A Retired Monsanto Scientist on Why Organic Food Isn't What You Think and Trade Wars

Doug Sammons [00:00:00] Come on you. Do you think that they never will, will plow up the Serengeti plane? Just because we like to watch elephants and wild bees.

Vance Crowe [00:00:09] This is the Vance Crow podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here this week. I'm doing something I've never done before. I have a guest on that I've had on before. Dr. Doug Salmons, who is a world renowned chemist and a fascinating, interesting guy that has heterodox takes on everything you ask him about. If you went back to that first interview with Doug, you would see a white belt trying to put together a podcast. I had one camera and one microphone that we sat in between the two of us and on my camera, every 29 minutes, I had to lean over and try and hit the button twice to stop it and start it again because it would shut off after 30 minutes of recording. And this was really distracting. And I'm trying to interview one of the world's leading biochemists, and every 29 minutes I have to ask myself, am I gonna get cut off? Is it gonna shut off? And I didn't get the everything outta that interview that I knew was possible to get, because I know how great it is to talk with Dr. Salmons. And I felt like the first time outta the gate was a good interview. I'm proud of it from, for where I was at the time, but it was nowhere near the type of information that would be valuable for you to hear. And so I've been waiting and waiting and waiting to get good enough to have Dr. Salmon's back on the podcast. And something big happened last week, and that is that St. Louis Bank, who is, you've probably heard me talk about them before.

Vance Crowe [00:01:41] I'm on the board of directors for the bank. I've actually interviewed their chief credit officer, their attorney and other board members. St. Louis Bank came to me and said, we love the show. We love how you're featuring people from the St. Louis area. We love how you respect expertise. We love how you dive deep and understand what people are really all about when you give them a long chance to explain themselves. And so they asked me, is there anything we can do to support the podcast so you can do more interviews so that your interviews can be better, so that you can drive forward the type of audience that you're looking to get? And man, I'm, I'm really humbled by that. And, and it's like an experience to have a group of people that you know, are working hard to run their own business to say, we think supporting you supports our community, and it supports the bank itself. So what can we do? And so they sponsored the podcast so that I could make some really serious equipment upgrades. You'll notice I don't have to lean over and start and stop the camera anymore. I also have two camera angles that I can add into the YouTube component. And I've also seriously upgraded both my computer and the software that I use to be able to process the digital files that are going through here. All of this is to say that St. Louis Bank really helped me out. And as a small business that's trying to build and grow and be doing the things that I love doing, getting out and giving public talks, putting on workshops to help people become tangibly better communicators and consulting, getting in the weeds and trying to figure out, Hey, what is your communications problem?

Vance Crowe [00:03:18] And what can we do to help solve it? By St. Louis Bank supporting the podcast, they're helping me to get to my dreams, and I am really grateful for it. So I wanted to make sure that you knew firsthand that they have been a big supporter of me. And if you are a small business and you see a way that banking services, maybe that's helping you with payroll, maybe that's holding your deposits, maybe it's helping you get lines of credit so that way you can make some big improvements in the way that your business operates, then I suggest checking out St. Louis Bank. I am grateful for their support and I hope that you'll support them if you're in the St. Louis community and you're in need of banking services. But I have to say for this podcast, I could not be happier that I was able to give 100% of my attention to Dr. Salmons because now that I have this new equipment, I am taking this all the way. I'm going to try and focus as deeply as I can. And my guest this week had a hell of a lot to say that I did not see coming. He has some really unique opinions on how quickly the rest of the world is going to upgrade their ability to grow commodity crops, rice, wheat, corn, soy. He has some pretty strong feelings about organic that I think are more balanced and more interesting and nuanced than any I've ever heard before. He has some thoughts that are really pretty heterodox about climate change, things I had never considered and now had to actually go and look up to make sure he wasn't pulling my leg about it.

Vance Crowe [00:04:52] And finally, he talks about other staple crops, other crops that we could potentially grow as human beings that are right now weeds out in the world, vegetation and plants that are producing some kind of fruit that we do not even expect or anticipate we could eat, but maybe someday could be a, an important part of the human diet. This was one of those conversations that pushes the very envelope of what I know and what I'm capable of asking. But I had a blast. So I hope you buckle in and love this interview as much as I enjoyed doing it. And if you are one of those people that Doug Salmons has blocked on Twitter, we are still not to the bottom of this. We do not know why there are so many of you that have been blocked on Twitter by Doug, but I did open up the very first question of the podcast with asking Doug, why did you block all these people? So buckle in, enjoy the show, and thank you so much St. Louis Bank for helping me put this together. Dr. Doug Salmons, welcome back to the podcast.

Doug Sammons [00:06:01] Thanks, Vance. It's nice to be here.

Vance Crowe [00:06:03] So last week I was on Twitter just after you had agreed that you had come on, and I was excitedly telling people, and Twitter actually jumped up. There was a little bit of storm that I don't think you could have seen because there was an uproar of people that said, I'd love to know more about this Doug Salmons guy, but I'm blocked by him. And there were like maybe four or five people that all sent me screenshots saying You blocked him at some point.

Doug Sammons [00:06:30] You know, I don't think I have blocked, I block a few people that I followed that just perpetually put up sports and ugly stuff, and I don't, I am not into that. So I just turned it. And so the others that I like that like put their pets up all the time and other stuff, I just put less of this.

Vance Crowe [00:06:55] Well, it, the, the combination of people that put that up there, it led me to believe that there must be something off because it would be like you going out of your way to block people. No,

Doug Sammons [00:07:06] It

Vance Crowe [00:07:06] Doesn't make any sense. I

Doug Sammons [00:07:07] Don't block anybody. I, in fact, I'm not even sure I know how to, but

Vance Crowe [00:07:12] That's what I thought.

Doug Sammons [00:07:13] But, but there are some few people that just had just really weird stuff all the time, not just like once in a while. It's just, it was perpetual and I'm just not interested in that crap. So

Vance Crowe [00:07:27] I mean, I'm, I'm super tight about what I follow on Twitter because to me, when you open up Twitter, you are giving 100% of the most valuable thing that you own your attention. And if somebody's putting up stuff about their political beliefs, their opinions on things, like I just don't have time for it. So I did a couple of things to clean up my Twitter feed that were really helpful. I, have you ever used muted words?

Doug Sammons [00:07:53] I don't know what it is. I've tried that on a couple of 'em.

Vance Crowe [00:07:56] It is fantastic. So I muted a bunch of political terms and then all of those are just knocked off into the waistband. I never see 'em. And it's great. And that means there are some people that have some political opinions that I don't wanna see, but anytime they relate to any of those political topics, they're just gone. And then I also am a big fan of unfollowing people. I I, I, I don't ever mean for it to hurt anybody's feelings, but for me it's like,

Doug Sammons [00:08:22] Yeah, I think I've done that to a couple people, but I'm not really sure to tell you the truth. But I, I, I saw I just put less of this, but I don't know, the only couple, maybe two or three or four people I blocked were just, I mean, obscene or really terrible stuff. I just didn't want, yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:08:43] I mean, I, I used to think

Doug Sammons [00:08:45] That, that's why I'm interested then, that they complained to you that they would like to follow me.

Vance Crowe [00:08:49] These are, these are people that I respect quite a bit, so, so I was surprised

Doug Sammons [00:08:54] It's not them. So, so, so those people, I, I'm not sure

Vance Crowe [00:08:57] I, I get,

Doug Sammons [00:08:59] I get tweets from you or like Randy Kerstetter I follow that are not available. I don't know why they're not available. The just has a gray box that this tweet's not available.

Vance Crowe [00:09:14] Yeah. There's, there's some weirdness to all of these things. And you know, I used to have almost no humility about how difficult it was to learn a new platform. I was like, you just get on there, you play with it, and then you figure it out. But I recently started trying to use Instagram, and it is as though I've stumbled into Japan and I'm trying to figure out how to do physics or something like, none of it works for me the way that I think it should. People are, are fast and loose on what they do. And so for me, the amount of time to learn a new platform has been humbling. I I actually have way more sympathy for people that join a new platform than I ever used to have.

Doug Sammons [00:09:52] I, I think one platform's enough for me and I, and I, it might even even be what I want to do. Okay. So I spend some time on it and try to read the ag stuff, particularly things that are global ag food things and send those on. But a lot of the stuff, I still get half of 'em or somebody's favorite sports team or other, I don't, I don't, I don't care about it

Vance Crowe [00:10:14] At all. Yeah. For me, the check that I have is, did I arrive at this conclusion that I wanna share with people purely because it's my opinion, right. That, you know, and that's what sports is. I, I feel strongly that's the way politics are. So I do my best not to include any of that stuff. Yeah. So you and I met a couple of weeks ago and we had a conversation that has rattled around in my head since we met, and I have tried to explain it to a couple of my friends, and I don't think I'm doing it justice, and it is the waves of technology that have impacted agriculture. And I thought that this was an interesting take that you had on how did we move forward in agriculture, and then where did, where do you think it's going in the future?

Doug Sammons [00:11:02] Well, it's an interesting thing. I mean, as a, a research scientist, you know, the question is what can you do that that they need the most? Right? And so I was trained basically to identify herbicides or to, to, to, to design and create herbicides. And after a few years and realizing I couldn't do that. I mean, I could design inhibitors, but I couldn't make them herbicides a big difference.

Vance Crowe [00:11:32] Meaning that they wouldn't just kill a plant,

Doug Sammons [00:11:34] Right? So then studied natural products, which led me into biotechnology. But trying, you know, as you're in it, the, the goal is just to do what you're told, but it's to see what's next or what should be look you should be looking at next. During that time was basically the end of the, the herbicide discovery program at Monsanto that had been very lucrative for almost 30 years. So how did it die? It died because none of the compounds we could discover, which were scarce, could replace, had a market because glyphosate was, was cannibalizing all of the herbicide markets. And so the reason for that was it cost so much money to create a product that would be on some segment of the market. And then if there was a way for glyphosate to, to be used in that market, well, it was gone overnight. I remember one year when they talked about introducing glyphosate into the burned out markets for wheat in Saskatchewan, you know, and they made so much money just overnight just decided to use it. So, and

Vance Crowe [00:12:43] For people that don't know what that is, the burndown market would be, you want wheat to move into its stage where it starts drying out so that way you can harvest it.

Doug Sammons [00:12:52] Well, that's, that's a different kind of burn down. This was to kill all the weeds before you plant.

Vance Crowe [00:12:56] Oh, okay.

Doug Sammons [00:12:57] Okay. And so glyphosate wasn't specific. It would kill the wheat, but so you spray it before planting and then plant. So they'd been using some other herbicides for that, and glyphosate fit nicely in the market and did a good job. And, you know, just overnight just make a huge amount of money. So what, so then the question becomes obvious. So what does it take to really create a new herbicide? And is there a market? Can it compete with the generics? And so that problem actually exists today. So you have some herbicides that are, have a lot of resistance, but not so much resistance that they've been taken off the market. They still have market segments they're good at and work in. And so it is with glyphosate, glyphosate basically just has a couple flaws. And those flaws happen to be big enough to create a lot of opportunity for the herbicides that got pushed out the last 15 years. And so people are reintroducing combinations. The problem is it costs a lot of money, a lot more money than glyphosate. And so where does that money have to come from? So this starts the argument of transitions of technology from one kind to another. So there are some new herbicide discovery compounds or herbicide discovery co companies that want to create a new glyphosate. Well, do we need a new glyphosate? Okay. Because if you spend a hundred million dollars in 10 years investment to make a compound, and somebody else in the meantime discovers how to kill Palmer amaranth specifically glyphosate's new again,

Vance Crowe [00:14:40] Which is the, which is the weed that's become resistant to a lot of glyphosate or to glyphosate.

Doug Sammons [00:14:46] Right. And creates a lot of problem because it's such a terrible weed. So if that problem is solved a different way, you're, you're just done. There is, there's no,

Vance Crowe [00:14:55] You put in a huge amount of time and money and

Doug Sammons [00:14:57] Right. So, so the, I don't think folks have thought clearly about how to, to really reintroduce chemistry. That's one problem. Second problem is who's gonna pay for it? So if the cost of the chemistry is, is high, then how are the guys gonna buy seed? So when, when glyphosate took over and the price of glyphosate went down, price of weed control went down, farmers could spend more money on seed and other inputs and chemical and, and machinery and so on. And so now we wanna turn the clock back and we want 'em all to pay more for chemistry. Well, the price of corn's not higher. The price of soybeans is not higher, but it will be soon, you say, but it's not the case. So when I started at Monsanto, there was a guy from the USDA came and he gives this lecture about how soybeans were becoming a big product in South America, Brazil in particular Argentina. And, and how fields were being planted that were so big, you couldn't even see the edges from a Cessna airplane. Okay. And so after I visited there later, I could see that it was true. I mean, we drove for six hours on a freeway, 70 miles an hour, never saw farmhouse and saw only soybeans. Okay.

Vance Crowe [00:16:25] Wow.

Doug Sammons [00:16:25] All right. So today Brazil makes about an equivalent amount of soybeans as the US and so we don't have a market control of the market for soybeans. Well, also, where do you think Africa is in the development of modern ag techniques for the production of corn and soybeans and other crops that they need?

Vance Crowe [00:16:49] My my sense is they're pretty far behind.

Doug Sammons [00:16:51] Well, they are, but they're catching up fast. Right. Remember what happened with, with phones, right? They didn't have to put all the telephone wiring in. They just went right to cell phones. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:17:00] I was there right as Kenya was getting cell phones. And it was staggering. You had people that didn't have electricity running to their house, but they were more adept at doing text messages than I was at the time because they, they just leapfrogged over that technology. Right.

Doug Sammons [00:17:15] So, so people forget about the migration from rural areas to the cities happened in the US it happens because life is easier, however terrible it is, than it is out in the, in the woods and or in the desert or wherever those those folks are. So as agriculture becomes modern and big in places that can do that, then those commodity crops will be produced and they won't need imports and they'll be making their own stuff. And that's gonna happen and it's gonna happen all through Africa and it's gonna happen all through southeast Asia and, and then China.

Vance Crowe [00:17:56] You know, it's not very often that I hear somebody making the case that Africa will be able to feed itself. Is that, is that the position you're putting forward?

Doug Sammons [00:18:04] Come on. Do you think that they never will, will plow up the Serengeti plane just because we like to watch elephants and wild bees?

Vance Crowe [00:18:14] No, I mean, I think if they, if they could standardize and consolidate their farms, they do it in an instant, they wouldn't even blink. Those people don't wanna be out there hoeing with the gem bays and it's, it's not something they wanna be doing.

Doug Sammons [00:18:27] That's right. It's not gonna happen. And so, you know, I heard a, the guy who was the CEO of one of the ag companies talk about they sell only generics, but his point was that 600 million people are gonna move to the cities in the next 10 years. And in Africa, the average distance from a village to the the next village is gonna increase to something like 50 or a hundred miles. The point being that all the small towns are gonna become ghost towns as people move to the cities. Oh,

Vance Crowe [00:19:00] That makes complete sense to me.

Doug Sammons [00:19:02] So, so then what he was pushing for was supermarket foods, prepackaged, how we can get people good and healthy, excuse me, food in the cities and the need for that because of the population increase that the cities are gonna see. And I think that that's what's happened historically, and there's no reason to doubt that it won't continue to happen. And meanwhile, agricultural will be taken over by large conglomerate farmers and they will grow large areas and it'll be efficiently done and there won't be a need for imports like there has been. And the, the food will be available in those regions.

Vance Crowe [00:19:44] How dramatically will that reshape the US agriculture market since so much of our GDP is based on agricultural exports?

Doug Sammons [00:19:52] Well, that's right. So let's just make sure we understand that. In, in, in China, so for my last fellow presentation, I had demonstrated that while the US since 1970 had gone from 30 or 40 metric tons of corn to 400, China had gone from 30 or 40 metric tons of vegetables to 450. So the average caloric intake in China, you know, if you go to the, that website or the Swedish guy

Vance Crowe [00:20:27] Gapminder,

Doug Sammons [00:20:28] You know, he's got the, the numbers there for you to look at. The calorie intake is now over, you know, starvation. I mean, China's major goal is to feed their people and they're gonna do it one way or the another. They are not gonna be limited by what other countries wanna give them. So when we put a, an export tariff on soybeans, I mean, where are they gonna get 'em? They're gonna get 'em someplace else. So they're, they're setting up to farm in Africa. They signed a big contract with Ukraine to bring in corn. They're not, they're not gonna wait for us to decide what whim we have to export to them and so will the other countries. So us ag you know, especially after this last series of tariffs, I think has really jeopardized our position. 'cause once the Chinese learn how to grow their own soybeans, where else they can get corn? They all need us.

Vance Crowe [00:21:23] I think it's always been, my intuition is that we have this land, we have soil that has, you know, really good nutrients and it's flat and we have an excellent transportation system. So our comparative advantage with growing crops with so much higher that it would always keep us in the game. But you're saying that the board is going to change so dramatically in places like Africa where they can grow themselves. You could, you could make a lot more green happen on that continent or China being able to turn from not just vegetables, but doing commodity crops, corn and soy. You think, you think how, how quickly does this change take place?

Doug Sammons [00:22:05] Well, Brazil did it in 25, 30 years to, to come up to speed to the US and soybeans. And if you go to Brazil, the whole north of the Brazil hasn't changed much. It's the southern half of Brazil that's doing all this for soybeans in Argentina. So I don't know, I don't, I I think that there's fertile ground in all these continents that hasn't been put to that use at that scale and that efficiency and that it, and that it should be and it will be. So, so then what, what will farmers grow in the Midwest if they can't export soybeans and corn? Then what? And so I, I think you know that, that without saying that it'll go away, I would just say that the commodity price is not going to ha skyrocket. Okay? It is gonna stay low. And so if it stays low and that means just barely enough, then where are you gonna put your money? As a farmer, you're gonna put it, you know, if, if the weeds are killing you taking your crop, you can't do that. The fungicides, if they kill all your crop, you lose everything overnight. Same way with insect, insect damage. So you have to take care of those things. So there's, you know, it's divided up into inputs. So there's the fertilizer and, and the chemistry for the nutrient efficiency.

Doug Sammons [00:23:36] There's the chemistry for pest control, there's the seed price and there's the machine price

Vance Crowe [00:23:42] And the labor price.

Doug Sammons [00:23:44] Well, and so the labor price has gone way, way, way down because of the efficiency of the machines,

Vance Crowe [00:23:49] Right?

Doug Sammons [00:23:50] So which of those are you gonna bring back? So the farmer's margin is already really tight, so he doesn't want to spend more money to control weeds. So if, if the newest self-propelled weeding machine cultivator can be done without a driver, 'cause it's all satellite camera detection and it can do a good job, a good enough job to control the weeds, can it do it at a price that's competitive with the chemistry? Some people see it as a win-win, it's more, it might be more reliable, maybe not if you have a wet field and it's muddy and it gets stuck, but it would be less chemistry in the system. So that might be from some people's point of view, a good thing.

Vance Crowe [00:24:45] And are you imagining this mechanized weeding system to be pulled behind by a giant tractor? Or are they gonna be No,

Doug Sammons [00:24:51] They'll little

Vance Crowe [00:24:52] Drones, they'll self-propelled. Self-propelled.

Doug Sammons [00:24:54] Now the drone thing, I think that's bogus. I think, I think there's a lot of misunderstanding. It's cool. Technology's kind of neat, it's kind of flashy pi pretty pictures. But my, my son-in-law has some of these drones and they do those things and you know, he does jobs and he tells me that, you know, you can only put that drone up for a certain amount of time, half an hour, hour max, and then you have to change batteries. And so then the conversation was about, well you have to recharge the battery or you have to have another one. Well, so you just do that, right. Well, you can only use the battery so many times. How much are they like 200 bucks?

Vance Crowe [00:25:39] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I totally see your point. And I think why fight gravity? You don't need a flying tractor. You, what you need is something that is close to the ground that's gonna be able to both pick up weeds, detect fungus, and hopefully be able to help with insects in

Doug Sammons [00:25:55] Some way down and do spot treatments of chemistry and fertilizer and stuff. So one machine can do all these things if it can move, if the ground's not too muddy and it can't find a way to get through, get everywhere, but

Vance Crowe [00:26:10] You have that problem regardless of,

Doug Sammons [00:26:12] Well, and maybe we'll stop farming the low spots and put those into something else that doesn't need it. So there are lots of workarounds for it. But the question is, will it ever be cheap enough to replace the price of chemistry or even decrease the price so the farmers can have put, put the money on more fertilizer or more. So, so keep in mind the, the prospects for increasing for unit activity or unit fertility is production is pretty good. The record for soybean production is over 170 bushels per acre. The average in the US is in the around 40 bushels per acre. So there's a lot of room for improvement. So where is that improvement? Is it just in fertilizer soil tilt or is it in some of it's in genetics, some of it's in weather and so on. For corn it's upwards to 540 bushels per acre. And, and so what's interesting about that, I studied that some for a lecture last year and some few guys, two or three guys were over 500. Another group of guys, 4, 5, 10 were four 30. So the question was what was the difference? That a hundred bushel difference, what was that difference? And then after those 10 or 15 guys is another group of hundreds of guys at 2 30, 2 50, 2 70. So what that says is that a very high efficiency farmer with does everything right, can get to 300.

Doug Sammons [00:27:53] Okay. And into that range, you gotta do something special to get over 400 and you have to have everything right at five. So, so why not take it to 300 when the country average is already 170?

Vance Crowe [00:28:10] It'd be a huge bump if you just double Yeah, that's right.

Doug Sammons [00:28:12] Yeah. Right, right, right. So that's not necessarily more space or anything. It's, it's, it's there. So that's the upside. So what, what are the, which of these tools is going to get us to that upside? Well, the pri the price for the is not the driver. I mean, it's still just a commodity. So, and the, and the storage bins are still on the full side, so we don't need twice as much. If all the guys went out and made 300 bushels, we wouldn't know what to do with it and the price would crash. Right. So I don't know, as, as technology waves of technology go forward, what the rest of the world is doing is going to impact our overall commodity price and our opportunity and then our own improvements and our own competition and efficiency for production are gonna affect the number of farmers that are there.

Vance Crowe [00:29:13] You are saying something that I would imagine if I were a farmer toughing it out right now, imagining that we're gonna get to six, seven, $8 corn, that that's really taking the wind outta their sails at this point, right? Well,

Doug Sammons [00:29:27] I hope they get all of it that can get okay. Personally, I think they work way too hard for too little. But you know, when there's a surplus, it's a commodity market, okay? This is not a specialty market and it goes like commodity markets and they're very predictable. And so if there's excess, then the price goes down.

Vance Crowe [00:29:50] So what do you think of the farmer that is struggling to, to make, to make money in a commodity based system that now decides one way that I can increase the value of my land, or at least the product coming off my land, is to get it certified organic and start selling organic?

Doug Sammons [00:30:08] Well, I I think there's a definitely an organic niche for food and it's a, it's 'cause people are willing to pay more money. And so it's a, it's an obvious market trend to do it. So if it's a better way to make money for the farm, then they should consider what they need to do to do it. I'm in favor of organic farmers who do it right and, and take on the challenge and or doing what's necessary to do it. The problem that I have are that some of the guys say, well, our organic food is healthier, it's not healthier. And in fact there could be evidence that it's less healthy because of the bacterial and fungal infections and the toxins they have not to speak of the organic fertilizers, manure and stuff contaminate with the bacteria and system. So if it's not washed and it's not clean, it could spawn more problems. So the healthier thing is a problem for me. It's, it's good food and if it's done right, it should be in the market and it's, it's a good thing that they get paid more for it. But the fact is less drugs, less pesticide in it. That's not true either. There are a number of compounds that organic gu of okay to use that are terribly toxic materials because they're natural, they're allowed to use them. And some of them, like copper sulfate are terribly toxic to the environment and they're allowed to use.

Doug Sammons [00:31:43] So the idea that that there's no pesticides or no chemical control whatsoever is wrong too. So it's a lie. And so I disagree with that, you know, not that they, that they need to do it, just that they assert, you know, in their advertising that it's safe and clean. So it's, I don't have a problem with them doing the things they need to do to have a good crop. I have a problem with the, the misguided definition of it. What it is when it's not that

Vance Crowe [00:32:17] My biggest problem with it is, is a matter of integrity and I don't see a way around it. And that is one of the big reasons that retailers can charge more for it, is that people have been made to feel like the organic is either pesticide free or it's somehow, like you said, healthier, more nutritional. And so the people that are making more money off of that are making more money as a result of marketing that has been done to people that now become afraid of the traditional food or the conventionally grown food. And, and also like by, by taking those margins, by making more money, you're giving up part of your margins to a marketing campaign that continues that cycle. And you could say, well, I'm not doing that, but there's no other situation that we sit and let people say, you can profit off of somebody else tell telling lies about, about your thing and still say, that's okay. I, I'm not facing losing my farm. I don't have any of those pressures on me. But when I see it, it's hard for me to square that. I, I really struggle with saying that that's not a matter of integrity.

Doug Sammons [00:33:26] Well, I don't know. And and so then there's the third part, and that's the labor. So you can only spend so much money to produce these crops, and if you're not gonna use chemistry to control the, the diseases and the insects and the weeds, then you have to use fingers. And my daughter went to live on an organic farm. Did

Vance Crowe [00:33:49] She really?

Doug Sammons [00:33:49] And you know, she worked for three months. She lived in a barn over a chicken coop. They had an outside latrine and an outside shower. Okay? So yes, the food was produced because they went through it and they picked everything and honed everything and did all the work by hand for like $9 an hour. And they worked ferociously long hours, dragged it all into Chevy Chase farmer's market and sold it for $5 a pound for tomatoes making thousands of dollars for the farmer. So who could sustain that? Well he figured out a way to sustain it by inviting college students to, to experience the organic farm system. So students were, you know, perpetually signing up to come there to work for a month to find out what it was like. Okay. So he was, he had an itinerant group that were dedicated to his cause that he could pay a substandard labor to who were willing to live in substandard living conditions to provide a product that he was gonna make money on Now. So where did the integrity go there now? And so I complained to my daughter that this, this wasn't sustainable, that the workers' lives were, were being taken advantage of. And she said, well, there was a farmer next door who tried to build a dormitory and so forth for his workers to live in, but he went bankrupt because he couldn't, couldn't afford to, to provide those facilities.

Doug Sammons [00:35:29] So everywhere in this organic market, if you're not gonna use modern chemical ag, then, then where, what are you using instead? You could use plastic so that that's a good alternative, but it's not so good for the environment. So there's kind of a contradiction there,

Vance Crowe [00:35:48] Meaning that you cover over all of the ground that isn't where the plant is coming up, that's got the crop and then the plant, the weeds underneath just can't grow.

Doug Sammons [00:35:56] You could use mulch. So what happens to the mulch and why do you replace it? Well, because it's, it's mineralized to CO2. So we're all trying to conserve CO2. So you can shade out the weeds by putting down mulch, but what about the other diseases? Fungal, fungal diseases and insects. They have to be picked off, you know, or something. So I, I just think it's a little disingenuous that to to, for an organic farmer, even if he's doing it right, you know, to the margins, you know, I guess the large scale guys who are trying to do it right have figured out how to manage the labor and the growing conditions so that they can make a profit at the higher price and that, and that should be good if they can. But I'm, I'm afraid there's too much slave labor or worse and too much

Vance Crowe [00:36:50] Worse than slave labor.

Doug Sammons [00:36:52] I think people who are, who can't get free of it, you know? So this is your only option and you have to work hard and you get some meager amount of money and you can't, not even enough to get away from it, you know?

Vance Crowe [00:37:06] Yeah. I one time had a chance to go down to Yuma, Arizona, where that's right on the border and, and about 80% of the salad vegetables that we eat in the United States from February through, I think April or May comes from that area. And I saw ev in the morning, we went to the border crossing where they have Mexican citizens come across the border with papers and then they go to their work sites and they work. And I was like, this would be terrible. That would be really awful work. And I think it would be, it would be really tough, but we got to talk with the workers there and they're like, this is so much better to have your papers and be able to come across the border and work here is a hundred times better than working in a farm in Mexico.

Doug Sammons [00:37:49] Well, that's right. And so, so it seems like a good thing, but it's still not fair. I mean, they should still pay a fair wage, not a Mexican wage that's just lying and cheating and stealing in a different way. It's someone else's expense and those people work terribly hard. I, yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:38:07] Bend over cutting lettuce was just an, an insane thing.

Doug Sammons [00:38:11] I don't think most of Americans could understand even what it's like to work one day as a migrant worker.

Vance Crowe [00:38:17] I think an hour would like, and that that's not me being hyperbolic when I was watching them bend over and cut the lettuce, it, it struck me that just the very act of doing that would be harder than any CrossFit workout that most people do. Like that's no joke.

Doug Sammons [00:38:34] Well, and, and so they work very, very hard. And so you're right. And so they, it's worse in northern Mexico where farms are growing organic foods that they ship to California for a high price and the workers are treated worse. So, so it's hard for me to, to come to terms with that. I feel, I feel I wanna be supportive. I go to the grocery store for this weekend, I bought a bunch of salad, mixed green salad says organic, so it's probably produced in a large scale greenhouse, like highly controlled condition, probably highly mechanized, washed several times and then cleaned up and packaged all automatically. So somebody has made a huge investment in equipment to provide that, I suspect. And, and that's just a, a miracle of ag the way they do that, you know. But if those greenhouses get a, get some kind of a, a fungus infection and they can lose a, a lot of the crop pretty quickly, you know, the whole process of sterilizing it and it and, and maintaining it again becomes extremely difficult.

Vance Crowe [00:39:54] What is your prediction on, you know, there's been this big movement towards in-house or greenhouses and, and all sorts of greens being built in warehouses in Brooklyn and this kind of movement indoors,

Doug Sammons [00:40:07] It costs a lot of money. I mean, these growing conditions green, the cost of running a greenhouse is not cheap. So you say, well you use solar energy. Well that's all right on a hot day, but what about in the wintertime? It takes, it can be done, but it takes a, a significant amount of technology to harness that energy and condense it to use for those growing conditions. Now you can grow cold weather vegetables for sure, and so you don't have to have high temperatures, but you still have to worry about all the disease issues. I mean, one of the problems that people have in the field in India right now, they're burning the wheat fields off because burning the stubble is a major way of controlling the fungal diseases for the next crop. If you don't, you just leave the stubble there and plant into it, then your chances of losing your crop to disease are very good. So you need to spray a fungicide if you don't. So you can't, you can't have it both ways. If you're gonna grow anything over and over and over again in the same space, it's eventually gonna get infected and then get, keep those infections out is very hard to do.

Vance Crowe [00:41:19] So in your, in Doug's future world, you are not imagining that most of our food will be produced in, in warehouses and, and giant greenhouses just outside of the city?

Doug Sammons [00:41:30] I don't think so. I think that co I mean, there's people, those places are productive because they found a market niche or a way to be competitive price wise. Okay. As people solve other problems, how to prevent disease and grow crops in the field or in other parts of the world and transportation becomes a limiting price, then that'll be harder for them to compete. So I, I I think that not all the problems the NGA have been solved. They certainly are lots of problems to solve and some of them are these diseases and as people get a better feel for how to control them in the same area, in the same over and over and over again, then I think that'll be a big giant step forward.

Vance Crowe [00:42:17] You know, when you talk about diseases for plants, I think most people don't have a sense for it. I now can look back with a sense of embarrassment of right before I started working for Monsanto, I went up to visit my brother who keeps cows. He, he raises grass fed cattle and next to a corn field. And I was looking at some of the corn and was like, oh, that doesn't look very good. And he's like, oh yeah, it's sick. And I i it had never crossed my mind that plants could get sick or have some sort of disease. So for anybody to have a strong sense of like, what is the actual danger of a rust coming through and, and annihilating crops, it's, it's, it's not even on their radar. They don't know to be afraid of it. How, how, how real is that as

Doug Sammons [00:43:01] Well? It's real. I mean, and the biggest mo most recent example, not that there are my or others I'm not aware of, is the, the failure of the wheat crop in Russia. And I think it was 2012, there was a huge area where wheat was destroyed by disease and no harvest. So it created a change in the markets for the price of wheat and rice and is thought to be one of the major implicating factors for the Arab Spring revolution. The people fighting tooth and nail in the markets in the, in northern Africa and Asia because of the price of rice changed by a penny. Okay? There are a billion people who are dependent on that, on the supply of some of these grains. And when there's a, a major change, it affects a huge number of people. So when, when we get ourselves limited to corn, soy, wheat, rice as the major grains, and something major happens to one of them, like god forbid the southern corn blight in the, in the United States in the seventies would just wiped out the corn.

Vance Crowe [00:44:19] What is a corn blight? Describe it for people that

Doug Sammons [00:44:22] Don't. It's a, it's a disease that is very contagious and is easily moved and, and kills them. So they plants desiccate and and die prematurely. So diseases like that, they, I mean the potato famine is famous, right? I mean, potatoes were a new world crop. They were brought to to Europe and the, the farmers and, and Ireland and, and the UK grow potatoes to live on, which wasn't, it was a sole source. Food wasn't a great thing for them, but had a market they could grow 'em that grew. Well then they got far Tora and they, and then they late blight and they died

Vance Crowe [00:45:06] Wasn't one of the big challenges there. So the potato originates in Peru, there's a huge amount of genetic diversity there of all these different types of potatoes. They could be purple or orange or all kinds of things.

Doug Sammons [00:45:17] I've seen them,

Vance Crowe [00:45:18] But the potatoes that were in Ireland were the one particular type of potato.

Doug Sammons [00:45:23] Well that's one argument. But, but, but the reality

Vance Crowe [00:45:26] Is, but extend it out for somebody that hasn't heard that, that this would be one type of potato that you've made clones of thousands, hundreds of thousands of clones. Well that's, and then they were vulnerable to a, to a disease.

Doug Sammons [00:45:36] Yeah, that's right. And so that same problem, it is what caused the corn blight and the southern yellow corn blight, I think it was called. But, and, and other famines that occurred were rust is was when you have too much one gen set of genetics either from cloning or something. So that's right. And so there are some breeding strategies around that, and guys are working furiously to do that around the world and making re rust resistant r wheat and so on. So yeah, people are, that's an active area of research in agriculture 'cause of that problem. That's right. But the consequences are still there when they happen and they can be biblical scale famines. And, and so when we limit the total number of crops we grow that we depend on, on a large scale, then we be, I think we, we are at more at risk of a, of a, a major famine.

Vance Crowe [00:46:38] Can you imagine a world where there's a different commodity other than soy, corn, rice and wheat?

Doug Sammons [00:46:44] Well, I think, yeah, I do. And I think that that quinoa, you know, which is a crop from South America should be a commodity down there. And so if some other grain sorghum fails in the United States, well it's not a big deal because there's surplus quinoa from South America. So I think, I think that every country should be developed agriculturally to maximize production of the crops that grow well in their geographies that their cultures have adopted and are used to. And in this way, fewer people will be at risk if there's a failure of any particular one segment.

Vance Crowe [00:47:26] I was at a, speaking of quinoa, I was at this gigantic baking conference in Las Vegas a few months ago, and there were some guys from Canada that were saying, we are the same latitude away from the sun, I think that Bolivia is, and therefore we figured out the type of strain of quinoa. And so they're, they're going for it. They're trying to start raising quinoa in, in Canada,

Doug Sammons [00:47:52] Which, well, it's a combination of latitude and altitude. And so there are other places that are different latitudes but have higher altitudes that could do it. So that's, that's just, there's two variables there.

Vance Crowe [00:48:08] And you were describing the big problems that you think agriculture has to face. So we talked about blight and, and types of diseases. What are the other big problems?

Doug Sammons [00:48:19] Storage. I mean, if you go into Africa today, into Congo or one of the West African countries that desperately needs, you know, a, a vibrant corn crop and you grow a hundred bushel corn, which is still not max 'cause their average is about 30 today.

Vance Crowe [00:48:40] Oh man,

Doug Sammons [00:48:40] Okay. They don't have the infrastructure to deal with it. Okay? It, the insects, storage insects will decimate it. They don't have silos or bins to put it in. They don't have trucks to haul it away to sell it. There's not a market waiting to buy it. The whole infrastructure of the production is not there. So overnight successes in, in any of these areas would be a difficult problem at first. But as soon as there is a surplus, then there's lots of jobs and opportunities for lots of people to create a a a a business, a large business,

Vance Crowe [00:49:26] It's gotta be a function of more than just a lack of capital, right? People wanna build grain elevators there or ways to dry it, but it's gotta be that they have trouble with their government and infrastructure roads to get, get places, get to get the grain where they've gotta get it to go. And

Doug Sammons [00:49:42] Well, you know, there's always the greedy person argument that someone, these people are suppressed because somebody else is being greedy. But every, all of those people want the very best for themselves and their families. And if they can take a little loan and they can work harder and make it work, they will. And the guy who's e even trying to is a tick on their back, makes more money. So, so it's not like the buck has to stop any particular place, it's just make, it's make bucks. So I think that those folks get that and, and the ones that are hardworking will do it and the ones that aren't will go to the city and the ones that stay will be bigger farmers. So I, I think it'll go in the natural way that, that people do it have become successful. Hard work usually wears wind out

Vance Crowe [00:50:36] Now to changing subjects. But if you, if we're talking about the continent of Africa and how much solar power hits that, there was a time when people were talking about the ability to grow a form of petroleum using something like an algae where, where you would have algae and these literally thin vats and they would be hit with enough sunlight that they would produce an oil that you could then turn into something that you could make a car, you know, an internal combustion engine. What, what happened with that? Why didn't that work?

Doug Sammons [00:51:06] I don't know. I, I think in the end all these ideas are just not very well thought out. I think first of all, I believe that the petroleum products from the earth are god's, the universe gift to the earth. And I, I don't understand why people hate it so much. What they should hate is that gasoline is, is burns at only 22% efficiency. Okay? That's worth hating. We should be getting 85, 90% of the efficiency out of that burning. Okay? And so it is with all the petroleum products, they're a gift and we waste it and at, at the being simple about it's easy to throw away and it's not recycled or it's not reused, it's just awful to grow something to replace that is ludicrous. We should be growing food to feed ourselves and clothe ourselves and, and do those things and find better ways to capture energy from the sun to replace the petroleum products. You know, think about it, you know, I saw driving in here that neighbors have all put their leaves in the gutter. There was a time when people would burn those. So, so what happens when you burn a trees, leaves you burn some small percentage of the sun's energy that they captured that year.

Doug Sammons [00:52:45] And this, the carbon that was captured and made into a leaf is released back. So it was there, it was taken and it's back. So it's a cycle. The heat is the heat that would've been from the sun, but was made into chemical energy. So it's all equal. So that's a balanced

Vance Crowe [00:53:04] Equation. I've never thought about it like that.

Doug Sammons [00:53:06] All right, so what happens if you burn the tree, the wood, well wait a minute. That's 50 years worth of sun energy. So that was stored like a, like a battery and now you've shorted the battery out and you've released all that heat that that tree captured from the sun as chemical energy for over 50 years. So in a few minutes, all that energy is released. Now that's not quite in the equation. The CO2 was taken from the atmosphere, alright? And it goes back, but the heat was, was taken out of the system and stored then

Vance Crowe [00:53:46] Dump over a long period of time, then released immediately

Doug Sammons [00:53:49] Same. And so then how much energy is there in a, a chunk of coal? I mean, millions a years ago the energy was saved and stored. The carbon was there originally, and the carbons goes back, but, but the heat is sun energy from time a long time ago and now it's into the system. So you could, you could get worried that there's way too much heat being dumped into the system, but you have to keep in mind that enough sunlight falls on the earth to be equal to all of man's industry in a year. So sunlight for an hour is equal to all of man's industry globally for a year. Okay.

Vance Crowe [00:54:46] Wow.

Doug Sammons [00:54:47] So what's wrong with that sun energy? Well, it's just too dilute. We don't know. We're not very good at concentrating it and using it for our purpose or we're not willing to. So, so the, the amount of energy we release from ancient stored energy, I'm not sure how it fits into the equation, but certainly if you have a terrarium and the earth is a terrarium, it's in a vacuum sealed jar, the heat can't get away unless it's by light. Okay. And, and so what does it do? Your, your terrarium, if you close the lid gets water all over it, right? And so and so the water cycle runs faster and that changes the way the heat is moved in the system.

Vance Crowe [00:55:38] So how concerned are you about the, you know, the, this seems to go to the obvious place of global warming or climate change. Is that something that keeps you up at night as far as concerns?

Doug Sammons [00:55:49] No. I mean, okay, so the earth has been warmer and recently, so the, the be best evidence for this are these dehydrated trees on the above the tree line in Glacier National Park. So you go there, you look it up and say, you know, dead trees and glacier on the ridges, 2000 feet above the tree line are dead trees. So how did they get there? Well, they carbonated them 700 8800 years ago. These trees were growing there,

Vance Crowe [00:56:27] That's not that long ago.

Doug Sammons [00:56:29] And the climate changed and they died. Now the what happened to the trees in between? Well, they rotted, but the ones up on the top of the ridge, it's too dry 'cause of the wind. And so the fungi weren't able to destroy them. So as little as 800 years ago, it was substantially warmer than it is now. Okay. So you can look up all the different degrees and so forth and you can look up this notion about tree lines and different altitudes around the world, but it's true. So, so the question isn't that the world is warming, it certainly seems to be warmer. People are measuring it as warmer and we don't really know what the cause is. I'm not sure that we should take all the credit. I mean, geo, physically the planet, its volcanic eruptions and all the other things that go on affect the earth's temperature. So I'm not sure we should take too much credit, but, but what we need to do is adapt and we're pretty good at that and we should be focusing our energy on that. And one of the adaptions that we haven't taken on is the pollution that we've caused to the larger part of the earth. So the, all the trash that's been dumped in the oceans and all the erosion, you know, all of those things are things we should be focused on fixing. And I think we'll, we'll take care of ourselves, be be all right.

Doug Sammons [00:58:04] There'll be more severe weather, we'll have to adapt to build our houses differently instead of out of, of drywall. We may have to use something sturdier, but

Vance Crowe [00:58:17] Wow, that's the first time I've heard somebody say that, that one of the, one of the solutions to going forward is to build your house outta something st sturdier than

Doug Sammons [00:58:24] Drywall. Well, in Florida they do, I mean, they build cinder block houses block and they have hurricane tied down roofs

Vance Crowe [00:58:31] And they survive 'em just fine when they do it

Doug Sammons [00:58:33] Right. And so the terrible, terrible hurricane in The Bahamas devastated everything. But if you look at the video very, very closely, you see selected houses that are fine. Well, you know, I suppose there were some wealthy people there that had just put more energy and effort into building a sturdy house and that survived it.

Vance Crowe [00:58:56] Yeah, there's a huge difference between the houses built in the late seventies and, and the early eighties. And there must have been one hell of a hurricane that went through because the ones now built eighties and beyond. They're pretty solid when you go down there after a hurricane, right?

Doug Sammons [00:59:11] So I think, you know, this is a combination of economics and people's ability to do what they can do, to have what they want and what's possible. So I I I think a lot of that can be worked out and, and for the better, but in the meantime there'll be some suffering.

Vance Crowe [00:59:32] Speaking about in the meantime, you know, when you and I last saw each other, you were still getting a little bit used to retirement, but now you've been in it for six more months than, than when I saw you before. What are you doing with your time? How, how does an agile mind like yours keep occupied?

Doug Sammons [00:59:49] I don't know. I do review a few papers and, and I enjoy that. This weekend I was fishing and I don't think I've learned anything about fishing I mean, how can you go fish all day long for two days and catch one fish?

Vance Crowe [01:00:05] You better enjoy your company.

Doug Sammons [01:00:06] So we talk about all this high technology and I can't figure out what it takes to get a fish to, and I have spent quite a lot of money on trying to figure that out. So out the weekend before I was taking a woodworking class on learn using a lathe, and I enjoyed my woodworking classes and then with a family in the garden and taking care of some aged parents.

Vance Crowe [01:00:32] So you, you're doing woodworking. Was that a skill you had before you ge were you retired?

Doug Sammons [01:00:38] It's something I've always wanted to do, so I've been, seems

Vance Crowe [01:00:41] Like a good old man kinda get into the shop and get away. Wow.

Doug Sammons [01:00:45] I re, I remodeled. I mean my dad and I built a house, like the stone house you have next door

Vance Crowe [01:00:50] We

Doug Sammons [01:00:50] Built when I was a kid and I remodeled a, an old farmhouse and I've built my current house with a contractor. So I'm, I can do those kind of things, but making fine furniture is a little bit, takes a little bit more patience and skill. So I'm working on that. It's kind of a meditation actually.

Vance Crowe [01:01:13] Yeah.

Doug Sammons [01:01:14] To do those things that correctly. And it's, it's good for my mental health I think. But it's also challenging, especially if your eye starting to not be quite as well, it's hard to see,

Vance Crowe [01:01:30] I talk about this quite a bit on the podcast is this concept of the flow state, which is right when you're on the edge between what you're capable of and just taking a small step further into what you're, you're really pushing the boundaries of what you're capable of. And it's in that moment, that time kind of, you know, floats away. You, you kind of forget where you're at and what you're doing because you're so focused on it that, that you, you get into a flow state. Would you say that is woodworking for you?

Doug Sammons [01:02:02] Well that's was true for a lot of things that I did. I mean when I, my wife complains that, that men just get too focused. That's why they're so successful at

Vance Crowe [01:02:10] Things. That's,

Doug Sammons [01:02:12] You get

Vance Crowe [01:02:12] Too focused. I don't think that's everybody's problem.

Doug Sammons [01:02:15] But I think, yeah, when I'm doing something I enjoy like that time disappears. But, you know, learning a new skill is a rollercoaster thing. You practice, you know what's supposed to happen and you can't do it. And you practice more tenaciously and you see some minor improvements and then all of a sudden you do it and it's like, ah, I can do it. So then you go to do it again and you can't do it. So it's very frustrating because to be able to have the high level of skill continuously, reliably is the, the, the measure of a real, real skillful person. I think,

Vance Crowe [01:02:57] Well you and I have talked about this before 'cause you did judo, but I'm just learning juujitsu and you'll have this experience where you go in and you're able to land a move 5, 6, 7 times on the guys and you come home and you're so excited and so you go back to another class. 'cause you think, well why not? It's so fun. I can just land all these moves and you can't land a single thing. And it is as though you were there on day one. Right. And, and it, it really does, the more that you are able to be humble about the skills that you actually possess, the less that you have to go endure the suffering of being humbled. And I think that that's something that you don't get just by going to school or just by growing up. Like you've gotta put yourself in a situation where you're trying to learn a new skill and, and you have the experience of being humbled enough times that it keeps you, it it keeps you Yeah. Grounded in a way that, that that other things don't. That's right.

Doug Sammons [01:03:53] So this class, the school that I go to has some of the world's most famous woodworking artists as teachers. And they seem to be a very wholesome, normal kind of group of people down to earth. And then you see the work they've done. It's just feel about this

Vance Crowe [01:04:11] Big, I'm sure there's some chemists right now that are like, welcome to my world, doctor. So another thing that you do that I find to be infinitely curious, but I don't have any interest in doing is keeping bees.

Doug Sammons [01:04:30] Well, to be fair, my wife keeps the bees and she does keep them as opposed to losing them, which a lot of beekeepers try to do, haven't done. And I, but I help, I'm support staff and every way I can do, and she's, she's got about 40 hives this year and she's got 40

Vance Crowe [01:04:50] Hives.

Doug Sammons [01:04:50] Yeah. My son is getting into beekeeping too, and he's got quite a few hives too. So it's a, it's a pretty busy these days. Raising bees is pretty, takes quite a lot of commitment. It's not a once and done thing. It's,

Vance Crowe [01:05:06] Why do you say that these days? Did it used to be? Yeah,

Doug Sammons [01:05:09] It did. Used to be, you could keep these, when we started in the early eighties, they didn't need so much care. I mean, you set them up for the, for the spring and made sure they were, had what they needed and reorganized the hive a little bit and came back in June, harvest the honey and then come back in the fall, set 'em up for the winter, you know, and so, you know, four or five visits a year and you're good these days. It's just not that you're lucky they have to be seen monthly for sure. And, and in the spring and parts of the winter, almost weekly or every two weeks, you have to check on 'em, make sure they're not need something in particular.

Vance Crowe [01:05:58] WI mean that sounds like a de-evolution or something that sounds like they're getting weaker.

Doug Sammons [01:06:03] Yeah, they are. So there's a combination of diseases that they seem to not be able to shake. So they're not as fit going into the winter as they were because the mites they endured in the fall and this summer and because they're not as healthy going into the winter, their tolerance for cold and things are a little less. And so the hive can go down. And we've noticed, oh, for the first time, last couple three years now, we've been feeding the bees in the wintertime, which we never did before. And it seems like the bees, the hive, you know, they cluster the insects cluster, you know, you know, keep in mind that what a honey bee does to survive the winter is totally unique in the insect world. I mean, they stay alive at something on the order of 70, 80, 90 degrees Fahrenheit in the hive that's outside without insulation, by using chemical energy to create heat. And so that, that chemical energy comes from the, the sugar honey. And we found that the cluster has a difficult time moving to the sugar or the honey that they've stored and that we have to make it, take it, bring it to 'em, put it closer to them, and to ensure that they'll get it and we'll survive it. And we never had to do that before. So I don't know if it's just because they're weaker.

Vance Crowe [01:07:35] Is the fitness challenge, is that because there's more beehives than there used to be? Is it that we're carrying more bees than, than we used to and therefore more weak bees get through the system? Or how, how, like it seems to me to be baffling that you could think that just in your wife's lifetime of caring for bees that they'd get weaker. It seems, seems almost

Doug Sammons [01:07:58] Impossible. Well they've, they've had a couple epidemics of diseases. I mean they, when we started there were not varroa mites in our hives. And so we lost all of our hives, seven of them to varroa about 19 86, 7 or so. You know, we just put 'em to sleep in the fall and we went up and marched to check on 'em and they were all dead, was a real bummer. And we had to restart. And, and so we've ne we've had mites been fighting mites every year since that and constantly and different remedies. And so treating for mites chemically is, you know, you can't collect honey if you're doing that. So you have to treat, take the chemistry out, then you can let 'em make honey. But now the mites grow and so there's this give and take in managing it so that the bees are in good condition by the end of the year. It's difficult and it can't be done just casually.

Vance Crowe [01:09:00] It strikes me that bees are like keeping livestock, but it's not like keeping a cow, certainly not like having a pet, like a cat or a dog where you can look and say, oh, that's cute. But people have a really strong connection with their bees. What, what do you think is the driving force there?

Doug Sammons [01:09:22] I don't know. That's interesting. I i having raised animals and our bees we're attached to our bees in part because it's a possession that you've worked hard for, like a flower. You know, if you grew something and you were expecting it to bloom and it, you know, somebody came along and cut the bud like your local deer, you're not happy, right? Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:09:44] I grew tomatoes this year. I grew clea tomatoes and, and there was something about giving them away that was, I mean on the one hand I loved it, it's fun to give 'em away, but then you're like, well you really appreciate just how fantastic this tomato really is. Well, I think so

Doug Sammons [01:10:02] There's a possession thing there and accomplishment, so it's a measure of success. And so when the bees fail, you failed. Right? So it's, you haven't done something right. So I think that kind of goes together. But you know, honeybees are people like honeybees because they're somehow associated with purity and goodness as, as pure as honey. You know, it's this, this

Vance Crowe [01:10:30] Thing. Oh, that's true. It's

Doug Sammons [01:10:31] Kind of a organic pure thing. Every pesticide in the United States is tested against honeybees. It's probably one of the most tested organisms on the planet. Everything is tested to see if it's safe for honeybees because people like honeybees, they're pollinators, they're important, they pollinate quite a lot of our, our food. And so Jerry Hayes used to show these plates of food with and without honeybees, you know, it makes a big difference. But for us, I mean they, the pollination, I don't know. They do the, the local area, but not, I mean, I do my garden some, but not.

Vance Crowe [01:11:14] So speaking of pollinators, what do you think of the tremendous efforts that are going into protecting monarch butterflies, which are are said to be

Doug Sammons [01:11:23] It's all good

Vance Crowe [01:11:24] Pollinators and yeah, why not?

Doug Sammons [01:11:26] I mean, why not? I'm not sure it'll be successful, but, well,

Vance Crowe [01:11:31] You're a chemist that worked pretty hard to find chemistry that would knock out milkweed and now we're going and replanting it.

Doug Sammons [01:11:38] Well some people are, I mean there are large areas that aren't in agriculture that, you know, monarchs can go to and fence rows have still have milkweeds. I have a lot of milkweeds in my garden. The damn things take over. You know, they have a romos mass. And so you let one milkweed grow here today and next year you'll have 10 of 'em all through there.

Vance Crowe [01:12:01] What does that mean? A romos mass?

Doug Sammons [01:12:03] It's got a root that goes horizontally and then sends up shoots. Oh, so you get a patch of milkweed going, you're gonna have a hard time taking it out.

Vance Crowe [01:12:14] Yeah, I mean they're not a hard plant. Like when you were, when I was walking beans, you'd go out with like a hook and you'd go cut 'em and they were easy as far as that's

Doug Sammons [01:12:22] An annual one. But once it goes through the winter and it comes back next year, it's gonna be more than one.

Vance Crowe [01:12:28] Yeah,

Doug Sammons [01:12:29] Okay. And they'll make seed. So in my garden, they've ruined my iris bed. I'll have to figure out how to get 'em out of there. But, but yeah, I, I think, and we plant milkweeds in our little prairie, but I think anything we can do to save the monarch, but you know, it, the monarch should be a symbol for a lot of insects that are, that are whose lifestyles were not congruent with ours, you know. And so there is some, there's an argument on the net that, that a lot of insects populations have decreased substantially. And the impact of that is that there's a whole cascade of an of animals and so on that depended on those insects that are gonna be affected. So it's not just pollination, it's the bats that feed on them and the, or the birds, the fly catchers that feed on 'em and who feeds on them and so on. So there's lots of insects, insect populations are down.

Vance Crowe [01:13:38] Are you worried about 'em?

Doug Sammons [01:13:39] I think some of 'em, yeah, some of 'em are very specialized. You want chocolate, there's a particular fly that pollinates chocolate flowers, coco cacao and it's not doing very well. And so then somebody's gonna have to pollinate 'em by hand if they can. But it's a very difficult pro process.

Vance Crowe [01:14:03] So speaking of endangered plants, I think you and I have spoken before about that all the bananas that we eat now are are genetic clones. They're, they're the ones that were the bananas that survived the giant blight that knocked out all the bananas in Central America.

Doug Sammons [01:14:20] I don't think that was me, but it's true. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:14:22] So I heard that this, that there is a blight that is now made it to South America that may wipe out the bananas. What do you know about this?

Doug Sammons [01:14:30] I don't know much about it, so I can't really speak to it. I've seen that, I don't know. I know that when I was in Peru we were served a meal that had bananas and there was a nice thick big banana that was served that had pink flesh that was delectable. It's one of the best bananas I've ever had anywhere and I wanna buy them here, but they're not available. So I know there are a lot of varieties of bananas. So I don't know if they're all affected or just the ones on the plantations. I know in Africa they've made some kind of a hybrid banana that's

Vance Crowe [01:15:08] Like

Doug Sammons [01:15:09] Four times bigger and better than anything the, the, the banana trees and they get very much larger harvest from and they're trying to get that growing on all the plantations. But otherwise I don't know much about it.

Vance Crowe [01:15:25] Yeah, me neither. I just know that it was there and that, that for a long time I'd always heard that bananas may go extinct or there's always a blight that could come and now apparently the blight is there. I'll, I'll look into it more.

Doug Sammons [01:15:38] Well it's, and it's not just a casual food for us, for some people it's a sustenance and so it's not good. Whatever. It's,

Vance Crowe [01:15:46] Yeah. And I mean I think that that concept of blights are, is like we were saying before, people don't really know that diseases can wipe entire, entire fields out entire crops. That and, and they may not come back or at least the versions that you had before and

Doug Sammons [01:16:01] Never, and maybe never again the way you had it.

Vance Crowe [01:16:05] What do you think of like the, the seed banks that are, that are going on like this, I can never remember how to say it. The, the one up in Finland, up in the Arctic circle where they try and capture all the seeds. Yeah,

Doug Sammons [01:16:18] I think it's great. I think that that's significantly more effort should be put into it. And I think that there should be institutes that study the genetic properties and attributes of those plants that we haven't been able to take advantage of. So, you know, some people who believe in new age crops talk about how the ones we have today were selected by, you know, women 10,000 years ago trying to make a living and kept the seeds. And, and so those became the crops we have when there were so many other plants that could have been selected that we could improve. So I would wanna see us use biotechnology to improve the attributes for cropping for a lot of plants and diversify the system

Vance Crowe [01:17:07] Plants that we don't think of as edible or we don't think of as,

Doug Sammons [01:17:11] Yeah, if you saw a primitive soybean plant, you would be aghast how different it is from the soybeans we go today. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:17:19] I've never seen that. I've seen teosinte general,

Doug Sammons [01:17:22] It's kind of a viy little plant that grows on the ground and teosinte and corns the same way. But I don't know why we think that other plants wouldn't, couldn't be modified in that way to a great advantage.

Vance Crowe [01:17:36] Yeah, and and I mean really when you look at the original bananas or you look at carrots, I mean to, to look at what a carrot came from, it looks like it's just a regular root. Somebody must have just been gnawing on it until they figured out like, oh well we could produce these and make 'em a lot bigger and a lot better.

Doug Sammons [01:17:52] Yeah. So I think there's lots of opportunity and we don't do enough of it. Too much of what's focused on are the current commodities and markets and business plans when, for a long-term future in the context of global warming, we should be learning everything we can about all those plants that are in those seed banks.

Vance Crowe [01:18:11] What do you think it takes to make that happen? I mean, financial incentive. Think it

Doug Sammons [01:18:14] Takes, I think it takes, well I don't know, it's, it's hard to say, but I would say if the government has A-U-S-D-A should the u un have a global agricultural thing and so that all the world contributes money instead of just for peacekeeping, but for research on ag. And there are institutes that are global, but it should be done on a larger scale, more cohesively.

Vance Crowe [01:18:43] So when you, you were talking about focus and you said, you know, what should we be focusing on? You have, is it six kids?

Doug Sammons [01:18:50] Seven,

Vance Crowe [01:18:51] Seven kids? What, what have you been telling them all along they should focus on as they get ready to go into adulthood?

Doug Sammons [01:18:58] Well, that's a big question. They all have particular and special goals and so the advice wouldn't be the same, but I think working hard is one of 'em and being honest and having high level of integrity or basic things. And I, so I think we've got that. Well

Vance Crowe [01:19:22] Good. Yeah, that's a great thing for a father to be able to say. Yeah. Well Doug, I am so grateful that you were willing to stop by after your fishing trip and, and come by. You are my first guest that I've had back on the podcast, but you're one, one of my favorite people to talk with, so I'm so grateful you were willing to stop by and chat.

Doug Sammons [01:19:40] Well thanks very much fans and I'm glad to see things are going well for you and keep up the good work.

Vance Crowe [01:19:44] Thanks, we'll see you again. Yep. Well that's gonna do it for this week's podcast. Thank you Dr. Doug Salmons for coming by and doing the interview. If you are one of those people that might find what Doug says interesting, then I hope you will go to his Twitter feed. Hopefully you have not been banned. We still don't know why that was. I suspect there's some sort of mistake happening here and we'll get it resolved. But if you are the type of person that enjoyed what Dr. Doug Salmons had to say, go check him out on Twitter. He is wilted weeds and he's an enjoyable guy. He's kind of fun and watch out. 'cause I would hate to see you get blocked by Doug. I don't know what you guys are doing out there to get blocked, but in any case we'll figure that out and when we do find out what happened, I'll come back and tell you to close out, know that I have, and as the Crow Flies episode coming up here on Friday, I'm excited about this one. I've got it nailed down to one of two topics. It is either on the topic of friendship and how you are the average of the five people that you spend the most time with. Or I want to talk about learning how to introduce yourself so that it's not so awkward. I, I've been putting on some classes about this subject and I finally was able to describe that idea that we call the sky hook in a way that I think is interesting and something that could help you at all these upcoming things that are gonna happen through Thanksgiving and Christmas. So we'll see which one of these two I put together, no matter what. I'll do them both at some point.

Vance Crowe [01:21:15] I love to hear your comments on Twitter. I am at Vance Crowe and if you know of any group that you think would love hearing one of my workshops about how to become a tangibly better communicator, want to invite me to give a speech about some of the things that we talk about, either on the podcast or in my past or just wanna communicate, just let me know. You can find out more about my company at Vance Crowe dot com. So without further ado, I'm gonna jump off here, but we'll see you on Friday. Ah, at.