Vance Crowe Podcast 011: Dwayne Faber Dairy Farmer talks milk, vegan activists, organic & stand up

Dwayne Faber [00:00:00] And so there's a saying that the cow is the foster mother of the human race. And, and there is, there's a lot of truth in that. I mean, the cow, I think is responsible for a lot of people being alive today. This is the Vance Crow podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:00:17] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. This week's guest is Dwayne Faber, who comes all the way from Washington State, and he came to visit me in the Vance Crow Studios here in St. Louis, Missouri. Dwayne is a fascinating guy. We met over Twitter and basically everyone that is involved in agriculture Twitter knows who Dwayne is. He goes by D Faber 84 online and he is a sort of court jester, the kind of guy that can make those jokes about sensitive topics and people maybe go, Ooh, oh, but at the same time they see there's a little bit of truth to that and they get a smirk and they start opening up. Dwayne used this comedy not only to amass a 35,000 person following on Twitter, but also to draw a lot of attention from mainstream news. So everybody from the AP to the LA Times and even the New York Times have contacted him when they wanted a quote from a farmer, somebody that they could trust as a voice that would give them an unfiltered opinion. And that is exactly what we get from Dwayne here in this conversation. Just as a little bit of background, Dwayne is 34 years old, and you should keep that in mind as you think about the fact that he has a 2000 cow herd that he milks and has a productive business with, and he has over 20 employees. I have met a lot of people over my years, but I don't think I've ever met somebody that is that astute of a businessman, somebody that is always thinking about how can we pencil the numbers?

Vance Crowe [00:01:49] How can we think about this in a different way? And this comes out in the interview. I think you will find this interview very interesting. He, we first start out talking about things like what is the difference between skim milk and whole milk and organic milk versus conventional? And then we start branching into other areas like what does it take to have discipline and be able to build towards your goals? What's going on with farmer suicides in the United States? And we even talk about some of Dwayne's latest experiences in getting up and doing standup comedy. This is unlike any interview I have done to date. And even though Dwayne and I met only for the first time ever in person last night, I feel like we are very good friends and shared a lot. So I hope you enjoy this. This is a particularly long episode. It is about two and a half hours long, but I think worth every minute I've gone back and listened to it and, and think there's a whole bunch in there that I got to learn and we got to test out some ideas in ways that we hadn't before. So buckle in and I hope you enjoy Dwayne Faber, welcome to St. Louis Missouri. I'm glad to have you on the podcast.

Dwayne Faber [00:02:58] Thank you for the invite. It's an honor. I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to meet you and, and be on the podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:03:04] It's amazing because you and I have known each other for quite a few years, but when I was explaining to my wife that you would be coming in from Washington State, she was like, wait a second. What do you mean you know him? And I was like, well, he is on Twitter and Right.

Dwayne Faber [00:03:18] And

Vance Crowe [00:03:18] We talked on the phone a couple of times, right?

Dwayne Faber [00:03:20] And that's what they always said is Make friends on Twitter, then just invite them to your house and spend a few days. And

Vance Crowe [00:03:26] So for the people that don't know, you are Dwayne Faber d Faber

Dwayne Faber [00:03:31] Eighty four four,

Vance Crowe [00:03:32] And that's your birth year 80

Dwayne Faber [00:03:33] Is, I couldn't fit my social security number on, on there, so I just had to put my birth year on. So,

Vance Crowe [00:03:38] And you are a dairy farmer and Twitter extraordinaire and and the father of three daughters.

Dwayne Faber [00:03:45] That is correct, yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:03:46] And you live 15 minutes away from the coast in Washington state. Yep,

Dwayne Faber [00:03:50] Exactly right. About two hours north of Seattle and Skagit Valley.

Vance Crowe [00:03:55] And I guess I didn't imagine that to be a place where dairy farming occurred. So what do you got going on up there?

Dwayne Faber [00:04:00] Yeah, it's actually really conducive to animal agriculture and to dairy farming, just because we have such moderate temperatures. We also have a lot of grasses that grow. Grass grows really well up there. We is legal. That's probably part of it. So, but no, the, we're grow, we're growing a lot of good grasses with high protein and really digestible. And so we convert that into milk really well. And actually for a lot of years, Washington, especially the western side of the state, would lead the United States as far as milk production per cow, because it was so conducive of a climate for animals. And so moderate, I mean, the summers were 75, maybe a hot day is 80. And then the winters are actually fairly mild. We do get rain and have to deal with rain, but for the most part, it's a, a very moderate climate because

Vance Crowe [00:04:44] Cows produce more milk when it's cold or cooler.

Dwayne Faber [00:04:47] A actually they do, they have to consume more calories when it's really cold, and that does translate into more milk because there's a, a correlation between feed in and milk output. However, they are burning a few more calories, so it's also less efficient. But they do give more milk in really cold weather. But hot weather is really what stunts them and, and what stunts their growth cows do. Well, typically in cold weather and really poor in hot weather.

Vance Crowe [00:05:11] So is that why Wisconsin was the dairy state because it would get so cold?

Dwayne Faber [00:05:15] That could be, that could be. It's definitely, definitely more conducive to it. Yeah. Absolutely.

Vance Crowe [00:05:19] And how long you been a dairy farmer for?

Dwayne Faber [00:05:21] So I grew up on a dairy farm. My dad started shortly after I was born, I believe in 1985.

Vance Crowe [00:05:27] Oh, so not multi-generational, like hundreds of years. Always been a dairy farmer.

Dwayne Faber [00:05:32] Not at all. No. Nope. Just two generations now. So my dad, well, originally my grandfather on my dad's side came from Holland, and then he worked in a factory in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and then moved to Washington State. And then my dad worked on a, a dairy farm through high school, and then went out on his own and, and kind of started the business that way.

Vance Crowe [00:05:53] Man, that is amazing. Normally you think of that's like a reverse migration, right? Normally it's farm to factory

Dwayne Faber [00:05:59] Yes. Into

Vance Crowe [00:05:59] The city. But this is factory to dairy.

Dwayne Faber [00:06:01] Exactly right. Yeah. And, and I was thinking on it actually the other day. It was, you know, somewhat fortuitous that he did move. I mean, because the, the economy in Michigan definitely started collapsing and they were having struggles out there, and I think he foresaw some of that and wanted to, to move and, and get into a, a better area. And so he decided to move to Washington and it's worked out really well. So,

Vance Crowe [00:06:21] So I have had the good fortune of hearing you on many ag podcasts. You're, you're quite popular in the world. But considering that most of the people that listen to my podcast, educated, a lot of 'em living in cities, they know very little about agriculture. But when I posted that I was gonna be interviewing you, they were pretty excited about it. And I actually thought of a question that's so simple that it's maybe even seems silly, but I think it's a good place for us to start, which is what is milk?

Dwayne Faber [00:06:49] Yeah, I mean, that, that term is kind of become somewhat ubiquitous, but I mean, the technical definition is it, it's a, a white secretion from the mammary glands typically of mammals. And and that's the sign scientific definition of it. And I would agree with that. There's a, a soy industry and a almond industry and a cashew industry that would, would disagree. But, but that is the technical definition.

Vance Crowe [00:07:13] And and why is it that we get milk from cows as opposed to other mammals?

Dwayne Faber [00:07:19] Ooh, that's a great question. I, I think some of it, just their docile nature, they, they were easier to domesticate early on. And then they also have a really good conversion rate of feed to milk output. And we see that even in the dairy industry, you have a, a breed like the milking shorthorns, where they're kind of a cross between the beef animal and the dairy animal, and they don't convert as well into milk. You also have the brown Swiss animal or the air shire. They've kind of fallen by the wayside in popularity just because that conversion of feed to milk isn't as good. Whereas the Holstein in Jersey, it, it's a lot more efficient. And the jersey animal, it gives a lot more fat and protein, whereas the Holstein gives more volume.

Vance Crowe [00:08:00] Oh, I didn't realize that. So then, does that mean that if you're producing with a different, like a jersey, you're producing for a different kind of thing for cheese or something like that?

Dwayne Faber [00:08:08] Correct. Exactly. So a lot of dairies will tailor their dairy farm to how they get paid. So if you're shipping your milk to a cheese plant, typically you'll tend to have more jerseys because they're, it's 30% more yield in a cheese vat. And so you put the same volume of milk in it, but jersey milk will yield 30% more out the back end. And so it, it's in the cheese plant's best interest to be getting jersey milk versus Holstein milk.

Vance Crowe [00:08:35] So we, this is like jumping off the rails, but you said something to me this morning as, so we're making breakfast and I said, all right, well, you know, if you're gonna stay here, we're gonna do the Vance Grow breakfast, which is consists of oats peanut butter and a whole bunch of whey protein. And you and I was like, you know, I don't understand why dairy farmers don't talk more about whey protein 'cause it does come from dairy and you blew my mind with how big the whey protein industry has gotten.

Dwayne Faber [00:09:04] Yeah, exactly. I mean, you go into the, into the supermarket and, and it's expensive. I mean, you go and you buy a big bag of it, it it is expensive. And a while back, it could be that the economics have changed, but for a while there, the, the way market was, was more lucrative than the cheese market. And so the cheese was actually the byproduct and the way was actually what people were, or the, the factories were making their money on the cheese factories.

Vance Crowe [00:09:27] So maybe talk a little bit about what the milk you've already talked about. So you get milk that people drink, and then there's 2% in skim and whole milk, and then there's whey and then there's the stuff that makes cheese. So how does all this stuff work together?

Dwayne Faber [00:09:43] Yeah, it's, it's kind of interesting. Most factories, they go and they take raw product in and they, they, they put 'em all together. They'll bring in steel, they'll bring in vinyl and rubber, and the out comes a car. The, the milk industry is actually the reverse. They bring in milk and they, and a lot of times they deconstruct it, we're pulling out different parts of the milk. So you'll go and, and you'll take the fluid milk and you'll say, well, we wanna make 1%. So then we skim off the, the cream, and then we go and we put that into ice cream, or we go, go and have the cheese and we take the whey out and use the whey for whey protein powder, or a lot of it gets, gets exported to China for, for animal feed. And then also powder, you know, pull, turning, turning a lot of our milk into Pacific Northwest, gets turned into powder and exported, and then trying to find these little parts of the milk that we can pull out, separate out and, and sell independently. So,

Vance Crowe [00:10:36] And who's doing like you as the dairy farmer? You are, you're not separating all of this out?

Dwayne Faber [00:10:41] No, so I, I'm a part of Dairy Gold, which is a co-op in the Pacific Northwest. They're in Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. And we're actually mostly an export company. So we, we make a lot of infant formula. We make a lot of skim milk powder that goes overseas. And then we also do have kind of a regional fluid, fluid milk market. They've, they've dabbled in a little bit into the cheese market, not so much into ice cream, but yeah, it's mostly, mostly an export company.

Vance Crowe [00:11:11] And when you're talking about powdered milk, is this, you just suck out all the, the moisture? Like how do you make powdered milk? Yeah,

Dwayne Faber [00:11:19] Exactly. It, it's actually similar to a, a diesel engine where you're, you're pressurizing the milk and shooting it through a, as a mist into a hot chamber. And then as soon as it hits that hot air in the hot chamber, it vaporizes and becomes powder and falls down. And so that's the simplified way to make, make powder. So

Vance Crowe [00:11:41] I remember as a kid, every once in a while we would have whatever that powdered milk was, and we'd add water to it, and it seemed like, just like magic, but I don't, I don't think I've seen Is that powdered milk? That's what that's called now.

Dwayne Faber [00:11:52] It is, yeah. And so you don't see much of it here. We, we do a lot of it for ingredients. So Hershey's will come and buy it, Nestle will come and buy it, and then a lot of it now is going into Asia where they'll reconstitute it in Asia and they'll, they'll use it even in make their cheese making out there or in reconstituting for fluid milk in homes. So a lot of these Asian countries where it's really hot and humid, it's difficult to, to raise cows and have access to good quality milk. And so they, there is a lot of buying powder from the US that goes into that. And then particularly China. China's historically had an issue with melamine in their milk back in 2014. What's

Vance Crowe [00:12:30] Melamine?

Dwayne Faber [00:12:30] So what the Chinese dairy farmers were doing was they wanted to increase the amount of milk they shipped, and so they'd put a garden hose into their milk tank and it would water down the milk and increase the volume. But there's a test that's done, I believe it's called the Babcock test, that freezes the milk to determine if water's been added to it. In order to circumvent that test, the Asian or the Chinese farmers were adding mercury to the milk. Yes. And it would bypass that test, and it would say that the milk was of a hundred percent milk and no water added. And so then they were using that in infant formula and it killed, you know, I don't know the number, but, but quite a few babies. And literally heads rolled from it as the Chinese government stepped in. But then the Chinese consumer did not trust local milk for the longest time. And so they were buying up milk powder everywhere they could. So, and that was kind of what led to the boom in 2014 in the dairy industry was, was a lot of it was fueled by Chinese demand.

Vance Crowe [00:13:36] And has that gone away? Is is

Dwayne Faber [00:13:39] It has. So there was kind of a confluence of event events on the backside too. So we had a really good year in 2014 and China was buying all this product. And then in 2015, Russia invaded Crimea and we slapped a whole bunch of sanctions on them. And so we lost that market for exporting milk products. And then Russia went out and started their own dairies, started setting up huge dairies themselves. And so that impacted us. And then also at the same time, the European Union had a quota system where they limited the number of, or the amount of milk they'd produced. And so they made it a free market system. And so then they started flooding the market and then taking all their excess milk, turning it into powder and storing it in warehouses. And that kept building up, building up, and there was no economic indicator to tell them to slow down production. And so then they had now three, four years of warehouses full of milk powder that just kind of a, a wet blanket on the entire dairy market. And up until recently they've been liquidating that oftentimes at a loss because it was going bad. 'cause it had been sitting in warehouses for so long. And so we had to work through that inventory. And, but yeah, things, and, and also, I mean, we have a good boom year like that. Everybody expands, everybody grows their business and, and, and we weren't getting the market signals to stop and we overproduced. And until recently that's changed.

Vance Crowe [00:15:03] So this is an interesting concept because, you know, if you look at the news and you don't know anything at all about ag, you're hearing that it's pretty tough right now for all farmers, but you hear a lot about dairy farms being shut down. What would you say is the state of the, of the world of dairy and well, of the US dairy?

Dwayne Faber [00:15:21] Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's tough right now. It, we've, we're going on now of four years of, of break even to, to losing money. And we're seeing huge liquidations. A lot of the stories you're seeing, there's, there's been a lot of liquidations of dairies in, in upstate New York in the Midwest through Wisconsin. And there's, there's a little bit of the tale of two stories. The West coast typically has larger dairy farms, and the, the middle of the country tended to get a, a higher price for their milk for a long time because that's where the population centers were. And the most profitable milk is fluid milk, the class one portion of your milk price. And on the west coast, a lot of ours gets exported and it's kind of the lowest, lowest denominator. And so in order to overcome that, we've had to milk more cows to divide fixed costs over more units of production. And so what you're seeing now in the Midwest is a lot of those pay prices that they experienced those increases or the, the over what we were getting have deteriorated and they are not getting that $2 premium to what we were getting. They

Vance Crowe [00:16:25] Were getting $2 per, per a hundred weight. Is that what it's

Dwayne Faber [00:16:28] Correct. For every a hundred pounds of milk. And I think particularly in Wisconsin, I mean, there's a lot of cheese, there's a lot of buyers of milk product out there. And even back in 2014, we have family in Michigan, we went to Michigan and, and there were co-ops fighting for milk. They were milk deficit. Well then that flipped. There was a huge investment in dairies in Michigan and to the point where now they didn't have a place to go with their milk, and there's more milk than there's capacity to process it. And there was stories where they would dump the milk just down the drain, and then that becomes a PR nightmare. And it looks like while you're,

Vance Crowe [00:17:01] And nobody wants to see that,

Dwayne Faber [00:17:02] Right? You got people going hungry, and here you're, you're dumping milk. I mean, is is this a monopoly? And so actually our co-op was buying milk from Michigan, transporting it all the way to Idaho, and then turning it into powder and, and then exporting it.

Vance Crowe [00:17:16] So Wow. Because it was cheap, like you could cover the transportation costs and still make money.

Dwayne Faber [00:17:21] Exactly. Right. So the Michigan producers were having to cover the cost of transporting it and also the cost of selling it at a huge discount.

Vance Crowe [00:17:29] Wow.

Dwayne Faber [00:17:29] So yeah, and it, it was a little bit controversial because people are saying, well, we need to get rid of that milk, so nobody should go and buy that milk. I mean, if we're gonna fix our oversupply problem, nobody should go and buy that milk, you know? And yet our co-op made the decision that we're, we're running a business here, there's an opportunity. We have plant capacity here, we can go and buy that milk and, and turn it into profitable products to export. So,

Vance Crowe [00:17:52] So here's something I don't, I don't understand. And I, I've been in the ag industry for about five years and I've had a chance to meet people all over the country go to speak, and then also listen, it seems obvious to me that you're going to have, as you have increases in production, right? Yep. So cows get more efficient, you get better at knowing what is the exact right feed, what are the exact right conditions to make these cows produce more milk. Unless the demand goes up, you are going to have increased supply and, you know, maybe modulated demand. But isn't it inevitable that there's going to be less and less farms? And why is it that people get so upset about the loss of family farms? Because it seems to me that this is, this is obvious something that's going to happen. Yeah,

Dwayne Faber [00:18:41] Exactly. Right. And we saw it in the, probably the chicken industry first. I mean, this vertical integration where, you know, you can, you know, fill the 98% of the egg industry, you can put 'em all into one room. You know, there's that few producers in the egg industry and, and chickens probably broilers the same way. You're seeing more and more the hog industry was going that way. And, and dairy's kind of the last one to go that route. And it's a little bit more difficult because it's hard to put huge 10,000 cow dairies together on one place. And there's more and more people that are opposed to it. They don't want it in their backyard. And so what would prevent some of that is probably just the environmental pushback of people setting up these massive units to milk cows. I think, I think more of a three to 4,000 cow model is the future. And yeah, you divide, what, 9 million dairy cows divided by 3000. I mean, that, that is probably more of the future. And, and we're headed that direction and, and there there is a romanticized view of the family, family dairy farm. And, and I think the American consumer wants to have that view that it's Iman p you know, just doing the workout on the farm and, but that, that isn't reality. And, and it's tough to see people go outta business, right? I mean, especially in our area of the country, we're, we've experienced that over the last 20 years, what they're now experiencing in upstate New York and in the Midwest. I mean, we, we don't have the 50 cow dairies anymore. They, they've all gone outta business.

Dwayne Faber [00:20:14] How

Vance Crowe [00:20:14] Many cows are in your dairy?

Dwayne Faber [00:20:15] About 2000.

Vance Crowe [00:20:16] Okay. So what does that look like for you then? You're, you're clearly not going out and, and milking cows by hand, but if you were gonna describe it for somebody that, that hasn't ever seen a modern dairy, how do you, how do you milk 3000 or 2000 cows?

Dwayne Faber [00:20:29] Yeah, we, we milk it. We, yeah, hopefully you have efficient facilities. So that's part of it is having the facilities set up in a way that it is efficient and you can minimize your labor costs. And then hiring good, good people to do the work, you know, hiring employees and then empowering them and allowing them to do their job. I I have employees that know cows better than I do. You know, they'll, they'll be able to look at a cow and say, Hey, she's sick and, and she'll recover with this medicine or that medicine because that's what they do on a daily basis. And for me, I've stepped back a little bit and for me, my job is putting out fires and, and making sure we make money and, and trying to find ways to make money.

Vance Crowe [00:21:07] What is the work of a, of a laborer on a dairy farm? You gotta feed them.

Dwayne Faber [00:21:11] Yep.

Vance Crowe [00:21:11] So what all is going on out there

Dwayne Faber [00:21:13] Ab Absolutely. So anything involved with a human, I mean, I mean, it's taking care of poop, it's taking, you know, scraping the pens, it's feeding the animals, it's taking care of breeding the cows. It's, it's taking care of the calves that are born and the young stock that get raised up. And then it's also the work of, of the cropping, you know, we do, we do the cropping side of it too.

Vance Crowe [00:21:35] When you say the cropping, you're, you're growing your own feed for the cows.

Dwayne Faber [00:21:39] Yeah, exactly. Right, exactly. So we're, we're growing corn, we grow about eight, 900 acres of corn silage, and then we have another four or 500 acres of grass silage that we make into silage.

Vance Crowe [00:21:50] And for people that don't know, so if you're in the Midwest and you see rows and rows of corn fields, what you're looking at are the cobs of corn that the seeds themselves are what you're gonna feed to the cows, what's on the cob. But in silage, you're actually growing up for that green stock that you cut it, you chop up, and then you ferment it in some,

Dwayne Faber [00:22:08] In

Vance Crowe [00:22:08] Some way, right? Yes.

Dwayne Faber [00:22:09] Yeah, exactly right. So basically we, we chop up the entire stock and then we in sil it, so we, we bring it into a silage pit, which is just concrete walls, and then we're also spraying on it anaerobic bacteria. And the anaerobic bacteria will eat up all the oxygen and help andile and preserve that feed so that we can feed it year round. And so we're driving a tractor over that to, to help push out all the oxygen and help compress it and to preserve it for feeding year round. So,

Vance Crowe [00:22:40] So how do you milk 2000 cows? Like what, what is it automated

Dwayne Faber [00:22:44] One tee at a time?

Vance Crowe [00:22:45] Yeah, right. Well, that's not, that's not true. I don't

Dwayne Faber [00:22:48] Believe that. Yeah. So there, there has been more and more automation. I mean, there's been robots that have been hitting the market and coming in, but for the most part it's just regular parlors and it's, yeah, we, we have what, a double 12 and a double 13. We're on two locations. And so it's usually one, one and a half guys is one guy full-time, the other one kind of bringing cows to the parlor. And yeah, so the process is we're spraying disinfectant on the tets, then we're wiping all the, all the stuff off of the tets to clean it, and then also attaching it, attaching the milking machine, which has pulsation and is, is basically squeezing the tet to stimulate the tet and trigger milk letdown. The other important part is you want to give two minutes from the first time that you touch that cow in order to get optimal stimulation. So when you touch the cow, as soon as she comes in the parlor that stimulates the release of oxytocin, that will tell the cow now's the time to let down your milk. And then she'll start letting down her milk milk and, and she'll milk out

Vance Crowe [00:23:46] Oxytocin. Isn't that the happy chemical? So they're excited and, and

Dwayne Faber [00:23:51] Yeah, feeling

Vance Crowe [00:23:51] Good when they're getting milked.

Dwayne Faber [00:23:53] It's actually a smooth muscle contraction hormone. And it's also a milk release hormone. They talk about it in, when you go to the hospital too. I mean, if, when your wife as a baby that, that's the same stimulation that tells her to push the baby out. And sometimes in the hospital, I believe they call it Pitocin, and that's given intravenously to an expectant mother to help stimulate her uterus to start pushing the baby out.

Vance Crowe [00:24:21] So when the cows come into the parlor, they're happy to be there. You have to fight to get 'em in there. What's going on?

Dwayne Faber [00:24:27] Yeah, no, they're excited to be there. They're, they're usually the, the two year olds when they first calve, and they, they, they don't quite understand the process, so that is difficult. But after that, they, they typically come into the parlor willingly. They know that what the process is, they, they'd like to be milked and they know they need to be milked. So,

Vance Crowe [00:24:45] And then how many times a day do cows get milked?

Dwayne Faber [00:24:48] So either two or three. So on one dairy with the, the jersey dairy, I'm only doing two times a day. And the, the holstein slash cross dairy we're doing three times a day. So the Holsteins tend to have more milk in their otters, and it's more beneficial for them to be milked three times a day in order to flush out that system. The mammary glands, if they, if they contain milk for too long, it can be problematic. And so we want to, to milk them three times instead of two times.

Vance Crowe [00:25:15] The most common question that I receive when I put it out on Facebook and Twitter that we were gonna do this interview was, what is the difference between skim milk 2% and whole milk? And specifically people, when they talk about skim milk, they kind of always have their nose wrinkled up. Like they feel like they should be drinking it, but they think something's kind of right off about it. What, what are your thoughts? Skim milk. Milk

Dwayne Faber [00:25:35] Milk has fat soluble vitamins, A, D, E, and K. And so they're more digestible and readily digestible in full fat milk. And, and we've kind of gone full circle on, on the milk. We've, we had the hysteria of fat is bad. And so people, there was a push to go to skim milk and, and fat now is back. We're seeing that in sales of butter. Everybody wants full fat milk again. And it's better for you, it's better for your body. I think it was, you know, what we were made to digest. So

Vance Crowe [00:26:04] It certainly tastes better when you have the, the full fat, but so in skim milk or what, what is it? 2% means what?

Dwayne Faber [00:26:13] So, so 2% is the percent fat in the milk, which I mean, really your milk is 98% fat free at 2%. And to go full fat milk, you're at 3.5%. Oh,

Vance Crowe [00:26:23] It's not that, oh, not the difference between 2% and, and full is right, not that much. Right.

Dwayne Faber [00:26:27] And that's a bit of a misnomer too, that people think, oh, I'm, you know, saving so many calories by consuming skim milk. I mean, the amount of, of fat in one scoop of ice cream or one small scoop of ice cream is the same as the difference between 3.5% and two point percent in a glass of milk. And so it's really, really minimal.

Vance Crowe [00:26:48] Wow, that's incredible. And what is vitamin D milk?

Dwayne Faber [00:26:51] So, vitamin D, we had an issue in the US with rickets way back in the day, and the solution to rickets is vitamin D. And they found, particularly in African Americans, they don't absorb vitamin D as readily as white skinned people. And in areas where there was limited sunshine, there was more and more rickets being developed. And so in order to answer that, they asked the dairy community to add vitamin D to their milk to alleviate that.

Vance Crowe [00:27:19] No kidding. The, it's interesting that, you know, when you look at the integration of milk into schools into the, the peer, the food pyramid, like you guys are really at the center of, i, I don't government intervention or I don't, I don't know what you wanna call that, but like definitely the, the US has dairy has been an important part of its, of its growth in the modern age.

Dwayne Faber [00:27:45] Absolutely. A as far as an economical way to, to get fat, to get vitamins and minerals. I mean, it's, it's about, as top of the class, I mean it, it's been described as nature's most perfect food, right? It's why mothers have that for babies at their most vital and critical point in their life is, is they're being fed milk because it contains everything that they need in order to survive. So there, there's some argument, I think as people age, you know, they, they, they, the propensity to have lactose intolerance increases. So we're seeing that, but it's also an area, I think in the, in the earlier days, people that domesticated the cow and found a way to bring the cow into their tribe had a source of food and calories year round. And it actually enabled Europe to grow and prosper because they had access to calories year round, and they had the ability to feed their people. And so there's a saying that the cow is the foster mother of the human race. And, and there is, there's a lot of truth in that. I mean, the cow I think is responsible for a lot of people being alive today. Well,

Vance Crowe [00:28:48] I, I, I've given talks to various dairy associations, and one crowd pleaser is to stand up and say the dairy farmer is the original ultimate warrior. Because once you had domesticated the milking cow, you now could move around in tribes and you had mobile protein factories that could convert sunlight into protein, that you didn't have to slaughter the animal. You could get it day in and day out. And that made it so their children grew up to be stronger and much, you know, a lot more muscle. Yes. And those were the ones that, you know, there's, there's theories out there that, that is how Europe was, was conquered, and the,

Dwayne Faber [00:29:25] The

Vance Crowe [00:29:26] Dairy farmers were the ones that ran everything.

Dwayne Faber [00:29:28] Absolutely. And so the Dutch people are known to be some of the tallest in the world. And the Dutch people also, that's where the Holstein Friesian cow came from. So the dairy industry's always kind of been close and tied close to the Dutch people. And, and there is a correlation to height as far as the consumption of dairy products in Europe in particular. So much so in fact, that I, a friend had said that he was in the Philippines, in the Philippines. Now is it Philippines or one of these other Asian countries are pushing their people to consume a glass of milk every single day in order to increase their height. They wanted to train their people to consume more milk. And, and because there is a correlation to that.

Vance Crowe [00:30:04] Every day when I was in kindergarten, we went, we lined up in line, walked to the, walked to the cafeteria, and every single one of us got that little pint of milk. And you could choose between chocolate or white. And I remember that nobody chose white because it was always frozen because it was in the back. 'cause none of the kids wanted it.

Dwayne Faber [00:30:22] That is awesome. Yeah, no, that's great. And, and there's been some debate even recently, I think under the Obama administration, they pulled out the full fat milk and they want, and the chocolate milk. And so they said, no, you're only gonna be able to, I believe, drink skim milk. And so the crater demand and, and the kids didn't want it. And, and like skimm milk, so they wanted, again, full flat milk that tastes good and, and also chocolate or strawberry or

Vance Crowe [00:30:45] What do you say to the people that say, you know, humans are the only ones that drink the milk of another animal, and this is some sort of un you know, you were referring to it as the foster mother of children. There are people that view that very, very negatively. Yeah,

Dwayne Faber [00:31:00] I mean, every time I put a bowl of cows milk out, my cat comes and drinks it up, so does my dog.

Vance Crowe [00:31:04] Oh, there you, I've never heard that response before. Right, okay. So

Dwayne Faber [00:31:07] I I don't think that's that's true at all. You know, there are,

Vance Crowe [00:31:11] They would be milking cows if they Yeah,

Dwayne Faber [00:31:13] If they had the ability, if they had, and they drink full fat chocolate milk. So yeah. So no, I, I, I don't concur with that statement. I think we see it in, in other animals if they have had the chance or if they had the ability to, they, they would drink milk from cows. So.

Vance Crowe [00:31:29] And let's talk a little bit about what you feed your cows and the movement of things like organic milk. What, what's the difference between the milk you raise and organic milk?

Dwayne Faber [00:31:44] So, organic milk, they cannot use any herbicides or pesticides on their crops. And they also cannot use an antibiotics on their cows. If they do use antibiotics, that cow has to be taken off the farm and sold to a conventional dairy farm. The reason I'm not organic, I love my cows too much, and if they get sick, just like my child, I want the ability to give them antibiotics to, to make them well and get them better again. And, and

Vance Crowe [00:32:14] Are you, I'm I, so I have not heard that organic was, there's no pesticides or herbicides used on their crops at all?

Dwayne Faber [00:32:21] Yeah. So you are allowed to use organically approved, and I don't believe they're somebody more smart than I could say what they're actually using. But I, they do spray crops. And so actually I had a neighbor, he's an organic farmer, and I took a video of it. He has organic broccoli and two days before they pick it, there was a huge sprayer with a cloud of mist going through the entire field. And, and then I panned to the, the picture and sure enough, it's, it's organic certified field, but organic farmers still spray their crops and, and they'll spray things like nicotine on, on, on the crops to kill any weeds that are coming up. And so it's a bit of a misnomer that organic production does not use sprays because they still do use sprays and, and it, it depends kind of what camp you want to be in as well, because we could not feed the world with a hundred percent organic production because there's a 30% yield drop in organic food production.

Vance Crowe [00:33:23] Is that because it's, in your opinion, safer or more healthy that, that you know, that, that they're using, you know, unhealthy steroids or things like that? Yeah,

Dwayne Faber [00:33:32] So all the research done has said that organic produce, organic milk. There, there, there is no more he, there, there is no healthier benefit to organic versus conventional. The only one would be in, in milk. When you pasture your cows, you get Cs, which are conjugated linoleic acids. And, and that has shown to be somewhat cancer fighting. And so there is some desire to, to increase those Cs in a diet, however, that can be achieved on a conventional dairy farm by just pasturing cows,

Vance Crowe [00:34:08] Pasturing them, meaning leaving them out to eat just regular grass. Correct.

Dwayne Faber [00:34:12] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:34:12] Okay. And how much of your cows are on pasture or near

Dwayne Faber [00:34:16] Yeah, so we keep them inside year round. And we, although for the dry cow period, so the last two months of pregnancy they get dried up, so they quit milking. And then on the dry cow farm, we do have some pasture for them, but for the most part we keep the d the dairy cows confined, just like the organic industry does for six months themselves, you know, during the six months of summer, then they will go on, go and release them out. But, but then we'll

Vance Crowe [00:34:41] Go, wait, wait, I didn't realize that. So in organic milk, organic dairies, they also keep their cows inside for six months outta the year?

Dwayne Faber [00:34:50] They do. Yep, they do. Yep. Because, but even well, anywhere north of northern United States, you're gonna be experiencing wind and snow and, and all of that. And then also the, the pastures turn muddy and, and they also quit growing during the winter months. So then they're also forced to in si feed and have feed on hand for the winter months.

Vance Crowe [00:35:10] So one of the things that people have complaints about with the dairy industry is that in order for you to have a cow that is milking, it needs to constantly be pregnant. But I don't have any of the, like, the background on that, like how long after mama cow calves

Dwayne Faber [00:35:28] Yep.

Vance Crowe [00:35:28] Does she produce milk and and how, how often is she getting pregnant then?

Dwayne Faber [00:35:32] Yep. So, so a dairy cow has called what's called a lactation curve. So they have their baby and then they go up in milk production, and then they kind of peak at about 90 to a hundred days in milk or post calving. And then they slowly drift down, down, down, down, down. And so for us as dairy farmers, we're, we're, we still have economics at play and we still need to milk profitable cows. And the most profitable cows are in that window of 50 to 120 days. When they're giving the most milk, they're most efficient at their feed conversion. And so we do breed them roughly 70 days, 80 days after they had their baby. We will start breeding them again and, and have a new baby in order to get another lactation, which is that time when they're in milk. And maximize the amount of time that they're at that level of production, whether it's humane or not. I mean, I mean, a cow will start having her first cycle 30 days after, after she has her baby. And if she was out in the wild, she'd be standing, waiting for a bull to come and, and, and mount her and, and put in the next round. And so I don't believe that it's contrary to, to nature at all.

Vance Crowe [00:36:42] And how long after the mother has the baby calf, like what's that whole process about? So she has the calf, is the calf immediately removed? How does that work?

Dwayne Faber [00:36:52] Yeah, so for us, we immediately remove 'em just for safety because we've had issues of mothers trampling their calf, that that can happen. Some mothers don't take to their calf. And so for us, we want to eliminate that possibility. And so we do remove the calf and then we immediately give her colostrum from the mother. And it has all the antibodies in the colostrum to help that calf do

Vance Crowe [00:37:17] Well. What is colostrum? It's the first milking. It's the,

Dwayne Faber [00:37:19] It it is, yeah. The first milk from, from the, the cow similar to, to a woman that gives birth shall have colostrum for the first week or two. And so it's basically enriched milk where it's got higher levels of fat and protein in it. And, and it just gives that calf that boost. And, and a lot of that immunity too will be transmitted from mother to calf in that colostrum. And so we give four quarts to that calf to make sure she has an adequate amount of colostrum in her belly. And then we will also dip the navel. So the navel, they'll have a string where the umbilical cord was tied to, and, and that's a potential place for disease and pathogens to go up. And so we'll dip it with hydrogen or not hydrogen peroxide, tincture of iodine, just kind of a brown liquid. And that will help dry that out. Well, it's similar to a baby that's born in the hospital, dry that out and help prevent any disease from going up. And then we'll put her in a straw bedded pen by herself. And oftentimes through those, through the winter months, we'll have a heat lamp on them and then also a, a jacket, a calf jacket to keep them warm. So,

Vance Crowe [00:38:25] And then what is their life like? They're, they're with, they're surrounded by other calves that are in, in similar pens. I have a little bit of an understanding of this because even though I grew up in town, I was about a block away from a dairy farm. So we would always go up there and we would see the little plastic houses that they would be in, but

Dwayne Faber [00:38:42] Yep.

Vance Crowe [00:38:43] But what's, what, how long is a calf in there for? What is this like?

Dwayne Faber [00:38:46] Yeah, so they're typically in what's called a igloo or a dome, and it's just a, basically what is an igloo and it's plastic. And a lot of it also is for disease prevention. We don't want the calves sucking on each other. There can be a lot of transfer of bacteria and bugs. And so we try and isolate them for their most critical time in their life, that first two to three months. And after three months, then we'll pull them out and we'll introduce them to their peers and, and have more of a group pen setting. And, and from there they'll be housed in groups and in pens as they, as they grow up and get older.

Vance Crowe [00:39:19] And they're being fed milk as well? Or what do they eat?

Dwayne Faber [00:39:21] Yep. So they're fed milk for about the first 30 to 45 days, and then we'll introduce grain and that will, so when they first, when they're first born, they just have one stomach called the abomasum, and then they develop some of the, I believe the rumen and, and then the grains help stimulate the rumen papilla, and that's what's digesting in, in the calf. And so they start having the ability to digest grains and then also hay. We'll, we'll give them a little bit of local grass hay too to, to help get 'em going.

Vance Crowe [00:39:56] So there are people out there that say the cow's stomach is designed for grass. I mean, I'm really hitting you with the stuff.

Dwayne Faber [00:40:02] Oh yeah, you bet. Bring it on, man. Bring it on. So

Vance Crowe [00:40:04] There are people out there that would say the cow's stomach is designed to break down cellulose in grass.

Dwayne Faber [00:40:10] Yes,

Vance Crowe [00:40:11] But not grain. Okay. That, that this is some sort of unholy

Dwayne Faber [00:40:14] Right.

Vance Crowe [00:40:15] Thing that we're doing by feeding corn grain to it and it produces a lot more methane and, and isn't really healthy for the cow. What do you, what do you think of that? Yeah,

Dwayne Faber [00:40:24] So, so I would say that the vast majority of the cow diet is forage. We're feeding them the grass silage, we're feeding them alfalfa hay, we're feeding them the entire corn stalk. And so we are converting that cellulose and lignin into something that's digestible. And, and really when it comes down to it, what a cow outputs the beef farmers might not like this, but they're actually more carbon friendly because they have it, their carbon cost and their carbon footprint is divided over not only their, their, their meat value, but also their continuous milk value. And, and so by and large, the dairy herd today is, is more efficient than ever before. It uses less resources than ever before, and we use less water than ever before. So,

Vance Crowe [00:41:13] And do you, you, you then, after a dairy cow has, has caved how many times and then you then sell them for meat?

Dwayne Faber [00:41:21] That that is correct. Yep. And so we, we have a bar and basically that cow, like any business has to earn the right to eat the food at the bunk. So she has to give you back her cost and feed, otherwise it's no longer economically viable to keep her around. And she has to then we ship them out for, for slaughter and for it to be put into to meat production. And so it

Vance Crowe [00:41:43] Who eats, who eats Holstein cows or Jersey cows?

Dwayne Faber [00:41:46] Yeah, actually. So there are a lot of cuts that are taken out of Holsteins jerseys, not as much. They're a smaller animal, so there's, there's less meat value on them, but the Holstein cow still has some cuts that make it into the steak section in the grocery store. Really? Yeah. So not all of it gets put into to ground beef and the ground hamburger. So, and

Vance Crowe [00:42:06] If you're walking through the grocery store, can you pick out that was a Holstein steak or that was, you know, Angus or I

Dwayne Faber [00:42:14] I couldn't, no, no, I couldn't.

Vance Crowe [00:42:15] Okay.

Dwayne Faber [00:42:16] No, but they're,

Vance Crowe [00:42:17] Well that's interesting. So they're, they're similar enough that there's, there's not a Yeah. Unless maybe you were a meat scientist or something. Right?

Dwayne Faber [00:42:24] Exactly. Yeah. I I, yeah, they, they would know maybe what it was, but it's particularly like the Tenderloin. I mean, that's a, that's a, a cut of meat that always remains really good and really viable. I mean, you wouldn't grind that up into hamburger. You'd use that in, in steaks. So,

Vance Crowe [00:42:39] And so the life of a favored daughter, are they drinking milk and eating butter and, and gorging on ice cream all the time? Or how does, how does it work? What are you feeding your family?

Dwayne Faber [00:42:50] Yeah, you bet. Yeah, we, we, we do buy milk from the store. So there, there's some risk, I mean, I grew up drinking milk out of the milk tank, but there, there's some risk in like having, I mean, you could have a bird that poops in the, in the cow feed, the cow ingests that, and then that gets transferred into the milk. And so that's why we do go and, and buy pasteurized milk just to,

Vance Crowe [00:43:11] There is nothing more like people talk about drinking raw milk. Right. And I can tell you that I have had fresh from the goat milk. Yes.

Dwayne Faber [00:43:19] And

Vance Crowe [00:43:19] There is literally nothing more disgusting than warm milk. I, I I think that is like, even thinking about it right. Makes me what makes me want to gag,

Dwayne Faber [00:43:27] Right.

Vance Crowe [00:43:28] Because I have been accustomed to

Dwayne Faber [00:43:30] Yes. Cold milk. Cold milk. Absolutely.

Vance Crowe [00:43:32] Absolutely. And what do you think, so raw milk, you're, you're not a fan, you're not a proponent of,

Dwayne Faber [00:43:36] Right?

Vance Crowe [00:43:36] The raw milk movement? No.

Dwayne Faber [00:43:38] So, so we would drink cold milk, so it would go through the cooling process and then get stored in the, into the tank. So it was still cold and, and it was good, it was creamy. And there has been this movement, the more natural foods, they believe that when you pasteurize and homogenize milk, particularly homogenization, there's certain people that believe your body doesn't digest the, the vitamins and minerals as well as drinking raw milk. It's similar to the raw food movement where people believe that you ought not go and, and cook your vegetables, just eat 'em raw. So, but for me, there, there is some risk with drinking raw milk and, and especially with people with compromised immune systems. There, there have been people that have died drinking raw milk because they've been a young, young kid or an older, older person and they weren't exposed to some of those particular bugs and bacteria.

Vance Crowe [00:44:29] Do you think your daughters have ever drank raw milk?

Dwayne Faber [00:44:32] I don't believe they have. No. I don't.

Vance Crowe [00:44:34] Interesting think so. No. And would you, if you saw it, would you smack it outta their hands or, probably. Or would you say you're Yeah,

Dwayne Faber [00:44:39] Probably

Vance Crowe [00:44:39] Not. You're taking your life into your own hands or,

Dwayne Faber [00:44:42] I mean, I think the, the percentage or the chance of that happening isn't super great, but it, it's like anything that is a risk. And so we just decided not to, not to do that. So,

Vance Crowe [00:44:52] And I, I heard you on a podcast one time talking about how when you grew up you were actually eating margarine because,

Dwayne Faber [00:44:59] Because

Vance Crowe [00:45:00] There was a time when butter was too expensive for your family, right?

Dwayne Faber [00:45:04] Absolutely. No margarine. And, and I mean, we can talk about the beyond meat and this push now to go into, into more of these, these processed meats. I mean, the dairy industry has been dealing with that for 150 years in margarine. And, and

Vance Crowe [00:45:18] Margarine's been around for 150 years.

Dwayne Faber [00:45:20] It has, I looked it up the other day and I believe it originated in France. And then it gained some prevalence through lean times, particularly through World War ii. And, and you had the science community, the American Heart Association coming out and saying, saturated fats are bad for you. And really up until recently where saturated fats are bad for you, get rid of don't eat butter butter's bad for you, eat margarine. And then all of a sudden now we found out about trans fats and, and how bad trans fats are for you. And now there's been this shift back into real wholesome butter again. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:45:53] I mean that's what's so frustrating about nutrition. And I had Connie Dickman on, who was the president of the Nutrition and Dietetics Association, and she said something that I'm sure she, she believes and is, is true from her perspective, which was I think the scientific community should be meeting once a once a year to talk about what, what is healthy and what is nutritious. And that's like really frustrating because you're saying, wait a second. Right. Does the nutrition science change that much year to year that you guys need to be meeting to decide what the new food plate is or food pyramid? And it's exactly from what you're talking about of one day they said, we should get rid of all saturated fats. And now it's coming back in a big way where people are like, I want full fat milk in my coffee. 'cause that's how healthy it is for you.

Dwayne Faber [00:46:38] Absolutely. And, and it's been a boom for the dairy industry because butter is back now in a big way, you know? Yeah. Like you said, people are adding butter to coffee cream. Have

Vance Crowe [00:46:45] You done that?

Dwayne Faber [00:46:46] I have, yeah. Yeah. What

Vance Crowe [00:46:47] Do you think of it?

Dwayne Faber [00:46:48] It's good. It's a little odd because it's super oily on the top. I should, I really need to mix it to, to homogenize it more, but it it was fine. It, yeah. You

Vance Crowe [00:46:58] Didn't ask for butter in your coffee this morning.

Dwayne Faber [00:47:01] Didn't. I did not. I saw the margarine in there. I I didn't want to put you on the spot.

Vance Crowe [00:47:05] Well, so actually, so the reason I love margarine, I was just telling my my brother about this the other day, is margarine in a lot of ways because it's just flavoring, right? It's just an oil that they've put to solidify you can then take a fake flavor and margarine tastes more like butter

Dwayne Faber [00:47:20] Yes.

Vance Crowe [00:47:20] Than butter.

Dwayne Faber [00:47:21] Right? Right.

Vance Crowe [00:47:21] And, and so we, we, we have that because I I I'm like, the butter flavor is something that must be deeply ingrained in the human mind to Yes. To want that flavoring.

Dwayne Faber [00:47:32] Right? Absolutely. And, and, well, and you could maybe speak to it too, but just that process of hydrogenated oils and, and, and heating them up and pushing 'em through screens and so that, that isn't digestible by the human body either. They're coming out now and saying just that processing of margarine is bad for you.

Vance Crowe [00:47:51] Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, I know that when I was in living in Kenya, it, it was surreal to me because the Kenyans, they had their own goats, like the one of the families that I lived with for a while. And so they had the, the potential to have their own churned butter from goats, but they all bought this stuff called blue band, and blue band was a form of margarine. And the reason they had it is 'cause they didn't have refrigeration.

Dwayne Faber [00:48:15] Oh, wow.

Vance Crowe [00:48:15] And that they would talk about how much work was required to churn butter

Dwayne Faber [00:48:21] Versus

Vance Crowe [00:48:21] Just buying this blue band that you could keep around. Wow. And then you start thinking like, you know, there's a lot of things that in our modern world we don't even consider anymore. Like it used to be that if you wanted butter, not only would you have to milk the cow, but you would have to churn the butter. Right.

Dwayne Faber [00:48:37] Which

Vance Crowe [00:48:37] Is a long, long, have you ever hand churned butter? I

Dwayne Faber [00:48:40] I've done it in the mason jars. We did that. Just shaking it.

Vance Crowe [00:48:42] And it's a lot of work, right? It

Dwayne Faber [00:48:43] Is a lot of work. Absolutely.

Vance Crowe [00:48:45] And it's, but so I, yeah, I like, I like margarine. Yeah. I mean, I like butter probably more, but I would

Dwayne Faber [00:48:51] Eat

Vance Crowe [00:48:51] Butter by the fistfuls if given the, I mean that for a long time, that was the only reason I ever ate corn was so that way I could, it was a vehicle for butter.

Dwayne Faber [00:48:59] That's exactly right. Actually, a while back there was a report that they found butter from hundreds and hundreds of years ago, I believe it was in England that was buried in like peat bogs. And it had preserved itself and they had found a way to preserve butter, and it was the earliest form of butter.

Vance Crowe [00:49:17] I mean, I know that butter, I mean, that's gotta last significantly longer than liquid milk. And I don't, I mean, I'm not sure what its comparison to cheese would be, but I mean Yeah. Those, anytime you process it, you're extending the life of the, of the product.

Dwayne Faber [00:49:30] Absolutely. And that was kind of the, the appeal of cheese too. So, so there was kind of this evolution of we have this cow, now we can bring it with us, and we've got access to protein and milk and we don't have to kill it. And, and then, I mean, the ru well, rumors, the hypothesis is that oftentimes back in the day they would u use calf stomachs to carry milk from one area to another. And then in the hot sun, one guy was carrying the calf milk and it curdled because of the REIT inside the lining of the calf stomach, which is essentially what the calf does. The, the REIT in the stomach of the calf turns it into cheese. And, and that was how the first cheese was formed. And now cheese gave tribes the ability to take milk, process it, and then store it for, I mean, essentially years on end and, and have access to calories through more calorie deficient times.

Vance Crowe [00:50:23] Well, and you bring up a, an interesting component of the GMO fight because most people don't realize that we no longer use the lining of calf stomachs with, for that ret, that we actually synthetically produce it using a genetically engineered process. But you don't see any cheese labeled GMO or non gmo. Right.

Dwayne Faber [00:50:41] Because

Vance Crowe [00:50:42] There are very, very few people that want to go back to using calf stomachs to produce the, the REIT

Dwayne Faber [00:50:48] Ab. Absolutely right. It, it's funny how we pick things to be offended by, or things that we don't like. I mean, it's like the really popular salt now, the Himalayan sea salt, it's got trace amounts of lead in it. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:51:01] Right.

Dwayne Faber [00:51:01] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:51:02] Right.

Dwayne Faber [00:51:02] And and as soon as you bring that up, well, I mean it, I mean, it, it, it's all indicative of what percentile is the lead. So, so modern consumers, they'll, they'll bypass looking at the lead, but then as soon as there's a trace amount, a nanogram of glyphosate on some food, then all of a sudden we're worried about it and it causes cancer.

Vance Crowe [00:51:21] Well, that was, so one of my good mentors when I was working at Monsanto was a guy named Dr. Fred Perla, and he was one of the inventors of BT Cotton. And he always talks about, if you have blue salt or pink salt, just realize that all of the coloring is an impurity because salt is Yes. A very clear chemical like chemistry. And any of those other colors are all impurities that they've now sold as as marketing.

Dwayne Faber [00:51:48] Yes. And in our area too, we actually feed the cows Redmond salt, and that comes, I believe, outta Ida or outta Utah. And it, it too has a whole movement of people that believe it causes cancer or it it cures cancer. And, and it's funny how as consumers, we're so quick to latch onto something and we want to believe that something is good for us, and, and we'll, we'll go there just making desiring to feel good about a certain product. And, and it, it's why you see, I mean, Instagram celebrities that are going and pushing non FDA approved pills and everybody just eats 'em up, scarfs 'em up, and they're totally divorced from science and, and, and from health, but yet we want to believe them and we follow the person and it, we feel good about it. So we continue to take it.

Vance Crowe [00:52:38] I mean, I couldn't agree more. I, I think that the reason that those Instagram celebrities are so popular, even more than what is the scientific literature, is for two reasons. One, we've already talked about the science changes, right? And that, that makes us frustrated and say, well, if you guys were wrong over the last 20 years, what are you gonna be wrong about in the future? And the other one is the Instagram model gives you a very clear story. I had these problems, I made this change to my diet, this thing occurred. And therefore, that's the secret for you. And I think most people don't actually, they don't think very much about what they believe. And this isn't just other people. I mean, this is for me, this is for you. They don't think very much about what is it that I actually believe. They just have a series of stories that describe how does the world work? And then they act on that.

Dwayne Faber [00:53:27] Yeah. And, and it's marketing 1 0 1. I mean, there's a, there's a a, a large portion of consumers that just want to feel good. They want to go to Whole Foods and feel like they're changing the world for good by what they eat. And, and then you also have the placebo effect where if somebody believes that that pill that's sold by the celebrity is gonna make them feel better, they're gonna feel better. And, and that, that's what makes it tough too, coming back with science and reason to people like that.

Vance Crowe [00:53:53] So speaking of saving the world, you know, you're out on the West Coast where there is, where it appears to me that there's a big movement of things like veganism where they're saying, you know, all animal products shouldn't be used. And in particular, I mean, veganism is where you take vegetarianism and you take it a step further by knocking out things like milk and cheese and, and any of the animal products. Where are you at on the, on the vegan movement?

Dwayne Faber [00:54:23] Yeah, I, it, it, it's always been there. It's always gonna continue to be there. I think it will increase a little bit, but it will never blow up, I believe, and become the norm because it goes contrary to, again, what we're designed to process and eat. I mean, I was on the plane to flying over here talking to somebody very in tune with nutrition, had an organic power bar. And, and he said too, the vegan, the vegan movement will never go anywhere because we're designed to eat fruits and vegetables and meat. I mean, you go back for, for millennia since the dawn of time, we've eaten meat and we've eaten vegetables and, and to cut out meat with these other synthetic products like the Beyond Burger, like these, they're, at the end of the day, they're all soy based plant proteins. And, and it's similar to margarine where you're, you're creating an abnormal effect and you're pushing all these things together that ought not be together. You know, we, we see it with the, with the, the soy in the, the Beyond Burger. It makes it bleed and makes it look like, like Burger makes it taste like, tastes like Burger has kind of a meaty iron flavor to it. And yet, at the end of the day, you can only eat soy so many times before you have to come to the realization that I'm just eating soy. And, and yet these people in that market, they're marketing to people that want, then they wanna make 'em feel good. I watched a video on The Beyond Burger and the guy was describing the process and he was saying, yeah, we're taking this beat, and then we're mashing it up, we're dehydrating it, we're reconstituting it, and then we're putting it back into the burger.

Dwayne Faber [00:56:06] And it's essentially farm to table. And if that's farm to table, I mean, that's no more farm to table table than the Oreo cookie is. I mean, the Oreo cookie came from a wheat field too, right. But they're, they're trying to, they're trying to plug into this, these buzzwords of, oh, it's farm to table, and oh, it's sustainable. But at the end of the day, you're, you're eating soy just a million different ways.

Vance Crowe [00:56:30] I I I don't agree that that veganism might not take off. Okay. And, and a lot of that comes from the fact that, back to the, we've talked a lot about tribes and, and the way that people understand. So Naval Ravikant, you and I have talked about him, he did a great podcast on the Joe Rogan experience. I'll link that in in the, in the show notes. But he talks about people want three things. They want to be fit, happy, and wealthy.

Dwayne Faber [00:56:59] And

Vance Crowe [00:57:00] When it comes to fitness, the nutrition community doesn't have any answers for us. Right? It's, it's, it's so complicated that people like Connie are saying, we should get together every year and, and change things up. And so what ends up happening is you get into these tribes that say, we can show you how to eat so that that way you'll be fit.

Dwayne Faber [00:57:20] And

Vance Crowe [00:57:20] People deeply, deeply want that. And I think that the vegan movement is a very simple set of rules that allows people to get closer to what they believe to be fit. Now, you and I might not not agree with it, like maybe they can't become big and muscular. You don't see a lot of bodybuilder vegans. I know they're out there and I'll probably get some comments about that, but they, they're not that common. But the reason that I think that it can grow is because it is a very simple set of rules that if you follow, you at least get on the path towards being fit. Or at least you feel like you're on the path towards getting fit. Whereas the alternative is eat whatever you want, or these things are all acceptable. It's not a path and people want to be on a path.

Dwayne Faber [00:58:03] Yeah. Do you feel like the keto movement has, has also kind of outlined those same set of boundaries for people?

Vance Crowe [00:58:08] I think, I think you could map those two things are exactly the same. Right.

Dwayne Faber [00:58:12] Only

Vance Crowe [00:58:12] They are dichotomies. Right. So it's, it's the, the difference between order and chaos or something. And, and, you know, the, the keto movement is, is a very simple set of rules. This much protein, this much fat, this many calories, and limit your carbohydrates and you will be fit. Yeah. And, and when that's what people are looking for. And that's why the, the movement of intuitive eating is, is never going to, to take off in the same way that something like veganism would be. 'cause intuitive eating is saying, we wanna teach you how to have a conversation with your body that allows you to figure out what's right for me now. And, but people don't have that. They need discipline. Yeah. And veganism for all of the criticisms that people can have for it. And I'm not talking about vegan activists, I'm just talking about the people that are saying this is the right way for me to eat. They have a set of rules that allows them to function in the world without having to think about every single meal that they have.

Dwayne Faber [00:59:14] Right. I mean, my body craves pasta, ding, dongs, and hohos. So I, I cannot listen to my body. So that and that, and that's your a hundred percent right? We, we need discipline in our lives, and I think these diets, quote unquote, will, you know, provide the, the guidelines for our eating. And, and I, yeah, definitely the popularity has been the keto diet. There's been more of a push for that. The Atkins diet, I mean, on a percentage basis, the vegan, the vegan percentage is actually mini minimal. I mean, it's single digits as far as vegans in the US

Vance Crowe [00:59:47] Yeah. I think you see so much of it because it's an easy story for the media to talk about, right? Yep. It's a juxtaposition that you don't, you don't have with other things. Like, you know, if I say I'm, well, like you, you were saying, you know, I'm on keto, which means I'm gonna limit carbohydrates. You're not going to war with the carbohydrate industry. You're just saying, I'm just gonna limit myself. But a lot of vegans, one of the ways that they can get themselves to make the sacrifice of not eating animal products Yeah. Is by, is by saying the other side is not just incorrect, they're doing something evil.

Dwayne Faber [01:00:24] Right.

Vance Crowe [01:00:24] And then by creating that dragon that they can go out and slay. Yeah. Now they're suffering, which is not eating meat has meaning because they are contributing to what they believe as improving, improving the world because they're, they're gonna go show other people just how terrible the animal ag industry is.

Dwayne Faber [01:00:43] Yep. Exactly. Right. And, and a while back, I was at a conference and I ran in, this was several years ago, ran into a, an executive that worked for General Mills, and he was telling me about Cheerios. And at that time they went GMO free. And I asked him, well, how, how much did sales increase on your Cheerios after being GMO free? And he said, zero. Our sales did not go up one single iota. But yet there are very few consumers that will go and say, well, I'm not gonna buy that now because it is non GMO. So they want to cover a blanket with as many people as possible, particularly in the West coast. Costco is actually the biggest purveyor of organic produce on the west coast. And their philosophy is too, we're gonna get organic cheap enough where we're not going to eliminate the customer that would preclude them from, from buying it. They don't care either way. But we're also capturing that organic customer and getting his needs met her

Vance Crowe [01:01:41] Needs. So Na Nasim Taleb, who is a mathematician and kind of provocateur who he certainly has no love for genetic engineering or any of the work that I would've done. But he has an interesting concept, which is called the intransigent minority, which says if you're a company, it benefits you. If, if, if, for example, I, he talks about kosher, right? So if I'm selling orange juice and it is not kosher, then you have everybody can buy it except for this group of people that follow, you know, the kosher diet. Right. But if I add that on, now everybody that wants kosher diet can get orange juice if, if I now get it certified as, as kosher. Now everybody that, that wasn't drinking it before can drink it. Plus all of the people that don't follow kosher. Yes.

Dwayne Faber [01:02:32] They

Vance Crowe [01:02:32] Don't, they don't have a problem meeting it either. And

Dwayne Faber [01:02:34] That's

Vance Crowe [01:02:34] The same thing with GMOs in that it is a form of like a, like a blessing that if there are people that are eating non GMO, they won't eat things that have GMOs in them. But if you have people that will eat GMOs or non-GMOs, they'll eat it too. So, so a lot of these companies just say, well, I'm gonna add this on 'cause the potential to expand my market share by 2% Yep. May help. And I think, I hope Cheerios learn their lesson. I mean, they, they actually played a kind of a sneaky game when they did that because when, as far as I understand it, when they went non GMO, it's wheat, right? Right. So there aren't, there is not genetically engineered wheat, but the things that were genetically engineered were some of the minerals that were in there and some of the, the additives that made Cheerios healthier. So what ended up happening was to go non GMO, they actually shrank the bag and the, and the amount of, of vitamins and minerals that were in Cheerios actually went down. So they, they actually were selling a less fortified product before they went non GMO.

Dwayne Faber [01:03:33] Oh, that is, that's fascinating. Well, and, and that's the juxtaposition with a lot of these ideologies too. It's similar to, you know, Brad Pitt in California pushing for larger cages for chickens or cage free chickens, you know, Brad Pitt can afford that $3 extra per for a dozen eggs. The cost now gets passed on to a single mother with five or six kids that's just trying to get by. Right. And so it doesn't hurt the people that are pushing for it. It hurts the people at the bottom. You know, and it's similar with this talk about if we, if we did go organic, or if we did get rid of Roundup and, and we did go GMO free, who's it gonna impact? It's gonna be impact the people that are dependent on our excess to survive. And, and it would impact people like in countries like Africa where we, where we send a lot of extra food.

Vance Crowe [01:04:23] One of the thoughts that I have when you start thinking about cages, right? This, you might have an interesting perspective on this because there is some limit on how much you efficiency you would force onto your dairy cows. Right. If you, if you could make it, so, hey, we get 20% more, but all we have to do is tie the cow down to the ground and keep it there for 24 hours a day. And then we, like, there's some limit on how much, how you would treat that cow. Right.

Dwayne Faber [01:04:53] Right. It, I mean, there is a spectrum, right? And a lot of it depends on, I mean, as a society, we're, we're going more towards animal welfare. And some of it's been good. I mean, you go to, I mean, you go halal, you go to, to Muslim countries, I mean, they're, they're killing animals by slitting their throat and letting them bleed out. That is not humane. And, and that goes on through much of the world. And so yeah, it, it, it is a balance. I mean, my great-grandfather growing up in, in, in Europe, they, there was a period where there was starvation towards the end of World War ii and they would have rabbits up in the attic and the Germans would come by to the, the, the country and the farms looking for food and just go and take it. Well, he had rabbits in cages just big enough for the rabbit to live. And he would, every day they'd go feed it Daniel lions and, and grass. And, and that was not humane. But at the same time they were looking to survive. They were looking for animal fats. They were looking for calories. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:05:50] And that's life or death, right there. It, it

Dwayne Faber [01:05:52] Is life or death. And so our perspective on animal welfare does change depending on where we are at as a society too.

Vance Crowe [01:06:00] Well, Jason Lusk, who's an economist that's out of Purdue University now has a really interesting study that he did, which was to say, if you were to rank what is the most important to you, nutrition, price, quality, and then environmental and animal welfare, you and you, you divide out, like people can put their votes that say they have a hundred votes and you can divide them out until you make over $65,000 a year or something like that. Yeah. My numbers might be slightly off. The only things you care about are price and nutrition and availability. Yes.

Dwayne Faber [01:06:40] And

Vance Crowe [01:06:40] Then once you make over a certain amount of money, now your, your, how much do I care about animal welfare and how much do I care goes way up or, or environmental stewardship goes way up and then price goes down to almost, you know, zero, they don't care at all because they're completely price insensitive. It doesn't matter to them. Right. And so your, your description of, you know, do, do the people that are at the bottom suffering the most and the people that are at the top of the income scale, not having any idea that there are other people that make decisions actually based on price. What am I going to buy today based on how much does it cost?

Dwayne Faber [01:07:14] And, and I think we've shifted a little bit in that, in that the millennials are the ones driving this too. But, and at the same time, I would venture that the vast majority of Americans still want their dollar 99 cheeseburger. They still want affordable produce. And I mean, what we're talking about, it's growing and I think it's gonna continue to grow. And I think it's the trend, but there still is a dichotomy of two different consumers. It's like, for us, we, we sell butter in Safeway as the Safeway brand, and we package it and it's, it's, I, I don't know the number 75 cents a dollar or less than our branded product. And it's the exact same butter, but it's just got a different packaging and that kind of stuff goes on everywhere.

Vance Crowe [01:07:58] So that's, that was one of the questions somebody had for you, which is if I go to the store Yeah.

Dwayne Faber [01:08:03] And

Vance Crowe [01:08:04] I buy the branded milk versus the store-bought milk. Yep. Is the farmer getting more money out of one or the other? Should I care? Is that a conscious decision I should be making to buy branded or not?

Dwayne Faber [01:08:16] It, it probably would benefit the farmer more. If you took the branded product, particularly if it's from a co-op, then then you'd be sending more money back to the farmer. The, the store brand typically is the one, it's the, the lowest cost that the, the co-op is just selling to them to move product. And

Vance Crowe [01:08:33] Which one do you have in your refrigerator?

Dwayne Faber [01:08:34] Branded product, baby? No, no. We, we do just to, just to support our, just to support our co-op and so,

Vance Crowe [01:08:43] Okay. And do you buy organic for your family?

Dwayne Faber [01:08:46] I do not, no. I don't. It's, I, I don't believe that. I mean the, the impact that it has is great enough to justify the price.

Vance Crowe [01:08:57] Speaking of organic and Jason Lusk, he actually has a concept called nitrogen smuggling, which you and I have actually talked about. I don't know how comfortable you'll be talking about this on a podcast, but I'll be interested to hear your thoughts on it. Which is one of the things that goes on in organic agriculture production is they say, well, we don't use fertilizers, we don't use synthetic fertilizers. We only use natural fertilizers that come from say, manure. Whereas a conventional farmer or modern farmer might be using, you know, the, the nitrogen that they can knife in. So the stuff that comes from the Haber-Bosch process. But the funny thing is, what Jason Lusk refers to as nitrogen smuggling is you have, let's say GMO silage. So you have corn that has GMOs that allows it to resist certain types of insects or allows you to spray certain kind of ins or herbicides on it without killing it. Then you feed that silage to your cows. So it's GMO feed going into your cows, and now they have manure. And then you are able to take that manure and go spread it out on fields, which is now bringing nitrogen to those fields that, that, that will then be used to grow organic produce on. And so now you have like the, they had the benefit of GMO crops.

Dwayne Faber [01:10:17] Yes.

Vance Crowe [01:10:17] But not the, they didn't, they didn't actually use the synthetic fertilizer. Have you heard of this concept before?

Dwayne Faber [01:10:22] A absolutely. I'm involved in this concept. So I have a neighbor farmer, a ton of acres, and he loves following my rotation of grass that I've had in grass for three years. And so we typically don't have any sprays on our grass. So our grass technically, I mean, it, it's considered organic and he'll follow that and he loves it because it's got a huge built up inventory of nitrogen and all these other beneficial bugs. And, and he, his yields on that are, are very, very good. And then also he'll have me apply manure in the fall before he plants his organic crops in the springtime. And so that limits the amount of organic chemicals that he, or organic chemicals and fertilizer that he has to buy because it's super expensive. In fact, a lot of organic fertilizer is made from chicken manure. Chicken manure is very concentrated in its nitrogen. And again, same story, the chicken manure comes from chickens all fed

Vance Crowe [01:11:17] GMO grain

Dwayne Faber [01:11:18] That were all fed GMO grain. Absolutely. Right.

Vance Crowe [01:11:20] I mean, if there's one thing that can be said for the benefit of organic, I, I have some real challenges with it because to me, most of the reason that people buy it is because they're, they've been made to feel afraid Yeah. Of, of the other kind. But it does create an ecosystem where a farmer can make more money on something like manure. Whereas if, if, if you had to pay to get rid of that, that would be cutting into your margins. Yeah. But then I still feel ambivalent about it because the reason that his, he's able to pay you for expensive manure is because people are potentially buying that because they think the other stuff has poison on it.

Dwayne Faber [01:11:54] Absolutely. I'm a free market capitalism. If you can convince somebody to pay $6 for, for a head of broccoli, I mean more power to you go for it. Right. And so that's what the organic industry has done. The sad part is a lot of times they disparage their conventional counterparts when oftentimes they have a very symbiotic relationship that they're tied to more closely the GMO market and, and, and cows and dairy manure in, in specifically. So,

Vance Crowe [01:12:20] Well this brings up an interesting component of the agriculture industry that people living in the city would have almost no knowledge of, which is the checkoff program.

Dwayne Faber [01:12:30] Yep.

Vance Crowe [01:12:31] And so maybe we'll do a little bit of a description of the checkoff and then we can talk about how this plays into the organic versus modern farming challenge. So when you are, are harvesting milk and you go to sell that you, in order to be a part of the checkoff, you are required to give money, explain how that works.

Dwayne Faber [01:12:50] Yeah. So the checkoff was actually mandated by Congress and, and in order. Oh,

Vance Crowe [01:12:54] I didn't know that.

Dwayne Faber [01:12:54] Yes. And there was actually, what, last year or the year before, there was a move to try and limit the amount of dollars that goes into dairy checkoff and they have to run it through Congress to get it passed. And I'm not a hundred percent sure on the history of it, but basically 15 cents out of every a hundred pounds of milk I sell goes into the promotion of dairy products.

Vance Crowe [01:13:16] And how much is that if you, if you sell a hundred pounds of milk Yeah.

Dwayne Faber [01:13:19] How much is that? Right. So it, it works out to, to about 55 to $60,000 a year that goes into the promotion.

Vance Crowe [01:13:25] Man, that's a very serious tax.

Dwayne Faber [01:13:27] Yeah, it is. And that's essentially what it is. So farmers have varying degrees of views on it. I mean, to me it is a tax, I mean it's the, it's the, the pay to play. You, you have to pay it. You don't have a choice in it. And, and you have to send the money in.

Vance Crowe [01:13:41] And so where does that money then go?

Dwayne Faber [01:13:43] So some of it stays locally, but then the majority of it, I believe 10 cents goes nationally. And it goes to support national programs that work with like Domino's or Pizza Hut or McDonald's and encourages them to use dairy products in, in their menu and actually has a kitchen and says this is how you should use it. Or also in export where they'll sometimes subsidize the export of dairy products to move them out.

Vance Crowe [01:14:10] And so this is essentially saying we recognize that farmers, an individual farmer that's got either 2000 cows or 70 cows, is not gonna be able to create an advertising campaign or a lobbying movement or Yep. Be able to go send representatives to China to sell more of our way milk. So let's compile all that money together.

Dwayne Faber [01:14:30] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:14:30] Have a group that, that goes out and does this work for us advertising and marketing? The got milk campaign would've come from the checkoff program, correct.

Dwayne Faber [01:14:37] Is

Vance Crowe [01:14:37] That right?

Dwayne Faber [01:14:37] Yep.

Vance Crowe [01:14:37] So one of the things that I have found interesting about the checkoff program and, and really all of of agriculture on the whole is that in the checkoff program they have rules that say you cannot disparage any other type of farming. So it's essentially like, we are gonna play on the white side, we are gonna be all good and we are not going to disparage other people. Yeah.

Dwayne Faber [01:15:02] And

Vance Crowe [01:15:03] Then, and then we have a whole bunch of rules about what we can talk about and what we can't talk about. The, and then that has also been pretty pervasive in farming pretty much for, for the most part, the idea is a coach doesn't talk to another coach about a player. Right. We, we do not criticize the other side. But the challenge has been the checkoff program in a lot of ways has tied the hands of, of farmers doing the modern farming or conventional farming behind their back because you're not allowed to talk smack about the other side, but the other side doesn't have that rule. No,

Dwayne Faber [01:15:33] That's

Vance Crowe [01:15:34] Right. And so they get to sit and sling things at, at the, at the conventional side. And the checkoff is, is yes, they have all this money, they have all this buying power Yeah.

Dwayne Faber [01:15:42] And they

Vance Crowe [01:15:42] Aren't allowed to hit back.

Dwayne Faber [01:15:43] Yeah. To be fair, the organic industry also does pay into the checkoff program. So the checkoff program represents both sides.

Vance Crowe [01:15:51] Oh, interesting. Yeah.

Dwayne Faber [01:15:52] Okay. So they, they can't do that. There, there's been a lot of frustration with the checkoff program. It's one of the largest ones of all checkoff programs. It's the

Vance Crowe [01:16:00] Dairy one is, yeah.

Dwayne Faber [01:16:00] It's been hundreds of millions of dollars go every year into promoting dairy products. And, and like a lot of big corporations, they get more and more corporate and it becomes big government, particularly when there's a lack of control or oversight, you know, and it feels like there's a lot of fat in, in the program. And yet we still do need those representatives lobbying congress to represent our needs. We still do need to promote our dairy products. And, and so the question is how efficient are they in converting that $200 million into sales and, and is it making dairy more profitable? And is it growing the pie and, and expanding the dairy industry?

Vance Crowe [01:16:43] Well, I can tell you that I have been invited by the Utah dairy out to speak with dieticians.

Dwayne Faber [01:16:53] Yes.

Vance Crowe [01:16:53] That was an interesting experience. That that was one of those things where I was like, well, I would never have thought to do this. Right.

Dwayne Faber [01:17:00] But

Vance Crowe [01:17:00] This is a very good idea. 'cause you have all these dieticians, a lot of them are working in like hospital

Dwayne Faber [01:17:05] Settings

Vance Crowe [01:17:06] And so they have no connection whatsoever with agriculture, but they hear all these things that are negative marketing. And then they say, well, I don't know what to believe. So once a year, the Utah, Idaho dairy, the, the West Coast

Dwayne Faber [01:17:19] Yep.

Vance Crowe [01:17:20] Checkoff program brings these dieticians like 300 in for breakfast. Wow.

Dwayne Faber [01:17:24] And then these

Vance Crowe [01:17:24] Dieticians can ask anything they want about farming. So you see very, very creative things coming out of it. Yeah.

Dwayne Faber [01:17:30] But

Vance Crowe [01:17:30] Then you also look at some of their advertising campaigns where they are spending millions and millions of dollars. And you have to say, right.

Dwayne Faber [01:17:37] How

Vance Crowe [01:17:37] Effective is that at getting people to drink more milk? I don't know the answer to that.

Dwayne Faber [01:17:40] Exactly. Right. And, and if you look at milk consumption, milk consumption's gone down. And there's a, there's a variety of reasons for that over

Vance Crowe [01:17:47] What time period

Dwayne Faber [01:17:48] Over the last 20 years. So the amount of dairy products that people consume has not gone down, but we're just consuming it in different ways. But fluid milk sales have gone down. And I think some of that is, like we talked earlier, soy milk and, and all the nut milk. And so that has been some of the challenge.

Vance Crowe [01:18:04] What is nut milk

Dwayne Faber [01:18:07] Ground up nuts and strained? And that's, that's about all I know of it

Vance Crowe [01:18:13] Really.

Dwayne Faber [01:18:13] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:18:13] And what do you think of it?

Dwayne Faber [01:18:18] I think it's a lucrative market. I think they make, I think they make a lot of money. A again, I I'm very much free choice. I mean, if, if somebody wants to, to, to make that, what I, what I don't like is them going out and, and calling it milk. I mean, by the definition of milk, it, it has to come from a mammal, you know, it's no different than me starting a, a shoe company called the check mark. And, and all of a sudden, you know, competing with Nike, I mean, you're calling something milk that, that is not milk. And you're putting forward an inferior product to what the, the product actually is.

Vance Crowe [01:18:58] Do you think that that should be legislated? You're not allowed to call it milk?

Dwayne Faber [01:19:02] I think so.

Vance Crowe [01:19:03] Wow. Yeah. So the, the free market libertarian believes that there should be some, some legislation on, on what words you can use.

Dwayne Faber [01:19:09] Yeah. And, and that's done all the time. Right. We have patents on certain verbiage on just do it. I mean, that's patented. So I mean the, the definition of milk and, and to our discredit, we were actually in the middle of a fight too, talking about Parmesan cheese. Parmesan cheese should come from Parmesan, Italy. Instead we had Kraft come and say, here's Parmesan cheese. And we made it in a, in a huge cheese factory in Philadelphia or wherever. And, and we are putting forward a product that technically is not Parmesan cheese,

Vance Crowe [01:19:43] Just like the difference between a sparkling white wine and champagne. That champagne should come from just the Champagne

Dwayne Faber [01:19:49] Valley

Vance Crowe [01:19:49] In France. And

Dwayne Faber [01:19:50] Exactly.

Vance Crowe [01:19:51] So this is an interesting concept. 'cause I was actually just in a Twitter kind of back and forth. There's a guy, there's a young guy that's probably worth following on Twitter named Jordan Gall, I'll, I'll link him on here. And he asked, Hey, what do you think about calling this impossible meat? Or the tofu burgers calling the meat? What do you think of that? And my reaction is, we wanna stay as far away from having government intervention on determining what we can and can't say as possible. So you've got all these farmers

Dwayne Faber [01:20:24] That

Vance Crowe [01:20:24] Are, that are free marketeers that are right up until you have the word thing. And then they start saying, well, we have trademarks and we have these words. Right. It just, it, it, it seems like it's a fight that goes against all of the principles that free marketeers have over something that's I import. I mean, like, I know it's your livelihood. Right. So it's interesting to me to hear your, your perspective on it, but I mean, more rules rather than less.

Dwayne Faber [01:20:48] I mean, it, it'd be no different than somebody putting forward a doctorate thesis where they, they pasted and copied from another author. Right. You would go and you'd say, that's plagiarism, that's dealing from another person. You know? And yet when we do it in the food industry, we go and say, well, everybody can use that term milk when the technical definition of milk is very clear.

Vance Crowe [01:21:09] I mean, you started from the very beginning Right. Making it really clear. Yeah.

Dwayne Faber [01:21:12] And, and, and companies are suing each other every day over things like this, over patent infringements and stealing trademarks. And in a lot of ways, I think, I think milk is the same. So why, why do they call it milk? Why didn't they come up with something else? Because it's easy to sell by calling it milk.

Vance Crowe [01:21:28] Yeah. I mean, and it's true that, you know, one of the first things you learn in a Jesuit education, so I went to college at Marquette, and you have to take logic and day one of the very first day of philosophy, they say he who controls the definition controls the argument.

Dwayne Faber [01:21:45] And

Vance Crowe [01:21:45] So whoever has control of what is the definition of meat or milk will be the one that gets to run the argument about how is all this stuff working? Do you believe that by calling soy milk soy milk or, or almond milk? You think that that's confusing customers?

Dwayne Faber [01:22:03] I I don't think it confuses them, but I think it's given them a unfair advantage because they're, I mean, it's, again, you've come up with a million different examples, but a, a Rolex watch and then somebody comes up with a knockoff Rolex watch, well, our entire trade war with China is, is over cheap imitations of a real product and them stealing stuff and steal, stealing patents and infringing on patents. And, and I I, it'd be interesting to see the data, if they were, were told to take that away and what the result would be and to see what consumers would do. And probably now they, they would continue with it. But, you know, similar to having a, a craft Parmesan cheese and calling it cheese in a can, it loses some of its appeal. So,

Vance Crowe [01:22:52] And I mean, one of the reasons that I think people are drawn to almond milk and soy milk is that there is a perception that the conventionally produced milk has a bunch of antibiotics and

Dwayne Faber [01:23:07] You're

Vance Crowe [01:23:07] Pumping those cows full of hormones. So what's going on there? Like, should people be concerned about how much antibiotics is in their milk?

Dwayne Faber [01:23:16] So the, there's a strict testing process before every load of milk is picked up. It is tested. And so we do use antibiotics. I I feel like it's an animal welfare issue that if an animal is sick, we, we owe them the, the service of, of treating them with antibiotics. And I mean, similar to, and, and on the hormone level, I mean, there's not been I any ability to determine any negative effects on hormone. Similar to Monsanto coming out with BST several years ago. And, and that got huge flack and huge kickback bovine somatotropin, it's a naturally occurring hormone in cows and it controls their ability to eat. And so if you give them a shot of this hormone, they go and they eat more, and then they convert that feed into more pounds of milk and there's, and

Vance Crowe [01:24:04] Then that means you need less cows.

Dwayne Faber [01:24:06] Exactly. Right. And you need less cows and you have more efficient cows. And yet be, and I, I think if there was a way to feed it, I think people would've been okay with it. But since it, I mean, it's a bad visual to give a shot to a cow to produce more milk and it just doesn't look good. And so the vast majority of milk now in the US that comes from cows not treated with this hormone, and yet cows that are treated with the hormone, the level in their milk is no different from one treated with RBST to those that are not treated.

Vance Crowe [01:24:38] Meaning that the, the whatever BST that you're pumping into them does not get put into their milk.

Dwayne Faber [01:24:43] Correct. Yeah. And it gets metabolized or Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:24:45] That was one of the big challenges was that they, they were trying to come up with more and more sophisticated testing techniques to say, which ones have BST in 'em? And they, and they didn't know No,

Dwayne Faber [01:24:55] That's right.

Vance Crowe [01:24:55] You, you can't detect the difference. Nope.

Dwayne Faber [01:24:57] That's right. And, and then on the antibiotic level, I mean, we've got testing now that is so good that you can test down to the nano level and, and you can find antibiotics in, in the nano level. And Organic Valley actually came out with a hit piece saying, Hey, we tested this conventional milk and on the nano level it had antibiotics in it. And when you're talking about like one, 1000000000th, I mean, that's one second out of 32 years. I mean, it's just a tiny, tiny drop that, that is almost insignificant. But yet it is still there. Similar to the glyphosate issue, I mean, where you test something and, and on the nano level, it's gonna be there, and yet all the science points do this is fine and it doesn't impact you negatively as a consumer.

Vance Crowe [01:25:44] Yeah. I mean, that's one of the biggest challenges of you. We were talking earlier about the story that, that people tell themselves to understand the world. Yeah.

Dwayne Faber [01:25:52] Because

Vance Crowe [01:25:53] We can't, you know, you had to take 1000000000th and put it into some sort of comparison that we could think of One second, you know, that out of 32 years. But we really can't understand those numbers. And when you're talking about something that people become afraid of, whether it's glyphosate in your Cheerios, or you know, antibiotics in, in your milk, people, the, you know, I, I often talk about if you want to really scare the shit out of somebody, just come when you get back home, you know, fill up a glass of water for one of your daughters. Right. Set it down in front of them and then push it over, look at it, then look up at them, look back down, smile, and look back up at them.

Dwayne Faber [01:26:34] Right.

Vance Crowe [01:26:34] Is your daughter gonna drink that water? No.

Dwayne Faber [01:26:36] No. Hell no. Because

Vance Crowe [01:26:37] There's like, we have all been programmed to be like, if there's something that might be hidden there

Dwayne Faber [01:26:43] Absolutely.

Vance Crowe [01:26:43] Then I'm not gonna do it. Because all of the people that ignored those warning signs got eaten by alligators or, you know, the thing jumped out. Absolutely. So our minds are programmed to be hyper hypersensitive to things that could be wrong. And that's why it's really insidious when a group like Organic Valley does that, or somebody does something against the, about glyphosate because you are just hitting on that fear button. And all there has to be is one molecule of doubt. Yes. And better to be on the safe side than the not

Dwayne Faber [01:27:11] Exactly. Right. And, and for years we've evolved to look out for each other. And that's how the human race has survived, is we created these tribes looking out for each other. So now you latch onto a tribe and your tribe says, Hey, there's, there's 1000000000th of a possibility that that's bad for you. Well then right away we latch onto that because our tribe said that. And we believe it. 'cause our tribe said that. And the interesting thing too is people don't change their mind from facts. Pe-people will be confronted with facts all day long. The only way to change somebody's mind is to have somebody in your tribe that you're close friends with that you agree 90 to 95% on. And then they'll say, Hey, have you thought about things this way? And then they are open to the possibility of changing their mind. And, and that is a danger, it's a scary time because that's their identity and that's who they are. Right. And so it's very difficult to get somebody to change their mind. And similar with social media going out there and and presenting a whole host of facts, we don't believe it because, well, and we've been lied to. I mean, the science community told us that margarine was better than butter. And so we're programmed, like you said, to look for potential threats and we rely on our tribe to tell us what those threats are and to avoid them

Vance Crowe [01:28:23] And to go out and go against what your tribe thinks. Right. So there's a guy named Yosha Bach, who he goes by Plin, P-L-I-N-Z, on on Twitter. And I find him to be infinitely fascinating. One of the talks that he gave was to talk about how like if you're trying to get computers to think like human beings, you first have to understand how do human beings know what they know? 'cause he's studying artificial intelligence. And one of the things that he points out is it is far more beneficial for a human most of the time not to look for the right answer, but to look for the normative answer. What answer what truth allows me to get along with this group of people as opposed to what answer gives me the correct one. Right. Because you wanna be a part of that tribe. And there's only a few people that are willing to askew what the group wants for the right answer. We'd all like to think that we're that way, But it doesn't actually benefit us that much to go for the right answer over the normative answer. So if you're a mom that's gonna bring in, you know, treats for your kids, and there's a couple of of people in the intransigent minority that we were talking about before with Nasem Taleb, you only need one or two moms to say, my children only eat organic X, y, z for this mom to say, you know, if I just pay the a dollar 50 more to be able to make these organic, then I don't have to fight with anybody. I don't have any of these problems and I get to stay in the tribe. The answer becomes obvious for her that that's the way to go, as opposed to fighting over a dollar 50 that it costs to make organic brownies.

Dwayne Faber [01:29:58] Yeah, no, that, that's a hundred percent accurate. And, and it, it's why getting into massive arguments with people on social media goes nowhere either. Right. No matter where, how many facts you present to somebody, they won't change their mind. And for me on social media, it's about first leading by being genuine, by being who you are. And then when there's an outbreak that looks disparaging to the dairy industry, they trust you enough and they say, Hey, you're part of my tribe. What is your opinion on this fair life issue where animals are being abused? Does this happen on dairy farms? And they trust you because now they've taken you in as part of your tribe. And, and that's how we get through to consumers too.

Vance Crowe [01:30:39] Alright, well you brought up something pretty interesting. A lot of people might not know about it, which is the Fairlife Farms. Now some people will, and you know, we kind of risk the causing the Streisand effect where you bring everybody's attention to it. But I'll give a little bit of background and then you can kind of give, give some thoughts on, on. So, so Fair Life is a part of Fair Oaks Farms, which is up in northern Indiana. And they have made their dairy farm, which is one of the largest in the Midwest, if not one in the largest in the country. And they've turned it into a tourist attraction where people that are living in Chicago or Gary, Indiana or wherever, can come in and actually see a working dairy farm. But then they can also see what it's like to raise pigs. And there's a crop building and they've turned it into this very fun. Have you ever been there? I

Dwayne Faber [01:31:27] Have not, no. Okay.

Vance Crowe [01:31:27] So I've been there a couple of times and, and it is really interesting and it's kind of this twilight zone kind of world where you imagine like people are so far away from agriculture that it is a tourist attraction to bring them to a farm. Yeah.

Dwayne Faber [01:31:40] But

Vance Crowe [01:31:40] They have always prided themselves on, let us show you how we actually are treating animals and we'll bring you into the barn so you can see it. We'll actually take you in there in, in trolleys and show you, and you can ask any question you want. And our employees are all open and transparent. So that brings us up to the fair life situation, which happened. Do you want, do you wanna give a little background on, on what happened with the A RM and Yeah.

Dwayne Faber [01:32:03] And

Vance Crowe [01:32:03] All that?

Dwayne Faber [01:32:03] So a RM even in the world of animal rights groups are, are a lot more militant even than peta. And, and when all the footage broke, PETA still distanced themselves from a RM just because they engage in tactics that aren't necessarily above board. And, and recently, so there was a video showing abusing of calves, throwing calves, kicking, kicking animals, and dead, dead calves. And, and it looked bad. I mean, it was, it was bad. And we have to do better. We have to strive.

Vance Crowe [01:32:35] So, so, but just sort a little bit more background. So a RM

Dwayne Faber [01:32:39] Put

Vance Crowe [01:32:39] Some employee, they got one or two or three people hired into Fair Oaks Farms, and then those people started taking undercover recordings of what they said was just happening on the farm. Correct.

Dwayne Faber [01:32:52] And they filmed it over eight, nine months, I believe. And so they sat on this footage to build more and more of a case. And only recently it came out that they were, the employees that were hired were encouraging farm employees to throw calves, to kick calves, to abuse them in order to get good footage. And so obviously they come with an agenda. They're, they're hoping to paint the dairy industry as abusers of dairy cows, abusers of animals. And, and Fair Oaks is a prime target because they are so transparent and they say, we do everything right, come and look, walk through our barn, see everything. And, and they've done a really good job because they're, they are modern agriculture and they show people modern agriculture instead of this idyllic pic picturesque farm with 20 cows that we're hand milking. And everybody has in their mind they say, no, this is modern agriculture. We're doing a good job. Look at how we do things. And they've kind of been championed as, as leading the way.

Vance Crowe [01:33:51] Well, and they have a very, a very big contract with Coca-Cola. Correct. 'cause they started producing Fairlife milk, which is a higher protein milk, and they make ice cream and they, and so they, they really put themselves out front and then the activist group targeted them and then released these videos on, on social media. I saw 'em on Facebook. Then there, there came out news articles where it really looked like, you know, you, you were talking about some sort of, you know, hellscape on, on Fair Oaks Farms where if a baby calf wasn't drinking milk, the the person on video would kick the cow. Or when they were trying to load up cows, they were, they were literally throwing them into the livestock tr trailers. I I thought it was particularly interesting that Fair Oaks came back and said, we are gonna be as open as we possibly can about this. Yep. So we had actually let go of the employees that were on film before the film ever came out. We have a contract that says if you, if you see any sort of abuse, you are to report it immediately because we can't know what all is going on. Yep. And, and three out of the four people that were on film doing negative things Right. Had already been let go before the video had been, had been released. So now we're, now we're kind of all brought up to speed. What is the behind the scenes thing are, are you worried about having an activist at your farm?

Vance Crowe [01:35:26] I mean, could that happen to you?

Dwayne Faber [01:35:28] Absolutely. It could happen to me because, and and you talk about the vegans, I mean, they, they are militant. Right. And then they, their goal is the elimination of animal agri agriculture. And so no matter how good of a job you're doing, they are never going to believe you're doing a good enough job because their belief is you shouldn't own cows at all. And that is a constant threat for us. And so every month we have 10 guidelines about how we treat our cows on our farm. And one of the things that we say is, every cow on here is a mother treat her like a mother. And every month my employees have to sign an affidavit saying that, Hey, we treated the cows in accordance with the standard operating procedure for this every

Vance Crowe [01:36:07] Month. Every

Dwayne Faber [01:36:08] Month. Yep. And so we're going, we're trying to go above and beyond to show that hey, we, we treat animals with the utmost care. We have a protocol that if you see abuse, you report it, and we need to create a paper history that says for the last three, four years everybody's agreed. And every month they know and they're reminded that they have to treat animals with care and respect.

Vance Crowe [01:36:30] So one of the things that comes to mind as you're saying, we ask people to sign this once a month, is it seems like only a monster

Dwayne Faber [01:36:39] Would

Vance Crowe [01:36:40] Kick a baby calf. So, you know, like if, you know, kicking my dog or something is so far beyond anything that I can picture myself doing. Right. What is going on? That there are people that you could hire that that's what you, that's what you need to do is to ask them to sign that.

Dwayne Faber [01:36:56] Yeah. It, it, it's, it's difficult because you're dealing with animals that don't always act the way you want. You're dealing with a large animal and you're dealing with humans. I mean, when you solve animal abuse to cats and dogs, then we can say a hundred with a hundred percent certainty. We've solved it in the dairy world too. But, but we have, you're dealing with humans that get frustrated with calves. And so we have to constantly remind people to put away that frustration and that anger when a cow kicks them. I mean, that it, it it's a painful process and, and it's not a good process. You're also dealing with a population and oftentimes that came from Mexico and, and they came from a country where similar to halal, I mean, animal cruelty kind of was the norm. I mean, and you're dealing with people that grew up with rival gangs fighting each other and seeing bodies in the streets and rapes and murders. And so they come to the US and we have to tell them, your

Vance Crowe [01:37:55] Laborers are coming from those kind of situations.

Dwayne Faber [01:37:57] Yeah, yeah. They are. Yeah. And, and yeah. Coming for a better life in, in, in a, in a better country. Right. And they're trying to leave that behind and, and that's why there's such a push to get to America. And so we have to train them that, hey, these are the standards in our country. The standards in your country are different than ours. And so that's why it takes constant, constant education to teach them that this is how we treat animals here.

Vance Crowe [01:38:24] Wow.

Dwayne Faber [01:38:24] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:38:25] And have you ever had a situation in your farm?

Dwayne Faber [01:38:29] I've talked to people and, and they've, they've agreed to, to make changes. So we do have, I mean, we allow them to, to, and I've seen it, you know, where they push a calf because a calf doesn't drink. A lot of times the most frustrating part is baby calves when they don't drink because it's in their best interest to drink milk and grow. And, and when they don't, it gets to be frustrating. And so my main calf feeder is a lady and ladies tend to have better temperaments and do better in being patient with a calf and treating a calf better. And they, they've got more of a maternal instinct than males do.

Vance Crowe [01:39:02] Oh, that is interesting.

Dwayne Faber [01:39:03] And so that's actually been a huge plus for us is, is having her take care of the calf feeding and does an excellent job, treats 'em like her babies. And so super grateful to have her there. So,

Vance Crowe [01:39:14] So let's maybe change gears just a little bit, but it's kind of in the same vein where farming itself or dairy farming can be pretty frustrating, right? You've talked about four years of not having things go well, at least for, for margins and, and making money. What, what is the state of how, how, you know, we hear a lot about mental health of farmers. There's been a whole bunch of articles written about farmer suicides and being worried as the, the trade wars have gone on. Where, where do you, what do you think about all that?

Dwayne Faber [01:39:52] Yeah, it, it, it has been tough. And, and for me, I've always said that farming doesn't define me. You know, I have to separate myself from the farm. When I come home from the dairy farm, I have to put all my cares and worries at, leave 'em at the front door and then go in there and be there for my family. And the struggle is when farming defines you, when farming goes poorly, then you take that on yourself and on your shoulders and, and it can have more of an impact because you're so emotionally invested. And, and for me, I try and keep that distinction and, and there's no doubt that there, there has been an issue with, with the suicide rates going up. I mean, I think it's been representative too, of just the broader population. I mean, suicide rates have gone up and, and it's, it's tough because we're at a time in history where we're by every standard and metric life is better than it has ever been. Whether it's murders, rapes, I mean income access to high quality food. I mean, we, we are better by every metric. And yet suicide rates have still gone up. And so I What are your thoughts? Why, why has the suicide rate gone up?

Vance Crowe [01:40:59] My thoughts are, are pretty complicated on this, but I actually have thought about it quite a bit because the suicide rate among men our age and up to 50, like I don't think there's anybody our age that doesn't know somebody or at least know somebody that knows somebody that has taken their own life, particularly among men. And I think a large part of that is There is a lack of meaning in, in, in people's lives. And I think that when you were talking about how much easier things have become, we, there's been this kind of movement in life to say, we should be getting rid of suffering. You know, everything should be as easy as possible. But I actually think all of the things that are meaningful in my life required some suffering they required me to make, to figure out like, things are not going the way that I want. I have to make some change. I am the only one that can make that change. And once I started to make the change and realized that the suffering was something I had to do to get somewhere else, then there was meaning. And once you have meaning in your life, then, then it's no longer suffering. And then you get to get to another place in life. And I think there has been a big movement to say we should remove as much suffering as possible, which I don't think is necessarily true. And that when bad things happen, it's okay to view yourself as the victim of circumstances.

Dwayne Faber [01:42:21] And

Vance Crowe [01:42:22] Really people that are resilient are the ones that say everything going on in my life is a consequence of me not knowing how to react in the best way possible.

Dwayne Faber [01:42:33] Yeah, and I would agree. I mean, if you go and you ask somebody on their deathbed, what is your greatest accomplishment in life? It's not gonna be the Kardashian saying, I was born on third base and I had a net worth of 200 million just because I was a Kardashian. It's gonna be the guy.

Vance Crowe [01:42:48] I think those people work their asses off.

Dwayne Faber [01:42:50] Yeah, they do. That is true. That's probably an unfair comparison. Yeah. 'cause they do, you're right. So that was a bad example. But somebody that is born on third base where they have, you know, inherited money and, and they just live their life not being challeng challenged, not having those dragons to slay, it's the person that said, look, I was really dealt a bad hand and I overcame these odds, and that is my greatest pride and joy is going and saying, and for some people it's totally different. I mean, for somebody born in the projects, it might be going out, working your butt off and owning a home. I mean, that, that may be your challenge and your joy and your pride, but that's what you take pride in because you were born in these circumstances. You went out and you listened to David Goggins and he told you to get your butt off the ground and not to feel sorry for yourself and not to be a victim, but to go out, work hard, be disciplined, create boundaries in your life. And then 20, 30 years later, the the, the fellow has a, a wife, a couple kids, the the white picket fence, and he's living the dream. And his greatest joy is getting out of that crappy situation.

Vance Crowe [01:43:55] Yeah. And I think, like, so you brought up David Goggins. It's one of the things you and I have talked about several times. I I think that that man is just truly profound. And I started, I listened to his audio book, which I think is one of the best audio books I've ever read. And most people, they look at that book and they say, he's a crazy person. Right? He's trying to run through a brick wall. So for people that don't know who he is, he is a guy that started out in the, in the military and he basically couldn't pass this, this certain type of swim test that was gonna allow him to get into the type of special forces that he want. So, so he ends up kind of meandering around for seven years doing some, some good work, but it wasn't very proud of it. He gets out of it and he becomes an exterminator

Dwayne Faber [01:44:44] And

Vance Crowe [01:44:44] He ends up ballooning up to like 300 pounds and his life is going nowhere. And he's, he's working for Ecolab Spraining for cockroaches. And then one day he sees a Navy Seal documentary and it kicks something into his brain of, I wanna be a Navy seal. And he essentially has, I don't know, 90 days or some, some short amount of time to lose enough weight to be able to try out for the Navy Seals. And then he goes on from, from doing that through a series of things which I would never want to take from somebody because the journey in his book is amazing to eventually becoming one of the, the ultimate athletes in the world. He runs a hundred mile races through, through, you know, scorching deserts. And in that book, he ends up saying, suffering is really important and you should stop thinking about I'm suffering here so that tomorrow I don't have to suffer. Right. That's not, that's not the way you should recognize I'm always going to be suffering and I need to find some way to point that suffering towards meaning towards me getting better and getting more full. So I read that book and on the last 10 minutes of it, I was out for a jog at probably five 15 in the morning and, and stopped and, and got very emotional because of how deep that was of giving people meaning. And I think that right now there is a, a major crisis of meaning. People don't have a way to make their suffering, direct them towards improving their lives. And, and, and, and the, and the movement that I've seen that goes on about making people feel so much empathy or, or to say everything's okay.

Vance Crowe [01:46:27] I mean, there's a place for suicide hotlines. There's a place for people to intervene and say, Hey, things are gonna be okay. But that's the first step and certainly not the last step. That's not the way to get people out of the trough of, of terrible suffering.

Dwayne Faber [01:46:41] Yeah. And, and I mean, I think we can use obesity as an example too. I mean, in our society we're heading towards justifying everything and confirming your beliefs. And so if your beliefs are negative, society's gonna say, you're right. You were dealt a bad hand, boy, you know, you've got a, you've got a bad thyroid, you know, and now you're 350 pounds. Or, you know, boy, you're right, you can't afford to eat good food. So you're, you're justified in, in being 350 pounds. And that's dangerous. I mean, that, that's a life or death situation that we as a society are saying it's okay to be that way. Instead of saying, no, you're fat. Get off your butt. Go, go out, start jogging, start being proactive and, and not justifying our negative beliefs and confirming our negative beliefs. And yet it's so easy to do that is confirm somebody's negative, negatives, beliefs. 'cause they're gonna agree with you. It's difficult to go and say to somebody, I'm concerned for your health, let's go jogging. Nobody wants to do that.

Vance Crowe [01:47:39] Well, that brings me to an interesting concept. Do you have close friends right now?

Dwayne Faber [01:47:46] I do.

Vance Crowe [01:47:47] So tell me about that. How often do you see your close friends? Who are they?

Dwayne Faber [01:47:51] So they're, they're, they're dairy farmers and I mean, it's, it's a, I mean, every time they drive by they flip me off and I flip them off. And that's usually indicative of, of a pretty good friend. So yeah. But they're mostly, mostly dairy farmers and, and for me, they're a support system too because sometimes we just need a vent. You know, we have a bad day and I, I try not to bring my problems and frustrations home and verbalizing our frustrations just to a buddy that just, and they don't necessarily even have to say anything. It's just sitting there listening to you and say, Hey, my day sucked. This happened, that happened, this happened. And then at the end of the day after the conversation, you say, well, let's go get it. Let's go move on. And, and it's important to have people like that in your life too. And, and they don't necessarily justify bad behavior, but they're also friends that will call you out and say, no, that was pretty stupid what you did. You know, and say, or That's pretty stupid what you said.

Vance Crowe [01:48:45] Yeah. I mean, I don't think there's anything more toxic in somebody's life than surrounding yourself by people that will not tell you that you're screwing up.

Dwayne Faber [01:48:52] Yes. Because,

Vance Crowe [01:48:53] Because like, you need someone that you respect enough that when they say, Hey, pull up the reins on this, when you're not, you're not in the right path otherwise.

Dwayne Faber [01:49:05] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:49:05] Like an individual can't do that. You, you need people in your tribe to be able to call you out. And if you don't have that, I don't know how, I don't know how you survive. No.

Dwayne Faber [01:49:14] Because that's the definition of a true friend is they're willing to risk the friendship because they care about you enough to risk offending you. They're the ones that'll say, Hey, you're fat. Go, go out and start running or jogging. And, and they're not an echo chamber. It's easy to be an echo chamber. But that to me is a shallow friendship too. We need to have people that are there to call us out and say, get off your butt and do something. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:49:36] That's exactly, I mean, the closest friends that I have are all friends that both I have gone and said, Hey, this is not, this is not right. You are not being everything that you could be. Yeah. And they've said the the same thing to me. I think that, so I have a group of guys that I get together with regularly every Thursday we get together and we, we spend time, we talk, we're, you know, giving each other shit about stuff. And when I bring other people occasionally to that group and, you know, they get to meet, we leave and they're like, I don't have any friends like that. I don't have a group like that. And I feel nothing but deep pity for them. And probably fear.

Dwayne Faber [01:50:15] Yes. Right.

Vance Crowe [01:50:15] Because I don't know how I would not be able to get along without having close friends to be able to share things with. And I think there is a crisis of men having men friendships. And it may be true with women too. I don't, I just don't know what the, the women experience is, but I think there is a major lack of men finding time and ways to get together Yep.

Dwayne Faber [01:50:38] To

Vance Crowe [01:50:39] Have that steady time

Dwayne Faber [01:50:41] To

Vance Crowe [01:50:41] Communicate.

Dwayne Faber [01:50:42] I agree a hundred percent. And I mean, part of being friends is sitting around a circle and then just making fun of each other. I mean, that's, that's how guys vent. And yet it, it's contrary to societal norms too. Societal norms, as I said, boys, you have to try and restrain those harsh words and you have to try and be nicer. And in a lot of ways it's the feminization of, of boys and men too. But guys need guy time where we talk shit to each other and we make fun of each other.

Vance Crowe [01:51:07] Well, and that's the, the, the talking shit is a really important component of being able to figure out is the voice in my head an accurate representation of what's going on in the real world? 'cause your guy friends will cut you down. Right.

Dwayne Faber [01:51:22] You

Vance Crowe [01:51:22] Know? Right. If you start thinking that you're too good, they will knock you down. And there's nothing wrong with that. Now, if you have friends that what their words are designed to do is to hurt you, that's a different thing. But, but to say that all of this ribbing that goes on between men, I mean, or, or, and I think about high school, like the people that ended up being the most well adjusted were the ones that had friends that were accomplishing things,

Dwayne Faber [01:51:45] But

Vance Crowe [01:51:45] Also getting together and talking shit.

Dwayne Faber [01:51:48] Yeah, absolutely. Right. Absolutely. No, it, it's, it's a hundred percent of our nature and we need to continue to surround ourself with those kind of people because they challenge us to get better and improve and, and they're the guardrails in life, you know, they'll say, Hey, one side, you're, you're drifting off over here. Let's get it back together. So yeah, I agree.

Vance Crowe [01:52:06] Well, you know, you've put yourself in an interesting situation that to me would be utterly terrifying. I I would, I would rather go, you know, fight people than do what you've been doing, which is you've started doing improv comedy or, or just standup comedy, right?

Dwayne Faber [01:52:24] Yeah. Yeah. I went to an open mic just trying it out. I, I love to challenge myself and put myself in awkward situations. I feel like we only grow when we put ourselves in difficult and awkward situations. And so it, it's a little bit unique. It's in Bellingham, very hippie liberal town. The the college in town has a red square in, in memory of the, the Communist party. And actually the first time I went up, they, they asked me to make sure I didn't use the N word. 'cause I had the look of somebody that would use the N word.

Vance Crowe [01:52:55] No kidding. Yeah.

Dwayne Faber [01:52:56] Yeah. They pulled you aside and said, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. They're like, Hey,

Vance Crowe [01:52:58] We need to make sure

Dwayne Faber [01:52:58] That you, right. Yeah, exactly right. Yeah. Apparently I look a little bit, how

Vance Crowe [01:53:01] Did you respond to that?

Dwayne Faber [01:53:02] I was taken aback. I didn't know what to say. I mean, I mean, I, I had to take my white robe off, so I, I mean Wow. Yeah. Yeah. So, but the in, in there too, I mean, and it's, it's a lot of incel antifa type, you know, living in mom's basement and, and not really accomplishing anything. And, and so I come in and I look different and, and I sound different, you know, and I'm talking about life experiences and, and so comedy is, is interesting. I, I like the written format of Twitter and coming up with jokes, and

Vance Crowe [01:53:38] I

Dwayne Faber [01:53:38] Want Yeah. For

Vance Crowe [01:53:38] Anybody that doesn't know you came on the scene in Twitter, in ag Twitter and exploded rather quickly because you were making jokes and, and in a way that, you know, some people would say like, Ooh, that was a little edgy, but it wasn't always about farming. Sometimes it was about family and, and really grew a pretty sizable following pretty quickly. But the medium of Twitter is really different than standing up in front of a crowd.

Dwayne Faber [01:54:05] It is. And, and it's been fun to try that out. I think everybody should try it just because it's an experience.

Vance Crowe [01:54:12] Oh man,

Dwayne Faber [01:54:12] I wanna go to a Vance Crowe open mic. I wanna, man,

Vance Crowe [01:54:15] That's, that sounds like terror. Terror.

Dwayne Faber [01:54:18] Yeah. But it, I mean, it, it's a challenge. And, and it, to me, open mics are fun just because it's you, you learn the cadence of speaking, you learn timing, you learn what jokes work and what jokes don't work, you know? And yet, I mean, the crowd over there is gonna be a completely different crowd than, you know, any agriculture crowd too. So that makes it a little bit difficult. So you have to try and come up with stuff that will transcend different groups and different tribes.

Vance Crowe [01:54:46] And how did it go?

Dwayne Faber [01:54:47] It went pretty good. It went pretty good. My, I, so I keep a library of all my tweets, so I've got 3000 tweets all written down in Excel format. And so I just go through and I, I say, Hey, this would be a good, good joke to say. And so I need to work on embellishing the joke. I mean, I have a bunch of punchlines, which I mean, that's why I love Twitter. It's so succinct. And you only have 280 characters to get your punchline in. And so essentially it's all punchlines. And so for me, I need to start working on developing, you know, a little bit more meat to it, followed by the punchline. But it's been a fun process. I mean, I don't know who knows where it goes, but I, I think it's, again, good to put yourself in difficult situations. I have a philosophy too that, I mean, it's similar as a kid, we'd always go out to the lake and there'd be like a 20 foot cliff. And I was standing at the edge, edge of the cliff, and all my buddies were jumping off. And I told myself, you only have to be brave for one second. And once you make that jump, you're gonna figure it out. And, and stand ups that way too. I mean, you get up there and, and you're gonna eat it for a while, you know, and it's gonna take time. But just go up there once, just go up there, get up there and, and try it and, and put yourself in those difficult, stressful situations, because that's only how you grow too, is putting yourself in those situations.

Vance Crowe [01:56:03] Well, I mean, I follow a lot of comedians and, and am very interested in the art of comedy. Not because I do comedy, but because I do a lot of speaking and I often compare public speaking on a stage, particularly when I was representing Monsanto, and there was a real danger there, right? Yep. Like somebody in the audience, there may be several people, they want to see you fail. And I often describe the experience of public speaking, like surfing, where you, you are out there, you're paddling your board, you're waiting for a wave to come in. And then once you feel that water pulling you up, you gotta jump on that wave. And if you don't, the, the, the bigger the wave, the bigger the rush of the surf, but also the, the more dangerous it is. But once you're on it,

Dwayne Faber [01:56:49] Yeah. There

Vance Crowe [01:56:50] Is no sensation on earth, like feeling the connection between you and the crowd and being able to tell them something that they haven't heard of or thought of before. And having that experience of the energy, there's, there's, there's nothing like it. So I'm excited to see where you go with this standup comedy.

Dwayne Faber [01:57:09] Yeah, no, it's fun, right? I mean, I had the same experience too. You're, you're working on working your way through the joke and then all of a sudden, boom, you drop the punchline and everybody, the room explodes. Right. To me, I mean, that's, that's euphoria. I mean, there's, that is an amazing feeling. And so,

Vance Crowe [01:57:22] Have you been surfing? Are you a surfer?

Dwayne Faber [01:57:24] I'm not. I snowboard. Okay. Pacific Northwest snowboard, similar, probably

Vance Crowe [01:57:27] Very, very similar. Yeah. The, the, the experience of the faster I go and then, oh shit. Yeah,

Dwayne Faber [01:57:34] It

Vance Crowe [01:57:34] Went wrong. Right. And, and like you fall and like that, that's probably the lesson that's hardest in speaking. And, and I would guess standup comedy is if you fail, you just get, you just get back up, right? Yeah. And the, nobody's gonna remember your failure if you get up and, and make a good joke again. Just like you don't remember the wave that crumbled over top of you.

Dwayne Faber [01:57:54] Exactly. Right. I mean, there's so many life lessons in it, right. And overcoming trials and continuing to press on, and it, it, it can be a lonely place to, to say something and nobody laughs Right. And learning to improve on that and using that as fuel to get better and improve that, that, that's what's been fun about it.

Vance Crowe [01:58:12] I think. So, so I think this is a form of, like we were discussing earlier, a form of suffering, right? Yep. You have found something that you're like, I want to improve. I'm a white belt. I'm totally new and I am going to put myself in the, in the place where I'm gonna get beat, beat up and battered. But if I come out on the other side, now I've got this whole new skill, this whole new thing. And that's a ton of meaning.

Dwayne Faber [01:58:37] Yes, absolutely. No, it, that, that is life, right? And that's what makes life fun is going out and trying new things, trying different things and, and working to improve yourself and starting at the bottom and then seeing improvement. And that, that to me is what brings joy too. And, and that is what gets us out of our own head. You know, I think a lot of times, you know, you deal with somebody that, that is deals with anxiety or depression, and a lot of times it's because there's not enough outward thinking or enough doing of themselves and going out and getting off the couch and, and going and volunteering somewhere, or going and teaching at a school that, that's a valuable lesson that I think is cheap medication too. And, and I have people in my life that are, that deal with struggle with depression and anxiety, and, and, and they say the same thing. They're, they're best served when they're looking outward and they're putting themselves in situations where they need to overcome a challenge and, and do they have to slay the dragon? So

Vance Crowe [01:59:37] Well, and I think that in a corporation, right? If you have a regular corporate job, one of the things that often gets taken away is the ability to fail, right? Yeah. Because you make so many decisions by committee in meetings where it's not you on the line, right? It's a group of people and they, they, they decentralize the responsibility. So no one person is able to make any decision, but also no one person is responsible for it. And if you take away the risk factor in people's work so that nobody, like you also don't get the reward. And I think that when we were talking about this crisis of meaning, I think that's a big part of it. Where, where if you don't have things that you are responsible for, you know, landing that wave,

Dwayne Faber [02:00:25] Right?

Vance Crowe [02:00:26] I don't know how you would have me, of course you would come home and be depressed and feel like things don't matter. Of course you would. Yeah.

Dwayne Faber [02:00:32] I mean, to me, the measure of a person is how many times have they failed? How many times have they gotten up after getting knocked off of something, you know? And we live in a, in a world in social media where we see the guy, you know, nailing the basketball shot and we don't see the 2000 attempts he made before that. And so very quickly we go and we say, well, that guy's just better than me. He's just good. Well, no, that guy failed 2000 times before he made that shot. And I think we have a crisis in not wanting to fail and creating these support systems where we're scared to fail and go out and fail.

Vance Crowe [02:01:06] I, you know, that, that brings up a person that is definitely, I think you and I kind of a have a kindred spirit, Jared McDaniel, and I remember I called him up and was talking with him about, you know, hey, I'm thinking about leaving my job and, and starting this company. And, and he made the point of, you know, things are pretty comfortable for you in a corporation, and the downside that you have to give up is that when you speak, you don't get to decide what you say. You know? Right. Montana wasn't, wasn't shoving words down my throat, but at the same time I had to get things cleared. I had to be on message. And he was like, until you get to the place where you are responsible for people hiring just you Yes. To come speak, then, you know, what are you really saying? How, how important, how much do you really believe in it? How important is it for you to say something? That's true. Yeah.

Dwayne Faber [02:01:56] And he

Vance Crowe [02:01:56] Was essentially saying, Hey, fatty, get out there, get out there and, and, and make it real. And, and, and that just goes to, you've, you've gotta be around people that are absolutely pushing you up on that wave.

Dwayne Faber [02:02:09] Exactly. Right. And, and I mean, I talking with your wife too, she said, you're happier going out and doing your own thing, and she sees it, right. And there, there is a certain level of, yeah, it's secure and it's safe. But I think we're programmed to want to go out and take a risk. We're programmed to want to go out and do our own thing instead of reporting to our boss who reports to a boss who reports to a boss. You know, we we're designed to go out and have a challenge, meet that challenge and surpass it. And, and entrepreneurship provides that. And going out and speaking provides that. I mean, you could bomb, you could say something really mean and nasty at a speaking gig, and it could all be over. I mean, you could drop the n word on an open mic and it's over. Well,

Vance Crowe [02:02:52] And I may, and maybe that comparison of the entrepreneurship, so, so people end up now, like I, I'm actually having to turn down engagements because people are like, oh, you can come and you can talk about these things or those things, or what do you wanna talk about? You have this, so it, there's a lot more energy there and it has been more exciting. I wonder if in the farming world, if that is one of the crises of meaning is that people were handed down farms. It's not to say they didn't work hard and it's not, but it's that they're just trying to maintain the balls that were in the air as opposed to creating something for themselves, deriving it on their own.

Dwayne Faber [02:03:31] Yes. What

Vance Crowe [02:03:31] Do you think?

Dwayne Faber [02:03:32] I mean, I, I felt that myself and I, I was just one generation into the farm, but I had that burning desire to go out and do my own thing, you know? And I feel sorry for somebody that's in the Midwest that has a farm that's been in the family for four or 500 years.

Vance Crowe [02:03:44] Sorry for them. I mean, they're million, millions of dollars.

Dwayne Faber [02:03:47] Yeah, that's right. But I mean, at the same time, they are pigeonholed into, oh, you're always gonna be so and so's son. It's similar to being Michael Jordan's son or somebody that's gone out and accomplished something. You're always living in their shadow, essentially. And you don't have that ability to go out naturally and do your own thing and leave your mark on the world. And not to say that that doesn't happen, there are, there are sons and daughters that follow in their parents' footsteps that do a good job and they do grow. But at the same time, when you have a lot of those intergenerational businesses and there's a, a tendency to not progress, there's a saying too that the first generation in the business rolls up his shirt sleeves, meaning he just works his butt off, the second generation rolls down their shirt sleeves, meaning they become more corporate, and then the third generation loses their shirt sleeves because they go broke.

Vance Crowe [02:04:37] Well, so you're second generation. Yeah. You're raising third generation. What are you doing to make sure your daughters are not, their life isn't too, well, I'm assuming you're saying, I don't want my daughter's lives to be too easy.

Dwayne Faber [02:04:49] Right. I mean, I, I don't want to apply any undue pressure on them to feel like they have to come back to the farm, but I'd like to give them that opportunity if they did want to come back to the farm. And so that's always the struggle too. And it's similar to wealthy people having kids. I mean, you can't fake poverty. I mean, a lot of the most successful people in life is because they have an insatiable desire. And, and, and maybe it's probably a problem, but they, they have an insatiable desire for a better life and to prove themself and to prove that, you know, the teacher that said they'd never amount to anything in grade school, they're gonna prove them wrong. And they spend the next 50 years trying to prove what that teacher said wrong. And, and they become uber successful. And yet at the same time it's a little bit dangerous because they never get to that point of enjoying what they have either, too. You know, it's like the Wolf of Wall Street with Gordon Gecko, you know,

Vance Crowe [02:05:44] Those are two different movies.

Dwayne Faber [02:05:46] Oh, is it? Oh

Vance Crowe [02:05:46] Yeah. One is Wall Street, one is the Wolf of Wall Street's.

Dwayne Faber [02:05:48] What's the one where he says, the one thing I'll always, that I'll have, that you'll never have and that is enough.

Vance Crowe [02:05:55] Oh, I think that's, that's Wall Street. Yeah.

Dwayne Faber [02:05:57] Okay. There you go. And so basically it was a guy telling a super wealthy person that the one thing I have that you will never have is enough.

Vance Crowe [02:06:05] That's interesting. That's profound.

Dwayne Faber [02:06:07] And that is a, a burden that can be on uber successful people too, is they never get a chance to enjoy that. They're always so driven trying to prove some voice wrong, inner voice wrong. And so it, it is a bit of a spectrum, you know, I feel like you have to separate a little bit from, you don't wanna become that neurotic about success either.

Vance Crowe [02:06:26] Well, and, and this is, so I made a decision on January 1st of this year that I, I was like, I wanna be a runner. And I don't know what it is to be a runner. I don't know who gets to decide. I'm a runner. I'm not a runner, but I definitely knew I was not a runner. So I would go out and run maybe three miles one time every two weeks, and then be like, okay, the reason I can't run tomorrow is 'cause you know, I need to break and my joints aren't right. And then started, started listening to David Goggin's book and decided, okay, I wanna become a runner, so I'm gonna, I, how, how would you know if you are a runner? Well, I, I'm gonna run 500 miles this year. And, and so, you know, divide that out over the year. It's not that much. It's, you know, nine miles a a week or something like that. It's actually not that much, but it requires that you stay after it. And during part of the time, I was thinking in my head about this person that I thought was standing in my way,

Dwayne Faber [02:07:23] And

Vance Crowe [02:07:24] So I was grinding out miles to prove this person that was standing in my way wrong or, or to grind them. And then in Goggin's book, he ends up saying like, Hey, you get to a point where you realize that person that you're grinding away at,

Dwayne Faber [02:07:38] They

Vance Crowe [02:07:39] Aren't out there running with you.

Dwayne Faber [02:07:40] They're

Vance Crowe [02:07:40] Not there. So if what is motivating you to endure this suffering is that person over there that you're trying to grind into the ground, you're missing the thing, the meaning is not real. That's the thing to get you out running. But it should not be the thing that drives you because you'll get 250 or 300 miles into your run and realize like, they aren't suffering the way that I hoped that they would suffer.

Dwayne Faber [02:08:04] Right, right. And yet you've made that journey all the way through. So I have a question for you. I, I've been asked to mentor a person or I did in the past, and it didn't go well because there was no discipline or desire to improve. And I feel like that's kind of symbolic of a lot of people in society or millennials today. How do you learn to be disciplined and can it be taught, or are people sometimes just programmed to be fat and unhappy and a mediocre dead end job?

Vance Crowe [02:08:40] I mean, it all comes down to he who has a why can bear anyhow.

Dwayne Faber [02:08:46] And

Vance Crowe [02:08:46] People won't have,

Dwayne Faber [02:08:48] In

Vance Crowe [02:08:49] My opinion, a discipline until they start having either a why or a a few why's. Like, why is it that I wanna do this? And, and they don't even need to be that profound. It could be to the, the first why maybe to prove to my dad that I'm not the screw up that he thought I was. Yeah. And

Dwayne Faber [02:09:06] Then

Vance Crowe [02:09:07] As you get on that path, you start finding other why's. But if you have a person that their why is I want to be successful because I don't want to not be successful.

Dwayne Faber [02:09:17] That's

Vance Crowe [02:09:17] Not the why. That ends up creating discipline, because discipline ends up being how do I manage suffering so that it has meaning. Right? Yeah. There, there, there's some combination between I am suffering, I need to change something about myself, which is the, the discipline which then results in meaning. And if you are, if somebody is asking you to mentor them, but they don't have a why, there's no reason to go through the the suffering. Right. And, and apply the discipline. And I, I mean, for me, I think that discipline has been something that I've built over the years, you know, where to get to this one level, I had a certain amount of discipline to get to the next level. I had to add more. And there was a point in my life where on the outside I had a lot of discipline, but I had to learn, Hey, every morning you should make your bed.

Dwayne Faber [02:10:06] Yes, you

Vance Crowe [02:10:07] Should. And that's a Jordan Peterson thing.

Dwayne Faber [02:10:09] Yep.

Vance Crowe [02:10:09] But that really helped me because it, it refocused my mind from being like, I need to solve the world's problems to

Dwayne Faber [02:10:16] Yes.

Vance Crowe [02:10:17] What is the thing that I need to take care of that is the closest to me. Right.

Dwayne Faber [02:10:20] Yeah. Well, and, and talking about solving the world's problems too, I think it's so easy. We get so much information thrown at us every single day, and we get so invested into our ideology that we start focusing on, well, I'm gonna change the world and I'm gonna be listening to Sean Hannity, rush Limbaugh, Fox News, or I'm gonna be listening to Rachel Maddow and CNN and I mean, and we end up losing focus on our own lives and our own circle. And to me, we need to do more focusing on our circle and how do we change our lives? Because when we can change our lives, that circle gets bigger and we can impact people around us, and then potentially more and more get involved in our circle. But if we're constantly sitting there trying to solve these global world issues, we do ourselves a disservice and we do everybody else around us a disservice.

Vance Crowe [02:11:10] I, I completely agree. I have a, a friend named Travis Liebig, and he and I are kind of this yin and yang, whereas I'm kind of a big picture thinker, and he is, you know, what is right in front of me. And he started working, chipping away at how can I bring together the right investors and find the right situation to buy a, a bank?

Dwayne Faber [02:11:33] And

Vance Crowe [02:11:33] That's what he did. And now that he is the president of a community bank, now he can start making loans and getting deposits and start impacting his world around him. But if he had started out by being like, I'm going to go fundamentally change the banking world,

Dwayne Faber [02:11:47] Yes.

Vance Crowe [02:11:47] It wouldn't have worked. So he started off and just kept increasing his fear. And you've seen now how big of a difference in the world he is making, but he never had these big, grandiose, let's go change the world ideas. And I learned a lot from that guy and just saying how he stays focused. And I I I see him as being really similar to the, the farming community, which is if your ideas get too grandiose, you forget to feed the cows. Right, right. You've gotta stay right there.

Dwayne Faber [02:12:15] Absolutely. You have to stay engaged in the moment and, and focus on that. Absolutely.

Vance Crowe [02:12:19] You know, you were talking earlier about how much something like Crimea being invaded by Russia impacted trade. Right. For dairy farmer out in Washington state, one of the things that's going on that is huge news globally, but very, very few people have heard about it in the US is the African swine fever going on in China. And what was interesting was when we were talking last night, and you were telling me about how this impacted pig farmers. So just as a little bit of background, there is a disease that is in China right now that has killed, well, I'm sorry, that has Well, it's interesting to say it has killed, or the farmers have had to cu their herd, which is something like 20% of all of China's pig production. At least that's the official estimates. So there's a disease that gets into the barns and the pigs either die or you say they are going to die, and we don't want it to spread, so we're gonna, we're gonna cu the herd. But that in an interesting impact on the, on the dairy world. So talk about that a little bit.

Dwayne Faber [02:13:23] Yeah. So a lot of whey products actually go to China to feed pigs in the first, I believe, three or four weeks of their life. And they're good at converting that way into, into pork and, and growing of the, of the piglet. And so we export quite a bit of that that way. And so just from what we're seeing as far as a reduction of whe and, and some of the other commodities that go into feeding hogs, particularly soybeans, and some of that is related to tariffs and trade wars, but there are people that are saying the number of hogs is, is more than the 20% that's being reported by the Chinese government. I mean, there's estimates that it could be as high as 50%.

Vance Crowe [02:14:07] 50%.

Dwayne Faber [02:14:07] Yeah. And so when we have a close family friend actually that's involved in a company in China, and they own several of these hog hotels, they big build hotels straight up in the air and they, they house their pigs in there. And I believe three of them, they got African swine flu in, is it flu or fever?

Vance Crowe [02:14:25] I believe. Fever. Okay,

Dwayne Faber [02:14:26] Thank you. Yeah, the fever, it, it got in three of their hog barns and one of them, it killed every single pig in there in a matter of two days. And then the other ones, they had the Chinese officials come out and they, they looked at the pigs and they said, oh, it's not African swine fever, but go ahead and euthanize everybody. And so there is a coverup on the part of the Chinese because it has huge implications for feeding their people. And it's a potential wild card for the trade war with Donald Trump.

Vance Crowe [02:14:58] I mean, it's, people like to give a sense of perspective, when they were saying between 20 to 30% of the Chinese herd that would represent if you slaughtered every single pig that was in the United States is how many China has lost. And we raise a lot of hogs in the United States. Yeah.

Dwayne Faber [02:15:17] Ab absolutely, it's gonna have ripple effects for a long time. And so the question is how are, how is the chin, how are the Chinese people going to deal with this? Because they're gonna see animal proteins start being eradicated and eliminated from their diets. And then what sort of ripple effects does it have on pork price or on, well pork prices here, but also the cattle market and then also on the chicken market. I mean, to me it's shaping up where it's gonna be a huge run up in prices at some point. The feeder market recently has, has collapsed and fallen apart. And I'm not sure exactly why that is, but, and some of it is China just hasn't come to the table and started buying these animal proteins, yet they're still in the middle of the trade war. And, and, and, you know, as, as wild and crazy as Donald Trump is at times, China is too. And they truly believe that they are in a war with the American people and, and the Chinese have a history of sacrificing their own people without cause. And so there's been reports already of, of rounding up

Vance Crowe [02:16:19] Without cause What do you mean?

Dwayne Faber [02:16:21] So as it stands right now, I believe in more western parts of China. That's what this relative was saying too. They're rounding up the more prominent Muslims and Christians and putting them in labor camps to eliminate some of the people that are voices that would be potentially contrary to the communist movement. And they're not afraid to take dissidents and put them in concentration camps to, to keep a hold of them. And I don't, I don't know if it would come to a point of starvation, but I think they'd be willing to sacrifice people going hungry in order to not give up the trade war or to sacrifice too much on that end. There's

Vance Crowe [02:16:59] Definitely a very different mindset in the, in the Chinese culture than than say the western American culture of, so I helped a professor when I was in graduate school write a book called Never Forget National Humiliation. And it was the a hundred years, never forget the a hundred years of national humiliation. And it was actually describing what the Chinese people went through for a hundred years of various colonizers coming in, whether it was the Japanese or the British, and describing how now in current day they teach their students how they were subjugated by other, by other cultures, and that they will never do that again. And that the way that you keep that from happening is by taking collective action that we all work together. And it, and the whole book is around designing their foreign policy. So how do you get a group of, you know, a billion Chinese to, to row in the same direction? And one of the interesting things that came from working with Xang, the, the professor that I worked with was that he said the, the Chinese economy and government is like the bus in the movie speed where it has to always go at 55 miles an hour. And if you go below that, then you hit some red line in the bomb goes off underneath. And what he's saying is that the government has put themselves in the position that they have helped raise the standard of living for the Chinese people so much, but even more than that, the people that haven't had their, their standard of living raised, they're watching the economy go up.

Vance Crowe [02:18:37] And one of the ways that you know, that the economy is getting better is how much meat you get access to. So it used to be you would have meat, you know, only on holidays, and then they got better. So they could have it once a month and then they could have it once a week. And then some people are having it every day. And if you're a peasant that is gone from eating meat a couple times a year to now having it once a week, you feel a lot wealthier. And you think about something like the, the swine fever coming through and calling a huge percentage, I mean 50% if what you're saying is right, that really makes for a very unstable situation that I think that most people in the United States are not aware is going on.

Dwayne Faber [02:19:18] Absolutely. I mean the communist government, their, their one job is to keep the bellies full in China. Right. And, and that's what separates them between massive political unrest. And, and this has kind of been a a, a cog that's been yanked out that is gonna be a challenge for them and could potentially force them to the nego negotiating table

Vance Crowe [02:19:36] Quite a

Dwayne Faber [02:19:36] Bit quicker. You know, and you, and you speak about the need for continuing to grow. I mean there's entire cities that have been built and roads that have been built just to keep people busy, to keep people employed in China because they recognize the need to, to keep the people working. And that's also why they're fighting so hard to maintain the manufacturing in, in, in their country because they need to keep people working and keep people employed. And if they don't have that, then they have political unrest.

Vance Crowe [02:20:04] So what is the status of the trade wars with China or with Canada right now from the, from the dairy farmer's perspective?

Dwayne Faber [02:20:13] Yeah, so we're still waiting for the codifying of the U-S-M-C-A. It needs to pass Congress. That's

Vance Crowe [02:20:19] The replacement for nafta. It

Dwayne Faber [02:20:20] Is, it is. And so Mexico, I believe they've signed off on it and, and approved it. And it seems like there's gonna, there's some contention on pushing it through Congress on our end, and it would be a win, it would be a win for the dairy industry. It gives some access to the Canadian industry and prevents them from, from dumping some protein powders and milk powders on the, on the global market. And so that's been good for us as far as the trade wars with China, it, it has impacted the, the American dairy industry, particularly the co-op that I sell milk to Dairy gold we had set up a year and a half ago in office in China, and we haven't been able to sell anything into China because of the tariffs, the high tariffs on our products going overseas. And then there's always an argument too that, I mean, China's still consuming dairy products or just buying 'em from other parts of the world. And so it does eliminate or use up some of the inventories, but it would be nice, particularly for us on a local level to be exporting to China. And, and I think for the most part, I mean the, the farmers have have, as a whole have been behind China and they are behind Donald Trump. And they recognized, you know, China has been taking advantage of us, their currency manipulators, they've been stealing IP and, and they've not played by the rules. And quite frankly, they had an agreement and then China reneged on that agreement. And so we're seeing a history of, of China being China. That being said, I think the, the American farmer can only afford to, to back Donald Trump for so long before they start saying, I need to vote with my, my pocketbook and, and my pocketbook has, has suffered because of this trade war unfairly.

Dwayne Faber [02:22:00] You know, I think when you look at a, at a global or a the United States as a whole, yeah, it's in our best interest to have this fight. But we don't think like the Chinese people we we're, we're very much segmented into why are we fighting the battle for intellectual property when myself as a, as a soybean farmer or a dairy farmer, we're struggling and our prices at are, are below the cost of production. And so yeah, it'd be interesting to see one. And there's been, there's always movement. I mean, reading this morning again, that trade representatives are going back to China and we'll see if they make a deal. And it's been, yeah, it's been discouraging. It's been a lot of hope and just no action. And, and probably a lot of it's justified. I do believe that China is continuing to change the rules and, and they've been playing by their own rule book now like they have been for the last 20 or 30 years.

Vance Crowe [02:22:50] So 2020 rolls around, who is the next president of the United States?

Dwayne Faber [02:22:55] Ooh, if the Democrats continue to go with crazy on the, on the far outskirts, I think it is Donald Trump. I think if they were to put forward a moderate, they'd, they'd be able to win the hearts and minds of the people and, and they'd get it. But pushing the socialist agenda, I think it still doesn't fly with the majority of the country.

Vance Crowe [02:23:18] Interesting. I mean, it's, it was, when the election was going on, I was traveling around to dozens of firm events and giving talks, and I definitely did not predict that Donald Trump would win the election, but I was like, something's going on here. Like, I would come back to St. Louis and be like, I don't think you guys get it. I think that's a lot more support for Donald Trump out in the countryside than most people realize. But even I had no idea how much.

Dwayne Faber [02:23:46] Right. And, and, and China has already verbalized this, and they know that they are striking at the heart of Donald Trump's base with this trade war because China is also looking at the long term. They think generationally, you know, they don't think in a four year cycle. And so really they're hoping to make it just through the end of the Donald Trump presidency and hoping for a Democrat that will cave on on a lot of the demands from the US trade negotiators.

Vance Crowe [02:24:12] Very interesting. Well, we'll see how that plays out. There is one final thing that I wanted to ask you about, which I heard you have, you talked about this. If you're, and I think it'd be good for an audience that is not that familiar with farming to hear about this, and it is, you say, if you're gonna have livestock, you've gotta be okay with dead stock.

Dwayne Faber [02:24:31] And

Vance Crowe [02:24:32] What is that? What do you mean by that? Yeah,

Dwayne Faber [02:24:33] It, it's a little bit frustrating because there's been this anthropomorph

Vance Crowe [02:24:38] Anthropomorphize

Dwayne Faber [02:24:40] Anthropomorphizing of animals, right. And we see it in a Disney culture where the, the, the deer talks to, to the, the

Vance Crowe [02:24:50] Bunny rabbit,

Dwayne Faber [02:24:50] The bunny rabbit and the, the cub. And, and yet at the same time, we, we utilize animals to sustain ourselves. And the, the highest value that we can place on this animal is honoring them by using everything that they have to further our existence and to honor them in life and in death by it. And it's a concept that flies in the face of a lot of, of, of modern society. I mean, we want to view cows as pets and, and it's a little, it's a little bit dangerous because cows are there for a purpose and that is to sustain us and feed us. So

Vance Crowe [02:25:28] It's, it's interesting because, you know, my wife is, well, you met her last night. She's so sweet. Yep. And she just wants to love and care and you know, she doesn't have a problem with eating hamburgers, but she definitely does not want to be confronted with the, with the slaughtering of animals. But it's important to understand that your animals come, your food comes from animals. And there's like a weird distinction because people, most people have never seen an animal slaughtered at all. Right.

Dwayne Faber [02:25:55] Well, and, and I think, you know, we talk about the vegan movement and how vegans are popular, but I come from kind of a hippie area too, but butchering of animals now has become a hippie thing to do. And, and the art of butchering and the art of aging meat, and I mean, as big as the vegan movement has grown also, there's been this movement of being closer to the animal knowing, you know, and killing the animal yourself, processing the animal yourself. And, and that's been one of the good things of millennials being more engaged in food production and wanting to know more about food production.

Vance Crowe [02:26:29] Well, I think that one of the ways that people will get connected with that will be to see you on stage doing your comedy act. I really am excited to, to see you progress with that. Do you think you'll release things? You think you'll get to a point where you're prepared to record it and post it?

Dwayne Faber [02:26:44] I don't know. We'll see. We will see, see where it all goes. But yeah, I'm excited to just keep trying it and may may we'll probably get to that point. Yeah. And

Vance Crowe [02:26:51] If people wanted to follow you on social media, where would they go?

Dwayne Faber [02:26:55] D Faber 84 on Twitter. And then I do have a Facebook page, but,

Vance Crowe [02:26:59] And how do you distinguish between the two? What do you put on Twitter and what do you put on Facebook?

Dwayne Faber [02:27:03] I actually put nothing on Facebook. I just kind of got sick of the entire medium, but I have a whole bunch of old photos that I don't want to get rid of. And I, I got sick of hearing about Aunt Peggy's super liberal or super conservative view and you know, fake news type stuff that kept getting posted. So I've kind of drifted away and spent more time just on Twitter.

Vance Crowe [02:27:23] Well, d Faber 84, it has been a great pleasure and honor. I'm so glad you came here. Thank you so much for stopping by the podcast. Thanks,

Dwayne Faber [02:27:30] Man. Appreciate the time.

Vance Crowe [02:27:33] Will, that's it for this week's episode. I want to thank Dwayne Faber d Faber 84 for flying all the way in from Washington State to do this interview. It was a pleasure. We actually had a great time. We got to go out to several dinners. We got to travel all around the city of St. Louis, taking in art and different parts of the scenes. And we got to talk a lot about what's going on, not just in the agriculture world, but in the world of Twitter. If, if you enjoyed this episode, I hope you'll consider subscribing. Make sure that you hit the like button and remember that if you offer a review on something like iTunes, that really helps the algorithms understand, hey, this is an episode, or this is a show that people are really enjoying and getting a lot out of. We should expose more people to it. This is the kind of thing that helps me get wider listenership and it also helps me get better guests. So if you can think of anybody that you think I should be interviewing, make sure you leave it in the comments or inter, or you can always send it to me via Twitter. I have really enjoyed this and thanks so much for being here. We'll be back next week with another interview. I'm not entirely sure who it'll be, but I guarantee it'll be interesting. So thanks so much and we'll see you next week.