What is food freedom?

Hi, and welcome to this week’s episode of the Homestead Education. So last week I told you guys that there were going to be some new products coming out and I am so excited about them. The first one is a digital e-text that is an excerpt from the introduction to Homestead Science, my core curriculum that is just the animal science units. So I know for a lot of people that have been wanting to try the product, but maybe the price is a little out of their range, or they weren’t sure if they wanted the whole setup. This is a really great option because they can try a few of the units for a much lower price and for some people, they really just want the animal science units, because those can be the most daunting tasks or the most daunting endeavors, when it comes to homesteading.

Everybody wants the animals, but they aren’t really sure how to get started with them or how to handle their health and that type of thing. These units really cover it. I mean, each unit goes over the history, the anatomy, the husbandry, raising the animals, marketing of the health of them, and then goes over what that really looks like in a homestead setting. So, it’s a really great program and I’m excited that some people are going to be able to get this into their hands that previously wouldn’t have been able to. Now this is only offered as a digital text as of right now, and it contains the whole textbook, the whole workbook and the answer key and glossary for the whole chapter too. 

It also includes my new course, which is a quail incubation course, which is part of this program. So that’s a really great package deal to go ahead and get. It has everything all in one. Now if you’re just interested in the quail incubation course, this is something new that I offer and it goes over all the best practices for incubating quail. Well, actually incubating all poultry and what we did in our homestead to not only be able to increase our hatch rates to a consistent 75+%, but also how I marketed these birds and their products to be able to make an extra $1500 a month for our house. So for those of you that have already downloaded my free money-making on the homestead guide, I do talk a little bit about the marketing, but this course is actually how to incubate the quail. It has all the best practices, how to make sure your equipment’s working, what’s the best equipment to buy for your homestead, all of it.

So I would definitely go check this out if that’s something that you’re interested in. It’s a really great time to be looking into this course because if you’re wanting spring chicks, you need to be incubating them over the next, I guess probably starting January, February. So you can either do this course before or while you’re incubating. It’s kind of set up one step at a time so you don’t really miss anything. It’s got all the printables that you need to be able to track your incubation. It’s a really great course. You can go to my website and check that out. I will also link it in the show notes because I’m doing some updates to my website right now. So some things may disappear and then pop back up a couple days later. So maybe the show notes are the best place for that.

If you’re listening to this right when it’s released, which is mid-December, I want to bring up my 12 Days of Homestead Gift Giving. It’s a really great resource on gifts that the homesteaders in your life really want for the men, women, children, and teens. Just really practical gifts for homesteaders and homeschoolers that really aren’t going to go to waste. Sometimes it’s really hard buying for people that have very particular interests and you don’t want to just go out and pick up something and have it go to waste or have it be a product that they really can’t use or isn’t the right quality. This 12 Days of Gift Giving really gives all that information, and it’s not just for Christmas, this is really a year round because most of the gifts aren’t “Christmas-y” or “Winter-y.” They are real gifts that these people can use.

So go check that out. Again, it’ll be in the show notes. 12 Days of Gift Giving. Also, with it being almost Christmastime, remember that I have recently released nine Homestead stories. These are the stories that are in the Lttle Learner’s edition. So if you already have that, you may not want the stories or even if you do have it, but your children really loved the stories and your textbook is all cut up. Now from doing the course, I have all of the books as a either a boxed set or can be bought individually. The boxed set’s a little bit discounted. You get one free if you’re buying all nine. Great Christmas gifts, wholesome stories for children where they can learn wholesome values while learning about something on the homestead or being in a homestead type setting. They’re all traditional families.

They’re really good stories, wholesome stories, ones that you want to get in your little kids’ hands and they’re funny and they give you guys something to talk about and they’re relatable. So go ahead and check those out right now. If you buy the whole gift set, the discounted where you get one free, you also get all of the stories as an audio version for completely free. It’s my gift to you. So onto the next thing on my list, and that is the Rogue Food Conference. So my daughter and I, Savannah, we went to Louisburg, Tennessee last week. That’s just south of Nashville, where we went to the Rogue Food Conference. We were vendors there. I was actually really excited to go and get to listen to the talks because the vendors are in the main hall for this event. Unfortunately, due to the popularity of my product and how loud the event was, we really weren’t able to hear a lot of what these really great thinkers had to say. I was super bummed out about that. I did get a chance to talk with some of the greats such as John Moody and Joel Salatin, who are the guys who put this event on.

I’m going to go into them a little bit more in a minute. I was really excited to go to this event because the Rogue Food Conference is really all about food freedom. And what that is, is kind of getting the government out of our food. And I mean, that’s not saying that they shouldn’t be in it completely. Well, I’m going to go into it a little bit more. But basically this conference wants people to be able to buy locally more, from farmers that they trust with regenerative practices and that deal with their animals in a way they want to be seen. Don’t use the chemicals that people want to use. And due to a lot of federal and state laws, although the state laws are a little bit more lenient than the federal, it’s really hard to buy from the farms that you want to buy from, buy the products that you want to buy. And it’s even harder, as the farmer, to try to be able to sell those products.

So these two guys, John Moody and Joel Sealatin- I didn’t get to hear a lot of the talks that I really hoped to hear, so I came home and did a little research because in my previous life I was a food safety specialist. I had originally wanted to work for the USDA. That was my goal when I went to college. Now on the other side of this world, in this more small-scale farming, in the homesteading, it’s interesting to me that that was where I had wanted to be at one point in life. But I think we all have those moments where we see where we really want to be.

However, it was my job in these food plants to make sure that they met the USDA requirements. Now there’s a federal code that outlines food safety. There are several companies out there that help facilitate these laws and have their own interpretations of them, such as, I believe it’s the American Institute of Baking, there’s the Global Food Safety Initiatives. And they basically take these sets of laws and interpret them on how they actually look inside of a plant. That was what my job was, was to take the set of laws or to take the interpretation and make sure that the plants I worked in met those requirements to be able to get certificates from these companies AIB. And I can’t remember the name of the Global Food Safety Initiative one at the moment- it’s been a few years since I’ve worked in this field.

And gosh, I’m sure it’s changed a lot with all the covid laws and stuff. So, if there’s places that I don’t know the answers to, I might tell you to go look that up for the moment, but these companies I worked for needed to be able to get a certificate from the companies that interpreted the laws in order to be able to sell at a lot of retailers such as Walmart, Costco, even if the products were going to another company that, say if I worked at a walnut plant and they were selling walnuts to a cookie company, but the cookie company wanted to be able to sell to Walmart, they needed to show that where they got the walnuts from had this certificate. So I do believe that there are some positives to this because there was a reason these laws were put into place and a lot of it was because there were not safe practices happening in food plants.

And this all really kind of came about between 70 and a hundred years ago now, with a better understanding of bacteria and how it grows and practices and better equipment and all that type of stuff. I don’t want to say the laws don’t need to be there. This is a hard topic for me because I was so passionate about food safety and what I did, but I also am very passionate about food freedoms now. And I’m trying to figure out where I stand on this. Not that I don’t believe in either of them anymore. I believe that there’s somewhere in the middle, and I guess in our current political climate where nobody can be in the middle anymore on any of the topics, I find it really hard to even state where I stand or understand where I even personally stand.

However, I am a big advocate of education. That is my whole goal with the Homestead Education is to give myself and my followers and listeners the information that they need to be able to make these good choices. And sometimes the middle is the right place. It’s just figuring out where in the middle that is. So onto these great thinkers. I said, both of them were at the event, and that’s John Moody, he’s out of Kentucky. And in his words he said that he participated in civil disobedience to get the government to change their policies in Kentucky. He was part of a food group – there’s a lot of them in different states – and they’re kind of a loophole in the laws.

And these loopholes actually, it’s where basically everybody has skin in the game as far as the farms and who’s buying from these farms. And basically the farms kind of skip the government and just sell directly to the customer, where the customer has skin in the game, where they’re part of the farm, whether they buy in through consumer supported ag, which the CSA boxes that everybody really s, or if it’s a farm share type program where they pay a monthly fee to be, I don’t know if it’s an owner of the farm, but basically instead of this money, this food going being sold to a customer without the government being involved, it is the food being given to this member of the farm that’s paying their monthly membership. So John was a part of one of these programs that actually Kentucky ended up coming in and getting a part of.

And there was, I didn’t really catch where there were fines or if they just tried to break up the group. Like I said, I didn’t get to hear all the talks and I came home and tried to do some research really quick to fill you guys in on what this program is. So the next guy there was Joel Salatin and he is a homestead guru. He calls himself the lunatic farmer. If you don’t know who Joel Salatin is, go look him up. He has a lot of wonderful books out there. He talks a lot about regenerative farming practices and permaculture and his family and his business is Polyface Farms in Swoope, Virginia. So he has a book that came out well over a decade ago called, Everything I Want To Do is Illegal.

He has a lot of really great titles. One of them is the Wonderful Pigness of Pigs. But these books, I’ve perused them. I don’t have a full grasp of them. One of them sitting by my nightstand. Hopefully I will learn it through osmosis or something along those lines. But Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal talks about all these practices of trying to have a better product for ourselves. The government just keeps stepping in and, it sometimes seems ridiculous. Raw milk, that’s one of the ones that is illegal in a lot of states now. You can stand on whatever side you want with raw milk. It’s kind of an interesting concept. Back when I worked in food safety, raw milk was the devil. There was constantly articles coming out about how children are dying from drinking raw milk and these poor practices and stuff.

I just don’t think that’s the case anymore. I’m a convert to raw milk. When we bought our most recent homestead in Idaho, we got a cow and we started milking her. I was pregnant at the time and I was not going to start drinking raw milk while pregnant because there is a bacteria called listeria that can cause abortions or a miscarriage, but spontaneous abortion, sorry. I work in the livestock field and that’s what they’re called in the livestock field. They don’t call them miscarriage, they call them spontaneous abortions. So I don’t even want to bring up a whole other political conversation right now. But I definitely wasn’t going to start drinking raw milk while pregnant. So after I had the baby, we pasteurized at home, our raw milk, which is still a lower heat pasteurization than what you’re getting from the store. So we were still able to get the cream off of it and we probably weren’t killing all of the good bacteria and enzymes that were in milk.

What you get from the store is generally ultra high pasteurized and you cannot get cream from that. And pretty much everything good that could be in it is dead at that point. Since having my son, we worked raw milk into our diets and nobody has had any issues and it’s been wonderful. So, like I said, I’m a convert. But I think it also comes back to why raw milk became illegal. So everybody a hundred years ago drank raw milk. There wasn’t anything else. Raw milk, it was just what you drank, which was just milk from the cow. Then, I want to say it was the late 1800’s, maybe early 1900’s, the baby food, well, there were these dairies and creameries that would be in downtown big cities Chicago and New York. And that is where mothers would get their milk for their babies.

Well, these cows did not have good practices because I mean, there were literally dairies in downtown New York to be able to get the freshest milk because they didn’t have the cooling practices and things that we do now. To be able to get that milk from a farm, say in upstate New York, into New York, and have a fresh product to be able to take to these families, or for the milkman to be able to drop off at the front door. Because of the poor practices from such small confinements, the raw milk in that case was contaminated. And so they were having a lot of infant deaths. So there’s this guy, a scientist named Louis Pasteur invented pasteurization, which is heating liquids to a certain temperature. There’s a couple of different ways of doing it, I mentioned before, to kill off the bad bacteria.

And this was originally designed for wine which then is going to sit and ferment for a long time. So making sure that the bad bacteria is gone before it’s given an opportunity to ferment, there’s different reasons for that than when it comes to milk. But when babies started to die from it, they started using the process of pasteurization and babies quit dying. So, this was a positive thing at that time. Now, with what we know about milk and the cooling practices that we have and the filtration practices that we have and the farm management practices that we have, having raw milk be illegal in a lot of states is not necessary anymore. So, when I say in a lot of states, I live in Idaho, raw milk is legal. In order to sell raw milk, I have somebody from the Idaho Department of Agriculture come to the house and they take samples of my milk or my cow’s milk and test it.

And as long as we don’t have any bad results, then I can continue selling my raw milk and I just have to follow certain practices. They don’t check my practices unless I have, I think it’s three bad reports. Well, you can have high bacteria counts, but you can’t have any pathogens, which are the deadly bacterias where the other bacterias, some of them are really good for you. It’s just about the quantity that is in the milk. So if I have high numbers three times or a pathogen one time, they come to the farm and then they go over your practices with you. As long as your practices, as long as your labs continue to be clean, then they don’t come out and check what you do. So that’s a really great program that I feel they have in Idaho. I feel there’s a little bit of food freedom there.

Other states, you cannot sell raw milk at all. There’s just no loopholes. Some of them you can sell as pet milk. Some people respect that. Some people are pet milk, wink, wink. Then there’s also a cow share program. So in some states it’s kind of a loophole that it’s similar to the CSA farm program where if you own part of the cow by paying a certain amount every month or every week or however they have it set up, then you get milk from your partially shared cow. So that’s a little bit of a loophole there that a lot of people take advantage of.

So I went down the rabbit trail of milk because I think that’s one that people can really understand in a black and white scenario. Now, there’s a lot of talk that kind of happened a couple years ago about a year, year and a half ago, in regards to an Amish gentleman named Amos Miller who got hit with a $250,000 fine for not complying with food processing laws in his state and or federally. So to kind of put it out there, there are three to four-ish different categories of meat laws. So when I say four-ish, one of them right off the bat is that poultry is not considered meat, it is its own category within the USDA. I mean obviously, poultry is meat, but it has a different category. So we’re just going to kind of set that off to the side.

The next one is called custom packing. Custom packing is where, if you raise a steer and you want to have it butchered and put back in your freezer, and you don’t want to do that yourself, you take it to a butcher in town, they come to your house and slaughter it. They do the cut and wrap, you get the meat, you’re not selling it, it’s just for you. And then the third, or third and fourth is state and federal inspected plants. A state inspected plant means that there is a vet that works in the plant, they check the animal, they check the organs, they check the brain before and after they’re slaughtered. It’s called antemortem and postmortem inspections. And so with a state inspection, I don’t know if it has to be an actual vet, it might be able to be somebody who works under a Vet or a USDA inspector.

But anyways, that meat cannot be sold outside of the state, but it can be sold within the state, in local stores or restaurants and things like that. So that’s kind of a nice setup there. Then there’s the federally inspected plants and they’re called the USDA plants. And those are plants where the meat can be sold everywhere. Grocery stores, big grocery stores, it can be transported over state lines, it can be sold off people’s farms, which I believe you can do with the state inspections as well. So there is a loophole to that, which is kind of the whole cow similar to the cow share type program that we’ve been talking about. But basically, and I do this a lot on my farm, this is how I actually sell most of my meat, is somebody will buy a pig from me and then the butcher comes to my house, slaughters the pig, takes it to the slaughter plant or takes it to the packing, his butcher shop.

They cut and wrap it per the customer’s specifications and the customer goes and picks up the meat. So the only time that the customer owned this pig is from the time they gave me the money for it until the time the butcher comes to my house and slaughters it. So it is a little bit of a loophole, but it’s legal. So what this Amos Miller guy was doing is, he had a situation where his customers were buying meat from him. He was having it butchered at a custom packing plant, and then he would get them their meat. But because when he wanted to go to a USDA plant, he found out that they were spraying the meat with a certain chemical. I’m going to circle back to that. So he didn’t want to be a part of that.

So he used this custom plant, but he had so many customers that wanted this organic non-sprayed meat that he ended up shipping across state lines. So then the USDA actually came in and said, Hey, you need to comply with our laws. We’ll give you x amount of time to do this. And he signed something to that extent. When he didn’t comply in the right amount of time, which ended up being a six year process, he was hit with a $250,000 fine. So when this hit, everything out there, the news and stuff, it was, oh my gosh, this guy is just trying to sell quality meat and he’s getting hit with a $250,000 fine. That wasn’t technically the case because there was a six year window that he may have been able to fight this under a different way and he kind of just signed his thing and went about his business.

I’m being a little bit of the devil’s advocate there, but I do feel there’s a better way for people to get meat on a mass scale- not everybody can afford to buy a whole hog. I mean, I sell my whole hogs for $850 and then they have to pay their cut and wrap fees on top of that. Now it ends up being a really good deal, and they get a good product that they know how it was treated. They know that it wasn’t chemicals involved. They know what medications I’m giving my animals, which I am open about it. And because sometimes, an animal gets sick and needs an antibiotic, I let them know if that was one of my animals that received an antibiotic.

Some people don’t care as long as it was done under proper practices and that the animal wasn’t butchered until after the withdrawal time on this medication, which, antibiotics, I think stay in the system for two weeks. After that, an animal can be butchered and have no traces of antibiotics in their system, but every antibiotic is different. So if you’re taking my advice on this, make sure you’re checking the bottle of the antibiotic that you’re giving your animal and see what the withdrawal time on that is. And there’s a different withdrawal time for milk and for meat. So make sure you’re checking that. Now as far as the chemicals that had to be sprayed, that’s a really hard one because all these food plants, and I believe a lot of custom plants do still spray the meat. Now what they spray them with is different in every plant.

Now, some plants, it’s kind of a vinegar solution because, what that does is, it kills any bacteria on the meat while it’s going to go get hung. Because beef sometimes is hung for 21 days in a cooler, but you want to make sure that there isn’t bacteria on the outside of that meat that’s going to sit there and grow. I mean, there has to be a way to handle this. Now, on the flip side, there’s chicken poultry plants, they will triple wash the carcasses in chlorine and then still come back with pathogens on the meat. So I mean, there’s got to be what I talked about at the beginning, there has to be a middle ground on this. And so, the middle ground might be okay, yeah, you can spray the meat, but it has to be done with the vinegar or, think some plants use isopropyl alcohol, but it’s a very low amount and then evaporates off really quick.

So I mean, the same with the vinegar, it evaporates off and so the meat doesn’t taste like vinegar, but in the meantime, the bacteria was killed at the beginning. So it’s again, finding that middle ground. Now I’m going to cover the antibiotic. Sorry, I am jumping around a little bit because I really wanted to make sure that everybody was kind of educated and I wasn’t sure how this conversation apparently with myself was going to go. But when we talk about antibiotics I feel that was a good time to bring that up after talking about the antibiotics that I use on my animals as needed. So antibiotic-free organic meat was put into place because in some commercial situations, they were using the antibiotics as part of their feed as a preventative practice to keep them from getting sick. Especially when, for example, when cows go from the fields to a feedlot, they’re really susceptible to respiratory infections.

So they would be given these antibiotics immediately to reduce or prevent these respiratory infections from happening. They could also use antibiotics to help with growth. So this is why they took that out. Now again, in that devil’s advocate place, how else do we help these animals that could be getting respiratory infections when being transferred from the field to the feedlots? I mean, do we let them suffer through it? Do we go ahead and give them antibiotics and then move them over to what they call a natural herd- they aren’t given antibiotics as preventatives, they’re given antibiotics as needed. So that’s kind of my pigs, they’re considered natural because the only medications they get are as needed, not as preventative, where a full organic would have to be no antibiotics. And that’s because, I don’t know if it’s me coming from commercial agriculture, but I also think that there can be a cruelty factor to not taking care of a sick animal. So I mean, an animal that is labeled as antibiotic free means they never received an antibiotic. So hopefully that means that’s because that animal never got sick in its entire life.

However, there are cases where in very organic situations, especially in some of the home farm, smaller farms, that really want to stick to organic practices. I mean, an animal gets sick and they’re giving them garlic supplements and stuff, and is that preventative enough? Is that going to heal them or are they allowing an animal to be sick just to maintain their practices? I think that there’s better ways of handling it. I know of situations where a larger organic beef operation will have an organic herd and then if a steer gets sick, they’ll go ahead and give it antibiotics and then wait for the withdrawal time and then market it as a natural beef rather than an organic beef. Now if a mom cow gets sick, say she has mastitis or something, she can be given antibiotics and their baby would have to go, I think they have to go natural at that point because they would be drinking milk with antibiotics in it.

But then that cow, as long as she’s not pregnant at the time, I know with feed she only has to be on organic feed the last trimester of her pregnancy. So I think it’s the same with antibiotics. So she’s treated with antibiotics for mastitis. The next year, she can be the mother of a calf that’s going to go into an organic herd again. So I just feel there’s really different ways on a dairy. Sometimes after they have to treat a cow with antibiotics, they don’t want to put her back into production. And so, I mean there’s ways that cows can then be sold and a new cow can be purchased or they can have a separate line of milk. But in smaller practices, that one cow might be one of only two cows that they’re selling milk from and to sell her could be a really big deal.

And so rather than treat her with antibiotics, they try to treat her with alternative supplements. And that’s where I think sometimes there can be some cruelty. And I mean, I hope that people aren’t coming at me with pitchforks and fire at this point, but it is something to consider. I’m not completely on one side of this fence or the other. I’m more just, let me give you something to think about. Just kind of, moving on in this conversation. Again, I just really wanted to bring about some education, some conversation, maybe something that you want to research further. When thinking about being able to have free food in the United States, we haven’t had free food in close to a hundred years. So therefore, we don’t believe that we’re safe having food that isn’t inspected by the government.

So, as an example with this, Sedgwick, Maine, began passing laws within their jurisdiction about free food, not free food, cost-wise, Food Freedom. And that ended up going all the way to the state level. And the USDA actually came in and said that if they did not rescind those laws, they’d be pulling all federal inspectors from Maine, which would’ve really damaged the livelihood of so many farmers and made it where they couldn’t sell certain foods right inside in their own grocery stores if they were federally owned groceries or not federally owned, but owned by companies that have these stores in all the states. So it’s an issue that there’s that much control when the state was willing to still have laws in place. So what a lot of people do is that they focus on the cottage food laws.

Now cottage foods are certain foods that don’t include milk and meat and certain other rules about not needing to be refrigerated, that they’re shelf stable, they have a certain acid level. I think even some breads can be sold under cottage food laws because they state the expiration date on them and they don’t need to be kept hot or cold to maintain their safety. I think there’s certain states that have more lenient cottage food laws. I’m more versed on Idaho and California, because those are the states, when I was in California was where I was the food safety specialist. And now in Idaho I sell food under the cottage food laws. So if there’s foods that you’re wanting to sell off your farm or that you’re wanting to buy from local farmers or from the farmer’s market, cottage foods might be something that you want to look into and you can just google those through your state.

So something else to consider. I know that so many of the laws that I was even familiar with have changed due to covid, but at the same time, covid is causing people to see how many holes there were in our supply chain, and they really want to shorten that. In order to shorten that the right way, we need more food freedoms. We need to change some of these laws. Now, the Rogue Food Conference, this group has started talking about being able to help people lobby to change those laws in their areas. Lobbying groups are similar to say the NRA, which is supporting our Second Amendment rights.

The Rogue Food Group is interested in helping some people. So if you have something, if you had the government come in and try to shut down your small dairy or something along those lines and you feel you’ve done everything right and you want some advice, reaching out to these guys is a really great place to start. I’ll post, of course, their link in the show notes as well. Now, I don’t have any affiliation with this conference other than I was a vendor there and I want to educate you guys more, but I do think that they have something positive. However, if all of the food safety programs were gone tomorrow, would people have the integrity to still produce safe products? I don’t know. I think people would see this as a catastrophe. I think it could be a catastrophe.

I think that these laws need to be changed the right way and slowly backed off, and that there’s possibly still some situations where the government does still need to be involved. Now, that could be the big food plants because I’ve seen some crazy things happen in them that I know without government involvement they wouldn’t have been corrected. But on a smaller level, I feel most small farms are not wanting to sell a bad or unsafe product because that falls under their reputation. Now, I’m not saying that someone should die before the USDA is coming in or, state or county inspectors, but I do believe that most farmers are not going to be selling a bad product intentionally where the laws fall on that. Maybe that’s a conversation we should all start having. 

I hope I gave you guys something to think about this week and don’t forget to keep growing. Well, thank you for joining me today at the Homestead Education and I hope that I have given you something to think about this week. To help others find me please comment and leave a review on your favorite, favorite podcast player. You can also follow me on Facebook and Instagram at homemade revelation. Do you have questions that you’d answered or just want to say hi? Please email me at hello@thehomesteadeducation.com. Until next time, keep growing.