Episode 1179 of Bitcoin And . . . is LIVE!
Topics for today:
- Impacts of “fiat” money on agriculture
- What’s about to happen in food production
- The rancher as ecologist
- Bitcoin as payment for goods and services
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[00:00:02]
David Bennett:
It is 02:22PM Pacific Daylight Time. It's the September 2025, and this is episode eleven seventy nine of bit Bitcoin. And today, I've got, an interview with the dairyman, JR Burdick will be joining us here momentarily. Actually, I'm lying. I already recorded the interview. This is post production. What am I gonna do? I mean, I'm not gonna lie to you. So, yeah. I'm about to drop in the audio of me and JR Burdick talking about all things agriculture. If you've kinda ever wanted to get a glimpse into what the hell's going on with, you know, agriculture and the fiat economy and how they are affecting each other, this is the one to listen to. We're gonna talk about his operation. Yeah. We're gonna talk about what he does. Yeah. But we're gonna talk about the impacts of fiat money and current monetary policies on agriculture.
How do subsidies come into all this? And insurance and futures on commodities. What happened in 1971 and slightly before when it came to agriculture all the way up till today? We answer a lot of questions. Actually, it's JR that answers a lot of the questions here for us, but we're gonna get into his take on current food production and procurement by at least United States citizenry and why well, it's just not all it's cracked up to be right now, and it's it's actually kinda frightening. But it hey. It is what it is, and we as Bitcoiners are here to change it. And JR is a Bitcoiner himself.
That's gonna be at the very end of the interview. But in between, we're gonna also talk about the rancher as an ecologist. That's right. There's a lot of people that really think that ranchers are just greedy, and dairy people are just greedy, and farmers are just greedy, and and that they they don't care about any of this. And, well, JR's a little bit different. He's in the regenerative ag portion, and these these are the people that really do understand soil. They really do understand how systems work and how they work together, and how ecology is just part of the whole play, you know, the whole stage that the play is performed upon.
And animals as ecological tools will be in there. We're we're gonna talk about Bitcoin as payment. And while JR is a Bitcoiner, understand he is a little frustrated with the fact that nobody will actually use Bitcoin to buy his goods and services. So that will actually tie up the very end of this particular episode. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna drop you right into it. Here we go. Hey. Hello. Alright. JR is a dairy, dairy farmer or rancher. That's gonna be a distinction I'm gonna wanna get get into here. And you have you've got some thoughts on food production in The United States and a couple of other things. One of the things that I find most interesting is that this is a Bitcoin podcast.
We are talking to a dairy farmer, and you might wanna know the fact you might wanna know why. Yeah. Where where's the crossover there? And it turns out that that JR is in fact a we'll just go ahead and call him a Bitcoiner. And he's got some thoughts on that that I think are I think the, I think my audience is gonna be interested in. But first, I really wanna know about your operation. Like Mhmm. What do you do? Like, how big is it? How do you make your money? What Mhmm. Or how does this work?
[00:04:00] JR Burdick:
Yep. Well, a little bit of background. I was what I would consider myself to be a commercial dairyman. I did it like every other dairy farm in The United States. We milked up until 2022. We milked about, we had about a 150 head of cattle running around the farm. My wife and I did all the work. We milked our cows twice a day, morning and night. We had about 70 cows all the time that we're actually milking, and then we had young cattle that were replacements and calves that, you know, that filled out that 150 head. And, in 2022, I ran into a so every farm I'll back up because it's kinda complicated, and I I gotta remember my audience doesn't know a lot about agriculture.
[00:04:50] David Bennett:
Yeah.
[00:04:52] JR Burdick:
So a dairy farmer makes takes the cows, processes the feed, grows the feed for them, harvests the milk, and then every other day or every day depending on the milk route, a milk truck comes and picks up the milk from the dairy farm, and he delivers it to a processing plant. And that processing plant in The United States, they are either owned by a, a a separate entity or by what's called a cooperative. I was part of a cooperative of about 8,000 other dairy farmers that owned processing plants across the nation, And, our milk would go there, and then it would get distributed to institutions in terms of a Sysco or a McDonald's or a Walmart.
And then they would brand it. They would put it into the products themselves. So there was several steps before the consumer from the dairy farm. And alls we did was we just made the milk and sent it off, and we were kind of a commodity producer in that terms because the end product, was necessarily determined by the processor or the final, institution that bought product. So, in 2022, some things were coming around. Of course, COVID had happened, and there was a lot of stress in the system, a lot of disruption in the food chain. And that made me aware, and I started asking a lot of questions that I had never asked before.
And, I'm kind of embarrassed that I was I was just put things on autopilot, trusted, you know, trusted the people in front of me that they were doing their job, and and I was getting paid. I was never happy with the amount I was getting paid, but, you know, we were we were paying our bills and and struggling, but getting along. And, 2022 happened, and they came out with a new program, and they wanted us to sign it. And I got to reading all the fine print, and I became very concerned with the language of the things that they were wanting us to sign. And it had it had a lot of good sounding things, things about the climate, things about animal care, but it was very intrusive at the same time. We were losing a lot of our independence and our own ability to manage our farms the way we saw fit, the way that we had done for generations.
And I started bringing up some of my concerns, then they couldn't answer my questions, and it just got you know, it snowballed. And, it ended up being a lot of things where they were they were looking for more information about, in terms of the environmental social government scores, carbon capture type things, and I just didn't wanna go along with that. And, I felt it was very intrusive. I had been milking cows for thirty years and had never been asked these kind of questions. They were asking for who my vet was and how often they had come out. And I live in a very, it's not It's a rural area and and low density population area, so my vet's quite a ways away. I have learned to do most of my vet work myself with very little oversight just from years of learning being around cat.
So I I told him, I says, man, I I I use my vet like the emergency room. You know? You just you don't still use it very often. I do everything that I need myself. And, they started to ask a lot of questions about vaccinations and those types of things. And my wife and I had always been a little bit, I'll call it vaccine hesitant even with our own children. And so I was very careful with those types of things. So so all of that came together and it came to a head. And, basically, we we agreed to disagree, and we parted ways. It wasn't as amiable as I would have liked it. They just basically one day said, if you're not gonna sign this paperwork, we're not gonna pick up your milk anymore, and I lost my milk market.
And, so my whole business my whole business model fell apart overnight because I couldn't, sell milk anymore. Because in The United States, there are certain laws going back to the early twenties, nineteen twenties that dictate how our milk is processed, procured, and placed into the marketplace. And, it's very difficult to mark to and very expensive to meet all those requirements to just sell milk to your neighbor. It really eliminated the peer to peer relationship. And, so we went we went from that very traditional model. I went through a series of, emotions from anger to depression to, anger again and wanting to burn the whole system down to a a, desire to change the system.
And, so we changed our we changed our farming model. I completely threw out everything I had done for fifty years, the things I had learned in college. And I just went back, and I said I said to my wife, I said, we're just gonna start farming the way grandpa farm. And, you know, great grandpa even. You know? So, we cut our herd back to only about 15 cows. We started to we we developed a marketing plan, figured out what our consumer base was, and started to bottle our own raw milk in August 2020 or July 2023. So it took us about seven months to figure out a plan and to get, our herd. We we wanted to sell a premium product.
Everybody knows about the issues with lactose intolerance. Very few few people understand that there's a couple of things that lead to that. They have nothing to do with milk. One is the homogenization process so that they homogenize milk so the cream doesn't separate out. So in in the natural state, milk, even at a cool temperature, the cream rises to the top. Mhmm. That's that old saying. I say to everybody, I said the two things that ruined American civilization were were the fact that we homogenize milk and light beer. And if we had those two things, we'd be back to we'd be back to real men.
And, so, so so that homogenation process, what they actually do is that they they send that milk at a high speed through a very small screen to break up the fat globules, and they make them smaller so that they don't separate out of the of the rest of the fluid milk, all the other components that make up milk. And then your body can't it doesn't recognize what that is anymore. And so Oh, yeah. That globule then commingles in your gut and and it causes a problem because, again, your body through the series of of, you know, I say through creation, other people say through evolution, your your body has designed yourself to, metabolize those fat globules in such a way that they, pass through your body. You could extract nutrition from it. But they have been mechanically changed, and it makes it more difficult then for people to eat and consume dairy products.
[00:12:35] David Bennett:
Right. And there's there's lots of studies about that. Let me ask you ask you this because it's like you bring up something comes up in my mind is that if if I'm buying whole milk and it's homogenized, the cream's not gonna come to the top. And like you say, it's the the these little vesicles of fat are are floating around. They cannot actually they're small enough that they can't stick together and then form the cream top. So my question is, if if I get, like, a gallon of whole milk that's homogenized versus a a gallon of raw milk that's clearly not homogenized nor pasteurized, and I pull that cream cap off, am I looking at 2% milk? Am I looking at 4% milk that's left?
Is that even the way to look at it?
[00:13:25] JR Burdick:
No. The the, the fat percentage is the, is is that cream. Okay. So so okay. So like my cows, I feed them a little bit differently. I feed a very low grain ration, high forages, high grasses. My cows are actually about a six to six and a half percent butterfat.
[00:13:47] David Bennett:
Okay.
[00:13:48] JR Burdick:
And, butterfat is a is is a component of the breed of the cow along with how the animal is fed. And so so you have so so then when they process the milk, what they're doing is they're taking everything off. So whole milk is 3.25% fat. That's what it is as as as a standardized. That's what it's gotta be. Any of the fat above that, they remove that, then they use that to make sour cream, butter, your other your other products such as that. And then 2%, they just remove another 1.25% of the fat away to leave you 2%. And, of course, because it's homogenized, you can't look at it and see that it's any different, you know, 2% to whole milk. Yeah. And then when you look at skim milk, you can obviously see that doesn't look the same as breast milk. It's water. It's disgusting.
Yes. Yes. And and, you know, and we we've had this big discussion about, fat in our diets for, you know, thirty years plus, and we're finding out now that we need that fat just for for brain function. And, one of the easiest ways, most digestible fat products out there is your dairy products.
[00:15:10] David Bennett:
So on your operation, how many acres are you on right now? Is it a large plot of land? Is it tiny?
[00:15:17] JR Burdick:
No. No. We well, I guess that's perspective. You know? We have we own 98 acres here. We did farm a lot more ground. We just found that, our changes in management, the number of cattle and and livestock that we had, we didn't need all of that land. Plus, now we were, we were doing all of the work, not just the production, but also the marketing, the distribution, the delivery, you know, everything. And, we just didn't have enough time to handle those extra acres. So we cut back on our acres to really just focus on doing a quality job with fewer fewer acres.
[00:16:01] David Bennett:
Now that brings up another thing that that I find really interesting is that you had kinda considered yourself, I guess, a commodity farmer while you were selling to the coop. Right? Doing That's correct. Kind of the same thing that all the other dairy farmers were doing. And all of a sudden, you get a wild hair up your butt and say, I'm not gonna do this. And they they basically pull your only revenue source, and you had to come up with on the fly and deploy in seven months a marketing plan. But I'm guessing that you weren't trained as on how to market things. Nope. Right? I mean, it's like the question the question becomes, how does somebody that is out there minding their own business, doing their thing, and all of a sudden, the rain comes down and everything changes?
How do you figure out how to market to the point that you were that you are now successfully able to sell direct to consumer and and have those relationships rather than sell to the milk coop? I mean, how did you do what what did you have to do? What did you get lucky, or did you read a book? Or
[00:17:22] JR Burdick:
No. I listened to several podcasts of and I and I went around and made a lot of phone calls to some other farmers that had that were in some type of a direct sale, maybe not directly to consumers, but they were had built their own bottling plants and were selling into it, you know, closer to larger metropolitan areas. They were selling their own brand of milk, into stores, into retail outlets, which in Missouri where I live, I can't do that by law, so I have to sell direct to the consumer. So I can't sell into a a third party retail outlet. Mhmm.
So I just, I just I just I just had a can do attitude. I just said, I'm not quitting. I'm not giving up. I'm not gonna be another statistic of a failed farm. And if I am, it's going to be because it's it's gonna be I know I gave it my my damnedest to get to where I needed to be. And, and that's just what I did. And, my wife my wife was a, she is not she she is not educated in marketing either. She didn't have any idea. I I mean, we we ran the farm she and I ran the farm together, so there was no off farm income, coming in. It's just as her and I working together side by side every day.
And, we just started to fight, and we just started to ask questions, and we started to read every newsletter that we could get our hands on. And we we read a few books on marketing, but we realized that those marketing gurus were all, they they weren't peer to peer. They were how to get how to get into, you know, a a a major corporation and get your get your brand established and those types of things. And, so while there was there was some insight there, there wasn't really this, exact formula for what we needed to do. Yeah. So Hallelujah
[00:19:30] David Bennett:
moment?
[00:19:31] JR Burdick:
No. Absolutely not. So my wife just one day, she just went to Walmart, and she's really good at asking questions, sometimes annoyingly good at asking questions. And, she started she started interviewing people as they came up to the dairy case there. What do you, you know, what are your complaints? What do you like about dairy? You know, all those kind of questions. And, it was eye opening to me because it was so different than what I had been told all of my years as a commodity dairyman that the consumer wanted. The the greatest complaint, for example, that we heard was people were very upset that when they got their milk, it was two days from spoiling or they would go shopping, you know, twice a week and pick up a couple of gallons, and they get the first gallon drink, and the second gallon would be spoiled. They'd look at the expiration date, you know, and it was the day they picked it up. And and, and and for me as a dairy farmer, I was just flabbergasted by that because I had never thought about that. I just assumed the milk left my farm. It went there. It got processed, and it was, you know, within forty eight hours, it was on the shelf. Well, I found out that's not how that works. Wow.
And, so we found that, and we found that the biggest issues were convenience. People wanted to, they they want convenience above price, even above quality. It was it was about convenience. So that that's our biggest hurdle is how do we overcome convenience because we are in a very low density population area. We have to travel about an hour to get to, so our model is that we deliver to certain locations once a week. People come and buy our milk there, and then they have, you know, a week supply or or whatever they need. And, our milk, because it is so fresh, it's usually bottled within twenty four hours of when I harvest it from the cow.
Most people will say they can we we recommend that nobody keep it over a week, but we've had people tell us it'll it'll keep in their refrigerators if they're careful and keep it to the back and, you know, don't don't open it and shut it every day, that it'll last up to two weeks. So so it's got a longer shelf life. It's got higher quality, of course, because it hasn't been the good bacteria haven't been killed by the pasteurization process. And, so it's just, so we just we just jumped in with both feet, not knowing we couldn't do what we didn't know, and, didn't know we needed to know it. You know? So we just took off and said, hey.
If if we're gonna fail, it's gonna be on us. And, we still don't feel very successful. We've had in fact, the last three months have been pretty tough financially just because we through summer, we've we've had a huge dip in our sales because of our normal customers going on vacation, things like that. Well, our milk, if we don't sell it, we've gotta we've gotta find another place for it. It it can't. It I can't store it for two weeks till somebody comes back to buy it. So, so we're you know, it's again, it's another part of our learning curve that we're still in, to little over two years after we began doing this. And, Yeah. We are we are not marketers. We are not going to we're gonna write a book someday. It's just gonna be called everything you shouldn't do because we still don't know what we're supposed to. That's the book that I wanna read. That's that's that's the book that I wanna read. But you've got
[00:23:14] David Bennett:
you've got another interesting part of of your past as far as your your experience in in in this whole ag business, and it has to do with stray voltage. Can can you talk about that? Because it looks like that was a pretty bad deal. And I I am I have never heard about this before. May I may have heard somebody say something about stray voltage, but never as it applies to to what you experienced.
[00:23:42] JR Burdick:
Sure. So we're in Missouri now, and we had we had to come to Missouri because we were about to lose our farm in Iowa. So in 02/2009, I'm gonna say that it never was proven in court. We did go through a very long court battle, learned a lot about our justice system that I hope nobody really ever has to learn. Mhmm. But in 02/2009, a large wind farm was being built near us. And as it came online, we began to get very unique, electrical problems on our dairy farm. So I correlate to two things, but I couldn't prove that in court. And and so don't don't take it as me being against wind farms or anything. I just think our technology hadn't caught up to our ability there yet.
But we had a we we brought on this large load, large production system, and we didn't have the, we didn't have the infrastructure from there to carry the load as it was necessary. And, you get into a lot of rural areas, and you're gonna find wires that were put up in the thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties still still in use. Mhmm. So, so we had an undersized wire supplying our area of, this this, this area of, service. And what it was basically doing was anything electricity runs in a loop, basically, and it runs basically in a straight line. And if there's any electrical engineers out there, they're gonna have arguments with that. I understand that. I'm just being very basic.
And so so the the power would feed out to your farm and then whatever power, wasn't used at your farm gets fed back to the transformer station. Well, there's always a little bit of leakage, and the leakage comes out in your grounds. Well, if your system is subpar, if your wires don't have the exact carrying load that they need to have, they're gonna send that that that stray voltage then that that that extra excessive voltage just goes wherever it needs to. And this voltage was finding its way to our farm because we happen to be on the end of the line.
So there was no place else for it to go. Right. And the loop was at the the the end of the loop was at our end. So we were the cul de sac at the end of the road. And, it started to just go, and it would find its way into our wiring system and then travel through, water pipes, underground, buried water pipes through the steel pipes where we milked our cows. It traveled into the house through the grounding system. So we just had multiple issues. First, we noticed it as issues with, electric motors that were burning up too fast because we were getting such variances in our voltage coming to the farm. Yeah.
One day, we were testing our 120 volt outlets, and we were getting a 160 volts at the outlet. And, that's a little hard on computers and TVs. Everything. Yes. And then, the big motors that we would run to for our feeding equipment were burning up constantly. And then so that was, like, our first thing all that's going on. And then we started having problems health problems with our cattle. So, ohms is a is a measure of electricity that that basically, defines resistance. Mhmm. And and a cow has the lowest resistance to electricity of any animal, any farm animal domesticated farm animal because of the way their hoof structure is.
And, they have a very they have a very thin veneer of tough hoof material, but just under that, there are blood vessels. And so that's why you see cows standing in ponds to cool off because their blood runs so close to their hooves. They can stand in there. That cools off the blood. That cools off their bodies. And, so, so so they went from having, good milk production, everything was going along fine, to just a train wreck. Cows would stop milking. They would stop breeding back. They would start to get mastitis much easier.
They become susceptible to other health problems because their body was always under attack. And when your immune system is always under attack, you just become susceptible to even a minor bug becomes a big issue. And, so we, we finally after well, the thing that that really set it off for us, all these things are going on, but but you have to understand everybody is looking at you and saying, what's wrong with you? What is your management that's causing these things to go wrong? What have you changed? We had we were spending a lot of money on consultants to come out and talk to us, and it was always it was always about what we were doing wrong.
And I kept saying, man, we just haven't changed anything, but we'll try you know, we were we were desperate. We'd try anything. We threw we threw hundreds of thousands of dollars at this problem trying to get it figured out very honestly and, couldn't come to a solution. And one day, my son who was, 15 at the time comes walking around the barn, end of the barn in the in the morning about 06:30. I'm feeding cattle, and he walks around. And he sees something. He comes and he runs and gets me. He said, dad, he says, the wires going to that box up there on the on the power pole are glowing red hot.
And I said, you're just you know? I was like, yeah. Right, son. And he's like, no. You gotta come and look, dad. So I come and look, and the wires were melting down from the power line to the transformer. And I immediately, we just shut everything down because I didn't, you know, didn't wanna fire, didn't wanna lose something more. Called the power company, and they came out, and they fixed a few things. And I says, you know, what's going on here? And he goes, oh, this is very common. And I just I looked at the guy like, I'm 45 years old. I've never seen that before in my life. What do you mean common? Never even heard of it. But he was just insistent, and I just I got to thinking about it. And, my next phone call was to a lawyer because I was like, something she is going on here.
And, so then we went through seven years of court battle to try to win. We finally did win, but, we we basically lost our farm. We just we just got behind so bad financially because of the, onerous cost of the loss of production, loss of cattle. All of our income was tied up in those cows. We lost it all. And, we, we've we sold the farm, and we moved down here just to try to keep on, keep alive. Our court case had we moved we moved to this farm in 2016. We had, we had our first court date that December, and then, they appealed it. We won.
It was two weeks of hell being every every question you can imagine, everything that doesn't matter. They they go through everything about your life and pick you apart to show that you're a bad person. And, we won. They appealed, and it was finally the 2017. It went to the appeals court, and then we won it the appellate level. They were going to go to, the next level, and, we basically said, you know, if you do I'm I'm up in because you can in Iowa. You could up your damage claim then. I said, if if you do, this is what we're gonna do, and it look and we've already won twice. You know? Unless you got unless you got the the magic card in your hand, you know, it looks like we're gonna be three times gonna be our charm. Yeah. And, so they they folded.
They wanted me to sign an NDA. I would not sign an NDA because I felt like I need to be able to tell my story and, help other dairy farmers with what was going on. Was this against the electric company or the Yes. Electric coop? Okay. Yep. Yep. It was, it's it was, Alliant Energy was our provider, but the, the parent company was, in was IPL. I can't remember exactly what it stands for. But Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Mhmm. Iowa producer does a Yeah. Something something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Well So so, yeah, it was, everybody says says, you know, something about going to court. And I'm like, you don't even begin to understand what that well entails. And to be honest, when we got done, our lawyers got a very large chunk of the money. I didn't get much out of it. But we want a week third.
[00:33:23] David Bennett:
I mean, it's usually, like, a third or so or something like that. Well, you know, this this kinda goes into something that I've I've wondered about quite a bit with with agricultural producers, but more specifically, people that are are linked to animal welfare is between you start seeing your cows get sick, and then they stop producing. So now you're you're you're operating at a at a at a loss because you got no sales. Mhmm. And and and then even you got equipment losses. Mhmm. And then all of a sudden, you know, you guys find yourself in a court of law. And and the question is is, where did you get the resilience to not just fold like a cheap suit? Because to me, this sounds like the kind of thing that would stop, you know, a normal human being dead in their tracks and cause them to go, I don't know what to do. I just don't know what to do.
[00:34:30] JR Burdick:
My my great grandpa used to say had a phrase, and it was, full strength and awkwardness. And, and and I just felt like there had been an injustice against us and more importantly against my family. And they were stealing everything that I had worked for, everything my dad had worked for, everything my grandpa had worked for.
[00:34:57] David Bennett:
For what?
[00:35:00] JR Burdick:
And and it was it was something I never want to go through again. In fact, I tell some people you shouldn't go through that. There's better ways around it. I, I would say my faith in God, I just felt like there was a a need to stand up for justice. And we did a lot of praying, and we just pushed through it. There was a lot of scars from that that I wish I look back on it now, it was all consuming. It was very hard on my two older boys because, you know, they're in the prime of their high school days. I was like, I was kind of a dictator to them, a tyrant, basically, because I was like, I gotta have you do this. And anytime they would, you know, kinda push back. Like, it wasn't just normal, you know, teenager, I don't wanna you know, I'd rather sit in the house and play video games. It was legitimate pushback of, you know, data when I have a life.
I'd be like, hey. If we don't stay at this, we're gonna lose our court case. And I put a lot on them. I shouldn't have. But, but we also just pushed through it. My two my two kids but, I mean, they get along with me great today. But I can just look back on that and say, I coulda handled some of those things differently. But the stress was unbelievable. I can't I can't begin to tell people, you know, what that stress was like to to go through that. And every time you turn around and you get you get a an email from your lawyer, oh, they want this. Oh, they want that. Oh, you gotta have these records. You just felt violated every time.
And Mhmm. And when you looked across when you know, I realized and this is what I realized about agriculture too. When we were sitting at that that, that first day at the, at in the court, and we were sitting at the at the plaintiff's table. I looked across, and nobody else in that room had anything to lose. The the lawyers on each side were gonna get paid regardless. The judge was gonna go home to her job. The jurors were gonna be able to go home. And I was like, the only person in this room that stands to lose anything is me and my family.
And and I just thought there's and and that was that that was when I really kind of became this anti corporatist type person because I was like, there's no corporation that's gonna feel any pain. Even if they pay me, it's just gonna be a expense, you know, the balance sheet. It's not gonna show up, and and they've got a, it was it was told to me after the fact by my lawyers. What my settlement was was less than what they paid their lawyer fees and their specialists. You know? They're all their expert witnesses. So I just was like, wow. Nobody nobody stood to lose anything other in there other than me and, and my family.
So, I just I that was when I began to realize there's something really wrong with our system in The United States because if if everybody has a little accountability, you don't do some of the stupid stuff you do.
[00:38:20] David Bennett:
Yeah. It becomes much more of a polite society. That's the same thing that we used to say about guns in the, you know, in the Old West. It's like it's a polite society because you don't dare call someone a liar or steal their stuff or hit their kids or Yeah. Pull any stuff that we would consider reprehensible even today because there'd be instant consequences. But, you know, beyond that, you know, there's there are court case out here on the King Ranch. I I live at Eastern Washington State, Central Washington, but you've if you've ever seen, it looks like Eastern New Mexico. And if you've ever seen that, you know it's dry as a bone.
Right. And they are they're probably gonna lose a five generation ranch because the the state of Washington has a lawsuit against them for at first, it was they had the audacity to dredge their, stock ponds that the great grandfather had dug. So it was man made, but they dredged them because they will silt in. Right? You know? You Right. Yep. Gotta be able to have water out there, especially in something like Central Washington. It's ridiculous. And no. No. They they were, deemed destroying the habitat of, I don't know, green lizard or some such shit. Doesn't matter. It's it they're probably gonna win that case, and they're probably gonna lose that ranch.
Mhmm. And when I look at you know, when I hear your story and I'm you know, and I talked for two and a half hours with their lawyer. It's actually a it's an interview that I did for this podcast. And, you know, I I talked to her for two and a half hours. I talked to to the old man. I talked to his wife. I talked to their kids. You know, I talked to there was hundreds of ranchers that were that were coming out in support of these guys, and it wasn't gonna matter. It wasn't gonna matter. They're, they're so far in the hole on legal, and and that's even with you know, their lawyer has tried to do everything she can to not charge them. Right. Or charge them the very, you know, least. And it's it's not gonna matter because this is a cost of doing business to the other side.
And, you know, this is, like, one of the other things that that I I think about when when I think of because like everybody else in The United States, I didn't think about food production. I don't think about you know, I do now because I care, but, you know, I when I was a kid, I I didn't know where milk came from. Shit, as far as I knew, is a spiffy looking dude in a in a nice little hat in a boarding truck that would actually bring the milk to our house. That's where milk came from. You know? Food came from the grocery store. And not only is it that we, generally speaking, don't spend enough time thinking about where our food really does come from, We don't spend enough time thinking about this, for lack of a better term, the absolute shit you guys have to go through, whether it's losing an animal, all the way up to fighting a court case, to input cost increasing.
Mhmm. Because at this point, we could probably start talking about the impacts of fiat money. Mhmm. Because I'll I think a lot of what the fact that it's a cost of doing business to damn near eviscerate your life to somebody, I think, is a direct consequence of being able to print money and being best friends with the person that prints that money. You know? So you've lived in both worlds. You you were doing commodity farming. You know? Or commodity dairy production, let's say. And then and then you've gone to to direct sales.
[00:42:15] JR Burdick:
Mhmm.
[00:42:19] David Bennett:
In in general, after seeing both of those worlds, how and you can get as specific as you want, but I don't even know where to to enter into this conversation other than to ask, how has Fiat affected farming outcomes, whether farm, ranch, dairy, all ag? What Mhmm. Since 1971, which is when Nixon took us off what was left of the gold standard because it there was only partial. Right. Since then, what was what's been the outcome in general?
[00:42:54] JR Burdick:
Mhmm. Well, I'll take you back, and and I had the privilege of knowing my great both of my great grandfathers very well. Both of them were born in 1899, and they both farmed. I my my uncle still has one of the family farms. You know? So, I was really blessed to hear their discussions about the time of the '20 the roaring twenties because that's when they were starting their life and getting their businesses going. And then the thirties and the depression and then the forties and then on up. And my dad started farming in 1970. So he he experienced that that commodity boom. So, fiat money what fiat money has done in agriculture is it has it has allowed people who are able to hold land and and and then build their empires because land appreciated above its its utility value.
Okay? Because people were looking for a place to put money that, would be a hedge against inflation. So land prices for for farmers have become the greatest single expense that you can't get a you it's just a hurdle you can't hardly overcome because it's not valued at what it can produce. It's valued at what it will be worth at the end of the next monetary cycle. And as the fiat the fiat devalues land increases in price, so you have to have land. So that was one of the things that I learned from my great grandfathers was that as they watched everything from the thirties, the people lost their land because the price of commodities didn't keep up with the asset appreciation of land plus taxes.
And so so they were in the they were they were behind the eight ball, especially if they had debt on the land because they couldn't outpace the the fiat running the land price up. And and at the same time, the fiat lowering the price of your of your actual work because fiat doesn't have a proof of work behind it. And it Right. And it works it works against anything that does have proof of work. So so that was a part of it. There was, of course, obviously, the the turmoils of of world wars and then the adaption of technology. But, you so so they they kind of they were able to kinda get that thing steadied and and moving at kind of a a level place until 1971.
There was some there was some fluctuation in the sixties, but it didn't it didn't outpace the the the devaluing of the dollar didn't outpace the the cost of producing the Mhmm. Said commodities. So there was kind of a symbiosis there. Everybody's able to kinda keep keep things the same, so you didn't have this way out of whack commodity prices compared to, input costs. 1971 comes along, and it's all out the window. You know? You you you you you've got some really interesting things out. I'll throw out some numbers here, and the numbers are always hard when you're talking, so I hope I hope people are paying attention here. But, in 1971, it took 200 and roughly 290 pounds of pork to buy an ounce of gold.
Okay? So an ounce of gold in 1971, you know, thirty five dollars an ounce to to $40 an ounce at the end of the at the end of that period. Took 290 pounds of of of pork to buy that ounce of gold. Today, it takes 3,970 pounds of pork to buy an ounce of gold.
[00:47:08] David Bennett:
Holy shit. That's a Yeah. Thousand percent increase.
[00:47:13] JR Burdick:
Yes. So so when people say my food costs more, of course, it does. Why does it? Because your dollar doesn't buy anything. Yeah. And and so we've gotten to so the the same can be said for milk, for beef. You can do it all through all the commodities, and you can see so when people say they're they're upset and I understand everybody's upset about the food price right now. But guess what? It's not the food. It's not the it's not the farmer getting richer. Because at the same time that that in 1970, that hog would buy an ounce of gold. 200 one hog basically would buy an ounce of gold compared to today where you're looking at needing a 100 hogs to buy an ounce of gold.
Right. So, you know, so do you have the same life weight?
[00:48:08] David Bennett:
And it it just it dawns on me. Now this is like, all things gotta be equal, and and we know that right now, not all things are equal when it comes to nutrition coming off the soil. Let's just imagine a time where we didn't completely destroy the soil microbiome. Let's go all the way back. And let's say that the dollar devalued that way from the course of 1800 to 1900 before we started using chemical fertilizers and and herbicides and pesticides like it was going out of style. That 290 pounds of hog processed let's say processed Mhmm. Is the same caloric.
It's the same, you know, nanograms or micrograms of of any you know, pick your favorite mineral, iron, magnesium, calcium, whatever. It's all the same. Mhmm. And if we can look at it that way, then then it becomes very evident what actually changed. And it has nothing to do with the hog. This has everything to do with this imaginary money that we've created out of thin air. Now, again, we're gonna we'll end up talking about this too. All things are not equal. Right. The say the same calorie will still be a calorie, but it's not gonna have the nutrition that Right.
Unless we get into things that your like, your practices are more regenerative, and we're we're seeing differences there. But back in commodity land, no. Right. No. It's it's it's terrible, but it becomes a a kind of like an object lesson of it ain't the food. Right. It's the money that broke. You know? If we're we're not looking at broken food. Right. Right. It it's so speaking the the other thing that I wanted to ask about Fiat, you'd I I was listening to you on Working Cows, and you said something, and I wanna see if I've got this right. I probably don't, but it seemed it it seemed like it it it could've led into it is that you were saying and we all know that land prices are increasing because of what we just talked about. The land is the same.
It's the dollar that's broke. We all know it. Okay. Great. Except as the dollar breaks and that land value, the perceived value goes up in price, then it seems that farmers and possibly ranchers, not all, but enough, can find themselves going, oh, well, I could releverage that land and get more loans and put those loans into what you would hope would be something a very useful endeavor. But in many cases, it doesn't matter what endeavor that they put it into. It comes back to bite them in the ass. Do I have this right? Are people, like, looking at their land? Farmers are looking at their land like the bank account that homeowners are looking at their home as. Right? Yes. Okay.
Yeah. Because this seems like a this seems this seems like a terrible state of affairs. You know? If you've got loans against equipment, if you've got loans against a barn, if you've got loans against next year's harvest because you got seed coming in, And I you know? And and I'm not even gonna pretend. I've never been on a farm. I have never been in a combine. I have I I have ridden a horse. Mhmm. Everything that I know is just talk comes from talking to people like you guys. But if that's the case, then I I don't wanna ask what percentage or or how many farmers have found themselves in a bad way, but I guess I have to ask it that way. How many farmers are finding themselves that, oh, shit. They should not have taken a a new loan out against that land as it as it appreciated upwards? And are they finding themselves in an impossible situation that they can never get away from?
[00:52:07] JR Burdick:
Well, yes. As far as a percentage, I couldn't tell you an exact percent. It's it's well over 30%, though. Okay. Okay. So so it's more than a third of the farms, but we have historical precedent for this. And that was 1979 and '27. Alright? And that was the beginning of the farm crisis as it was called in the eighties when so many farms went bankrupt.
[00:52:33] David Bennett:
Now is this when is this when all the farmers got in their tractors and drove to Washington, DC? Yeah. Okay.
[00:52:39] JR Burdick:
Tractor Cade was I wanna say that was 1982 that actually happened, but it was in response to what had been already start. So going back to our previous conversation about 1971 and fiat money, when when the when when the when we finally broke away from the the gold standard completely and said, yes. We're gonna default on our promise to give you gold, and we're going to let you have these wonderful things called dollars that are just as good, and we promise that they'll they'll be just as good for at least another week. You know, what did you see in the in the value of land?
So land where we were in Iowa was about 6 to $800 an acre in 1971. By 1979, it was over $3,000 a day. Oh. So what did everybody do? Everybody was like, they went into the bank, and the bank was like, look. You're worth this much more money. You should buy a new tractor. You should become more efficient. You should build this type of barn to that is going to be more efficient and help, you know, get the get confinement hogs started and all those things because they had equity on the bank balance sheet because of the inflation in land prices. So everybody did that.
Everybody just jumped on, and it the funny thing was the more highly leveraged you were, the more they kept throwing money at you. Because now they had you, but you also had the bank. And the bank was like, well, we gotta keep this guy going so that we don't go backwards so that we don't look bad to the regulators of the fiat money. And so that was all working really good until 1979. And it's really unique, and we'll talk about this a little bit with sidebar. The the second largest year over year price increase in gold is this year.
The first one is 1979. Oh, okay. '79. You look at the price of gold in 1979. The gold market was screaming, this is not sustainable. We can't do this anymore. And so Paul Volcker gets everybody's re gotta gotta remember Paul Volcker, and everybody blames Reagan for Paul Volcker, but nobody realizes that he was appointed fed chair under Jimmy Carter. Yeah. And Jimmy Carter brought him in and said, you've got to do what you've got to do. So we went all those loans that had been given to farmers because of this new value that was suddenly found because of fiat money on their balance sheets, they had always used, variable rate interest rates on those.
That was the predominant amount that was the predominant way most of those were financed. So they had no no security, no top end security on any of those. And as Paul Volcker started to tighten the money supply by raising increase interest rates, everybody's operating notes, everybody's land notes, everything started to just go up. So they were and and then you took 1980, and Carter had the Russian grain embargo where he said to Russia, because you guys went into Afghanistan, we're not selling you any wheat. We're not selling you any any products anymore. And then all of a sudden, our commodities completely fell apart. So we went from about wheat being about $4 a bushel in the 1980.
By harvest time, it was about $2 a bushel. By fall, it was about a dollar 75 a bushel. All the while, your interest rates are climbing at a half a point every time the Fed meets or a point, whatever it was. And so your your variable costs and your fixed costs were both going up, but your balance sheet was going down because now the asset value because the dollar was getting stronger in that Uh-huh. It was weakening your asset value, and it was the perfect storm. And that's why we lost hundreds of thousands of farms in the eighties was because of those because yeah. One A lot of those farms got foreclosed on because the asset value fell below their liquidation cost. Right? Okay. Right. Most of them still cash most of them still cash flowed, and most of them still were making their payments.
But they're because of what their balance sheet looked like, the small rural banks were out of compliance. And the only way those banks could get back into compliance was to shut down those bad loans, write them off the books because the FDIC was gonna come in and make them whole. And that's that's how all those small banks, they they just had to. They didn't have any choices because of what the regulators do. Let me just clarify for the for the audience if you missed it.
[00:57:33] David Bennett:
People will have a fifteen year or thirty year fixed rate mortgage on their house. That's not what we were talking about here. We were talking about variable rate loans, or I guess an arm is probably the best Yeah. Variable rate mortgage, but and this would be on farmland. So as Volcker was raising rates, your interest payments went up. And and, you know, like, if you have a thirty year fixed, that doesn't happen, and United States still enjoys, I think, the only country in the world that actually has a fixed mortgage rate. Yes. Alright. So to compound all this, I got Earl Butts Mhmm. In the 1973 Mhmm. Telling people and and and I wanna you know, I since you're out in the sticks, you're out the the out there actually doing the thing. Let's see see how how far off the mark I am.
Everybody attributes him saying, go big or go home, and he never said that. Right. No. What he said was, you will you will plant commodity, and I don't care what as long as it's wheat, corn, oats, cotton, I don't give a shit. You will plant commodity crops from fence row to fence row.
[00:58:51] JR Burdick:
Right.
[00:58:52] David Bennett:
Means that you had to rip out all your fencing. Now and and I'm getting to a point. It's not really about ripping out the fencing. It's about you got no more turn radius on your tractor. So what are the other things that came out? So first, you got nothing but commodities. Mhmm. Yeah. You got increasing land prices. You got bankers calling saying, hey. Now's the best time to get new stuff and take out a new loan. And then the Russian grain embargo. And so so there's where we were. But in 1973, when Howard when Errol Butts said that, and everybody went along with it and said, yeah. We're gonna do grain everywhere.
So now it ain't nothing but commodity. Whereas before, there was there was some hedge against whatever else is being grown that wasn't wouldn't be considered commodity. Maybe a lot more grays, maybe a lot more, yeah, hog ranching. Who knows? Right. But one of the things that that I find interesting about the Great Plains, because I I grew up in in West Texas. Mhmm. And, you know, I've seen farms all over the place, and, like, you can drive a straight line east to west in Iowa and not see a tree for a 100 miles. And that's what I wanna get back to the fence row to fence row because if you're gonna do that, if you're really gonna sacrifice every single bit of land, then you had hedges, you had trees, you had all kinds of stuff, and all of a sudden, now the birds aren't there.
Mhmm. And then now there's not a population of shit that gobbles up insects. Mhmm. And then all of a sudden, you start getting insect problems.
[01:00:35] JR Burdick:
Mhmm.
[01:00:36] David Bennett:
And we're just it it seems that we're just now putting this knowledge back together again. Mhmm. And that's where where people like you from the regenerative agriculture movement kinda come in. You know? And and and that's, I guess, the last part of this question that I, you know, that I wanted to ask was, you know, all of the stuff we were just talking about really did hammer the commodity guys. Mhmm. And and it's still hammering. You know, it's it hasn't gone away. Right? Right. Yep. Do you see any difference considering that you've changed your farming practices to more regenerative, and I and I assume you're gonna keep continuing down that path and learn more and more. Mhmm. Are do you see any relief from those practices against the fiat printing of money, or you're not there yet, or is it just the same?
[01:01:30] JR Burdick:
Well, the relief is going to come with the adoption the the acceptance of consumers to start to care about their food because we have to have access to capital. We have to ax have access to cops, and and it has to be out of outside of those normal streams of commodity production. And and and that's where the relief will come in in terms of the economic side. I have already had a lot of mental relief from getting off of that, that treadmill, you know, out of that rat race of commodity production where you're always gotta have more. Every year, you've gotta have an increase to some because you have to overcome fiat, and you have to overcome, just nature and the natural things. I mean, it it's everything we do is still affected by the sun, the wind, the rain, and and all those things. So you always have to overcome that, but you always are trying to overcome that next Fiat model and that whatever the next thing the government's gonna throw out there, that's going to be your competition in terms of are they are they who are they paying this year? Who what's what's the commodity that's gonna get, you know, the golden parachute this year for for extra money that's going to and and it always goes in the direction of the biggest guys, and they seem to be able to find a way to collect the most of the money. And if you're a small farmer, you don't ever get enough of it to really get you over the hump.
You just get enough to keep you, you know, keep you satiated until next year. And, you know, so so, the the outcome of it and and, again, it gets back to community. I think that's one of the things that I have found as I have changed my farming practices is it really does connect you more to your your in a peer to peer relationship where you have that ultimate accountability, that quick feedback, and it's the same in regenerative agriculture because you're seeing the so the the the benefits to the soil that you you didn't care about before. It was this summer, I was walking around, and I do I do, manage grazing on my farm. So I'm moving cattle from this pasture to that pasture, and I've got fences, you know, temporary fences so I can move them easily. And and I was walking along, and I was moving fence posts. It's a hot day, you know, in the morning, and dew is on there. Your feet are wet, all those types of things. And and I was just it just dawned on me how happy I was because I'm walking along and I'm going, okay. That grass is growing there.
Then I'm noticing these grasses, and I'm noticing the soil structure, and I'm noticing the earthworm bounds. And I'm and I'm seeing that cow eating over here and picking and eating this grass, but not eating this grass. And and I'm gathering all that information, and I'm thinking to myself, just three years ago, I was driving over this field with the tractor. I didn't notice any of that. I was just trying to drive straight. Mhmm. And I didn't I didn't pay attention to what moths were out here and what insect was over there and, again, earthworms. And and I just was like, oh, this is so cool to be doing this in this way.
And it was exciting for me. And I was like, I was actually connected in a real way for the for in a in a in a real way that I had had been in my, you know, previous forty years of farming. And, and I think as more farmers, and especially young farmers, because I'm kinda not I'm I'm long in the tooth. I'm the old old guy in this thing now, which which is harder for me to because I I told my wife, I says, I'm having to unlearn forty years of bad habits and re relearn how to do something new. But, but young guys, I get so much I get so much joy listening to them talk about these things. They're so much farther ahead than I am and I was at their age because they're looking at a holistic agriculture practice instead of a monolithic one, which is Yeah. Which is really what I was in all those years. And so I have I have a lot of hope for the future. There's gonna be some really intense pain coming as we have to change because the fiat model is running out. Mhmm. We can't keep doing the the money is running out. We can't keep doing what we were doing because, we're at the end of we really can't have any more asset appreciation for that next round of advancement, you know, go and borrow it from the bank because who's gonna afford the land? Yeah. You know, how much how much higher could the land go and still be used for for ag?
[01:06:26] David Bennett:
Yeah. You know? And you you had mentioned something about it in the in the realm of commodities and and grains, which one's gonna get the golden parachute. Mhmm. And it it just reminded me of this thing going on with the Argentinian soybean thing. And so I'm guessing that the golden parachute is not gonna be awarded to soybeans right now, or is it? How does this work?
[01:06:53] JR Burdick:
It's it's we're in a we're in a very different type of frame than what we've been for the last the the twenty five years leading up to 2016. 2016 on the implementation of tariffs is kind of a new thing that changes that dynamic a little bit. But, prior to that, it was always basically, all grains got treated the same, and we are going to give a standard payout based on a percentage, you know, percentage of the total. So corn is the largest one. The percentage the price per bushel was lower, but the percentage was equal to the percentage the percentage of payout was equal to the percentage of production.
Well, now, they're gonna give a little bit more money out to soybean farmers than they would corn farmers because of the fact that what happened was Argentina was just about broke here three weeks ago. Mhmm. And, they had no way to generate income. Their their dollar peso peso had devalued so far. So Trump went to him and said, we're not going to we're not gonna do anything with your tariffs. And, Bassett went to him and said, you need to just sell soybeans, sell as many as you want to China. And, allowed them to kinda circumvent the natural trade routes and let them just feed China Mhmm. At the expense of US soybeans.
So instead of us saying you still were going to have to buy this many soybeans from us in the next trade deal, this trade deal that they're negotiating, they basically said we're not going to put soybeans in there as a requirement for the trade, and they allowed them to then buy all these all that pent up demand went to Argentina instead of having to be coming through us. That was basically what happened. Okay. Okay. So the so they just took they they took the beans off of the requirements for tariffs is basically So
[01:09:00] David Bennett:
this is kind of another format of subsidy, right
[01:09:03] JR Burdick:
Mhmm. In a way. I mean It's directly subsidy. We just don't call them that anymore because, you know, they did the polling in the nineties, and nobody liked the word subsidy. So let's change it to an indemnity payment because that sounds really bad, and everybody goes, oh, something bad must have happened. So we must we must pay them. And and 90% of Americans can't spell indemnity, let alone know what it means. So you know?
[01:09:32] David Bennett:
Right. So this and I don't know. Maybe you could say something because you're you're dairy and you're not general meat cattle, but this secretary Walt Rollins thing that just happened this this debacle that happened over the last week, it from what I understand, the rumor was that they were gonna pay ranchers to keep heifers. Mhmm. And now secretary Rollins has come out and said and she's secretary of the what? USDA. Yeah. Okay. That Yeah. Yeah. USDA. And she said that that's not true. That's not what they were gonna do, but it got enough people talking about it so fast that that everybody saw it. Or not everybody, but a lot of people have you know, if you're following one farmer on Twitter, you've heard about this. And I follow several, so I've heard about this a lot. Mhmm.
What was what would even let's say we still don't know because I don't trust these guys as far as I can throw them anyway. Let's just say that they were gonna do it, that they were gonna pay ranchers to keep heifers. What's the ram what's the potential ramifications of that? I mean, it doesn't this and and a lot of the ranches were saying, for the love of God, don't pay us anything. Don't give us any money. This is a bad deal, and yet we've had agriculture that that the commodity side has been so dependent on commodities that it seemed kinda shocking that there was an outrage on on not all, but many of the ranchers that that I follow were all freaking out going, this is a bad move, man. You do not want us to pay us to keep heifers. And I was wondering if you had any other insight on not I mean, I kinda know why they had outrage, but what does it mean to pay somebody to keep their heifers? What was what was trying to be done?
[01:11:30] JR Burdick:
K. Well, again and it gets back to solid money fixes all these problems, but we'll we'll get back to what happened was you go back to the 1996 farm, and this is pivotal because this is still what we kind of operate under as our as our baseline. We changed from having a very, our subsidy system prior to that, which was everybody understood was we pay a farmer not to grow a crop or pay him to grow less crops or or whatever. We changed that to a a model where we were, expecting, insurance to make up for the shortfall, and the government just subsidized every farmer's insurance pay. So they they paid a portion of that insurance payment, and you the farmer still had to pay a portion. It's about it's about $65.35 right in there. 65% paid by the government, 35% by the farm, roughly.
Depends on commodity in those things. And then for livestock, there was insurance programs set up for them as well so that you bought you bought an insurance pro product, and that gave you, a locked in price and a a chance, you know, of basically a 4.
[01:12:49] David Bennett:
So it wasn't just insurance on a full crop failure. It was insurance on no. It's $3 a bushel. You would get even if it's a buck 50 a bushel on the open market, you will we will make sure you get 3. Right? Right. Yes. Okay. Yes. So you had revenue as well as production. So it was both sides of it.
[01:13:10] JR Burdick:
Well, you go to 2005 in the Renewable Fuel Act where we increase the amount of ethanol that was out in there, and that threw out all of the that that skewed all the formulas that we were using for insurance. Because before, it had been able to keep prices. Fiat hadn't moved much really in the nineties. The dollar didn't go a lot of places. Gold didn't go a lot of places. So everything kinda stays stays level. Well, 02/2005, we get the Renewable Fuel Act. We increase how much ethanol is avail is is to be mandated, used in in everybody's vehicles, And corn just goes out of this world because they're all afraid we're gonna run out of corn. So we go from, literally in 02/2005, I sold corn for a dollar 50 a bushel.
By 02/2007, it was $5 a bushel. By 02/2008, it was it was over $6 a bushel. So a four times increase in three and a half, four years, no no insurance model predicts that, and you don't know what to do with that. Uh-huh. So so it wasn't valuable. It it was it was more valuable and more advantageous. It it made more economic sense to sell your cows and grow corn for this ever expanding corn market that was never going to stop because ethanol was always gonna get mandated to go higher. And so we started decimate our cow herd. And we everybody just started getting rid of them because it's a lot easier to drive a tractor than it is to herd cattle. You know? It's just the cow on Christmas day, you gotta go out and take care of your cows. You don't have to go out, walk, check your tractor. You know? It it doesn't matter. It doesn't care if you're there or not. So so we had we had that system going on, and then you also had this exorbitant price increase in land that has happened since the great financial crisis till now, after land kinda cratered, and then it's just been on this, you know, up into the right the whole time.
And you couldn't afford to run cattle on it because they didn't generate generate enough income to even pay the taxes at that time. We increased our imports dramatically at that time, so we were our domestic herd was competing against cheap imports. And so so I say all that to say we had the perfect storm coming into about two years ago when cattle prices started to take off and people started to say, and hamburger's getting more expensive, and beef is getting more expensive. Mhmm. Well, every farmer really, as our as our farmers get older, they started to say, it's a lot less work to to grow corn than it is to feed cattle. I'll grow corn.
And, so they they started to depopulate the cattle herd, got rid of it because of the economics, and we just ground them into hamburger. And the big four packers were happy to do it because they were making a killing because everybody's liquidating at the same time. Supply is high. We're we're gonna make lots of money. This is gonna be fine. Well, cows take two years before they can reproduce, and then there's two more years before that animal that it reproduced can be eaten. So you've got a you really got a four year life cycle before you can either have reproduction or or an expansion in numbers or you could have more supply of meat.
So when they when they floated this idea, what they were saying was, we know we got a problem. We gotta incentivize you guys to keep your, your heifers back so we can grow the cow. But the the one industry in all of agriculture that has been pretty immune from government subsidies is the cow calf fruits. There's really not ever been a a go to program that they could that they could, you know, reap the benefits of taxpayer transfers. So they've been very independent, and they were like, no. Listen. Basically, you know, screw you. You you guys, made your bed lying.
You you screwed us for all of these years. We're getting ours. And it's not out of vengeance towards the, the consumer because they all have a lot of compassion for the fact that food's getting more expensive, but they're like, somebody needs to learn a lesson here. Stop screwing with everything. Stop playing with the funny money and stop playing with with all of these subsidies and leave us alone. And by the way, make sure you'd stop importing beef from other places so that we know that if we make the investment, you aren't gonna undercut us in six months or a year or eighteen months and say, oh, look at we just brought in a record amount of beef from Uruguay, and now your beef isn't worth anything.
And now you got all these heifers that we've paid you to retain, but now they're worth a third of what they were when you we could have sold them as beef. And and that's really what's going on is the beef producers are saying, no.
[01:18:30] David Bennett:
We we this is not the pig in the poke. Yeah. We aren't we aren't gonna fall for it. So, you know, I was just putting it together in my head, and I just wanna recap for the folks out there. The FAR bill in '96 basically got replaced by well, did get replaced, but elements of it got eviscerated by corn because of ethanol production. Yes. So in in so all the people that are bitching about we have to have clean ethanol burning engines, and they're the same people that are worried about $25 ribeye, $25 pad ribeye. We actually, it's I saw a I saw a price the other day, $29.50. Mhmm. Yep. And that's uncut. You gotta you gotta butcher that shit yourself. Yep. And that's uncut. It's $29, and that's Costco price. That's not Wagyu. That's not, like you know, it's just their Kirkland whatever.
Right. This is what you get. And Right. And it it took 96 to 2,006 is ten years. To '16 is twenty years. Here we are about thirty years away from that, and it takes that long for that it's like a butterfly flap in its wings in Iwan, and a tsunami hits thirty years later on the coast of The United States. Yeah. And this is we're so far removed from from agriculture. And even if if I was, like, if I had been a farmer for, like, sixty years and then somehow or another frozen, and then, like, frozen in 1930, and then we, you know, awoken, I would probably not understand any of this. Oh. I would not understand futures markets.
Mhmm. You know, they don't even allow futures on onions anymore because of what happened. And for those of you who don't know, there are a bunch of people bunch of onion farmers brought all their onions to the commodities floor for physical delivery Right. Because the futures market basically tanked their price and said, okay. You want the onions? You can have the onions. And in Chicago in the summer, that's a smelly mess. And Yeah. To this day, they don't allow futures commodities to be traded on onions. But Yep. This this notion of subsidies and insurance, and I we could talk about futures contracts on commodities, but I suspect that we're just gonna end up in the same with the same answer. It's just it's just noise.
We don't know what the price of corn per bushel should be. We don't really know what meat should cost. We don't know what eggs should cost. We probably don't know what anything should cost, but certainly anything that has something to do with if it's been subsidized, if it's got an insurance policy against it, and it's traded on the open market as a futures a futures contract, then we probably don't know what it really costs. You're exactly right. Yeah. Okay. Which brings us to what is about to happen to food production and procurement. You've got this is this is the what this is the thing that that you were talking about on Twitter that I saw.
And I your this is kinda your bag. What what do you see coming?
[01:21:56] JR Burdick:
Well, you have a, we have a production problem in terms of the fact that we have consolidated so much and we are in, the the consolidation has gotten us so far away from our immediate centers of consumption, the the big cities and those types of things. So we have a transportation requirement. We have a distribution hurdle, those types of things. And at the same time, you have a production model that depends upon fiat money. It it absolutely requires the continuation of fiat money to to fuel it to provide the fuel, which is the dollars, the capital, to to keep going. So it's going to come to a point, and I don't know exactly when. I see it right now in beef market. We saw it in eggs earlier, and they found a way around the egg thing.
We're not encouraging domestic production. We we're encouraging imports. So the the whole egg thing, we got how do we get out of it? Taiwan, Turkey, and Brazil. We went to them and said we're gonna now Taiwan is a friendly country, and that's fine. Or that wasn't Taiwan. It was South Korea. Excuse me. South Korea was the country. South Korea is a friendly country. Turkey, I've noticed, hasn't been one of our strongest allies over the years, and probably we should be counting on them for everything. And Brazil is a anomaly because, we have a friendship with them, but it's a love hate deal. And most of their food products, by the time they get them packaged, beef their their plants, most of them would not pass our USDA inspection. Yeah. It just blows my mind that we take food products from them and put them into, you know, The United States stream.
So so two of those but we did it all because, we were gonna be able to export fiat dollars to import this thing and that, you know, that keeps us in the our global homogeneity going and and the the global reserve currency because they've got more dollars now. And and we see that happening in beef. We've become this net importer of food. We don't we don't understand that. People don't understand that that right now, we are importing $40,000,000,000 worth of food every year that we never did before. And 40,000,000,000 doesn't sound like a lot, but understand our whole corn crop is only worth about a $160,000,000,000. Mhmm. So it's about a quarter of our bill a quarter of our total worth of our our, our corn crop. So we're importing food that is made into places that is not necessarily that doesn't have the same standards as us, doesn't have the same welfare animal welfare requirements as we do.
None of the none of those standards are the same. And then people go they they and they they don't label them correctly, so none of us really knows what we're eating. Mhmm. And and, and we're all doing it for increased profits for the the mega corporations, and you sit there and go at some point in time, this this this game, house house of cards falls apart. Mhmm. It it just takes a what happens if oil goes up 20%? Your transportation costs get out of whack. And now you you sit there. Is it cheaper for me to let this rot on the dock than to haul it? Or is it, you know that's that's really where we're at. Well, you you know,
[01:25:50] David Bennett:
JR, that that sounds like it it it is we're actually talking about what we were talking about with the ethanol production. Nobody knows how to model it. Mhmm. You got these models that work right now. But you change one variable and it gets too far out of whack, and all of a sudden, that model breaks. And Mhmm. All models are worthless. Some of them are are useful, but they're all generally worthless. And that's not me saying that. I can't there's a mathematician that said that at, you know, years and years and years ago. Yep. And this you're you're like, whether or not we let the food rot on the docks or not is the same decision as to what how the hell do we price this insurance product on corn given this ethanol production mandate that we've got. We don't know how the math doesn't work. I don't know how to math this out, and it looks like we're making the same mistake in a different in a different color dress.
[01:26:48] JR Burdick:
Yes. Yes. And all of those are why you see an increase in the push for these fake meats and fake proteins and and biological because then, you know, the real world can't be, you you no matter how hard we try, we can't make it fit in its spots. There's always gonna be that one variable you didn't see coming. So what they wanna do is they wanna be able to put everything into a factory where everything is controlled, make fake meat, put it out to the people, and say, see. We have a steady constant supply of all of this stuff because we can control.
And the you know, you go back to Jurassic Park one, you know, that first one where the scientist says, life finds a way. Mhmm. You know, we we gotta remember that the chaos is our life. And and you have to embrace that chaos, and you have to kinda say, I'm gonna control the things I can control. I'm gonna leave the things alone I can't control. And government, especially with fiat money, can't do that because if they lose control, they lose to fiat. If they lose to fiat, the gig is up. And, you know, so so, hey. Let's throw money at because we've got an endless supply of money because we haven't run out of ink or paper. And, so so they can they can say, we'll throw money at Beyond Beef. We'll throw money at this fake dairy product that's made out of, you know, worm juice or or or whatever.
And and we'll say that it has this nutritional standard, has this much protein, has this many calories, all these things. And it's like, yeah. But it doesn't have nutrients. It just has calories.
[01:28:35] David Bennett:
And it has your
[01:28:36] JR Burdick:
and and then we have sick people being sick and continuation of the same model that just keeps breaking us down. And and I see that I mean, I'm looking at it from 30 ago looking forward. I'm going, I did not see this when I was in my twenties. Yeah. Because I was still involved in the system and, hey. This is all good, and we can do all this. But now I look back and I go, man, we were just we just marched down this road every step of the way. There was another guardrail put in, and we just had less room to turn around, less room to turn around. And we're to the point now where you either have to jump out of the guardrails, completely get out of the system because the system won't allow for any descent or any innovation.
Mhmm. Or you have to stay there and just keep hoping you are not the guy the first guy to buzzsaw. And,
[01:29:35] David Bennett:
like Like the like the so it it sounds like the entire United States food production model is poised on the edge of a pen, and one one breeze from any direction, it could be fuel prices. It who knows? It it it could be like one of our majors of one of the major suppliers that is an importer of food just goes into civil war. And all of a sudden because we can't replace it, not yet not yet. It's gonna I mean, like you said, meat is a four year cycle just to get production up, you know, production numbers up for where we would be at sub whatever starting base. So but even if you know, let's say that that that model just stays perfectly balanced and there is no wind.
It's still all empty calories, which is now feeding the health care system. Right. And it's not health care. It's, you know, we we call it sick care or, you know, we call it pharmacy you know, we're caring for the pharmaceutical companies more than they're caring for us. I don't care. I it's clear that we're sick. Yeah. It's clear that that Americans have have a health crisis, you know, in the midst, and and nobody really wants to see it. Even, like, your general person on the street, this is I I think this is where the fat shaming body issue, everybody is beautiful, this movement, I think it's come out of a way to crush anybody saying that's not healthy.
Right. And it's not because I'm making fun of somebody. That's what somebody, you know, that's what another person on the other side of this argument wants people to think, that I'm shaming I'm fat shaming this person. No. I'm saying if you don't get your metabolic crap together, you're gonna keel over and die an early death. And if you I don't want that for anybody. Right. Right. And and that's where we are. So even even if the the food model that we have, we because we've chased efficiency Mhmm. To a a almost herculean measure. It's amazing how efficient that we've gotten at this.
And it's empty calories, and it's so efficient that it's poised on the edge of a pen, and any wind from any direction blows it down, which leads me to and I don't wanna disparage any ag producer Right. At all, but I gotta bring up the confined animal feeding operation. Mhmm. I don't like this model at all, and it's not even I don't like it because of animal welfare, but I also don't like it because of human welfare. But there's another thing about this. It's this mad rush for efficiency. Mhmm. Because, like, let me the this this isn't where it really broke my heart, but it was one of the many times that I've I've driven down this road in West Texas that it it always broke my heart. And it was going from Canyon, Texas to Amarillo. It's It's about a 20 mile stretch Mhmm. North, from south to north.
And there's this one part of this road where there's a small CAFO. It's not it's not one of these immense things you see out in in, you know, other parts of West Texas. But it is a it is a capo. And so there's all these cows on like, climbing over these mounds of of manure, because that's what it is. Mhmm. And then right next to it, there's a dying field.
[01:33:10] JR Burdick:
Mhmm.
[01:33:11] David Bennett:
And this makes no sense to me at all. And, you know, this is where we start getting into the the rancher is the ecologist, honestly. You know? People like the those those greedy ranchers are just with the cows burping meth actually, they don't even say burping. They say farting methane, are destroying the planet, and they're all doing it for greed. And I I've never heard a sentence uttered that was further from the truth or so centered in ignorance than that one. Mhmm. I I mean, sure. I get it. There's some CAFO operators that probably never even see a cow anymore. I I understand that, but that's not every rancher.
Because that's like that's like a team of 10 people that can direct a team of a 100 people that are directing the lives of a 100,000 cows. Right. You know, it's not you. And and and the fact that all those cows were pinned up and piling you know, they were having to actually burn diesel Mhmm. And burn man hours to pile up manure to get it shipped off when there's a dead field right next door. Mhmm. And I'm not even talking about dumping the manure over there. Mhmm. Because you need to you need to spread it. Yeah. And then, like, the cows actually do this. They walk around, and they they poop. And we don't even need to get into all the good things that the poop does. Mhmm. But how how do you fit? How do you see yourself the way that you've changed from commodity practices more to regenerative practices?
How do you see that changing your your actions upon this earth? Mhmm. I mean, I do you feel a change in yourself as to who you are, why you're here when you've done that? Absolutely. What
[01:35:07] JR Burdick:
can you describe that? I mean Sure. Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna step back and and answer a couple of things about your question there. One is the word efficiency. That gets thrown around a lot, and and everybody thinks that it's efficiency and how fast an animal gains weight or how little water we use to grow a plant, how much, you know, fertilizer we use. We're using the this and this and this. The system doesn't care about those. The efficiency is the doubt. Mhmm. So so when everybody talks about efficiency, they're saying it's the most dollar efficient way.
So it's the most way to make this fake thing be the most valuable to me. So that's that's what most efficiency is in agriculture today. And I did not realize that until about two and a half years ago when I began my journey because I always had measured my operation by the efficiency, which was calculated down to a number. How can you be more efficient than a black cow going out and eating green grass for three hundred days of its life, four hundred days of its life? It's got a great life every day of its life, and it has one bad day, and it makes you red, great, delicious steak. How is that's the most efficient thing out there.
But we haven't made that the most efficient thing because we have overvalued the value of land because of fiat money. So we can't have one animal on an acre. We gotta have 500 on that acre packed into a pen, brought all the feed for the from the other 400 acres or whatever to feed those animals because that's more efficient. And so efficiency I have started to measure efficiency in terms of how are my cattle handling, efficiently utilizing sun, soil, and water. If they can do those three things efficiently, I'm happy.
And not every animal can. There's we we have changed our breeding, our genetics to some extent where they're not quite as able. So the rancher is the eco ecological person. He has to the ecologist, he has to say, I'm going to stop measuring everything in dollars. Now we have to have money to operate. We have to have a profit. We have to pay our taxes and Mhmm. Keep the lights on and all those things, so you have to have money. But is it is that the most efficient model, the the conventional model, which is all run on a a fake monetary system? Or can I tap into what is real over here and say, I'm gonna have this animal walk across this field, harvest this grass? I'm gonna I'm gonna manage the grass by moving her. I'm gonna change the seasons. I'm gonna give proper rest to my grass. So I'm not gonna have a cow on here every day and make her eat the the very last little stub that's there and not gain weight, but, you know, I'll say, at least I had her on grass. You know? You you've gotta manage that.
You gotta manage that sun. Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant. Why do so many of these places have such such a rampant disease problem? The sun never gets to the animals. There's there's no ionization of any of those germs, and then they're always breathing the same nasty, stale, you know, air. Oxygen is a great, inhibitor of growth of of the different, diseases that could affect cattle and hogs. So and chickens for that matter as well. So you get out there, and now I have this efficient ecological system, but it is not fast.
It doesn't present it doesn't always give me a 100% repeatability. You know? So the grass this year feeds different than the grass last year. And by the time I get everything, you know, evened out, you know, I don't maybe have quite as many pounds of gain a day. I don't have cows giving as many pounds of milk a day. So there's fluctuations there, which is natural for life. But we have taken because we have taken fiat money, and we have said, we're gonna take all we're we're gonna take all of the, obstacles that we're we're gonna control them all. We're gonna take anything away. We've we've translated that to our livestock and said we're going to we're gonna put them in a uniform place doing uniform things so we can have a uniform product so the consumer can be in, you know, Washington DC and get a hamburger, and it tastes the same at that McDonald's as it does text the the McDonald's in Texas Mhmm. Because we want them the same. And we lost all our localism from that. We lost all of our regionalism and our individuality because we're all part of the pod because that hamburger is the same as that hamburger because that cow was raised under the same management in Texas. It's the same management in Missouri. It's the same management in Iowa, and we don't have any any nuance to our life. It's all sterile. It's all the same.
And it's like, what do we lose? We've we've we've lost that interaction with nature. We lost that element of surprise where our food becomes a feasting opportunity, where we go, I really like those peaches from from Georgia, and I like the peaches from Missouri, but they're not the same. But I still like peaches or peach from California. But we wanna have them all the same, so we spray them with stuff. We pick them early, and we store them the same way so that, you know, everybody has sameness. And and and and, therefore, we have a a production model in agriculture that has forced us to reduce our innovation, reduce our individuality, and we all become part of the pod. You know? And and that's just hope.
[01:41:08] David Bennett:
Yeah. And I've listened to a couple of a a couple of farmers that are read you know, whether they're Regen Ranch, Regen Farm, doesn't matter. And one of the things that and it even though I've heard it by now a 100 times, it still surprises me. If you're doing regen ag on on your property and your neighbors are not doing regen ag on their property, they get kinda miffed at you, and they make it known. And it's almost as if it's the kind of peer pressure that you that you tell your children about before they go to high school and about drugs. Mhmm. Is that there will be people, and they will pressure you into trying to do things that you know you don't want to do.
And if you break, you'll do them. If you stand strong, you won't, but the onslaught will never will never cease. And of all the people in my wildest imaginings, I would have never thought that it would be ag guys that would allow themselves to fall into that pattern. It and I hope I'm just talking out talking out of the side of my head on that one, and that I've got it all wrong. But do I You got it all wrong. Oh, thank god.
[01:42:32] JR Burdick:
Well, I should say, I have had a lot of pushback from other dairy farmers about what I'm doing. They're they're not happy with my direct market milk because I'm an outlier. I'm not the same as everybody else. And commodity production is all about being is sameness. So if you're doing something different, you have somebody has to answer the question, why is he doing it that way? You're not doing that. Which is better? And and I always tell everybody, I think I'm doing something better, but I came to this after thirty years of doing something that I thought was better too. So it everybody's got their own individual pace to learn, to gain knowledge, to find their own freedom, to break out and do their own thing. So, but it's again and it's fueled more less by the individual farmer and more by our commodity groups, those people that would represent us because they are sitting there, and they're trying to have a unified voice when they go to the congress critters for the next pile of funding.
And, you know, and if there's an outlier and they get a there becomes a big enough group of them, then congress is gonna start asking questions. Well, why you want money, but this group over here isn't asking for money. Why is why is that? And and, so they they need the sameness for that, that in particular. That's the main thing that they need. And then our consolidation of processing is so huge. The processors are demanding the same thing. Whereas when you had an individual, you had smaller beef processors all across the nation, that were maybe taking 50 to a 100 head of head of cattle to harvest every day.
If that one cow was a little bigger or a little smaller than this other cow, it didn't matter because it was all humans in there cutting it up. Well, when they come through and they're supposed to be robots doing this or or it's supposed to be this chain speed, you don't wanna change it, so we gotta keep production up, and that animal slowed us down. You know? That really does impact how, how we manage things. And and, and that production, it also takes away from that local guy that can say, hey. I'm cutting cutting hamburgers for for the grocery store down the street, and I know what they like for fat percentage in there because that's what customers want. I can make it special. No. JBS just says, this is all of our hamburger. This is 10%, eighty twenty. This is is ninety ten. Take it or leave it. And when you say, well, where did all the beef come from? They go from our plant. And you don't have any idea if it's if it how much of it's mixed together, how many different DNAs are in that. You you just you just take it and go. Well, I would assume that
[01:45:26] David Bennett:
how much how much is mixed, I just assume all of it. Mhmm. All of it. I mean, there there's there's no there's no safer safer number there. Right. That yeah. That the the mixing of the DNA, that's all gets a little bit into the more of the molecular biology Right. Stuff. And, you know, we used to have, you know, a meat processor that would do chicken and cow and deer and elk, whatever, you know, and and and hog. You know? Mhmm. And we used to have one in almost every county that there was a a population enough to have one in that county. Mhmm. And like you said and I still don't think people understand this. We have four.
We we have JBS, and I think they're Brazilian. Right? Yes. And then we have Tyson, and we've got US Packer. I can't remember. Nash National Beef and,
[01:46:24] JR Burdick:
oh, you're putting me on the spot now. Oh, I'm sorry. The question. There's only four. I mean, there's only four, and
[01:46:31] David Bennett:
and none of them are United States based. As I mean, there's US Packers or or or Yeah. National Packers that that it's not They got foreign ownership. Yeah. Yeah. All of them do. And that goes right that feeds right back into the problem you were talking about earlier today. You know, earlier in this interview is is the problem that that's coming, and this would be one of them. I mean, it's like if they major and we saw that with COVID, at least with Tyson. You saw you know? And and and you're right about the the we get back to dollar efficiency, and we've got, you know, mechanized, mechanized chains, that require us a chicken of a certain size or a animal of a certain size.
And it's all it's all that mentality that is has brought us to where we are. And, you know, honestly, I got it from a food food security, situation. I don't feel safe. You You know? I don't feel safe. And it's you know, it was better, you know, when I had like, I was out on on you know, I had a little bit little bit of property, and I at least had chickens. Hell, I had eggs all the time. Mhmm. You know? And it's like you learn how to butcher a chicken, and all of a sudden, it's like, that is a damn tasty chicken. Mhmm. Of course. Because I I control what it eats. You know? So and I I know what I wanna feed it. And it we're just and nothing I don't see anything changing anytime soon.
[01:48:08] JR Burdick:
Not on its own.
[01:48:10] David Bennett:
Yeah. And I think your prescription is is, you know, to go back to having people reach out to their local guys. Mhmm. Is there anything that we can do to make that easy for people that who just almost almost would see that ask. Like, I would ask somebody to go shake the rancher's hand, and then I could see it in their eyes. I don't know any ranchers. I I don't know where to go find them. You're asking me to do more work. Stop asking me to do more work. I already got asked to do a whole bunch of stuff earlier today, and you're just making me mad. Mhmm. And as as ludicrous as that sounds, I know that that's true. It's just one more thing that we're asking somebody who's already been who's not feeling mentally well anyway.
And all you have to do is look outside and go, yeah. I don't feel mentally well either. Mhmm. And is there is there something that we can do to help them through that journey to make it easier to go find their person?
[01:49:14] JR Burdick:
Well, I think I think we need to start asking more questions, and we need to engage in a dialogue. And that that's the first step. That's what we found with our customers is, what do you want? Why don't you feel it? So I'll I'll use this as an example. We had a a young lady who you know, we put up a website. We're on Facebook. We're we're trying to find customers. And, we're talking about the health benefits of our particular milk. And I had a young lady reach out to us who was a vegan. So she is eating nothing, no animal products, but she goes, I I've been asking questions about why I feel so poorly, And I've I've been reading some things, and I'm wondering if I need to put a little bit more fat in my diet. That was her whole thing.
And so she said, I've been reading some books, and I don't know what books they were, but how how dairy fat would be a good thing for me to have in my diet. So she started to ask us questions. So she was asking us questions out of concern about our farming practices.
[01:50:16] David Bennett:
Mhmm.
[01:50:17] JR Burdick:
And we started to tell her I just was very honest with her what we did, explained our process to her. It's not real complicated. This is what we do. This is what we don't do. And, she was like, oh, okay. Well, what do I have to do to buy a gallon of milk for her? So we went through the process of that. We're in her area making a delivery every Tuesday. We said stop and get a gallon. It's gonna cost you $13. Go from there. And she was like, okay. So she bought it. And then as she was sitting there, my wife talked for a little bit. She said, now listen. You haven't had milk for years.
Your body's not ready for this, but have a little bit. And then get your body built up to it. And we walked her through those steps. That lady is a full carnivore now. Yeah. She she just is like and she feels great, and she's she's gained weight. She's she was this little rail, skin and bones. She turned into this beautiful young lady now, You know? And it's just like so start asking the questions. Why don't I feel well? What am I doing? Because if you want to feel well, at some point in time, you have to take the responsibility of that because the system is is rigged to keep you ill so that it can make money.
We have to we have to understand that that's what we've got going on in The United States is we've got a system rigged to keep you nutritionally deficit so that you're pharmaceutically dependent so that you can become a cash cow for multinational corporations. That's what that's what everybody in The United States has to understand. That's the that's the goal behind what's going on. So so everybody has some more work to do, but let's say I like I told this young lady, I says, let's say you start coming to us because she said, I'm you know, it's another day. I've got drive twenty minutes to get to you. It's not just on the other side of town, you know, all those excuses. And I says, ma'am, I says, where do you go to get your prescriptions?
And she goes, well, it's it's over there too, and it's about twenty minutes away. I said, okay. I said, stop going and get your prescriptions filled there and come get your healthy food here and stop having to go there. I says, that so so so you make a choice. You make a choice about what you're going to do. Are you going to feel well? But you gotta do a little f you've gotta put a little proof of work into your own health instead of just proof of concept of going to, the the pharmaceutical's place, and they're telling you, here's another pill. Pop this. That'll take care of that symptom. This take care of that. Oh, we gotta give you this to counteract that symptom. And it was it was those conversations began that process.
And then get on the Internet. Weston a Price is a great, great website to look at that's gonna connect you, especially in raw milk, stuff. There's other websites out there. I can't think of them all right now. Do a little Internet search. I'll bet you'll find a local farmer close to you that's providing something that you need, and then ask the farmer questions. If they aren't willing to answer your question, you know, they're they're charlatans everywhere over the Internet. So so ask some questions, and then vet your farmer. And then if he won't let you come on your farm and walk around and see what you're doing, he's hiding some. Yeah. I we have we have an open door policy. We tell people every Saturday, we have a family come that's a customer. Hey. This is our day off work. We wanted to get out of the country. We're kids wanna walk around, see baby calves, see cows, walk around to the woods, you know, whatever, and, see the barn kittens and the and the puppy dogs and, you know, and people just and we just love having them here. We don't charge anything for it. You just come and take a look. And Yeah. And then they say, well, hey. We're here. We'd like to buy this, buy that, then we have products that we can sell them, and that's how we make our money. But but, again, it's that it's that connection, and you have to make a little effort. And and, again, we can't overcome the convenience part. That's our biggest that's our biggest hurdle.
We have we have almost nobody ever complained about the price of our products, and, yes, we're much higher than grocery store. Everybody complains about the convenience, and we're only it's only my wife and I. We can only be in so many places at one time and only do so many deliveries, you know, a a week. So it's you you kinda gotta we we, of course, we ask people what's the most convenient, and then we get a consensus and say, this is when it's gonna work to go here. This is when it's gonna work to go here. And, but people it's it comes back to responsibility. People gotta take responsibility for their own health, meet their farmers, and then trust their food, and then feel better.
Man, they do.
[01:55:12] David Bennett:
You know, you were talking about how you were telling that young woman, you're not ready your body's not ready for this milk. And it it just it I keep thinking about the fact that we import so much of our food, and we're importing it from from different places all you know, from everywhere that you're not. Or Mhmm. For you're not anywhere this stuff is produced. Right. And I and I wonder I I'm just gonna run this by you. You'll you'll either have an opinion or or further knowledge or you won't, but it seems to me that food is a two part system. Food for humans and food for mammals and, actually, just food for anything is sort of it's built on two pieces, and you have and you have to have them both. And if you don't get them, everything gets out of whack. Like, we get autoimmune diseases.
We get weird things going on. And what I'm saying is that if I live in a place that I'm inhaling pollen from grasses, clovers, what have you, I'm ingesting certain kinds of information. We can go back into the little bit of the molecular biology aspect and DNA, but these are antigens that are like they they, you know, they might make me sneeze. You know, they they might cause an allergic reaction. They might god only knows what. They might do nothing, but they're still gonna be collected by my immune system, and they're gonna be examined by my immune system. And my immune system's gonna do all kinds of fantastic things. Mhmm. But then I eat the animal that eats the grass that produce the pollen, And now my gut, which is the other side of my immune system, has another part of that key.
And when those two come together, I don't have again, theory. Pure theory. I have nothing to back this up. But it seems to me that you need both of those pieces so that your body understands where it is in the world. And that if you're eating fruit from Paraguay, but you're not ingesting any of the pollen from the flora and and or or dander from the fauna in that area, then you're not getting the other end of that information, and your body and your immune system ends up being confused. Mhmm. Is that so far away from the target that that I'm just crazy at this point? Or I mean, what when you think about food and place, what do you think about?
[01:57:55] JR Burdick:
Well, I will go I will go to a a a step lower than just pollen, the flora, and the fauna. The bacteria in the soil that we are all subjected to or or around, that actually has also something to do with what we eat because the cows as they're moving through those bacteria get moved up into the plants. The cows absorb them. So so the place where you live is where your food should come from because it is, like you said, it is that whole information superhighway. Soil to you, to your gut. And all of that is tied together. And and one of the things that we've done with our industrial complex of food and farming that we've got now is we've killed the bacteria in the soil so in such a way that it doesn't translate through the food, and then we've changed the molecular.
Know, we could get into GMOs and all that. That's a different topic, but we've changed that. So it doesn't translate from the soil to the animal that eats it, and then the animal is held away from the soil on a concrete slab inside a protected building with a protected air environment, cooled and heated without sunlight. They don't have that translation of that back soil bacteria to them. And then when it gets to you, they don't have you don't have anything that can translate from the soil to you, so you don't have any connection to the soil. And and I always get back to this is this is proven a lot.
Joel Hollingsworth with, Smoker of the Ranch has done a lot of work on this. The when when a civilization stops to appreciate and care for its soil, that's the end of the civilization.
[01:59:49] David Bennett:
Oh, this you're talking about dirt, the end of civilizations? Yeah. I read that book. That's one of my favorite ones. Yes. And so so you've
[01:59:59] JR Burdick:
you've lost all that connection, and we have broken that up because we haven't maintained that superhighway from the soil to your gut. Mhmm. And that's part of the reason why we have so many of the diseases that we have is because we just haven't got that connection anymore. We've changed all these food things, and we've gotten away from that that basic most basic, parts of our environment. I like to say I I was doing a talk here a few weeks ago, and I brought up everybody's been to a funeral, and they've heard those famous words, you know, from dust to dust, ashes to ashes. You know? Well, in my faith, I believe that we were all created. God bowed down. He made us out of the dirt.
Well, if we were made out of the dirt, we should probably respect the dirt. We should probably have a connection to soil, and it should feed through in our lives because life springs out of soil. But we have made it I was talking years ago to a potato farmer. We were talking about fertile fertility, and this is when I was a commodity guy and was listening to his talk. I was all excited about what he said, and he said, basically, all is I want the soil there for is to hold all my stuff. I don't care what the soil is or anything about it. I just want it to hold my seed, my fertilizer, my pests. I want it to just be a big pot. So that straight.
Yeah. Yep. It's just the it's just the medium that I'm using to grow this in. I don't care anything about. And I thought about that now that I've made this change, and I thought, how shortsighted is that? If he feeds the soil, it feeds all this other stuff. And we get all of that biology. We get all that nutrients. We get all of that that comes up deep within the earth, and it comes through that plant, and it comes to me, and I get the benefit all that nutrient mining that that plant did, and it fills me up. You know? How many times do you go and you eat something? You know? We're all busy. We all get on the road. We have to run through, you know, quick fast food to get something to eat because you're on the way. And after you get done, you either feel sluggish or you're still hungry. You're thinking, I just ate this big hamburger, and I drink that big pop of it, and I'm still hungry. Why? Because your body is not craving calories. It's Mhmm. Craving nutrition.
[02:02:16] David Bennett:
And we don't have any nutrition in any of that food. We just have cows. Yeah. And and that's the thing is, like, for anybody that's listening, it's going, okay. So, you know, I I know what a calorie is, but I don't know what nutrition is. It's just micronutrients and minerals. That's just that's what it is. It's it's you don't have enough calcium. You don't have enough iron. Iron's a big one. Iron deficiency is is huge, especially in women. And if without iron, your hemoglobin doesn't work, and without hemoglobin not working, you're not able to transition as much oxygen as you normally would, which means that your neurons don't fire as well. It ain't rocket science. I mean, by this what I love about biology is, you know, some people will look at it and say, oh, that's just too complicated for me. And I'm like, well, a, brother, you ain't seen nothing yet. And b, it's really not. You can look at it on on whatever levels that you want. And, like, I could I could look at it on on the one of the best levels that I look at biology at is you're either a dirt farmer or you're a soil farmer.
And that means if you're a dirt farmer, you'll say what it is you farm. I farm potatoes. I I farm corn. I'm a I'm I'm a fifth generation wheat, corn, and soy rotation guy, but none of them are soil farmers. Right. Because if they were, then they'd say that. They'd say, I farm soil. Because at that point, it doesn't matter what I plug in. It's gonna grow just fine. I'll be able I'm in anything farmer at that point because the soil is taken care of. The soil's got the microbiology. This and and and how just for somebody who's asking why that's important, these critters, whether they're fungi or bacteria or some of the other smaller critters, emit organic acids that dissolve rock, and some of that rock has iron and aluminum and copper and phosphorus and everything. And that's the amazing thing that people keep saying is, like, oh, we're we're at peak phosphorus. I'm like, no. We're not. No. We're we're we're we're at peak phosphorus as far as where we can find, you know, pure sources to mine it and then spread it. But phosphorus is everywhere. It just gets bound up in the soil so damn quick that it and it gets and it stays that way unless you have critters in the soil, breaking it down with organic acids constantly because it's constantly getting chelated back into a mineral form. And if you don't have that, if you've wiped everything out with glyphosate and then, like, herbicide and a fungicide and anematocyte and a virus side in whatever side, and you have no nutrient cycling, then all you've got is empty calories. And that's what we put into the food, which is why you could eat a huge hamburger and get nothing out of it. It's just it's just nothing.
So Yep. Yeah. That that said, I'd let's it's it's this is Bitcoin, and so it's time to talk about Bitcoin. And that'll be the last piece that we do. Sure. You've got an interesting take on on Bitcoin, and I I I I like hearing this particular take because a lot of people don't they just wanna love something to death, and they don't wanna see any downsides to to to the thing. So what's your what's your overall take on when when you saw it? What did you think? How did you start thinking differently about it, and where are you at with Bitcoin now?
[02:06:12] JR Burdick:
So about so, like, 02/2022 was, like, my spiritual awakening to a lot of things. And, but I have always been interested in economics. And a a quick story, I remember in 1987, October it was October 19, Black Monday, nineteen eighty seven when the stock market fell apart. Mhmm. I remember walking in the house, my dad and I I was still a teenager. I was still home. Dad was combining corn. I was hauling corn, and we were putting it in the silo for feed for cattle. And I walked in the house late that night. My mom was watching the evening news, and, they were talking about the stock market crash. Of course, we didn't have cell phones. Another radio has worked in the tractors. Of course, at 16, I would have been listening to that anyhow. Right.
But and she just looked at me, and she said, this is our great depression. This is the beginning of our great depression. And within about a week, that was kinda over. I mean, there was some ramifications, but life went on. No banks really closed. There was no you know, it just kept going. And I remember saying to my dad, I said, what happened? And he says, well, they just went to the backroom and got more money to fix it. And and that was my first understanding of what fiat money was. And it's really funny because worldwide in that week, we lost $1,700,000,000,000 of of value.
Now our government spends that in a hundred and seventy days. You know? So you're sitting there and you're going, what was a catastrophe back here? Is it now? And you gotta ask yourself why. So, to be very honest with you, I've always been interested in econ house. I've kinda always been a gold bug kinda guy. And when Bitcoin first came out, I was like, yeah. Sounds like a scheme to me. You know? And and and and I was like, I don't understand it. And I I was going through everything with our straight voltage thing when that was starting to get really hot, and I just didn't have the bandwidth to to think about it. Right. But we we got through that, and, I started to pay attention to it, but I didn't buy any. I just was is watching. I was watching it go from 10,000 to 12,000 and just kinda stall out. I thought, man, it's probably done. Then you watch it go to 50,000, and I'm like, oh, this might be for real. You know? So so, I I had been taking so many risks in my life. I was kinda out of risk taking my life. I hear that.
And, but I was I was actually thinking about it, and I've always appreciated the arguments that Bitcoin brought forward about fiat money because they're spot on with all their arguments. So it's actually in the morning, I was reading my Bible. In Isaiah, it talks about chapter one. It says, your silver has become dross. And he was using that as an example of saying, you're cheating the young people. This is one of the things I'm gonna bring judgment on the nation of Israel for is because you have devalued your doubt. It's not pure silvering. And I and that just hit me. That's what Bitcoin has been really screaming.
And then I a couple verses later there in chapter one, it says, I will purge your silver of its dross. And that's God saying through the natural consequences of economy, the fake will be taken away, and the real will be left. And I started looking around for ways to get into real money. I bought a little gold. I bought a little silver, and then I started playing with Bitcoin. So, I don't have a lot of Bitcoin, but I put some in every every two weeks. I've got an automatic draw. I put it in there. And, then as we started on this after a year of getting getting our feet on the ground of getting our milk business going, I started reaching out through Facebook groups to people who were talking about Bitcoin.
And I said, listen. I would love to transact Bitcoin. I think the thing that needs to happen is you want Bitcoin to overtake Fiat. It has to overtake Fiat as a currency, as a mode, and and a medium of of transaction, peer to peer transaction. It can't just be an investment. If you're gonna overtake Fiat, you have to use it. So I started talking to people. To this day, I have never been able to get anybody to buy any milk from me with with Bitcoin. And that has been that's that's that has been an awakening to me. I'm like, I understand everything about it. I mean, I don't understand. I understand the concepts behind it. I still get a little lost on the mining side of things. I'm still trying to figure that out, but I I understand. All of us all of us are there. I don't care who it is you're talking to. There's always some aspect of this that you're like,
[02:11:02] David Bennett:
I can't believe I didn't know that. You just you learn more. It's just the rabbit hole goes on forever. So I at this point, I just assume we nobody really knows what this is. Not yet. And we may never because it it it may evolve into into to have even more appendages than it already does. But with and and I I totally feel you, and and you're certainly not the only one that feels this way. I mean, you you're you're a really good company, in fact, of people that are like, we gotta start being able to use it directly. And we're not talking about buying a a Visa gift card with it and then buying stuff with that. I need to be able to buy the stuff that I end up with at my door Mhmm. With Bitcoin, and I can do that.
I and but then the question becomes, a, am I willing to do that? And, b, is the vendor prepared in a way that can accept it? And you are. Right. But there's not a lot of vendors that are, and this kinda comes back to what I was asking about. What like, I I'd asked you, what can we do to make it easier for people to reach out and and go meet their rancher? Mhmm. It's sort of the same question. It's like, what can all of us do is there anything that you think that we can do to make it easier for other people to look into this? Do you is it an interface deal? Is it a potentially just human greed and they don't wanna get rid of a deal?
The is there something that strikes you as, of all the things of why people aren't buy buying my milk with Bitcoin, this is the one. Do you have one of those? Or Yeah. I I think I do. Okay.
[02:13:01] JR Burdick:
And it's basically the unknown. People especially with milk, I have I have to overcome the unknown or they perceived the perceived or what everybody's telling me is the problem. And so they say to me, oh, raw milk might kill me because I heard about something that happened in 1963, and and I go, yeah. We can debunk that. More people died last year of E coli and salmonella poisoning and lettuce than died of raw milk in the last twenty five years. That's a literal statistic. So you're like, it's it's way safer to drink raw milk than it is to even eat lettuce, and nobody thinks about not eating lettuce. So but it comes to the same thing with with using Bitcoin. People are going like, well, I don't know if this guy does accept it. I don't wanna look like a fool for if I ask or if I if I haven't ever done it before, is he gonna think I'm dumb asking questions?
And we've gotta be able to go out there and say, hey. Let's learn this together. Let's let's go through this process together. It's not that hard. We you you do Venmo. You finally get it figured out. Boom. It's done. It's peer to peer. It's it's the ultimate transaction that you have full power in. And you can say, nobody thinks about when they change a dollar for something. What if I had held this dollar, would it be worth more tomorrow? Mhmm. Nope. Nobody thinks about that. They go, I need I need that I need that beer at the store, so I'm gonna give you $5 for that beer. You know? Mhmm. And nobody think because they're exchanging this for another thing that's got value.
So people have to start to look at we all talk about proof of work. We talk about Bitcoin. And all those things, I am 100% for. But show me that you value my product by giving me something you value, that you have control of. And I think I think that if we can get that mentality to come into Bitcoin and especially, you get those things out there, then they become mainstream. You you know, it's like everything. That that first time is hard, and then it gets easier as you do it more. And and as Bitcoiners, we have to encourage transactions between people. And then the beauty of that is you get to start to say, I am going to change the economy.
I am going to change the direction of where money goes and where services flow from because I'm going to stop giving it to the globalists, and I'm going to start giving it to my local people. And suddenly, the Bitcoin community explodes out of ecommerce. And and that commerce community goes, oh, we can operate outside the system. So I am going to start to look for more people that operate outside the system. And then the thing that every Bitcoiner wants is to see the failure of fiat money or at least expose to the world. What a farce that is. Well, you can't do that if you don't use it, if you don't bring it out to people and say, it's it really is just like money. You use your money to buy milk. I use my money to buy milk. The difference?
I can buy my milk from a guy who I know who's producing good quality milk, and he has taken care of his soil, and it's full flowing through, and it's the ultimate proof of work right from the soil. The soil has proved its work. The cow has proved its work. The dairy farmer has proved its work, and you have proved your work by paying me in bit. And it's all through the whole way. And I think I get excited when I talk about it that way because I have friends that are very anti Bitcoin or, like, you know, they all of the all of the you know, it's a CIA thing, and and it's gonna devalue the world, and it's gonna you know, I get all that. But when I could start to talk about it in terms of peer to peer, that's when I get excited about it. But Right. I gotta get those peers around me, and I gotta get them to start to think about it in terms of not just an investment portfolio, but a utility portfolio that I can use to buy goods and services with, and I can shape the economy. And I have that is the ultimate power. Having it in your wallet, having it on a exchange, that's not the ultimate power. And definitely having it in ETF isn't the ultimate power. But as soon as you get it and you go, hey. I'm gonna go find another Bitcoiner, and we're gonna change money.
And all of a sudden, you are completely outside of the Fiat system. And it's like, oh, that's what I wanted.
[02:17:44] David Bennett:
And and I had I had the good luck of the very first day that I bought Bitcoin. I immediately turned around and bought something from a vendor with Bitcoin, and that was in 2015. And you may know him, Jack Spearko from the Survival Podcast. Yep. Have you been on his show? No. I should send a, do his, guest fill his form fill out because I think he'd like to talk to you. I I really do. And he's got, like, I don't know, 500 times my my audience size or something. But the very first day, because I bought it for two I I like, I remember the day. It was 09/11/2015, and I bought I bought $250 worth. So I got just under 1 Bitcoin out of that.
And I turned around, and I gave him one fifth of that for $50 Yeah. For his for his member service brigade, and it's turned out to be the most expensive subscription I've ever bought in my entire life. And it makes I've subscription I've ever bought in my entire life. And it makes I feel good about it because I like Jack, and I wanted to do well. But I just I don't feel good about myself for being that dumb. But Yeah. But the point being is that I had the luck of being able to buy Bitcoin from Coinbase, throw it almost immediately onto a hardware wallet, and then turn around and give one fifth of that Bitcoin over to to Jack Spear Co in the same day. And that was back in 2015.
So what's running around my head right now is the the question that I asked you about before, it go well, this would be the third time we've touched on it. How do I make it easier for people to get ahold of their rancher? Is almost the same question as how does the rancher get ahold of the people to make it easier for them to use Bitcoin? And all of a sudden, this becomes this becomes almost a meet up worthy event. Yes. It could be held, like, the first Thursday of every month. Come meet your rancher. Ranchers come meet your future customers, and you're all gonna learn how to use Bitcoin. Mhmm. Yeah. It did because we have Bitcoin meetups, and we've we've had successful Bitcoin meetups through the beef initiative where we got ranchers and Bitcoiners hanging out together, which that was back in I can't remember. It was Kerrville, Texas, and I went to the first one.
I can't remember what year it was, but I went there, and I'm hanging out with all like, a lot of the guys that I that I know knew from Bitcoin Twitter at the time Mhmm. And a whole bunch of ranchers that I didn't know. And there was half ranchers and half Bitcoiners, and it was an it was an amazing event be and I don't know why. I I I it was because I guess it's because I saw a bunch of nerds, you know, like, talking to a bunch of guys in in in hats and boots. Mhmm. And you would and and you would have thought they had known each other for years. Mhmm. Because they're all talking about no you know, sovereignty is important.
Self ownership is important. Doing things on a handshake basis is important. Your reputation is like freaking tissue paper, and you could burn it down in seconds, and it takes you forty years to build. And everybody knew the language. Everybody knew all those concepts, and it didn't matter if you were a geek with glasses that programmed in c plus plus or you were you were cutting mutton chops off your cheap Mhmm. You know, out of Colorado. It didn't matter. Y'all were all talking the same language. And now, you know, maybe if we could just get the customers involved Mhmm. And, like, teach each each other how to put a invoice, you know, from Zapprite to be able to take lightning lightning network payments on our websites.
Because I'm a Bitcoiner, like, a self admittedly been one since 2015, and I still have no way on my website to allow people to pay me in Bitcoin because it's not that easy. Right. I don't have a module I can just shove into a web page and say, click this button, and it does everything in the background. Mhmm. I need somebody for that, and I'm not built out of you know, I'd I'm not standing on suitcases of money. Right. So, you know, I you know, it's in this we're I think we a lot of us find ourselves in this weird interstitial space. But in the long run, do you think that this is going to continue to be a problem or or not?
[02:22:36] JR Burdick:
Well, again, it comes back to the, the peep what do the people want? You know, in my business, what I have found is I have to meet a need. If I meet a peep person's need, I have a customer for life, you know, because they're like, hey. So the so if what I need is I need some people who say sovereignty is important to me. Peer to peer relationships are important to me. Knowing where my food comes from is important to me. I can fill all of those needs, you know, but I gotta find that person. So, like, the meetups that you've talked about, I was I was trying to get to one in Kansas City, which is about a two hour drive for me here, but I scheduling just didn't didn't go through right. Because Mhmm. Here's here's the other thing. I milk twice a day.
So I have to be here twice a day to milk. And and and I'm not particularly a young spring chicken anymore, but they all wanna meet at, like, 09:30 at night, go till midnight, you know, and and sit around and and drink energy drinks. And I'm like, give me a beer and a bowl of peanuts, and I'm fine. And, by the way, I gotta go home. And, you know, so so I have to but but that's something I will do. I will make those invoices, and I will make those connections because it's important to me. And things that are important to you, you do. But, again, it's it's getting those people to understand, hey. We're on the same wavelength. We're we're doing all the same things. We both wanna operate outside the system. We both want sovereignty. We both want peer to peer connections.
You just have to be willing to take what I'm selling because it's good for you, and I'm happy to take what you have because it's good for me. Now you can't ship milk, but you do have some pork products. Are are you able to ship that? Yes. I can ship pork products. We are working right now on a flour product that's grown from our own heritage wheats here that's that's a, stone milled type, you know, natural, all you know, no no pesticides, no synthetic fertilizers, and we're gonna be able to ship that. But we're we're in the process. You'll get it. It's a it's a two person show. Me and my wife, we've got so many hours a day. Right. And then and then capital is always the biggest issue. It's like, well Same thing.
You gotta you gotta have you got all these great ideas, but, you know, none of them cost $50. They lost up to every thousand. That's exactly right. We gotta do that. How are we gonna do that? So, so our our milk business but, no, we can't, and that gets back to those archaic laws from 1927. We can't we can't ship across state lines, with our milk products, but we can beef or or, pork. Next summer, we'll have beef because we are raising our bull calves up on grass. So we'll have beef next summer, and, we'll have, we do have some chicken products that we kind of dabbled in, but I'm not a chicken farmer.
And, Yeah. And then then the flower will be coming, hopefully, within the next three weeks.
[02:25:52] David Bennett:
Sweet since you that's right. Because you are doing chicken. I forgot to ask. Do you run your chickens behind your cows a couple of days later to get all the fly larvae out? Yep. Okay. Do do they do do they actually do a good job in getting that manure spread out?
[02:26:10] JR Burdick:
I didn't have enough chickens to really cover the same acres as the cows. But where they were where they were, they did. Yes. And I kept them away from high traffic areas. So, like, the way my system is set up, there's there's kind of a wagon wheel with a drinker in the middle, and then I moved the cattle around. So they stayed away from the the where the heavy traffic was out at the edges of the pasture. Yeah. So so we we only had a 100 broilers just as a trial trial error kind of thing this year. Learned a lot from that, and, we're gonna do it again. So it worked out well? It it worked out okay. It was to be honest with you, I got the wrong breed of chicken.
Because because we were we were kinda coming out of that egg that egg fiasco, and they were like, we the chickens the chickens that I wanted, the Cornish hen crosses, I couldn't get. So I got another chicken, and
[02:27:04] David Bennett:
they don't taste quite as good. Yeah. Yeah. But Well, now now the reason that I'm asking about all this is that do if somebody did want to pay you for something you could ship them, you know, to to say, hey. I'm here. I, like, I I would I would buy your stuff. Do they have to do that? Like, is that an email thing? Because I I I didn't see anything on your website either that suggested I could invoice a Bitcoin. No. I haven't I haven't found a a workable system because
[02:27:35] JR Burdick:
I I found one system that was kinda archaic Uh-huh. To do Bitcoin, but I couldn't do anything else with. Right. So so I didn't so the majority of my customers are still using Fiat, and I was like, I'm not gonna pay for two websites and then Exactly. Keep trying to get people yeah. So so what people can do is is they email me, they email our farm, nursing family farm g mail dot com, and, hey. I wanna buy these things. I wanna use Bitcoin. And then we just go through we go through the process on this on the server or on the on the website, get everything figured out, and then we just then I just say, here's my wallet. You you're you're and we do our, you know, we do our transaction then. Okay. So, it's a little bit more complicated, but it it doesn't I've only done it once. And that time, you know, we were both learning the first time, but it took us about twenty minutes that first time. And now I've got it down.
I think I can get through cut through some of the BS a little bit faster.
[02:28:35] David Bennett:
There there's a couple of, a couple of the I I try to give airtime to vendors that can't afford advertising. So I just started this thing called the Circle p, and there's a couple of vendors that I have. And you'll be happy to know that, like, you can buy soap miner hand you know, hit, tallow soap with Bitcoin directly from his website. Mhmm. And Oshi that makes this really these fantastic chocolate and, like, pecan butter products. He only takes Bitcoin. He won't take fiat. And so it is happening. And that so I I I just wanna make sure that I don't leave you hanging there because there are people that that are out there, and I'm I'll bet you my bottom dollar they'd they'd be willing to help. And, you know, I'll, put your, your information in in all the show in in this show notes and and bring you up in the circle p every once in a while just just to see if we can get somebody to reach out to you and buy one of your products with Bitcoin so that that you know that we do exist. There are people like us that that will definitely buy at Bitcoin.
Yep. But as we close out, because good lord, brother. We've been going for two and a half hours. What what's the where can people first of all, is there anything that you wanna say that we haven't talked about yet? Something you think is important for somebody to know. Okay. Then, what's your website and all the places that people can get in touch with you? Yep. So our website is nourishingfamilyfarm.com.
[02:30:29] JR Burdick:
So it's, it that's we we we made it that name for a reason because we wanna nourish families with our farm. So nourishingfamilyfarm.com. Go on there. I try to do a, blog every once in a while. It's kinda irregular. I I need to do a better job of that. And, then if you sign up, we have a farm membership that gets that's for one year. It's $25. You're part of our private membership association then. In our in my in our exuberance to get going, we didn't study all of the laws at Missouri, so we kinda ran into a roadblock with the food Nazis here at Missouri. And one of our ways around that was to start a PMA. So, like but I, again, I I did it out of an idea of I want people to understand the hurdles of getting your own food that shouldn't be there. So for $25 a year and it's not a requirement because you can get our milk in state for for not that for for for without the private membership association. But if you buy our meat, we ask you sign up for our PMA. So it's $25 for a year.
And the reason I did that is because I bristle so much at the idea of USDA inspected. We so we've got these small lockers here. They they have one day where they'll do USDA inspected processing so that we can do stuff with our meat then and sell them. USDA inspected. I get frustrated with those laws because I'm like, the same facility with the same people with the same equipment is doing it the rest of the week to the same standards. It's not like the other day because they don't, you know, rinse off their hands between doing things. And it's like, why am I paying an extra $200 to kill a hog Uh-huh. And have it USDA inspected?
So I just went the PMA route and said because because the laws say you can't sell to the public Uh-huh. But I can sell to the private. So that's what we did was we changed that, that that model. And, so we have a we have that, and then we can ship our our products to you, our meat products that way. And, our dairy products that are not part of the accepted norm, so like our butter, our cheese curds, our other products we sell in state, we you have to have the PMA to buy those. So so that's that's the only thing that we do a little bit different on our website. And then we've had people say, hey. We you're you're too far away from us. We really support you, but we're gonna buy one of your PMAs just to, you know, give you a $25. And it's like, hey. That's cool. So Yeah. This is throw that out there. I'm not expecting that from anybody, but it's kind of a because there there are people out there that really appreciate there's people pushing the boundaries and and and making making headway. Because somebody's gotta somebody's gotta be the first guy through the wall, and, that's kinda where we're at right now. So, so you can go there, to our website, see what we got.
On Twitter, I'm j r cow farmer is my handle. And, I do a little thing every morning, five days a week from the recall from the parlor pit. Just talking about mostly about stuff in agriculture and, giving you a little insight into what's going on in the world of of of ag. And then, Facebook is our nursing family farm, page as well. And, like everything, I need to do a little more there. But, but it's, there's only so many hours in the day.
[02:34:00] David Bennett:
Yeah. And Twitter is is definitely where I found, found you at that, saw one of those one of those videos there. They are informative. I do recommend everybody go follow you there on Twitter. JR, I can't I can't thank you enough for the amount of time you spent because it like I said, it's I know you're busy. I could tell it's it's fall. You're having to change over the change over the farm, so I can't thank you enough for the amount of time that you spent. This has been Bitcoin, and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
It is 02:22PM Pacific Daylight Time. It's the September 2025, and this is episode eleven seventy nine of bit Bitcoin. And today, I've got, an interview with the dairyman, JR Burdick will be joining us here momentarily. Actually, I'm lying. I already recorded the interview. This is post production. What am I gonna do? I mean, I'm not gonna lie to you. So, yeah. I'm about to drop in the audio of me and JR Burdick talking about all things agriculture. If you've kinda ever wanted to get a glimpse into what the hell's going on with, you know, agriculture and the fiat economy and how they are affecting each other, this is the one to listen to. We're gonna talk about his operation. Yeah. We're gonna talk about what he does. Yeah. But we're gonna talk about the impacts of fiat money and current monetary policies on agriculture.
How do subsidies come into all this? And insurance and futures on commodities. What happened in 1971 and slightly before when it came to agriculture all the way up till today? We answer a lot of questions. Actually, it's JR that answers a lot of the questions here for us, but we're gonna get into his take on current food production and procurement by at least United States citizenry and why well, it's just not all it's cracked up to be right now, and it's it's actually kinda frightening. But it hey. It is what it is, and we as Bitcoiners are here to change it. And JR is a Bitcoiner himself.
That's gonna be at the very end of the interview. But in between, we're gonna also talk about the rancher as an ecologist. That's right. There's a lot of people that really think that ranchers are just greedy, and dairy people are just greedy, and farmers are just greedy, and and that they they don't care about any of this. And, well, JR's a little bit different. He's in the regenerative ag portion, and these these are the people that really do understand soil. They really do understand how systems work and how they work together, and how ecology is just part of the whole play, you know, the whole stage that the play is performed upon.
And animals as ecological tools will be in there. We're we're gonna talk about Bitcoin as payment. And while JR is a Bitcoiner, understand he is a little frustrated with the fact that nobody will actually use Bitcoin to buy his goods and services. So that will actually tie up the very end of this particular episode. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna drop you right into it. Here we go. Hey. Hello. Alright. JR is a dairy, dairy farmer or rancher. That's gonna be a distinction I'm gonna wanna get get into here. And you have you've got some thoughts on food production in The United States and a couple of other things. One of the things that I find most interesting is that this is a Bitcoin podcast.
We are talking to a dairy farmer, and you might wanna know the fact you might wanna know why. Yeah. Where where's the crossover there? And it turns out that that JR is in fact a we'll just go ahead and call him a Bitcoiner. And he's got some thoughts on that that I think are I think the, I think my audience is gonna be interested in. But first, I really wanna know about your operation. Like Mhmm. What do you do? Like, how big is it? How do you make your money? What Mhmm. Or how does this work?
[00:04:00] JR Burdick:
Yep. Well, a little bit of background. I was what I would consider myself to be a commercial dairyman. I did it like every other dairy farm in The United States. We milked up until 2022. We milked about, we had about a 150 head of cattle running around the farm. My wife and I did all the work. We milked our cows twice a day, morning and night. We had about 70 cows all the time that we're actually milking, and then we had young cattle that were replacements and calves that, you know, that filled out that 150 head. And, in 2022, I ran into a so every farm I'll back up because it's kinda complicated, and I I gotta remember my audience doesn't know a lot about agriculture.
[00:04:50] David Bennett:
Yeah.
[00:04:52] JR Burdick:
So a dairy farmer makes takes the cows, processes the feed, grows the feed for them, harvests the milk, and then every other day or every day depending on the milk route, a milk truck comes and picks up the milk from the dairy farm, and he delivers it to a processing plant. And that processing plant in The United States, they are either owned by a, a a separate entity or by what's called a cooperative. I was part of a cooperative of about 8,000 other dairy farmers that owned processing plants across the nation, And, our milk would go there, and then it would get distributed to institutions in terms of a Sysco or a McDonald's or a Walmart.
And then they would brand it. They would put it into the products themselves. So there was several steps before the consumer from the dairy farm. And alls we did was we just made the milk and sent it off, and we were kind of a commodity producer in that terms because the end product, was necessarily determined by the processor or the final, institution that bought product. So, in 2022, some things were coming around. Of course, COVID had happened, and there was a lot of stress in the system, a lot of disruption in the food chain. And that made me aware, and I started asking a lot of questions that I had never asked before.
And, I'm kind of embarrassed that I was I was just put things on autopilot, trusted, you know, trusted the people in front of me that they were doing their job, and and I was getting paid. I was never happy with the amount I was getting paid, but, you know, we were we were paying our bills and and struggling, but getting along. And, 2022 happened, and they came out with a new program, and they wanted us to sign it. And I got to reading all the fine print, and I became very concerned with the language of the things that they were wanting us to sign. And it had it had a lot of good sounding things, things about the climate, things about animal care, but it was very intrusive at the same time. We were losing a lot of our independence and our own ability to manage our farms the way we saw fit, the way that we had done for generations.
And I started bringing up some of my concerns, then they couldn't answer my questions, and it just got you know, it snowballed. And, it ended up being a lot of things where they were they were looking for more information about, in terms of the environmental social government scores, carbon capture type things, and I just didn't wanna go along with that. And, I felt it was very intrusive. I had been milking cows for thirty years and had never been asked these kind of questions. They were asking for who my vet was and how often they had come out. And I live in a very, it's not It's a rural area and and low density population area, so my vet's quite a ways away. I have learned to do most of my vet work myself with very little oversight just from years of learning being around cat.
So I I told him, I says, man, I I I use my vet like the emergency room. You know? You just you don't still use it very often. I do everything that I need myself. And, they started to ask a lot of questions about vaccinations and those types of things. And my wife and I had always been a little bit, I'll call it vaccine hesitant even with our own children. And so I was very careful with those types of things. So so all of that came together and it came to a head. And, basically, we we agreed to disagree, and we parted ways. It wasn't as amiable as I would have liked it. They just basically one day said, if you're not gonna sign this paperwork, we're not gonna pick up your milk anymore, and I lost my milk market.
And, so my whole business my whole business model fell apart overnight because I couldn't, sell milk anymore. Because in The United States, there are certain laws going back to the early twenties, nineteen twenties that dictate how our milk is processed, procured, and placed into the marketplace. And, it's very difficult to mark to and very expensive to meet all those requirements to just sell milk to your neighbor. It really eliminated the peer to peer relationship. And, so we went we went from that very traditional model. I went through a series of, emotions from anger to depression to, anger again and wanting to burn the whole system down to a a, desire to change the system.
And, so we changed our we changed our farming model. I completely threw out everything I had done for fifty years, the things I had learned in college. And I just went back, and I said I said to my wife, I said, we're just gonna start farming the way grandpa farm. And, you know, great grandpa even. You know? So, we cut our herd back to only about 15 cows. We started to we we developed a marketing plan, figured out what our consumer base was, and started to bottle our own raw milk in August 2020 or July 2023. So it took us about seven months to figure out a plan and to get, our herd. We we wanted to sell a premium product.
Everybody knows about the issues with lactose intolerance. Very few few people understand that there's a couple of things that lead to that. They have nothing to do with milk. One is the homogenization process so that they homogenize milk so the cream doesn't separate out. So in in the natural state, milk, even at a cool temperature, the cream rises to the top. Mhmm. That's that old saying. I say to everybody, I said the two things that ruined American civilization were were the fact that we homogenize milk and light beer. And if we had those two things, we'd be back to we'd be back to real men.
And, so, so so that homogenation process, what they actually do is that they they send that milk at a high speed through a very small screen to break up the fat globules, and they make them smaller so that they don't separate out of the of the rest of the fluid milk, all the other components that make up milk. And then your body can't it doesn't recognize what that is anymore. And so Oh, yeah. That globule then commingles in your gut and and it causes a problem because, again, your body through the series of of, you know, I say through creation, other people say through evolution, your your body has designed yourself to, metabolize those fat globules in such a way that they, pass through your body. You could extract nutrition from it. But they have been mechanically changed, and it makes it more difficult then for people to eat and consume dairy products.
[00:12:35] David Bennett:
Right. And there's there's lots of studies about that. Let me ask you ask you this because it's like you bring up something comes up in my mind is that if if I'm buying whole milk and it's homogenized, the cream's not gonna come to the top. And like you say, it's the the these little vesicles of fat are are floating around. They cannot actually they're small enough that they can't stick together and then form the cream top. So my question is, if if I get, like, a gallon of whole milk that's homogenized versus a a gallon of raw milk that's clearly not homogenized nor pasteurized, and I pull that cream cap off, am I looking at 2% milk? Am I looking at 4% milk that's left?
Is that even the way to look at it?
[00:13:25] JR Burdick:
No. The the, the fat percentage is the, is is that cream. Okay. So so okay. So like my cows, I feed them a little bit differently. I feed a very low grain ration, high forages, high grasses. My cows are actually about a six to six and a half percent butterfat.
[00:13:47] David Bennett:
Okay.
[00:13:48] JR Burdick:
And, butterfat is a is is a component of the breed of the cow along with how the animal is fed. And so so you have so so then when they process the milk, what they're doing is they're taking everything off. So whole milk is 3.25% fat. That's what it is as as as a standardized. That's what it's gotta be. Any of the fat above that, they remove that, then they use that to make sour cream, butter, your other your other products such as that. And then 2%, they just remove another 1.25% of the fat away to leave you 2%. And, of course, because it's homogenized, you can't look at it and see that it's any different, you know, 2% to whole milk. Yeah. And then when you look at skim milk, you can obviously see that doesn't look the same as breast milk. It's water. It's disgusting.
Yes. Yes. And and, you know, and we we've had this big discussion about, fat in our diets for, you know, thirty years plus, and we're finding out now that we need that fat just for for brain function. And, one of the easiest ways, most digestible fat products out there is your dairy products.
[00:15:10] David Bennett:
So on your operation, how many acres are you on right now? Is it a large plot of land? Is it tiny?
[00:15:17] JR Burdick:
No. No. We well, I guess that's perspective. You know? We have we own 98 acres here. We did farm a lot more ground. We just found that, our changes in management, the number of cattle and and livestock that we had, we didn't need all of that land. Plus, now we were, we were doing all of the work, not just the production, but also the marketing, the distribution, the delivery, you know, everything. And, we just didn't have enough time to handle those extra acres. So we cut back on our acres to really just focus on doing a quality job with fewer fewer acres.
[00:16:01] David Bennett:
Now that brings up another thing that that I find really interesting is that you had kinda considered yourself, I guess, a commodity farmer while you were selling to the coop. Right? Doing That's correct. Kind of the same thing that all the other dairy farmers were doing. And all of a sudden, you get a wild hair up your butt and say, I'm not gonna do this. And they they basically pull your only revenue source, and you had to come up with on the fly and deploy in seven months a marketing plan. But I'm guessing that you weren't trained as on how to market things. Nope. Right? I mean, it's like the question the question becomes, how does somebody that is out there minding their own business, doing their thing, and all of a sudden, the rain comes down and everything changes?
How do you figure out how to market to the point that you were that you are now successfully able to sell direct to consumer and and have those relationships rather than sell to the milk coop? I mean, how did you do what what did you have to do? What did you get lucky, or did you read a book? Or
[00:17:22] JR Burdick:
No. I listened to several podcasts of and I and I went around and made a lot of phone calls to some other farmers that had that were in some type of a direct sale, maybe not directly to consumers, but they were had built their own bottling plants and were selling into it, you know, closer to larger metropolitan areas. They were selling their own brand of milk, into stores, into retail outlets, which in Missouri where I live, I can't do that by law, so I have to sell direct to the consumer. So I can't sell into a a third party retail outlet. Mhmm.
So I just, I just I just I just had a can do attitude. I just said, I'm not quitting. I'm not giving up. I'm not gonna be another statistic of a failed farm. And if I am, it's going to be because it's it's gonna be I know I gave it my my damnedest to get to where I needed to be. And, and that's just what I did. And, my wife my wife was a, she is not she she is not educated in marketing either. She didn't have any idea. I I mean, we we ran the farm she and I ran the farm together, so there was no off farm income, coming in. It's just as her and I working together side by side every day.
And, we just started to fight, and we just started to ask questions, and we started to read every newsletter that we could get our hands on. And we we read a few books on marketing, but we realized that those marketing gurus were all, they they weren't peer to peer. They were how to get how to get into, you know, a a a major corporation and get your get your brand established and those types of things. And, so while there was there was some insight there, there wasn't really this, exact formula for what we needed to do. Yeah. So Hallelujah
[00:19:30] David Bennett:
moment?
[00:19:31] JR Burdick:
No. Absolutely not. So my wife just one day, she just went to Walmart, and she's really good at asking questions, sometimes annoyingly good at asking questions. And, she started she started interviewing people as they came up to the dairy case there. What do you, you know, what are your complaints? What do you like about dairy? You know, all those kind of questions. And, it was eye opening to me because it was so different than what I had been told all of my years as a commodity dairyman that the consumer wanted. The the greatest complaint, for example, that we heard was people were very upset that when they got their milk, it was two days from spoiling or they would go shopping, you know, twice a week and pick up a couple of gallons, and they get the first gallon drink, and the second gallon would be spoiled. They'd look at the expiration date, you know, and it was the day they picked it up. And and, and and for me as a dairy farmer, I was just flabbergasted by that because I had never thought about that. I just assumed the milk left my farm. It went there. It got processed, and it was, you know, within forty eight hours, it was on the shelf. Well, I found out that's not how that works. Wow.
And, so we found that, and we found that the biggest issues were convenience. People wanted to, they they want convenience above price, even above quality. It was it was about convenience. So that that's our biggest hurdle is how do we overcome convenience because we are in a very low density population area. We have to travel about an hour to get to, so our model is that we deliver to certain locations once a week. People come and buy our milk there, and then they have, you know, a week supply or or whatever they need. And, our milk, because it is so fresh, it's usually bottled within twenty four hours of when I harvest it from the cow.
Most people will say they can we we recommend that nobody keep it over a week, but we've had people tell us it'll it'll keep in their refrigerators if they're careful and keep it to the back and, you know, don't don't open it and shut it every day, that it'll last up to two weeks. So so it's got a longer shelf life. It's got higher quality, of course, because it hasn't been the good bacteria haven't been killed by the pasteurization process. And, so it's just, so we just we just jumped in with both feet, not knowing we couldn't do what we didn't know, and, didn't know we needed to know it. You know? So we just took off and said, hey.
If if we're gonna fail, it's gonna be on us. And, we still don't feel very successful. We've had in fact, the last three months have been pretty tough financially just because we through summer, we've we've had a huge dip in our sales because of our normal customers going on vacation, things like that. Well, our milk, if we don't sell it, we've gotta we've gotta find another place for it. It it can't. It I can't store it for two weeks till somebody comes back to buy it. So, so we're you know, it's again, it's another part of our learning curve that we're still in, to little over two years after we began doing this. And, Yeah. We are we are not marketers. We are not going to we're gonna write a book someday. It's just gonna be called everything you shouldn't do because we still don't know what we're supposed to. That's the book that I wanna read. That's that's that's the book that I wanna read. But you've got
[00:23:14] David Bennett:
you've got another interesting part of of your past as far as your your experience in in in this whole ag business, and it has to do with stray voltage. Can can you talk about that? Because it looks like that was a pretty bad deal. And I I am I have never heard about this before. May I may have heard somebody say something about stray voltage, but never as it applies to to what you experienced.
[00:23:42] JR Burdick:
Sure. So we're in Missouri now, and we had we had to come to Missouri because we were about to lose our farm in Iowa. So in 02/2009, I'm gonna say that it never was proven in court. We did go through a very long court battle, learned a lot about our justice system that I hope nobody really ever has to learn. Mhmm. But in 02/2009, a large wind farm was being built near us. And as it came online, we began to get very unique, electrical problems on our dairy farm. So I correlate to two things, but I couldn't prove that in court. And and so don't don't take it as me being against wind farms or anything. I just think our technology hadn't caught up to our ability there yet.
But we had a we we brought on this large load, large production system, and we didn't have the, we didn't have the infrastructure from there to carry the load as it was necessary. And, you get into a lot of rural areas, and you're gonna find wires that were put up in the thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties still still in use. Mhmm. So, so we had an undersized wire supplying our area of, this this, this area of, service. And what it was basically doing was anything electricity runs in a loop, basically, and it runs basically in a straight line. And if there's any electrical engineers out there, they're gonna have arguments with that. I understand that. I'm just being very basic.
And so so the the power would feed out to your farm and then whatever power, wasn't used at your farm gets fed back to the transformer station. Well, there's always a little bit of leakage, and the leakage comes out in your grounds. Well, if your system is subpar, if your wires don't have the exact carrying load that they need to have, they're gonna send that that that stray voltage then that that that extra excessive voltage just goes wherever it needs to. And this voltage was finding its way to our farm because we happen to be on the end of the line.
So there was no place else for it to go. Right. And the loop was at the the the end of the loop was at our end. So we were the cul de sac at the end of the road. And, it started to just go, and it would find its way into our wiring system and then travel through, water pipes, underground, buried water pipes through the steel pipes where we milked our cows. It traveled into the house through the grounding system. So we just had multiple issues. First, we noticed it as issues with, electric motors that were burning up too fast because we were getting such variances in our voltage coming to the farm. Yeah.
One day, we were testing our 120 volt outlets, and we were getting a 160 volts at the outlet. And, that's a little hard on computers and TVs. Everything. Yes. And then, the big motors that we would run to for our feeding equipment were burning up constantly. And then so that was, like, our first thing all that's going on. And then we started having problems health problems with our cattle. So, ohms is a is a measure of electricity that that basically, defines resistance. Mhmm. And and a cow has the lowest resistance to electricity of any animal, any farm animal domesticated farm animal because of the way their hoof structure is.
And, they have a very they have a very thin veneer of tough hoof material, but just under that, there are blood vessels. And so that's why you see cows standing in ponds to cool off because their blood runs so close to their hooves. They can stand in there. That cools off the blood. That cools off their bodies. And, so, so so they went from having, good milk production, everything was going along fine, to just a train wreck. Cows would stop milking. They would stop breeding back. They would start to get mastitis much easier.
They become susceptible to other health problems because their body was always under attack. And when your immune system is always under attack, you just become susceptible to even a minor bug becomes a big issue. And, so we, we finally after well, the thing that that really set it off for us, all these things are going on, but but you have to understand everybody is looking at you and saying, what's wrong with you? What is your management that's causing these things to go wrong? What have you changed? We had we were spending a lot of money on consultants to come out and talk to us, and it was always it was always about what we were doing wrong.
And I kept saying, man, we just haven't changed anything, but we'll try you know, we were we were desperate. We'd try anything. We threw we threw hundreds of thousands of dollars at this problem trying to get it figured out very honestly and, couldn't come to a solution. And one day, my son who was, 15 at the time comes walking around the barn, end of the barn in the in the morning about 06:30. I'm feeding cattle, and he walks around. And he sees something. He comes and he runs and gets me. He said, dad, he says, the wires going to that box up there on the on the power pole are glowing red hot.
And I said, you're just you know? I was like, yeah. Right, son. And he's like, no. You gotta come and look, dad. So I come and look, and the wires were melting down from the power line to the transformer. And I immediately, we just shut everything down because I didn't, you know, didn't wanna fire, didn't wanna lose something more. Called the power company, and they came out, and they fixed a few things. And I says, you know, what's going on here? And he goes, oh, this is very common. And I just I looked at the guy like, I'm 45 years old. I've never seen that before in my life. What do you mean common? Never even heard of it. But he was just insistent, and I just I got to thinking about it. And, my next phone call was to a lawyer because I was like, something she is going on here.
And, so then we went through seven years of court battle to try to win. We finally did win, but, we we basically lost our farm. We just we just got behind so bad financially because of the, onerous cost of the loss of production, loss of cattle. All of our income was tied up in those cows. We lost it all. And, we, we've we sold the farm, and we moved down here just to try to keep on, keep alive. Our court case had we moved we moved to this farm in 2016. We had, we had our first court date that December, and then, they appealed it. We won.
It was two weeks of hell being every every question you can imagine, everything that doesn't matter. They they go through everything about your life and pick you apart to show that you're a bad person. And, we won. They appealed, and it was finally the 2017. It went to the appeals court, and then we won it the appellate level. They were going to go to, the next level, and, we basically said, you know, if you do I'm I'm up in because you can in Iowa. You could up your damage claim then. I said, if if you do, this is what we're gonna do, and it look and we've already won twice. You know? Unless you got unless you got the the magic card in your hand, you know, it looks like we're gonna be three times gonna be our charm. Yeah. And, so they they folded.
They wanted me to sign an NDA. I would not sign an NDA because I felt like I need to be able to tell my story and, help other dairy farmers with what was going on. Was this against the electric company or the Yes. Electric coop? Okay. Yep. Yep. It was, it's it was, Alliant Energy was our provider, but the, the parent company was, in was IPL. I can't remember exactly what it stands for. But Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Mhmm. Iowa producer does a Yeah. Something something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Well So so, yeah, it was, everybody says says, you know, something about going to court. And I'm like, you don't even begin to understand what that well entails. And to be honest, when we got done, our lawyers got a very large chunk of the money. I didn't get much out of it. But we want a week third.
[00:33:23] David Bennett:
I mean, it's usually, like, a third or so or something like that. Well, you know, this this kinda goes into something that I've I've wondered about quite a bit with with agricultural producers, but more specifically, people that are are linked to animal welfare is between you start seeing your cows get sick, and then they stop producing. So now you're you're you're operating at a at a at a loss because you got no sales. Mhmm. And and and then even you got equipment losses. Mhmm. And then all of a sudden, you know, you guys find yourself in a court of law. And and the question is is, where did you get the resilience to not just fold like a cheap suit? Because to me, this sounds like the kind of thing that would stop, you know, a normal human being dead in their tracks and cause them to go, I don't know what to do. I just don't know what to do.
[00:34:30] JR Burdick:
My my great grandpa used to say had a phrase, and it was, full strength and awkwardness. And, and and I just felt like there had been an injustice against us and more importantly against my family. And they were stealing everything that I had worked for, everything my dad had worked for, everything my grandpa had worked for.
[00:34:57] David Bennett:
For what?
[00:35:00] JR Burdick:
And and it was it was something I never want to go through again. In fact, I tell some people you shouldn't go through that. There's better ways around it. I, I would say my faith in God, I just felt like there was a a need to stand up for justice. And we did a lot of praying, and we just pushed through it. There was a lot of scars from that that I wish I look back on it now, it was all consuming. It was very hard on my two older boys because, you know, they're in the prime of their high school days. I was like, I was kind of a dictator to them, a tyrant, basically, because I was like, I gotta have you do this. And anytime they would, you know, kinda push back. Like, it wasn't just normal, you know, teenager, I don't wanna you know, I'd rather sit in the house and play video games. It was legitimate pushback of, you know, data when I have a life.
I'd be like, hey. If we don't stay at this, we're gonna lose our court case. And I put a lot on them. I shouldn't have. But, but we also just pushed through it. My two my two kids but, I mean, they get along with me great today. But I can just look back on that and say, I coulda handled some of those things differently. But the stress was unbelievable. I can't I can't begin to tell people, you know, what that stress was like to to go through that. And every time you turn around and you get you get a an email from your lawyer, oh, they want this. Oh, they want that. Oh, you gotta have these records. You just felt violated every time.
And Mhmm. And when you looked across when you know, I realized and this is what I realized about agriculture too. When we were sitting at that that, that first day at the, at in the court, and we were sitting at the at the plaintiff's table. I looked across, and nobody else in that room had anything to lose. The the lawyers on each side were gonna get paid regardless. The judge was gonna go home to her job. The jurors were gonna be able to go home. And I was like, the only person in this room that stands to lose anything is me and my family.
And and I just thought there's and and that was that that was when I really kind of became this anti corporatist type person because I was like, there's no corporation that's gonna feel any pain. Even if they pay me, it's just gonna be a expense, you know, the balance sheet. It's not gonna show up, and and they've got a, it was it was told to me after the fact by my lawyers. What my settlement was was less than what they paid their lawyer fees and their specialists. You know? They're all their expert witnesses. So I just was like, wow. Nobody nobody stood to lose anything other in there other than me and, and my family.
So, I just I that was when I began to realize there's something really wrong with our system in The United States because if if everybody has a little accountability, you don't do some of the stupid stuff you do.
[00:38:20] David Bennett:
Yeah. It becomes much more of a polite society. That's the same thing that we used to say about guns in the, you know, in the Old West. It's like it's a polite society because you don't dare call someone a liar or steal their stuff or hit their kids or Yeah. Pull any stuff that we would consider reprehensible even today because there'd be instant consequences. But, you know, beyond that, you know, there's there are court case out here on the King Ranch. I I live at Eastern Washington State, Central Washington, but you've if you've ever seen, it looks like Eastern New Mexico. And if you've ever seen that, you know it's dry as a bone.
Right. And they are they're probably gonna lose a five generation ranch because the the state of Washington has a lawsuit against them for at first, it was they had the audacity to dredge their, stock ponds that the great grandfather had dug. So it was man made, but they dredged them because they will silt in. Right? You know? You Right. Yep. Gotta be able to have water out there, especially in something like Central Washington. It's ridiculous. And no. No. They they were, deemed destroying the habitat of, I don't know, green lizard or some such shit. Doesn't matter. It's it they're probably gonna win that case, and they're probably gonna lose that ranch.
Mhmm. And when I look at you know, when I hear your story and I'm you know, and I talked for two and a half hours with their lawyer. It's actually a it's an interview that I did for this podcast. And, you know, I I talked to her for two and a half hours. I talked to to the old man. I talked to his wife. I talked to their kids. You know, I talked to there was hundreds of ranchers that were that were coming out in support of these guys, and it wasn't gonna matter. It wasn't gonna matter. They're, they're so far in the hole on legal, and and that's even with you know, their lawyer has tried to do everything she can to not charge them. Right. Or charge them the very, you know, least. And it's it's not gonna matter because this is a cost of doing business to the other side.
And, you know, this is, like, one of the other things that that I I think about when when I think of because like everybody else in The United States, I didn't think about food production. I don't think about you know, I do now because I care, but, you know, I when I was a kid, I I didn't know where milk came from. Shit, as far as I knew, is a spiffy looking dude in a in a nice little hat in a boarding truck that would actually bring the milk to our house. That's where milk came from. You know? Food came from the grocery store. And not only is it that we, generally speaking, don't spend enough time thinking about where our food really does come from, We don't spend enough time thinking about this, for lack of a better term, the absolute shit you guys have to go through, whether it's losing an animal, all the way up to fighting a court case, to input cost increasing.
Mhmm. Because at this point, we could probably start talking about the impacts of fiat money. Mhmm. Because I'll I think a lot of what the fact that it's a cost of doing business to damn near eviscerate your life to somebody, I think, is a direct consequence of being able to print money and being best friends with the person that prints that money. You know? So you've lived in both worlds. You you were doing commodity farming. You know? Or commodity dairy production, let's say. And then and then you've gone to to direct sales.
[00:42:15] JR Burdick:
Mhmm.
[00:42:19] David Bennett:
In in general, after seeing both of those worlds, how and you can get as specific as you want, but I don't even know where to to enter into this conversation other than to ask, how has Fiat affected farming outcomes, whether farm, ranch, dairy, all ag? What Mhmm. Since 1971, which is when Nixon took us off what was left of the gold standard because it there was only partial. Right. Since then, what was what's been the outcome in general?
[00:42:54] JR Burdick:
Mhmm. Well, I'll take you back, and and I had the privilege of knowing my great both of my great grandfathers very well. Both of them were born in 1899, and they both farmed. I my my uncle still has one of the family farms. You know? So, I was really blessed to hear their discussions about the time of the '20 the roaring twenties because that's when they were starting their life and getting their businesses going. And then the thirties and the depression and then the forties and then on up. And my dad started farming in 1970. So he he experienced that that commodity boom. So, fiat money what fiat money has done in agriculture is it has it has allowed people who are able to hold land and and and then build their empires because land appreciated above its its utility value.
Okay? Because people were looking for a place to put money that, would be a hedge against inflation. So land prices for for farmers have become the greatest single expense that you can't get a you it's just a hurdle you can't hardly overcome because it's not valued at what it can produce. It's valued at what it will be worth at the end of the next monetary cycle. And as the fiat the fiat devalues land increases in price, so you have to have land. So that was one of the things that I learned from my great grandfathers was that as they watched everything from the thirties, the people lost their land because the price of commodities didn't keep up with the asset appreciation of land plus taxes.
And so so they were in the they were they were behind the eight ball, especially if they had debt on the land because they couldn't outpace the the fiat running the land price up. And and at the same time, the fiat lowering the price of your of your actual work because fiat doesn't have a proof of work behind it. And it Right. And it works it works against anything that does have proof of work. So so that was a part of it. There was, of course, obviously, the the turmoils of of world wars and then the adaption of technology. But, you so so they they kind of they were able to kinda get that thing steadied and and moving at kind of a a level place until 1971.
There was some there was some fluctuation in the sixties, but it didn't it didn't outpace the the the devaluing of the dollar didn't outpace the the cost of producing the Mhmm. Said commodities. So there was kind of a symbiosis there. Everybody's able to kinda keep keep things the same, so you didn't have this way out of whack commodity prices compared to, input costs. 1971 comes along, and it's all out the window. You know? You you you you you've got some really interesting things out. I'll throw out some numbers here, and the numbers are always hard when you're talking, so I hope I hope people are paying attention here. But, in 1971, it took 200 and roughly 290 pounds of pork to buy an ounce of gold.
Okay? So an ounce of gold in 1971, you know, thirty five dollars an ounce to to $40 an ounce at the end of the at the end of that period. Took 290 pounds of of of pork to buy that ounce of gold. Today, it takes 3,970 pounds of pork to buy an ounce of gold.
[00:47:08] David Bennett:
Holy shit. That's a Yeah. Thousand percent increase.
[00:47:13] JR Burdick:
Yes. So so when people say my food costs more, of course, it does. Why does it? Because your dollar doesn't buy anything. Yeah. And and so we've gotten to so the the same can be said for milk, for beef. You can do it all through all the commodities, and you can see so when people say they're they're upset and I understand everybody's upset about the food price right now. But guess what? It's not the food. It's not the it's not the farmer getting richer. Because at the same time that that in 1970, that hog would buy an ounce of gold. 200 one hog basically would buy an ounce of gold compared to today where you're looking at needing a 100 hogs to buy an ounce of gold.
Right. So, you know, so do you have the same life weight?
[00:48:08] David Bennett:
And it it just it dawns on me. Now this is like, all things gotta be equal, and and we know that right now, not all things are equal when it comes to nutrition coming off the soil. Let's just imagine a time where we didn't completely destroy the soil microbiome. Let's go all the way back. And let's say that the dollar devalued that way from the course of 1800 to 1900 before we started using chemical fertilizers and and herbicides and pesticides like it was going out of style. That 290 pounds of hog processed let's say processed Mhmm. Is the same caloric.
It's the same, you know, nanograms or micrograms of of any you know, pick your favorite mineral, iron, magnesium, calcium, whatever. It's all the same. Mhmm. And if we can look at it that way, then then it becomes very evident what actually changed. And it has nothing to do with the hog. This has everything to do with this imaginary money that we've created out of thin air. Now, again, we're gonna we'll end up talking about this too. All things are not equal. Right. The say the same calorie will still be a calorie, but it's not gonna have the nutrition that Right.
Unless we get into things that your like, your practices are more regenerative, and we're we're seeing differences there. But back in commodity land, no. Right. No. It's it's it's terrible, but it becomes a a kind of like an object lesson of it ain't the food. Right. It's the money that broke. You know? If we're we're not looking at broken food. Right. Right. It it's so speaking the the other thing that I wanted to ask about Fiat, you'd I I was listening to you on Working Cows, and you said something, and I wanna see if I've got this right. I probably don't, but it seemed it it seemed like it it it could've led into it is that you were saying and we all know that land prices are increasing because of what we just talked about. The land is the same.
It's the dollar that's broke. We all know it. Okay. Great. Except as the dollar breaks and that land value, the perceived value goes up in price, then it seems that farmers and possibly ranchers, not all, but enough, can find themselves going, oh, well, I could releverage that land and get more loans and put those loans into what you would hope would be something a very useful endeavor. But in many cases, it doesn't matter what endeavor that they put it into. It comes back to bite them in the ass. Do I have this right? Are people, like, looking at their land? Farmers are looking at their land like the bank account that homeowners are looking at their home as. Right? Yes. Okay.
Yeah. Because this seems like a this seems this seems like a terrible state of affairs. You know? If you've got loans against equipment, if you've got loans against a barn, if you've got loans against next year's harvest because you got seed coming in, And I you know? And and I'm not even gonna pretend. I've never been on a farm. I have never been in a combine. I have I I have ridden a horse. Mhmm. Everything that I know is just talk comes from talking to people like you guys. But if that's the case, then I I don't wanna ask what percentage or or how many farmers have found themselves in a bad way, but I guess I have to ask it that way. How many farmers are finding themselves that, oh, shit. They should not have taken a a new loan out against that land as it as it appreciated upwards? And are they finding themselves in an impossible situation that they can never get away from?
[00:52:07] JR Burdick:
Well, yes. As far as a percentage, I couldn't tell you an exact percent. It's it's well over 30%, though. Okay. Okay. So so it's more than a third of the farms, but we have historical precedent for this. And that was 1979 and '27. Alright? And that was the beginning of the farm crisis as it was called in the eighties when so many farms went bankrupt.
[00:52:33] David Bennett:
Now is this when is this when all the farmers got in their tractors and drove to Washington, DC? Yeah. Okay.
[00:52:39] JR Burdick:
Tractor Cade was I wanna say that was 1982 that actually happened, but it was in response to what had been already start. So going back to our previous conversation about 1971 and fiat money, when when the when when the when we finally broke away from the the gold standard completely and said, yes. We're gonna default on our promise to give you gold, and we're going to let you have these wonderful things called dollars that are just as good, and we promise that they'll they'll be just as good for at least another week. You know, what did you see in the in the value of land?
So land where we were in Iowa was about 6 to $800 an acre in 1971. By 1979, it was over $3,000 a day. Oh. So what did everybody do? Everybody was like, they went into the bank, and the bank was like, look. You're worth this much more money. You should buy a new tractor. You should become more efficient. You should build this type of barn to that is going to be more efficient and help, you know, get the get confinement hogs started and all those things because they had equity on the bank balance sheet because of the inflation in land prices. So everybody did that.
Everybody just jumped on, and it the funny thing was the more highly leveraged you were, the more they kept throwing money at you. Because now they had you, but you also had the bank. And the bank was like, well, we gotta keep this guy going so that we don't go backwards so that we don't look bad to the regulators of the fiat money. And so that was all working really good until 1979. And it's really unique, and we'll talk about this a little bit with sidebar. The the second largest year over year price increase in gold is this year.
The first one is 1979. Oh, okay. '79. You look at the price of gold in 1979. The gold market was screaming, this is not sustainable. We can't do this anymore. And so Paul Volcker gets everybody's re gotta gotta remember Paul Volcker, and everybody blames Reagan for Paul Volcker, but nobody realizes that he was appointed fed chair under Jimmy Carter. Yeah. And Jimmy Carter brought him in and said, you've got to do what you've got to do. So we went all those loans that had been given to farmers because of this new value that was suddenly found because of fiat money on their balance sheets, they had always used, variable rate interest rates on those.
That was the predominant amount that was the predominant way most of those were financed. So they had no no security, no top end security on any of those. And as Paul Volcker started to tighten the money supply by raising increase interest rates, everybody's operating notes, everybody's land notes, everything started to just go up. So they were and and then you took 1980, and Carter had the Russian grain embargo where he said to Russia, because you guys went into Afghanistan, we're not selling you any wheat. We're not selling you any any products anymore. And then all of a sudden, our commodities completely fell apart. So we went from about wheat being about $4 a bushel in the 1980.
By harvest time, it was about $2 a bushel. By fall, it was about a dollar 75 a bushel. All the while, your interest rates are climbing at a half a point every time the Fed meets or a point, whatever it was. And so your your variable costs and your fixed costs were both going up, but your balance sheet was going down because now the asset value because the dollar was getting stronger in that Uh-huh. It was weakening your asset value, and it was the perfect storm. And that's why we lost hundreds of thousands of farms in the eighties was because of those because yeah. One A lot of those farms got foreclosed on because the asset value fell below their liquidation cost. Right? Okay. Right. Most of them still cash most of them still cash flowed, and most of them still were making their payments.
But they're because of what their balance sheet looked like, the small rural banks were out of compliance. And the only way those banks could get back into compliance was to shut down those bad loans, write them off the books because the FDIC was gonna come in and make them whole. And that's that's how all those small banks, they they just had to. They didn't have any choices because of what the regulators do. Let me just clarify for the for the audience if you missed it.
[00:57:33] David Bennett:
People will have a fifteen year or thirty year fixed rate mortgage on their house. That's not what we were talking about here. We were talking about variable rate loans, or I guess an arm is probably the best Yeah. Variable rate mortgage, but and this would be on farmland. So as Volcker was raising rates, your interest payments went up. And and, you know, like, if you have a thirty year fixed, that doesn't happen, and United States still enjoys, I think, the only country in the world that actually has a fixed mortgage rate. Yes. Alright. So to compound all this, I got Earl Butts Mhmm. In the 1973 Mhmm. Telling people and and and I wanna you know, I since you're out in the sticks, you're out the the out there actually doing the thing. Let's see see how how far off the mark I am.
Everybody attributes him saying, go big or go home, and he never said that. Right. No. What he said was, you will you will plant commodity, and I don't care what as long as it's wheat, corn, oats, cotton, I don't give a shit. You will plant commodity crops from fence row to fence row.
[00:58:51] JR Burdick:
Right.
[00:58:52] David Bennett:
Means that you had to rip out all your fencing. Now and and I'm getting to a point. It's not really about ripping out the fencing. It's about you got no more turn radius on your tractor. So what are the other things that came out? So first, you got nothing but commodities. Mhmm. Yeah. You got increasing land prices. You got bankers calling saying, hey. Now's the best time to get new stuff and take out a new loan. And then the Russian grain embargo. And so so there's where we were. But in 1973, when Howard when Errol Butts said that, and everybody went along with it and said, yeah. We're gonna do grain everywhere.
So now it ain't nothing but commodity. Whereas before, there was there was some hedge against whatever else is being grown that wasn't wouldn't be considered commodity. Maybe a lot more grays, maybe a lot more, yeah, hog ranching. Who knows? Right. But one of the things that that I find interesting about the Great Plains, because I I grew up in in West Texas. Mhmm. And, you know, I've seen farms all over the place, and, like, you can drive a straight line east to west in Iowa and not see a tree for a 100 miles. And that's what I wanna get back to the fence row to fence row because if you're gonna do that, if you're really gonna sacrifice every single bit of land, then you had hedges, you had trees, you had all kinds of stuff, and all of a sudden, now the birds aren't there.
Mhmm. And then now there's not a population of shit that gobbles up insects. Mhmm. And then all of a sudden, you start getting insect problems.
[01:00:35] JR Burdick:
Mhmm.
[01:00:36] David Bennett:
And we're just it it seems that we're just now putting this knowledge back together again. Mhmm. And that's where where people like you from the regenerative agriculture movement kinda come in. You know? And and and that's, I guess, the last part of this question that I, you know, that I wanted to ask was, you know, all of the stuff we were just talking about really did hammer the commodity guys. Mhmm. And and it's still hammering. You know, it's it hasn't gone away. Right? Right. Yep. Do you see any difference considering that you've changed your farming practices to more regenerative, and I and I assume you're gonna keep continuing down that path and learn more and more. Mhmm. Are do you see any relief from those practices against the fiat printing of money, or you're not there yet, or is it just the same?
[01:01:30] JR Burdick:
Well, the relief is going to come with the adoption the the acceptance of consumers to start to care about their food because we have to have access to capital. We have to ax have access to cops, and and it has to be out of outside of those normal streams of commodity production. And and and that's where the relief will come in in terms of the economic side. I have already had a lot of mental relief from getting off of that, that treadmill, you know, out of that rat race of commodity production where you're always gotta have more. Every year, you've gotta have an increase to some because you have to overcome fiat, and you have to overcome, just nature and the natural things. I mean, it it's everything we do is still affected by the sun, the wind, the rain, and and all those things. So you always have to overcome that, but you always are trying to overcome that next Fiat model and that whatever the next thing the government's gonna throw out there, that's going to be your competition in terms of are they are they who are they paying this year? Who what's what's the commodity that's gonna get, you know, the golden parachute this year for for extra money that's going to and and it always goes in the direction of the biggest guys, and they seem to be able to find a way to collect the most of the money. And if you're a small farmer, you don't ever get enough of it to really get you over the hump.
You just get enough to keep you, you know, keep you satiated until next year. And, you know, so so, the the outcome of it and and, again, it gets back to community. I think that's one of the things that I have found as I have changed my farming practices is it really does connect you more to your your in a peer to peer relationship where you have that ultimate accountability, that quick feedback, and it's the same in regenerative agriculture because you're seeing the so the the the benefits to the soil that you you didn't care about before. It was this summer, I was walking around, and I do I do, manage grazing on my farm. So I'm moving cattle from this pasture to that pasture, and I've got fences, you know, temporary fences so I can move them easily. And and I was walking along, and I was moving fence posts. It's a hot day, you know, in the morning, and dew is on there. Your feet are wet, all those types of things. And and I was just it just dawned on me how happy I was because I'm walking along and I'm going, okay. That grass is growing there.
Then I'm noticing these grasses, and I'm noticing the soil structure, and I'm noticing the earthworm bounds. And I'm and I'm seeing that cow eating over here and picking and eating this grass, but not eating this grass. And and I'm gathering all that information, and I'm thinking to myself, just three years ago, I was driving over this field with the tractor. I didn't notice any of that. I was just trying to drive straight. Mhmm. And I didn't I didn't pay attention to what moths were out here and what insect was over there and, again, earthworms. And and I just was like, oh, this is so cool to be doing this in this way.
And it was exciting for me. And I was like, I was actually connected in a real way for the for in a in a in a real way that I had had been in my, you know, previous forty years of farming. And, and I think as more farmers, and especially young farmers, because I'm kinda not I'm I'm long in the tooth. I'm the old old guy in this thing now, which which is harder for me to because I I told my wife, I says, I'm having to unlearn forty years of bad habits and re relearn how to do something new. But, but young guys, I get so much I get so much joy listening to them talk about these things. They're so much farther ahead than I am and I was at their age because they're looking at a holistic agriculture practice instead of a monolithic one, which is Yeah. Which is really what I was in all those years. And so I have I have a lot of hope for the future. There's gonna be some really intense pain coming as we have to change because the fiat model is running out. Mhmm. We can't keep doing the the money is running out. We can't keep doing what we were doing because, we're at the end of we really can't have any more asset appreciation for that next round of advancement, you know, go and borrow it from the bank because who's gonna afford the land? Yeah. You know, how much how much higher could the land go and still be used for for ag?
[01:06:26] David Bennett:
Yeah. You know? And you you had mentioned something about it in the in the realm of commodities and and grains, which one's gonna get the golden parachute. Mhmm. And it it just reminded me of this thing going on with the Argentinian soybean thing. And so I'm guessing that the golden parachute is not gonna be awarded to soybeans right now, or is it? How does this work?
[01:06:53] JR Burdick:
It's it's we're in a we're in a very different type of frame than what we've been for the last the the twenty five years leading up to 2016. 2016 on the implementation of tariffs is kind of a new thing that changes that dynamic a little bit. But, prior to that, it was always basically, all grains got treated the same, and we are going to give a standard payout based on a percentage, you know, percentage of the total. So corn is the largest one. The percentage the price per bushel was lower, but the percentage was equal to the percentage the percentage of payout was equal to the percentage of production.
Well, now, they're gonna give a little bit more money out to soybean farmers than they would corn farmers because of the fact that what happened was Argentina was just about broke here three weeks ago. Mhmm. And, they had no way to generate income. Their their dollar peso peso had devalued so far. So Trump went to him and said, we're not going to we're not gonna do anything with your tariffs. And, Bassett went to him and said, you need to just sell soybeans, sell as many as you want to China. And, allowed them to kinda circumvent the natural trade routes and let them just feed China Mhmm. At the expense of US soybeans.
So instead of us saying you still were going to have to buy this many soybeans from us in the next trade deal, this trade deal that they're negotiating, they basically said we're not going to put soybeans in there as a requirement for the trade, and they allowed them to then buy all these all that pent up demand went to Argentina instead of having to be coming through us. That was basically what happened. Okay. Okay. So the so they just took they they took the beans off of the requirements for tariffs is basically So
[01:09:00] David Bennett:
this is kind of another format of subsidy, right
[01:09:03] JR Burdick:
Mhmm. In a way. I mean It's directly subsidy. We just don't call them that anymore because, you know, they did the polling in the nineties, and nobody liked the word subsidy. So let's change it to an indemnity payment because that sounds really bad, and everybody goes, oh, something bad must have happened. So we must we must pay them. And and 90% of Americans can't spell indemnity, let alone know what it means. So you know?
[01:09:32] David Bennett:
Right. So this and I don't know. Maybe you could say something because you're you're dairy and you're not general meat cattle, but this secretary Walt Rollins thing that just happened this this debacle that happened over the last week, it from what I understand, the rumor was that they were gonna pay ranchers to keep heifers. Mhmm. And now secretary Rollins has come out and said and she's secretary of the what? USDA. Yeah. Okay. That Yeah. Yeah. USDA. And she said that that's not true. That's not what they were gonna do, but it got enough people talking about it so fast that that everybody saw it. Or not everybody, but a lot of people have you know, if you're following one farmer on Twitter, you've heard about this. And I follow several, so I've heard about this a lot. Mhmm.
What was what would even let's say we still don't know because I don't trust these guys as far as I can throw them anyway. Let's just say that they were gonna do it, that they were gonna pay ranchers to keep heifers. What's the ram what's the potential ramifications of that? I mean, it doesn't this and and a lot of the ranches were saying, for the love of God, don't pay us anything. Don't give us any money. This is a bad deal, and yet we've had agriculture that that the commodity side has been so dependent on commodities that it seemed kinda shocking that there was an outrage on on not all, but many of the ranchers that that I follow were all freaking out going, this is a bad move, man. You do not want us to pay us to keep heifers. And I was wondering if you had any other insight on not I mean, I kinda know why they had outrage, but what does it mean to pay somebody to keep their heifers? What was what was trying to be done?
[01:11:30] JR Burdick:
K. Well, again and it gets back to solid money fixes all these problems, but we'll we'll get back to what happened was you go back to the 1996 farm, and this is pivotal because this is still what we kind of operate under as our as our baseline. We changed from having a very, our subsidy system prior to that, which was everybody understood was we pay a farmer not to grow a crop or pay him to grow less crops or or whatever. We changed that to a a model where we were, expecting, insurance to make up for the shortfall, and the government just subsidized every farmer's insurance pay. So they they paid a portion of that insurance payment, and you the farmer still had to pay a portion. It's about it's about $65.35 right in there. 65% paid by the government, 35% by the farm, roughly.
Depends on commodity in those things. And then for livestock, there was insurance programs set up for them as well so that you bought you bought an insurance pro product, and that gave you, a locked in price and a a chance, you know, of basically a 4.
[01:12:49] David Bennett:
So it wasn't just insurance on a full crop failure. It was insurance on no. It's $3 a bushel. You would get even if it's a buck 50 a bushel on the open market, you will we will make sure you get 3. Right? Right. Yes. Okay. Yes. So you had revenue as well as production. So it was both sides of it.
[01:13:10] JR Burdick:
Well, you go to 2005 in the Renewable Fuel Act where we increase the amount of ethanol that was out in there, and that threw out all of the that that skewed all the formulas that we were using for insurance. Because before, it had been able to keep prices. Fiat hadn't moved much really in the nineties. The dollar didn't go a lot of places. Gold didn't go a lot of places. So everything kinda stays stays level. Well, 02/2005, we get the Renewable Fuel Act. We increase how much ethanol is avail is is to be mandated, used in in everybody's vehicles, And corn just goes out of this world because they're all afraid we're gonna run out of corn. So we go from, literally in 02/2005, I sold corn for a dollar 50 a bushel.
By 02/2007, it was $5 a bushel. By 02/2008, it was it was over $6 a bushel. So a four times increase in three and a half, four years, no no insurance model predicts that, and you don't know what to do with that. Uh-huh. So so it wasn't valuable. It it was it was more valuable and more advantageous. It it made more economic sense to sell your cows and grow corn for this ever expanding corn market that was never going to stop because ethanol was always gonna get mandated to go higher. And so we started decimate our cow herd. And we everybody just started getting rid of them because it's a lot easier to drive a tractor than it is to herd cattle. You know? It's just the cow on Christmas day, you gotta go out and take care of your cows. You don't have to go out, walk, check your tractor. You know? It it doesn't matter. It doesn't care if you're there or not. So so we had we had that system going on, and then you also had this exorbitant price increase in land that has happened since the great financial crisis till now, after land kinda cratered, and then it's just been on this, you know, up into the right the whole time.
And you couldn't afford to run cattle on it because they didn't generate generate enough income to even pay the taxes at that time. We increased our imports dramatically at that time, so we were our domestic herd was competing against cheap imports. And so so I say all that to say we had the perfect storm coming into about two years ago when cattle prices started to take off and people started to say, and hamburger's getting more expensive, and beef is getting more expensive. Mhmm. Well, every farmer really, as our as our farmers get older, they started to say, it's a lot less work to to grow corn than it is to feed cattle. I'll grow corn.
And, so they they started to depopulate the cattle herd, got rid of it because of the economics, and we just ground them into hamburger. And the big four packers were happy to do it because they were making a killing because everybody's liquidating at the same time. Supply is high. We're we're gonna make lots of money. This is gonna be fine. Well, cows take two years before they can reproduce, and then there's two more years before that animal that it reproduced can be eaten. So you've got a you really got a four year life cycle before you can either have reproduction or or an expansion in numbers or you could have more supply of meat.
So when they when they floated this idea, what they were saying was, we know we got a problem. We gotta incentivize you guys to keep your, your heifers back so we can grow the cow. But the the one industry in all of agriculture that has been pretty immune from government subsidies is the cow calf fruits. There's really not ever been a a go to program that they could that they could, you know, reap the benefits of taxpayer transfers. So they've been very independent, and they were like, no. Listen. Basically, you know, screw you. You you guys, made your bed lying.
You you screwed us for all of these years. We're getting ours. And it's not out of vengeance towards the, the consumer because they all have a lot of compassion for the fact that food's getting more expensive, but they're like, somebody needs to learn a lesson here. Stop screwing with everything. Stop playing with the funny money and stop playing with with all of these subsidies and leave us alone. And by the way, make sure you'd stop importing beef from other places so that we know that if we make the investment, you aren't gonna undercut us in six months or a year or eighteen months and say, oh, look at we just brought in a record amount of beef from Uruguay, and now your beef isn't worth anything.
And now you got all these heifers that we've paid you to retain, but now they're worth a third of what they were when you we could have sold them as beef. And and that's really what's going on is the beef producers are saying, no.
[01:18:30] David Bennett:
We we this is not the pig in the poke. Yeah. We aren't we aren't gonna fall for it. So, you know, I was just putting it together in my head, and I just wanna recap for the folks out there. The FAR bill in '96 basically got replaced by well, did get replaced, but elements of it got eviscerated by corn because of ethanol production. Yes. So in in so all the people that are bitching about we have to have clean ethanol burning engines, and they're the same people that are worried about $25 ribeye, $25 pad ribeye. We actually, it's I saw a I saw a price the other day, $29.50. Mhmm. Yep. And that's uncut. You gotta you gotta butcher that shit yourself. Yep. And that's uncut. It's $29, and that's Costco price. That's not Wagyu. That's not, like you know, it's just their Kirkland whatever.
Right. This is what you get. And Right. And it it took 96 to 2,006 is ten years. To '16 is twenty years. Here we are about thirty years away from that, and it takes that long for that it's like a butterfly flap in its wings in Iwan, and a tsunami hits thirty years later on the coast of The United States. Yeah. And this is we're so far removed from from agriculture. And even if if I was, like, if I had been a farmer for, like, sixty years and then somehow or another frozen, and then, like, frozen in 1930, and then we, you know, awoken, I would probably not understand any of this. Oh. I would not understand futures markets.
Mhmm. You know, they don't even allow futures on onions anymore because of what happened. And for those of you who don't know, there are a bunch of people bunch of onion farmers brought all their onions to the commodities floor for physical delivery Right. Because the futures market basically tanked their price and said, okay. You want the onions? You can have the onions. And in Chicago in the summer, that's a smelly mess. And Yeah. To this day, they don't allow futures commodities to be traded on onions. But Yep. This this notion of subsidies and insurance, and I we could talk about futures contracts on commodities, but I suspect that we're just gonna end up in the same with the same answer. It's just it's just noise.
We don't know what the price of corn per bushel should be. We don't really know what meat should cost. We don't know what eggs should cost. We probably don't know what anything should cost, but certainly anything that has something to do with if it's been subsidized, if it's got an insurance policy against it, and it's traded on the open market as a futures a futures contract, then we probably don't know what it really costs. You're exactly right. Yeah. Okay. Which brings us to what is about to happen to food production and procurement. You've got this is this is the what this is the thing that that you were talking about on Twitter that I saw.
And I your this is kinda your bag. What what do you see coming?
[01:21:56] JR Burdick:
Well, you have a, we have a production problem in terms of the fact that we have consolidated so much and we are in, the the consolidation has gotten us so far away from our immediate centers of consumption, the the big cities and those types of things. So we have a transportation requirement. We have a distribution hurdle, those types of things. And at the same time, you have a production model that depends upon fiat money. It it absolutely requires the continuation of fiat money to to fuel it to provide the fuel, which is the dollars, the capital, to to keep going. So it's going to come to a point, and I don't know exactly when. I see it right now in beef market. We saw it in eggs earlier, and they found a way around the egg thing.
We're not encouraging domestic production. We we're encouraging imports. So the the whole egg thing, we got how do we get out of it? Taiwan, Turkey, and Brazil. We went to them and said we're gonna now Taiwan is a friendly country, and that's fine. Or that wasn't Taiwan. It was South Korea. Excuse me. South Korea was the country. South Korea is a friendly country. Turkey, I've noticed, hasn't been one of our strongest allies over the years, and probably we should be counting on them for everything. And Brazil is a anomaly because, we have a friendship with them, but it's a love hate deal. And most of their food products, by the time they get them packaged, beef their their plants, most of them would not pass our USDA inspection. Yeah. It just blows my mind that we take food products from them and put them into, you know, The United States stream.
So so two of those but we did it all because, we were gonna be able to export fiat dollars to import this thing and that, you know, that keeps us in the our global homogeneity going and and the the global reserve currency because they've got more dollars now. And and we see that happening in beef. We've become this net importer of food. We don't we don't understand that. People don't understand that that right now, we are importing $40,000,000,000 worth of food every year that we never did before. And 40,000,000,000 doesn't sound like a lot, but understand our whole corn crop is only worth about a $160,000,000,000. Mhmm. So it's about a quarter of our bill a quarter of our total worth of our our, our corn crop. So we're importing food that is made into places that is not necessarily that doesn't have the same standards as us, doesn't have the same welfare animal welfare requirements as we do.
None of the none of those standards are the same. And then people go they they and they they don't label them correctly, so none of us really knows what we're eating. Mhmm. And and, and we're all doing it for increased profits for the the mega corporations, and you sit there and go at some point in time, this this this game, house house of cards falls apart. Mhmm. It it just takes a what happens if oil goes up 20%? Your transportation costs get out of whack. And now you you sit there. Is it cheaper for me to let this rot on the dock than to haul it? Or is it, you know that's that's really where we're at. Well, you you know,
[01:25:50] David Bennett:
JR, that that sounds like it it it is we're actually talking about what we were talking about with the ethanol production. Nobody knows how to model it. Mhmm. You got these models that work right now. But you change one variable and it gets too far out of whack, and all of a sudden, that model breaks. And Mhmm. All models are worthless. Some of them are are useful, but they're all generally worthless. And that's not me saying that. I can't there's a mathematician that said that at, you know, years and years and years ago. Yep. And this you're you're like, whether or not we let the food rot on the docks or not is the same decision as to what how the hell do we price this insurance product on corn given this ethanol production mandate that we've got. We don't know how the math doesn't work. I don't know how to math this out, and it looks like we're making the same mistake in a different in a different color dress.
[01:26:48] JR Burdick:
Yes. Yes. And all of those are why you see an increase in the push for these fake meats and fake proteins and and biological because then, you know, the real world can't be, you you no matter how hard we try, we can't make it fit in its spots. There's always gonna be that one variable you didn't see coming. So what they wanna do is they wanna be able to put everything into a factory where everything is controlled, make fake meat, put it out to the people, and say, see. We have a steady constant supply of all of this stuff because we can control.
And the you know, you go back to Jurassic Park one, you know, that first one where the scientist says, life finds a way. Mhmm. You know, we we gotta remember that the chaos is our life. And and you have to embrace that chaos, and you have to kinda say, I'm gonna control the things I can control. I'm gonna leave the things alone I can't control. And government, especially with fiat money, can't do that because if they lose control, they lose to fiat. If they lose to fiat, the gig is up. And, you know, so so, hey. Let's throw money at because we've got an endless supply of money because we haven't run out of ink or paper. And, so so they can they can say, we'll throw money at Beyond Beef. We'll throw money at this fake dairy product that's made out of, you know, worm juice or or or whatever.
And and we'll say that it has this nutritional standard, has this much protein, has this many calories, all these things. And it's like, yeah. But it doesn't have nutrients. It just has calories.
[01:28:35] David Bennett:
And it has your
[01:28:36] JR Burdick:
and and then we have sick people being sick and continuation of the same model that just keeps breaking us down. And and I see that I mean, I'm looking at it from 30 ago looking forward. I'm going, I did not see this when I was in my twenties. Yeah. Because I was still involved in the system and, hey. This is all good, and we can do all this. But now I look back and I go, man, we were just we just marched down this road every step of the way. There was another guardrail put in, and we just had less room to turn around, less room to turn around. And we're to the point now where you either have to jump out of the guardrails, completely get out of the system because the system won't allow for any descent or any innovation.
Mhmm. Or you have to stay there and just keep hoping you are not the guy the first guy to buzzsaw. And,
[01:29:35] David Bennett:
like Like the like the so it it sounds like the entire United States food production model is poised on the edge of a pen, and one one breeze from any direction, it could be fuel prices. It who knows? It it it could be like one of our majors of one of the major suppliers that is an importer of food just goes into civil war. And all of a sudden because we can't replace it, not yet not yet. It's gonna I mean, like you said, meat is a four year cycle just to get production up, you know, production numbers up for where we would be at sub whatever starting base. So but even if you know, let's say that that that model just stays perfectly balanced and there is no wind.
It's still all empty calories, which is now feeding the health care system. Right. And it's not health care. It's, you know, we we call it sick care or, you know, we call it pharmacy you know, we're caring for the pharmaceutical companies more than they're caring for us. I don't care. I it's clear that we're sick. Yeah. It's clear that that Americans have have a health crisis, you know, in the midst, and and nobody really wants to see it. Even, like, your general person on the street, this is I I think this is where the fat shaming body issue, everybody is beautiful, this movement, I think it's come out of a way to crush anybody saying that's not healthy.
Right. And it's not because I'm making fun of somebody. That's what somebody, you know, that's what another person on the other side of this argument wants people to think, that I'm shaming I'm fat shaming this person. No. I'm saying if you don't get your metabolic crap together, you're gonna keel over and die an early death. And if you I don't want that for anybody. Right. Right. And and that's where we are. So even even if the the food model that we have, we because we've chased efficiency Mhmm. To a a almost herculean measure. It's amazing how efficient that we've gotten at this.
And it's empty calories, and it's so efficient that it's poised on the edge of a pen, and any wind from any direction blows it down, which leads me to and I don't wanna disparage any ag producer Right. At all, but I gotta bring up the confined animal feeding operation. Mhmm. I don't like this model at all, and it's not even I don't like it because of animal welfare, but I also don't like it because of human welfare. But there's another thing about this. It's this mad rush for efficiency. Mhmm. Because, like, let me the this this isn't where it really broke my heart, but it was one of the many times that I've I've driven down this road in West Texas that it it always broke my heart. And it was going from Canyon, Texas to Amarillo. It's It's about a 20 mile stretch Mhmm. North, from south to north.
And there's this one part of this road where there's a small CAFO. It's not it's not one of these immense things you see out in in, you know, other parts of West Texas. But it is a it is a capo. And so there's all these cows on like, climbing over these mounds of of manure, because that's what it is. Mhmm. And then right next to it, there's a dying field.
[01:33:10] JR Burdick:
Mhmm.
[01:33:11] David Bennett:
And this makes no sense to me at all. And, you know, this is where we start getting into the the rancher is the ecologist, honestly. You know? People like the those those greedy ranchers are just with the cows burping meth actually, they don't even say burping. They say farting methane, are destroying the planet, and they're all doing it for greed. And I I've never heard a sentence uttered that was further from the truth or so centered in ignorance than that one. Mhmm. I I mean, sure. I get it. There's some CAFO operators that probably never even see a cow anymore. I I understand that, but that's not every rancher.
Because that's like that's like a team of 10 people that can direct a team of a 100 people that are directing the lives of a 100,000 cows. Right. You know, it's not you. And and and the fact that all those cows were pinned up and piling you know, they were having to actually burn diesel Mhmm. And burn man hours to pile up manure to get it shipped off when there's a dead field right next door. Mhmm. And I'm not even talking about dumping the manure over there. Mhmm. Because you need to you need to spread it. Yeah. And then, like, the cows actually do this. They walk around, and they they poop. And we don't even need to get into all the good things that the poop does. Mhmm. But how how do you fit? How do you see yourself the way that you've changed from commodity practices more to regenerative practices?
How do you see that changing your your actions upon this earth? Mhmm. I mean, I do you feel a change in yourself as to who you are, why you're here when you've done that? Absolutely. What
[01:35:07] JR Burdick:
can you describe that? I mean Sure. Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna step back and and answer a couple of things about your question there. One is the word efficiency. That gets thrown around a lot, and and everybody thinks that it's efficiency and how fast an animal gains weight or how little water we use to grow a plant, how much, you know, fertilizer we use. We're using the this and this and this. The system doesn't care about those. The efficiency is the doubt. Mhmm. So so when everybody talks about efficiency, they're saying it's the most dollar efficient way.
So it's the most way to make this fake thing be the most valuable to me. So that's that's what most efficiency is in agriculture today. And I did not realize that until about two and a half years ago when I began my journey because I always had measured my operation by the efficiency, which was calculated down to a number. How can you be more efficient than a black cow going out and eating green grass for three hundred days of its life, four hundred days of its life? It's got a great life every day of its life, and it has one bad day, and it makes you red, great, delicious steak. How is that's the most efficient thing out there.
But we haven't made that the most efficient thing because we have overvalued the value of land because of fiat money. So we can't have one animal on an acre. We gotta have 500 on that acre packed into a pen, brought all the feed for the from the other 400 acres or whatever to feed those animals because that's more efficient. And so efficiency I have started to measure efficiency in terms of how are my cattle handling, efficiently utilizing sun, soil, and water. If they can do those three things efficiently, I'm happy.
And not every animal can. There's we we have changed our breeding, our genetics to some extent where they're not quite as able. So the rancher is the eco ecological person. He has to the ecologist, he has to say, I'm going to stop measuring everything in dollars. Now we have to have money to operate. We have to have a profit. We have to pay our taxes and Mhmm. Keep the lights on and all those things, so you have to have money. But is it is that the most efficient model, the the conventional model, which is all run on a a fake monetary system? Or can I tap into what is real over here and say, I'm gonna have this animal walk across this field, harvest this grass? I'm gonna I'm gonna manage the grass by moving her. I'm gonna change the seasons. I'm gonna give proper rest to my grass. So I'm not gonna have a cow on here every day and make her eat the the very last little stub that's there and not gain weight, but, you know, I'll say, at least I had her on grass. You know? You you've gotta manage that.
You gotta manage that sun. Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant. Why do so many of these places have such such a rampant disease problem? The sun never gets to the animals. There's there's no ionization of any of those germs, and then they're always breathing the same nasty, stale, you know, air. Oxygen is a great, inhibitor of growth of of the different, diseases that could affect cattle and hogs. So and chickens for that matter as well. So you get out there, and now I have this efficient ecological system, but it is not fast.
It doesn't present it doesn't always give me a 100% repeatability. You know? So the grass this year feeds different than the grass last year. And by the time I get everything, you know, evened out, you know, I don't maybe have quite as many pounds of gain a day. I don't have cows giving as many pounds of milk a day. So there's fluctuations there, which is natural for life. But we have taken because we have taken fiat money, and we have said, we're gonna take all we're we're gonna take all of the, obstacles that we're we're gonna control them all. We're gonna take anything away. We've we've translated that to our livestock and said we're going to we're gonna put them in a uniform place doing uniform things so we can have a uniform product so the consumer can be in, you know, Washington DC and get a hamburger, and it tastes the same at that McDonald's as it does text the the McDonald's in Texas Mhmm. Because we want them the same. And we lost all our localism from that. We lost all of our regionalism and our individuality because we're all part of the pod because that hamburger is the same as that hamburger because that cow was raised under the same management in Texas. It's the same management in Missouri. It's the same management in Iowa, and we don't have any any nuance to our life. It's all sterile. It's all the same.
And it's like, what do we lose? We've we've we've lost that interaction with nature. We lost that element of surprise where our food becomes a feasting opportunity, where we go, I really like those peaches from from Georgia, and I like the peaches from Missouri, but they're not the same. But I still like peaches or peach from California. But we wanna have them all the same, so we spray them with stuff. We pick them early, and we store them the same way so that, you know, everybody has sameness. And and and and, therefore, we have a a production model in agriculture that has forced us to reduce our innovation, reduce our individuality, and we all become part of the pod. You know? And and that's just hope.
[01:41:08] David Bennett:
Yeah. And I've listened to a couple of a a couple of farmers that are read you know, whether they're Regen Ranch, Regen Farm, doesn't matter. And one of the things that and it even though I've heard it by now a 100 times, it still surprises me. If you're doing regen ag on on your property and your neighbors are not doing regen ag on their property, they get kinda miffed at you, and they make it known. And it's almost as if it's the kind of peer pressure that you that you tell your children about before they go to high school and about drugs. Mhmm. Is that there will be people, and they will pressure you into trying to do things that you know you don't want to do.
And if you break, you'll do them. If you stand strong, you won't, but the onslaught will never will never cease. And of all the people in my wildest imaginings, I would have never thought that it would be ag guys that would allow themselves to fall into that pattern. It and I hope I'm just talking out talking out of the side of my head on that one, and that I've got it all wrong. But do I You got it all wrong. Oh, thank god.
[01:42:32] JR Burdick:
Well, I should say, I have had a lot of pushback from other dairy farmers about what I'm doing. They're they're not happy with my direct market milk because I'm an outlier. I'm not the same as everybody else. And commodity production is all about being is sameness. So if you're doing something different, you have somebody has to answer the question, why is he doing it that way? You're not doing that. Which is better? And and I always tell everybody, I think I'm doing something better, but I came to this after thirty years of doing something that I thought was better too. So it everybody's got their own individual pace to learn, to gain knowledge, to find their own freedom, to break out and do their own thing. So, but it's again and it's fueled more less by the individual farmer and more by our commodity groups, those people that would represent us because they are sitting there, and they're trying to have a unified voice when they go to the congress critters for the next pile of funding.
And, you know, and if there's an outlier and they get a there becomes a big enough group of them, then congress is gonna start asking questions. Well, why you want money, but this group over here isn't asking for money. Why is why is that? And and, so they they need the sameness for that, that in particular. That's the main thing that they need. And then our consolidation of processing is so huge. The processors are demanding the same thing. Whereas when you had an individual, you had smaller beef processors all across the nation, that were maybe taking 50 to a 100 head of head of cattle to harvest every day.
If that one cow was a little bigger or a little smaller than this other cow, it didn't matter because it was all humans in there cutting it up. Well, when they come through and they're supposed to be robots doing this or or it's supposed to be this chain speed, you don't wanna change it, so we gotta keep production up, and that animal slowed us down. You know? That really does impact how, how we manage things. And and, and that production, it also takes away from that local guy that can say, hey. I'm cutting cutting hamburgers for for the grocery store down the street, and I know what they like for fat percentage in there because that's what customers want. I can make it special. No. JBS just says, this is all of our hamburger. This is 10%, eighty twenty. This is is ninety ten. Take it or leave it. And when you say, well, where did all the beef come from? They go from our plant. And you don't have any idea if it's if it how much of it's mixed together, how many different DNAs are in that. You you just you just take it and go. Well, I would assume that
[01:45:26] David Bennett:
how much how much is mixed, I just assume all of it. Mhmm. All of it. I mean, there there's there's no there's no safer safer number there. Right. That yeah. That the the mixing of the DNA, that's all gets a little bit into the more of the molecular biology Right. Stuff. And, you know, we used to have, you know, a meat processor that would do chicken and cow and deer and elk, whatever, you know, and and and hog. You know? Mhmm. And we used to have one in almost every county that there was a a population enough to have one in that county. Mhmm. And like you said and I still don't think people understand this. We have four.
We we have JBS, and I think they're Brazilian. Right? Yes. And then we have Tyson, and we've got US Packer. I can't remember. Nash National Beef and,
[01:46:24] JR Burdick:
oh, you're putting me on the spot now. Oh, I'm sorry. The question. There's only four. I mean, there's only four, and
[01:46:31] David Bennett:
and none of them are United States based. As I mean, there's US Packers or or or Yeah. National Packers that that it's not They got foreign ownership. Yeah. Yeah. All of them do. And that goes right that feeds right back into the problem you were talking about earlier today. You know, earlier in this interview is is the problem that that's coming, and this would be one of them. I mean, it's like if they major and we saw that with COVID, at least with Tyson. You saw you know? And and and you're right about the the we get back to dollar efficiency, and we've got, you know, mechanized, mechanized chains, that require us a chicken of a certain size or a animal of a certain size.
And it's all it's all that mentality that is has brought us to where we are. And, you know, honestly, I got it from a food food security, situation. I don't feel safe. You You know? I don't feel safe. And it's you know, it was better, you know, when I had like, I was out on on you know, I had a little bit little bit of property, and I at least had chickens. Hell, I had eggs all the time. Mhmm. You know? And it's like you learn how to butcher a chicken, and all of a sudden, it's like, that is a damn tasty chicken. Mhmm. Of course. Because I I control what it eats. You know? So and I I know what I wanna feed it. And it we're just and nothing I don't see anything changing anytime soon.
[01:48:08] JR Burdick:
Not on its own.
[01:48:10] David Bennett:
Yeah. And I think your prescription is is, you know, to go back to having people reach out to their local guys. Mhmm. Is there anything that we can do to make that easy for people that who just almost almost would see that ask. Like, I would ask somebody to go shake the rancher's hand, and then I could see it in their eyes. I don't know any ranchers. I I don't know where to go find them. You're asking me to do more work. Stop asking me to do more work. I already got asked to do a whole bunch of stuff earlier today, and you're just making me mad. Mhmm. And as as ludicrous as that sounds, I know that that's true. It's just one more thing that we're asking somebody who's already been who's not feeling mentally well anyway.
And all you have to do is look outside and go, yeah. I don't feel mentally well either. Mhmm. And is there is there something that we can do to help them through that journey to make it easier to go find their person?
[01:49:14] JR Burdick:
Well, I think I think we need to start asking more questions, and we need to engage in a dialogue. And that that's the first step. That's what we found with our customers is, what do you want? Why don't you feel it? So I'll I'll use this as an example. We had a a young lady who you know, we put up a website. We're on Facebook. We're we're trying to find customers. And, we're talking about the health benefits of our particular milk. And I had a young lady reach out to us who was a vegan. So she is eating nothing, no animal products, but she goes, I I've been asking questions about why I feel so poorly, And I've I've been reading some things, and I'm wondering if I need to put a little bit more fat in my diet. That was her whole thing.
And so she said, I've been reading some books, and I don't know what books they were, but how how dairy fat would be a good thing for me to have in my diet. So she started to ask us questions. So she was asking us questions out of concern about our farming practices.
[01:50:16] David Bennett:
Mhmm.
[01:50:17] JR Burdick:
And we started to tell her I just was very honest with her what we did, explained our process to her. It's not real complicated. This is what we do. This is what we don't do. And, she was like, oh, okay. Well, what do I have to do to buy a gallon of milk for her? So we went through the process of that. We're in her area making a delivery every Tuesday. We said stop and get a gallon. It's gonna cost you $13. Go from there. And she was like, okay. So she bought it. And then as she was sitting there, my wife talked for a little bit. She said, now listen. You haven't had milk for years.
Your body's not ready for this, but have a little bit. And then get your body built up to it. And we walked her through those steps. That lady is a full carnivore now. Yeah. She she just is like and she feels great, and she's she's gained weight. She's she was this little rail, skin and bones. She turned into this beautiful young lady now, You know? And it's just like so start asking the questions. Why don't I feel well? What am I doing? Because if you want to feel well, at some point in time, you have to take the responsibility of that because the system is is rigged to keep you ill so that it can make money.
We have to we have to understand that that's what we've got going on in The United States is we've got a system rigged to keep you nutritionally deficit so that you're pharmaceutically dependent so that you can become a cash cow for multinational corporations. That's what that's what everybody in The United States has to understand. That's the that's the goal behind what's going on. So so everybody has some more work to do, but let's say I like I told this young lady, I says, let's say you start coming to us because she said, I'm you know, it's another day. I've got drive twenty minutes to get to you. It's not just on the other side of town, you know, all those excuses. And I says, ma'am, I says, where do you go to get your prescriptions?
And she goes, well, it's it's over there too, and it's about twenty minutes away. I said, okay. I said, stop going and get your prescriptions filled there and come get your healthy food here and stop having to go there. I says, that so so so you make a choice. You make a choice about what you're going to do. Are you going to feel well? But you gotta do a little f you've gotta put a little proof of work into your own health instead of just proof of concept of going to, the the pharmaceutical's place, and they're telling you, here's another pill. Pop this. That'll take care of that symptom. This take care of that. Oh, we gotta give you this to counteract that symptom. And it was it was those conversations began that process.
And then get on the Internet. Weston a Price is a great, great website to look at that's gonna connect you, especially in raw milk, stuff. There's other websites out there. I can't think of them all right now. Do a little Internet search. I'll bet you'll find a local farmer close to you that's providing something that you need, and then ask the farmer questions. If they aren't willing to answer your question, you know, they're they're charlatans everywhere over the Internet. So so ask some questions, and then vet your farmer. And then if he won't let you come on your farm and walk around and see what you're doing, he's hiding some. Yeah. I we have we have an open door policy. We tell people every Saturday, we have a family come that's a customer. Hey. This is our day off work. We wanted to get out of the country. We're kids wanna walk around, see baby calves, see cows, walk around to the woods, you know, whatever, and, see the barn kittens and the and the puppy dogs and, you know, and people just and we just love having them here. We don't charge anything for it. You just come and take a look. And Yeah. And then they say, well, hey. We're here. We'd like to buy this, buy that, then we have products that we can sell them, and that's how we make our money. But but, again, it's that it's that connection, and you have to make a little effort. And and, again, we can't overcome the convenience part. That's our biggest that's our biggest hurdle.
We have we have almost nobody ever complained about the price of our products, and, yes, we're much higher than grocery store. Everybody complains about the convenience, and we're only it's only my wife and I. We can only be in so many places at one time and only do so many deliveries, you know, a a week. So it's you you kinda gotta we we, of course, we ask people what's the most convenient, and then we get a consensus and say, this is when it's gonna work to go here. This is when it's gonna work to go here. And, but people it's it comes back to responsibility. People gotta take responsibility for their own health, meet their farmers, and then trust their food, and then feel better.
Man, they do.
[01:55:12] David Bennett:
You know, you were talking about how you were telling that young woman, you're not ready your body's not ready for this milk. And it it just it I keep thinking about the fact that we import so much of our food, and we're importing it from from different places all you know, from everywhere that you're not. Or Mhmm. For you're not anywhere this stuff is produced. Right. And I and I wonder I I'm just gonna run this by you. You'll you'll either have an opinion or or further knowledge or you won't, but it seems to me that food is a two part system. Food for humans and food for mammals and, actually, just food for anything is sort of it's built on two pieces, and you have and you have to have them both. And if you don't get them, everything gets out of whack. Like, we get autoimmune diseases.
We get weird things going on. And what I'm saying is that if I live in a place that I'm inhaling pollen from grasses, clovers, what have you, I'm ingesting certain kinds of information. We can go back into the little bit of the molecular biology aspect and DNA, but these are antigens that are like they they, you know, they might make me sneeze. You know, they they might cause an allergic reaction. They might god only knows what. They might do nothing, but they're still gonna be collected by my immune system, and they're gonna be examined by my immune system. And my immune system's gonna do all kinds of fantastic things. Mhmm. But then I eat the animal that eats the grass that produce the pollen, And now my gut, which is the other side of my immune system, has another part of that key.
And when those two come together, I don't have again, theory. Pure theory. I have nothing to back this up. But it seems to me that you need both of those pieces so that your body understands where it is in the world. And that if you're eating fruit from Paraguay, but you're not ingesting any of the pollen from the flora and and or or dander from the fauna in that area, then you're not getting the other end of that information, and your body and your immune system ends up being confused. Mhmm. Is that so far away from the target that that I'm just crazy at this point? Or I mean, what when you think about food and place, what do you think about?
[01:57:55] JR Burdick:
Well, I will go I will go to a a a step lower than just pollen, the flora, and the fauna. The bacteria in the soil that we are all subjected to or or around, that actually has also something to do with what we eat because the cows as they're moving through those bacteria get moved up into the plants. The cows absorb them. So so the place where you live is where your food should come from because it is, like you said, it is that whole information superhighway. Soil to you, to your gut. And all of that is tied together. And and one of the things that we've done with our industrial complex of food and farming that we've got now is we've killed the bacteria in the soil so in such a way that it doesn't translate through the food, and then we've changed the molecular.
Know, we could get into GMOs and all that. That's a different topic, but we've changed that. So it doesn't translate from the soil to the animal that eats it, and then the animal is held away from the soil on a concrete slab inside a protected building with a protected air environment, cooled and heated without sunlight. They don't have that translation of that back soil bacteria to them. And then when it gets to you, they don't have you don't have anything that can translate from the soil to you, so you don't have any connection to the soil. And and I always get back to this is this is proven a lot.
Joel Hollingsworth with, Smoker of the Ranch has done a lot of work on this. The when when a civilization stops to appreciate and care for its soil, that's the end of the civilization.
[01:59:49] David Bennett:
Oh, this you're talking about dirt, the end of civilizations? Yeah. I read that book. That's one of my favorite ones. Yes. And so so you've
[01:59:59] JR Burdick:
you've lost all that connection, and we have broken that up because we haven't maintained that superhighway from the soil to your gut. Mhmm. And that's part of the reason why we have so many of the diseases that we have is because we just haven't got that connection anymore. We've changed all these food things, and we've gotten away from that that basic most basic, parts of our environment. I like to say I I was doing a talk here a few weeks ago, and I brought up everybody's been to a funeral, and they've heard those famous words, you know, from dust to dust, ashes to ashes. You know? Well, in my faith, I believe that we were all created. God bowed down. He made us out of the dirt.
Well, if we were made out of the dirt, we should probably respect the dirt. We should probably have a connection to soil, and it should feed through in our lives because life springs out of soil. But we have made it I was talking years ago to a potato farmer. We were talking about fertile fertility, and this is when I was a commodity guy and was listening to his talk. I was all excited about what he said, and he said, basically, all is I want the soil there for is to hold all my stuff. I don't care what the soil is or anything about it. I just want it to hold my seed, my fertilizer, my pests. I want it to just be a big pot. So that straight.
Yeah. Yep. It's just the it's just the medium that I'm using to grow this in. I don't care anything about. And I thought about that now that I've made this change, and I thought, how shortsighted is that? If he feeds the soil, it feeds all this other stuff. And we get all of that biology. We get all that nutrients. We get all of that that comes up deep within the earth, and it comes through that plant, and it comes to me, and I get the benefit all that nutrient mining that that plant did, and it fills me up. You know? How many times do you go and you eat something? You know? We're all busy. We all get on the road. We have to run through, you know, quick fast food to get something to eat because you're on the way. And after you get done, you either feel sluggish or you're still hungry. You're thinking, I just ate this big hamburger, and I drink that big pop of it, and I'm still hungry. Why? Because your body is not craving calories. It's Mhmm. Craving nutrition.
[02:02:16] David Bennett:
And we don't have any nutrition in any of that food. We just have cows. Yeah. And and that's the thing is, like, for anybody that's listening, it's going, okay. So, you know, I I know what a calorie is, but I don't know what nutrition is. It's just micronutrients and minerals. That's just that's what it is. It's it's you don't have enough calcium. You don't have enough iron. Iron's a big one. Iron deficiency is is huge, especially in women. And if without iron, your hemoglobin doesn't work, and without hemoglobin not working, you're not able to transition as much oxygen as you normally would, which means that your neurons don't fire as well. It ain't rocket science. I mean, by this what I love about biology is, you know, some people will look at it and say, oh, that's just too complicated for me. And I'm like, well, a, brother, you ain't seen nothing yet. And b, it's really not. You can look at it on on whatever levels that you want. And, like, I could I could look at it on on the one of the best levels that I look at biology at is you're either a dirt farmer or you're a soil farmer.
And that means if you're a dirt farmer, you'll say what it is you farm. I farm potatoes. I I farm corn. I'm a I'm I'm a fifth generation wheat, corn, and soy rotation guy, but none of them are soil farmers. Right. Because if they were, then they'd say that. They'd say, I farm soil. Because at that point, it doesn't matter what I plug in. It's gonna grow just fine. I'll be able I'm in anything farmer at that point because the soil is taken care of. The soil's got the microbiology. This and and and how just for somebody who's asking why that's important, these critters, whether they're fungi or bacteria or some of the other smaller critters, emit organic acids that dissolve rock, and some of that rock has iron and aluminum and copper and phosphorus and everything. And that's the amazing thing that people keep saying is, like, oh, we're we're at peak phosphorus. I'm like, no. We're not. No. We're we're we're we're at peak phosphorus as far as where we can find, you know, pure sources to mine it and then spread it. But phosphorus is everywhere. It just gets bound up in the soil so damn quick that it and it gets and it stays that way unless you have critters in the soil, breaking it down with organic acids constantly because it's constantly getting chelated back into a mineral form. And if you don't have that, if you've wiped everything out with glyphosate and then, like, herbicide and a fungicide and anematocyte and a virus side in whatever side, and you have no nutrient cycling, then all you've got is empty calories. And that's what we put into the food, which is why you could eat a huge hamburger and get nothing out of it. It's just it's just nothing.
So Yep. Yeah. That that said, I'd let's it's it's this is Bitcoin, and so it's time to talk about Bitcoin. And that'll be the last piece that we do. Sure. You've got an interesting take on on Bitcoin, and I I I I like hearing this particular take because a lot of people don't they just wanna love something to death, and they don't wanna see any downsides to to to the thing. So what's your what's your overall take on when when you saw it? What did you think? How did you start thinking differently about it, and where are you at with Bitcoin now?
[02:06:12] JR Burdick:
So about so, like, 02/2022 was, like, my spiritual awakening to a lot of things. And, but I have always been interested in economics. And a a quick story, I remember in 1987, October it was October 19, Black Monday, nineteen eighty seven when the stock market fell apart. Mhmm. I remember walking in the house, my dad and I I was still a teenager. I was still home. Dad was combining corn. I was hauling corn, and we were putting it in the silo for feed for cattle. And I walked in the house late that night. My mom was watching the evening news, and, they were talking about the stock market crash. Of course, we didn't have cell phones. Another radio has worked in the tractors. Of course, at 16, I would have been listening to that anyhow. Right.
But and she just looked at me, and she said, this is our great depression. This is the beginning of our great depression. And within about a week, that was kinda over. I mean, there was some ramifications, but life went on. No banks really closed. There was no you know, it just kept going. And I remember saying to my dad, I said, what happened? And he says, well, they just went to the backroom and got more money to fix it. And and that was my first understanding of what fiat money was. And it's really funny because worldwide in that week, we lost $1,700,000,000,000 of of value.
Now our government spends that in a hundred and seventy days. You know? So you're sitting there and you're going, what was a catastrophe back here? Is it now? And you gotta ask yourself why. So, to be very honest with you, I've always been interested in econ house. I've kinda always been a gold bug kinda guy. And when Bitcoin first came out, I was like, yeah. Sounds like a scheme to me. You know? And and and and I was like, I don't understand it. And I I was going through everything with our straight voltage thing when that was starting to get really hot, and I just didn't have the bandwidth to to think about it. Right. But we we got through that, and, I started to pay attention to it, but I didn't buy any. I just was is watching. I was watching it go from 10,000 to 12,000 and just kinda stall out. I thought, man, it's probably done. Then you watch it go to 50,000, and I'm like, oh, this might be for real. You know? So so, I I had been taking so many risks in my life. I was kinda out of risk taking my life. I hear that.
And, but I was I was actually thinking about it, and I've always appreciated the arguments that Bitcoin brought forward about fiat money because they're spot on with all their arguments. So it's actually in the morning, I was reading my Bible. In Isaiah, it talks about chapter one. It says, your silver has become dross. And he was using that as an example of saying, you're cheating the young people. This is one of the things I'm gonna bring judgment on the nation of Israel for is because you have devalued your doubt. It's not pure silvering. And I and that just hit me. That's what Bitcoin has been really screaming.
And then I a couple verses later there in chapter one, it says, I will purge your silver of its dross. And that's God saying through the natural consequences of economy, the fake will be taken away, and the real will be left. And I started looking around for ways to get into real money. I bought a little gold. I bought a little silver, and then I started playing with Bitcoin. So, I don't have a lot of Bitcoin, but I put some in every every two weeks. I've got an automatic draw. I put it in there. And, then as we started on this after a year of getting getting our feet on the ground of getting our milk business going, I started reaching out through Facebook groups to people who were talking about Bitcoin.
And I said, listen. I would love to transact Bitcoin. I think the thing that needs to happen is you want Bitcoin to overtake Fiat. It has to overtake Fiat as a currency, as a mode, and and a medium of of transaction, peer to peer transaction. It can't just be an investment. If you're gonna overtake Fiat, you have to use it. So I started talking to people. To this day, I have never been able to get anybody to buy any milk from me with with Bitcoin. And that has been that's that's that has been an awakening to me. I'm like, I understand everything about it. I mean, I don't understand. I understand the concepts behind it. I still get a little lost on the mining side of things. I'm still trying to figure that out, but I I understand. All of us all of us are there. I don't care who it is you're talking to. There's always some aspect of this that you're like,
[02:11:02] David Bennett:
I can't believe I didn't know that. You just you learn more. It's just the rabbit hole goes on forever. So I at this point, I just assume we nobody really knows what this is. Not yet. And we may never because it it it may evolve into into to have even more appendages than it already does. But with and and I I totally feel you, and and you're certainly not the only one that feels this way. I mean, you you're you're a really good company, in fact, of people that are like, we gotta start being able to use it directly. And we're not talking about buying a a Visa gift card with it and then buying stuff with that. I need to be able to buy the stuff that I end up with at my door Mhmm. With Bitcoin, and I can do that.
I and but then the question becomes, a, am I willing to do that? And, b, is the vendor prepared in a way that can accept it? And you are. Right. But there's not a lot of vendors that are, and this kinda comes back to what I was asking about. What like, I I'd asked you, what can we do to make it easier for people to reach out and and go meet their rancher? Mhmm. It's sort of the same question. It's like, what can all of us do is there anything that you think that we can do to make it easier for other people to look into this? Do you is it an interface deal? Is it a potentially just human greed and they don't wanna get rid of a deal?
The is there something that strikes you as, of all the things of why people aren't buy buying my milk with Bitcoin, this is the one. Do you have one of those? Or Yeah. I I think I do. Okay.
[02:13:01] JR Burdick:
And it's basically the unknown. People especially with milk, I have I have to overcome the unknown or they perceived the perceived or what everybody's telling me is the problem. And so they say to me, oh, raw milk might kill me because I heard about something that happened in 1963, and and I go, yeah. We can debunk that. More people died last year of E coli and salmonella poisoning and lettuce than died of raw milk in the last twenty five years. That's a literal statistic. So you're like, it's it's way safer to drink raw milk than it is to even eat lettuce, and nobody thinks about not eating lettuce. So but it comes to the same thing with with using Bitcoin. People are going like, well, I don't know if this guy does accept it. I don't wanna look like a fool for if I ask or if I if I haven't ever done it before, is he gonna think I'm dumb asking questions?
And we've gotta be able to go out there and say, hey. Let's learn this together. Let's let's go through this process together. It's not that hard. We you you do Venmo. You finally get it figured out. Boom. It's done. It's peer to peer. It's it's the ultimate transaction that you have full power in. And you can say, nobody thinks about when they change a dollar for something. What if I had held this dollar, would it be worth more tomorrow? Mhmm. Nope. Nobody thinks about that. They go, I need I need that I need that beer at the store, so I'm gonna give you $5 for that beer. You know? Mhmm. And nobody think because they're exchanging this for another thing that's got value.
So people have to start to look at we all talk about proof of work. We talk about Bitcoin. And all those things, I am 100% for. But show me that you value my product by giving me something you value, that you have control of. And I think I think that if we can get that mentality to come into Bitcoin and especially, you get those things out there, then they become mainstream. You you know, it's like everything. That that first time is hard, and then it gets easier as you do it more. And and as Bitcoiners, we have to encourage transactions between people. And then the beauty of that is you get to start to say, I am going to change the economy.
I am going to change the direction of where money goes and where services flow from because I'm going to stop giving it to the globalists, and I'm going to start giving it to my local people. And suddenly, the Bitcoin community explodes out of ecommerce. And and that commerce community goes, oh, we can operate outside the system. So I am going to start to look for more people that operate outside the system. And then the thing that every Bitcoiner wants is to see the failure of fiat money or at least expose to the world. What a farce that is. Well, you can't do that if you don't use it, if you don't bring it out to people and say, it's it really is just like money. You use your money to buy milk. I use my money to buy milk. The difference?
I can buy my milk from a guy who I know who's producing good quality milk, and he has taken care of his soil, and it's full flowing through, and it's the ultimate proof of work right from the soil. The soil has proved its work. The cow has proved its work. The dairy farmer has proved its work, and you have proved your work by paying me in bit. And it's all through the whole way. And I think I get excited when I talk about it that way because I have friends that are very anti Bitcoin or, like, you know, they all of the all of the you know, it's a CIA thing, and and it's gonna devalue the world, and it's gonna you know, I get all that. But when I could start to talk about it in terms of peer to peer, that's when I get excited about it. But Right. I gotta get those peers around me, and I gotta get them to start to think about it in terms of not just an investment portfolio, but a utility portfolio that I can use to buy goods and services with, and I can shape the economy. And I have that is the ultimate power. Having it in your wallet, having it on a exchange, that's not the ultimate power. And definitely having it in ETF isn't the ultimate power. But as soon as you get it and you go, hey. I'm gonna go find another Bitcoiner, and we're gonna change money.
And all of a sudden, you are completely outside of the Fiat system. And it's like, oh, that's what I wanted.
[02:17:44] David Bennett:
And and I had I had the good luck of the very first day that I bought Bitcoin. I immediately turned around and bought something from a vendor with Bitcoin, and that was in 2015. And you may know him, Jack Spearko from the Survival Podcast. Yep. Have you been on his show? No. I should send a, do his, guest fill his form fill out because I think he'd like to talk to you. I I really do. And he's got, like, I don't know, 500 times my my audience size or something. But the very first day, because I bought it for two I I like, I remember the day. It was 09/11/2015, and I bought I bought $250 worth. So I got just under 1 Bitcoin out of that.
And I turned around, and I gave him one fifth of that for $50 Yeah. For his for his member service brigade, and it's turned out to be the most expensive subscription I've ever bought in my entire life. And it makes I've subscription I've ever bought in my entire life. And it makes I feel good about it because I like Jack, and I wanted to do well. But I just I don't feel good about myself for being that dumb. But Yeah. But the point being is that I had the luck of being able to buy Bitcoin from Coinbase, throw it almost immediately onto a hardware wallet, and then turn around and give one fifth of that Bitcoin over to to Jack Spear Co in the same day. And that was back in 2015.
So what's running around my head right now is the the question that I asked you about before, it go well, this would be the third time we've touched on it. How do I make it easier for people to get ahold of their rancher? Is almost the same question as how does the rancher get ahold of the people to make it easier for them to use Bitcoin? And all of a sudden, this becomes this becomes almost a meet up worthy event. Yes. It could be held, like, the first Thursday of every month. Come meet your rancher. Ranchers come meet your future customers, and you're all gonna learn how to use Bitcoin. Mhmm. Yeah. It did because we have Bitcoin meetups, and we've we've had successful Bitcoin meetups through the beef initiative where we got ranchers and Bitcoiners hanging out together, which that was back in I can't remember. It was Kerrville, Texas, and I went to the first one.
I can't remember what year it was, but I went there, and I'm hanging out with all like, a lot of the guys that I that I know knew from Bitcoin Twitter at the time Mhmm. And a whole bunch of ranchers that I didn't know. And there was half ranchers and half Bitcoiners, and it was an it was an amazing event be and I don't know why. I I I it was because I guess it's because I saw a bunch of nerds, you know, like, talking to a bunch of guys in in in hats and boots. Mhmm. And you would and and you would have thought they had known each other for years. Mhmm. Because they're all talking about no you know, sovereignty is important.
Self ownership is important. Doing things on a handshake basis is important. Your reputation is like freaking tissue paper, and you could burn it down in seconds, and it takes you forty years to build. And everybody knew the language. Everybody knew all those concepts, and it didn't matter if you were a geek with glasses that programmed in c plus plus or you were you were cutting mutton chops off your cheap Mhmm. You know, out of Colorado. It didn't matter. Y'all were all talking the same language. And now, you know, maybe if we could just get the customers involved Mhmm. And, like, teach each each other how to put a invoice, you know, from Zapprite to be able to take lightning lightning network payments on our websites.
Because I'm a Bitcoiner, like, a self admittedly been one since 2015, and I still have no way on my website to allow people to pay me in Bitcoin because it's not that easy. Right. I don't have a module I can just shove into a web page and say, click this button, and it does everything in the background. Mhmm. I need somebody for that, and I'm not built out of you know, I'd I'm not standing on suitcases of money. Right. So, you know, I you know, it's in this we're I think we a lot of us find ourselves in this weird interstitial space. But in the long run, do you think that this is going to continue to be a problem or or not?
[02:22:36] JR Burdick:
Well, again, it comes back to the, the peep what do the people want? You know, in my business, what I have found is I have to meet a need. If I meet a peep person's need, I have a customer for life, you know, because they're like, hey. So the so if what I need is I need some people who say sovereignty is important to me. Peer to peer relationships are important to me. Knowing where my food comes from is important to me. I can fill all of those needs, you know, but I gotta find that person. So, like, the meetups that you've talked about, I was I was trying to get to one in Kansas City, which is about a two hour drive for me here, but I scheduling just didn't didn't go through right. Because Mhmm. Here's here's the other thing. I milk twice a day.
So I have to be here twice a day to milk. And and and I'm not particularly a young spring chicken anymore, but they all wanna meet at, like, 09:30 at night, go till midnight, you know, and and sit around and and drink energy drinks. And I'm like, give me a beer and a bowl of peanuts, and I'm fine. And, by the way, I gotta go home. And, you know, so so I have to but but that's something I will do. I will make those invoices, and I will make those connections because it's important to me. And things that are important to you, you do. But, again, it's it's getting those people to understand, hey. We're on the same wavelength. We're we're doing all the same things. We both wanna operate outside the system. We both want sovereignty. We both want peer to peer connections.
You just have to be willing to take what I'm selling because it's good for you, and I'm happy to take what you have because it's good for me. Now you can't ship milk, but you do have some pork products. Are are you able to ship that? Yes. I can ship pork products. We are working right now on a flour product that's grown from our own heritage wheats here that's that's a, stone milled type, you know, natural, all you know, no no pesticides, no synthetic fertilizers, and we're gonna be able to ship that. But we're we're in the process. You'll get it. It's a it's a two person show. Me and my wife, we've got so many hours a day. Right. And then and then capital is always the biggest issue. It's like, well Same thing.
You gotta you gotta have you got all these great ideas, but, you know, none of them cost $50. They lost up to every thousand. That's exactly right. We gotta do that. How are we gonna do that? So, so our our milk business but, no, we can't, and that gets back to those archaic laws from 1927. We can't we can't ship across state lines, with our milk products, but we can beef or or, pork. Next summer, we'll have beef because we are raising our bull calves up on grass. So we'll have beef next summer, and, we'll have, we do have some chicken products that we kind of dabbled in, but I'm not a chicken farmer.
And, Yeah. And then then the flower will be coming, hopefully, within the next three weeks.
[02:25:52] David Bennett:
Sweet since you that's right. Because you are doing chicken. I forgot to ask. Do you run your chickens behind your cows a couple of days later to get all the fly larvae out? Yep. Okay. Do do they do do they actually do a good job in getting that manure spread out?
[02:26:10] JR Burdick:
I didn't have enough chickens to really cover the same acres as the cows. But where they were where they were, they did. Yes. And I kept them away from high traffic areas. So, like, the way my system is set up, there's there's kind of a wagon wheel with a drinker in the middle, and then I moved the cattle around. So they stayed away from the the where the heavy traffic was out at the edges of the pasture. Yeah. So so we we only had a 100 broilers just as a trial trial error kind of thing this year. Learned a lot from that, and, we're gonna do it again. So it worked out well? It it worked out okay. It was to be honest with you, I got the wrong breed of chicken.
Because because we were we were kinda coming out of that egg that egg fiasco, and they were like, we the chickens the chickens that I wanted, the Cornish hen crosses, I couldn't get. So I got another chicken, and
[02:27:04] David Bennett:
they don't taste quite as good. Yeah. Yeah. But Well, now now the reason that I'm asking about all this is that do if somebody did want to pay you for something you could ship them, you know, to to say, hey. I'm here. I, like, I I would I would buy your stuff. Do they have to do that? Like, is that an email thing? Because I I I didn't see anything on your website either that suggested I could invoice a Bitcoin. No. I haven't I haven't found a a workable system because
[02:27:35] JR Burdick:
I I found one system that was kinda archaic Uh-huh. To do Bitcoin, but I couldn't do anything else with. Right. So so I didn't so the majority of my customers are still using Fiat, and I was like, I'm not gonna pay for two websites and then Exactly. Keep trying to get people yeah. So so what people can do is is they email me, they email our farm, nursing family farm g mail dot com, and, hey. I wanna buy these things. I wanna use Bitcoin. And then we just go through we go through the process on this on the server or on the on the website, get everything figured out, and then we just then I just say, here's my wallet. You you're you're and we do our, you know, we do our transaction then. Okay. So, it's a little bit more complicated, but it it doesn't I've only done it once. And that time, you know, we were both learning the first time, but it took us about twenty minutes that first time. And now I've got it down.
I think I can get through cut through some of the BS a little bit faster.
[02:28:35] David Bennett:
There there's a couple of, a couple of the I I try to give airtime to vendors that can't afford advertising. So I just started this thing called the Circle p, and there's a couple of vendors that I have. And you'll be happy to know that, like, you can buy soap miner hand you know, hit, tallow soap with Bitcoin directly from his website. Mhmm. And Oshi that makes this really these fantastic chocolate and, like, pecan butter products. He only takes Bitcoin. He won't take fiat. And so it is happening. And that so I I I just wanna make sure that I don't leave you hanging there because there are people that that are out there, and I'm I'll bet you my bottom dollar they'd they'd be willing to help. And, you know, I'll, put your, your information in in all the show in in this show notes and and bring you up in the circle p every once in a while just just to see if we can get somebody to reach out to you and buy one of your products with Bitcoin so that that you know that we do exist. There are people like us that that will definitely buy at Bitcoin.
Yep. But as we close out, because good lord, brother. We've been going for two and a half hours. What what's the where can people first of all, is there anything that you wanna say that we haven't talked about yet? Something you think is important for somebody to know. Okay. Then, what's your website and all the places that people can get in touch with you? Yep. So our website is nourishingfamilyfarm.com.
[02:30:29] JR Burdick:
So it's, it that's we we we made it that name for a reason because we wanna nourish families with our farm. So nourishingfamilyfarm.com. Go on there. I try to do a, blog every once in a while. It's kinda irregular. I I need to do a better job of that. And, then if you sign up, we have a farm membership that gets that's for one year. It's $25. You're part of our private membership association then. In our in my in our exuberance to get going, we didn't study all of the laws at Missouri, so we kinda ran into a roadblock with the food Nazis here at Missouri. And one of our ways around that was to start a PMA. So, like but I, again, I I did it out of an idea of I want people to understand the hurdles of getting your own food that shouldn't be there. So for $25 a year and it's not a requirement because you can get our milk in state for for not that for for for without the private membership association. But if you buy our meat, we ask you sign up for our PMA. So it's $25 for a year.
And the reason I did that is because I bristle so much at the idea of USDA inspected. We so we've got these small lockers here. They they have one day where they'll do USDA inspected processing so that we can do stuff with our meat then and sell them. USDA inspected. I get frustrated with those laws because I'm like, the same facility with the same people with the same equipment is doing it the rest of the week to the same standards. It's not like the other day because they don't, you know, rinse off their hands between doing things. And it's like, why am I paying an extra $200 to kill a hog Uh-huh. And have it USDA inspected?
So I just went the PMA route and said because because the laws say you can't sell to the public Uh-huh. But I can sell to the private. So that's what we did was we changed that, that that model. And, so we have a we have that, and then we can ship our our products to you, our meat products that way. And, our dairy products that are not part of the accepted norm, so like our butter, our cheese curds, our other products we sell in state, we you have to have the PMA to buy those. So so that's that's the only thing that we do a little bit different on our website. And then we've had people say, hey. We you're you're too far away from us. We really support you, but we're gonna buy one of your PMAs just to, you know, give you a $25. And it's like, hey. That's cool. So Yeah. This is throw that out there. I'm not expecting that from anybody, but it's kind of a because there there are people out there that really appreciate there's people pushing the boundaries and and and making making headway. Because somebody's gotta somebody's gotta be the first guy through the wall, and, that's kinda where we're at right now. So, so you can go there, to our website, see what we got.
On Twitter, I'm j r cow farmer is my handle. And, I do a little thing every morning, five days a week from the recall from the parlor pit. Just talking about mostly about stuff in agriculture and, giving you a little insight into what's going on in the world of of of ag. And then, Facebook is our nursing family farm, page as well. And, like everything, I need to do a little more there. But, but it's, there's only so many hours in the day.
[02:34:00] David Bennett:
Yeah. And Twitter is is definitely where I found, found you at that, saw one of those one of those videos there. They are informative. I do recommend everybody go follow you there on Twitter. JR, I can't I can't thank you enough for the amount of time you spent because it like I said, it's I know you're busy. I could tell it's it's fall. You're having to change over the change over the farm, so I can't thank you enough for the amount of time that you spent. This has been Bitcoin, and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Intro: Episode setup and today’s guest
Meet JR Burdick: From commercial dairyman to direct-to-consumer
How the legacy dairy system works: co-ops, processors, and commodities
2022 breaking point: intrusive programs, ESG, and loss of market
Regulatory barriers to selling milk locally and the pivot to change
Rebooting the farm: downsizing, raw milk, premium product strategy
Milk science 101: homogenization, fat globules, and digestibility
Understanding butterfat, whole vs. 2% vs. skim
Scale and land: 98 acres, doing more with less
Learning to market: customer discovery and convenience challenge
Bootstrapping sales: interviews in the dairy aisle and shelf-life insights
The hard realities: waste risk, seasonality, and cash flow dips
Stray voltage saga (Iowa): wind farm era, infrastructure, and farm damage
Electrical havoc: equipment failures, cow health, and a smoking gun
Seven-year court battle: winning the case, losing the farm
Resilience and costs: family toll, justice, and system critique
From food producers to fiat: how money printing warps accountability
Fiat vs. agriculture since 1971: land prices, subsidies, and proof of work
Numbers that bite: pork-to-gold parity then and now
Leverage trap: land as ATM and the road to the 1980s farm crisis
1979-80 shock: Volcker rates, grain embargo, and mass foreclosures
ARMs on the farm: why variable rates wrecked producers
Fence row to fence row: Earl Butz, monocrops, and ecological costs
Can regenerative practices buffer fiat shocks?
Community, peer-to-peer, and mental relief from regen ag
End of the fiat model? Structural limits and who gets the parachute
Tariffs, soybeans, and Argentina: policy whiplash as subsidy by proxy
From subsidies to insurance: the 1996 Farm Bill and ethanol aftershocks
Why the cow herd shrank: ethanol boom, imports, and beef cycles
“Pay to keep heifers?” Rancher backlash and import fears
Price discovery is broken: subsidies, insurance, and futures distortions
Food security warning: consolidation, imports, and fragility
Factory food dreams vs. life’s chaos: why fake meat gets funded
CAFOs, efficiency defined by dollars, and ecological blindness
Redefining efficiency: sun, soil, water—and managing for life
Sameness kills nuance: consolidation of processors and taste
Four packers, foreign ownership, and COVID lessons
Rebuilding trust: meet your farmer and overcoming convenience
A vegan’s journey: raw milk, fat, and feeling better
Food, place, and immunity: soil-to-gut information flow
Dirt vs. soil: nutrients, microbes, and why calories aren’t nutrition
Bitcoin time: why medium-of-exchange matters to food
From gold bug to Bitcoiner: dross, Isaiah, and stacking
The adoption gap: wants usage, not just investment
Make it normal: first-time fear, peer learning, and local commerce
Meetups that matter: connecting ranchers, customers, and Lightning
Meeting real needs: sovereignty, food sources, and timing challenges
What JR can ship: pork now, flour soon, beef next summer
How to pay with Bitcoin today: email, invoice, and wallet
Closing: where to find JR—site, PMA, and daily ‘Parlor Pit’ updates
