Thoughts From Your Farmer

In the news today is a prime example of why you should be shopping for your food from a local farmer or rancher. And I am not talking about the resellers who claim they are buying their food from local farmers so they can resell it back to you as a prepared meal.

Educate yourself. Source for yourself. Know where every item comes from.

This week, approximately 1.5 million dozen eggs — more than 19 million individual eggs — have been recalled because of potential Salmonella contamination. So far, 98 people have reportedly become sick, with some requiring hospitalization.

One aspect that COVID brought into the public conversation was the concept of comorbidity — the reality that other health conditions can sometimes affect how severely an illness impacts an individual. Statistically, when you divide the number of reported illnesses by more than 19 million eggs, the chances of becoming sick may appear very small.

But that isn't really the issue here, in my opinion.

How did we allow one or two giant corporations to control this much of our chicken-egg production and distribution?

How did we let that happen?

A second observation that caught my attention this week concerns cattle and large feedlot operations. One report described an audit involving 20,481 cattle finished for slaughter, with 6,078 reportedly observed lactating.

That raises some serious questions.

Growth-promoting hormone implants are commonly used in conventional feedlot cattle. These implants are typically placed beneath the skin behind the animal's ear and can contain naturally occurring hormones such as progesterone, testosterone, and estradiol, as well as synthetic compounds such as trenbolone acetate, zeranol, and melengestrol acetate. They are used to promote growth and improve feed efficiency.

But I can't help asking: What are these practices doing beyond simply making an animal grow faster?

When I read reports suggesting unusual physiological changes in feedlot cattle, including lactation, it makes me question what we are doing to these animals in the pursuit of greater production and efficiency.

And then comes the question that inevitably follows:

What, if anything, does that mean for us when we consume the meat?

Can we definitively correlate agricultural hormone use with hormonal changes in people? I am not claiming here that we can. But I do believe consumers have every right to ask questions about how their food is produced and what is being used to produce it.

Look around at today's society and the conversations surrounding hormonal health. Is it unreasonable to wonder whether our increasingly manipulated food supply could play some role? Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn't. But I think asking the question is entirely reasonable.

And if problems with conventionally produced meat eventually become a larger part of the public conversation, will we someday be told that laboratory-grown meat is the healthier alternative?

I know. I'll take off my tin-foil hat.

Perhaps the motivation behind chemically altering our meat supply really is much simpler: efficiency, greed, and profit.

But that brings me right back to where I started.

Please find your local farmer and rancher.

Find someone who can tell you where your eggs came from. Find someone who can tell you how their chickens were raised. Find a rancher who can tell you whether growth-promoting hormones were used and how the animals were fed and finished.

Buying locally does not magically eliminate every possibility of foodborne illness or guarantee that nothing will ever go wrong. But it gives you something our increasingly consolidated food system often does not:

A direct connection to the person who produced your food.

Yes, locally produced food will often cost you more.

But please consider the alternative.

— Farmer Mark

To tie into one of my previous editorials, “Cheap Food,” I have just read that a USDA study on consumer dollars spent on food shows that only about 5 cents out of every $1.00 makes it down to the farmer.

If you’re a small farmer, you must make the connection “direct to consumer” to capture as much revenue as possible. Since COVID, selling to restaurants has become even less profitable. Chef-run restaurants operate on such thin profit margins—with state minimum-wage requirements, long hours, medical insurance costs, and a dwindling workforce—that it’s easy to see why they can’t afford local farmers’ produce.

Don’t forget the absurd food-safety regulations that apply when purchasing from a local farmer. The system is truly broken.

Your relationship with your local farmer is critical.

However you can make it work, every dollar you spend directly with your local farmer or rancher helps keep them in business—whether by purchasing online at their individual farm stands or elsewhere.

Be watchful at the farmers markets, as I have mentioned before: make sure you know the source of what you are buying. Make an informed decision and do not take for granted that just because something is sold at a farmers market, the seller grew that food.

— Farmer Mark

Every year the temptation returns: push the timing just a little further, squeeze one more meat-bird harvest before the Arizona summer closes the window. This year I gave in. We ordered late. The heat exacted its price.

Yesterday we processed 45 birds for direct sales. Six of us worked four hours through prep, harvest, and cleanup. The chamber vacuum machine failed us—our birds had simply grown too large for it—so we fell back on the reliable shrink-bag method, the approach I still recommend to any new farmer or homesteader. Equipment failures piled up around us: a broken ice machine waiting on a circuit board, refrigeration trucks down, dead batteries. Another Arizona summer.

Yet the birds themselves were beautiful and heavy. They will sell quickly. We need the revenue.

What matters more than the logistics is the choice that produced those birds. We raise Red Rangers, a heritage broiler. They are active, aggressive, and slow to mature. Roosters behave like roosters. Feed conversion is less efficient, time to harvest is longer, and costs are higher. We accept that. We feed them one of the most expensive organic rations available—Scratch and Peck 18 percent protein—supplemented with vegetable scraps from our microgreen and vegetable production. Quality over quantity is not a slogan here; it is the operating rule.

Contrast that with the industry default, the Cornish Cross. Bred for extreme growth and feed efficiency, these birds become almost motionless at an early age. They sit and eat. Many sit in their own waste unless moved daily. That is not animal husbandry. It is the genetic manipulation of a species for maximum return. I will not raise them. The preference is personal, but the principle is not.

If you eat meat for nutrition, you should know who raised the animal, what it ate, how it lived, and the state of its health.

Anything less is guesswork. Visit the farms that supply you. Look for actual coops and living birds. If a seller offers eggs but has no chickens, you are buying someone else’s product under a different name. The same test applies to meat. Reselling under a farm label is common in Arizona and, remarkably, legal. Labels on cartons and packages tell only part of the story; the rest must be verified in person.

Farming is not a game of volume alone. It is a series of deliberate choices about genetics, feed, housing, and labor. We house birds outdoors under shade cloth and wire, protected at night by guardian dogs. We accept slower growth and higher costs because the alternative produces an animal we would not want to eat. That standard should not be rare.

The birds we harvested yesterday met it. That is the only measure that ultimately matters.

— Your Farmer, Mark

I’ve been receiving many requests from the public for volunteers. Many of you have watched our YouTube videos on Rogue Rhino Gardens and want to come learn what we’re doing here. First, please let me say thank you.

Unfortunately, we have had some difficult experiences with volunteers in the past. The old saying is true: “One bad apple…”

Several seasons ago a young male volunteer climbed a ladder he was never asked or allowed to use, fell, and injured his leg. He went to the hospital and was found to have a broken bone.

Weeks later I received the hospital bill from his parents. When I asked why they were sending it to me, I said, “Your son was a volunteer, and he did not have permission to climb or work on a ladder.” They told me to just make a claim with my insurance company.

I told them no. Insurance companies already charge farmers extremely high rates no matter how carefully we operate. Yes, some of the larger “show farms” do allow volunteers and simply pay those higher premiums. We choose not to.

Anyone who thinks they can learn how to grow food in the desert in a short period of time by volunteering is far more optimistic than I am. I’ve been doing this for eighteen years and I’m still learning every single day.

Cyclospora is in the news again. This parasite is not new, not lab-created, not genetically engineered, and not deliberately released. It is a naturally occurring, water-borne organism that has been with us for a very long time.

Most outbreaks are tied to raw produce—lettuce leads the list, followed by berries, peas, Thai basil, herbs, and cilantro. When U.S. production is out of season, we import these foods to meet year-round demand. The contamination almost always happens the same way: the produce is washed in water that carries the parasite. Standard food-safety rules require a chlorine rinse, yet Cyclospora shrugs it off.

These outbreaks are neither rare nor surprising. In my view they are the predictable result of a food system built on cheapness. As a society we no longer eat with the seasons; we eat what advertising tells us to eat, whenever we want it. For decades government policy has subsidized farmers to grow certain crops at a loss and paid them not to grow others. Farmers have almost no control over next year’s price for a bushel or a pound. The only time a farmer truly sets the price is when he or she sells direct to the consumer. Corporations set the rest of the prices—and that is why thousands of farms disappear every year.

Cheap food carries enormous hidden costs: declining public health, heavier reliance on pharmaceuticals, soaring Medicaid and Medicare bills, and long-term care expenses—all ultimately paid by the same consumers. SNAP and food-stamp dollars should be restricted to nutrient-dense real food, not soda and snack foods. Imagine shifting the money we already spend on the true cost of cheap food into nutrient-dense production instead. Our collective health and immune resilience would improve dramatically. The human body is an extraordinary machine; “garbage in, garbage out” is simply the full price tag of the current system.

A strong, healthy population would barely notice pathogens like Cyclospora. If you want to lower your personal risk and raise your own vitality, the path is straightforward: buy from local farmers, learn to eat with the seasons, stop relying on imported produce, and walk away from fast-food restaurants.

For those who have followed my farming journey these past eighteen years in the Phoenix area, you already know my obsession with nutrient density. It begins in the soil. We feed the soil; the plants take care of themselves. When I became a full-time farmer my social life largely vanished—two simple reasons: the work and the hours. I still love to read. Reading fuels imagination and wonder in a way nothing else can. I still remember the jolt of watching the first movie made from a book I had already lived inside my own head; the filmmaker’s vision and mine were worlds apart.

The old-school agricultural writers remain some of the most valuable teachers I know. In today’s world every time-tested method seems to get a shiny new name. “Organic,” once a plain description of how my grandparents grew food without synthetic pesticides, herbicides, or fungicides, is now a patented, multi-billion-dollar brand complete with its own list of approved sprays. When that kind of money enters the picture, common sense often exits.

I once found a home in the idea of regenerative farming, but it too is rapidly becoming another regulated certification. Allan Savory, the true originator of the thinking many now call regenerative, used a better term: Holistic Management. That is the word I stand behind. It means seeing the farm as a complete living ecosystem—diversity, soil health, and the intricate, symbiotic relationships between plants, animals, microbes, water, and even the wider cosmos. Falling in love with your land, whether it is a backyard or a thousand acres, and learning to work with those relationships rather than against them, is one of the deepest satisfactions I know.