ATR: ADM shutters CO2 injections Poultry destroyed in GA, Food Babe re-emerges with Christina Kohler

About this episode

Vance hosts Christina Hudson Kohler of Hudson Egg Farms — American Egg Board member and former NY Farm Bureau Young Farmers president — for a standard Ag Tribes Report news roundup. Topics include ADM's abrupt halt of CO2 injection at its Decatur carbon-capture site after detecting brine movement between geological formations (a rare admission undercutting the "green technology is automatically safe" assumption); Hurricane Helene's devastation of Georgia's poultry industry (170 facilities damaged/destroyed in the nation's top chicken-producing state); the ILA dockworkers' strike, which Kohler notes is fundamentally about resisting automation rather than wages, a stance she finds baffling from an agriculture perspective where automation is universally welcomed; and the resurgence of food-activist momentum as Rep. Thomas Massie amplifies Vani Hari ("the Food Babe"), which both hosts frame as a much harder fight for ag to win than the GMO debate because food-additive toxicology is far more technical and harder to communicate simply. The Peter Thiel Paradox segment produces the episode's most provocative claim: Kohler argues American food may be "too safe," hypothesizing that over-sanitized food and excessive regulation could be degrading gut microbiome health by eliminating beneficial microbial exposure — Vance validates this with the hygiene hypothesis and extends it into a broader critique of regulatory bureaucracy that entrenches outdated rules and stifles honest dialogue about food safety tradeoffs.

“There are institutions and there are people inside of those institutions that for really good reasons are saying, no, no, we need these rules... But what really happens is you can't have a robust dialogue... a lot of the checkoff dollars and the money that's used to promote things also puts restraints on what people can and can't say.”

“Almost half of more the, of the more than 9 billion chickens farmed for meat in the US broiler chickens are raised and slaughtered in this region... just this weekend the governor was saying we've had 170 poultry facilities damaged or totally destroyed.”

“My Peter Teel paradox is I believe that our food here in the United States is actually too safe. And that is why we're seeing issues with gut health, digestion, metabolism. And I just wonder what these food safety regulations are doing to our digestive system.”

Key moments

• ~84%: Kohler's "food is too safe" microbiome hypothesis — a genuinely contrarian claim within agriculture's own pro-safety consensus.
• ~72%: Vance's critique that checkoff-dollar funding structures stifle honest food-safety dialogue within agriculture.
• ~55%: Kohler's genuine confusion at dockworkers opposing automation, contrasted with agriculture's embrace of it.
• ~10%: The ADM CO2 pipeline leak admission, undercutting assumptions that green infrastructure is inherently safe.
• ~45%: The prediction that ag's post-GMO political alliance with the right is eroding as food-additive activism gains libertarian support.