months ago and
it kind of it's embarrassing to me that that's the case because i always just
thought if you go to the
pets i didn't think about it you go to the pet store you buy healthy food uh
the best food that they
have available at a you know a nice pet store like this got to be good for the
dog oh look at all the
nutrients look at all the stuff but then i was thinking like how is it just
sitting there how can
it how how does it not go bad how does it not there's never mold on pet food
there's the cheeseburger
20 years oh my god a utah man 20 well there's your answer megan it doesn't even
look like that one's been
in the refrigerator no just sitting there i don't think hers was either dang
this guy's just hoarding
cheeseburgers this guy's got a 14 year old cheeseburger there's quite quite a
few of them he just breaks
it out every year for update oh my god that's insane that's insane the pickle
went bad yeah the pickle
went bad pickle kind of he's got it he's got the receipt that's incredible how
much was it 79 cents
79 cents not much more now which is pretty shocking yeah but there's a
consequence

Fixing the Problem with Industrial Farming and Food Consolidation

the Joe Rogan experience when when dad started talking about writing a book we
were like oh there's no way you know his brain is is truly cyclical just like
the
farm there's you know birth growth death decay birth growth death decay where
do
you start the chicken or the egg who came first and for him you know we had
talked about him writing a book for a very long time and honestly nobody knew
where to start and so he was approached by you know some folks who said hey we
think you know you'd be a great book writer and dad quickly told them there's
no way I can write a book no way in hell I don't know where to start and where
to
end I said well let us help you so they found a ghostwriter named Emily Grieven
who is great and she and dad had phone dates every Friday for probably a year
that lasted anywhere from two to four hours and in listening to the book dad
there and dad narrated it and it is like a glimpse inside of his brain it is
such a
all of his thoughts are there and you know I think it's so important because
you
know dad started a business and a mission that is gonna last a lot longer than
him
you know he's 69 this year and you know the food system is not going to be
fixed uh you know by the
time he is gone and so to be part of that and to be part of a business that's
you know bigger than
one person bigger than one person's life that last you know last so much longer
I think is so important
and people like him have got to focus on that you know he can't fix the food
system he has to set the
groundwork for people like you and I to fix the food system and then to instill
it in our children to fix the food system
what was the motivation to write this
you know I felt like people needed to know what I spent the last 25 years
learning
I'm not the only one that knows it but I'm the only one that has this
particular slant on it
I knew I couldn't write a book you know I went to the University of Georgia and
majored in agriculture
we didn't read many books we certainly didn't write a book when they approached
us about
about writing it uh it it just seemed like the thing to do and I give so much
credit to this
Amy the Graven that Jenny referenced who wrote it who actually
wrote my thoughts down on the paper
and do you think this is a one-time deal are you gonna write more books
I know damn well it took me 69 years to come up with enough shit to put in that
book
it seems like another book though someone should write is uh how this can be
fixed
and uh what steps need to be taken and I think it it needs to be taken and
for sure it needs to be taken at a governmental level
there's a bunch of books out there that I've seen that farmers have written
that I
I didn't agree with there's one dirt to soil by gay but brown that's great
so you know there are others
so there's if someone is out there that does run an industrial farm and is uh
sort of tortured by it
that it that they're aware of the consequences of what they're doing and they
would like to maybe
and they maybe admire what you've done and would like to move in that direction
well not since you mentioned it uh Gabe and I are both we're both in about the
same age we're both
industrial farmers that that went this route and uh there's some great regenerative
farmers out there
but there are a tremendous number of them that used to be uh an industrial farm
it's just just it's not a lot of that
how many industrial farms are there in this country
oh I have no idea a lot I mean a lot less than it used to be because they've
consolidated and gotten so much bigger
but I don't know that number that's that's well you were originally brought uh
onto that fox news show
because they were they were trying to figure out what a farmer thinks about
bill gates buying up farmland
you know bill gates who's uh famously said that everyone's got to stop eating
meat and eat these
bullshit fake meat versions these plant-based meats so there's 25 000 factory
farms factory farms continue
to take over the agricultural landscape of the united states are currently 1.6
billion animals in our nation's
25 000 factory farms which makes sense I mean if you you just you know go to arby's
where's that food
coming from well and you know the uneven so jamie you should google this but
when we talk about that
um the centralization of the meat industry is even more stark so what is it
four four um maybe four meat
processors in at least with beef occupy over 80 percent of the nation's beef
supply
you know just gave me this before we came in here but it's uh this is in 2023
you know the united
states has imported 956 million pounds of beef so far in 2023 wow that's
imported beef wow that's crazy
jamie will you pull up that um i think i named it like food consolidation or
something i bet most
people have no idea i bet most people listen to this are blown away by that
number that most people
would if you ask the average person on the street how much meat do you think is
imported from other
countries beef they would probably say none no they wouldn't even think of it
no especially if you get to
label it a product of the usa which is so dirty yeah you and and that's you
know consumers believe
they have the impression of choice they don't actually have choice the the
image that jamie's
going to show us i'm trying to find a cleaner one oh good blurry but yep here
it is so look at all these
brands that are owned by this you know 10 or so parent companies that's crazy
so you know consumers have
the um you know the impression that there is choice but truly there is no
choice the same is true with
with meat i think on tyson's website it has uh and i gave it to jamie but one
in every five pounds of
meat that's consumed in america is a tyson product wow whoa you know so we talk
about centralized food
we talk about food security do we really want a global food supply and the
answer is yes or no but
with regards to uh fragility in food think about covid uh and the effects of of
what it did to the
grocery store there we go one in five pounds of chicken beef and pork in the us
is produced by tyson foods
wow that's proudly registered on their website yeah there's another one that
talks about how many
animals they slaughter in a week and that's another just in incredible number
and the same is the
the other four pounds are produced by two or three other companies so like it
was tyson and everybody
else right right right will you pull up that that other one jamie because i
want to draw a correlation
between the the scale of this versus the scale of what farms like us do
no there's one that says like 177 000 cattle are processed um
anyways i'll tell you a little bit about about our model and then we can
compare it to that but
so when dad decided to build the the processing plant in 2007 he built it to
process 50 head of cattle a
week and we got to that number and we were still hemorrhaging money there was
no way that was going
to work and so we made a few modifications primarily around refrigeration uh we
dropped the chill time
yep that's it so our processing plant own farm processing plant will process 25
head of cattle a day
five days a week so it's 125 head a week compared to systems like this which is
also on tyson's website 155
5 000 head of cattle or processed per week in only 14 facilities wow that's
crazy and you know the further to
the right you go so you know pork 471 000 pigs are slaughtered in a week at
only seven facilities
47 million chickens per week and i've been in the i've been in those facilities
and it's not pretty but
that that that is the scale of food we've uh we've shown the footage of um
someone got drone footage
where they fly a drone over a pig farm and industrialized pig farm and you see
these lakes
of pig waste and it's so disgusting it's just toxic waste which is sad because
that waste is what created
that topsoil right at white oak pastures it's just right we took the livestock
off of the land we decoupled what had been
coupled for millions of years so these are these lakes now here's the question
why can't they take that
waste and redistribute it into the land and use it for fertilizer and there's
some of that doing but
it's expensive that's the problem that's expensive is that what they're doing
right here yeah i think so
yeah i remember them talking about the waste was getting spread on the people's
like houses because
the wind it would be in the air and then it right of course yeah well yeah indiscriminate
because they
want to do it cheaply oh yeah and and there's a difference between a cow or pig
or chicken defecating
here and there and there right it's spreading natural way that thick yes right
well and just
just to sort of tie all that together jamie you have one more thing and i swear
i'm going to quit
asking you to pull shit up that's what he does it's okay he likes it i have to
apologize he's
probably like who invited her no no no no no but there's there's uh one more
that's like our brands
so one in five uh pounds of meat we just read that was produced produced by tyson
but consumers have no
idea that it was a tyson product so if you look at the amount of brands that
you know these big
multinational meat corporations own there's no there's no uh no way for a
consumer to know that
that that's one of those products so it's just it's just a really incredible
system when you start
pulling the layers back on it and there's demand that's the other problem it's
like you're not going
to get them to stop doing that there's a massive demand for all this food yeah
and most people
listening to this are part of that demand most people listening to this have
stopped at a fast food
burger place this week and and picked up a product of this system yeah and they
want to be able to do
that if you're hungry and you're you're on the go and you want to be able to
pull into a drive-through
get a cheeseburger and some fries and a soda bam it takes it's kind of
extraordinary the system they've
created it sucks that you can't do it in a healthy way but it's kind of
extraordinary that you just pull
into someone and get a thousand calories like that so convenient and cheap yeah
very cheap incredibly
cheap yeah for the amount of calories and that and that is also reflected in
the health consequences
of impoverished people if you look at people that are poor that rely upon this
kind of food all the
time those are the people that have the worst health outcomes because they're
eating stuff that's
doesn't have any nutrients in it it's terrible for you it's filled with seed
oils and
bullshit and preservatives and i'm sure you've seen those um uh they've done
these uh little tests
where they've taken a mcdonald's cheeseburger and just sit it on a shelf yeah
oh yeah for like weeks
and nothing happens to it yeah yeah you could probably eat it which is so
insane that's crazy
i mean you could sit for weeks but you know these companies as bad as this is
these companies have
done what the public told them to do the public has said we want food cheaper
cheaper cheaper cheaper cheaper
cheaper quicker consistent quicker and you know you know how you get cheaper
and quicker okay this is
exactly the same after five years five years way to go jamie that is wild it
doesn't look that bad
that is crazy stick a fork in me i'm done wow so megan wants to find out
whether the cheeseburger
will stay the same after another five years so i bet it will i mean what's
going to change
five years said she's inspired to carry out the experiment after seeing an old
burger being
showcased in her doctor's office and so she set this burger down and just left
it out there for five
years and that's what it looks like hi megan kind of crazy but also disturbing
if you you eat that
like what is that doing to your gut microbiome what is that doing to your
health i mean the preservatives
have a consequence on your health the eating stuff that you know we were
talking about dog food earlier
and um i feed my dog raw food 