Security Halt!
Welcome to Security Halt! Podcast, the show dedicated to Veterans, Active Duty Service Members, and First Responders. Hosted by retired Green Beret Deny Caballero, this podcast dives deep into the stories of resilience, triumph, and the unique challenges faced by those who serve.
Through powerful interviews and candid discussions, Security Halt! Podcast highlights vital resources, celebrates success stories, and offers actionable tools to navigate mental health, career transitions, and personal growth.
Join us as we stand shoulder-to-shoulder, proving that even after the mission changes, the call to serve and thrive never ends.
Security Halt!
Is the future of food already broken — or are we just disconnected from it?
In this eye-opening episode of Security Halt!, host Deny Caballero sits down with Patrick Samuels — veteran entrepreneur, farmer, and advocate for sustainable agriculture — to unpack the hard truths behind the modern food industry.
From misleading “pasture-raised” labels to the decentralization of food production, Patrick shares his journey from Special Forces to regenerative farming — and why local food systems may be the key to community health and resilience.
This conversation dives deep into:
- Entrepreneurship in agriculture and lessons learned from failure
- The shocking realities behind food labeling and marketing
- Why transparency matters in the food industry
- How local farming builds stronger communities
- Fair wages for farmers and the broken food economy
- The healing power of nature and reconnection to our food
- The rise of Honest Booths and new ways to connect consumers directly with farmers
If you care about entrepreneurship, community support, food transparency, or rebuilding sustainable food systems — this episode is for you.
🎧 Tune in now to learn how farming isn’t just about food — it’s about rebuilding connection, resilience, and purpose.
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Chapters
00:00 The Reality of Entrepreneurship
02:59 Journey into Agriculture
05:59 Understanding the Food Industry
09:05 The Misuse of 'Pasture Raised' Labeling
12:01 Creating Affordable, Sustainable Options
14:54 The Truth Behind Egg Quality
17:48 Transparency vs. Certification in Agriculture
21:05 Bridging the Gap in Food Systems
24:01 Innovative Solutions for Egg Distribution
27:08 The Rise of Honest Booths
31:39 Decentralization in Agriculture
33:40 Connecting Consumers with Local Farmers
35:09 The Importance of Farmers in Society
36:57 Urbanization's Impact on Agriculture
38:18 Keeping Dollars Local
39:31 The Need for Fair Wages in Farming
41:01 Barriers to Entry in Agriculture
43:43 Encouraging New Farmers
46:39 The Healing Power of Nature
48:14 Community and Connection in Agriculture
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LinkedIn: Deny Caballero
Follow Patrick on LinkedIn today!
Patrick Samuels
https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrick-samuels-3540ab2b4/
Website: sunnysideeggco.com
Produced by Security Halt Media
Security Odd Podcast. Let's go the only podcast that's purpose-built from the ground up to support you Not just you, but the wider audience, everybody. Authentic, impactful and insightful conversations that serve a purpose to help you. And the quality has gone up. It's decent. It's hosted by me, danny Caballero. It's a decent, it's hosted by me, danny Caballero. You make you make just enough progress to start catching back up to everything else Exactly how it is.
Speaker 2:That's exactly how it is, yeah.
Speaker 1:Finish putting out one thing that's on fire. Well, all right, yep, I'll take care of that.
Speaker 2:That's yeah, if I've learned anything from business, it's, it's, yeah, putting out fires and then moving on to the next fire.
Speaker 1:Yeah, oh man. You know, I thought being an entrepreneur was going to be a lot of fun. Fuck those guys. We're going to have the cheese steak factory. I've got it made.
Speaker 2:Boy, wouldn't I give a fucking shiny nickel to work an assembly line right now yeah, it's like getting kicked in the balls 7.9 days or 6.9 days a week, and then for like one hour you might have a win then you go to mass feel good, yeah, that's right yeah get back, check, check your emails, fuck that's exactly right. That's exactly patrick.
Speaker 1:Welcome back, man, it's good to have you appreciate it, brother.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thanks for having me again absolutely, man, I think your your story, like we started wrapping it up and we hear just so many of the things that I'm always championing, like being of service to others, going after big things and and trying to make your community just a little bit better, and, uh, not not only that, but the chickens, agriculture, so much. So yeah, I mean just, uh, you know I'll let you decide where we go. This is a choose your adventure book and it's it's yours, patrick, sure, yeah, we can start on the journey start with, um, maybe, how we got into agriculture?
Speaker 2:I guess because, um, I grew up in kind of like on the outskirts of indianapolis and so my dad had worked for some farmers when I was like really young, but outside of that, um, I had like no tangible farming experience, you know, zero really knowledge of farming or anything about agriculture, had no interest in it. Um, and then, while, uh, whenever COVID hit, um, you know, my wife and I started diving into the rabbit hole of like you know, why are vaccines such a controversial issue right now? And then that kind of turned into like, okay, well, what about the food system? Um, and at the time she was pregnant with our first son too, and so we were kind of turned into like, okay, well, what about the food system? And at the time she was pregnant with our first son too, and so we were kind of starting to do some research about like, okay, well, what do we, you know, feed our kid, do we vaccinate? Do we not vaccinate? Like what are kind of all those kind of questions that early parents go through.
Speaker 2:And so we just started looking into agriculture, and so that kind of turned into, you know, we started looking into food, and then that kind of turned into watching videos about like, well, you know, if you were to grow your own food, what would that look like? You know, what's it look like to raise meat chickens? What does it look like to raise some cattle for beef, or grow your own vegetables? And um, and so yeah, during COVID was kind of, uh, what sparked that interest? And then we started kind of looking into what it would look like just to just to raise our own food for the more so, just for the knowledge of like, okay, we know where our food comes from, we know what goes into it. And we didn't even really have a very good understanding, I think, yet of um, the depth of the food industry, you know, and sort of uh, uh problems in it. At the time we were kind of just like, well, we want to be self-sufficient. You know classic, you know green beret thing really is just like. You know, we want to be self-sufficient kind of people. And so we started looking at buying farms and that sort of thing.
Speaker 2:And on my way out of the military kind of my last year group we bought a farm here in Kentucky and just started doing the homestead thing. We've got a couple of old chicken tractors where we were raising meat chickens. We had a couple of cows out back um, did our own little garden and that sort of thing and, um, as I got out of the military, um, I went and worked for, uh, one of the largest pasture raised egg companies uh in the country and, um, that kind of dipped my toes a little bit more into the water of, like, what the food industry really looks like. And, and no shade to that company you know they actually are doing, compared compared to most large corporations, they're actually doing a really good job, I think. Um, but it gave me a lot more of a behind the scenes. Look at, yeah, the food industry more broadly, um, and particularly you know the one, the centralization of food and how, uh, you know essentially all, every, every sub industry within food is controlled by just a handful of major large corporations. And so, even though you go to the grocery store and it looks like there's a lot of variety on the shelves, really most of those companies are owned by the same people. Um, and not only that, but you know, most of the food and grocery stores in general are designed not to make you healthier, keep you healthy, but just to kind of fill your stomach and and make you think that you're eating, you're eating food Uh, when really really it's more like a food like product. It's not food itself. You know, um and uh.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, I got a little bit deeper understanding of the food industry, um, and then we kind of just kept looking out at our back pasture and we're like, you know, surely there's a way to? We we have like nine acres here and we were kind of like surely we can like pay the mortgage um, just off of our our own little pasture here, you know. And so, um, our, our plan was I was going to leave the company that I was working for. We have a. You know, we talked on the last podcast a little bit about a real estate company and that kind of pays the bills for us.
Speaker 2:And then we were kind of just going to start selling some eggs out of our back pasture here. And so we bought a kind of nicer mobile chicken house and we actually, well, initially we were going to start with like 50 hens, um, just kind of in like a small pasture grass over here, uh, and then it became clear that people were going to be kind of interested in in our eggs. So we're like, well, we'll go up to 350 hens, um, and so we bought this like fancy solar powered, uh, mobile chicken house which, if you go on the sunny side egg co instagram, you can kind of see a bunch of pictures and how it operates and that kind of thing. But it's, it's pretty fancy, uh and uh.
Speaker 1:Your favorite page by the way, yeah, yeah, I appreciate it yeah, lots of videos of chickens.
Speaker 2:If you like peaceful chicken videos, that's the place to go for five minutes.
Speaker 1:Five minutes in the morning. Yeah, it's where I go to. Just that's the way to start. Oh yeah, that's what?
Speaker 2:yeah at the end of a long, long day I like to just go out and watch chickens just do their thing. It's peaceful man. It's super peaceful, I'm not weird.
Speaker 1:Stop making it seem like I'm weird. It's perfectly normal.
Speaker 2:I call it birdwashing for professionals. I'm making money off the birds, so it doesn't really count, but it's basically birdwatching. We bought this mobile chicken house. One of the things that I had an issue with was labeling in both meat and in the egg industry. For example, there's a really greenwashed term in eggs called pasture-raised You've probably seen it all over the egg industry and so, for example, there's a really kind of greenwash term and eggs called pasture raised. You've probably seen it all over the grocery store.
Speaker 1:Right, you got to break that down for the folks, cause I, I got um, I got bamboozled by a specific egg company with that iconic black and white littering Yep, yep, yeah Boy.
Speaker 2:So that's probably still pissed.
Speaker 2:That company is a little bit of like my greatest enemy right now, because, um, yeah, so just to kind of, yeah, break it down a little bit more, um, so we, what we do, is what I call pasture raised, which is, um, we have a giant bubble chicken house. Uh, the the hens are released onto pasture every single day, from the moment the day that we get them until the day that we depopulate those hens. Uh, those hens spend every single day outside, uh, and fresh air. Now, there's a little bit of. You know, if the weather conditions are so bad that, like, a human wouldn't go outside, then we won't let them out. But other than that, um, those chickens, 100% of our chickens, are out on side, outside, uh, on pasture, every single day, right, um, and that is what you expect from a term pasture raised is that the animal is raised on a pasture.
Speaker 2:Um, unfortunately, the industry has really greenwashed that term and so what you have now is you have 20,000, 30,000, 40,000, 80,000 bird chicken barns where there's a little door on, a couple of doors on the outside that open up periodically. Usually they won't let them out till about noon every day. Some farms, they tell the farmers, you know, it's better to wait as long as possible. If there's no audit coming in or anything like that, a lot of the farmers won't even let them outside at all, and so they open up these little doors, and then industry standard is that less than 15% of hens ever leave the barn, let alone actually go outside every single day. And so I remember going into one of my first meetings with a company I used to work for which was a pasture-raised company, and I asked that question because my understanding of pasture-raised was like hey, every single bird is going to be outside, using all the pasture, and, and you know, the most of them go by what's called certified humane standards, which says that you have to have 108 square feet per bird allocated outside of the barn for the animal. And so you know, at um, let's use like 12 000 birds that's a pretty common size for a barn. That puts you at about 30 acres of space outside. And so in your mind you're thinking, oh wow, those chickens, they have tons of room to roam, they're're all going outside.
Speaker 2:But the reality is is that the companies are creating conditions inside the barn that make it unlikely for that bird to go out, and the reason for that is fairly obvious, right? It's like chickens, naturally, will lay wherever they feel most comfortable. Well, if they feel more comfortable outside of the barn, then they won't lay their egg inside of the barn, and so let's try to. You know, the corporations are trying to maximize their profit and how many eggs they can collect in a day, and so they create conditions that are best for the chickens to stay inside the park. Um, and so what you end up with is, yeah, these giant poultry barns, uh, where the vast majority of the birds never leave the barn, and even if they do leave the barn, most of them aren't spending their entire day outside, or anything like that.
Speaker 2:And the way these barns are set up is that you basically have like a 50 foot buffer of gravel around the outside, and then past that is some fencing, what they call apron fencing and then outside of that fencing is a pasture, and so some of the corporations, um have have uh decided that they want to, in an attempt to again greenwash the term regenerative. What they do is they fence off multiple portions of their pasture and then they'll only open up a section of pasture for a chicken to go to, and chickens are not the brightest animals. They can't really figure out, like, oh, this gate is open today, that gate's open today or closed today. They're not going to figure that out. And so what ends up happening is that they're using, uh, the claim that hey, we have uh fencing throughout our paddock or we have fenced off paddocks so we can rotationally graze these chickens. They're making a regenerative claim there when in reality, on the ground, uh, the chickens just like aren't even going outside now because they have no idea where to go. They don't have that. They haven't built like kind of a daily routine of going into the same place every day, and so, yeah, ultimately what that does is just forces a chicken to stay inside or, at the very least, go outside and just kind of hang out on some gravel for a little while.
Speaker 2:Uh, and so the term pasture raise has really really been greenwashed by both egg companies and meat companies, because you see it a lot in the meat industry as well. And yeah, unfortunately, people are paying a premium for a product that they're not really getting, and that's what really frustrates me. And we've actually partnered with some farmers who used to work for some of those big corporations for what we call free range, which is a barn-raised model. What everyone else calls pasture-raised, we're calling free range, um, and we do offer that product in some of our stores. Um, but we partnered with some of those, those uh farmers that used to work for those companies, because we pay way better than they do, Uh, and we provide it at a lower cost in the stores. And so, if you compare their pasture raised with our free range, most of the time we pay farmers double what those companies are paying and it's a couple of dollars cheaper in the store than what you're going to pay for those those eggs.
Speaker 2:And so, um, we're trying to provide you know, whether it's our pasture raised or our free range, we're trying to really provide, uh, a an option for people who, um, maybe normally wouldn't go for a free range, organic pasture-raised, any of that at an affordable option in the grocery store, so that, hey, we can start moving people towards a more sustainable food system rather than just, if you can't really afford $10 eggs, well, you'll just go to $2 conventional eggs, which is even worse than what some of these other corporations are doing.
Speaker 2:So, um, yeah, that's kind of a rough, rough rundown of uh of our operation, but, yeah, what we ended up doing. I guess, just to wrap that all up a little bit, is that in our, in our pasture and then a couple of our farms, we have mobile chicken houses, uh, and that's what we would call pasture raise, um, and those are all fed organic feed, so it's a little bit higher cost for the consumer. And then we have a what we call free range, non-gmo product line, which is our barn raised. Everyone else in the industry would call that pasture raised. We think it's more accurate to call it free range, because the chickens have the freedom to go outside but they're not raised on a pasture, you know. So yeah, those are kind of our two different product lines right now and where we're headed.
Speaker 1:I like that. I think the other thing that we're missing from the other guys is the diet that those birds have. We were always talking about and always hearing about. You want that yolk, that rich, bright orange color, and come to find out those motherfuckers were fabricating that too. They are.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so for anyone who does not know, it used to be kind of considered or thought that you could judge an egg by the darkness of the yolk, right, that was kind of just a normal consideration. If you went into the store and it was a really like pale yellow yolk, then the chicken probably wasn't outside getting the insects and access to grass that it needed and vitamin D and that kind of thing, um, but if you had a darker yolk, well then that meant that it was probably eating a lot more bugs, is getting a lot more vitamin D, uh, and and that sort of thing. And so, uh, what corporations have started to do is they started to inject things into the feed that artificially darken the yolk, and so you can have a uh chicken who has never seen the light of, who has literally never been in sunlight for its entire life, uh will produce a dark orange yolk. Uh, that you, whenever you crack it open, because they I can't remember the name there's a chemical and conventional feeds there's a chemical that they can put in it. Whenever you start to get into non-GMO and organic, you can't put chemicals in the feed, and so what they do is they put something like paprika that'll darken the yolk. And then there's one other one, I can't remember, but they'll put ingredients inside the feed so that it just artificially darkens the yolk, whether or not.
Speaker 2:And so this is one thing too is, like you know, as you go through the seasons. If you were to, if you were to look at a chicken egg throughout the seasons, you would naturally get darker yolks spring to fall because there's more bugs outside for them to eat, and that's a protein inside of the bugs is what usually darkens the yolk. And so you would naturally see darker yolks during the spring to fall, and then lighter yolks in the winter because there's like, less bugs for them to eat, right, and so you don't see that variation on shells. Whenever you crack open a uh, a store egg, for the most part you see the exact same yolk and every single egg, and that's an indicator that somebody has been putting something into the feed to make those yolks all look the exact same, you know. And so pretty easy way to tell is if your yolks all look literally identical, then it's yeah, there's probably something in the feed that's making them look that way, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's crazy what we've done to our food system, something that's you know. I think we've been pretty ignorant with how much a corporation is willing or what they're willing to do for profit. There's nothing. They're not willing to try or try to pull over on the consumer in order to make just a little bit more money.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:That's the sad thing.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's awful. Yeah, yeah, We've, we've, yeah, Corporations are certainly willing to forego any sense of morality in order to maximize profit. You know, Uh, and that's kind of heartbreaking. You know, like one of the yeah, I, I just know some like local farmers who you know there's. Like a woman who was a widow who, uh, one of the big companies pays her like a dollar 10, I think, for a dozen for her eggs, and then they turn around and sell those eggs for $8 a dozen in the store. You know, and it's like there's a lot, there's a lot more wiggle room to pay. You know, like a widow with a bunch of kids uh, more money than that it sounds.
Speaker 1:it sounds like the worst super villain in a comic book. It sounds ridiculous. This is a real thing yeah.
Speaker 2:And one thing, too, that some of these corporations will do is because you know if you go in the grocery store. Well, so I'll start with this we have kind of committed to rejecting all certifications, and that's not out of like a desire to maximize profit or anything like that, like avoid, um, transparency. In fact I think we're trying to. My personal belief is that corporations use certifications to mask transparency, uh, and so we're trying to do the opposite, where it's like, hey, if you want to come out to the farm or any one of the farms, if you, if you see at, uh, the name of the farm on your egg carton from one of our, our eggs, and you're like, hey, I would like to go out and see where my eggs are raised, like hit us up and I'll take you out to the farm. You know like I would prefer extreme transparency over just some sort of certification. And so what corporations do is they use certifications to mass transparency. And so a lot of times, what they'll do is they will pay a certifying agency right, so they are which is sort of a nonprofit, often a nonprofit. They'll pay the certifying agency, they'll pay a third party nonprofit to come out and assess whether or not they're meeting those, those certifying standards. And then they'll pay another third-party nonprofit to message about how well they're meeting all of those standards, and so, really, what ends up happening is that the corporation ends up paying or owning is the way that I would look at it all of the different checks and balances that are supposed to be there.
Speaker 2:So anytime somebody gets certified by something, chances are they've been paid off by that company to be certified by them, and so and sort of a rejection of that model. We're just like well, we're not going to get certified by anything. Uh, instead, we're just going to take a bunch of photos and videos and if you want to, you know we'll do a bunch of farm tours. And if people want to come out and see the farm whenever they they find our eggs, then like, schedule time with us, you can come and see our farms. Like our farms are pretty open, like we had. We had a fairly large retail partner that we just started working with and, uh, literally, like he emailed me on a Friday, that was like, hey, I want to, I'd like to. Before we commit to anything, I'd like to see your uh production, basically, and I was like, okay, come tomorrow. You know, like I didn't need time to to prep or hide or show them the best parts of X, Y and Z.
Speaker 2:You can literally come out to our farm the next day and what we have is what we'll show you, Because we're proud of what we have and we're not trying to hide anything from a consumer.
Speaker 1:But that's not the case. Kudos to you, man, kudos to you. We need to connect you with RFK.
Speaker 2:Yeah, if anyone knows him'm out there, let me know the way you're handling these tickets are perfect yeah, uh, yeah, yeah um it's uh, yeah, and and again, you know to, to be fair to some of these corporations, um, I, I probably can get hate from both sides, from both the kind of like regenerative crowd and the corporation crowd, because it's like, well, I think I can, yeah, because right now there's there's only two models. Right, there's the corporation side, which is like, hey, we have to feed a nation and we're trying to do it more humanely, right, and so you know, there there is an argument to be made for for those corporations, because it's like, well, compared to what you're saying there compared to a caged model where you keep three chickens in a tiny cage and they never leave that cage for their entire life and they never have access.
Speaker 2:They can't even move their legs, they're so confined. You know that is a way better system than that. And the other part of that is like you know, you have to feed a nation. We have to feed 350 million people, and right now there's no system for us to feed 350 million using regenerative agriculture. The flip side to that is kind of the small farm homestead people who are like you know, all corporations are evil, they're all out to get you. They're never going to. You know, do the right thing and that sort of thing. Uh, but those people never have an answer as to how we're going to feed.
Speaker 2:You know, hundreds of millions of people using anything other than those big commercial, uh, agriculture practices and so what? I see our role as is kind of bridging the gap between those two, and so I get a little bit of hate from from both sides because we're scaling regenerative agriculture, which inherently comes with some semblance of compromises. But we're also kind of calling out the big guys, because you know we are doing what we claim to be doing, and so the ICS is kind of a bridge between those two places where we can start to scale. You know, truly regenerative agriculture and offer it, and you know we'll be in, I think, 25 stores and restaurants this week, um, and so you know we're making it possible for people to get affordable, regeneratively raised products on their shelves, uh, without you know cutting corners or making it uh into something that that we're not, and um, and yeah, I think that's, you know that's, that's the.
Speaker 1:The path forward if we want to try to scale, regenerative agriculture is is, uh, you know, a model like what we're doing and and but yeah, it brings some hate from from those sides, unfortunately, yeah yeah, it's, it's true, though, um, we have to amplify and support the regenerative agricultural movement so that it can grow, not stay the same size, not stay as the cute boutique farm community that you go visit on the weekends. No, it has to grow. Yeah, it has to get become mainstream, and yeah, with that comes some. You have to adopt some things that we might be shitting on right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I, you know, early on, our kind of initial plan was like we wanted it to be more farm to like, direct to consumer, one, because the margins are just always a little bit better, and two, we wanted to really connect people with their farmer.
Speaker 2:But the reality is that, you know, most people just don't have the freedom of time or financial freedom to buy directly from, like you said, kind of like a boutique farm, um.
Speaker 2:And so that was kind of what we were struggling with in the early days was like, well, do we want to keep it a little bit more niche or like niche and and have a a, a a limited population or customer base, or do we want to try to make this as accessible as possible?
Speaker 2:And we kind of leaned into making it more accessible, um, and, and lowering our prices and lowering our profit margin and doing so, um, but just because, like, at the end of the day it's, it's easier right now, given our current food system, to place regenerative products inside of a grocery store than it is to try to convince a consumer to not go to a grocery store and only buy their products from from farm, direct from farms. And so maybe some people can, you know, have the ability to do that, but the reality is that most people in the next 10, 20, 30 years are going to be going to grocery stores and there's just no way to get around that, you know. And so, um, that's kind of what we've been just like struggling with and working through a little bit is that we wanted to be a little bit more direct to consumer, but, uh, the reality is like we just have to go into grocery stores in order to make it more accessible to folks, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah it's. I don't know mailing eggs would ever be a good idea, like butcher box, that's what we did.
Speaker 2:That's how we started. We started mailing eggs, uh, no shit, yeah, yeah, we had like we had like a 90, 95 success rate. It was it really depended on um it. Really we found it really depended on the local like ups driver, because we would ship them through ups and those eggs would not survive here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was like it was the uh, it was like the same people who kept getting broken eggs and then other people would have, like, you know, we'd have some customers who never got a single broken egg and then we'd have ones who were like literally every egg was broken whenever we got it, you know, and it's like what a mess, you know. And then I gotta refund those people. I don't get my shipping costs back. It was a huge headache.
Speaker 2:So yeah, my ups guy here in alabama literally yeets just against my door we, uh, yeah, we tried everything to to minimize that too, as much as we could like. We started whenever we first started, because I shipped some to my buddy, um, and all we had was a little bit of foam inside of the cartons to try to like keep them from jostling. That's all we had and he got them and he was like dude, these things were absolutely destroyed. So then we put foam outside the cartons. We had custom like die cut foam inserts that would like snuggle the eggs inside the curtains, uh, so we tried that and still they were getting, you know, broken pretty often. So then we put fragile on the box, like fragile stickers on the box, and that finally kind of brought it down but still is like. You know, there's just some some ups delivery guys who are just like doesn't you can clearly see eggs on here? You could see fragile, you could you know what I'm saying and they just would chuck those suckers.
Speaker 1:So it was you ain't got time to read that shit. Yeah, yeah, that's what. Living his best life? Yeah, listen to three, six mafia just throwing it in there, yep yeah, so, uh, that's yeah so we ultimately ended up transitioning to focusing on a retail base. Here's an idea, though. Did you ever try the kiosk Like the Redbox DVDs?
Speaker 2:No, that's an interesting idea. You could have, like a vending machine for eggs. Yeah, that would be a good idea. That would be a good idea. Yeah, that could work. That could work. That could work. Especially right now, people are so hard up on eggs.
Speaker 1:You know that they'll buy eggs from anywhere we just had our in-laws come up and visit and uh, they they always like make breakfast and they got us like two giant cartons of eggs. I was like holy shit they must like you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, look at me, I've got eggs that's what, uh, we hired a uh uh guy to kind of help us with delivery and stuff like that. And uh, he and I, I was kind of like taking him through the rounds one day and uh, you know, right now we like leave the truck open just to make deliveries faster, like we just leave the truck open while we kind of get things in and out of a store or whatever. And he was like dude, I'm a little concerned. People are going to start stealing eggs out of the back of this van if they see it. He's like I'm I'm pretty concerned people are going to steal eggs from us right now.
Speaker 1:Dude, I've seen. I've seen a rise of these honest booths. I don't know if that's a proper terminology, but a lot of farmers that sell their eggs or bread.
Speaker 1:They have these little stalls with no kiosk, like just a little slot for, yeah, for you to drop your money, uh, for eggs, for bread, any of the the things they uh watch like consume a lot of tiktoks. I don't know why, uh, in my, my daily quest for the best memes, yeah, I'm always having to go through. But I've seen these, uh, ladies and gentlemen that will go every morning to their farm booth, their stall, load up on their you know stock to shelves, put their eggs, put their bread on. They come back and they show the hall and they're never, ever short on money. Yeah, that blows me away like that's.
Speaker 2:That's beautiful, that's heartwarming for america yeah, it is super, even in hard times, right now.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, it's not exactly. You know, we're not in the uh, the great depression.
Speaker 2:But yeah, eggs are a little little expensive yeah, and that's what one thing we also kind of shifted on, and this kind of just tells you a little bit about the kind of journey of like early on and building a business is like you got to be able to shift fast and change what you're doing fast to meet market demand.
Speaker 2:You know, because we had these, the carton labels that we originally had focused heavily on the fact that our eggs were like organic, regenerative and that sort of thing and that sort of thing. And what kept happening every time I went in to make our deliveries, uh was, you know, we would meet with some of the customers as we're like kind of unloading, uh, eggs and these places, people would be like, oh, are these raised locally? Are these from a local farm? Are they, you know, from a local farmer? Yada, yada. And that was always the question. People really didn't care that we were doing regenerative agriculture and a mobile chicken house and like I would try to tell people about that and they'd be like, oh, okay, that's cool, you know, but what they really wanted to know, was like yeah it wasn't from a, from a local farmer, you know, because they wanted to support somebody who is in their local area.
Speaker 2:And so, um, that and that drove us to change two things uh, all of our marketing right now, all of our um packaging in our cartons right now and giant letters it says raised on local farms. And the reason for that is because I wanted to kind of kind of poke back a little bit at some of these big companies who started to you know who kind of uh started the like, oh, pasture raised, free range, all of those terminology. And I was like, well, I read blue ocean strategy. Anybody who's an entrepreneur out there I would recommend reading Blue Ocean Strategy. It talks a lot about how to separate yourself from the current market and create your own market within the existing infrastructure, and so that was what I was kind of what's the name of the book? Blue Ocean Strategy? Blue Ocean Strategy.
Speaker 1:Yeah and so It'll be in the description.
Speaker 2:Yep. So I read that and I was like I just was kind of like chewing on, like how can I be different? You know, everybody right now is claiming pasture raised, everybody's claiming regenerative, even if they're not doing it. Whenever you go to the store, that's what everyone is claiming right now. And so I was like what is the one thing that I can claim on all of our eggs that no one else can claim in these big stores? And I was like the only thing I can do is claim that they were raised on local farms.
Speaker 2:All of our farms are 100% guaranteed to be raised within a hundred miles of their final destination. You know, and no one else can do that, because right now, most of the time your eggs are going to be by the time you get them in the store, they've traveled tens of thousands of miles and they're probably three or four weeks old. You know because they sat in a cooler on a farm for two weeks and then they went and took a week for them to get grade wash packed and then distributed down to a store and then you go buy them off the shelf. They've been sitting there for a couple of days and so next thing, you know you've got three or four week old eggs that you're buying.
Speaker 2:Uh well, our eggs are are, and this is why people, I think, really like our eggs because they're super fresh, because they were laid really local, and so that was the one thing that we thought we could really differentiate ourselves on was raised on local farms, and so that's what we put on all of our marketing right now, and that's something that the big guys can't keep up with or won't be able to keep up with, because their systems are so centralized that they just logistically could not guarantee that their eggs were raised on local farms, and so that's something that we pivoted to kind of here recently, just to emphasize you know that you're getting it from an actual farmer that's absolutely fucking brilliant, man.
Speaker 1:That is absolutely brilliant. Like, yeah, anything that applies to anybody in any space. That's sound wisdom that any of you can take right now, whatever space you're in, um figure out how to be the opposite of your competition.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. And the other piece of that, too is the question in agriculture right now and you see it all over podcasts and and you know, if you listen to somebody like Joel Salton or Will Harris or any of those guys, they all say regenerative agriculture can't be scaled. And the reason that regenerative agriculture can't be scaled right now is because everyone's working off of a centralized mindset and so with scalability, generally you get centralization. And so I basically just took the green beret idea of the decentralized, on the ground solution is always the best solution. I basically took that framework and was like, okay, well, how do we do this? If we wanted to scale this, then how do we? How do we do it? And the way you do it is is decentralizing.
Speaker 2:So, again, how do I guarantee if we start selling eggs in Atlanta, how do I guarantee that eggs come from the greater Atlanta region and not from one of my farms out here?
Speaker 2:Well, we just build a similar system to what I have here down in that area and, yes, you know like our profit margins probably won't be as great because we're not, you know, centralizing all of our logistics and everything like that. But the flip side of that is, you know we're creating a product that I think people want, which is a product that's raised locally, on a local farm, and you're supporting local farmers. And then now we've started adding the name of every farm on our carton of eggs, and so you can go into our website, you can, like, look on your carton and see, like, okay, this one came from, uh, you know, samuel samuel's family farm. And then you can go on our website and you can see what our farm looks like, who we are and that kind of thing you know. So, um, we're really trying to connect people with their local farmer. Um, and the way that you scale that is just by keeping your systems decentralized rather than, you know, centralizing over time. And, yeah, we'll see if it works, I guess.
Speaker 1:Well, I think it's a brilliant idea and it's something that we need to start promoting and talking about, because the sad truth is, people are very disconnected from the food chain. They're very disconnected from where their food comes from yes, anybody who lives in giant cities and they just say I'm some fucking farmer. I don't know some farmer like. We have this in our culture, especially like our young adults or that are going into higher education. What they're learning is they're learning all the benefits and the pros of living in the big, wonderful city and they shit on every single system that makes it possible for them to live in these wonderful urban dreamscapes. Like, the farmer is the most pushed on, knocked down individual and we can't live without him. He provides all of our food, a vast majority of our food. And here's the other thing that will blow a lot of people's minds we're like the number one exporter for greens or for lettuce. Like, think about that. We provide a vast majority of the world's lettuce.
Speaker 1:Now, look at corn, look at rice, look at all these things that you have on your plate today, or at some point you go to Chipotle. All that goes back down, trickle down, go all the way back to that guy that's working in his 10th generation family farm working his ass off and these guys get shit on. Oh yeah, they get squeezed system fucks them down. And beef that's the other one I didn't know about, so I started diving into this. Like our, I used to think beef and chicken. You know, you think of names like tyson. You think of these american names. No man, brazil fucking know the brazil outdid it in the like. We outsource all this beef and it goes over to get processed and comes back to get on your table it makes no fucking sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, we have lost sight of how food's supposed to work, how agriculture's supposed to work and who we should be grateful for. It's a bit scary. It's like no one's really paying attention. Everybody's just worried about money.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you kind of hit on it too with urbanization. This is kind of just my personal theory is that urbanization really destroyed our entire agriculture system because, as we urbanized, there was a forcing function to have grocery stores. You know, large chain grocery stores really didn't exist until, I think, like the 1940s, 1950s and so prior to that, well, where did people get their food? Well, they just got it from a local guy who was raising, you know, meat or vegetables or whatever it was. And so, as we urbanized, we kind of forced grocery stores to become a thing, and so, and doing, you know, and and doing so, we also forced corporations to centralize to be able to distribute, uh, those grocery stores, um, and so, yeah, again, you know, de-urbanization is is another, you know, just like decentralization, de-urbanization is a good way to um start to to bring um, you know, profit back to the farm instead of to a corporation.
Speaker 2:And, and that's one thing that we're kind of proud of too, is that we did the math, and I think it's like you know, eight, for every dollar spent with our company, 81 cents stays in the, in the local area. Essentially, the only thing that we have to um that that we outsource outside of the immediate geographic area. Here is our egg cartons which, you know, I just can't, I can't source at scale within the local area. Um, and so you know, but everything else they're coming from China.
Speaker 2:Don't say no, I don't think. They're coming from a company down in Georgia, um, which there actually is. Who to Maki is a is a company here in in Hopkinsville who does produce, um, uh, egg cartons. But they don't produce egg cartons at this plant. They produce like car parts or something at this plant. So it would be cool if I could get who to Maki to produce them for us at this plant. And then, you know, that'd be, that'd be great, but so far we can't.
Speaker 2:But but every other dollar is spent, or every other piece of the dollar is is spent here in the local area, because you're either, you know, paying the. The money's going to the farmer himself, he's going to our. You know one employee who, uh, grades, washes and packs for us, uh, or it's going to the feed mill. You know who? Uh, even our. All of our feed is sourced from a local female. We don't get feed trucked in from out of state or from somewhere else, Like it's literally an Amish feed mill that we get all of our feed from. So everything is just kept as local as possible. Your dollar stays local, it doesn't go to some giant corporation, and our goal is to kind of keep it that way as long as we can. But yeah, urbanization and centralization of the food industry has really changed that and unfortunately you see most of your dollar not going back to the farmer himself but going to investor shareholders.
Speaker 1:Yeah, which is absolutely crazy to to think that in one season a farmer works his ass off from start to finish, goes in with his you know, with the hopes and dreams of making at least breaking even, and it's like hey, sorry, there's a, you know wheat's at an all time low, here's two nickels Yep. And and nobody bats an eye, nobody says, hey, this is fucking wrong. There's no activists, no lobbying group, like we actively have lobbyists for candy at Capitol Hill trying to make it more accessible to people on diabetes.
Speaker 1:Yep for sure, yeah, but we don't have enough people advocating for our farmers and for fair wages and for restored decency.
Speaker 1:Man, it feels like we're living in and I know it's not just recent, I know it's been going on for a long time, but I think, uh, we're at a shifting point in our culture. I feel more people are starting to wake up and realize the importance of these professions, like the importance of what our farmers and our ranchers do, and hopefully with that, with that sort of american spirit and that respect, we can start understanding. They're like hey, you know, we always talk about fair and equal wages. Like, in my opinion, that's where we should start.
Speaker 2:We should look at how much goes into feeding america and realizing that we need to value that work I agree a lot more I agree, and that's that was one of the things that I started to see too at in some of these corporations is that right now, um, again, you know the the there's basically two options. If you want to get into, you know I'll use egg farming just cause that's what I'm most familiar with Um, basically, you can be a backyard farmer and you can have 50 hens in your backyard and you can sell to some family or friends, or you can take out a million and a half in debt, build a 20,000 bird, uh, chicken barn, uh, and hopefully, you know you make some money off of it if, if, everything goes right and, uh, you know your chickens don't catch the disease or something like that. And so right now, those are your only two options. If you contact, even, you know, a small, a small chicken farm and the poultry industry is 10,000 birds. That's like a tiny chicken operation or egg operation for these pasture-raised companies, for example. That's tiny, but right now most of them, if you go onto I won't name any names but if you go onto their websites right now most of them are looking for farms with at least 52 acres, which means at least 20,000 birds for a pasture-raised system, for free-range systems, they generally start out at about 100,000 birds, least 52 acres, which means at least 20 000 birds for a pasture-raised system.
Speaker 2:Um, for free range systems, they generally start out at about a hundred thousand birds. Um, and also just for reference, to give you kind of the size of scale, we have 300 birds on about six and a half acres at our farm. A free range if you see free range in the in the store a free range system is a hundred thousand birds on five acres. Yeah, it's not a lot of space, um, uh, but anyways, those are your only two options. Right Is is you either go backyard farm or giant, huge corporate farm and you go a ton of money in debt. Uh well, the problem with that right now is that, because of interest rates, because of building costs and that sort of thing, I have seen personally seen farmers who they'll put up a $1.5 million barn on their property thinking they're going to cash flow and then, as prices go up and prices for them come down on their eggs, well then all of a sudden they're losing money every month on that barn, because of utilities, because of cost, because of interest, because of everything.
Speaker 2:And so now you have these farmers, and this is what really broke my heart, and one of the reasons that drove me to leave the previous company was was what I saw was a lot of Amish, mennonite small family farms who they were working some other, some sort of like construction job or some other kind of job, and they wanted something where they could be home more often. You know, which rings true for you and I right Is that we were working a job and we wanted something where we could be at home a little bit more often. And so they were like well, we'll go into poultry farming. And so they build this giant barn, thinking, well, at least now I can work from home, I'll make enough money to work from home. And then they find themselves a million and a half dollars in debt.
Speaker 2:The property, the operation is not cash flowing the way that they were told that it was going to, and so now they have all of that still going on and they still have to go back to their old job, you know, doing construction, where they're away from their family for weeks at a time, and so now the families end up bearing the burden of a lot of that and you know, the wife and kids are the ones collecting 20,000 eggs every single day, while the husband and father, you know, is off working this construction job.
Speaker 2:And so that was another piece of it was we wanted to offer something kind of in between, where right now, all of our farms range between 300 and 3,000 hens, which those are all very manageable flocks, flock sizes, and so, yeah, we kind of offer an alternative to somebody who is looking to get into agriculture but not take on a million and a half in debt. We have a young farmer who I think he put his whole operation together for like $8,000 or something like that. He's got 500 heads with us and so, like you know, if you're a young, if you're a young guy and you want to start getting into, if you want to kind of like dip your toes in the water, get a little bit of like a side hustle going on, uh, you know you can do this for for relatively cheap compared to you know what the big guys are asking for and uh, yes, we kind of offer a unique alternative to to all of those.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's something that, um, I was actually talking with a fellow green beret Um, he goes by the handles, the sticky green beret, hilarious dude, um, but, uh, yeah, alex is. Is is just one of many Green Berets and one of many veterans that when you sit down and talk, you hear the drive to do things like ranching, to work with cattle, to be on family land, to go back to a simpler life where you're connected with nature, and I think that movement's growing and I, I think it, it fucking needs to. It needs to. Um, forget the name of the two gentlemen I had a few seasons back. Um, both were officers in sfab. I'll.
Speaker 1:I'll link their profile stuff on uh linkedin in the episode description gosh, I cannot remember their name, but their idea was very much the same thing decentralized veteran farmers that were willing and able to support each other, just like how we supported and enabled each other in combat operations. Uh, this is stetson, sort of a bitch by memory, but it makes sense, right? We know what it's like to operate on our own, we know what it's like to go into the unknown, learn something new, and we like working with our hands and being outdoors, and I think more people need to be encouraged and empowered to think of that as an option, to think of that as an option. It's sad to me that for a long time, when people even expressed the idea of going into agriculture, people would immediately be like no, no, no, no. Go to sales, go to marketing, go do that. Maybe he's not built for that, maybe he doesn't want to do that.
Speaker 1:He could excel at it. But maybe what he really wants to do is go get a plot of land, learn how to work it, learn how to take care of animals and, yeah, have a family, learn how to provide for others through farming and then teach the next generation of farmers. Yeah, because we're not going to last that long without farmers. Yeah, definitely not. Like, definitely not. Thank you. I don't want to eat soiling green.
Speaker 2:I'm sure you don't yeah intent, it's people and you and I talked about it last time a little bit of like the uh, you know, the kind of classic green beret path is, if you get out um before the 20 years, then then you kind of just go try to find whatever you can make the most money at, you know, and, like you know, if that's your only goal in life, then hey, go for it, buddy.
Speaker 2:But I think most people, particularly veterans coming out of the military, they want something where they can find purpose, they want something where they can have a little bit more peace in their lives.
Speaker 2:You know, and that's something that I think a lot of guys are missing out, missing out on, uh, by not getting into something like agriculture or or even just, you know, maybe there's even value in just some sort of job where you're outdoors and nature, uh, because you know nature can be very healing, just kind of like you were talking about at the beginning, where you like watch it, sitting and watching our videos. You know it's the same for me is like there's something very peaceful when I just sit out on my back porch and I watch uh, chickens kind of just scratching and pecking at the ground and my cattle are uh roaming through and eating the grass. You know like there's something very peaceful about just watching all of that and uh, you know, for particularly for guys who, uh, maybe have a little bit of tpi and ptsd and that sort of thing like there's something very, very healing about just like being a part of nature and and uh, participating in it, rather than just, uh, you know, your only your only interaction with with food being you go to the grocery store and you buy a chicken breast. You know like, um, yeah, there's something very healing about it to me and I think for other guys as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. I think that uh, more of our brothers and sisters, um, because there is a big movement for females in agriculture too, not just traditional wives. There's nothing wrong with that either but there's a lot of women that I'm seeing that are getting into that space because they're passionate about the same stuff Getting out there, being self-reliant and helping others and it comes with community. That's the other thing that I hate about fucking cities like you. Nobody wants to interact, nobody wants to get to know each other. Um, I mean, I I hate going into a major city. Um, maybe that's my own sign. Maybe give up the podcast, start fucking figuring out what I want to do in the farming life. Maybe alpacas, they seem fun. Can you? Can you race meat alpaca?
Speaker 2:I think you can. I think you can. Actually, you know what you brought it up, so I have to, I have to talk about it. I have a buddy who you know that, uh, there's a disease that if you get bit by a certain tick, uh, that you like can't eat red meat. Yeah, lyme disease, uh. So I had a buddy who got that and I think he looked into I think alpaca meat doesn't have the same effects or something like that. So he was looking into alpaca meat for a while. So there you go. Maybe it's kind of your own little market there.
Speaker 1:You might think they're cute. I'm all about slaughtering.
Speaker 2:That's right. Come on to my farm. Which one you want, billy, that one got your own abacus.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's on the same lines of trying to like hawk penguin me. Yeah, to kill a cute critter. Patrick, I can't thank you enough for coming back. Man, it's been awesome, sure, uh, I am just thrilled to see somebody that's going after something big and and doing good man, like it's, it's uh rewarding. It may not pay off as well as the the conventional big farmers, but boy uh, are you killing them in the feel good department? Because, yeah, it looks. It looks awesome from the outside perspective. So I know there's it's difficult work, but it looks like you are a man in his purpose, in his mission, and I love seeing more stories like this.
Speaker 1:And if you're out there listening and you're also in agriculture and you want to talk about what you're doing, come on the fucking show. We don't always talk about just mental health stuff. I like diving into areas of americana culture and farming is one of those things, and cattle ranching too. It's a it's, it's part of the american thread. Like cowboy, it's iconic, and it's sad to me to think that someday we won't have that, that we'll just be relying on getting our beef from brazil. Fuck that. Make american beef great again that's right, that's right make it happen, patrick.
Speaker 1:If people want to check out your farm, where can they go?
Speaker 2:uh go to instagram sunny side egg co on instagram or facebook best way to find us and uh or check out our website sunny side egg cocom hell yeah, thank you so much for tuning in, guys.
Speaker 1:I won't give any spiel about giving me a rating, or maybe I just did. Go on Spotify, go to Apple Podcasts, leave me a five-star review, put some words in there I don't care where it is, just say Denny's cool cuckoo or cool beans. That's good enough for me and I really appreciate it. See you all next time. Till then, take care. Thanks for tuning in and don't forget to like, follow, share, subscribe and review us on your favorite podcast platform. If you want to support us, head on over to buymeacoffeecom. Forward slash SecHawk podcast. Buy us a coffee. Connect with us on Instagram X or TikTok and share your thoughts or questions about today's episode. You can also visit securityhawkcom for exclusive content, resources and updates. And remember we get through this together. If you're still listening, the episode's over. Yeah, there's no more Tune in tomorrow or next week.
