Transcript for Episode 14

Ryan McDermott: I'm here with Jesse Straight, chief Mad Farmer at Wiffletree Farm in Warrenton, Virginia. Jesse is one of the leading Mad Farmers in the country. He's part of a second generation that's been inspired by people like Wendell Berry and Joel Salatin, and is running a very successful operation that started out raising primarily chickens and now does pigs, cattle, and a number of other things that we'll be hearing about. And it's profitable and it is serving the community.

So, Jesse, welcome.

Jesse Straight: Thank you, Ryan. I'm glad to be here.

Ryan McDermott: Jesse, once upon a time you wrote a letter to Wendell Berry. What did you say and how did he respond?

Jesse Straight: So I had to have been hooked on his fiction and I, for about a year, I just read every piece of fiction he had ever written, and it really grabbed me. And I think I was a certain place in my life and had certain inclinations that what he was saying was exactly what I needed to hear at the time and was very compelling. It was articulating things that I couldn't have articulated but I was hungry for. And so that just got me going down a certain path, and very much the path I'm on now.

So part of that was actually thinking about farming as a career. And I was visiting lots of farmers and I was reading lots of books.

I had written him a letter one, just to thank him for his writing, and then two, to run past him some of my ideas. And I was sensitive to the pitfall of being starry-eyed and naive and someone who didn't grow up in a farming family and just being foolish. So I was sensitive to that, taking that into consideration as I did my investigations and then also in my letter to Wendell. And I explained to him how I'd been doing all this reading and visiting all these farms and I wasn't going to take on a big mortgage and take all these risky moves and that would have been naive, but just sort of saying, like, “This is something I'm really considering and I'm guessing that both with your farming background and then I'm sure not the first person to write you a letter like this, what are your recommendations? Just sort of kind of get some wisdom from someone that like I would even any other farmer. But obviously, you are engaging a world of non-farmers with this really compelling mission of good agriculture, and so I'm sure you're dealing with these kinds of letters and people.”

So anyway, I went in with that and he wrote me back a letter that was very surprising for me. And it was very dismissive. “You should not go into farming.” And that was the short of it, was like, “You should not go into farming.” And I thought that was just very surprising to get from Wendell Berry.

Ryan McDermott: And why not? What were his reasons?

Jesse Straight: Yeah, so I think – it wasn't a long letter and I'm sure he gets a lot of letters, so I don't blame him for that – but I think, as I remember it right, I think he thought that I was maybe more naive than I thought I was. And so he was saying, “You're going to fail. You're going to be unhappy. You're not set up well for this,” and, “Don't bring on misery.” And so then I wrote him back another letter. I think my pride was a little bit hurt because I felt like he'd spoke to me like a child. He thought I was more naïve than I thought I was.

Ryan McDermott: And how old were you at this time?  

Jesse Straight: Let's see here. I was probably twenty-four, twenty-five or something like that.

Ryan McDermott: Right, okay.

Jesse Straight: So I was really old and mature. [Laughter] It's a joke.

So anyway, I came back at him. I was like, “Hey buddy, I'm not joking around here and I'm not making pie in the sky plans. I'm making real plans. And I have a plan and it's not crazy and here's why it's not crazy. And why are you telling me not to farm? You’re Wendell Berry, gosh darn it!”

So I essentially wrote him a letter back saying that, and then he wrote me back a letter basically saying like, “If you really want to farm, you won't listen to what I say.” Which was [laughter], yeah, just kind of funny and also just very Wendell Barry-ian. He's funny in his roundabout ways. He says a lot, but then sometimes when you try and nail him down on something, he doesn't like to give strong prescriptions.

Ryan McDermott: Besides writing about farming and small community, he's famous for this early essay “Why I Don't Use a Computer.”

Jesse Straight: Yeah.

Ryan McDermott: And yet, wasn't one of his responses to you typed on a computer?

Jesse Straight: Yeah, it, I mean, it was typed and printed off of… I mean, I guess it could have been a word processor, but it was not a typewriter.

Ryan McDermott: Yeah.

Jesse Straight: I don't know if he had someone do it for him or whatever, but yeah, it was a bit funny.

Ryan McDermott: Yeah. A bit disillusioning too, right?

Jesse Straight: No, actually later on – it kind of came full circle, because later on I went and heard him read some poetry. I think you remember when he came to UVA. And he had a new book of poetry and he had a private reading and I was lucky enough to be invited. So it was a smaller group of, I don't know, sixty people or something.

And he read the poetry and then afterwards I went up and spoke with him and I was like, “Hey, I don't know if you remember me, but we shared these letters back and forth and, hey, guess what? I did what I said I was going to do. I didn't go into a lot of debt. I have work doing carpentry work. I'm taking care of my family with the carpentry work and I'm building up my farm business and I'm segueing into full-time farming. And I hope to be, I'm on course to be full-time farming in about a year.”

I had this spine-tingling experience where he pumped his fist after this sedate poetry reading, and he was like, “Yes! That's how you do it! That's how you do it!”

And so, it was really rewarding because, I think in his defense, he was really protecting against those people who, in the passion of the moment, and they have five kids and they have a good job and they're used to a certain quality of life, et cetera, and they go and take out a million-dollar mortgage on a farm and they go bankrupt and they get divorced and everything falls apart. And I think Wendell Berry would feel really bad if he didn't do his part to dissuade those kind of family destructive decisions based on impassioned, naive, Wendell Berry-inspired plans.

So anyway, I think he's concerned about having that kind of effect on people who don't know what they're getting into. But then he was really happy when he heard how I was going about it and how I had Joel Salatin as a mentor and I wasn't going into debt and I was doing direct marketing and I was doing all these things that showed that there was hope and that I wasn't jeopardizing my family and all that kind of stuff.

Ryan McDermott: Right. And just to back up a little bit, before we get into what's happened since then. I've known you and your wife Liz for a long time, and at this time when you're talking about writing these letters to Wendell Berry, farming was one of, it seemed, a dozen career options for you, all of which you seemed equally passionate about. And so your experience is one that a lot of my college students share and certainly recent graduates share.

Looking back, how do you think back on the discovery of vocation? And do you have advice that you would give to people in a similar situation?

Jesse Straight: I remember getting together with you, Ryan and Ross one time, I believe it was on the lawn at UVA, and it was sort of like a hash-out session. It was like, “All right, I'm sick of this. I got to figure this out. Let's put our heads together and we're going to figure out what I'm going to do with my life.” And I'm sure we had a good conversation, but like, I don't think it really felt to me that it moved the ball forward at all.

And that was my situation, I would say from seventeen to twenty-seven, is, for better or worse, my work in life was very much at the forefront of my mind. That was always a big deal to me. I really wanted to have my work be an integrated and coherent part of my life. So I really wanted to not have it be the case where I'm checking the box off, paying the bills and coming home and compartmentalizing, the work time is totally separate and just a sort of necessary evil and check it off and take care of the family.

And of course that can sound very precious because of course it's very noble and good to – and most people don't have the privilege I have – but it's very noble and good to just take care of your family. And that's great. But for what it's worth, if I could have more than that, I wanted to.

And I was eager to get started. So every minute passing made the dilemma and the stagnation all the more unbearable. So I just desperately wanted to get working on my project. I wanted to dig in and get started, and I felt like I was just spinning my wheels and feeling my way around in the dark.  I really felt like this was a problem I had no way of answering. I didn't feel like any of these things people do really had any traction, you know, taking like these personality tests or taking these sort of vocational things. That had no purchase with me. That got me nowhere.

And I was sick of talking about it. I was sick of thinking about it. I was just sick of everything about it, and I was so despairing of ever – I never thought that I would ever not be like that. I just thought this was going to be my miserable fate of just wanting to get to work and always spinning my wheels and at a loss and second guessing myself at every step.

Ryan McDermott: And at what point then did some kind of clarity begin to emerge?

Jesse Straight: You remember our friend, Father Minnick, the retired Episcopal priest. I was going to him occasionally for a spiritual direction. And of course, this was something that we were talking about. And he was very adamant that I needed to ask God to tell me what he wanted, what his will was, and that I needed to make time and space to listen and to be quiet.

And I'm very much a person that has a hard time with that. I would much rather polish my boots than sit still. I would rather do anything than not do something. So that was a difficult challenge for me and, I think, appropriate. That's maybe part of my, to your question, that's part of my advice, is that I think if I had been Catholic at the time, I would recommend Eucharistic adoration and silent meditation and prayer and explicitly asking God for his will and talking to wise friends and mentors that you respect. So those are things I would recommend.

And I really do feel like how the story went for me is very miraculous. Like I mentioned, there was at least a decade there where I was in that state I described. And like you mentioned, I was thinking about audio documentary work. I was thinking about becoming a professor in religious studies, about becoming an Episcopal priest, about probably construction and carpentry and probably some other things I've since forgotten.

Ryan McDermott: You were going to create a music and arts festival.

Jesse Straight: Oh, yeah. Yeah. That – I'm sure. And at one point there was going to be a school that was integrated into agriculture and all kinds of things like this.

Ryan McDermott: Yes.

Jesse Straight: So anyway, all over the place. And so, I just, I never thought that I would be where I am now, where I am totally at peace with my work. And I love my work.

And I can honestly say that I have no second thoughts, which maybe is a fault of mine. Maybe there's something weird about that. But for my 25-year-old self to hear my 38-year-old self say that, he would've been like, “You're totally lying. That is not true.” But it really is true that I, as miraculous as it is, have no second thoughts. And I've never once looked over my shoulder.

Maybe a moment of the greatest clarity I remember was Liz, myself and our new baby Josephine were going flying out west to visit my brother for Christmas. And I was sitting next to my sister on the plane and I was reading one of Joel Salatin's books. And I remember just sort of like looking up and it's one of those times when you sort of like, say something before you think it or you think it by saying it. And I remember just saying to my sister, I was like, “You know what? I'm going to do this.” And I almost heard myself from the third perspective say that. And, kind of agreeing with myself, I was like,
“Yeah! Yeah, I am going to do this. Yeah, that's right!”

And I remember that being a moment when I was – whatever parts of consciousness and subconsciousness came together – it was a moment of decision and of hearing. And I don't think I could have articulated to my sister at that moment why it was so compelling in that moment. But nonetheless, in retrospect, of course, I see all the patterns of my past and the parts of my personality and the things that have been and have become important to me and how that's all come together and made a lot of sense with this life and work.

Ryan McDermott: And Joel Salatin is the founder of Polyface Farms outside of Stanton, Virginia.  He is the subject of, I think, four bestselling books by now, plus three documentaries, I think, movie documentaries, and is an active blogger and himself has written – how many books has he written now?

Jesse Straight: I couldn't tell you, but it's probably in the 15 or so range.

Ryan McDermott: Right. So some of his first books were blueprints for, if you want to start a successful farm, how do you do that? Could you just quickly bring us up to speed then? How you got from wanting to start a farm to where you are now? Milestones?

Jesse Straight: Sure. So we were living and working in Charlottesville, Virginia. And in 2009, we moved back to my hometown of Warrenton to live on a rented piece of land, about seven acres to basically begin. And so we just started with meat chickens and we just did a very small amount. We didn't know we were doing, we were just, I basically was working out of Joel's books and taking day trips to Polyface and talking to Joel on the phone and emails and letters and all that.

And yeah, so we started there and we just slowly built up our skills and our production and our customer base. And we added on laying hens, and then we added on pigs, and then we added on turkeys, and then we added on beef cattle. And then we needed more land and we rented pasture offsite.

And then in 2012 we eventually moved to our home farm now, Wiffletree Farm. And we've been here since 2012. And we’re now, we have, I guess, four people on staff and three to five interns and some part-time help as well. And then we do about 15,000 meat chickens a year, and we have about 2,000 laying hens and do about seven, 800 turkeys for Thanksgiving and slaughter about a hundred, hundred plus head of cattle a year, and about 200 pigs a year, to just give a sense of the production. And then we sell through a store on our farm, and then we do these monthly neighborhood deliveries where we deliver to people's neighborhoods, and they pick up from a host family.

And then we sell to wholesale customers like restaurants. And so our reach is from Maryland, DC, Northern Virginia and down to Central Virginia.

Ryan McDermott: And what are the principles? I mean, you didn't set out to start an industrial farm, right? Even though your production is large now, it's nothing like that. And it's limited, so… You're not organic. What are the basic principles?

Jesse Straight: I mean, our size would be laughable to an industrial farm. It's very small, but we are not rinky-dink. So we provide a lot of families and a lot of restaurants with food.

So yeah, in terms of our farm practices, fundamentally our main principle is to observe natural biological systems and to try and imitate, replicate and participate in those systems.

Ryan McDermott: And what would be one example of that?

Jesse Straight: The one example that I always go to first is movement.

So it seems kind of simple, but if you think about it, animals in nature are always on the move. There's no animals in the wild that would naturally raise their hand and say, “Hey, let's all get together and live in this 2,000 square foot area and just poop and eat on this same spot. And forget about the other 500 square miles. Let's just all hang out here. It would be so much better.”

And of course that doesn't happen because animals are wiser than that and they know that if they hang out and muck around in the same spot, they're going to stress out their immune system because of the pathogens that are going to have an easy host. So whether that's bacteria or viruses or parasites or even predators, you make life easy on all those pathogens by staying still. And movement makes you a difficult host and you want to be a difficult host.

So those animals are on the move because it's better for them to be on clean ground. They don't want to be mucking around their own feces. And also, the clean and healthiest food, and grass and forages and et cetera, are the stuff they haven't sat on, pooped on and chewed on already.

That's what the land wants, too. The land wants to be stepped on, pooped on and chewed on, or the plants at least, but it doesn't want that 365 days a year. And if it did that, it would just turn into a desert or eroded, compacted soil. So it wants that biological stimulant. It wants that grazing. It wants that tillage. That energizes it and feeds the soil microbes and brings good bacterial life to the soil and to the plants. But it needs time to rest and recuperate.

So all that to say, that's a really big principle for us. Because once you get that down, so many other things fall into place.

Ryan McDermott: And so, is this why I pay the 50 cents extra per dozen to get the cage-free eggs at the grocery store?

Jesse Straight: [Laughter] Pushing my buttons!

Ryan McDermott: So you saying that movement is not involved with the cage-free eggs?

Jesse Straight: The whole virtue of movement is movement off of actual living soil and plants onto actual living soil and plants. And that's not what happens when you buy cage-free eggs. You buy hens that can freely move from one piece of concrete to another piece of concrete. It's – unfortunately, it's bad-faith marketing, where you buy the carton and it has the picture of the pasture and it says “cage-free,” and you're supposed to think about hens on grass. But what it just means is those hens aren't in a cage in a building. They're just in a building.

That gets to a point, which I was trying to get to, which is: movement is one of our biggest ways in which we get in line with natural biological systems and those cycles that plants and animals are made by their nature to be in cycle with, with each other. That's the hardest for an industrial food system to do. They can swap out their feed and give them a feed that's organic feed or doesn't have antibiotics – that's easily swapped. But to then get one of those poultry houses that's 300 yards long and hook that up to a tractor and drag that to fresh pasture, that's just not going to happen.

Industrial food systems love concrete, and concrete does not love to be moved. And industrial food systems like to control. And movement means you have to give up control because when you have movement, that means you're probably not necessarily tied to all the nice fancy electrical gadgets like feed augers and things like that, that save labor. And you probably have a structure that's maybe a little bit more vulnerable to weather events or to predators, things like that. So it takes more skill to read the weather, to understand how to deal with predators.

So it's not dummy proof. Movement means that you are a choreographer and the animals are your dancers. And the pasture is your stage and the sun and rain are – and the seasons are part of your music.

Ryan McDermott: So what does this choreography look like on a typical day at Wiffletree Farm?

Jesse Straight: The team gets together at six to do a 10-minute powwow and go through the different things we’ve got to get done that day and pointers and who's doing what and that kind of stuff.

But then we'll go out and we'll move all the broilers to fresh pasture. So, that's about 2,500 chickens that's getting moved to fresh pasture every morning. And then we'll move our laying hens to fresh pasture twice a week in these about half-acre paddocks that we create with mobile electrified poultry fencing. And they have these “eggmobiles,” we call them, wagons that are shelters and have their nest boxes and things like that. So we are moving the meat chickens, the laying hens to fresh pasture. Likewise the turkeys when they're out on pasture as we get closer to Thanksgiving and all that. And then we're moving our pigs with electric fencing at least every two weeks to fresh ground. And then our cows we're moving every day, or sometimes as much as twice a day to fresh, small paddocks. So everything is just always on the move.

And it's really satisfying because when you actually get out there and do it, it's so evident that it's a good thing. It's a good thing for the land, it's a good thing for the animals. And when you open that electric wire and you let the cows run into the untouched, lush, beautiful pasture that's not been picked over, and they get to have their feast for the next 12 or 24 hours on clean ground with beautiful clean food, not mucking around in old, muddy, manure-y spots or anything like that, it's just, it's common sense to see that this is a place where an animal has the best chance for being healthy and being happy and thriving.

Ryan McDermott: And so what are the interactions? I mean, you're moving each class of animals for their own sake, but there are also interactions between the different types of animals, right? How does that work?

Jesse Straight: For example, the cattle are happy with grass that's two to four feet tall. They can get in there. They're the size animal and have the type of mouth and digestive system that can handle that kind of grass. So they get in there and they stomp on grass. And their hoof impact forces that litter from the grass into the soil and contacts the soil and that feeds the soil microbes, because, as it turns out, those soil microbes don't get to eat unless some of that green matter actually touches the soil. And so an important part of the cattle's interaction with all these systems is to actually just get in there and stomp on things.

And that stomping also does other interesting things where it's creating small divots in the soil. When you have a thousand-pound animal with four pointy hooves, those make these little micro pools, where you actually capture more water and less water runs off and you can have more infiltration of water into the soil, which, again, is something the soil microbes and plants need to be productive. So that's the cattle come through.

Well, the chickens – a chicken does not have the beak or the digestive system to handle taking on a four-foot stem-ey, stocky, starchy grass plant. What a chicken really wants is that really supple, soft tender leaf, and that's what it wants to eat and that's what it can handle eating. So poultry really prefer younger, tender, shorter plants. So you get in there with the cows and you stomp around and you graze and you knock it down. And then we’ll come in there later with the poultry and they'll come after those younger shoots and those more tender shoots and they can actually handle that.

And at the same time they're going through those cow patties. And if you time it right, there's some really delicious fly larva in those patties. So they're very eagerly scratching through those cow patties and getting out their little treasures of grubs and fly larva.

And while they're doing that, they're also, of course, integrating that cow patty into the soil. And so you might have seen farmers driving tractors around fields with a big chain net behind the tractor. And the point of that is to knock those cow patties into the soil and help integrate that into the soil as opposed to having a lumpy field where those cow patties aren't really doing as good of a job as they could be with fertilizing because it's too concentrated in one cow patty spot.

Well, we never have to do that because that's what the chickens do for us. So they're in there decreasing the fly population, which is a stress on the cattle, and they're also integrating those cow patties into the soil. And they're also utilizing growth off that pasture that otherwise the cattle wouldn't utilize. And they're also putting down their own manure, which has its own spectrum of benefits that's complimentary to the herbivores, to the cattle.

And so, just by that example, in terms of looking at the cattle, their relationship to the grass and soil and microbes and the poultry and their relation to all the above and the cattle, you can see a bit of how those things all are in a dance with each other.

Ryan McDermott: There's a kind of biblical beauty and harmony and simplicity to what you're describing. I wonder though, thinking about this in terms of theology and ethics, when we consider where we're living in the modern world with vastly larger population than during biblical times. So pressures on needing to feed close to seven billion people and growing, and also pressures on land use and the need to have trees there that are going to soak up ozone gases instead of pastureland. Even though this sounds so sustainable, isn't this a kind of luxury that is actually promoting a larger unsustainability?

Jesse Straight: There's actually nothing that is more productive to sequester carbon and create biomass than a well-managed pasture. We can make things more productive, we can increase photosynthesis, we can increase carbon sequestration through really intelligent management. A forest cannot, through photosynthesis, capture and utilize as much carbon and create as much biomass in the soil as well-managed pasture. Basically: grasses are race cars and they love sun, and they love capturing nutrients and putting it into the soil. And they only are a well-performed race car when they have those animals to help them go through those cycles by grazing, by stompage, tilling. And the relationship that those soil microbes need those animals as well. And the plants need to be grazed as well for them to stay in those sort of adolescent growth phases that they are really just going crazy in photosynthesis and in sequestering carbon.

I don't know if you've seen the study, but there's a fellow pasture-based farmer down in Georgia, White Oak Pastures, where they had a carbon audit done. The same company that audited them also did Impossible Burger. And White Oak Pastures is, I forget what the percentage is, but they're sequestering a significant more carbon then they're using, in grazing all this chicken, egg, turkey, pork and beef and lamb and goat. And the same kind of things we're doing with the same kind of models.

And the same firm that audited them also did the Impossible Burger. And the Impossible Burger is pretty much right on par with the rest of the industrial food system in terms of their carbon impact.

Ryan McDermott: So they're net producers of carbon?

Jesse Straight: Yeah. So they're net producers, whereas White Oak Pastures is a net consumer, or capture of carbon. So, these systems are putting carbon into the soil and they're doing it because everything is happy and is roaring along.

And at the end of the day, we only get what the sun gives us. And you can only effectively capture all this beautiful and abundant energy that we get, 16 hours a day or whatever it is, if you're managing your plants and your soils and your animals well, to set them up to just stay busy photosynthesizing. And that's what you want to do, you want to, just – there's all this beautiful, abundant energy coming out of the sky and we mostly waste it and don't take advantage of it.

But just through some simple observations of natural systems and how plants and animals and soils like to be in relation to each other, we can essentially turn on the race car and get roaring away and can dump lots and lots of carbon, beautiful carbon into our soils. And we’re going to have less flooding, less runoff, capture more water, make the soil microbes happy, make more productive grasslands that make more food. So that's where hope lies in a long-term sustainable system.

Ryan McDermott: So to come at this from another direction, then, granting that part of your argument: one of the major economic considerations that economists raise about various proposals to mitigate climate change is that these mitigation efforts might be affordable to rich countries, but they're not affordable to poor countries. And that poor countries are going to be impoverished.

And, wherever you stand on that particular argument, I just want to bring it up as an analogy here: The analogous argument is that, okay, this is great, it's a sustainable way, but it's expensive. And as Christians, we have an obligation to consider the poor first and the poor's ability to feed their families, to afford to feed their families. How do you think through that aspect of affordability? Isn't this just a luxury of rich, educated East Coast and West Coast elites?

Jesse Straight: Yeah, of course that is, on its face, a pretty tricky question to answer. I might put it back to you in this way. And not to say that I sort of have all the answers and how and how to concretely deliver the goods, but I'll give you some points to go on.

So one is, I would say… First of all, we have to remember that our industrial food system is not that old. So, we might think this is the status quo, but let's remember that, in terms of history of human civilization, it's not the status quo. And of course you have to parse through the different farming practices and their advent and all that stuff. But, setting that aside.

So the second point I would say is if you're going to bring up the point of, as Christians, we have an obligation to the poor, I would make a similar argument that as Christians, we have obligation to not exploit the poor and the vulnerable. And right now our industrial food system is propped up on a system of exploiting the weak and the vulnerable. And what it does is it exploits the land in poisoning and in robbing fertility and not putting fertility into the land.

And it exploits the people. So these farmers that have zero leverage to monopolistic corporations that control the sales outlet and control the market, they dictate to the farmer what they will pay the farmer. And the farmer is under the burden of debt and expensive infrastructure that's required by the corporation. And so they're at their mercy and they have very little leverage and they have been given very poor circumstances. So they're being exploited.

Many of the people that work in the industrial food system, whether that's processing plants, et cetera, are people that don't have a lot of options and are being exploited and in some cases illegal aliens who are especially in vulnerable situations to be exploited.

Our country is being exploited in the form of tax subsidies. That, again, that centralization of power and the industrialized food system has been able to lobby for itself. So that's taxpayers are being exploited.

And then the eaters are being exploited because the industrial food system has done a good job of accomplishing its goals. And its goals are convenience and cheapness. And so it's done that, but to the exclusion of whether the food is healthy. And much less healthy for the land or the animals or anything like that, but even just healthy for the eaters. I think most people would agree that that's not the highest priority of the industrial food system is to think about bringing to the table the healthiest food. So, in that way, the eaters are being exploited.

Basically, there's all these members that are being affected by the industrial food system that are being exploited. And they are because they're vulnerable, and they can be. So, it wouldn't be justified as Christians to say, “Well, we should feed the poor by exploiting the poor.” So that doesn't make sense as a good solution.

And to the other point, there's a way in which when you buy that industrial food at the grocery store, you're only paying for part of the price. Like I said, part of the price is being picked up by taxpayers. Part of the price will be picked up by future generations as they try and clean out the Mississippi Delta or the Chesapeake Bay, or the topsoil that's eroded in the Midwest and no longer can grow crops in 50 years or whatever the time it is. There's a way in which when you go and buy that inexpensive food, you're just not paying for all of it and you're asking for other people to pay for the rest of it. There's a justice or an injustice there that's not right. And if we aren't trying to go at this through a Christian ethics, that's not just.

Ryan McDermott: I think even if there are all of these injustices, one of the great achievements of the modern industrial food system is its stability. So we don't have famines in the developed world like we used to. However, I think a lot of people have been recognizing some vulnerabilities there since the coronavirus. What should we be seeing in the mainstream industrial food system that is now becoming apparent because of supply bottlenecks and so on?

Jesse Straight: The system has been very good at providing cheap food and convenience to get that food. But to do that, it's had to have a long supply chain. Because you have to get that supply chain long enough away from us to where we can pay people a lot less than you would pay us to do the work. So you got to get supply chains that go abroad to where you can pay people less to do it. So that means a long supply chain.

It also means you have to have a really sophisticated supply chain to have really low inventory. So, a grocery store is not going to have more than two days of food or whatever it is that they aim for. And that, of course: low inventory systems mean less expensive systems mean cheaper food.

So again, it's this very sophisticated system of emphasizing cheapness and convenience. But in that there's an embedded vulnerability that's inherent with a long supply chain and inherent with a system that doesn't have a lot of inventory backup.

And so I think this coronavirus experience, where there's a person who's going to a white collar job with a nice house and a nice car, and then in the course of two weeks, they find themselves in empty grocery store, fighting over the last can of beans, and they have these worst-case scenario fears in their mind about “How bad is this going to get am I going to get to the point where I'm having a hard time feeding my family?” I have to think that that person is going to have the kind of thoughts of like, “Goodness gracious, this is America! What is go – why can't we do better than this?”

And in this coronavirus experience, we essentially haven't had really that much of an impact on the supply chain itself. We just had a run on the bank. And the pipeline wasn't fat enough to keep up with the run on the bank. So, we haven't even touched the apocalyptic worst-case scenario of an actual disruption of the supply chain itself. We just had a supply chain that was too lean and sophisticated to be able to keep up with a run on the bank.

So all that to say is I think that this experience – and of course we went through it, we've gone through it now with this and hopefully we'll get out of this and things will get back to normal – But if we don't change anything about the system, there's not really a great reason to say that this isn't likely going to happen to us again. And there's all kinds of things that can disrupt society to create an analogous situation. And I'd have to think that this is planting a seed in people's mind. Like what would that upper-middle class, white collar job with a nice house and nice cars, who finds himself in an empty grocery store, how much would he pay or how much inconvenience would he be willing to submit himself to not go through that on an every-other-year basis or whatever our new normal is. I'm hoping that basically it'll be a wake-up call in terms of just our cultural priorities of cheapness and convenience over stability and health.

Ryan McDermott:  Right. So these are the kinds of arguments that for Whole Foods shoppers, New York Times readers, even if their new arguments are going to come across as I think, somewhat compelling.

However, you don't really inhabit that world yourself. You go to a fairly traditional Catholic church in the Diocese of Arlington. And my experience of these types of suburban, more conservative, traditional Christian circles is that people tend to shop at Costco rather than Whole Foods. They tend to shop at Sam's Club rather than the farmer's market. What kinds of arguments have you found resonate with people who maybe feel a little, even just culturally averse to shopping at your store, who might feel like to shop at your store is almost like subscribing to the New York Times? What's the theological-cultural spin that you see emerging that would make it so that Christians should be at the forefront of this movement and not following along?

Jesse Straight: So I mean, we have a comically diverse customer base, where we will have the blue collar Catholic family with 12 kids come in and buy a whole bunch of whole chickens and eggs from us, and then we'll have the double-income, liberal, Northern Virginia customer as well, side by side.

I don't know if I've had terribly great success in terms of persuading the people you're talking about. Those fellow parishioners of ours at St. John's that have always bought from us was not because I convinced them. And the ones who we count as good family friends of ours who rarely or never buy from us, I've not had a huge impact on them. And of course I try to not be obnoxious about talking about food all the time. So there's that.

But I think that some of the reasons I see why people in a sense get out of, break their category where it's the, like you mentioned, the conservative at Costco and the liberal at Whole Foods, or the liberal at the farmer's market. I think the couple reasons that come to mind that make someone be the weirdo that doesn't fit in those categories would be health issues. We have families where they just sort of hit the wall with themselves or their children and they start doing some research and they start learning about the conventional food and what it has and what it doesn't have, and they see results when they, whatever health issue. So that's obviously, that's a very strong motivator and that'll make a parent make decisions they wouldn't otherwise make when they're desperately trying to figure out what's going on with their health or their children's health.

The other thing would just be if people learn more about the conventional food system and the injustices involved. Once you see how this is being facilitated and basically the exploitation of land, animals, people, communities, taxpayers, et cetera. And that's a motivation for people of goodwill who are like, “You know what, I don't want to participate in that. I don't want to be facilitating that. That's not the world I want and it's not consistent with my Christian or Catholic ethics.”

Ryan McDermott: Yeah. I bought steaks for my son Augustine's birthday a couple months ago. And they were grass-fed steaks at Whole Foods. What’s the difference between, is there a difference between the steaks I bought there and steaks I would buy from your farm store?

Jesse Straight: So, unfortunately, this conversation gets into the weeds about labeling and what labels mean and don't mean. So, grass-fed, the label “grass-fed” allows for 60 days of feeding grain at the end of the animal's life. So most people don't know that. And that's a lot of time to feed a lot of grain and totally changes the gut of the animal and the health of the food. So that'd be one example.

Ryan McDermott: So this is what is technically according to the, whatever the certifying bodies are, this is what they say the limits are to putting that label on something.

Jesse Straight: Yep. You can feed grain for 60 days and put a grass-fed label on it.

Ryan McDermott: So, do you not grain-finish your cattle?

Jesse Straight: No. Nope. They're just completely grass.

So, that would be one example where a customer would be like, “What? I didn't know that. Why do they say grass-fed if it's grass-fed and corn.”

And then another example would be the one we talked about before, which is the cage-free bill.

Ryan McDermott: So, why doesn't Aldi and Whole Foods buy from you?

Jesse Straight: Well, I think because basically the customers haven't demanded it, because I think the tricky marketing has mostly placated customers. They said, “Oh, well, here's cage-free eggs and they're $3 a dozen. I'll buy for that.”

And then, when they, say, experiment with the local farmer's eggs and it's $6 a dozen and it's pasture raised and “These are cage-free with a pretty picture of pasture and that's pasture raised with a pretty picture of pasture, but this one's half the price.” Okay. So I think it's a lack of customer's understanding. And for good reason, because I think the marketing is tricky.

Ryan McDermott: And so what's your business model then, by contrast?

Jesse Straight: Yeah. So basically an important part of our business model is that we do not sell to a corporation that basically markets our stuff for us. So we do the whole thing: we raise the animal. We process the animal. We package the animal. We sell it directly to the customer and deliver it to the customer, deal with all the communication and all that stuff.

So of course it means you have to be willing to do that part of the work, but that does a lot of good things in my mind. So, in particular connection to the strain of this conversation, it allows me to not be beholden to a corporation that says, like Purdue or Tyson’s or whatever, and I'm now free of that indentured servitude where they're not dictating to me, “Well, Jesse we’ll pay you 29 cents for these chickens. And if you're not willing to take that, you won't have any birds and your house will be empty and you can't pay your mortgage. So, good luck.” So I'm not in that situation where I'm – I get to be in control.

And also I get to capture that full retail dollar. Since the food corporations are so monopolized, they are taking sort of a lion’s share of the retail dollar and the farmer is getting pennies because of their lack of leverage. So it's really important just in terms of the economics that if this wasn't such a monopolized situation with food businesses, then there might be actually a little better situation for farmers who want to sell into a commodity market, where basically, they're just raising food and it's selling to someone else who's going to bring it to market. But our situation is so monopolized, and that means that the farmer is so powerless that they're in a really bad situation and they essentially get bad prices. So that's our situation, and for that reason alone, it's wise to think about going directly to the market so that you're not taken advantage of.

The other reason is because part of our mission here is to do what I'm doing with you, which is to try and explain what is good about our farming model and how it's different than the status quo or the conventional system. So our best opportunity to do that is directly with customers. And when they come to the farm and they see the fields and they see the animals in the fields and they see us doing the work and taking care of the animals, and we get to tell them, for those who don't come to the farm, we get to take pictures and videos and tell them about our work and how it's benefiting the land and all that kind of stuff. That's us giving the customer the benefit of them learning about our model of farming and why it's good.

And then of course we learn about our customers and their needs in this closer relationship, where if without this relationship I might be like, “I'm just going to do whole chickens, and if you don't like it, tough luck.” But if I get a lot of feedback from busy families, like “We really want leg thighs and we really want breasts and we'll pay you to cut it up,” then I can take that. Or if I explain to them, “Hey, we only raise chickens from spring to the fall because they're on pasture and it's not good for the pasture or the birds to be out in the winter, so would you please hang with me and buy frozen birds through the winter and then we'll get back onto the fresh birds from April to November. And here's why and here's why this is a better system. And please don't go buy those CAFO fresh chickens in the winter because they're not on pasture.” And so I can help – it's a two-way street where we can both better understand each other's needs and they can better understand why we're doing what we're doing and why there's the things that might seem odd when you're coming from the grocery store experience. So yeah, so that means that we're selling out of our store on the farm and we're doing these neighborhood deliveries from Maryland down to Central Virginia.

And I guess the other thing that's nice about this is the diversity of work. It's fun that we get to not just take care of animals and process animals and package meat and all that, but we also get to communicate with customers and make deliveries and help people in the farm store and educate people.

And so it's – I think in terms of that sort of Christian understanding of the human person, that in terms of engaging as many parts of the human person as possible, it really creates a work that I feel like is more humane in that it's more diverse, and, like I mentioned, engaging different parts. You're both out there physically, using your body and moving shelters and animals to fresh ground. And at the same time, you're having to use the other parts of human nature that God's given us to, say, communicate an idea to a customer who doesn't understand how we do it, or to put together orders in the farm store, things like that.

So anyway, those are all reasons I think that this business model is really critical. If someone were to come to me and say, “Hey, I want to do exactly what you're doing; I just want to find someone I can sell it all to and not have to do any of the marketing,” I would be very cautionary with them and say, “You know what? I'm not sure that this works, unless you have a really special situation, unless you're willing to do some of the work of bringing your food to the market.”

Ryan McDermott: And you have a large team by now, right? And I know you have an internship program. Do you want to put in a little plug for that? And maybe, do you have any current interns who might be a good exemplary story about what that looks like?

Jesse Straight: Yeah, sure. Yep. So yeah, our team is myself; Jonathan Elliot, who's been with us for about five years; Ben Fisk, who was an intern with us in 2017, and he's been full-time with us for about a year. Matt Stalcup was an intern with us in 2018. He's been full-time with us since last summer. And then we have a local fellow Brendon McGurk, who's a community college student that works part-time for us. And then we generally have anywhere from two to five interns at a time.

And no one on our team went to an agricultural school. Our typical person is a liberal arts person. And so yeah, for example, just to think through some of our interns, one of our interns right now, Catherine, recently graduated from Villanova, studying the great books. And another intern, Amanda, graduated from Hillsdale several years back and was working managing a nonprofit in DC but is wanting to go into food. And then another intern is a young guy who's just finished up homeschool high school and comes from a conservative, Anglo-Catholic family in Central Virginia. And, let’s see here… Another intern comes just from Roanoke College, just in between her junior and summer year, and she's studying environmental science. So, yeah. And then, Jonathan, for example, he got his master's in theology from the Dominican House of Studies in DC and I somehow convinced him to come join up with us.

Yeah, so basically, I guess all that to say is that for us, an understanding of what it means to be human and the proper human relationship to God and to creation and then to just earnestly want to pursue that is maybe more of a common denominator among us, as opposed to someone who grew up in a farming family or went to Virginia Tech or things like that. And I think these other ideals of a more Catholic or Christian understanding of the human person in relation to the world is maybe more compelling.

Of course, there's lots of people who think about those things and would never want to do farm work or never want to have a farming career, but… Yeah, but I think those kind of thoughts and ideas for the right person who could see themselves doing that work is the person that's right up our alley.

Ryan McDermott: And I know you have details about the internship on your website, but, just really quickly, I know that it's kind of a curriculum too, right? What do interns learn?

Jesse Straight: Yeah, so it's four months and interns live on the farm and basically their primary benefit of the internship is the education.

I wish I had been able to intern somewhere before I started, but Liz and I were married and we had just had Josephine and I was trying to convince Joel Salatin at Polyface to allow us to come and intern there, but family housing just wasn't something they had. So that ruled that out.

And for that reason, I made the best of it, and I would take day trips and I would read his books and I would make lots of mistakes, but there's ways in which I would be so much further along now if I'd had that simple experience. And what it means is that I made all kinds of mistakes that were expensive and that were very disheartening and frustrating that wouldn't have been necessary if I had been able to work at a full-flung, full-fledged working farm that was in this paradigm, this model. And basically, I now have paid for all those mistakes and I've pushed through all those frustrations, but it's not necessary. If one’s station in life allows for it, it is a great way to cheat the learning curve.

Because basically, on one hand it's very low risk. You're not taking on debt and it's not a lot of time, but you can jump in the deep end. Even if you're like, “Well, maybe I want to do farming, I think I'll get 50 chickens and see how I like farming.” Well, that's not farming. That's raising 50 chicks and that's not really going to tell you if you like what it takes to farm to raise a full-time income. So, this is a way to really explore that idea. You can come here, jump in the deep end, see what a full-fledged, full-time, income-providing farm looks and feels like, and you can be like, “Yeah, that's awesome. I definitely want that.” And now you're off and running. Or you might have the opposite and be like, “No thanks. I think I'll just be a homesteader and keep a little backyard flock and do whatever other job.”

So that's one virtue of it. It's a very low-risk way to explore the career in a field that it's very hard to have a low-risk experience. Most farming requires land and infrastructure and investment and knowledge that's hard won. And so it's hard to get a good picture without doing something like this.

And then the other thing is that, basically, me and others who have good internship programs, we have figured out the things that work and we've figured out the things that have not worked, and someone else doesn't need to relearn that on their own dime. They can just learn that on ours.

So again, it really cheats the learning curve. I can think of a handful of mistakes where… For example, I didn't appreciate the heat's impact on our meat chickens. And the day before slaughter, I go out to the shelter, it's in the summer and I see four or $500 worth of chicken completely dead the day before slaughter. Because I didn't know to be concerned about that. And if I had just taken a couple measures, I would've been saved that frustration and loss.

So yeah, that's a big one, is cheating the learning curve. And, as an intern, the interns will learn – very comfortable with in-the-field operations. So, when they leave the internship, raising meat chickens, taking care of laying hens, pigs, to a lesser extent, cattle – that takes more time to learn, but – turkeys… They could leave here knowing, “You know what? I know how to do that. I know how to raise that poultry and those pigs and to certain extent the cattle. I got that.”

Now, the scary part still might be, “I'm starting a business, I'm making some risks, some investment, and I'm going to have to figure out: Can I make sales? Can I market? Can I keep up with it all?” And that might be scarier, but what I had to do was learn how to farm out in the field. I’d never run a business either, so I'm trying to learn how to farm and trying to learn how to run a business at the same time. And if I could just have been like, “You know what? I’ve got the farming down. Like, sure you'll make mistakes and things, but generally I’ve got this. That I'm not worried about. All I'm worried about now is making sure I'm going to sell everything I raise or whatever else the business concern might be.” So if you can just take one of those off your plate to an extent, you're in such a better spot than I was.

And then, and that being said, we do give a business education to our interns where we'll have a weekly meal together. We'll just open up the table to our interns and their particular interests. So some of them might be, “I'm really interested in just doing an operation that was beef and eggs. So, let's talk about how that would look and, what my startup costs might be, and I'm going to be working part-time or I'm not going to be working an off-farm job at all.” Or whatever it might be. And we can walk through: “Okay, here's what your labor's going to look like. All right, here's your startup costs. Here's how soon you could pay back your startup costs. Here's the kind of market you should be expecting. Can you find 20 families to buy from you?” or whatever it might be.

So we do go through that on a weekly basis. And then I essentially am an ongoing free consultant for our former interns. As they get their operations started, they call me, text me, et cetera, and, “Hey, what was that fence charger you like to use?” Or, “I’ve got a chef asking me this question. What would you say about that?” So that's the other benefit of just having, again, that classic mentor relationship, which is I know, in my life, has been so helpful with people like Joel and other people. It just makes a ton of sense. These people know things. They've done things. Why not learn from them?

Ryan McDermott: Great. Well, we'll put a link to the site and particularly that program in the show notes.

Jesse Straight: Yeah, that's great. Thank you.

Ryan McDermott: Jesse Straight of Wiffletree Farm, thank you very much.

Jesse Straight: Yeah, thank you, Ryan.