Rebuilding America's Soil and Economy: A Panel on Regenerative Agriculture Ep.97

Howdy Eco Farmers, welcome to the Acres USA Podcast, a conversational podcast where

we will explore sustainable farming, real-world regenerative practices, and the latest innovations

in technology shaping the future of ecological agriculture with some of your favorite farmers

and ranchers.

This episode of the podcast is proudly supported by Azure Standard and American Farmland Trust,

two organizations that are deeply committed to strengthening farms, building healthier

food systems, and promoting land stewardship across the country.

I'm your host, Taylor Henry, the owner and CEO of Acres USA.

Now let's get into today's conversation.

Okay, everybody, we're going to get started here.

We have a panel for you today, hosted by Joel Hollingsworth.

Joel is a first-generation farmer and the owner of Smoke River Ranch, and a leader in transitioning

traditional ranches to regenerative, economically resilient systems.

Known for his work with herchairs, adaptive grazing and nutrient dense food production,

he brings a realistic, forward-thinking approach to building profitable, regenerative,

ranching models.

Take it away, Joel.

Howdy-howdy, everybody.

So this is going to be a fun panel, a little more about me.

I started with no money, no land, no cows in 2019.

We scaled in from nothing to about 500 head with one of the leading ultra-head density

grazing operations in the country.

It's both been pure stubbornness, willingness to die on the ultra-revet and creativity

and entrepreneurial genius to make that possible.

Mixed with the favor of God and miracles.

Our goal with this panel, it takes a strong middle class, working at middle scale with

a vibrant young generation to make a strong nation.

If we do not get the young generation successfully weighted into the industry and farming in a profitable

manner, the whole system collapses as does our nation.

And our goal in this panel right now, I don't know the answers to how to make that work.

I'm on the bleeding edge of stubbornly trying to figure that out in the real world, scaling

something like I am from zero, running it at all these problems head on.

And the problem that we've had, we have a lot of conversational Twitter about this, where

everybody is so distracted talking about the trees ignoring the forest.

They don't see the water we're swimming in, or the ecosystem not defined just as nature,

but of the monetary policy, of culture, of demographics, of politics, of property rights,

and the capital base of America.

That is dictating how the problems function and what it takes to solve them.

So we're going to use this talk to kind of define the problems of the ecosystem or water

we're swimming in with the goal being that after this panel, I want to have good conversations

where we'll all be available to brainstorm with you guys like, how do we fix this?

And we want to have conversations that are useful that aren't distracted by these little

side details of things all of us on the ground have already tried that share the context

of what's really causing the issues in America agriculture today.

So Adam, Matt, go ahead and introduce yourselves real quick.

Okay, my name is Adam Lash, my wife and I started milking cows in 2016.

We were first generation and we have run into all of the problems that Joel talks about.

And that led us on the regenerative path.

We kind of backed into it because we were looking for more feed for our animals and kind of

closed a bunch of loops and decided that there's a future here for us in ag.

But that every roadblock that we stepped into, it was like, okay, where is this coming

from?

Why are we doing this?

Why is everybody in our neighborhood old?

And that led us down to a whole path of awakening and understanding.

Where you add on the regenerative versus conventional spectrum, what's the size of your operation?

So we've milked about 50 cows, we're very diversified.

We also have beef herd, we also do some grazing.

We've got about 250 acres, mostly rented land.

We've got some poultry and we try and do some direct marketing.

We're very much still in the conventional model with regenerative roots, I would say.

So Southeast Wisconsin, so Lake Geneva.

I'm Northeast Oklahoma.

I'm up by Amherst, 100 miles north of here.

Do you met?

Okay, well I let that part out like bag, I'm jumping around here now.

So I'm mad hints.

My wife and I and 13 year old son, farm above 100 miles north of here by Amherst.

First generation farm as well.

My story started when I sold two fair pigs and bought a farm all age tractor.

One has 14 and morphed it into this three-ring circus that I got today.

I guess I talked to Adam a lot, I guess about all these, the same issues.

It's good to have a sounding board so you can stay somewhat mentally with it.

Did somebody can measure it with?

Yeah, yeah.

Keep you from losing heart.

That's right.

But I guess we're here to have a panel and talk about the challenges, successes and where

do we go from here?

I just have one question for the audience.

Why are you guys in this room?

Yeah, because this is a kind of niche topic economic.

So popcorn real quick, 30 seconds, shout at me what you guys are here for.

Oh, new ideas.

What else?

What's that?

More farmers.

Nice.

How's it going?

I think we're going to work with these people.

I think nobody said they're lost.

Yeah.

Okay, so I'm just going to start with agriculture is collapsing.

Do I need to defend that idea?

Are we mostly in agreement on that?

Where are we on the spectrum of understanding that?

Industrial farming is flat.

I would beg to differ even there.

I'm just going to come out and say it, almost all the old guard of thought leaders that

you guys would know in the regenerative space, very, very few of them are making any money

at all.

Almost everything I would even say almost as probably a word I shouldn't even use in agriculture

is subsidized.

Whether it's subsidized through eroding down your infrastructure base, the health of

the farmer themselves, the soil base, or through having some sort of income stream being

channeled in the farming.

Hit me.

Orange growth.

Got the farmers.

All of them.

Orange.

Orange.

You stay farming.

Do they return from these uptrend?

It's so much farming.

Correct.

I mean crop farming orchards, ranching, that statement applies to basically all of them.

Let's start with defining what the base layer of the existing conventional egg system really

is.

Hit me.

Let's roll crop production in the Midwest.

It is corn and soybeans, subsidized through crop insurance as the base layer, and every

other enterprise has to compete with that subsidized pair of crops.

Everything else is a derivative of that.

So let me start with ranching.

The average ranch in the U.S. loses 1.5% return on assets if you don't factor land appreciation.

They would make more money as a land investment company than a farm.

They lose money by ranching.

The 89% of ranch in the U.S. are less than 100 cows.

Average herd size of that tranche is 22 animals.

Jaimeo Azondo says that the economically viable scale of a gendered cow calf in the U.S. is

500 head.

85% of ranchers in the U.S. have a full-time city job subsidizing their farm.

Every layer you look at this, the ranchers are just not making money.

Like there are more ranchers over the age of 55 than under the age of 54.

The generational handoff is failing.

And it all ties back largely in Adam.

I have a lot of conversation about this.

To the cost of calories is set by the four price of the government subsidies through crop

insurance.

Do you want to dive in to explain the basics of that, Adam?

You want to go on that?

You want crop insurance 101, basically?

Okay.

But so basically, depending on where you're at in the country, they've got these base

yields to start with until you build your own APH to call it actual production history.

I think it stands for.

So say, we're here in Dane County, Wisconsin.

I'm going to sue an APH as probably 190 bushell corn.

And this is a guess, educated guess.

So basically, you are guaranteed 190 bushell times whatever their spring price that they

determine, which they take an average off the Chicago Board of Trade in February for

that.

Then they take another one in October, I believe, and whichever one is higher, that is how

they come up with this number.

And then what you do is you buy insurance into that at a certain percentage of production

protection.

So 75, 85 percent is probably pretty typical where most of that would fall.

And how much of that is subsidized by the government?

What percent?

60 percent, I believe.

It's now 80.

Post the farm bill.

There you go.

The one big, beautiful bill actually increased the subsidy.

So what we're trying to get here is we do not have a free market in real crop ag, okay?

Can you explain how the measuring of crop insurance in the whole market of that as excluding

the young generation and empire building for the incumbents?

Well, you said it were over, there's more people over the age of 65 than under the age

of 54.

So what does that do?

If you're guaranteed to not have a loss, how do you farm?

You farm differently.

You're not caring about tomorrow because today is taking care of.

You know what I'm saying?

So that effectively has allowed us to have empire building by the older generations.

It returns money to assets.

Whereas as long as you keep your input costs below the threshold of the payouts for your

paid to fail, you always make money.

And so like what you're getting into here is that the base acreage is for a new farmer

based on the county average and for older farmers that's based upon their average production.

Then this match between those means that the incumbent farmers are paid to fail at a

higher cost or a higher payment rate than a young farmer.

So what ends up happening is until you can have like 10-ish years of production information

that the young farmer can't get paid to fail the same amount that an older farmer does.

And so what ends up happening is the younger farmer can't weather the volatility.

The older farmer is paid to fail, ends up buying out the younger farmer.

Then no disruption can occur because there's no new blood coming in the industry to try

to be creative.

Well, we never have that wildfire event that allows the old model to reset or bring anybody

back in and reset the risk profile.

Go ahead.

What's the history of what do you call supplements or subsidies?

Why is it going wrong to keep the background?

We can do that.

We have a good thing when it started and what happened so let's give up another context.

Let's start with soil being the foundation of society and then move towards subsidies

and like what happened.

Okay, so I probably don't need to debate this with this career, right?

Like David Montgomery wrote a great book, Dirt the Erosion of Civilizations.

What he proved in that book, he went through a whole bunch of ancient civilizations, Rome,

China, the Aztecs, and he mapped that when a society is investing in its soil fertility,

they flourish generation upon generation.

When they start extracting from their fertility base, they typically collapse in a generation,

right?

You have this tie between soil being the base productive asset.

It's a solar economy, right?

You're taking the generous infinite resource God gives us a solar energy to produce food

of value for the sustainment of your people and then once you have that happening with

enough surplus, you have an economy develop where not everybody has to be a subsistence

farmer.

Okay, and there's always a tie between that base production of soil, stewarding that for

the future generations and the economic viability of a nation.

So this is where you see like the pattern where the dust bowl and the thirties and the

great depression, economic collapse and soil collapse always go hand in hand.

Okay, you want to go into the next piece?

Yeah, so the history of the subsidies of that is we can't, we don't want people to ever

be hungry because what happens?

You're what?

Nine meals away from revolution.

It is government policy that we are not going to ever have any sort of calorie deficit

in this country, which is a laudable goal.

But like anything, it gets taken too far.

So we always want surpluses from a government policy way and what is it done that has shifted

the balance too far in any one direction, probably right after the dust bowl, I would

say.

1933 is a number that sticks in my head.

Well, if you look at the history of soil, even Thomas Jefferson says the quest to go

west was a quest for soil fertility because the cropping practices and money crops on

the east coast, eroded the soil base to where we chased the great inheritance of fertility

and the great plains, which made us the bread basket of the world and the powerhouse economically

as a nation.

And so then you transfer that extraction of poor stewardship over, which the founding

history of our nation was rooted in it, right?

Like the European settlers come over, they see this idemic place of productivity, they

see all the food for us, they see all the wild buffalo and animals.

And so you have this system here that they didn't understand.

They thought it was just naturally vibrant, they didn't understand it was like a permaculture

style system, the Native Americans stewarded.

But like even the Native Americans participated in the extraction and decimation of the ecology,

you have like the over trapping of the beaver, the Native Americans did that exporting the

wealth of the first to Europe.

And the hard part of a lot of these phenomena at a macro society lens is that if you don't

say no with solidarity, the one person extracting just has more riches they garner from it, right?

And so you first have the destruction of North American ecology through the water engineers,

the beaver eliminated.

So the West is no longer nearest moist and productive as it once was.

Then you got the railroad cutting across the nation, limiting the migration patterns of

the bison, which are the Keystone species of soil development on our silvo pasture like

grassland ecology, right?

So you have these layers of times where soil stewardship of North America through the

culture transition from the Native American management to the settlers management brought

us to a place where we weren't invested in this perpetual fertility of abundance that

was there before.

And that fast forwards here to where you're talking about getting into these pieces of what

happens in history of how do we maintain the system working without it collapsing as

the fertility diminishes.

So the lens of even the subsidies and culture and farming is even tied into what happened

to America of how we treated our soil from our initial founding as a nation.

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Your soil, your farm and your future will thank you.

Yep.

So there's a question here.

Yeah, so you mentioned the stuff that is put in place primarily because you don't want

to see the whole hungry.

And it's also there out there for the row crops, corn sorties, but what the corn beads,

you don't need a lot of corn beads.

But what do you know of the corn beads?

Go ahead, Matt.

The lettuce lobby isn't very good in Washington.

And this whole thing is so backwards and screwed up from calories to food and it, follow the

money.

I mean, that's where you're going to go.

And I guess our point here is we're at the end of this cycle, okay?

Just like Joel was talking about, you know, the last time this happened was in the 30s.

Now we believe we're at that same stage.

The demographics are bad, the subsidy system is bad, the incentive system is bad from

government, the payments, the ad hoc, all that, the input side is bad, we're at the end

of the cycle.

So now what we're trying to figure out is what does the next 50 years look like, you know,

how do we go forward?

Oh, man, we could go deep on that for like 10 hours.

Okay.

A key thing here, and I don't want to go into the weeds too much in agriculture policy.

Let's talk erosion in middle class and economics of America, right?

In the 60s, the poverty index was developed where they were trying to have a, they were

having a hard time measuring poverty.

So what she did is she said that the person who developed the poverty index is that the

lower class that needed help in America was going to be calculated three X, the average

family food budget.

At the time, an average American spent 33% of their income on food, okay?

If you play that forward today, the average American is only spending five to seven percent

or so of their income on food.

So now that multipliers more like 16, if you were to multiply that food budget by the

actual multiplier, that poverty index would be between $140,000 to $160,000 now.

Not the 35 that you see, right?

What we've done is we designed agriculture policy to hold down the price per calorie at

the erosion of health and ecology of the nation to, as you're saying, for stall revolution

because it's a way of kind of keeping the population satisfied because you hide the

damage in the future, right?

And this would always happen because we were talking bailouts with a housing crisis.

All it does is it takes the risk, brings it higher in the economy or society, and makes

it more and more existential because you don't allow the creative destruction to happen

on the ground layer of the economy.

Get ties in with that subsidy, you know?

If people are spending less money on food, where do they spend their money, other places

in the economy?

Healthcare?

Well, that I would say is actually the other way, you know, the healthcare cost has gone

up because of demographics, we're getting older, you know, what's the, and we're eating

garbage, exactly, because cheap calories, cheap fillers, cheap food, leads to bad health.

So if you look at the cost of things in America, even if you use government data on inflation,

which I don't believe in anyway, it's way higher than what the numbers say, you look at

healthcare, I think it's up like five, six acts, you look at housing, it's up like three

or four X above inflation, like all these things are way more expensive than they were in

the 70s when she did the poverty index.

Food is the only thing that still matches the inflation rate of what the government says

inflation actually is.

Agriculture policy has been intentionally designed to hold down the price of food because

it's the one thing that keeps society stable and happy.

All of our policy with subsidies, every layer of this has been driven at that.

And if we don't admit that that's what's happening, and this is where a lot of the negative

extra hours are coming from, you're missing the force for the trees and the systems here.

I'm going to get yelled at by J.R. Burdek, who is not here, he was supposed to be a panelist

on here, but one of the problems in our farming careers is we can't get enough labor and

he had trouble getting enough labor to get his milking done so he could come up here.

But anyway, one of the points that he makes is because the base layer for our calories

are so cheap, regenerative agriculture, he's a direct marketer, is hard to scale.

Because if you can buy it, the grocery store is so much cheaper, if money is like limiting

factor, are you going to spend more at the local neighbors or the local farm?

No, because it's cheaper to go to the grocery store.

So that is one of the roadblocks to scaling, direct marketing, and regenerative agriculture.

Well, the back door subsidization too, is there any like pasture poultry people in here?

Chickens?

All right.

Costco chicken, right?

Like eight bucks out the door.

I mean, it's, yeah, see, I mean, it's totally screwed up and backwards.

So when you sit there and say, well, I want 25 or 30 bucks for my chicken that you get

to eat everything, not just the breast or whatever, you know, that's why you have that

shock from somebody that's, that's not used to that.

So this gets to the subsidization.

Costco is willing to lose $100 million a year on their chicken.

How do you compete with that?

And they do it to get somebody in the door into Costco to buy other things.

Walmart's doing the same thing.

They're doing their prime pursuits program now where they're trying to raise their vertically

integrated beef system that Walmart's investing in.

They're trying to hit upper two thirds choice.

What they've learned is that if they lose money on beef having this prime almost

prime beef in their stores, it increases the value of a shopping cart of an average person

coming into Walmart by 70 bucks.

It's not the beef they're making money on.

I was getting somebody in the door.

If they get that stacked with a wine purchase or an alcohol purchase by putting the sections

close to where that Walmart beef that's actually artificially cheap because they're actually

losing money on it, they get, I think, it's 120 dollars more per shopping cart of

a person coming in.

They're using that to control their total profit of purchases in the store.

And then we as farmers have to compete against that.

Hence everything is subsidized.

Does that make sense?

It's hard to compete when everything is subsidized.

And it's hard to compete with someone that's willing to do it at a loss.

Right.

Sorry.

What?

And the general is looking at that.

Yeah.

Molly?

Well, that gets into the regulation side too.

That gets into the regulation side as well.

So a huge part of the problem here is misinformation in the marketplace.

This gets into the country or country of origin labeling, right?

There was an international lobby that pushed when you were labeling beef as either foreign

beef with a country on an American, Americans were paying a premium for American beef.

And they said that this was actually not fair to foreign producers, so they changed the

law to hide this.

Like, 4% of the beef in America's grass fed, 1% or a quarter of that, only 1% raised

in America.

And so we're competing against dynamics where you've got these large incentives of lobbyists

and money, whatever, to obfuscate from the consumer the demand for the whole sub nutrient

dense, local, economic impact food they want to be supporting, right?

So it's like, how did we get here?

And this is where I get into talking about, say, like, trifin's dilemma.

Does anybody in the room know enough I can know what trifin's dilemma is?

No.

Yeah.

Okay.

So you got like the history, right?

Dust Bowl, great depression in the 30s, fast forwarded generation, we leave the gold

standard.

Maybe what that was was admitting that we've robbed the whole world.

We as a nation are in so much debt that we can't actually back with real money things

anymore.

That's rooted on the base, like agriculture and manufacturing economy wasn't actually

making money.

And so we leave the gold standard, go to paper money, I don't know why nobody bombed

this for that when we robbed the whole world.

Fast forward another 50 years, another generation.

Now we've got like the housing crisis, 40 years, and that whole pop, right?

What ends up happening is that we got out of the dust bowl, the great depression and

all that because of we went to war, went to like go defend freedom in Europe.

And we ended up because of military power, we everybody got back to producing again, making

bombs, work it in the factories, everything of like energy of a civilization kind of sparked

back up again.

And then we became the World Reserve currency post-World War.

Okay.

And this is a known phenomenon economics that when you're a World Reserve currency, they

call it an exorbitant privilege with an exorbitant cost.

You have to provide money to the world.

But what ends up happening is you have to run a trade deficit.

This guts your agriculture base, it guts your manufacturing base because you have a disadvantage.

Like I was talking to some South American farmers when Trump started doing the tear of

stuff and they were all upset because like what we want to sell our beef into America.

I was like, okay, like what's talk about this?

And they were telling me, well, American farmers just need to get more efficient about

to compete with us.

And I was like, well, what you're missing here is that the currency mismatch because the

US being the reserve currency, your beef just by currency games is 30% cheaper than ours.

What small business or ranch can stomach a 30% like just cost right off your bottom line

to be competitive?

And so this slowly erodes the nation's agriculture base, their manufacturing base to where they

become basically a financial services economy.

And that's where we are in America today.

The only things making money, I mean, Uber's not making money, Twitter's not making money.

They're all multi-million billion dollar companies that on the bottom line, like they're

all in the red, right?

The only things that really look like they're making money are these large assets, accumulations

and these equity stakes of basically either cannibalizing in industry like Twitter cannibalizing

mass media, Uber cannibalizing the taxi industry, like on and on you go, or some sort of

vaporware type situation where you can take a digital idea and try to scale it.

Like real things in America, due to monetary policy of inflation driven by the Federal Reserve

with a reserve currency dynamic, is part of what's happened here.

And it's also put us in the situation where like we all talk about young farmers need, young

farmers need to be inheriting land.

They can't afford to buy in at current asset prices or animal prices, right?

Well, average ranch, they're losing 1.5%, if you don't fact a land appreciation.

So it's like you've got an old boomer who wants to retire and they want their kid to

start farming.

They get to end their life and they realize, I've not made any money.

I don't actually have any cash.

I'm rich, but all it is is in land appreciation.

And so it's like, okay, do I accept a massive hit to my like standard of living?

Do I just actually now work for my son or like go become a greeter at Walmart and live

like a popper in order to like give my child the land, which I would argue none of us

own land.

We steward it for the next generation, right?

It's not a liquid asset that we should think of as something we can extract from as

ours, right?

But if they didn't make any money also due to this macroeconomic policy, monetary policy,

how did they retire?

They have to sell their land to their kids, otherwise they have nothing to live on, right?

And so this culture, this economic, this political thing has forced even us who want to think

of ourselves is the key stewards of soil, the key stewards of the foundation of society

as farmers into a posture of extraction that we don't realize why we're trapped to be

an extractive, why we have to like erode the capital base of the soil to stay profitable,

why we have to like erode the infrastructure or our own health or why we have to steal

it from our children by not passing the land on for them to pass the next generation

but try to sell it to them.

It's rooted in the fact that we have a policy as a nation that is causing us to play a game

that we can't overcome on the ground.

Everybody's trying to run out the clock and not have it stop on them, basically.

Anything to add to that, Matt?

No, or 38 trillion and dead and I bet it went up today.

We like 700 billion more in the last 100 days or something?

So go ahead.

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I want to know what's working for you guys now and what's going to work for you there.

I mean, I understand everything's terrible, which guys are finally in all these things.

We're just laying the groundwork here, so I really want to see you stand out and have

great stuff.

All right.

Well, let's get a little more real.

I don't like it.

It's going to be kind of blackpilling, but we want to have real conversations how to fix

it, and most of the conversations that have aren't useful, because we have to understand

this stuff to know what it takes to fix this.

My old sage or mentor, he always always say, in order to have real hope to fix things

in the world, you have to be courageous enough to admit how deep the darkness goes.

We've got to look right at it, and that's one of the challenges is most people aren't.

We're not looking right at the problems.

Like stacked on top of this, like we've been talking about this where not only is agriculture

collapsing, we live in a nation that's collapsing, and if we don't take that into account, all

of our conversations are just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic or looking through

a soil microscope.

Hold the second.

Let's ship sink.

Let's hit that question, though, because you're right on it.

I'm going to tell you what I'm doing.

I'm getting into whatever the boomers are getting out of, which in my case is livestock.

I'm looking at crop insurance.

I'm looking at the way the farm programs are going, and to me, it looks like everybody is

going to continue to be shoved into road crop production.

Why would I go into cattle?

Matt's got cattle, too, when road crops look easier, because if the lowest common denominator

is road crops, guys will take a lower return for the surety that they will still be there.

Meaning, cattle are work, and as you get older, you don't want to work as hard.

I can see livestock getting pretty good going forward.

That's what I'm doing.

Matt, what are you doing?

Well, one thing I've noticed is that if you try to get into something that's easy for

somebody else to get into, and it makes good money, pretty soon you're going to have a

lot of friends doing it, and then there's not going to be any money.

So I appreciated your pumpkin soup, squash soup, in the last session.

I thought that was a great way to add value to a waste product, basically.

We're doing a beef thing, too.

We're trying to graze cheaper by putting them after residues, crop residues with cover

crops and stuff in it.

I think it's important to get the cows back on the land.

I can definitely see it in our yields.

Our soil is better.

His better tilth.

Basically, I've noticed I typically don't go and try to rent more land.

It usually comes to me because we're different.

We're doing a cover crop thing.

In my area, wind erosion is a big deal, because we've got a lot of vegetables.

So there isn't much residue unless they do put a cover crop in there.

And when the neighbor's field is blowing so bad, the interstate could shut down and

mine's staying there.

People go, I think I'm going to rent to that guy, and money doesn't matter as much anymore.

So that's helped us have a financial edge, I guess, with doing all this as well.

So a little more context that I'll get my mind on that, right?

Where we are in history, late stage democracy, what always happens is that the voter

base, and in our case, an older voter base, votes to keep asset prices high, which is still

accelerating the demographic and the pass on collapse of the assets of farming, manufacturing,

whatever, because it raises the price to get in, but they're firstling their own collapse.

So asset prices run just through purely monetary and government policy.

And the government tends to throw out more and more bread and circuses to try to keep

people calm and pass the buck to the future of robbing from the children or the nation

somewhere.

Whether this is robbing from the health because of using farming practices that don't actually

make a healthy nation, or handing out money trying to keep things stable, but the whole

thing is built on like this, like I've had a lot of conversations with Mahakaru, where

all the things that are needed to truly fix agriculture in America are stopping behaviors

to allow creative destruction to take place, to have a reset with things shift.

But the only political will out there is to add a subsidy on top of things.

So it's like you got this like freight liner across the ocean of the ship with shipping

containers stacked on it right, and the ship sinking.

The inflation that is the main input into farming is land is the root problem.

Land prices are running.

The young generation can't afford it.

Land is basically monetized, right?

Like that concept, gold, gold's money, right?

It's a store of value.

You don't see gold use much for electronics or industrial purposes, because it's worth

more as a money held in a vault as a store of value asset than it is for like a productive

purpose.

We're seeing land be used the same way as a hedge, as a hard asset, where it's treated

as money, which is out-competent as productive use.

And so inflation is driven by government debt.

The more subsidies, the more handouts we have, the more money we print, the more government

debt goes up.

And so a lot of this try to fix farming in America, return to regenerative, fix the soil.

It's like stacking another crate on top of the shipping container.

Yeah, you maybe eight feet higher from the water level on a sinking ship, but you've made

it way more and now it's sinking faster, right?

And so this whole phenomena is rooted in the fact that nobody can stop the freight train

of the demographic situation in the U.S., the sovereign debt crisis in the U.S. says

like, what do we do as young people and local communities?

And this is where I returned to like, I love Charles Walters' initial statement about agriculture,

right?

He says, in order for agriculture to be economical, it must be ecological.

Hard degree.

I would add to it, it must be measuring value over a long enough time horizons and value

of all capital assets, not just cash flows, and in order to do that at a scale that works,

we must do it as local communities together.

None of us can fix us on our own, right?

And like, so like for me, I'll be totally honest, right?

Like my story of scaling from zero, I got a Greg Judy style low-cost lease opportunity

in Virginia.

It was 28 acres a bucket year, recreational horse farm, she wanted tax deductions back.

So I signed that lease, had no money for cows.

I was hanging out on Twitter because I'd found Bitcoin, and I was convinced that Bitcoin

was going to be the future, because I understood some of this history and economic stuff.

And I was on Twitter because the Bitcoiners were, I wanted to learn about it.

And when Bitcoin ran from like $5,000 to what was like $69,000 in 2022, my Twitter account

grew with it with all the mania, and I ended up getting a DM from a wealthy Wall Street

guy.

He's like, hey, like this little farming thing you're doing, I see you out there posting videos

putting in fence, and I went in to be a part of it.

I was like, no, you don't, like, I'm using hair just breed pine woods, building zombie apocalypse

brief cattle.

Like, I'm going to push the edge of grazing science, learn everything in the real world.

Like there's no reason for you to do this with me.

And he wrote me back, he's like, look, my world is kind of hedge fund investment banking.

We're starting to realize we're getting on a war footing with China.

We are learning that most of our food security of things, we depend on here or tied the

China.

Whether it's the amino acids, being used in animal supplements, the medical stuff, he's

like, look, I want a few things, I want food security for my family, measured in quality,

not just calories.

And he said, I'm also worried about a few other pieces.

Like one is that I'm tired of owning investments on the mainstream marketplace where I'm buying

ETFs stewarded by BlackRock that buy up houses the least and back to my children.

Like I want to be investing in things that move forward the world I want my kids to have.

He said, I'm also concerned about being debanked for political beliefs or anything.

This is back in 2019.

He saw a lot coming that ended up happening during COVID, right?

And so we ended up come with a program called Herd Shares where he bought into owned the

breeding stock every year in the cabs or we and we split the calves.

It's all underneath of my management and control.

And then the line share of the calves go to me.

It's how I fund the operation.

It gave me the capital base to get launched and get started, right?

It was a beautiful inheritance basically of somebody with a line meant helping me have

the scale to get going in a way I never could have as a young farmer.

It happens.

My phone blows up with all his friends calling me like, hey, these herds share things.

We went in on these two and I'm like, well, I don't have any land, but sure we'll try.

And so I got some buddies together.

I've moved from Virginia, bought 700 acres in Oklahoma and I had a friend in Oklahoma, young

lawyer runs a family office for investment stuff, high net worth Native American guy.

He co-signed a loan for me for the property, never could have gotten started without him.

A blessing of his patronage was a huge boost for me.

It subsidized me to get me going.

And then when we launched, I raised money for buying the land in addition to helping

co-sign it.

And we raised about 800 grand for a land-honey company.

The terms of the company were, we're going to buy this land.

I'm never going to pay rent to the land-honey company because I want to plow all the energy

into trying to figure out these problems to fix this stuff in the world.

And we're never going to sell the land.

So you're going to own an asset, the asset will never be realized or capitalized on.

Who wants to participate?

You want to donate money to this farming mission we have?

I had hundreds of thousands of dollars where, and my Twitter phone is not that huge, it's

low 20,000s.

But I've been telling my story and being authentic in the world and being honest of just sharing

the heart that, like, God's put in me to want to do this.

And a number of people just DMed me, they're like, hey, I was in my morning prayer time

with God today.

He told me that I'm supposed to help back and launch you.

I got 50 grand on buying into your land with.

So I don't even understand all the details, but I need to explain it to my wife.

So like, we need to have a phone call so I can give you some capital to get you going.

Like, that's how I got the land, miracles.

Like, I'm not being facetious when I say it.

Like, that, and then the herd shares, we bought the property, we had about 18 months of

capital runway when we launched.

That was just carry cost.

Not infrastructure.

That's not getting more than my original 18 cows.

But I knew I had appetite for herd shares.

I have a die hard crew of guys with me, about three and a half guys, we count the patron

kind of being like not on site, but helping back us and give us a safety net.

Us three guys are willing to die on the altar of figuring this out.

That's another form of a subsidy.

It's loyalty and just vehemence to want to fix something in the world, right?

And so then I went out and was able to go through the phone network and kind of hit the

podcast circuit.

We raised, or the last three and a half years, 1.8, 1.9 million dollars or so in herd shares

to scale up to the 500 head where it now.

This whole thing has been rooted in the fact that God's helped to launch me with favor.

That's the keystone that's done everything to open the door for me, bringing the people.

But it's been having the courage to say the truth, to raise the banner of carrying about

something in the world greater than financial returns.

And that people exist, you care about this too.

Them joining together, us building systems of collaboration to unite these people into

functional ideas of how do we work together in a way that actually has a long-term traction

or viability.

And then with that alignment and shared vision and shared heart, we all are going after

fixing a problem in the world that doesn't currently pay us.

It's a problem we believe in fixing.

It's a problem we all want to have fixed for our children.

We all view it like Molly was saying, of playing in a tree under which we don't sit,

that we're putting our energy in knowing that if we don't fix this, America has in trouble.

The hope I have is that those kind of people exist, and that we're willing to do this,

and it's not just about like, how do we make this financially viable?

Well, I was talking with Kenneth Hamilton and his team with some of the fermented forage

stuff yesterday.

I explained to them like my genetics program for breeding efficient cattle, I can carry

more cows per acre, grazing practices, ultra-identity where I can carry more cows per acre, want to

integrate into like a novel version of his fermented silage system for like more feed

conversion efficiency during finishing to finish faster for more profitability.

He looked at me and was like, well, you have every key biologically and entrepreneur-wise,

I don't know how you can't not be profitable.

And I said, well, the problem is I've made one bet.

My bet is that we can do this with scale of stacking these pieces together to make it work,

but that requires me to have people.

And one of the biggest challenges right now is that the whole young generation,

like 70% of them have a chronic disease.

They've been raised in an education system that largely teaches you to regurgitate information

rather than critically think.

Like, we also have to not just invest in spinning up operations, restoring the capital

base of the soil, or all these other things that we're trying to figure out the knowledge base

that we talk about a lot of conferences like this.

We also have to restore the viability of the young generation,

puring a cultural and a skill in competency lens.

And my hope is the fact that there's enough of us that believe in this,

that we're going to just through sheer force of will and hope plow that until it plows,

yeah, no till here, right?

But like, work hard at doing this until we turn the flywheel back over again

with the scale of doing it together to overcome these large-scale dynamics.

But the thing I would encourage is that like, don't try to do it alone.

And don't try to think nationally.

You have to think locally, even thinking state size is too big.

You need to think your immediate community of the type of people you can touch.

Work within your Dumbart limits.

What would you add to that, Adam?

I would say every operation, I mean, specifically, how many farmers are in here?

All right. None of you guys are using utilizing enough of your own resources.

There is always more on the table that you're leaving.

You're forgetting.

It's different things.

You have to look at every operation that you're doing with a fresh set of eyes.

Joel found a very unique way to scale a cattle ranch.

I wouldn't have been able to do that.

Matt, you started first gen.

You basically, in my situation as a similar, I had to be in amoeba.

If there was five acres that nobody wanted, that was the ground I got.

You have to be able to look for those opportunities.

The world is crashing down around us.

How?

What do they say?

It's not the size of the dog in the fight.

It's the size of the fight in the dog.

What kind of fight are you going to have?

How bad do you want to be in it?

The journey of trying to eat healthier foods

is it can be a very complicated one.

Sometimes the complication is just as simple as where do you find the right foods?

And one of the things that is incredible about Azure is that they've taken that complexity

and really simplified it.

Everything you get from Azure is, you know, clean food.

Just the simplicity of it to have that is amazing.

For more information, visit azurestandard.com.

And see where it add to that, right?

Part of the reason I want to have these kind of hard talks,

I'm really, really tired of watching my friends and the youth this generation

where regenerative agriculture is largely a churn factory.

Like, Saladin talks about it's a six-year cycle.

It's excited young people in the front and broken dreams out the back.

And grit is not enough.

We have to be willing to humble ourselves, find ways to do this together,

and learn to play infinite some games instead of zero ones.

But we have to do it as local teams.

If you're not doing it with a community of people with you who share the heart to

fix things in the world, you're not going to have to turn it over to get there.

Because it's not the 90s or the early 2000s anymore.

Acid inflation, like the labor and culture dynamics,

the ability to even hire a subcontractor to competently do something,

like the base things that make a farming economy work,

the labor force, it's all just missing.

And the only way to overcome that is having enough energy of shared heart

that one keeps you encouraged,

but there's also enough creativity inside your community circle

to play an infinite some game to pivot around the problem, right?

Like, what are my mentors?

We've had a lot of conversation entrepreneurship,

and we've come to define it as this.

Entrepreneurship is having an accurate long-term vision of the world

and the adaptability and stubbornness to survive until it comes true.

And that ability is rooted in the human capital of the people you're building with.

And that's everything.

Like, if I did anything right,

and like I've had tons of blessings,

I mean, part of like even the Bitcoin thing,

right, with Bitcoin price today,

like these are all things that have enabled me to be stubborn to stay the course.

But the creativity of knowing how to take energy from like say like having assets

and Bitcoin and plow that back into fixing the soil

is something that was rooted in having relationships that taught me to know how to do that.

All right, the question was over there.

I guess I can't speak specifically on organic value.

I only have the outside view because I'm not involved with it or whatever.

But I would say buy and large, most of our co-ops systems are,

they don't work anymore.

A lot of the stuff that for the conventional side of things,

I can go direct to these places to sell stuff or I can go direct to them to buy them,

where I think our, again, conventional co-ops has missed.

The boat is there's specialty things that they could help us market.

I mean, I can farm like you wouldn't believe.

But when it comes to marketing, that's where I lack.

And that's where I need help.

I need help with the distribution.

And this is stuff that I think that co-ops would be awesome at.

But they're too busy, you know, being busy until the next buyout and whatever else.

So we shipped to Prairie Farms.

And Prairie Farms is a cooperative, you know.

And I think we got 600 some members.

Very good, very well-run cooperative.

But they're swimming in the same ecosystem as everything else.

Everything's financed.

They're trying to gain scale, you know, when they bid a milk contract for a school district,

you're talking about down to the 10th of a penny per carton.

The margins are squeezed everywhere.

It's that model in my mind is his run its course.

So now it's okay, if everybody's in the same boat,

like Joel said, and we just keep stacking containers on top,

where do we go from here?

Okay, so cooperatives in my mind are a narrow, I don't know, I put this.

The exact same dynamic is happening in the co-ops is everything else.

The thing I would add to that though, and I'm sitting up here and now that I'm up here,

I don't remember anything. But there was a documentary that the farmers are like

in Central Illinois and they were part of a co-op system.

And like they supplied restaurants in Chicago with stuff, some of you probably

seen it, and I can't remember the name of it.

But I thought that would work awesome.

Like, you know, I'll grow the kale, you can grow the carrots, you can grow the beef,

you know, instead of sitting here just pounding on each other and piling on and making nothing,

you know, that's how a co-op ought to be run if you ask me.

So I would go back to one of the root problems is the middle's gone.

The things are either subsidized hobby farms by somebody having a tech job,

a bit of work on my acre too, or it's mega corporate farming, which is subsidized by access

to cheap debt to play finance games. Like the only people who are really making money in the

cattle industry are now cattle traders. They're basically using the lossy small family farms that

are small to capitalize on understanding cattle market values to do high frequency trading

of a hard asset, right? The real, the root of this issue is where we have to understand we're

playing financial games because a lot of the root of what's happening is the financialization

of the market in our nation, right? You have to have that context and have the skill and wisdom

to know that like we have to win that somehow and play that somehow. For me, that's been Bitcoin

of keeping that on my balance sheet. But you look at like the approach to trying to do this in

a community oriented way. You've got like people trying to build farming communes and I probably

don't need to explain those are usually just fricking disasters. Or you've got co-ops. And the problem

with a co-op is that they're usually important to solve the real problem because once again,

the scale of relationship is too large. You're trying to swim in the large ecosystem of the nation

versus kind of a small shared vision and heart. And what I've seen as being successful for me

is just to bluntly raise the banner of we're exiting the world of financial incentives.

We have a community of people that's small enough but has enough energy in it that we can say we

don't care about profitability right now. We care about having something that is sustainably

going to survive this challenging season in our nation to be there for my children.

And we have a depth of relationship of people who share the vision of understanding this

that we're willing to kind of exit the terms of the game together. And I call it like collaborative

relationships instead of cooperative relationships. It's not as trying to be as much in

each other's space as like a commune where you're all doing the same thing like and living on the

same piece of ground but it's like we share a vision like with the herd shares like they're not stuck

there they can take their cows and sell them an exit. But while the cows are there they're under

my management and they have to accept the leadership and that leadership enables me with strong

captaincy to go tackle real problems in the world right without a line that a vision of exiting

the terms of the game you're destined to lose because the DAC is stacked against you.

There was a question a couple of months. Molly?

And I think that the care of our money but like food has to cost what it costs and it has to be a

good enough time. It's very good and wobble by my shirt because they're happy with the

food that care enough to start paying food costs but it costs every day what it costs because

right now you can't compare the apples to the orange and green. I mean and it's not I mean

it's a game but like it's across every day to the back and house that they were in 1978

and what was the team like it was in place I want to jump in for a place or I'm saying

we're adjusted for nutrient density like takes 10 oranges equal one

a conventional horn farmer today is $60 for a thousand pounds right now for the ending is like

$85 for a thousand pounds right now. It was more than that in 1979 by 30% and that money actually

meant one but I think this is just active eating like you're saying about a food with enough

energy we need to inspire the public with the timber base to leave that energy and say I'm

going to pay what we cost it doesn't matter if you can get milk at dollar general for two

dollars a night and then the gallon my mom caught $18 gallon so I got what it cost me pretty good

and that's what it is and we have to inspire some person it and then yes that's really

the global lot of people but until we can shift perception because like you said in the 30%

of everybody's food was spent on first in our red income was spent on food now we're spending

25% for that everyone out to eat for most of our meals so the actual spend is even less.

Totally agree I would add to that that like say people are either going to pay for health care

pay for food right but this all requires having long enough time horizons for people to think

this way and with a whole middle class economy that's in debt like the pay later apps are now 25%

used to pay for groceries this is really challenging we're like yeah we definitely need wealthy people

willing to help support restoring the capital base of our soil and restoring the generation of

farmers to the land being willing to pay what foods actually worth but I'd add to this that

our farming systems now are incredibly lossy because of the way national logistics of food supply

chains work that if we get people together sharing long time horizons and carrying about these things

there's enough efficiencies there that like you don't have to have a young person paying a mega

premium to make this work right like I've had young people come work at my farm I pay them in

herchairs it's the aligning of vision and time horizons because farm right like most people they

want to stake they want to like in a couple hours I'm going to go like after going to Costco going

to go and putting on the grill at home and eat it right versus us I've got a female cow I got

inseminated then a year to gestate a year to ween if you really want to finish grass fed beef probably

two years of finishing in the grass and so it's like I've got four years time horizon to get

that stake produced where I'm carrying the time horizons of the capital base okay but like

with these young people who've worked for herchairs they're with this long term vision they're

able to kind of hold that for a while and actually share time horizons with me and carrying about

creating food value for themselves over a longer periods of time by us sharing alignment and

willingness to have long term vision it actually enables me to pay them at a premium rate because

I'm not paying them out of my cash reserves I'm sharing my asset base growth with them where they're

actually able to get access to super high quality beef at a price point of labor that's totally

achievable for them because of how good I can pay them if they're thinking long term and so as

you think as communities there's like just like you were doing with like the like value added

products right there's there's so many edges of value that when we work together as tighter net

relationship networks of communities like I'm thinking dumbbell limits of like 35 to 50 people

150 tops big enough that like you can have some scale of having big projects but small enough

you know everybody's first name and have no relationship that there is so much edges to capitalize

on and capture that you don't just need to go into like a super wealthy part of town selling rich

product like the local community and people with you can flourish too even if they're well or

middle class you have to line the incentives with the outcomes that's what it takes there was a

question back there hey eco farmers this is Taylor Henry with acres USA I hope you enjoy this

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well look at the rise of the carnivore diet so this is where I'd make a pretty

extremist statement I don't think as farmers we should be raising commodities I think what we

should be doing is focus on the fact that we're the stewards of civilization in every sense of

the word the health of our nation the function and productivity or soil the flourishing of the

ecology that's rooted in the health of the people itself the base economic productivity and that

we need to be uniting people together who are no longer thinking about food as commodities but

thinking about farms as the cornerstone of the nation and returning to looking at that as the

vision just like in like the era of the war times of like victory gardens or like rallying

together to do whatever it takes to restore the base of our society and I believe if we do so

that there's ways to create if we play infinite some games like the herd share system like

plain finance games like I carry assets and bitcoin which out appreciate the inflation of my

input costs right or like the like stuff kennis working on on feed conversion efficiency with

fermented forages right when we play longtime horizon games tackling the mission statement as how

do we restore our nation through restoring the foundation stewardship of farms it allows you to

attack the war with a different vision that gets the right people thinking the right way to solve

the right problems

totally different the 80s farm crisis was largely a demographic problem the boomers there was a lot

of them there were 75 million boomers they all came of age in the 70s that caused the inflation

and the natural crash out was the 1980s so they were all trying to get through the door at the

same time this one is a totally different problem this is asset inflation not debt see other way

there's one in the back that's awesome that's super cool so that makes me think of my fiance Aaron

Martin she's working in the food as medicine movement she found to fresh our ex Oklahoma so like the

basis of what she's up to she got the food as medicine bill passed in Oklahoma which she's working

towards where she's got a program that's sourcing nutrient dense food from local regenerative farms

and then doctors are prescribing chronic disease patients primarily type two diabetics to be a part

of her program she provides sourcing the food she provides cooking education and training community

support and accountability in the bill that they pass in Oklahoma is working towards having

insurance companies actually pay for outcomes rather than simply treating symptoms of chronic

disease right so she's channeling healthcare dollars to change that inversion of food to healthcare

money back from healthcare money back into food system money right and there's layers of challenges

there which I'm sure you like what you did is you probably just fix some of these where a lot of

local food systems they only use pre-prepared food they don't have people who know to use knives

anymore like liability wise they'll have microwaves a lot of school kitchens so like there's all

these kind of rude issues we have to address kind of restoring foodways restoring education like

getting people to actually value that local food back to kids again or local food fixing health

issues again and like I don't know how much of liability some of these things have for the long haul

even with the food is medicine movement because in my mind I see the insurance industry is going to go

bankrupt in 10 years and I'll look at their balance sheets right but like what we're working on

is how do we channel as much energy as possible into our local rural farming communities while

we're in the situation our nation and I think the key like kind of more hopeful side I think our

key edges here are like one how do we get more yield per acre while growing biological diverse

infertility in the soil a lot of the science being worked on here is hugely driving that forward

like that's one of the places in the regenerative movement we're doing the best you've got like

stuff like Kenneth Hamilton the fermentant forage how do you get more nutrient dense beef per pound

of feed going in the animal with the science he's working on there there's all these little ways

we're starting to point infinite some games restore biological diversity soil fertility while growing

more value per acre right then like we've got how do we scale systems where like as a regenerative

ranch I'm not at 22 head I'm at 500 like with the herd share and community back system there's

like financial collaborative systems that's another space we can be creative inside of are there

any other key spaces we can brainstorm creatively and that you guys can think of deploy infinite

some games to kind of overcome these challenges we've tried to plug the holes whether it's fertility

whether it's nutrients you know plugging the holes on the farm because there's a lot of waste

when you have a subsidized system you end up with a lot of waste inherent into that system you know

there was a question here yeah I was just wondering you know so many ideas here one was just

getting collaboration going with this your small community I wonder what you're doing at

farmers to identify people to collaborate with and how you're putting yourself in that leadership

position telling the story honestly is a huge one because everybody's just tired of hollow

answers it sounds kind of dark to be having a conversation like we are here now but these kind of

conversations are how the right people who are willing to be change agents meet each other because

are the people who are willing to be honest to take it on the chops to figure it out so one of the

things I've learned and I've said this in my operation I've been shocked how much I've been able to

get a seat at the table at local conversations around like ranching or whatever and what I've

realized is this basically a three-legged stool it's the heart and passion and love of what you're

doing is just electric that's a huge part of it right when you're one of the best examples of

that I've ever seen there's true expertise and knowledge for people know that you've got creativity

and ability to solve problems so they're willing to like trust the whole space for you to go out in

the world and challenge things and then there's scale because people know you're actually playing a

game that can be impactful when you put those three pieces together you end up building networks and

community where people jump on the ship with you to go solve problems in a way you wouldn't if

you didn't have all three yeah what we've noticed is the problems are inherent everywhere and it's

every little area Matt and I different different different areas completely different you know

parts of the state the same set of problems comes up and it's like okay how are you tackling that

how am I tackling it the network huge so kind of the tie a lot of these pieces together

young farmers ranchers are functioning in a non-profitable industry largely rooted in political

and macroeconomic trends we're trying to while dealing with that in an extractive system that's

already nonprofit because it's extracted everything down to zero fixing the base capital assets

of restoring them over a long time horizons doing so with an erosion of culture erosion of like

the labor contractor work base and with no assets ourselves to invest into spending up fixing

those long-term problems and the energy has to come from somewhere and it comes from ultimately

just creativity and fortitude and doing it together so like some of those ideas I just listed are like

my creative spaces I think were the most like area is for us to like tackle this to find more energy

to plow into solving these problems do you guys have any others like the other pain point for me

is the labor problem of we need solutions for mentoring the hearts and minds in the young generation

to make them super effective citizens in the world again who are adding and creating value as pillars

like that's a huge problem it's a health problem it's a education problem it's a it's a spiritual

and heart problem too that's a huge one I'm best one at right now that I think I've got all the

pieces I need once I fix that to turn the whole thing and get it going and then I'll be to spin

up an example farm that I'll be able to take all these pieces I'm putting together to help others do

on does anybody else have any other ideas of places we can play creative games to get more energy

into fixing things so the challenge there is the misinformation in the marketplace of there's

many places selling that but providing a false thing how do we fix that any ideas I think you're

on to something I think we have a glacial movement here we all want to quick we want it fast we

want it you know at the speed of a tweet but I think this is a cultural problem that we're seeing

that is going to take some time and I'm seeing this happening slowly look at the rise of the

carnivore diet there's more information out there there's a yuka app there's there's more

information in our on our cell phones now than at any time in history so I think we're moving

in the right direction it's probably slower than all of us would like but I do believe it is

happening hey farmers and ranchers we've got some incredible events coming up here at acres USA

in 2026 first from March 25th through March 27th Steve Campbell is joining us for a hands-on livestock

workshop Steve is a lifelong cattleman who focuses on fertility efficiency and building better

herds using low-cost nature-based principles then from April 30th to May 2nd we're hosting the

American Regeneration event at Mali Engelhart Farm speakers include Rick Clark Will Harris

and Mali herself and many more over two full days the third day includes an optional tour of

sovereignty ranch and will also be celebrating Mali's new book and the vision behind this movement

more events are coming soon find details and register at acres USA dot com forward slash events

and ideas hit me dark where you are so that's for me

about 1,600 miles from this conference but what I'm on was when it was hit so far I didn't need to travel 1,600 miles

About half of the land and half of the land and half of the land and half of the land and half of the land

I'd say say where you will welcome well set

Agreed I mean you can't steer a ship that has no heading right like a cell boat without any

momentum the utter does there doesn't know good to store it steer it the rudder does know good

I just want to pick up on your on your mentor

I feel like if we're going to capture the hearts and minds of young people we have to be the older

generation has to be worthy of the of having mentees and we have to tell compelling story and we have to leave it compelling

Let me heart agree yet one of the problems I'm seeing is that the older generation is not really realizing the way

The asset inflation is what enabled them to get to where they are and they tend to talk down to the young generation

And the young generation is getting so disgruntled and frustrated about it that they're starting to disconnect

And where that ultimately leads is just revolution. This is where society is just totally flip

Our greatest hope is to have those of us of the older generation who are willing to be ambassadors and be honest of like

Yes, the deck is stacked, but I'm here to help you

And to engage with the level of compassion honesty and generosity and grace

To help restore what's been broken but also restore them their hearts their minds their competence

But also be willing to be gracious as they work out their disgruntledness because a lot of that's reasonable with what this young

Generations living through in America today

And that's a huge one that's been making my team successful is the willingness to be honest about that and be gracious with them while we work with them

Could it be like a land trade where you like take people into our fishing instead of your talk

Function stacking is a huge huge thing. That's also super beneficial

It's hard with the labor bench and so it goes back to once again training young people to about have diversification of people in a farm to capture all the wasted value

That's everywhere

I really think mentoring the young generation is the thing if we can fix that we can get the problems going because everything else is solvable

The hearts and minds are the biggest battle

Hit me

Thank you for putting this panel together

I wanted to double click on some of you who were talking about earlier about

Sort of opting out of the financial system or at least those short-term as um, that's part of it

So does that mean

Like you don't look you're not looking for investors

Even in like impact investors are envisioned or into people or

Or does it just matter for a person what that aligns it looks like and then so maybe talk a little bit about that and the second part of the question is

You know you mentioned your own assets

Eat some lunchware who had something to think about

Are there I think about other sort of institutional

Players that might be able to help catalyze or start to tip the balance

Non-profit like the nature Conservancy is investing a lot of engineering

Faith institutions

Similarly can have a longer term time horizon in the financial institution

Where should we be looking or those kinds of

You know jump starts

Great question. So I focus on

Getting people to understand the problems

Because a lot of the issues here a lot of these collaborative endeavors is we're not all trying to solve the same things

To the root of what things really are of the pain points

And I look for alignment of vision ideology where there are like the herchairs do have growth like there are things like

It's not totally like a donation

But I tell people from the very beginning if you want to maximize purely financial returns like go by tech stocks or Bitcoin

Like I sell the product that what we're building the product is the restoration of the farming base of America

Like are you willing to take lower financial returns than what you could get in the market in other places

For the return of planning a tree that our young generation can actually flourish on when we're gone

And just trying to get people together who share that

With enough understanding of the problem to be an alignment on these are the steps of what we have to tackle first

There's a bunch of other questions. We probably got time for one more. I was gonna say thank you guys all for coming

We will be around here the rest of the afternoon

So if you guys individually want to come up more than welcome to

With love to chat more and talk about wherever we can brainstorm how to plow more energy and to fix in these problems. Appreciate you guys

All right that wraps up this episode of the podcast

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