David Stelzer: When you have a child today, you have a 50/50 chance of them being diagnosed with a chronic disease. We have an extremely deficient population nutritionally. It’s causing all kinds of problems in our population.
[00:00:14] Josh Wilder: Welcome to the Mother Earth News and Friends podcast. At Mother Earth News, for 50 years and counting, we’ve been dedicated to conserving the planet’s natural resources while helping you conserve your financial resources. In this podcast, we host conversations with experts in the fields of sustainability, homesteading, natural health, and more to share all about how you can live well wherever you are in a way that values both people and our Mother Earth.
[00:00:41] Hello, and welcome to this episode of Mother Earth News and Friends. I’m Josh Wilder, and with me today I have Ana Skemp and David Stelzer. How are you doing today?
[00:00:53] David Stelzer: Awesome.
[00:00:54] Ana Skemp: Hi, thanks for joining us.
[00:00:56] Josh Wilder: Great. David Stelzer is the CEO and founder of Azure Standard, [00:01:00] and Ana Skemp is the lead editor here at Mother Earth News.
[00:01:03] I’m gonna have Ana Skemp be my main co-host today, and I’ll pop in here and there. But take it away, Ana.
[00:01:09] Ana Skemp: All right. So David, I just finished reading your new book a week ago, and- Yeah … it was a really inspiring story. It’s lovely to relate to everything you’ve been through as a fellow farmer.
[00:01:23] Maybe you could just give us a brief outline of your book.
[00:01:26] David Stelzer: Yeah. So my book starts out, at the very beginning, it tells a little bit about my, my childhood. And I ended up one of those super sick kids. I was not expected to live, and my parents really it was before I was really, Of an age to make a difference. But they found a naturopath that inspired them to do a major diet change. That major diet change changed my, it saved my life. I was able to regain my [00:02:00] health, but it also put our family on the journey of healthy eating in a general sense, and which in, in very relatively short order led to organic farming.
[00:02:14] This would’ve been the last time my dad actually put any chemicals on this farm was in 1973. So that was way before it was cool. I think maybe even Mother Earth News was an infant at that point in time. You guys have been around a long time, too. So as an organic farmer from way back when moving forward my dad originally, he had a market with Bob Moore.
[00:02:41] I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Bob’s Red Mill brand.
[00:02:45] Fairly common in the health food stores and stuff today, in most major retail, actually. Bob is no longer with us, but Dad and Bob were good friends. And in fact, Dad helped Bob get his very first [00:03:00] miller, milling stones, ’cause he was stone ground flour in the early days.
[00:03:03] And so the dad was gonna be the farmer, and Bob was gonna be the miller, and he was primarily selling to Fred Meyers, which was a grocery store chain on the West Coast here. And Bob knew Fred Meyer pretty well, so they were friends. So we were secondhand there. So anyway, that went along happily for 10 or 12 years, and then Fred retired, and the company ended up selling to some investment capital group. And it didn’t happen immediately, but in a little while they started auditing all their stuff and they went to Bob and said, “Hey, we don’t need this expensive organic stuff in our stores anymore. We’re a grocery store, not some kind of health food store.”
[00:03:50] So Bob instead of him trying to find a new market, he simply pivoted. He just went [00:04:00] down to the elevator and got the cheapest conventional grain that he could possibly get, ground it through his mills, and he took the organic off his labels and replaced that with natural and be- and everything else looked the same, and he continued to sell into Fred Meyers at a cheaper price point But Dad was not willing to pivot.
[00:04:22] There was no way he was going back to conventional farming. So now we were left with a lot. In fact, we got the message after we’d already planted, because we plant here… Most of the grain, at least, we plant in the fall. I was young and stupid, and figured that I knew a thing or two, and probably could find the markets.
[00:04:44] That took a lot longer than I thought at the time. But so we started, I started marketing, trying to market our own grain. I took some down and got it custom ground, custom cleaned, custom ground. I didn’t have… We didn’t have any vertical integration at all at that point. [00:05:00] It was a zero.
[00:05:00] We were just selling bulk grain out of the field to Bob’s Red Mill. We didn’t have a cleaner, we didn’t have a mill, we didn’t have anything. And other than my mom had messed around, she had a couple little magic mills on her at least kitchen version, and she ended up having five of them, so she was grinding some flour from a, for a local co-op in those.
[00:05:22] But other than that, we didn’t have anything that way. So I had to get all that custom done, had to go take it to a custom cleaner, custom flour mill. But then I got out and started trying to s- went, hit the road, so to speak, and started trying to sell to food co-ops and health food stores and places like that, that I thought we could sell the grain to and the flour.
[00:05:46] And instead of, farmer thinks “Oh, we sold to Bob’s, it was a truckload at a time.” We did have to put in on-farm storage. We had that, which we had to put in because we didn’t have that before we switched to organic, so that’s the only infrastructure we’d built. [00:06:00] But then, it was a truckload at a time.
[00:06:02] A semi pulled up, and we would load it up with grain, and away it would go to Portland, and he would clean it and grind it and do all the stuff and get it ready, right? We’re thinking of truckloads, and they’re thinking in a few bags. So the, the health food store would say, “Oh, yeah I, I think we would sell four or five bags of flour a week.
[00:06:24] I could see that happening.” Four or five bags. We’re talking about 25-pound bags here. This is gonna take a long time. But instead of say, saying no, I said, “Okay, yeah, let’s do that.” And so that was how Azure started. It was out of the back of my pickup. And then we had some customers some current now, later customers, but basically started with some friends of friends and family, and they kept asking me, they were in Eastern Washington, and they kept [00:07:00] saying, “Hey, since you’re coming through here, can you stop in Portland or Seattle and pick me up some nuts or some seeds or some this or that?”
[00:07:08] And I began to realize after doing that for a while, it sunk through my thick skull that this might be a market opportunity that could actually help me pay for these routes. So In I guess it was December, it was basically Christmas of 1987, I sat down at a typewriter word processor thing and typed up the first Azure catalog, all the things that the friends and family had been asking for, and a few things that maybe my family would use, and that was– it was three pa- three pieces of paper folded in half, and that was the first Azure catalog. And that was also when we started u- very first began to use the name Azure Standard. Before that, we were marketing under Stelzer & Sons Husbandry. And so [00:08:00] it was it was my first first shot at selling, consumer direct.
[00:08:05] And and that took a little while. It wasn’t an instant hit, but we really grew up in ’98 and ’99 when the whole world was worried about food shortages from Y2K. And I didn’t really advertise in that space, but some of the talk show hosts and stuff, talk radio was a big deal back then.
[00:08:28] They found out about Azure. Some of our customers were talk show hosts, and they started pitching Azure as, “Hey, if you wanna be a do-it-yourselfer and do your own grains and put it in your own buckets or mylars or whatever, buy the grain at Azure. It’s a better way to go. You get higher quality grain, and it can be, then you can do that yourself.” So we went from, a one-ton van and that kind of thing to semi-trucks just in the course of a couple of years.
[00:08:59] Ana Skemp: So [00:09:00] let’s step back just a little bit, still. And in your story, already from the very beginning, you’re dealing with some pretty significant setbacks as a farmer. And farmers are certainly some of the most stubborn people I’ve ever met, and that’s probably why we survive. But you dealt with losing the bulk of your equipment.
[00:09:18] You’ve dealt with fire. You’ve dealt with market shifts, computer challenges. I want to say, first of all, that I appreciate so much in the book that you share the good and the bad. But how did you keep going when any one of these might have shut down a company? Why did you believe so strongly in this that you kept at it no matter what?
[00:09:39] David Stelzer: Our name Azure Standard actually was a visionary name. It was not what we were doing at the time. But based on my experience with healthy food saving my life.
[00:09:53] And I’d seen it in other people as well, especially now that I’d started [00:10:00] selling into this market a little bit I knew that this was absolutely necessary.
[00:10:05] This is an incredibly important thing to have happen. And it was the grace of God, but I felt like we needed to. Azure is a shade of blue that stands for law, justice, and doing things right in heraldry, and so we were trying to create a healthier standard or a better standard.
[00:10:30] And so that’s why we ended up using that name, just ’cause I’m a little bit of a history buff and was using the heraldry symbols.
[00:10:37] Yeah. It’s kinda why we have blue in our flag in the US. It’s, the states are embedded in a system of law and justice in between. That was the idea. It was a visionary statement, so that vision never left.
[00:10:53] And on the early days, the first setback that you mentioned with all of the equipment the IRS [00:11:00] took every piece of farm equipment on the farm, and, Azure really wasn’t born yet. We were still selling to Bob’s Red Mill at that point in time. And even that was difficult, but we were able to continue doing that during a good chunk of this time.
[00:11:17] But that ended up taking… By the time that went all the way through court and everything, that ended up taking, like, six years. This wasn’t something that just came and went, so we were without equipment for six years. And I guess that was, it’s what grew me up very quickly ’cause I felt like what, the farm was, and I, and I mentioned that in the book, I had a struggle with that earlier in life.
[00:11:49] It was like, hey, do I, is there an economic future or on the farm? I don’t know if there is, it hasn’t been great. We’ve been getting [00:12:00] by, but the economic future is pretty slim. And especially, how many people can do it. So there’s five of us kids in my family. Would it support more than one family?
[00:12:14] Probably not. Little did I know, but there is, because I was thinking linear, linearly, I was looking at growing that grain was the only future that we have. I was not thinking about vertical integration or any of those things. But I almost felt, I felt that I was really inspired almost in a, I don’t know, a conversion type of way that I was not that to abandon the farm.
[00:12:52] And I can, I committed to that. And this was about, I don’t know, eight months or so before [00:13:00] this IRS debacle that took place. And so by that time I was already committed to it, at least in my mind and heart. So I dropped everything. I dropped out of school at the beginning of my sophomore year.
[00:13:15] So I have a ninth grade education, I guess they would call it.
[00:13:24] Went to work and I worked a dollar per hour job for a total of two months, and that’s the only time I’ve ever worked for wages in my entire life, is a two-month period of time, and I realized that there was no way I was gonna support the family and save the farm doing it that way. So my first entrepreneurial thought was I went to the neighbor I was working for and said, “Hey, I will…
[00:13:56] Instead of working for you for cash, [00:14:00] I will work for you for… If you’ll let me use your equipment.” And he thought that was a great deal. And so I worked for cash for eight hours a day, and then I worked for equipment for eight hours a day for the neighbor, and then I took the equipment to our farm.
[00:14:17] It was basically the closest farm, about a mile apart. Drive the equipment over there, and then worked our farm in the evenings and on the weekends when I wasn’t, when he didn’t need the equipment. So it was, So then I was able to continue to grow some grain for Bob’s. We intend- continued to have a little bit of an income stream off of the farm while while all this stuff was going on using, using at least some of the neighbor’s equipment.
[00:14:45] So this is, those are some of the stories of, that I put in the book.
[00:14:51] It wasn’t it wasn’t exactly you know, a bed of roses all the way through. This [00:15:00] is, this was not exactly the steady, oh, highly successful entrepreneurial endeavor. Didn’t quite work that way. I don’t know if it does for some people or not, but organic agriculture is probably not the easiest- It’s not the easiest place to create a successful business, if you read the, the 10 easiest businesses to start with low capital, I don’t think that would get on the list in the top thousand, right?
[00:15:30] Ana Skemp: I strongly agree. We’re we’re putting our hearts into, we’re in our sixth year of a certified organic apple orchard in Minnesota, and goodness, yeah, we’re just starting to squeak ahead, but the work that goes into it is we’re probably not making a very good hourly rage right now, and that’s okay.
[00:15:47] We’re committed. You just keep going, and eventually things succeed like that. But yeah, organic farming is a lot of work. I’m curious, so your dad shifted because he was very aware of the chemicals. He was [00:16:00] very worried about your health. What did it, what is it exactly, though, about organic agriculture?
[00:16:05] What does it not have in it that you wanted to avoid, or what were the goals exactly related to that, and why have you stuck with it for so many decades?
[00:16:14] David Stelzer: There’s a lot about what’s not in it, but, let’s talk about … I would talk about both sides of it. It’s not just about what’s not in it.
[00:16:24] It’s also about what is in it. Our food and in your world, I guess most people would probably know this already to some extent, but all, all life on Earth is powered by plants, right? The photosynthetic action that happens in a plant, all life on Earth has to get its energy from that.
[00:16:48] There is nothing else that, that life can get energy from besides photosynthetic action in plants. Whether we’re getting that firsthand or secondhand [00:17:00] or thirdhand, down the food chain, it all originated from the plants and that photosynthetic action. The, the big deal about that is in order for that to happen, the micro-microbial life that’s in the soil, just like it is in our bodies, are the microbes that are in our digestive system and in our bodies break down the food so it’s utilizable at the cellular level.
[00:17:27] The exact same thing happens in the soil. The microbial microbiome of the soil, so to speak, breaks down the minerals, the dead plant matter, everything else around that, and puts it in a usable form that the next generation of plants can utilize that for the nutrients to feed the plant so it can actually create the photosynthetic action to create the sugar and energy, and some of that’s converted to proteins, and some of it’s converted to fats, and a lot of it’s left in…[00:18:00]
[00:18:00] So you have your saccharides, your amino acids, and your lipids, right? If you’re talking from the agricultural side. So those are all converted by plants and, to some degree, animals on the protein side and fat side to a utilizable form that we can use in, use in our bodies.
[00:18:24] And the healthier a plant is, the more balanced that nutrient quality is. And the plant even exudes sugars into the soil to feed the microbes ’cause microbes, they have to have plant sugars to live too. They couldn’t, they cannot exist. They cannot create sugar From sunlight like a plant can.
[00:18:49] So the healthier the soil microbiome, those microbes create the building blocks of the next generation of [00:19:00] plants, and they do it in roughly the right balance. And I like to think of it like this, that nitrogen being the growth regulator of a plant, it’s also one of the harder ones for the microbes to convert.
[00:19:14] Now, I know there’s some that go on legumes that convert nitrogen a little bit better, but the microbes that convert nitrogen… nitrogen’s readily available. The air is loaded with nitrogen. It’s not… It’s just not in a utilizable form for the plant. And if you think about it, probably nature made it that way on purpose because, if it had all the nitrogen that’s available in a plant, we would live in a, some kind of a crazy jungle.
[00:19:38] The plants would never quit growing. But because it’s the growth regulator and the microbes have to create, make it bioavailable for the plant and it’s one of the slowest thing, the, the hardest ones to convert. So basically, what that means is that almost all the other nutrients have been converted first.
[00:19:58] So if a plant, is [00:20:00] taking up all the nutrients in roughly the right balance, and nitrogen being the last one converted, and if it doesn’t have enough nitrogen, it’s gonna grow a smaller plant, and it’s gonna become more concentrated with the other nutrients. So we’re not gonna get as big. If we need a big plant, then we need more microbes and more biodiversity in the soil so that the plant grows bigger and it has all the nutrients all the way up.
[00:20:28] Modern agriculture learned that they can synthesize nitrogen through an ammonia product. Aqua ammonia, anhydrous ammonia, whatever you wanna call it. They’re… Almost every conventional fertilizer is based on that thing. Originally discovered by making airfields in war zones. They found that the plants grew a little bit bigger on the edges of the airfields.
[00:20:54] Started using it in agriculture. It’s a synthesizer. It makes the plant think [00:21:00] it has nitrogen, and it converts on its own. So in, in a way, it has nitrogen. In a way, it’s a synthetic nitrogen, or it synthesizes. It makes the plant grow bigger, but the nu- the other microbes that are in the soil are not there.
[00:21:15] They are not converting all the other minerals and nutrients that we need in our bodies. The human body needs Well I’ve always told people 72 nutrients, that’s what I’ve read. But a naturopath recently corrected me and said that’s 94 nutrients that are needed for optimum health. The average conventional farmer, they only put on three, NPK.
[00:21:50] Every fertilizer, those are the only three that are on the bag. And I’m not saying some specialty farmers. If you have an apple orchard, you’re probably putting on something [00:22:00] else. But every conventional farmer is only looking at those three nutrients. Because once you put on the ammonia-type fertilizer, those are the other two that will absolutely limit plant growth.
[00:22:15] And by synthesizing it with those three, you’re able to create more mass. The problem is we have an industrialized food system that, that rewards the farmer. The farmer doesn’t have any control over… They hold out one hand, “How much does this stuff cost? How much is the new tractor? How much is fuel?”
[00:22:40] Whatever, all the inputs. On the other hand, he holds out the other hand, “How much will you give me for my grain?” Beef, whatever it is. Set by the Chicago Board of Trade or the Iowa Beef Council or whatever the deal is, market conditions from around the world outside of his control. So the only thing he can [00:23:00] control is tons.
[00:23:01] So farmers have become producers of commodities and not real farmers. And the quality has suffered because now we have three nutrients going on the soil, and the other 69 or 91 nutrients nobody cares about. Farmer’s not getting paid for that. So we have an extremely deficient population nutritionally. It’s causing all kinds of problems in our population. When you have a child today, you have a 50/50 chance of them being diagnosed with a chronic disease so starters, we have a very… there’s processed food and all of that plays into this, too. I’m not downgrading those issues at all. Excess sugars.
[00:23:57] There’s a bunch of issues that are going on in the [00:24:00] food supply of the US right now. But agriculture is a big part of that. Then you add onto the other side of this these poisons that you’re talking about. So now, because the plant is out of balance, nature sends in swarms of insects to kill that plant so it doesn’t reproduce because it’s got its sugars all out of balance.
[00:24:21] And so instead of working with nature, we put on more poisons. We put… call those insecticides. The soil begins to get depleted, and soil does not like to live in a vacuum. It wants to replenish itself, so it begins to grow all these weeds. So then we come up with weed killers to kill the weeds. It’s a vicious cycle, and it keeps putting more and more things, more and more pressure on our bodies.
[00:24:50] Our bodies are not made to deal with these chemicals. We’re– They’ve just come on the scene in the last, 50 to 100 years, a lot of them. [00:25:00] Glyphosate’s less than that. Glyphosate’s an, it’s an atrocious one. It’s an, it’s a synthetic synthetic protein, amino acid, I guess I should say that synthesizes lysine, which is what it…
[00:25:16] and that’s just one of the problems with glyphosates. It also has some really carcinogenic. It’s been proved in court to cause non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. But you look at what it does because the lysine’s what goes, it lubricates our joints, right? Our body has very thin layer of tissue between our, the joints in our bones, and it creates lubrication.
[00:25:43] And those, that tissue is made out of special kinds of proteins. Those protein amino acid chains the body confuses the glyphosate with those amino acid chains, puts it right in the tissue in our joints, all of our major joints, [00:26:00] and then we wonder how come suddenly we ha- And it doesn’t lubricate like the real amino acid does.
[00:26:08] It’s a synthetic. It’s not made for that. It’s made for killing weeds Then it gets in our joints, and now we have a proliferation of joint replacements. Who knows somebody, I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t know someone who’s had to have a joint replacement. A lot of times in their 40s, 50s, and 60s now.
[00:26:28] Before glyphosates, maybe a very elderly old, woman that was suffering with some osteoporosis and fell and broke a hip might get a joint replacement, but those are the only joint replacements that we ever saw. Our joints don’t wear out. Doctors will tell you, “Oh I guess they just wore out, you’ve been using them for 50 years now.” Oh, bull crap. Joints don’t wear out. Their joints are made to last a lifetime, and they will [00:27:00] last a lifetime. In fact, the marathon runner doesn’t have joint problems any more frequently than the couch potato, so that’s just logically bunk. It’s
[00:27:12] We’re destroying the joints from these chemicals to kill the weeds that we had to put on because our cro- our soils were not healthy enough to produce crops without pushing weeds to try to replenish the soil nutrients.
[00:27:27] Ana Skemp: So we’re in an agricultural mess right now, and I’m curious, if you were given the reins tomorrow, what would you change?
[00:27:36] How would you deal with conventional corn and soy subsidies? How … If we were to transition, how financially feasible is that for farmers? In your book, you talk about when you transition to conventional to organic, you have a couple of years. The soil’s dead. It takes a while to revitalize it.
[00:27:56] What can we actually change at this point, and how would you do [00:28:00] it?
[00:28:01] David Stelzer: So there’s three parts to that. Only one part is actually agricultural. We also have a political component to that, and the big component is the processing and marketing component. Right now, in the US, the marketing and pro- not the processing, but the marketing component has way outdone the agricultural and processing component.
[00:28:28] So right now, we are selling almost 70% of the organic food being sold in the US is being imported from overseas. From some other nation, I should say. Some, some from Canada and Mexico, but the vast majority from overseas. So the market demand is absolutely there. When I started farming organically, I was super happy to get a, a 1.4 to a 1.6 over conventional price for grain.
[00:28:59] Today, [00:29:00] I can’t touch organic grain for less than triple of conventional price. Right now, wheat is sitting at $5.50 a bushel on the conventional market. For a good high quality wheat, I would, I’m gonna be paying close to $22 to a grower that’s growing for me. If it’s lesser quality, it may be $18 or something.
[00:29:26] But even lesser quality grain, I’m gonna be paying $15 for chicken wheat, basically. So almost triple for chicken, for low quality wheat that’s not, can’t even… I’m saying chicken wheat, but feed grade. Because right now there’s a tremendous demand for organic meat, chicken per- in particular, but all the meats.
[00:29:49] And so the market has already moved towards the organic farmer. The big pieces that we’re [00:30:00] seeing is that we have an extreme deficit in the US of middle mid-size processing. So you can grow organic beef, and right now there’s not much of a market for it. Either you go get it butchered at your local butcher that can take five cows, maybe butcher five animals a day, and is booked out for six months, or if you try to take it to one of the really big ones they’re gonna want 300 head for one day’s production.
[00:30:39] And, and they will g- they’re gonna want you to pay for their organic certification and all kinds of other stuff. And their clean downs and you name it. So it’s … Right now there’s just no … There’s very little middle ground. There’s no- nobody in that space. I’m not saying nobody in any s- any of that [00:31:00] space.
[00:31:00] We’ve tried to … And so farmers have a choice. They either vertically integrate, or they try to sell on the mass market. And a lot of times, if it’s cattle, for instance, there’s not much of a premium. Even if you’re doing your apples, you have to make a choice. You’re gonna have to either vertically integrate, i.e.,
[00:31:22] you’re gonna have to put your own packing house in, or you’re going to have to bin that and probably send it either to Michigan or Washington State to get processed. I’m guessing there’s probably not some, there’s not good processing houses in Minnesota. I’m just guessing, but that would be my best guess.
[00:31:44] So you’re gonna either go in to Michigan Or to Washington State to be able to get those apples packed for you. And when you’re in Minnesota, e- neither one of those sounds really good, [00:32:00] right? So you’re gonna say I guess maybe I’m gonna put a packing house in.” Now if you’ve… Let’s say you had, I don’t know, h- how many acres do you have?
[00:32:09] Small one, or is this-
[00:32:11] Ana Skemp: Of apples?
[00:32:13] David Stelzer: Yeah.
[00:32:13] Ana Skemp: Over 100 acres, but it’s not all in production right now. We have about 11 acres of apples that we’re actively tending this year.
[00:32:21] David Stelzer: So let’s say all 100 was in production. Yep. You’ve got 100 acres of apples. You’re going to harvest, let’s say, you’re gonna get, 20, 20 bins fir acre, per acre.
[00:32:35] That’s a pretty moderate yield. Should do better than that. Should be going 35, but, I don’t know Minnesota, but in Oregon, we would get, on a good, mature orchard, we get about 35 bins a, bins an acre, maybe a little more. But let’s just say it was moderate and 20. 20, 20 bins times 100.
[00:32:57] You’re looking at 2,000, [00:33:00] 2,000 bins of apples to process. If the bin is nine- 900 pounds, so you’re gonna be pack out, if you have a good pack out and you’re packing out at 80%, you’re looking at, how many? Let’s see. That would be, like, fif- 20, 20 boxes per bin-ish. Okay. So you’ve got two choices if you’re gonna create your own packing house.
[00:33:27] You spend $4 or $5 million on one that’s actually designed to do what you need it to do.
[00:33:33] If you get a good eye one, you’re gonna be into that probably at least 3 or $4 million, for a good electronic eye and everything with the proper packing lines. You’re almost too small for that, but because it’s gonna be really hard to sell your crop for that kind of money.
[00:33:52] Or you get some broken down equipment that’s a pile of junk that some other f- packing house has already abandoned and thrown away, [00:34:00] and you cobble it back together and make it work, and you pack with something that’s relegated, been already relegated to the antique pile a long time ago.
[00:34:14] This is the choice that our farmers are up against. And is that relatively accurate for what you’re f- what you find yourself up against? You got it.
[00:34:23] Ana Skemp: We have a little bit of a weird model. We sell everything locally. We have huge U-pick. It’s all to local cooperatives, and we have an apple CSA.
[00:34:32] So I’m, but I’m also not trying to make a living off of apples, and
[00:34:37] David Stelzer: I think it’s very much- will you have that once you get to 100 acres?
[00:34:41] Ana Skemp: Yes, and I probably will not get to that point, but I very much understand this argument for farmers who are trying to make a, a living solely off of farming.
[00:34:50] That It’s hard to size up. It’s very expensive to size up, and yeah, I see all of that, too …
[00:34:57] David Stelzer: from your vertical integration. So that’s [00:35:00] why, that’s why we need… so ideally, the way I envision this in a, in the world moving forward, and I love to put this stuff together when we can, is you maybe have that $5 million apple packing line.
[00:35:15] But you’re not just growing apples. You also grow, I don’t know, I don’t know if you grow anything else, but let’s say you have some cows over there.
[00:35:23] Ana Skemp: I do. I do have some cows. We do hay, cattle.
[00:35:27] David Stelzer: Okay, so you also have some cows, and so you, are you gonna put in a slaughter facility? No, your neighbor maybe puts in the slaughter facility.
[00:35:37] You pack his apples. He packs your cows. These kinds of things this is the model that we’re gonna need to work out over time to create a mid-size processing world before we can take over the big ones.
[00:35:56] And I have that vision that someday the conventional [00:36:00] guys are gonna be the little ones that are gonna have to try to figure out what to do, and the organic world’s gonna be the, on the top, the top rung.
[00:36:09] But it’s still never, agribusiness is never gonna be very well-suited for organic agriculture. We’re gonna, we really need, Yeah, and I’m not necessarily saying every organic farm has to be small. Ev- some organic farms some organic farmers say, “Oh, what are you talking about?
[00:36:27] You’re a big guy. You’re a big organic farmer.” And by, okay, so we farm about 5,000 acres. Is that big or small? It’s everyone’s perspective. It doesn’t really matter. It’s the soul of what you’re doing. What are we doing with our, with our organic agriculture?
[00:36:47] Are we putting the process in place that w- the soil needs what it gets what it needs? Or is this something completely [00:37:00] different?
[00:37:03] Ana Skemp: So Give me two things that could happen to get us closer to that goal
[00:37:14] David Stelzer: I think one thing we’re already seeing some signs of right now, and that is the market demand.
[00:37:22] Ana Skemp: Yeah.
[00:37:23] David Stelzer: When it be- when it becomes obvious in our, in, to the consumer that the conventional food is killing them And they are willing to pay pretty much any price for organic over conventional.
[00:37:43] And the market demand begins to drive that. It becomes less and less demand for the conventional stuff and more and more for the organic. It is going to … If farmers want to survive, they [00:38:00] will move over to organic farming. And it’s already happening. Right now, if you took away the government subsidies that are supporting the corn and soy and wheat farmers in America, there would be very few of them surviving right now.
[00:38:20] Absolutely. What … They are growing something that nobody wants But it’s subsidized by the government, so they continue to grow it. And of course, then it becomes cheaper and cheaper, and it can create cheaper pork and chicken, or whatever they’re using for. They export it at, for next to nothing. Becomes subsidized all the way through the, all through the chain.
[00:38:44] We can change. We do not need to be importing tremendous amounts of organic food. I’m not saying that imports completely go away. We’ll have a hard time growing coconut in the US, and olive, enough olive oil, and there’s some things like that. [00:39:00] But for the most part, we should be able to be more than food sufficient in this country.
[00:39:08] Ana Skemp: What do you say? Of course the argument is organic food can’t feed the world. The the yield is so much smaller that it’s a pipe dream. And yes, if you’re wealthy, you can afford this special healthy food, but we could never actually feed our country with organic food. And I do know the, a little bit of research at least, that that suggests very much otherwise.
[00:39:28] But what’s your response to that?
[00:39:31] David Stelzer: I would I say that is pure propaganda from the chemical companies. If you really think about it, not only has our food production not really gone up very much in the last, say, 50 years but it has gotten more and more specialized. We have less and less the wide variety.
[00:39:58] We have lost, [00:40:00] we’ve even lost cultivars. They’ve completely gone away. There’s just a handful of things. If we can … Which having a wider variety in our diet is a, is super healthy, especially when you’re dealing with the vegetable and grain and some of those worlds. There’s grains that, who grows them anymore?
[00:40:20] There’s, some of them are coming back now. We’re talking about spelt and einkorn and Khorasan and all these things now. But those almost completely went away, and it’s the same in the vegetable world. Who’s talk- it used to be, “Oh, what do you grow in your garden? Corn and potatoes.”
[00:40:35] It pretty much got down to that. And, and you wouldn’t wanna grow your own greens because after all, they could have bacteria on them or something, and you could get sick and, yeah. Look at what a good job agribusiness is doing in that space lately. I dare say there isn’t anybody been, gotten sick from the lettuce in their garden or the peppers or the local farmer’s [00:41:00] market we have farmers that really care. They’re not, putting feces in their lettuce patches. You wouldn’t do that in your own garden. This is not, nor would the organic grower down the road that’s selling to you at the farmer’s market, nor would an organic grower that cared.
[00:41:18] Because if you’re selling on a mass scale and your only concern is tonnage, it’s a completely different thing than when you actually have a real customer that you look in the eye that you know that product is going to… You’re nev- never gonna take a chance on quality when you have a real customer you’re selling to, because if you give them crappy stuff, they’re not coming back.
[00:41:43] And so you’re gonna give them the best that you know how to give
[00:41:48] Ana Skemp: Do you think the subsidy structure will significantly change in our lifetimes?
[00:41:55] David Stelzer: I have a hard time predicting politics, [00:42:00] but I feel like it will have to. I feel like the subsidy structure is so broken, and they are changing a little bit of it. At least in this country it used to be that all the prosperous farmers were CRP farmers. Conservation Reserve Program, they get paid not to grow stuff, right?
[00:42:22] And so everyone, they jumped in on that. Be a CRP farmer. If you can get your land enrolled, then you get paid. We can make as much without doing any of the work.” Some of the farmers even sold all their equipment. They put their whole farms in CRP and sat back in their easy chairs to collect the government payments and stay on the dole and didn’t even bother to keep farm equipment available.
[00:42:45] A lot of those farms are up for sale now. That is already turning around. Now, nobody can make a living off of CRP. They’re decreasing the payments. They’re getting less and less [00:43:00] if they even take your land, which is getting less and less. So there’s already some changes, but whether the corn and soy thing, they’re
[00:43:08] The, the lobbies for the corn and soy states are pretty strong. So until-
[00:43:17] Until some things shift, and I think part of it is us going out and teaching the world that organic, regenerative, and sustainable agriculture can absolutely feed the world. We can feed the world, we can feed America, and we’ll do a better job. And then you look at also how much land has been abandoned by agribusiness.
[00:43:42] Driving through states like Virginia and Ohio and on the East Coast there, there are thousands and thousands of acres that used to be in agriculture. It’s either grown back to brush or it’s little patches of maybe call it pasture, but they just mow it because they don’t have any cows anymore.[00:44:00]
[00:44:00] It’s like there are– And then you get the, these people like Joel Salatin coming out there and teaching these homesteaders how to use that kind of land, and that’s completely different farming than what we do. But that farm is totally usable for livestock, for rotational grazing and all of that kind of stuff.
[00:44:20] It’s– now we bring– Not only do we we really don’t take much of a hit in the yield to go organic and sustainable if we do it right, but we also open up millions of extra acres to grow grass-fed beef and chicken and things like that on that, we don’t have to use corn and soy to feed those beef.
[00:44:43] They can be fed on grass like nature intended that’s in the Appalachia or in, in all over, in Ohio, in upstate New York, all, you know, all these places you drive through there, there’s millions of almost [00:45:00] abandoned acres up there. Just need a little, need to be cleared out a little bit again and regenerated, and there is no reason that can’t happen if we actually have a profitable system for the farmers that are doing that.
[00:45:15] Ana Skemp: I think, I haven’t looked recently, but I think the average age of a farmer in our country right now is close to 59, and I’m seeing that alongside land prices. Some in Iowa nearby to us were recently over 20,000 an acre for just farm- beautiful farmland, but farmland. And I think along with those subsidies, I’d like to see a way to fix those two problems, too.
[00:45:37] Make farmland more affordable and find a way to get more younger farmers on land to revitalize all that land that’s available.
[00:45:45] David Stelzer: And that is also a political issue that has to be dealt with at some point, and I think it… I think when the marketplace demands it, when enough people are buying organic and they’re not wanting to use their tax dollars to support, GMO corn and [00:46:00] soy, we will see that shift.
[00:46:02] The land value will reflect the amount of dollars. And, limiting development and stuff can help with that to some degree. There is so much land that can be developed. We do not need to use prime Iowa farm ground to put steel factories on. That’s just silly. But right now, it’s where we’re at, and so that’s the thing that’s driving the price of land up a lot- is it’s those subsidies and it’s the development pressure. And we also have a situation where I believe that a lot of the people in tech are seeing that we probably don’t have l- much longer that farm, that farming is sustainable, so they are buying up farm ground and just renting it out. So the tech world is bidding higher for farm ground. So you have these [00:47:00] pressures. And it nec- it’s not gonna be solved by government until we sol- solve it in the marketplace. The government always follows the marketplace, not the other r- way around. It, in our world, there’s all kinds of people that always say, “Oh, in fact, I was talking to Jeff that wrote the GMO, the let’s see, Genetic Roulette, that first made people aware of the GMOs. And he and he always is– he keeps telling me, “Hey, we gotta go lobby Congress. We gotta make this happen at the federal level.” And I kept telling him, “Hey, that’s gonna be a hard battle until we win it on the streets.
[00:47:42] We have to win this in the marketplace and on the streets before we will ever win it in the halls of Congress.” And he was talking about, GMO labeling and stuff like that. But, it’s not gonna happen until the people demand it. And the people did demand it in [00:48:00] places like Europe when we’re talking about GMOs.
[00:48:03] And they’ve also demanded a higher quality food. The food is a– even though it’s not all organic, they have to produce a higher quality food in Europe than what we’re producing in the US. And it’s gonna ha- you know, it’s going to… The same thing will happen as we get a little bit more a-aware consumer.
[00:48:24] And I think that’s the big deal right there
[00:48:30] Ana Skemp: So this is a funny question, but you have access to some of the healthiest, most nutrient-dense clean food in the world. What are some of the things you love to have for a family dinner?
[00:48:41] David Stelzer: Oh. Personally? Oh, my, my very favorite dinner is what we call our garden dinner.
[00:48:50] So hey, if I have my, And this time of year, it’s great, ’cause we can have this frequently. Fresh lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumber [00:49:00] salad, maybe with a little, s- a little bit s- We call it a… Our salad, we put a little like oil and vinegar brined a little bit- … in there. And fresh potatoes with homemade sauerkraut.
[00:49:17] Probably, that would, be one of my favorite dinners. But hey there’s lots of, a lots of great dinners- Yeah … that we can make off of completely healthy food. We also have, at our house, we do a lot of what we call them rice salad dinners- Ah … but basically we do, we cook some rice and beans, and then we put that over, like, all kinds of vegetables.
[00:49:43] Some of them steamed and some of them raw, and then we put that together in, in a, a single dish.
[00:49:51] And that’s one of, that’s one of our favorites.
[00:49:54] And you got the, the brown rice and the beans, and so you got a pretty good mix of protein and [00:50:00] carbs and a lot of vegetables. So that’s that’s one, another one of our our family favorites.
[00:50:07] Ana Skemp: That sounds great. I I feel like I could ask you about 100 more questions. Josh, is there anything that you wanna ask before we wrap?
[00:50:17] Josh Wilder: I think I’m just curious about the structure of Azure as far as the network of deliveries and drop sites, and that it is a ground up grassroots sort of operation that other people should know about support or you would like more people to be a part of?
[00:50:37] David Stelzer: In the food world, we’re a little bit of a unique a little bit of a unique model. And so there’s not a lot of other people doing what we do. There are a few local ones that that have smaller networks, [00:51:00] through farmer’s markets and CSAs and things along those lines.
[00:51:05] There’s a company called Farm Match that seems cool. I haven’t done a lot of business with it, but it’s a online thing that matches farms to consumers. Which is cool. I, I feel like that’s the reason I keep moving and I keep doubling down, is because there’s not a lot of people doing this right now.
[00:51:29] There’s not a lot of connecting. There’s been some great ideas. There’s been, companies like Organic Valley that brought organic dairy into mainstream. They, they created a lot of really good awareness.
[00:51:43] They co-opted farmers into working together to create a market that could go into our current shall we say, supply chain system into mass market grocery retail. They were able to [00:52:00] pull that off. I was not able to pull that off, so I completely did a end run completely around the, the whole mass market grocery retail system.
[00:52:14] I think any way that we can do this is good because we’re all here to support healthy and abundant living and healthy and abundant farms.
[00:52:23] So it’s about farmers taking really good care of their soil and their farms, and being paid enough so that they’re able to survive and ideally thrive and buy that next farm. She was mentioning earlier that the farm ground has gotten expensive now. But for somebody who’s vertically integrated and is getting a fair price, it’s not that expensive.
[00:52:50] We can, we can buy a new farm if we need to, or a second farm, or buy our kids’ farms, or however that works out in our families. [00:53:00] It’s, it seems really expensive but when we’re actually making enough off of our crops that can happen. In my world, I don’t have any trouble doing that.
[00:53:13] But now, fast-forwarding 35 years, we are very into- vertically integrated. I can take that grain. We can… we have our own cleaning facility. We clean it. We grind it into flour. We bake sourdough bread out of it. We make tortillas out of it. We freeze those. We put them in a package, and it goes all the way to the consumer ready to eat.
[00:53:39] Those, it’s this, and we even deliver it to the consumer through the Azure distribution model if needed or, or it can go into retail, either one, and we sell the product at every stage of that. We’ll sell the grain if you want. You’re doing your own sourdough bread, we’ll clean the grain and sell it to you that way.
[00:53:56] Or, if you wanna, if you don’t have your own grinder and you [00:54:00] wanna make your own bread, we’ll sell you the flour. Or, if you don’t wanna do either, we’ll sell you the sourdough bread. We’ll sell you the tortillas. It’s fully integrated, and we’ve done that on multiple different ways. We have our own cannery, so our vegetable line, we’ll sell, you know- “Oh, we’re gonna do beets today, and I’ll sell you the fresh beets,” or, the ones that are off size or whatever.
[00:54:23] We dice them up and we pickle them, and we can’t run them through the cannery, and now we sell diced pickled beets, right? I’m, it’s and we’ll run that into retail. We’ll sell it to the stores, or we’ll sell it to the end consumer. I, it’s completely vertically integrated, and that’s where the money is.
[00:54:40] If we’re talking about a farm, right now, on average, according to the Department of Agriculture website the farmer gets nine cents of the food dollar. Nine, nine cents out of 100. So guess where the money’s at? It’s in the, it’s in the 81, [00:55:00] or, the or the 91, I should say. Nine cents, 91 cents is open to the farmer to take.
[00:55:08] It’s up for grabs, and when you can get 100 instead of… And I’m not saying there’s not costs and stuff associated with the rest of that. There is, and there’s more work. There’s more, there are costs. But the f- the farm is the most, it’s the hardest part in many ways. So So there is money to be made in farming.
[00:55:35] It’s just not in commodity farming.
[00:55:39] Josh Wilder: Yeah, and I think, with your model and different things people are trying, for instance, there, your products are in a retail establishment here in Topeka, Kansas. Started off as a delivery service for CSA style direct from farmers during during the pandemic.
[00:55:55] And then since then they’ve opened a retail location, [00:56:00] but, almost half their business is still in delivering straight to the consumer. And no it’s models like that and different things that people are trying that obviously and when you get down to a community, there’s gonna be different needs and, different characteristics for each community.
[00:56:17] And, part of what we try to do is share as many of those as we can. So if what one person is doing in Arizona will help someone else in Indiana, then, that’s worth learning about it.
[00:56:30] David Stelzer: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. We really need to get those organic oranges from Arizona to Kansas, and, the sunflower seeds from Kansas to Arizona.
[00:56:41] And that’s what distribution is, should be doing, not completely blocking the marketplace and creating commodity, commoditization out of food. Food is not a commodity. It’s our life, it’s our life. It’s what we, creates our health and [00:57:00] our community.
[00:57:01] A, community, culture, all of that is widely done around food. That needs to never be commoditized. And CSA, all of those things are really good. A lot of those things are harder to scale, where you have to… the farmer’s market, it’s a wonderful idea, but it’s really hard to scale. How many Saturday markets can you hit as one farmer?
[00:57:26] Josh Wilder: Yeah.
[00:57:26] David Stelzer: You might be able to hit two markets in a week, or maybe three if you have a Wednesday afternoon market or something. But… And every one you hit, you basically burn a day that you’re not out on your farm. And then, so it’s a rough model.
[00:57:45] There’s nothing wrong with the model. It’s a wonderful model, and people get to meet their farmer, and farmers get to meet their customer and look them in the eye and tell them exactly why their food is the very best. But, it can’t really be scaled.
[00:57:57] And so that was, in a way [00:58:00] the, the thing that Azure did is it created a scalable model of a very similar thing. And someday in the future, I see a retail organization to be able to do the same thing so that we create. If I were doing it, I would call them the Azure Market or Azure Partner Store model, where we’re able to franchise or partner with all these retailers, and they would be very focused on local because we want that.
[00:58:29] But high-quality local, not just because it’s local. This has to be, sustainably raised in some way that it’s better than conventional. We’re not gonna buy corn down at the, from the GMO farmer down the road there. But very focused on local, and then we use the Azure distribution network to bring them everything else that’s local somewhere else.
[00:58:52] Everything’s local somewhere, right?
[00:58:55] Josh Wilder: Yeah. That’s
[00:58:56] David Stelzer: Right. This is the, we bring them those local oranges from Arizona to [00:59:00] Kansas. And sometimes it’s from around the world. We’re gonna bring the local coconut oil from Tunisia, or from, not Tunisia, from Indonesia into Kansas as well, ’cause last I heard, coconut trees didn’t grow real well in Kansas.
[00:59:17] Josh Wilder: No that’s accurate. Thanks again for your time, and we’ll let you get back to your work. But again, appreciate it and everybody, get out and read the new book, Seeds of Hope.
[00:59:31] David Stelzer: And it is available to pre-order right now on- seedsofhopebook.com, and we would love to get as many pre-orders as we can, because that will… If it gets on… The more bestsellers lists that we can get onto, the bigger the voice will be in mass market media. So I will be able to, or Azure will be able to have a larger voice and be able to help promote organic agriculture and [01:00:00] sustainable farming in a much larger way, and that’s the goal.
[01:00:05] And that was the whole, really the whole purpose for writing the book, was to inspire healthy and abundant living, inspire farmers, hey, that it, this is possible, but mostly inspire consumers that it matters. The quality of the food that you eat does matter. And I do that through my testimony, but also through the inspiration.
[01:00:26] Or the… At least hopefully that’s inspiring to know that you can change your diet and change the trajectory of your health.
[01:00:37] Josh Wilder: Absolutely. Thanks again. And we’re also selling it at the Mother Earth News store online so any way we can help to spread the word-
[01:00:46] David Stelzer: I appreciate it … we’d
[01:00:47] Josh Wilder: love
[01:00:47] David Stelzer: to. Thank you so much, and thank you for having me.
[01:00:51] Josh Wilder: Absolutely. Thank you.
[01:00:52] Thanks for joining us for this episode of Mother Earth News and Friends. To listen to more podcasts and get connected on our social media, [01:01:00] visit www.motherearthnews.com/podcast. You can also email us at podcast@ogdenpubs.com with any questions or suggestions. Our podcast production team includes Alyssa Warner and myself, Josh Wilder.
[01:01:16] Music for this episode is the song Hustle by Kevin MacLeod. The Mother Earth News and Friends podcast is a production of Ogden Publications.
