Dr Brooke Miller - US Cattlemen: Anti-Farming Pressures and the Benefits of Being a Carnivore

Shownotes and Transcript

We have reached peak insanity as it appears that agriculture and farming are under attack from the left because they see food production as a bad thing.  
We are joined today by Dr Brooke Miller to discuss this and more. 
Brooke is a doctor but is also a cattleman, he served as President of the US Cattlemen's Association until recently and knows the pressures on the industry. 
Brooke explains what goes into looking after cattle which parts of the US are known worldwide for and talks about the impact that COVID had. 
He discusses the regulatory and political pressures and how multinational's control the industry before sharing the benefits of a carnivore diet.

D. Brooke Miller, MD graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Virginia Tech Magna Cum Laude with a Bachelor of Science in Biology in 1982. He was a National Champion, beef cattle judging , and member of the Livestock Judging Team at Virginia Tech. He graduated the University of Virginia School of Medicine in 1986. His Residency was in Family Medicine at the Medical College of Virginia. He is board certified in Family Medicine and has worked in Emergency Medicine in both Virginia and Montana. Dr. Brooke has practiced Family Medicine for nearly 25 years, currently employed by Valley Health System with offices in Luray and Washington, VA. Brooke is the 8th generation of his family to live in Washington, VA where he carries on the family’s purebred Angus cattle operation, Ginger Hill Angus. Through his passion for cattle and farming, he became active in the United States Cattlemen’s Association, formerly serving at the organization’s president.  Together Brooke and his wife Ann have 4 children and 4 grandchildren. While his first love is his family, he is passionate about cattle and agriculture as well as health, wellness and preventive medicine. In his spare time, he is an avid cross fitter. 

Connect with Brooke at...
WEBSITE:    https://www.gingerhillangus.com/ 
TWITTER:    https://twitter.com/Brookemillermd?s=20
SUBSTACK: https://brookemillermd.substack.com/

Interview recorded 30.6.23

*Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast.

Check out his art https://theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com/ and follow him on GETTR https://gettr.com/user/BoschFawstin and Twitter https://twitter.com/TheBoschFawstin?s=20 

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Transcript

(Hearts of Oak)
Hello, Hearts of Oak, and welcome to another interview coming up in a moment with Dr Brooke Miller. 

I've got to know Brooke in my travels in the US. He is a doctor, obviously, but he's also a cattleman, and he's just stepped down as president of the US Cattlemen's Association.
It's an industry that I know zero about, so I wanted him to come on to discuss the industry, the meat industry, the cattle industry in the US, the different pressures they face. We look at the COVID pressures, we look at the regulatory and political pressures, We look at the difficulty of actually individuals now getting involved in the industry and he as a doctor has one source of income, the difficulty if you rely on the cattle industry as your source of income. We also look at the multinational corporations and the pressures they apply on the industry and how they stranglehold at various points. And then we end up on the carnivore diet. He's a big proponent of the carnivore diet. We look at the health benefits of that. 

Dr Brooke Miller, it's wonderful to have you with us. Thank you for your time today.

(Dr Brooke Miller)

Well, thank you, Peter. I appreciate you having me on. 

Not at all, great to have you and people can find you @BrookeMillerMD on Twitter, also on Facebook, Substack, all the links are in the description. And we're going to discuss all things cattle. And I, being a Brit, don't know much, so I'm looking forward to learning. But, can I, I saw pictures of you, you were over in my neck of the woods, round the corner in the European Parliament.
What on earth were you doing there? 

Well, as you know, I know Robert Malone, Robert and Jill Malone, and they've become great friends. And they're always traversing the globe, trying to fight injustice and untruths.
And we went over to Brussels to have the International COVID Summit number three in Brussels.
We had a meeting of physicians and scientists and interested parties.
It was a private meeting on one day. And then the next day, there was a part of our delegation, testified in the European Parliament regarding COVID and the COVID response.
And then the following day was a media day, but it was fun and it was informative and we had a great time.
So I really appreciate Robert and Jill in dragging Anne and I along, and it was a life experience.

Let me start with you. Your background is a medical background, but you also will get onto the cattle side and you're, what, born and bred Virginia. Do you want to just introduce yourself before we get into the topic.

Did you say just describe myself you said? 

Yes, so just introduce yourself to the viewers and listeners. 

Yeah, well I grew up, I'm born and raised in a small town in Washington called Washington, Virginia. It was the first Washington of them all. George Washington surveyed it as a 17-year-old young man. We're nestled in the foothills of the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains about 70 miles southwest of Washington, D.C. It's a very rural area, sparsely populated.
I grew up here, I'm eighth generation to live here in my family.
My grandchildren will be the 10th generation.
My wife, Anne and I own and operate a family medicine clinic here about a mile from the house, Miller Family Health and Wellness, where we provide, you know, primary care, preventive medicine, small surgical procedures, pretty much everything that most people need in a small rural community.
I also grew up on a cattle farm, third-generation cattle farmer and rancher here in Washington, Virginia.
We have a purebred Angus operation where we sell purebred Angus seed stock.
We also market some beef directly to consumers in the form of freezer beef.

Well, yes, I want to ask you a little bit about that commercial cattle industry.
And I think the headwinds at the UFAS.
Were president of the US Cattlemen's Association and as a Brit, I've no idea what that means.
So I wonder, could you just explain to me what that is?

The United States Cattlemen's Association is a grassroots organization where we represent, the production side of the cattle industry. You have the production side and then you have the packing and the retail side, and we represent the producers who basically have been taken advantage of by big, large, multinational corporations.
So we're a nationwide organization of cattle producers here in the United States, and we basically try to lobby and shape, policy here in the United States that's beneficial to cattle ranchers, so cattle ranchers can stay in business and we can continue to feed our country and the world.
Unfortunately for most of my lifetime, there's been sort of a war on cattle ranchers.
The big multinational corporations, there are only four of them that control about 85% of our slaughter cattle market worldwide.
And they basically have a monopoly and they exert their power and their influence in Washington, DC and worldwide.
And there's no real free true market for cattle ranchers to make a good fair living.
And consequently, we have lost thousands of cattle ranchers over the last several decades and eventually it's going to reach critical mass and it's gonna seriously harm our country. 

What has it traditionally been like? Has it traditionally been small holdings of kind of small farms? What kind of has it been like up until I guess the advent of the large multinational companies?

Yeah, I think we had a secretary of agriculture back during the, maybe it was the Reagan administration, I'm not sure, that said get big or get out.
And that's really been harmful for cattle farmers and ranchers and small family farms.
And small family farms are actually going by the wayside.
And, you got to get bigger and bigger and bigger. And even the guys in the production side that are getting bigger and bigger and bigger are having a hard time because our production costs are going through the roof, especially with the inflation that we've seen in the last several years.
And what the retailer or what the packers are paying us for our end product, really hasn't been worthwhile. Now, recently there's been, and with environmental disasters and the cattle market being so bad for so long, our nation's cow herd is smaller than any time since 1965.
So our cattle prices recently in the past six months have come up dramatically, but those things are very cyclical.
We'll probably enjoy a good cattle market for a couple of years and then it'll be back to famine, you know, just barely scraping by and not being able to put any money back into your production and your program and not really make a living.
As you know, I'm a medical doctor and I loved cattle ranching my whole life and my dad and I had a special bond because he loved it too.
And he saw the handwriting on the wall when I was a kid and he directed me away from just being a solo, only cattle ranching is my only means of income and raising family, and thank goodness that he did.
And so I have to be a medical doctor in order to be able to, I'm not going to say to afford to ranch, but possibly to afford to ranch because I couldn't, you know, we make a little bit of money on the ranch, but not near as much money as we could if we did other things with that time, and it's really not economically feasible.
And consequently, a bunch of young people in our country are not going into it.
And we're losing cattle ranchers, you know, it's at epidemic proportions.
And eventually, if we lose enough cattle ranchers, we're not going to be able to feed this nation and we will be dependent on foreign countries for our food sources and we know how that would turn out. I mean being dependent on anybody for something that's so critical as your food is a disastrous plan.

It's curious when you say you need to be a doctor to actually afford to look after cattle.
I mean, is it possible for someone to run a, I don't know what you call it, a cattle ranch?
Is it possible for someone to run that and actually make money?
Or are you saying it's probably getting to the point where that's not possible anymore?

Well, I don't know what the statistics are, but they're getting worse and worse as far as the number of family farms and ranchers that require or depend on outside income from some family members.
Back in the 50s and 60s, the wife didn't work on the ranch, I mean, she didn't work in town.
Now a lot of those families are requiring outside income and it's becoming more and more.
Some of my best friends get all of their income solely through ranching and you can see how they are struggling and they're finding other revenue streams to support themselves and their family in addition to what they can make on the cattle ranch.

Tell me, when you talk about multinational companies, those large companies, what part of the kind of chain is that in? Is that the beginning? Is that the process?
Is that packing? Is that the supermarket? 

That's the packing and processing industry.
There's basically a bottleneck.
What you have is you have seed stock producers like me who produce the seed stock to go out to the commercial cattle ranchers to provide the genetics for their herds. The commercial cattle ranches are usually a little bit bigger. They have more cattle, but I sell them bulls to breed their cows to hopefully produce superior livestock, to more efficiently produce good healthy tasting beef. Those people then sell to some middlemen usually, sometimes they take it all the way through to the fattening, but essentially those, most people that are in the commercial cattle business raise their calves till they're about seven or eight months of age, maybe a little bit longer, and then they sell them.
From there, they'll usually go on to grass to people that purchase cattle to grow them out and put more of a frame on them so they can put feed on, I mean weight on them in a very economic fashion when they go to the feedlot, once they're eight, nine hundred pounds, they go to the into the feedlots where they're fed for the most part a very high concentrate ration.
And when those animals are what we call finished, where they're adequately fattened at an adequate size and weight, then they're sold to the packers and there are basically four multinational packing companies, two of them owned in Brazil, one of them I think is heavily invested in China and one of them is American. And they basically there's, they have contracts and they contract with these big corporate feeders. They don't let, there's no sort of free market. These contracts, are secret and the independent cattle feeders are, they try to squeeze them out.
Right now, depending on what part of the country you are, in this country there's feeding areas like in the south in Texas and Kansas, less than 10% of the fed cattle are sold on an open market, so you really don't know what the true value of those animals is. And in other areas like Iowa and Nebraska, there are a few more independent farmer feeders, and it's probably 25 or 30% at most but there are weeks where those these farmers and ranchers can't even get bids on their cattle and it's just a purely a monopolistic practice and our government, our Department of Justice, and our Congress, and The Agricultural Department has allowed this to happen through mergers and acquisitions and through their regulations.
The regulations are just so much more beneficial to these big multinational packers because these big multinational packers have a lot of money and they have more money to put into lobbying and influence.
And it's really a sad situation for both the American consumer and the American farmer and rancher.
And as our cattle market goes, so goes the Canadian cattle market, the Australian cattle market. We pretty much set the cattle market here. So it hurts basically all other countries as well.
And those farmers and ranchers in those other countries, because, you know, they look at what we're getting.
And to be quite honest, the packers try to use those foreign cattle in our country to control the market, and try to get them at a cheaper price.
And unfortunately, our labelling laws allow it to happen where they can deceive the consumers.
They can label foreign product as product of the USA.
And we don't really have any labelling laws that are truthful right now, as far as, you know, grass fed is not even truthful. Product of the USA is not even truthful.
They're just ways that people can get around and they change definitions.
And the average consumer doesn't know where their food is coming from.
And that's becoming more and more important because everybody is really concerned about their food supply and the safety and the health benefits of their food supply, and what those animals have been treated with, what they've been fed.
And this country has the highest safety standards in the world.
And they're not allowing the American cattle ranchers to compete on a global scale if we can't identify our product.
And if we're able to identify our product, it's gonna help the cattle market in general and help farmers and ranchers all over the country, all over the world, I mean.

You talked about the pressures from governments. and you look at the Democrat Party, they seem to support anything but homegrown products.
We have the same issue in the UK, where it's a destruction of industry and products in the UK.
Tell us about the political pressures that there are on the industry and why is there not more political support?

Because there are not many farmers and ranchers in this world, and they don't, they're not a lot of votes.
There's not a lot of money behind it, and there's not a lot of votes.
And that's why it doesn't get support from either party in our country across the board.
We had a bill in Congress last year that would have created a mandatory minimum number of, percentage of cattle that each packer had to procure there on the open market each week.
In other words, a mandatory minimum. Our open market has been dwindling year after year after year.
And we were trying to put a stop on that and require these packers who are exerting their monopolistic powers to require to, you know, bid on cattle on the open market.
And these cattle that are on the open market are superior in their quality.
And we couldn't even get, we had, I think there were 27 sponsors in the Senate, bipartisan, and we couldn't get the head of the Senate to even bring it to a vote.
And, it's not one party or the other, they're both equally responsible for this.
I mean, there are some people in the Republican Party in powerful positions that are beholden to the big corporations, Tyson Foods and Walmart, because they're big factories in their states. And they're very powerful and they exert all the influence that they can. And in order to get this turned around, we have to create a partnership with the American consumer and basically the worldwide consumer, and they have to become more aware of what's going on.
They have to realize that there's a lot of deceit in the labelling process in food, not only in this country, but worldwide. And more and more people, this this past spring there was the big hot button issue was mRNA vaccines in livestock. And consumers are really paying attention to that. And they want to make sure that they're they know what they're eating. And the United States Cattlemen's Association is all about truthful labelling.
And we know we are in partnership with consumers and we want to produce the safest, best product, available. But in order to do that, we have to be able to differentiate it. And we can't do it so far.

Yeah, we are having the same conversation about mRNA in the cattle industry here in the UK. Can I ask you about the last three years COVID, I think I read something on the US California Association discussing the impact of COVID and the damage to the industry. What kind of have the last three years been like?

Well, when COVID-19 hit, it seemed like the World Health Organization and the American,
I guess, agencies, the CDC, NIH, it seemed like they were trying to scare people, and people were really scared about this disease. And as we know, it's turned out a lot of what they put out was not true. But there was, the concentration at our industry, we have four packing companies and they have very large packing plants where they slaughter, a couple, you know, tens of thousands of animals each day. And if one of those packing plants, isn't operational, then it creates a food shortage in the grocery store where we don't  have a food shortage on the supply end.
We have a bottleneck in the packing plants. And it just so happened that some of the workers got sick, and they closed down these packing plants.
And so then those corporations use that basically to their advantage. They made money and the poor farmer and rancher were getting nothing for their animals because they were told that they didn't have the capacity to kill these finished market animals.
And they told the retailers they didn't have any beef, and then you saw beef skyrocket in the grocery store, and there were some shortages on the shelves.
And they were making upwards of $1,000 an animal, and they slaughter hundreds of thousands of animals each week.
And they were making upwards of $1,000, we hear, as high as $2,000 per animal.
And it was just basically price gouging on two ends.
It was price gouging on the production side and price gouging the consumer.
And that just showed how fragile our system was when you put all your eggs in a couple of baskets, and a couple of those baskets go bad.
And our food supply chain was not very resilient. So there has been a move on in this country, and I think worldwide, to develop a more regionalized, food system and spread the risk out amongst many many smaller regional packing plants and unfortunately it had gotten so that these large mega corporations with economy of scale and all the rules and regulations these packers have, these packing plants independent packing plants have to go under that it just wasn't it's just not feasible and it's a direct result of all of our policies in this country.

There's something else specifically I want to ask you, and that is, I guess, the push to net zero, and we're seeing across Europe, certainly in the Netherlands, a push to restrict farming because farming is bad and meat is certainly very bad.
Many farms in the Netherlands have been forced to close, and as somebody who works in the food industry. I mean, are you having some of the same pressures in the US against farming, against the whole carbon issue and being told that farming and meat are bad?

Well, you know, we hear it. We hear a lot of people beating the drums that meat is harmful, not only for your health, but harmful for the environment. And some people that are beating that drum actually believe it, but the main players, I think, in the reality, you have to look and see where their money is invested and how they're going to make their wealth.
And I think, again, it's a fear tactic.
I'm 62 years of age, and I remember back in high school hearing that we were going to have an ice age and then followed that it was going to be Los Angeles was going to be be underwater in 10 years.
And it started out as global cooling, and then it was global warming.
And since our globe hasn't warmed appreciably in the last 50 years, now it's just climate change.
And the climate, as you know, is always changing. But it always has changed, and it always will change.
Anybody that thinks carbon dioxide is an environmental pollutant is, I think, just nuts.
Carbon dioxide is part of our environment. That's what plants use to produce oxygen and photosynthesis.
So it's a necessary part of our atmosphere, and it's a very small part of our atmosphere.
So I think it's nuts. I think it's the push is mainly through, you know, wealth and power to for people to gain more wealth and power.
You look at Bill Gates as a big climate alarmist.
And if he if he thought that we actually were going to melt all the polar ice caps and the sea level is going to rise, why would he have so many houses on the coast near sea level?
If he really believed in that, why would he own three private jets and 30 mega mansions?
You know, he's been one of the one of the main pushers of beef being bad for the environment.
Well, he's heavily invested in cell cultured protein and fake meat and is buying up a lot of farmland around around the country.
So, you know, you have to look at the guys that are pushing this.
Where do they stand to benefit?
And unfortunately, that's that's where it's coming from.
And I hope and pray that the world wakes up and sees this for exactly what it is, because it's nothing more than that.
My cattle are not ruining the environment. All you have to do is go out and look.
We live in one of the most ecologically stable parts of the world. And these people that are saying cattle are so bad, they live in their mega mansions, and they have their drivers, and they have their private jets, and they're going all over the world beating the drum. And I think it's just hogwash.

100% and hypocrisy is in full swing. My big concern is with governments pushing it.
Before you've had pressure groups or organisations, it seems as though certainly the government in the Netherlands, in Holland are 100% behind this and I've heard reports of 4,000 farms being forcibly taken over by the government and just left to fallow.
That seems to be spreading certainly across Europe.
And part of it is the whole climate change alarmism, but part of it seems to be just destroying industries in the countries and I guess making us more reliant, but possibly that hasn't yet swept or hit over there in the US, even though your politics is just as crazy as ours in Europe.

Yeah. Yeah. I look at that in the Netherlands and I'm thinking, what are they trying to do?
They're trying to destroy their ability to produce food. For what reason? I mean humanity has to has to eat. And there are certain things that humanity needs, in order to exist. And I think it's more of a power. It's more of a power grab.
We can control these people if we can control their food, we can control their monetary supply, we can control their ability to move and travel.
It's just something to, it's tyranny is what it is, and they want to whip the population into being a subservient, non-free people.
And I don't think it's going to, you know, change is very slow, but I don't think it's going to be something that they will be able to sustain.
I mean, I guess, how are they going to feed their nation? Are they going to make all their food in a laboratory? I don't think so.
Are they going to be dependent upon foreign countries for their food?
That doesn't seem like a very good plan to me. So I really don't get it, but I think it's a power grab.

Yeah, I would propose that anyone like that they can eat grass and the rest of us can enjoy meat and we'll see how that works, 

Absolutely. Well, you know we've heard, I've heard since, I went to medical school, graduated from medical school in 1986 and all through medical school we heard about the cholesterol theory of heart disease and beef and fat is bad for you and it was all based on some from faulty scientific cherry-picked epidemiologic studies.
And what we've seen happen more in this country, but when we were in Europe, we saw a lot of the result of it in Europe too.
Like 10 years ago, it wasn't as prevalent, but big food, the big food corporations are pretty evil, and they will put out anything they can make a profit and try to make people think it's healthy.
And since we've been traveling down this path our country, and I think many countries have become much unhealthier.
We have so much more chronic disease, so much more obesity, so much more cancer, so much more diabetes, heart disease, autoimmune disorders.
And it's a direct result of what people are eating, just processed crap.
And they've got people, they label food like it's low fat.
This is low fat. Well, I submit our body needs fat. Our brain needs fat in order to survive and thrive.
And they're making people very, very unhealthy and they're addicting people to certain foods all along the way.

Well, that's something I've certainly been looking into in the last few months, the whole issue of processed foods and ultra processed.
And the unknown effect on many of us. And I know you're a big proponent of the carnivore diet.
And I'm wondering, is that just PR, publicity, or are you yourself finding that healthy? Tell us about that.

I truly 110% believe in a low carbohydrate, high protein, high fat diet with time limited food intake and intermittent fasting.
Carnivore diet is just the, it's that, just to an extreme.
And I'm not saying everybody needs to be a carnivore, but with so much chronic disease that we have here and that I see on a daily basis, most of my patients are tremendously overweight.
Many of them have diabetes or pre-diabetes, they're completely inflamed.
A lot of them have autoimmune disorders, a lot of them have anxiety and depression.
And their food is deficient in essential nutrients and fat.
And the carnivore diet is the best way to counteract what we're seeing causing chronic disease in this country, and I think worldwide. It's really simple.
You don't have to really think, all you have to do is, is your thought process is, is it did this grow from the soil?
Or is this an animal or a living being product? And if it's an animal or living being product, and it's not been tainted, or, you know, unhealthy chemicals or additives added to it, it's carnivore.
And I have seen a tremendous improvement. I have so many type two diabetics.
And the ones that really will stick to a carnivore diet, they can get off all medications and they become so much healthier and their life becomes so much better.
It's amazing, we can cure autoimmune disorders with this, cure diabetes, hypertension, depression, anxiety.
The list just goes on and on and on and of what I have seen in my clinical practice, when I heard about the carnivore diet initially, my son's in medical school, and he was following a guy named Sean Baker, and Sean was a big proponent or still is a big proponent of the carnivore diet.
And my son mentioned it to me and I go, that's hogwash.
But then I actually got to know Sean and I started, have created a great friendship with him.
And he was stating a lot of really good scientific studies and there was a lot of science and proof behind it.
And so then I started following it for myself because at one point in time, I was probably 10, 15 pounds overweight and I was on blood pressure medicine.
I didn't feel good. I started feeling old. I was feeling stiff and sore and not looking forward to aging.
And I, myself, my wife and I started on a carnivore diet after meeting with Sean one fall.
We started on in January, that following January.
And I leaned out tremendously.
My blood pressure plummeted into the normal range and actually got really low on antihypertensive medicine.
So I stopped my blood pressure medicine and my indicators of chronic inflammation improved dramatically. Triglycerides and HDL cholesterol have never been so good as they are on a carnivore diet and improve my sleep.
And the other thing, as you may or may not know, I'm a CrossFit athlete, and I used to do it competitively.
But when I'm on a regular, what we call a standard American diet, I just eat pretty much what everybody else eats.
My body hurts, and my hands hurt, and I get arthritic symptoms in my hands.
And I really struggle just basically throwing around and carrying the weight when that happens.
And, you know, when I go on a strict carnivore diet, all those symptoms go away and I don't even think about it.
So I couldn't believe any more in the carnivore diet than what I do, what I already do, just from what I've seen personally and in my practice.
And then the stories, the more and more stories of people that we know that have changed their lives with the carnivore diet, it's completely counterintuitive to what we've been hearing for the last 30 years, but what we've been hearing for the last 30 years hasn't worked, obviously.

Exactly. It's intriguing that you bring that medical understanding that it's not just this tastes good, but you see the effects of unhealthy eating in patients.
And then that's made you question, but I'm assuming that there is no push towards healthy eating as such, because there is always a drug to correct.
And I know we sometimes look at the U.S. and think, well, you guys have got a drug for everything.
But I guess that's the way that the industry stops any push towards healthy eating.

Well, it's almost like the food industry and the pharmaceutical industry are in cahoots with one another because the food industry is one of the many things that's making our population in the world become unhealthy and need medications. And then the pharmaceutical industry, unfortunately, they have exerted so much influence in our agencies and in the media and on celebrities, and they pay these people to push the narrative.
If the pharmaceutical industry doesn't come up with it, it can't work.
You know, cheap repurposed medications or natural remedies are felt to be bad alternative types of medicine, not backed by sound science.
And we know, I mean, that's one of the things that the COVID pandemic opened up my eyes to is all the things that are out there that we can do for our patients and encourage our patients to do that will get them off medications.
They don't need medicine for everything. And it's really sad.
I tell my patients when I meet with them, I spend a lot of time when I meet with them for the first time trying to explain the science and the rationale behind what I'm recommending them to do, and one of which is a carnivore diet with time-limited food intake and sunlight and vitamin D is I'm trying to get myself out of a job.
I mean, if I get them healthy, they won't need to come see me and they won't need medication.
And they appreciate that. I mean, a lot of them come to see me and they say they heard that I was a straight shooter and would tell them what they needed to hear, not what they wanted to hear, and not push of medicine on them and not push this therapy on them if we could do it more natural ways.

Just to finish off, could I ask you what advice you would give me? You understand the cattle industry for generations. I kind of feel that you would be probably encouraging someone who's wanting to get into that and maybe steer them elsewhere, but what changes do you think would need to be made to actually make it a better industry for people to actually get involved and take it as a career.

Well, on the national level, they need to break up the monopolies.
I don't think there's going to be the political will to do that right now, but maybe if the people get behind it, that would solve a lot of problems.
That would give us a true free market where you could make a fair living raising food in a healthy manner.
In the short term, and the United States Cattlemen's Association will push to fight against rules and regulations and improve the laws and everything as far as that for our industry.
But in the short term, and actually maybe in the long term, we need a more regionalization of our food supply chain and we need to make consumers and farmers and ranchers partners.
And I encourage young people that are getting into the livestock industry, they want to raise cattle and raise food, to develop a direct to consumer marketing approach, whether be online or just through local. I mean, we have a limited number. We probably sell 30, 35, maybe 40 animals a year direct to consumers. And it's really easy. You don't have to advertise at all. They just, you know, they hear about it, they taste it, they taste how much better the product is when it comes directly from the farmer and rancher and they're not getting the leftovers. They're not getting the 10 year old cow that's been at the end of her lifespan or the 10-year-old bull is after the end of her lifespan, and they're getting a better product and they really love it, and they also develop a friendship with you, and you basically try to educate them and let them know the practice that you are performing in order to raise these animals in a healthy and wholesome and environmentally sound method. I'm definitely an environmentalist, I don't want to destroy our environment, especially right where I live or anywhere really. So we're very environmentally conscious on what we put on the land and our practices, but we're also very conscious on how we we care for and and treat our livestock and people appreciate it. They come out and they see the animals and they see what you do and it just makes them want to buy their their food directly from the source.
When you buy food in a grocery store, you really don't know what's happened to that food before it gets to the grocery store, how it's been treated, both plant food and livestock.
So buying food directly from a farmer and rancher, I think would be the most superior way.
And it also bypasses all these multinational corporations and the consumer can get it for a better price and the farmer is getting a better price for his product too.
So direct to market consumption model is what I'm recommending and trying to encourage young people to do when they get into the farming ranching business.

Okay, Brooke, I appreciate your time. Thank you so much for coming along and explaining your industry.

Well, thank you for having me, Peter. It's always good to see you and talk to you and I hope to see you when you're in the States.