Food Freedom, The Farm Bill And The Future Of Farming With Judith McGeary

Judith McGeary, founder of the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance (FARFA), joins us to explain how one massive piece of legislation quietly shapes nearly every aspect of our food system—from the seeds farmers plant to the food that ends up on our plates. She breaks down the history of the Farm Bill, how it evolved from supporting soil conservation and family farms to favoring consolidation and industrial agriculture, and why consumers should pay attention.

Judith also discusses the controversial effort to grant pesticide manufacturers liability protection, the challenges facing regenerative farmers, the loss of seed diversity, and the regulatory barriers that make it difficult for local food producers to thrive. Along the way, she offers practical solutions for rebuilding resilient local food systems and explains why meaningful change often begins with ordinary citizens making a phone call to their elected representatives.

Whether you’re concerned about food quality, farmer livelihoods, regenerative agriculture, or the future of America’s food supply, this conversation offers an eye-opening look at the policies shaping our agricultural landscape—and what each of us can do to help create a healthier future.

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Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Kendall Nelson and the regular text is Judith McGeary.

Many people feel frustrated by the state of our food system. We see rising rates of chronic illness, growing concerns about pesticides and food quality, and increasing consolidation in agriculture. Yet, few of us understand how much what ends up on our plates is shaped by decisions made far from the farm through policies, regulations, and legislation that most Americans never hear about.

This is episode 585. Our guest is Judith McGeary. Judith is an Attorney, Farmer, and the Founder and Executive Director of the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance, an organization that has spent years advocating for independent farmers, local food systems, and consumer choice. She’s one of the nation’s leading voices in the food freedom movement and has worked on everything from cottage food laws and raw milk access to meat processing reform and federal farm policy.

In this episode, Judith helps us unpack the farm bill, one of the largest and most influential pieces of legislation in the United States. She explains how it shapes nearly every aspect of our food and agricultural system, why policies often favor consolidation and industrial agriculture, and what changes could help create a healthier and more resilient food future.

We also discuss pesticide liability protections, regenerative agriculture, seed diversity, local food systems, cottage food laws, and why a handful of phone calls from engaged citizens can sometimes change the course of legislation. Most importantly, Judith reminds us that meaningful change doesn’t happen overnight. It happens when ordinary people build relationships, stay engaged, and take small but consistent actions to support the farmers and food systems they want to see thrive.

Before we get into the conversation, I want to tell you about Real Milk. Are you curious about the safety of raw milk and wondering about its availability? Go to Real Milk’s website. It’s a source of reliable information on real raw milk. There are articles, blog posts, videos, and podcasts that explain why raw milk is healthy, its amazing benefits, and where you can obtain it in the US. You’ll also find insights on the politics and economics of raw milk and industrial dairy production. Go to Real Milk, a project of the Weston A. Price Foundation. Now, let’s welcome Judith McGeary.

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Judith, welcome to the show.

It’s great to be on. Thank you.

I’m so glad you’re here. First off, right off the bat, I have to say congratulations because you are celebrating your 20th anniversary with the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance. I’m wondering if you could tell me a little bit about the group and why you started it.

Building A Voice For Independent Farmers

Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance is an advocacy organization. I started it many years ago when I came to understand what was happening with the USDA’s proposal to electronically tag and track every single livestock animal in the country. It was a program called NAIS, for those who may have heard of it back then. It would have been incredibly destructive for small farmers and local food producers. It would finish the lockdown of our meat supply in the hands of the big meat packers.

It’s funny looking back at it and sitting here years later because I thought I was going to be gone from my law practice for six months. I took a six-month leave of absence, founded this with other farmers and ranchers, and thought I was going to have this all neatly solved very quickly. It was not the case. It took us five years of fighting to get the USDA to withdraw the program. After that, we’ve kept going because there is an incredible need for farmers to be heard in the halls of the Capitol.

You are arguably one of the largest voices in food freedom. I’m curious if you can tell us what food freedom is. What does it mean?

Understanding The Impact Of The Farm Bill

I appreciate that compliment. There’s amazing work being done by lots of groups and people out there. It’s a term that means different things to different people. For me, what it means is the ability of consumers to access foods that they choose with information and understanding of what those choices are. That is only possible in the long run if farmers are able to make a living on their farms, if we can make farming ecologically and economically viable. The consumer’s food freedom doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists in complete reliance on the farmers and the supply chain.

The consumer’s food freedom doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists in complete reliance on the farmers and the supply chain.

I invited you to the show for several reasons, but the biggest reason was to have you talk about the farm bill. If you could give us a little bit of an update as to what’s happening. Maybe even back up and tell us why we should care about the farm bill. What is it about it that affects every American?

The farm bill is a massive piece of legislation that is supposed to be passed every five years. It’s been delayed a little bit, for three years. It touches on every aspect, pretty much, of our food and agricultural system. Pretty much anything the FDA or USDA does that has to do with agricultural food has something stemming from the farm bill.

I appreciate your comment towards the end of why people should care and how it affects every American. I do think that there’s a fair number of people in the local food and food freedom movement who are like, “That’s for the big business guys. We’re opting out. I’m a farmer. I’m a consumer. I buy direct from the farm.” That stuff is a headache for everybody else.

The reality is it shapes everything. It shapes what seeds are available, what livestock animals are available, and how the price of land is impacted by it in different ways. Although, there are things like development and such that are outside the farm bill. It creates this framework that we can’t completely opt out of, so it affects everyone who eats in this country.

Wise Traditions - Kendall Nelson | Judith McGeary | Farming — Farming: The farm bill shapes everything. It shapes what seeds are available, what livestock animals are available, and how the price of land is impacted.

How did the farm bill start? What was it originally? What is it now?

I don’t remember the exact year, but a lot of it stems from the 1930s. It was part of the New Deal. Back then, it was structured in a way that looked, first and foremost, at ensuring ecological sustainability. It was like, “Let’s make sure the soils of this country don’t disappear,” because they were visibly disappearing in front of people’s eyes. It was also designed to address the boom-and-bust cycle of agriculture. What they’d been seeing for decades in this country is that when there was a good year agriculturally, there was so much food grown that then the prices cratered, and the farmers went out of business.

The programs in their original farm bill were designed to try to smooth out those booms and busts and keep this within a sustainability framework. There were flaws. You can certainly pick flaws in the original farm bill programs. It worked pretty well overall until we reached the era where they decided, “What we want are the big farms.” They started changing the programs to drive consolidation and growth.

You mentioned that the farm bill is supposed to come about every five years, and it’s supposed to go on a certain trajectory. When we talked, you said it’s like Groundhog Day. Explain to me what you meant by that.

What happens when they do the farm bill is that most of the programs, not all, but the way it’s designed is that a lot of things are written to only last five years, and they drop. They end. A lot of what we’d call the subsidy programs, the crop insurance programs, the price support, and all of these things default to they’re gone. That’s designed to make a new farm bill every five years.

We were supposed to have a farm bill in 2023. That was farm bill year one, and they filed a short-term extension. In 2024, they filed another short-term extension. In 2025, they filed another short-term extension. We’re in year four for Congress attempting to pass a farm bill. It’s not clear they’re going to make it in 2026, either.

What’s happening? I’ve heard a lot of controversy over the pesticide liability shield. I heard that it got defeated in the House, but that it remains iffy in the Senate. Can you fill us in on what exactly that means? Where do you think it stands now?

The Pesticide Liability Shield Controversy

You can think of the farm bill as a bit of a Christmas tree. Everybody hangs things on it. You’ve got the core programs or the core pieces that are in there, and then everyone’s like, “What’s my new pet policy?” Unfortunately, one of the popular pet policies among some legislators has been to protect pesticide manufacturers like Bayer-Monsanto from the consequences of their actions.

In the version of the farm bill that the House Agriculture Committee sent to the floor, it was complicated because if you read it, you went, “All it’s doing is saying it’s about labels and warnings.” Legally, the impact would have been to prevent the various lawsuits that have been brought against these pesticide companies for failing to warn people about the dangers of their products and to effectively act as a manufacturer liability shield.

Fill us in a little bit about what has happened with the manufacturers. How much are they being sued for? Is anybody winning lawsuits against them? What’s happening in that world?

I’ve lost track of the lawsuits. There are thousands of lawsuits. There have been some huge awards in the hundreds of millions of awards because it’s punitive. First, people have won based on the incredible impacts on their health and the costs and loss in their lives. There have been punitive damages. What has come out in these trials is evidence that Monsanto knew of these risks.

Bayer is also liable for that because they bought Monsanto out. It’s not like it was some innocent, “We had no idea.” Things came out that showed that they knew exactly what the dangers were. There have been punitive damages. They’re facing potentially billions in damages, and it has been very hard on bare stocks. They want those lawsuits to go away.

This reminds me a lot of the vaccine industry. The only people I can think of who are immune to lawsuits are the vaccine industry. I assume this is the next big industry that’s trying to get liability protection.

As an attorney, I think that any legislator who’s thinking in any logical terms as opposed to, “Let’s protect industry,” should be insulted by this. Here’s the thing. Basic economic principles hold that you should absorb the costs of what you sell. The cost of what you sell should reflect the true cost of producing it, which would include addressing the damages that it does. This goes back to the Ford Pinto cases, where the Pinto was blowing up.

Ford made an assessment of, “It’ll cost less to pay the people who die when the cars blow up than it would to design a safer car.” Our court system or our legal system said, “You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to put out things that are inherently unsafe and say, “It’ll only be a few lawsuits. They’ll be okay.” If these products are so valuable and they provide so much benefit, then they should be able to absorb the costs of damages they cause. If it stops being profitable to make this product, whether it’s vaccines or pesticides, and distribute it, and if you have to pay when people are hurt. Stop making and selling it.

Speaking of money, can you talk about how much money is involved in the farm bill? How big of a bill is this?

The Congressional Budget Office or CBO’s estimate of the cost of the farm bill is over ten years because some of it extends past the five years. Over ten years, it’s a $1.4 trillion bill.

It’s not even in the billions. It’s in the trillions.

We’re heading into the trillions. It’s also per year. Per year, we’re in the hundreds of billions. We’re out of $100 billion or more per year.

This is one of the most heavily funded things that Congress funds, right?

It’s massive. I haven’t compared the numbers. I think it’s less than the Military-Industrial Complex, but it is a massive thing. I don’t want to leave too soon on the pesticide manufacturer liability shield. I stopped at the fact that the House Ag Committee included it in the farm bill, but what happened next is what’s interesting. We have big money behind this. This is a very high-stakes provision with some huge companies that want it to happen.

There was a massive outcry from the environmental community, the MAHA community, left-wing, and right-wing. There was a huge outcry, and Congress listened. There was a vote on the floor of the House on an amendment to strip it out. The vote was 280 to 142 in favor of stripping it out. We have a supermajority vote and are pretty strongly bipartisan. You had 207 Democrats and 73 Republicans, which is one of the most bipartisan votes on anything that we’ve seen. They were saying, “We heard from our constituents that they don’t like this.”

Hopefully, they also thought about the things I mentioned earlier, which is what possible justification do you have for this other than a big business that wants to be protected? Economically, politically, and legally, there’s no justification for providing this kind of protection for this industry. They listened. Members of a supermajority in the parties listened to the constituents and stripped it out.

I know it’s a bit of a Wild West out there, but if you had to guess, what do you think is going to happen in the Senate?

Where’s my crystal ball when I need it? I don’t know. It’s fascinating. I’ve heard feedback from people in different meetings with the same Senate leadership where one group of people was told, “We’re going to put it back in. Don’t worry.” Another group was told, “We’re not going down that road. We don’t want to have to fight like the House did.” Those meetings were two days apart. I have no idea. What we do know is that if we stop paying attention and we stop being vocal, it will be back in a heartbeat.

What happened? You said that there was a lot of outcries. I’m curious as to who was speaking up.

Transitioning To Regenerative Agriculture

It was a great range of people. You have this community. Weston Price has been at the heart of a lot of this for many years before a lot of other groups joined in. Parents are looking and saying, “Why are my kids so sick? Why are the kids in my community so sick?” They recognize how much of it goes back to food and how much of it goes back to both food quality and the toxins in our food supply.

You have the environmentalist movement that’s been fighting for decades to make people understand the consequences of the widespread application of toxic chemicals. You have the sustainable ag community that has grown immensely in the last couple of years, that are saying, “We’ve got another way to raise food. It’s not a binary equation of whether we use these chemicals or we don’t eat. We can raise food in other ways.” That’s an easy thing to say. It is a harder thing to do.

Certainly, I do want to emphasize that it will be very hard to transition all of these acres of farmland that have been under heavy, intensive chemical management to regenerative. That’s not something where you can be like, “We’re going to stop using it, and we’re okay.” It’s hard, complicated, and doable. It is possible. We can make that path forward. Our option isn’t to say, “We have to add these chemicals. People dying of cancer and people being sickened with all kinds of things is the price that we have to pay.”

Tell me more. If we can’t expect this to happen overnight, and we can’t expect the pesticides and all of the chemicals to be outlawed overnight, which is probably not a realistic goal, what is a realistic goal? How can we make things better?

I do want to start and say I was talking as a farmer, as a soil biologist. It is not realistic to think that you can take land that has had heavy chemical usage on it for 20, 30, or 40 years and expect it to produce under a no-chemical system in a year or even 2 or 3 years. You have to take it slow. You have to gradually transition it. The folks who are proponents of the chemical industry are right when they say that if you quit cold turkey, you will create a production of food in this country.

The folks who are proponents of the chemical industry are right when they say that if you quit cold turkey, you will create a production of food in this country.

We have to transition. We have to respect farmers’ livelihoods in doing so and farmers’ choices. What we have to do, and this is both as education and as a political movement looking for policy, is how do we support those transitions? How do we make sure that farmers have the information, technical assistance, and resources?

What about the seeds? We need to start building up seed sources again, which are non-genetically modified and well-adapted to each area. We used to have that many years ago. We had immense, wonderful diversity in our seed sources in this country. Now, we don’t. That’s not going to change overnight. We need funding that goes into programs to rebuild those pieces to provide the infrastructure and support for farmers to farm regeneratively and be able to do so profitably.

You mentioned seeds. I was thinking about this. A lot of our foods are being bred to not have seeds anymore. We have seedless watermelon or seedless this or that. Part of me thinks that there’s almost an agenda to it. We won’t have any seeds left in order to be independent farmers. Could there be any truth in that?

I agree with you. I walk right past the seedless watermelon. I’m like, “I’m not buying the seedless watermelons. Thank you very much.” It doesn’t even take to that stage. What has happened to our seed supply, and what the genetic engineering companies have done is take the best-producing hybrids that already exist, the non-genetically engineered, put on these extra genes, whether it’s glyphosate resistance or producing a BT toxin or whatever it is, and then dominate the market.

The farmer who used to have this corn that grew well for his region, that seed is not available anymore because the only version of it being sold is the genetically engineered seed designed to be used with all of the chemicals. There’s the economic reality in the seed market. The development of seeds is being done to maximize profits and maximize patentability. The focus is, “Can we patent it so we can control it? How do we dominate the market for it?” En masse, we are left without a seed supply that’s accessible to farmers.

Back to the farm bill a little bit, I know that a lot of those billions and trillions of dollars that we’re talking about are spent propping up the big growers, the ones who are growing the genetically modified corn, soy, big wheat crops, and these crops that maybe are not necessarily so healthy for us. How do we get it so that more of the dollars go towards independent regenerative farmers, the people who are doing things the right way, in order to make us healthier?

The way we do that is by eating the elephant one bite at a time as opposed to throwing up our hands and saying, “We’re opting out. We’re done.” Like what I talked about with the seeds, this affects our growers who are like, “I’m going to grow organic. I’m going to grow holistically and biodynamically. I’m going to sell direct to consumers.” Where are they getting their seeds? Their options for seeds are getting fewer.

We have to change the policies at every scale. That takes being engaged, developing the relationships, and developing the attention on these issues consistently. As much as I hate the Groundhog Day effect of the farm bill being over, the reality is, even if it had passed in 2023, we still would have had to show up every single year. That’s what we need to do if we want to change it. This is a titanic. This is massive. You don’t get to say, “We’re going to be vocal for six months and somehow think we’re going to have an impact.” It takes staying engaged day after day and year after year, and looking for where the openings are to move the needle and where the pieces are that could make a difference.

I hadn’t planned to come on and talk this much about seeds, but somehow, we’ve gotten onto it. One of the things that we’ve worked on multiple farm bills in the past has been getting funding for public research for regional adapted varieties that are open source, so that farmers can access them without paying the big seed companies. If they have to buy their seeds, that’s fine, but they are able to buy seeds at fair prices instead of being gouged, and that is for their areas. We work on those sorts of changes to start moving this around.

It sounds like it’s baby steps, and then eventually, we’ll get to the place that we want to be. What does the reader do? What can they do to help change the system? You said we have to show up all the time, and we have to keep the pressure on. What does that mean for our audience?

How Listeners Can Effect Change

It doesn’t mean you have to devote your life to it. It’s not like you can’t hold down a full-time job and still have family time because you’re so busy with this. It is something that, in some ways, can take a few minutes of your time. The thing is to be strategic. If you think about how an elected official thinks, they want to keep their job. Everybody wants to keep their job. What matters to them is that it matters a lot what people are going to think about when they get in those voting booths.

The wrong way to do this is to call them up and be like, “I want to do this. If you don’t, I’m never voting for you again.” I make fun of that because I have had people tell me they’ve done it. I want to cry when they tell me that. I’m like, “If someone came in and threatened you, are you likely to listen to them well?” None of us like being threatened.

What we do respond to as human beings is real human stories. The person who calls up and says, “I’m a constituent. I live in Cameron. My husband and I have a farm. We have all these people who want to buy our meat. We have to haul our animals three hours away. The amount we have to charge these people is 40% higher because of how expensive processing is. After two years of raising our animals, 40% of what our customers have to pay is because the processing is so bad. Guess what? There are these bills that could make processing more affordable and accessible for our farm.”

What we do respond to as human beings is real human stories.

Flip it and be the consumer. The number of farmers is very small, so it’s the consumer. “I want to buy from local farmers. When I’ve tried to find out why it’s so hard for me to get locally raised meat, what I keep hearing is that it’s about processing, and they can’t access small-scale affordable processing. The Prime Act and the Local Act are things that could help my farmer provide me with meat, as well as people in my area.”

That whole conversation was three minutes, if I hadn’t sidestepped some of it. That’s where you start making an impact. They hear the story and hear that it matters enough to you that they know you’re going to pay attention to this. You’re going to remember whether that legislator stood with you on this because it matters to you.

Can you talk a little bit about how important it is for each individual phone call that they get? I believe it can take very few phone calls and a few people taking action to make a congressperson pay attention or change their mind. What has your experience been?

I came into this work years ago with the image most of us have, which is like, “These legislators don’t listen to anyone.” People have all had the experience where they write, and then they get a form letter back. It’s miserable. If you’re trying to change their position on taxes, gun control, or abortion, you’re going to have a hard time doing it.

With something like food, first of all, there’s more commonality. There’s no staked-out win or lose on one position or the other. There’s more room for win-wins. They probably haven’t staked out a position. They didn’t come into the office with an opinion on meat processing. It doesn’t take very many votes. One of the first numbers I heard was from a long-time congressional chief of staff at a conference. This was Ron Paul’s chief of staff.

He shared that he had seen as few as 25 phone calls turn a congressman’s vote from no to yes or yes to no. That’s a pretty decent rule of thumb on a lot of our issues. At the state level, I’ve seen half a dozen phone calls make a difference to how my state legislator’s vote. If you get a few neighbors and friends all to call in, you very well could have a very major impact on what happens with how that legislature moves forward.

I have to ask you. In preparation for this interview, I watched Farmageddon, which you are in. I was astounded by how poorly some of these farmers were being treated by the USDA. Can you talk a little bit about what was going on and what was being documented in that movie?

Government Policy And Independent Farmers

That’s a blast from the past. I don’t remember the specific stories in the movie. To be honest, there have been too many. What I’ve seen over the years, not tying this to farm again in stories specifically. Sometimes, we have farmers run afoul of whether it’s USDA, state, or local, where the agency folks don’t even understand our farms. It’s not their context. They don’t get it, and they don’t necessarily want to get it. That isn’t even anything necessarily malicious.

Let’s think about this. Meat processing is one of the key examples. If you’re an inspector and you can go spend your day at one large facility that’s got a nice office for you with air conditioning, and it’s simple, straightforward, and streamlined, great. Do you want to run around to four different facilities where your office might be a little closet remade with a chair and a desk, and you’re driving long distances and having to pull over time and all of this? You prefer the big guys. There are some, unfortunately, normal human impulses that cause the agency guys to often favor the big industry before we ever get into issues like the revolving door and the relationship between agency officials and the industry.

We do often see farms being harassed by officials at every level, out of ignorance, out of bureaucratic ease, and out of people playing power games. Unfortunately, that thing happens. Not everyone. There are some wonderful agency folks. I don’t want to tar every bureaucrat as power-hungry, abusive, but it happens. I’ve seen it. It’s a reality. If you’re the one it happens to, it doesn’t matter that there are ten other agency guys who are perfectly decent people. You got stuck with the one who’s abusive. They can be incredibly destructive for your farm and operation.

We get to the level of the industry capture of the agencies, where there is a revolving door between agency officials and industry jobs. They’ve come out of the industry. They’re now at the agency. They’re probably eyeing where they want to go next after the agency, which will be back into industry, which creates obvious conflicts of interest and monetary interests. This is their community. This is who they know. This is who they hang out with. This is who they’ve been buddies with for years.

Unfortunately, if I do a blast from the past, I would encourage people to look at, read, or watch Mad Sheep, which was an incredibly devastating situation. The USDA was horribly abusive towards the sheep farm. If I remember correctly, a USDA senior official who led that abuse ended up getting a job at McDonald’s afterwards in their corporate offices. It was certainly with big industry, and I want to say it was with McDonald’s. We need to have much better ethical rules surrounding agency officials than we have now.

In the movie Farmageddon, it was similar. There was a story about a family that had sheep. They had imported their sheep, and their sheep had been quarantined the way they were supposed to. It was mad cow disease that they were trying to say was going to be in the sheep. There had never been any incidents of mad cow disease in any sheep, let alone the family of sheep that these came from. They terrorized the family. They took all the sheep and euthanized them all. It devastated them financially. They paid them only a fraction of what the sheep were worth.

One of the families, I think it was that one in the movie, later, they were able to go back and get the records. I don’t know if it was a Freedom of Information Act type of thing or something. They found out that the USDA, our government, had paid a million dollars to harass this family for the year or so that they did. You’re being nice.

I didn’t realize. The farm for Mad Sheep was profiled in Farmageddon. Mad Sheep is the book that they themselves wrote about. I’m not trying to be nice. The people who did that, the specific officials who did that, are horrific. They’re unethical. They should have been prosecuted. I’m not trying to tiptoe around that.

What I do think is important to understand is that the USDA has tens of thousands of employees. When we look at something like Farmageddon, it is real and devastating, and it needs to stop. The majority of folks at the USDA are trying to do their job. If 10% of the folks at USDA are bad actors, that’s a huge number of people still with a lot of power over a lot of farms. It’s not trying to soft-shoe the thing when it does go wrong. It’s recognizing the complexity and how big this is.

Reimagining The Farm Bill Priorities

It’s like the farm bill. It’s so complex. If you could walk into Congress, take charge, and change three things about the farm bill. What three things would you change?

I would first go in and completely overhaul the crop insurance program and set it up so that it is addressing real risks. In other words, rewarding diverse and regenerative practices instead of generally penalizing diverse and regenerative practices. It would require, and this ties to the next change I’d make, farmers to take conservation measures.

I am for food freedom. What someone wants to do on their land, they can do. If you want government support, then maybe the answer is that you also need to preserve our soil and our water. You don’t get to take government support and destroy the soil and water. Let’s be clear. A vast majority of farmers out there want to take care of their land. They’re being put in impossible situations by the combination of badly designed government programs that create the wrong incentives and bad information from the industries that they rely on.

Let’s go back and create programs and crop insurance that protect farmers from going bankrupt. We should reward the farmers for doing things that support the land and support our long-term food security and national security, which ties to massively increasing the funding for conservation programs. When we have farmers who are doing it right, we have what’s called positive externalities.

Unless they happen to have customers, who are willing to pay because they value it, in general, they’re not able to capture the value that they provide to the communities around them with healthy soils, reduced water consumption, improved water quality, aquifer recharge, and all of these things that our regenerative farmers provide to the communities.

Conservation programs are a way to help economically address the positive externalities for these farmers. A massive increase in recognition of the benefits that farmers provide. I’ll shove a bunch of things into one, under the saying we do an overhaul of the regulatory system to address what I would call scale-appropriate regulation.

Meat processing is a piece that we’ve been most vocal on and that we have focused on with things like the Prime Act and the Local Act, but this is something we need across the board with FSMA, meat processing. All of these regulatory programs that have been set up designed for large scale industrial approaches, single product lines, and everything that is counter to diversified local food systems. The answer isn’t to get rid of all regulation because I want the food in the grocery store that’s shipped from another country to be regulated.

I don’t think we benefit from saying, “No regulation.” We need food regulations, but we need regulations that address real risk and that understand that it is different when you’ve got a small-scale producer whose business is on the line, selling in their local community, versus a Tyson or a Cargill to whom, frankly, food safety is an economic piece on the balance sheet. They’re like, “What’s our risk exposure? What can we get away with?” Those would be my three magic wands.

I believe that if you are a giant corporation versus a small farmer, the rules are the same for both. Is that correct?

In general, yes. There are very few places where there’s any scale differentiation. It doesn’t make sense.

What can we do? How can we change ag policy at the federal level to support the smaller farmers? Even the people who are making food in their kitchens and trying to sell it. What can we do to help those people?

The thing that’s going to impact all of it is developing a relationship with your legislators. Who are your two senators? Who’s your rep in Congress? Pick up the phone and ask to talk to their agricultural staffer. It doesn’t have to be long. It can be a 5-minute conversation or a 10-minute conversation. Introduce yourself. Talk about why this good food is so important to you. Pick 1 or 2 things that are live discussions on the farm bill and be like, “This could make a difference.” Whether it’s the meat processing, the conservation programs, or stopping the pesticide manufacturer liability shield from coming back.

What are the things that you see that matter? Tell that to them clearly. That’s the big picture. The way to do that, because probably a lot of people are like, “That sounds great. Now, what the heck do I do?” is to hook up with an organization that is doing this work. I’ll encourage people to check out Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance. We send out action alerts, and we tell you, “Here’s what to say. Here’s what’s happening now.”

One of the things that Ron Paul’s chief of staff said is that the timing of the calls matters because it shows that you’re tracking it and you know what’s going on. You didn’t drop into it from nowhere. Look for groups, whether it’s Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance, or you can look for state groups in your own state, or what have you. There are other groups that do great work on this to help provide that background for you. We’ve started launching a new program where we’re doing action hours.

We get people on a Zoom meeting all at the same time, and we give you, “Here’s what’s happening now. Here’s what you can call about,” and then we all pause. We’re like, “Go call your senator now while we’re on the call. Come back to us with questions. Tell us what happened.” After everyone has made their calls, we’re like, “Everyone, go post on social media and tag your legislator.” The key is tagging them because you want them to see it. You want their communications person to be like, “What’s this happening on social media? My boss is getting tagged about meat processing.”

The social media person bumps it over to the ag person and says, “Something’s happening here.” That’s a tool we’re starting. We’ve started that program. Those sorts of things where you make the calls, you get to know the staff. Ten or fifteen minutes once a month will put you in the top 1% of the country in having a relationship with your legislator, which will lead to having a greater impact.

If we fix everything and eventually say goodbye to the chemicals and all of this sort of stuff. Do you think that regenerative agriculture can feed everyone? There’s always an argument that it can’t, which I personally don’t believe, and I’m guessing you don’t either.

Regenerative agriculture can feed everyone. The studies that come in and say it can’t feed everyone is they stopped using chemicals, or they only instituted cover crops in isolation. It is not easy. I also don’t think any farmer should be forced into it. It is about providing the tools and support. The farmers overwhelmingly would want to go to it when properly supported because they care about their land. Farmers don’t farm because they want to see their topsoil disappear. They care about that land. They just aren’t being given the tools.

Subsequently, when you look at studies like the Rodale Institute studies, a Nobel Foundation in Oklahoma, they’ve done the research. When you do it right, when you sit there, take the time, and do it in a way that truly does heal the soil and address the complexity, then the production rates are equal to or greater than, in many cases, the conventional act.

We talked a lot about the farm bill. Is there anything else that’s happening that people should be aware of, so that they can make their voice heard on?

Rebuilding Local Food Systems

The most active thing is the farm bill. This is also a great time to pick up the phone and get to know your state legislators, too. Most state legislatures are out of session. A few of them go year-round. A lot of them end by mid-year like this. Guess what? That’s a perfect time to talk to them because they’re not swamped.

They’re not in hearings. They’re not juggling whether to vote on this bill. This is the time when, if you pick up the phone and you take 10 to 15 minutes to talk with them. They can breathe and get to know you. Keep doing that. By the time the next legislative session rolls around in 2027, you’ve already got that relationship.

When you call them, and you’re like, “There’s this great farm-to-school bill or there’s this great cottage foods bill or there’s this great raw milk bill.” They already know you. There’s a level of trust and respect. They get where you’re coming from. That call could be two minutes and will have so much impact. That’s a good, low-stress, lowkey thing that you can do very effectively to build power.

You mentioned farm-to-school and also cottage laws. Can you explain what both of those mean?

Farm to school is both federal and state, in many cases. It’s trying to see how we get decent food from local farms back into the schools. There are a lot of pieces to it. One piece that everybody automatically goes to look at is that we need more money. The local farms can’t afford to sell at the prices that the big industrial complexes can.

It’s also more than that, though, because we have a broken supply chain. We don’t have processing capacity. We don’t have aggregation and distribution capacity. The lines of communication between the schools and farms, in many cases, don’t exist. There are a lot of pieces that many groups are working on, including mine, to figure out how we build that so that kids are getting good food in the schools. The local farms are more prosperous and are getting a good market.

This is an important market for those farms. That’s both federal and state. They’re provisions that people are looking at. Cottage food is an area of the law that is all being done at the state level, about low-risk foods, generally, but not always. These are foods being made in home kitchens and sold mostly to consumers. Some states, including Texas, my state, have adopted some limited allowance for wholesaling. The idea is we’re trying to rebuild the local food system.

My husband and I sold at farmers’ markets for years. Direct-to-consumer is the heart and soul of this movement. It can’t be all there is to this movement. If we want more farmers to raise food this way and make a living at it, and we want more people to have access to good food, there have to be options that don’t require going to the farmers’ market every week. As we’ve looked at cottage laws, I’ll use Texas as an example.

We started with this itty-bitty law that allowed baked goods to be sold from your house directly to consumers. That’s it. They had to come to your home. We gradually expanded it through multiple sessions. We got through a bill that allows almost any food to be sold directly to consumers and that allows for the non-potentially hazardous foods, the shelf-stable foods, to be sold through a vendor.

It can’t enter the wide-open supply chain. We’re not shipping it all over the place. If your local cafe, your local co-op, or your mom-and-pop grocer wants to carry your cottage food item, the shelf-stable, they can in Texas. This is how we rebuild food systems. It is by taking these steps that we build more options for both the farmers and the consumers.

This is wonderful. As we begin to wrap up, I want to ask you. Tell me what your greatest success has been with the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance. If you had to look back over these years and reminisce. What are you most proud of?

Successes And Future Goals

The two that have had the greatest widespread impact were stopping the National Animal ID System. That electronic tagging and tracking of every livestock animal in the country would have driven tens of thousands of farmers out of business and put many more in impossible situations. Another is getting a small farm exemption into the Food Safety Modernization Act. That provided protection for tens of thousands of produce farmers, the market farmers who bring their produce to the farmers markets and are selling farm-to-school and this.

I want to give credit. Those were both coalition efforts. We led the coalitions. I credit us with being key in it, but it wasn’t just FARFA, not by any stretch of the imagination. It was bringing together coalitions of people and organizations who were passionate for different reasons about protecting first the livestock farmers and then the produce farmers that enabled those to happen.

In a much quieter way, or one of the things that, day in, day out, I am proud of, and it keeps me going, is the people who will say, “I never bothered getting involved before. Now, I’m talking to my legislator’s staffer. I didn’t think it made any sense, but I picked up the phone and called my legislator.” A young woman who had never done lobbying came to our lobby day in Austin. She does a couple of those and then ends up flying to DC. She is doing that not just for us, but with other organizations. She is being this incredibly vocal advocate. NAIS and the Food Safety Modernization Act were vital damage control.

I don’t overstate that tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of farmers would have gone out of business had the coalitions not won those battles. For me, that damage control gives us the space to build the positive movement where we start making positive changes and changing the direction. The heart of that is those individuals who keep coming back and saying, “After I heard you, I went ahead and called. I made those calls. I met my legislator. I invited them to my farm.” That’s how we’ll make the changes long-term.

If you could pick one thing for the next year or so that you want to see happen through your alliance, what are you going to accomplish?

Unfortunately, it depends on whether the farm bill gets passed. I want meat processing reform. We have been fighting for so many years because it could open up so many doors. There’s so much interest. Many consumers want better meat locally, and it is so hard to do without reform of those regulations. It’s going to have to come through the farm bill. We have to have a farm bill passed for our reforms to pass, but we’re working on including those reforms in there.

As we come to an end here, I want to ask you one final question, and that is a question that I ask all of my interviewees. If the reader could do one thing to improve their health, what would you suggest?

Find that local farmer and buy fresh produce, the stuff that hasn’t been stored forever or that got picked. Buy that fresh produce. Buy the meat from the local farms. Not all of it is perfect. You and I have talked about chemical usage among some local farmers. It’s not magic, but that nourishment of what was grown in your area or in your soils is not only the actual vitamin, mineral, and protein content that we could measure in the labs. There’s something very real about eating within your community.

I agree. Judith, thank you so much for taking the time. It was lovely to see you. I hope I get to see you at the conference in October 2026.

It’s great seeing you. Thank you for inviting me on.

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Our guest was Judith McGeary. To learn more about her work and the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance, visit Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance. This conversation was a powerful reminder that our food system is not something that happens to us. It’s something we help shape through our choices, our voices, and our communities.

We explored how federal policies influence everything from the seeds farmers plant to the food that reaches our tables, why so many independent farmers struggle within a system designed for consolidation, and how local food systems can offer a healthier path forward. Judith also challenged the idea that ordinary citizens are powerless, whether it’s supporting local farmers, building relationships with elected officials, or speaking up on issues that matter. She showed us that meaningful change often begins with simple actions taken consistently over time.

Perhaps most importantly, she made the case that food freedom depends on thriving farmers. If we want access to nourishing, locally produced food, we must also create the conditions that allow the people growing that food to succeed. If you’re enjoying the show, we’d be grateful if you’d take a moment to leave a rating or review wherever you tune in. Your feedback helps others discover the show and become part of this growing community. Thank you for spending this time with us. Be well, be nourished, and be free.

About Judith McGeary

Judith McGeary is an attorney, activist, and sustainable farmer. After earning her Bachelors of Science from Stanford University and her law degree with high honors from the University of Texas at Austin, she clerked for a Federal Appeals Court and went on to private law practice. During that time, she became a passionate advocate of sustainable agriculture, and she and her husband established their own livestock farm.

After seeing how government regulations benefit industrial agriculture at the expense of family farms, she founded the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance to promote common-sense policies for local, diversified agricultural systems.

Judith has been profiled in the Texas Observer and Edible Austin, appears in the documentary Farmageddon, and has been interviewed on numerous radio shows across the country.