ATR: 70 dead horses, PivotBio's Farm Bill activities, & Pilgrim's Pride settlement; Greg Gunthorp

About this episode

Vance Crowe hosts Greg Gunthorp, a fourth-generation regenerative pastured-pork farmer and processor from northeast Indiana, on this week's Ag Tribes Report. Headlines cover Pivot Bio's reported lobbying to get its nitrogen-fixing seed-coating technology written into the stalled Farm Bill; a $100M Pilgrim's Pride antitrust settlement over underpaying contract chicken farmers (following similar settlements by Tyson, Sanderson, and others), with Gunthorp explaining the "tournament system" that leaves growers owning only "the mortgage, the mortalities and the manure"; and the tragic deaths of 70 rodeo bucking horses from tainted feed contaminated with monensin, an ionophore safe for cattle but lethal to horses even in small doses. In the Bitcoin land price report, Gunthorp shares that good land in LaGrange County, Indiana goes for ~$13,000/acre (~0.23 BTC at the time), and recalls once being offered 200 Bitcoin as a joke at a Denver dinner when it cost $1. His Peter Thiel paradox is a genuinely disagreement-generating claim within the direct-marketing/local-food movement: that small meat processors are kept out of the market primarily by brute economics and economy of scale, not by USDA regulation, since restaurants and wholesale buyers require sanitation standards processors can't hit affordably at small scale regardless of red tape. Vance pushes back sharply. His worthy adversary is fellow hog farmer Wanda Patsche of Minnesota Farm Living, who favors large-scale confinement operations that Gunthorp's regenerative pasture model directly contrasts with.

“We probably have a Wall Street Farm bill... multinational corporations that are lobbying to get their desires into the Farm Bill. I personally believe that we ought to probably get more interest that actually benefit independent family farms.”

“The only thing that they own on the farm is the mortgage, the mortalities and the manure... it's buying a very, very expensive job.”

“It's not regulations that keep most of the small processors out... it's just sheer economics. Economy of scale is real... it just does not work economically at a really small scale compared to the industry.”

Key moments

• early ~5-15%: Pivot Bio Farm Bill lobbying story and debate over whether private companies should shape Farm Bill provisions (institutions, money).
• Pilgrim's Pride $100M antitrust settlement breakdown — 24,354 complainants, chicken farmers own "the mortgage, the mortalities and the manure" (institutions, money).
• middle ~35-45%: 70 rodeo horses killed by monensin-tainted feed; discussion of business survival after an accidental mass poisoning (legacy, trust).
• middle ~50-65%: Peter Thiel paradox debate — economics vs. regulation as the true barrier to small meat processors, with detailed back-and-forth on USDA inspection costs and scale (craft, institutions, money).
• Bitcoin land price report and grandfather's $172/acre land story (legacy, money).