Factory Farms Vs. Regenerative Farms

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You may have heard of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) or “factory farms”, but what is REALLY happening on these conventional farms? What is the mindset of the animals? How are they treated? And does this affect the quality of the meat in any way? Guest Will Winter is a veterinarian and the co-founder of the American Holistic Veterinary Medical Association. He is a herd consultant with “feet on the ground” on conventional and regenerative farms. Today, he reveals the differences he has noted from start to finish, revealing insights on how the animals are cared for, what vaccines they receive, what happens with their waste, and how this affects our health and the health of the planet.

Visit Will’s website for more info: willwinter.com

Go to westonaprice.org for more resources on regenerative agriculture and sustainable farming practices.

Check out our 12 Spoons Restaurant Rating site.

See our sponsors: Offally Good Cooking and One Earth Health

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Will Winter.

What is the difference between factory farms and regenerative farms in terms of the farming operations, the mindset of those running the farms, and the meat that they produce? This is episode 465, and our guest is Will Winter. He is a veterinarian who cofounded the American Holistic Veterinary Medical Association.

Among other roles, Will is the author of The Holistic Veterinary Handbook and a Herd Consultant for the Thousand Hills Cattle Company. In this episode, Will discusses the importance of the provenance of the meat that we eat and why it truly matters for our health and the health of the environment. He covers the difference between factory farms or concentrated animal feeding operations and regenerative farms.

He talks about the role of vaccines in each contamination that comes from the CAFOs and the alarming conditions of the animals in the CAFOs. He contrasts their environment there with what he has witnessed on regenerative farms and the difference in the results both for the animals and those who later purchase their meat.

Before we get into the conversation, would you like to find Wise Traditions-friendly restaurants where you live, or at least, have an idea of places to eat that might have some decent options for you and your city or state? Go to 12 Spoons. It’s the site of the Weston A. Price Foundation’s Restaurant Rating System. It’s like a WPF Michelin Guide that can help you find places to eat out that incorporate some of our dietary principles.

You can also go there to rate restaurants near you that you would recommend and that you consider worth patronizing. Go to their website for more on the criteria for each spoon and this initiative. Our hope is that this rating system will have a ripple effect in the restaurant industry, encouraging chefs to make bone broth, use natural fats for cooking, and so on.

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Visit Will’s website for more info

Go to Weston A Price for more resources on regenerative agriculture and sustainable farming practices

Check out our 12 Spoons Restaurant Rating site

See our sponsors: Offally Good Cooking and OneEarthHealth

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Welcome to the show, Will.

It’s nice to see you, Hilda. We’re not in person, but I can see your face and your hat and your beautiful face. You look great.

Thank you. You’ve rubbed off on me. That’s why I’m wearing this cowboy hat.

I feel naked

For a long time, I have respected the work that you’re doing as a veterinarian and then as a farmer and all the things. It blows my mind. When we first spoke, I think that Will, you were in episode 3 of this show which was years ago. A lot has happened between when we first spoke and now especially in the realm of vaccinations. I was wondering if you could give us an overview of how they tell folks who handle livestock to protect their herds from sickness. Can you give us the lowdown on that?

Two Worlds In Livestock

There are two worlds in livestock. There’s the commodity factory farms, and then there’s the rest of us. It’s worlds apart. It’s completely different. If you have a factory farm, in other words, confinement livestock, CAFO, or a confined animal facility, you need all the vaccines in the world, all the chemicals in the world, and the antibiotics because they’re living in their own manure. They’re eating a GMO, a Genetically Modified Diet. They’re cram-jammed together, and they’re under unreal production pressure.

You have to bang out a calf every year. You have to have two litters of pigs a year. It’s a recipe for disaster. Again, when you eat in a restaurant, you’re going to be eating factory farm food. I live in a city of millions of people in Minneapolis, and I think there’s one farm restaurant here that’s the real deal. They serve food from their own farm with the exception of orange juice and coffee, everything. All their produce, they raised all that. They raised the pork, the chicken, the eggs, and the dairy products but the rest of it, you’re looking at Cisco truck basically.

It makes eating out difficult and makes travel difficult. I travel mostly to food deserts. I work in the country in rural areas. For the Thousand Hills Cattle Company where I work, we are aggregators for grass-fed beef. Also, we have at any given time, maybe 60 producers and maybe they have sold us five heads a year. Maybe they sell us about 100 a week but in that process, we aggregate between 250 and 350 animals a week that are 100% grass-fed.

I have visited every single farm that they’re following my instructions. I am the consulting veterinarian for a Thousand Hills so I get to have boots on the ground. I get to see that but it’s rare. It’s also rare for any restaurant to take our beef and put it on their menu. We had one restaurant in St. Paul, the twin city town, and all the beef they served there was a Thousand Hills beef. It was awesome that you’d go on there and relax. You don’t have to worry about the beef. Also, they tried to do that with the potatoes, corn, carrots, the peas, and the salad. We’re a long way from where we need to be with restaurant food.

Factory Farm Versus Regenerative Farm

Will, we have some readers who might not quite understand why you’re saying it matters? Why does it matter the provenance of the meat on the table in the restaurant or in the grocery store? Why does it matter if it comes from a concentrated animal feeding operation or a factory farm versus a regenerative farm? What difference does it make in the quality of the meat?

There are so many answers. Let me count the ways but let’s start with the fact that the number one source of pollution on the planet is what industry. What would you guess?

They say it’s the cattle industry.

It’s agriculture in general. Globally, the number one source of pollution is agriculture. How we produce food for people is a determinant of pollution. The runoff from a feedlot, has converted manure, which in our systems is God’s gift of farming. Manure is fertility. They’ve converted that into a toxic waste product that they can’t get rid of. The only way they found to get rid of all the manure because let’s say hogs, for example, live on a slatted floor in a factory farm. All the poop and urine go down into a system that washes it into a major manure lagoon. This is true of most dairies too. All the manure that’s in the barn is flushed into a lagoon manure pit and that’s Chernobyl. It’s toxic.

The number one source of pollution is agriculture. How we produce food for people is a determinant of pollution.

When we eat that food, we’re supporting more of that and those people don’t have your interest in mind. They are looking at the bottom line. Most are owned by corporate entities. A classic example is a modern factory farm for pigs where Cargill, ADM, or some large corporation owns the pigs. They own the barns. They own the feed and the farmer is just a janitor. That’s all he gets. He cleans up the mess.

Also, if he doesn’t do it right, he doesn’t get paid. It’s a sick system. I’ve helped only one that I can recall which was a nasty factory farm for hogs. I don’t work with them. They don’t like what I do. They don’t follow my directions. Even if they do temporarily, as soon as things get better, they start backing things down. We’re pampering them. They use that word derogatively. I use it as “I want to pamper my livestock. Why would you not want to pamper your livestock?

They don’t. With dairies, if they’re not losing animals on a daily basis, if there isn’t a pile of dead animals every day they feel like that we got to cut something back and they do. This one large hog operation called me because they were getting eaten alive. First, they had PRRS, which is a respiratory disease of hogs. It wiped them out. It’s like a pandemic for hogs. They lost almost everything and then they recovered. Now, they had PED, which is another disease of baby piggies. We call it Pigs Everywhere Dead. That’s not the real name for it, but it’s this episode.

They call me and it’s a father and four sons. It’s five families that live off of this operation. At the time I started working with them, they had 3,000 sows. The sows are living in a gestation crate, which is big enough. I’ve heard it aligned to an airplane seed. It’s like if you’re pregnant and you’re living in an airplane seed. You can’t get out of it. They can’t turn around. They can’t scratch their butt. They can’t do anything.

When I was let in there, I felt sorry for these farmers. They wanted to break out of this deal, but they were trapped. I said, “Matt, I’ll try. I’ll work with you. I know I can solve your problems. I just don’t know if you believe it.” The first thing you do is go to a chain link fence and they unlock a big lock. You go to another chain link and then the doors are all locked. There are three layers of locking and there are signs like, “No germs in. No germs out. Restricted facility. No access.”

There are all these signs and you’re thinking old McDonald’s farm. It’s like a nuclear power plant to get in. When you go in, you have to take all your clothes off and you take a shower and you have to scrub with a disinfectant soap all over your body, your hair, and everything. You dry off and then they put you in a moon suit with boots, with gloves, with earplugs because you go deaf in there with goggles and a respirator.

You haven’t even gone in yet and you do all that. You can see maybe 100 crates. Your eyes can see that far, 200, 300, 400, and thousands of hogs in all these crates. The screaming is deafening even with earplugs. The respirator was on me 100% of the time but for days my nose was running. I was congested from having breathed all that nitrogenous place that’s in the air. It’s ammonia that you’re breathing.

Why are the animals screaming, Will, do you think?

They’re in pain. They’re in misery. The pigs are smarter than some humans. They’re certainly smarter than dogs. Of all the animals to torture, a pig is not a good one and I don’t know why it’s done. In California, this is breaking news. They passed the law. You can’t have hogs in crates anymore. Crate-free hogs. This is in California only. Our newspapers are filled with hog farmers, like, “We’ll go broke. It’s dangerous. You’re putting us out there with these dangerous animals if they’re not in a crate,” which is totally not true.

 

What I did on this farm is I said, “We have to get them out of the crates. I put them on a natural program. I cut off all the antibiotics. The guys called me the next day and said, “Yeah, we had seven more deaths. I said, “Okay.” He called me the next day. He said, “We had five more deaths.” About the third day, these guys are desperate. They’re dying. They’re going bankrupt their lifetime generation. He said, “I thought you said you could help me.” I said, “Yeah, I can but you were falling off a cliff when I met you and you’re going to go down a little further before we start going back up.” On the third or fourth day, they only lost one piggy and then they never lost another one after that.

These farmers now have cut down to 450 mama sows. They have the boars. They do natural breeding now. They’re making more money. Their average is about 1,200 sows. They were in the thousands. This is a concrete city. This is like the airport. It’s concrete. They go, “What are we going to do with all this concrete?” “That’s a good question. Do you have a bulldozer?” We’re starting to dig some of it up, but they’re now producing hogs for these humane-certified Niman Pork. That’s the one they’re producing for and they get such a premium for their meat that they’re making more money.

Pigs sell for about $0.60 a pound now. You do all this work all day long. You’re cleaning up hogs and feeding them. You get $0.60 a pound and it was as low as $0.11. Now, they’re getting several dollars a pound for this valuable pork. They’re so happy and they don’t have to live in this hell hellhole anymore but that was a rare exception for success. I hope to do more of that but again, they don’t like my version of what they’re doing.

In the newspaper, there are all these editorials like, “Our pigs are not happy. What would they do anyway?” This reminds me of a story. A New Yorker was driving through the countryside and he saw this farmer holding a pig up to an apple tree. The pig was munching on the apples and the New Yorker was so curious. He said, “Why are you doing that? You can save so much time by letting the pig eat them off the ground.”

The farmer said, “What’s time to a pig?” It’s all that dichotomy. The only reason they get away with it to answer your question is that people don’t know. They don’t know how bad it is. There’s no way you could even get in for one. They’re so terrified that a PETA rep will come in and take videos. It’s another sign you see on factory farms. It’s a big sign, “No videotaping.”

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These factory farms with thousands and thousands of animals are creating contamination because they don’t know what to do with the waste. They’re not using the waste as fertilizer, but it’s running off into streams, bays, and things like that.

Factory farms with thousands of animals are creating contamination because they don’t know what to do with the waste.

You don’t within 10 miles of one of these factories.

They stink and number two, they’re mistreating the animals. From what I understand as well, when the animals are in that stressful condition their whole life, when we partake of that animal, whether it’s fat, which may be loaded with toxins or it’s muscle meat, we’re going to get some of that energy, cortisol, and all those things that are not to mention the ingredients that are in vaccines and that takes me to that question, Will. Talk to us about the role of vaccinations in these factory farms.

Vaccinations In Factory Farms

My answer is going to change, and I’m glad we’re on the Weston A. Price site because Dr. Tom Cowan has done an enormous service to us, even though it’s disrupting because he’s pretty much-asking people, “Prove to me that there is such a thing as a virus.” There’s a doctor in Germany. He is a biochemist. He is asking people. He said, “I’ll give you € 100,000 reward. All you do is show me one study where they’ve isolated a virus.”

This is interesting. He’s had that reward out there for three years and nobody’s claimed it. Nobody proved that they’ve isolated a virus. They’re called the no-virus sect of medicine now. They’re shunned. As you probably know, Dr. Tom Cowan had to surrender his medical license because of his beliefs. He believes that humans are biologically alive and that they’re energetically alive. Which by the way, back to that question about eating factory meat has bad energy in it, not from a chemical sense, but from the energy that’s put into it in that godawful situation.

They only have one good day of their life and that’s the day they’re killed to relieve them from the torture. Is that the energy you want to put in your body? Again, that mainly is true for those of us who believe that food has energy if it’s a carrot or head of lettuce. If it’s water, any liquid has the energy of the person who raised it the person who cooked it, or the surroundings. That’s another reason. We did this with Thousand Hills when we first started in 2002. Our message was, “Save the planet and enjoy doing it.” In other words, this talks about pollution, the loss of water, and the loss of everything.

Save the planet and enjoy doing it.

It didn’t sell grass-fed beef. We said, “Grass-fed beef has a different pH. It’s not a pH that deadly pathogens grow in. You will never see salmonella, listeria, and all the deadly pathogens in this type of meat. I suppose you could almost make it happen, but you’d have to work at it. It’s the same is true of raw milk. There’s a whole other topic that we’ve talked about a lot. The health part didn’t sell. We thought, “Let’s sell grass-fed beef based on the fact that the fat in it is omega-3 fat. It’s the good fat, the anti-inflammatory fat. Whereas factory pork or beef or chicken or egg eat a lot of seed oil so they have omega-six oil, which is the inflammatory fat that’s in the meat. We thought, “Why don’t you not get a heart attack or a stroke? Why don’t you eat this meat because it’s full of omega-3 fat?” I’m not doing as great a job as we did with marketing then and it still didn’t sell. Do you know why they sold it?

I happen to know but go ahead.

Each of us that worked, there were only five of us, but we each got a little grill, an apron, and a cowboy hat. We went to all the food co-ops and the health food stores. We had our little grill there and we’re grilling hamburger steak. We’re like, “Would you like to try some 100% grass-fed beef?” Also, there’s a barter system agreement that if they take your sample, you have 10 seconds or 30 seconds to say something. However, what happens is when you put it in their mouth, the first word that comes out of their mouth almost universally is “Wow.”

It jumps in the grocery cart, believes me. The second word that came in or sentence, anybody over about 50 would say, “I remember when beef used to taste good. Now, beef tastes like ketchup or Heinz 57 because it has no good flavor. Also, pork tastes like what they’re walking around in the confinement facility.” Flavor sells the beef. Again, it’s funny when you’re in a grocery store demonstrating grass-fed beef because they’ll be pushing their cart.

It’s an interesting hobby if you go to any grocery store or supermarket and see what people are pushing around their carts and then what they look like. We’re what we eat. A lot of times, there’ll be five pounds of garbage hamburger in their cart and they go, “This is not for me. My husband’s family, I’m having an in-law gathering and they don’t care what they eat, so they’re going to eat it.” People get very defensive when you look into their grocery cart. “You got 15 pounds of ice cream in there.”

It’s like looking in their bank account. They feel their privacy has been violated.

Good grass-fed beef tastes good. It also rings your bell. I’ve cooked ten thousand steaks for guys and you give a guy that would normally eat a 32 or 42-ounce steak at Ruth’ Chris Steakhouse and then ask for dessert. You give them an 8 to 12-ounce ribeye or a New York strip that’s grass-fed, and they push away from the table. It’s like, “I feel great. I’m full,” because it rings your bell. It’s got all that satisfaction with all the minerals vitamins and nutrients. Your body recognizes good food.

 

There are a lot of reasons on both sides why people are like, “I can’t afford all that organic food. We have to eat. We clip coupons.” “Do you have a cell phone?” “Yeah, I have a cell phone.” Do you have cable TV?” “Yeah, I have that.” It’s where are you spending your money, and the phrase that we used to use was, “Would you rather pay your farmer or your doctor?” I know you want to talk about vaccines and I do too because that is a bell ringer for getting people’s attention.

I was pleasantly shocked at how many people reacting negatively to the news that came out that there’s an mRNA vaccine available for livestock because they’ve already demonstrated that if you give it to an individual, it’s already in the milk the next day in humans so the babies are getting it. They’re getting the lipid nanoparticles. They’re getting these adjuvants and things that are in this vaccine even though they didn’t eat it themselves. Also, the industry is always pushing that edge. They’re inventing aerosol vaccines so you don’t even have to get jabbed. You put it in the water and everybody’s vaccinated.

That’s what they want especially for poultry operations. Poultry operations are very similar to what I said about the pigs. They’re highly confined. You see these pictures of wall-to-wall chickens, turkeys, or ducks. Also, they can’t figure out why they’re getting avian flu. I quit clipping articles about avian flu, and what it was costing the government, people, and farmers. It’s in the billions of dollars because of what they do, if you test positive for avian flu, guess what the next step is? They kill everything.

They are wiping them out. It’s so sad.

It’s genocide. It’s criminal but they will wipe out every animal you have. There was a while back ago. We had a guy named Mark Purdy. You can’t interview him now because he is in heaven, but he died at 42. He is a dairy farmer in England. He was the whistleblower about what people call mad cow disease. He knew that it was not contagious, but he couldn’t prove it. He went about his life because this guy had two times that the government agents came out and machine-gunned his whole dairy herd in front of him and his wife and children. That was for foot and mouth disease.

One of his neighbors had foot and mouth in their cattle so anybody that was adjacent to that farm had to exterminate all their animals. That was hideous and that was PTSD for him. It permanently scarred him. When this BSE came out, the same thing happened. He had his whole herd exterminated because of the fear of BSE. He went on a rampage. You might say he went insane or he got sane. He proved that diseases are not infectious agents, but it’s an environmental diseases.

In his particular world where the path of the Supersonic Transport or the SST from Paris to London, that thing was supersonic. It was a sonic boom. He found out that the sonic boom triggered a reaction in the brain where they’re storing certain elements in the brain and there are certain things like a sonic boom that will trigger it and it blows holes in your brain. It’s spongiform encephalopathy. Also, the same is true of Creutzfeldt Jakob disease in humans, which is a human mad cow or all the other prion diseases. Now, we have chronic wasting in our deer herds. We have scrapie. These are prion diseases. It’s been proven that the mRNA vaccine triggers prion diseases too.

 

It’s way beyond that. In Europe, they had a fear of this foot-mouth disease so they gave everybody an organophosphate Phosmet. Organophosphate is an insecticide. It’s warmer and they were afraid of the germ. They gave it at least double the amount and when they use Phosmet, they pour it down the back of the animal to pour on right down the spine. What’s right under the skin on this point? The spinal cord.

Phosmet was changing the chemical makeup of the brain and nerves. It turned it into basically a battery where the electrical energy that all nervous systems have was stored and then certain things like the sonic boom are one example of several things that explode that battery and you get these releases. That’s a whole nother deal related to the same thing.

Again, here we are again with things that trigger it. That avian flu people say, “The wild birds are carrying it. They don’t get sick from it, but they’re carrying it. We have to keep the wild birds out of our farm so they’re shooting. They’re poisoning and they’re killing these wild birds because that’s the source of this pathogen.

This sounds oddly familiar to me because during COVID they were saying it’s all the unvaccinated people that are making everyone else sick. They’re the ones carrying it, even though they are an asymptomatic carrier. I thought, “That’s so insane. It’s so illogical that a person can have something and spread it though they have no effect on themselves.” It’s reverse psychology or something. It’s some weird way of looking at it.

Many people love that one because it enables them to get away from the fact that they like it. I would say, I don’t want it so I don’t want to get it and it’s my health. They say, “Yeah, but you’re making your family and your neighbors vulnerable because of your selfish choice. If you love other humanity, you’ll get jabbed.” That’s a great sales pitch for them.

Going back to the livestock, I do have many people in my circles who are concerned that they don’t want to consume meat that has been given an mRNA vaccine. How common is it and is it common among regenerative farmers, let’s say?

The first answer is a cumulative answer from Tom Cowan and the other people that I respect, Andy Kaufman and others we don’t know how common it is because it’s a well-kept secret. We know for sure that there are swine vaccines that are mRNA with lipid nanoparticles and all the other problems. Those are for sure that they exist. How common it is? We don’t know. They want this aerosol vaccine very badly for the poultry industry especially but there’s a very easy way to make sure that the meat you’re eating doesn’t have an mRNA vaccine. Ask the farmer.

Find out if they use any vaccine because our 60 producers, we might have one or two newcomers that haven’t been able to elevate their mentality to the position where we don’t need no stinking vaccines of any kind. All the producers I work with and as I say with 1 or 2 exceptions don’t use any vaccine. They don’t use any chemical warmers and they don’t use any antibiotics. Why? We don’t need them. They have a healthy herds based on health from a healthy immune system.

That means they have to change pretty much everything. They have to mineralize their animals. They have to watch out for crowding. They have to watch out for mold mycotoxin that might be in the feed. They have to have their water tested because most rural water now is contaminated, polluted with nitrates and that’s a very bad situation from, again, this pollution from feedlots or from farmers that overdo it with nitrogen on their corn and beans.

If I’m hearing you correctly, Will, you were saying earlier that that one farmer pivoted, he and his sons pivoted so that they could change the health of their pork and it’s benefited their company, their farm in addition to their livelihood. However, most conventional farmers, if they’re reduced to the role of caretaker or janitor, to me, the more natural way to go about it, as you said, with checking for mold and water and testing the soil and different things, it’s more involved. There are a few that want to pivot from the conventional farming method to the regenerative is the impression I’m getting from you.

Regenerative Farm

Yeah. They’ve been sold a lie because the industry says, “You can’t afford to do all that.” In a way they’re right because meat is so cheap right now. We’re addicted to cheap food and that myth is very powerful and very hard to break. They’re told that you can’t afford to do all this stuff. Also, I have to admit. At Thousand Hills, we pay enormous value for the meat that we buy directly from the farmer that we resell so that then they can afford to do that.

What it boils down to a farmer is if you’re a commodity farmer, let’s say you’re white corn and beans or milk or whatever, if you’re producing a commodity, you’re a price taker. You take whatever they offer. That’s it. If they’re offering $0.11 for pork a pound or if they’re offering $12 for milk, you either have to say, “Shut up,” or take it. We are price makers. There’s only one place in the world you can get, and in our example, Thousand Hills Beef from Thousand Hills. We’re a branded product. We’re not a commodity. It’s not on the stock exchange.

It’s like if you want a Thousand Hills beef or something like it, here’s what the price is. We figured that out from day one. We figured out we have to charge $4.99 a pound for hamburger. At the time, this is 2002, you could buy hamburger all day long for a $1.99 pound. They looked pretty much alike in the case. People would point to us, we’re sitting there with our little grilling, “Why would I want to pay $5 a pound for the same thing I can give for $2 a pound?” If I was tired, if I’d been there all day, I’d go, “Here, taste it and then you’ll know.”

Maybe the answer to these consumers is the same thing that the companies would tell the farmers. “You can’t afford to buy the cheap meat because the price you pay is the health.”

That won’t work because that goes against the grain. That irritates them. You’re 100% right but it’s very difficult. Here’s my hope, and this probably sounds very pessimistic to you is the people that are eating garbage food are dying faster. The farmers that are exposed to all these toxins raising it are dying off. We’re entering a new era where people is Darwinian, but the people that are eating good food or raising good food are going to live longer. Just like I was a kid, I got off a farm as soon as I could get away to college because farming in Kansas, our family are all wheat farmers. You’re riding around a circle all day on a John Deere tractor spraying poisons and that did not appeal to me.

The people eating good food or raising good food will live longer.

Even as stupid as I was, I was incredibly stupid. I did a lot of things I regret. Now, George Burns said, “If I’d had known I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself. I’m that way. I’m paying for the donuts I ate when I was in college in the Coca-Cola. We rotted out our teeth as kids with all the candy that was available that we’re craving it. We pay for that but I work with a lot of young farmers now. The average age of a rancher are in the late 60s now. I think it was Elon Musk or Bill Gates who said, “You can evaluate the health of any profession by the average age.” The Googlers, their average age is 24. There’s a profession that has legs. It’s going to last a long time.

If the average age is 68 for ranchers, that’s a professional that’s dying unless we get new blood. We are seeing that. We do run into these. There’s two kinds of dilemma. One is Sonny boy comes home from college and, “Dad, I got all these great ideas.” Dad says, “Shut up and get out in the barn.” Also, Sonny boy goes to college and learns all this high tech stuff. Dad said, what my dad did is better than that. I know it sounds glossy and exciting to you, but we need to revert back to what grandpa used to do.

We see that a lot of times I’m thinking to myself when I’m doing an intervention, you might say of the consulting is I feel like a family therapist a lot of times. I’m not trained in that because there’s usually someone is that’s the foot dragger that’s like, “I don’t know. It sounds too good to be true.” You have to find out who’s the one that’s fighting change, even though change is absolutely necessary.

I’ve told this story to a lot of people, but we had one young guy came. I met him when he was 22. He just graduated from Ag school or from college. He came home and his dad said, “Son, here’s the keys to the farm. This farm is yours.” He had beautiful 1,200 acres of corn and beans. He said, “It’s yours. I’m your hired hand.”

This Ryan Herman’s. It’s the guy’s name. I love this kid. I met him when he was 22. He said, “Dad, I want to raise grass-fed beef. To a corn and bean farmer, that is the enemy. That’s like, “Saying I want to raise coyotes, jackrabbits or something.” However, his dad didn’t have a heart attack and die on the spot. He did help his son. The guy called. Ryan called me. As a consultant, he did 100% of what I recommended and that almost never happens.

People might do 50% or, “We couldn’t find that,” or, “We don’t know if we are ready to do that,” but he did 100%. The next year he had a herd of cattle. The second year, he started making payments on the farm to his dad. His dad gave it to him. He said, “No. I’m going to pay you dad. This is $15,000 an acre of corn ground. I’m going to pay you.” He did. He paid off the farm. Within the third year, he was in the black. He was making a profit. Now Ryan is married and he’s got a couple kids on the ground.

He is ranching 3,800 acres raising all 100% grass-fed beef done the right way and hair sheep. The point that made it so poignant to me, Ryan’s best friend was a kid that grew on the next farm over. They rode the school bus together, they played ball together, and they went to college together. When that kid came home, his dad said, “You’ve been screwing around for four years in college. Here’s a pitchfork. Get out there in the barn.” About a year later, that farm went belly up. That dad was not willing to change anything. It went bankrupt, broke, went to town, and died. That kid has a hired hand for Ryan now. He has nothing. He has no farm and no heritage. All that went down the toilet.

I think people have gone through such a health crisis and I’m not just talking about COVID. I think people are so depressed, anxious, and lacking energy that they realize something has to change. A lot of people are turning to food and they understand the distinction as you’ve been making it between factory farms and farms that are doing it right. Even if they can’t see behind the scenes though, I think there are secret videos and things out there. They’re realizing, “What’s happening here isn’t good for the planet or the animals or me. I need to make a different choice.”

You’re a big part of that revolution with your podcast and the work you do with the Weston A. Price Foundation, Sally Fallon and Tom Cowan. Do you know what Weston A. Price said? “You teach.” That was his dying words. That’s what it is all about. He was a holistic dentist in the ’30s, and he knew that diet was related to whether you have goofed up teeth, cavities sideways, impacted molars, or all of that. He figured it out. It’s your diet. He said, “You got to teach this.”

If we don’t have those kind of people, we’re going to be eating a lot of crystal hydrogenated cotton seed oil and it’s pure as white. How could it be bad? It’s snow white and it doesn’t taste like a pig. Where I grew up, we ate pie crust made with crystal and the farm families love crystal, but they were sold alive and margarine. I grew on margarine. My folk’s farm family are like, “Margarine’s healthier,” is what we were told. Margarine’s better for you. I didn’t like butter as a little kid.

These appearances are deceiving and all those Frankenfoods on the grocery store shelf. I like to say if it has a long shelf life, it’s likely to shorten yours.

I’ve never heard that. That’s good.

I think it’s true because all those preservatives and all those weird chemicals in there. It’ll last a long time up there, but it’s not going to do well for your digestion and your health. Now, we’re getting near the end. Will, is there something that we need to know? You said ask your farmer if you want to know what practices they’re using indeed especially if they’re using an mRNA vaccine on their livestock. Is there something else we should be aware of if we want to be savvy consumers?

Be A Savvy Consumer

First of all, you have to know a farmer to ask a farmer anything. That’s the first step is go to the farmer’s markets for a starter. If you live in the city, go to the farmer’s market and find out because not all farmers are noble or altruistic or care. I had this. It was a sad admission for me to admit that most farmers are terrible ecologist. They’ll spray anything. If they see a weed, they’re going to zap it with glyphosate or with Roundup and unfortunately, they’re not noble.

There’s a poverty mentality that comes from way back. A lot of us think, “I was from a royal family when we were over in Europe. We’re not.” Ninety-nine percent of us are white trash. That was our roots. We’re a slave and white trash people are not taught altruism or mobility of the honest kind. They’re taught survival. You’re in a trailer and you’re on welfare. That just begets itself. That whole thing about as we get more wealthy and as we prioritize how we spend our money, this is going to be a huge thing.

I’m an optimist. I believe what we’re doing at the Weston A. Price Foundation, all the chapter leaders, that’s where I want to hang out and these restaurants that have farm to table food and if it’s real farm to table. That’s where I want to spend my restaurant money. I don’t go to Perkins or Albee’s or these places, or even the high quality restaurants then everything still comes off the Cisco truck from the restaurant. They gussy it all up.

Once you’ve seen behind the scenes, you can’t unsee it. I think you especially know what goes on. You’ve been in those hoop houses that go for yards and yards. You’ve seen the conditions of those animals. I think once you’ve seen that, you’re like, “I can’t have that chicken because I know where it’s been.”

I think a lot of PETA people are nut balls, but they’re educating people. They’re behind the scenes and they’re hidden cameras. I got to respect them. They’re risking their life to do that. Some of them have been killed to expose these cruelties. People eating tasty animals, to me, that’s my version of PETA.

People eating tasty animals. I like that.

We’re all in this together. I love your show. I love what you’re doing. Also, being a veterinarian, I feel obliged to the plight of animals. That to me is everything in my life. I’ve been there since I was a little kid. I like people too, but I like my dog better than a lot of people.

I’ve heard that. That happens in a lot of dog families. They prefer their dog’s company to other people. Will, I love your company, but I want to pose the final question to you here that we pose on the show. Now, I’m cognizant of the fact that you are a veterinarian, but you’ve lived a long time. I want to ask you the question I like to pose here at the end. If the reader could only do one thing to improve their health, how should they get there?

I have to use a trade phrase which is know your farmer. That’s what it boils down to and that takes work. I qualify my own axiom here but it means you have to pay more attention to what you’re eating and study. It requires education and knowledge. It requires you to get away from the propaganda from big food or big ag. We have to get beyond propaganda and that’s challenging. Carl Jung, the famous psychoanalyst said, “There’s no coming to consciousness without pain.” That’s the only phrase I have on the wall in my office here. There’s no coming to conscience about pain. In other words, people that are not in pain when you’re eighteen years old and someone says, “Smoking’s bad for you.” “So what?” I don’t want to be an old person or something like that. They’re not in pain yet.

 

The farmers who come to me, they don’t come to me. Nobody ever calls a holistic vet and tells me how great their life is and how great their animal. The only people that call me are in pain. Things are not working. The wheels have fallen off and they’re in pain and they know they have to change something. I guess that’s what it boils down to is if you’re not in pain, you’re not going to change anything. You’re fat and happy and then all of a sudden, you get diabetes or you get a stroke or you get a heart attack and then you’re in pain. “What was it you said about grass-fed beef?”

That’s a sad reality that if you’re not in pain, you will not change anything. That’s human nature. Some people are very lucky. They eat junk food and it seems unfair, but it’s true. Granted, they’d be smarter and happier and better looking if they ate better but still, people can get away with murder. Our body is so incredible that we can tolerate abuse every day eating donuts, KFC, chugging soda pop and still live quite a few years. I hope people can have some pain to wake them up, but not permanently damage them. Yes. That’s an ideal situation.

That’s exactly what the Weston A. Price Foundation, the show, and all of these initiatives are about. It’s about what your work is too. It’s getting to people before it’s too late and before they do have too much pain and they can’t even continue. I’m so grateful for the time you spent and for your anecdotes, for your warmth, and for your heart. Thank you so much, Will.

I wish I could hug you right now, but I’m thinking it.

Next time we see each other. At the conference, hopefully, next time.

I hope everybody that’s reading can come to one of the conferences. It’s the thing that changes your life that has the message that you’ve been living your life longing to hear. You hear it. That’s the only original sin is if you know better, but you don’t, change. It’s fine to not know anything. Ignorance is what we’re born with but to know better and still do it the evil way, that’s a crime to me. We want people not only to know better, but to do better.

Thank you for empowering us. I appreciate it, Will.

Thank you.

—

Our guest was Will Winter. Visit Will Winter’s website to learn more. Now, for a letter to the editor from a recent Wise Traditions journal. Emily Couyo writes this. “As I was driving home from the Wise Traditions Conference enjoying beautiful autumn foliage views drenched in sunshine across the Midwest plains, I was moved to tears with great optimism reflecting on the wonderful people I had just met. I realized I have optimism for our country for the first time in a long time. Thanks to gathering with and meeting fellow members who are top notch. I am so grateful to be a part of the Weston A. Price Foundation family these past few months. Thank you for a fantastic weekend and the knowledge that will stay with me for a lifetime. You have blessed my family.”

That’s a letter from Emily from Kansas. Emily, we are so glad you came to the conference. Let me tell you, the Weston A. Price Foundation just announced that their conference for 2024 will be held in Orlando, Florida this October. For more details, visit our website, Weston A Price, and click on the Events tab. Thank you so much for reading, my friend. Stay well and remember to keep your feet on the ground and your face to the sun.

 

Important Links

• Will Winter
• American Holistic Veterinary Medical Association
• The Holistic Veterinary Handbook
• 12 Spoons
• Episode 3
• LiverLoverChallenge.com
• One Earth Health Wise Traditions

 

About Will Winter

Will Winter received a DVM degree from Kansas State University in 1975, as well as an undergraduate degree in animal husbandry and conducted post-graduate studies and research in veterinary toxicology for the College of Veterinary Medicine’s Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory and Animal Resource Facility. After graduating he specialized in surgical referrals and emergency medicine. In 1980 he created the Uptown Veterinarian-A Holistic Practice, one of the largest and most successful holistic veterinary practices in the U.S. In 1983, he co-founded the American Holistic Veterinary Medical Association. He is the author of “The Holistic Veterinary Handbook” and founded Rescue Animal Products.

 

 

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