28. Seed to Table | Ultimate Human Short with Gary Brecka

Ultimate human. Hey guys, welcome back to the ultimate human podcast where as you know, we go down the road of everything. Anti aging, longevity, biohacking and everything in between. As you can see, I'm in the parking lot of the world's greatest grocery store. And what makes this the greatest grocery store is how they originate grow their organic produce. It's called seed to table. It's been labeled the number one grocery store in America. And I got a behind the scenes tour today with the helicopter out to thousands of acres and it detailed under the, under the roots look at how they're raising their organic produce. This is going to be a really interesting episode. I snipped together everything behind the scenes that makes true organic food. Organic food. I always talk about, it's not really the food, it's the distance from the food to the table. So I hope you enjoy today's episodes on the true roots of organic living. All right, guys, we're at Oaks Farms distribution center in Immokalee, Florida. This is where it all happens. It all comes in here and then it gets distributed out to the restaurants, to the, to the grocery stores, to his grocery store. The food and thought and seat to table. Let's get ready for the tour. Seed to table from your own farm, getting there same day.

The same day. So that's.

You mean same day. You mean harvesting packaged, ship and on storage.

We get to the store in the same day.

That's why we have two times, times a day delivery. Because in the morning we're bringing in the product that's not from the farms and in the afternoons we're bringing in farm fresh product after it's harvested in the morning. Yep.

Wow.

So something could be growing and I could be eating it within 48 hours.

The way that nature intended for us. Right. Because there's, there's a studies that done that show that even, even the electric living energy and, and food and one or two days later is down to half and then three or four days later it's down to half again. So if you get this food that's been sitting in the store for weeks or even months, sometimes you get apples that could be a year old. The living energy in that is depleted. It's really. I've never been sick. I've never missed a day of work in my life. I don't get sick. But I've been around food that's harvested that day all the time. I think it has amazing values. I think that's that electric living energy that we talk about. We're Made or electric. Right. You know more about this than I am. But, but, but nature intended for us to eat food that was, that was living. And at the time that you. There's nothing better than we go out to the farm when you pick the strawberries. We'll be picking the strawberries off the plant and eating them today. And they taste amazing. And it's so much better for you.

Yeah, I agree.

This is our first seeded table salads. So this is all made with the highest quality growing practices. True organic product from Lily's out in California.

Okay. This product, this comes all the way in from California.

It does. All these come in right in from California, California. These were loaded three days ago. All this product goes on team trucks and they, they bump the dock here. So here's some cauliflower from Dal Andy Boy out in California. They're a really good grower. This product specifically is from Yuma, Arizona right now. A really good snow white. Good, good growing package.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Beautiful. It's heavy too. A lot of water in there. That feels good. Feels nutritious.

Of all the things that we can't do in production here in Florida, we go to that extra length to try to source the very best vendors from around the country. Even as you see sometimes the world to bring in the stuff that's best for our stores and our customers is the quality of our food. You get access to new shop to them. Is that dwindling down or is it growing? It is. It's getting worse every, every year from a health perspective because there's more genetically modified of, you know, items out. There's, there's, you know, and there are, there is a demand for quality food. Yeah, but, and, and the only thing that's gonna, gonna stifle the people from producing all the garbage is education. So when we educate people that, no, I'm not going to eat that, then there's no longer a market for it. And we can change the industry to get everybody doing, doing the right thing. And that's, that's kind of the goal here.

Is it possible to get non GMO corn nowadays? It's got to get tough.

It, it's, it's, it's tough. We. One of the things that I was, that I was going to try to grow and there's, there's sweet corn that we're getting this non gmo, but it's getting tougher because they're, they're exactly my on everything. Right? Yeah, but, but corn is for the land that we have over here and the Soil type that we have over here, it's, it's like a huge money loser. That's the only reason we're not growing the corn here. Because they can grow it over there. We can grow it here, but you're.

Gonna, they grow it over there. Non gmo and you can fly it in cheaper.

Yeah.

So where are they growing it?

Over by Bellblade, over, over by Lewiston, by Lake Anchovy.

Okay.

Yeah. None of this is directly modified. That is beautiful. Yeah, look at this. And every one of them is, look at the quality there of the product. I mean, that's from, that's from giving the plant what it needs. That's. The other guys that are growing with the chemical fertilizer can't grow this quality because, because it doesn't have the nutrients, you know. Right.

This is our state of the art. So this gentleman, I can't really say on the record what it, what specifically, but they, they really figured out the citrus greening program the right way by putting the right nutrients back into the soil. And they've got amazing products. He, this gentleman spent 40 years working on this. He started this in college.

Putting the nutrients into the soil. Now I talk about that all the time.

And they literally ties it on the box. Nearly four decades in the making. So really first class individuals, four weeks, seasons, and the flavor profiles out of this world.

So the people that don't know the Florida citrus industry has been completely decimated. And it's been decimated by a virus called the citrus screening virus. And when I say it's decimated, I would say that the Florida citrus industry is a shell like 15 or 20% of what it was.

Wow.

10 or 15 years ago, oranges. And I think my personal thoughts are, is that all these farmers were doing the same program that the universities gave them. They're, they're using a lot of glyphate in these groves. They're giving them chemical fertilizer, they're spraying the trees and they're, they're all about production. But little by little, it's like going to McDonald's every day and eating that. You know, you're going to be healthy, you're going to be pretty healthy until you're 15 or 20 years old. You can eat all that garbage. And then it's then, then, then the reality of all the damage you've done comes to fruition. And that's what happened with our soil here is they were depleting the soil across all these orange groves. And then this, this virus came in and it spread like wildfire because all the trees were truly sick because they didn't have the nutrition in the, in the ground. So what we've done, we're going to fly over today. We're going to fly over our orange grove. I have 170 acre orange grove that we put in. It's still young. The trees are about this big. They're all covered right now by white nets so that they won't get the disease. The citrus greening disease is spread by flies, by white flies. So the nets protect them from getting that disease. And meanwhile we're putting, you're also gonna fly over the field. You're gonna see, you're gonna see 600 tons of chicken manure that we just brought out there and we're spreading it around. 600 tons of chicken manure, it comes from North Florida. They dry it out slightly so it doesn't, it's not green, it doesn't stink. But it's got all the microbial activity and it's got, you know, it builds the soil base back and then we put a lot of compost mulch, we pine bark mulch and then let it compost for a year, year and a half and then we put a lot of that out there as well. So these practices are what's going to, going to make a healthy tree and a healthy disease resistant plant because it's got, it's got the building blocks.

If somebody's watching this and they, and they, they're so interested in what you're doing and they, and they want to, as a consumer, they can't source from you. They'd have to find a grocery store. Yeah. So I think eventually the market has got to go direct to consumer. It's got it. The consumer's got to be able to buy their own grass fed meats, their own pasture raised chickens. Because there are very few places where they can go into a grocery store and get everything that they need in one place that's, that's truly healthy, organic growing. The way, the kind of care that you guys are taking, unless it's a seed to table or you know, or food.

We did a seminar back 10, 15 years ago about the, the high cost of cheap food, like what you really pay in the end by buying a 99 cent hamburger or something like that. And it's, it's devastating what's happened in our country. The whole idea is to get healthy food out to the masses. Because when I travel around the country, I've been doing a lot of traveling around doing Speaking events and you. I can't find any good food. I have to go in a grocery store and settle for whatever produce that I can find. But as far as find something that's.

Prepared, you'd have to have like growing within a certain distance of the store, right? Yeah, growing and processing it.

I think that we could, we could, we can circumvent that somewhat like, like we do with the products that you see here by putting it on our team trucks, our own. As you see, we have over 300 trucks over there. So we could, we could get stuff to the, we can get a lot of the product to the stores within a day, within 24 hours, within 30 hours by, by our streamlined process. And as you see, you look through all of our warehouse today, have you seen any one thing that looks old in here? Everything is.

Dude, it's smells fresh. It feels fresh.

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We're at one of our eight farm locations and we call this the, we call this the West Miami farm because it's, it's getting pretty far out. Going over to watch them harvest our vine ripe tomatoes. We were at the packing house earlier. You saw some of the product come in and this is, this is, you know, where the crews are harvesting the tomatoes by hand off of, off of the plants and then, and then they'll go in to be packed and then you know, they'll be in the processing facilities. Like you saw earlier.

We're in the fields right now. We're going to walk down and check it out. There's so much going on behind the scenes here that is not evident to the naked eye. One of the things that I just learned about how they irrigate these fields is that just like you have to level a floor or level a driveway or you know, create a slope in a driveway so the water runs away from the house, they have to do the same thing here so that when they irrigate these fields they can manage the water and the drainage from these crops just like they're managing the fertilizer and everything else. And so what you can see here are slopes running in certain directions so that all the water management is handled properly. It's just a lot going on behind the scenes. It's beautiful and it's fascinating. It's very impressive. I'm so amazed by how dense these, these organic farms are with. With tomatoes. When you peel these back, just look at the density of the amount of tomatoes in here and how just healthy they look. And there's a couple things going on. Number one, no pesticides, no herbicides, no insecticides, no glyphosates. And. And one of the things that they do is they use this reflective material right here so that they can actually trap the moisture into the root and make a reflection to disorient white flies. And these white flies are the flies that come in and they just, they attack the plants and they attack the, the, the fruits and the vegetables. So instead of spraying it with poisons and chemicals, they actually reflect the light back to disorient these flies and use it as a natural pesticide. Amazing idea. I just wonder why we're so stuck on using so many chemicals and so many synth, so many poisons to actually protect and grow our food supply. If you look at the thousands of acres around me right now, they're using none of those things. I just ate a tomato straight out of the field. It was absolutely freaking delicious. It was heavy and dense and nutritious. And this is the direction that we need to go with our food supply in America, because the food supply is leading to the drugs.

When a lot of the tomatoes that are shipped across the country, they'll go in there and they'll pick these tomatoes when they're stone green like this, they'll pick up, you know, hard green tomato like that.

No way.

Oh, yeah. That's what almost all the tomatoes are shipped. They're picked green like that, like, like the bananas that come across the ocean. And they're picked green and then they're gas gas ripened with ethylene gas. That's. There's nothing wrong, nothing harmful with the gas. What's harmful is, is that the, the, the nutritional value of this green tomato compared to something that's ripened on the vine. It's much, much more nutrition in the, in the ripe tomato. And then also the flavor is 100 times better. So. So that. Because when you look at the process that we have to go through here on the, on the Truck. And you'll see these guys are hand grading these.

So really they're literally looking at them and, and separating them by hand.

Yeah, because you can't take a red tomato like this and, and run it across a machine, a belt without damaging it. So it's a whole other process that you have to do.

Yeah, they're already, I mean, just. These are falling. Yeah, you can see, you can see they're already damaged.

Yeah. Right. So when they pick them green like this, they can throw them in great big huge tubs, like big semi 40,000 pound containers and then dump them all in and then run them through conveyor lines and everything separated in size. And you don't need to use people to do it. So it's a lot cheaper to get the pack. But then you still have a packed up green tomato, not a red tomato.

Gotcha. That makes perfect sense.

They're grading up there for size and color and different things. And we'll take all these really red tomatoes and just send them just like this right to the seeded tablespoons. So we're getting that true vine right product. And then these other ones that are still traditionally, you know, technically a vine, Right. Because they've been picked with the ripeness will ship out to the customers that might be in New England or places like that where by the time, by the time it gets here, if we took these right there and shipped them, then we'd be having.

So these are site sorted. So these guys right here just take, they're bringing the tomatoes up and then there's. These guys are site sorted.

The thing is, normally, normally we would be picking the field a little bit more riper than what it is right now. But there's something called rain check that comes from all the rain that we've been having. So if you let the tomatoes get, get really red like this, you know, they get damaged by the rain. So you have to be ahead of it. And that's when things. Where mother nature is constantly dictating everything that these guys have to do out here. From, from whether the. When we plant, when we harvest, when you know, everything, it's all. All directly related to only the weather, really.

Wow. So Alfie's taking us through the tomatoes, squash, the pepper farms. A really interesting thing I just learned about squash is that you can actually pick squash in the morning from a, from a squash that's about a quarter of this size. And by that afternoon it could be this size or even this size. You can actually pick squash every day. It grows that fast. Not like peppers, which might take a few weeks or a few months to actually harvest.

Right. During our, you know, really hot summer season, you can take a squash that's that big on the plant in the morning, and by the end of the day it will be as big as the squash here sitting next to that is incredible. Really. It's really.

Yeah, yeah, it's incredible. This is real food. This is just nutrient dense food. And actually coming out here and seeing behind the scenes, like the care and, and, and, and the love and what it takes to actually, the technology that goes in to really raise, you know, organic crops or semi organic crops is fascinating. And I know that we're going to fix the food supply, brother.

Yeah, we're, you know, we've been after it. My. When I first started farming at the age of 19, I was doing conventional farming. I was taking, I wasn't, I didn't grow up in a farming family. I was first generation. So I just learned what some people that I went to school with were generational farmers. And I started doing their bad practices.

Right.

And then my father, which was not farming at the time and never farmed about five years after I got out of farming. So I only farmed for about three or four years before I went bustola. Yeah. And then got out of it. And, and then my dad got into farming. He was into organic farming. And then he told me that, that we could farm organically. We could put this organic material into the soil and grow better crops. And, and I didn't really believe him at first. And it, and honestly, when I first started farming again 17 years ago, because I took, I took a 15 year hiatus, we, we started growing things the right way and it wasn't, it didn't come easy. We had a lot of trial and error.

Yeah.

A lot of money that you could consider wasted.

Yeah.

Until, until we finally come up with a program that we can grow good, good organic product.

Amazing.

Successfully.

All right, let's go to the last location. So we, we're, we're at the chicken coop now. And, and you can see that these are just fresh eggs. It almost looks like I went out and, and dyed them for, for Easter.

Easter. Yeah.

But they're still, they're still warm. I can't wait to try these. But one of the things they do is they take the, they take the produce and the trimmings from the produce, the lettuce and the waste from actually trimming the produce and don't let it go to waste. They actually bring it out here and they feed it to the chickens. So these chickens are eating really, really well. And then there's a whole area inside where they can go in, they can quiet. Find some quiet to kind of nest and lay their eggs. But they seem to be treated pretty well. The cage is more here to keep the coyotes and the wolves and things from actually eating the chickens and not to keep the chickens from running.

They have plenty of square footage between these three bays here to roam around as they want all day. So they. And you can see on the very backside, that's where we put a bunch of the romaine lettuce trimmings. And they're just finishing up the last of that from this morning. So every day, romaine lettuce. A lot of times it'll be the ripe strawberries. It could be really anything that we have an abundance of goes in there. And. But the eggs are phenomenal here. You can feel the temperature of these eggs. We just pull them out. They're warm. They're like 95, 98 degrees. They just came out of the backside of the chicken there. And there's nothing better than getting these good fresh pasture raisins.

I can't wait to try these. Oh, you just skewed her out.

And look.

Look what she left us.

Yeah, but.

And it's nice and warm. It's like a perfectly made egg. It feels like the shell's a little light, but. But the egg is heavy.

It's huge, too.

This is a grade A egg right there. That's as organic as egg gets. Right there.

Doesn't get fresher than that. It literally just came out. Yeah, the hen just jumped up from that egg.

Amazing. So you see how they're not trapped in there. You know, they can. They can run. They can run through here and go outside if they like.

But 40 years ago, a McDonald's hamburger still was made with 100% pure beef. It's not anymore. It didn't used to have pink slime in it. It does have pink slime in it. The bread weren't made with genetically modified wheat, and before 1977, it didn't have folate in it. Right, right. So. So. And then all the different chemicals in the sauces and everything. So the. The people our age that aren't educated think that they're going. Taking their kids and they're like, oh, the McDonald's hamburger didn't really hurt me that bad. Right, Right. Even though I'm not, you know, I don't think. I don't think ever when I was a Child, it was like the best food to eat, but it's so much better than the toxic, toxic food that you would get right now. That's kind of.

Is it because a lot of the farmers are just not aware that there are, there are practices that they can put in place that actually don't have so many chemicals and pesticides and herbicides and sites and what have you. Because I noticed that you, you know, part of the farm was semi organic and it was still using the, you know, still using the chicken manure, and it was still using as little of the chemicals as well.

Yeah. So the first farm we went to was all organic, and you could tell by all the extra weeds that you saw in the middles. And, and that's, that's, that's a certified organic location. The other farm that we went to, second is not certified organic, although we really do about 95% organic practices because we found a way to do it. And our buying power to buy all the chicken manure and compost, mulch and everything made it feasible. But we grow, we grow product that has so much more integrity of, you see the quality of the peppers and the things in our packing house that we grow. So nutrients because it, because it's grow with, with all of the right micronutrients. There's some studies that have been done that show if you just grow, you know, a pepper that has NPK chemical fertilizer versus you grow something that has all the different elements and everything in the soil. Well, of course, this one is 10, 50 times more healthy for you than the other one. So part of, part of what's, what's making our country obese is the fact that we're eating all this food that has the calories in it, but it's devoid of the nutrients. Right. So our brain is still, I talk.

About it all the time.

Brain is still saying, feed me, feed me, feed me. Even after you eat all this food that's nutrient void and has everything in it except for what you really need. Right, right. And back to your point about why are there not more farmers doing this? I think there's enough farmers growing organic that meets the demand right now because there's most organic items you can find in stores. So the awareness has to happen to create the demand to make some of the other farmers shift. And when you ask me how come more farmers aren't educated to it, my answer is how come more doctors aren't educated to it? How come these doctors are prescribing all of these pharmaceutical medicines that we know aren't doing people any good in a lot of cases, not every case, but a lot of cases. And it's the same thing with the farmers. The farmers are just taking what the universities tell them is gospel and this is the way that you do it. And they believe that just like our doctors do. And I don't think that any of the doctors are necessarily bad people. I don't think these farmers that are using all, you know, all this genetically modified seeds and, and all the terrible chemicals, the lanates and glyphosates and things like that that we would never use, like we would never consider using that under any circumstance here. But I don't think that they're bad people, they're just not educated.

Yeah, I'm always advising my audience to eat grass fed, you know, grass finished meat and a lot of what they say as well, it costs so much more. So why does it cost so much more to raise a grass fed cow?

Well, it's grass, right? So I guess if we sold the cow just by the cow, it wouldn't cost more. But we sell, unfortunately we sell the meat by the pound, right? So, so when you feed, when a cow eats like it's supposed to in nature, just grass, not a bunch of genetically modified corn and, and corn syrup and soy and all this other stuff. So the, the weight comes on much, much more slowly, right? And then you can go to other third world countries and go out and see their cattle and, and see that, that, you know, drastic difference between the size of their cows, the meat that's on their, their cows compared to the, the cows that we have over here that are the, you know, the corn fed, you know, all that are getting, eating all this, this, this food that's really not, not good for them and good for us to eat it. But those cows will grow in a matter of a year. They can put on, you know, several hundred pounds, 250, 300 pounds in a year. Whereas a grass fed cow, it's going to take, you know, two and a half years to do it. And if you can get it any faster, it's only because you're growing a lot of grass and you're rushing them through the fields quickly because there is a little bit more protein up at the top areas of the grass. If you don't want to meet it all the way down. But you have to have a lot more land, you have to give a lot more time for the, for the cows to put on the weight. And, and yes, it is just grass, but the time and energy is always, always equates money.

So that makes a lot, a lot more sense.

But it's worth every dime, worth every penny. I mean, there's maybe even not an area that you could consider of all the guys, that's a better value than meat. Because I think it is such a drastic difference between what we, what we now have to call grass finished beef. Because they messed up, you know, they started calling all beef grass fed, but grass finished beef, it's from a good supplier that, you know, that did the right thing versus the meat that is in that I call poison.

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