How Squeeze Citrus Packs 8x The Nutrient Density (and Flavor) Into Fruit | Herb Young

No exageration...Herb Young will change the way you look at food!

Bottom line...improving soil health (through regenerative agriculture) makes flavors exploded and increases vitamins, minerals & phytonutrients in our food which helps our bodies work better (like fight cancer, improve energy, manage stress, balance hormones, blood vessel health, gut health...you name it!)

Herb is a scientist farmer who is an amazing visual storyteller, so be sure to follow him on LinekdIn & Ig.  And, vistit his website to order his fruit & experience nutrient density for yourself!

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Transcript

Bill Jollie (02:04)
Hey everyone, welcome to Interrupt Hunger's Move Eat Give. I'm Bill Jollie We've got with us today Herb Young from Squeeze Citrus down in South Georgia. Herb, welcome to the show.

HERB YOUNG (02:16)
Good morning, thank you.

Bill Jollie (02:17)
I've been following Herb for a while on LinkedIn and I got to tell you he is just posting some really incredible videos and pictures about his orchard and he is really big on improving nutrient density for fruits. And I came across Herb on

a couple picks. He just does a side by side of his mandarin oranges or some other ones and compared to conventionally grown or store-bought and it's just it's night and day difference. The color of your produce is just incredible and then the orange juice, the side by side orange juice. just it didn't even didn't even look real. It was pretty fantastic. So you're quite the storyteller. This is wonderful.

HERB YOUNG (03:06)
Thank you. Thanks. It's a great story.

Bill Jollie (03:09)
So, is a great story. the last thing I want to share before we get started and ask you some questions is several years ago, I read Michael Pollan's book, Omnivore's Dilemma. And that's when I first came across, someone you definitely know, Joel Salatin. Most folks in regenerative.

farming no Joel. And he had this neat story, since a simple story. He was raising pasture raised chickens. We're talking about produce today, but he's raising pasture raised chickens. And all he would do is go around to chefs and show his eggs, crack them open, show this beautiful, bright orange yolk. And then these, these pale yellow yolks from the grocery store and the chefs

They were done. That's all they needed to see. Well, I went home after reading that and I did my own little comparison. I got my frying pan on the stove. I cracked open one of my one of my one of my store bought eggs. And then for the first time I bought a pack of pasture raised eggs. And the same thing is this puny light yellow egg compared to this beautiful sun colored egg. and it wasn't just the color, it was the taste.

HERB YOUNG (04:15)
Okay.

Bill Jollie (04:19)
And I don't know how many years ago that was. It was over 10 years, but that completely changed how I viewed nutrition and started me down this incredible path. And seeing your fruit and seeing your orange juice, it was the exact same experience for me. And it just opened my eyes. So for that Herb, thank you for all you've done. This is incredible.

HERB YOUNG (04:40)
Thanks. Bill, it was almost the same experience for me. I'd been growing my my grove organically and regeneratively and my very first harvest, a university professor from Florida called me and he said, he said, Herb, I've got a grant to analyze organic citrus against conventionally grown. And I said, great. So I ran out and sampled their grove and my grove same day.

juiced them, froze them, and found a lab to send them to, to analyze them. And I waited weeks and months. And finally, after about three months, he called me and he said, Herb, my grant fell through. I don't have the money to do the analysis, which was, it was a lot And I waited and finally my wife and I talked and we said, you know, if we're gonna

do this. We need to just invest the money and get them analyzed. And I hoped it was, this was one of the varieties. I had two varieties I'd sent off. This is pink grapefruit. And I hoped, I'd be 50 % more nutritious. And I really hoped it might be a hundred. And when the results came back, to be honest, that day changed my life.

was my fruit was eight times more nutritious than conventionally grown fruit. And that was 26 different things they analyzed, vitamins, flavonoids and carotenoids. was unbelievable. Beginning that day, I changed the way I eat and I completely changed how I approached my growth. Well, I really didn't, I'd been doing it correctly, but it gave me a chance to tell people and explain.

This is the chance you've got to change your health by finding, seeking out and finding nutrient-dense food.

Bill Jollie (06:30)
is fantastic. I love that story. if you're listening to the podcast, you don't see this beautiful orchard that Herb's in, but you can hear the birds chirping a little bit. I love this. I love it. why don't you back up a little bit and tell us how you got to where you are? Because your journey, it's pretty cool as well.

HERB YOUNG (06:53)
It's so I spent my whole career in agriculture. In college, I discovered ecology and agriculture about the same time. And I thought, you know, I want to combine the two of those. And so I transferred from a prestigious school to the University of Georgia because they had a institute of both. And my first

agronomy, agriculture class. wrote about environment and ecology and the professor absolutely shot me down and said, why are you talking about this? We've always been doing that. So being respectful, I just completely bought in. Spent the next 40 years, my entire career working in big industrial ag complex.

25 years of that was doing field research. So I worked on, I worked quite a few places around all over the US. Worked in Europe for a year and a half. And then when I got close to retirement, a of that was doing research, answering questions out in the field, testing products, working with farmers. And when I got ready to retire, I thought, you know.

I'm in way south Georgia, almost in Florida. We have a brand new citrus industry. We have some new irrigation techniques and some new root stocks that allow us to go into colder temperatures. I thought, you know, that would be fun to have a citrus grove And so I went a little overboard, started with 1300 trees and...

I started out and I looked at it, you know, I think I can get back to my organic roots and you know, probably be an opportunity. And as soon as I started doing the research and looking into it, I discovered regenerative. It's, it's, it's almost like it's a new science. Nobody in those 40 years in ag, I'd never even heard the word regenerative. And basically

It's going way beyond organic, which I'm certified organic and certified regenerative, but regenerative is restoring the soil. It's bringing the ecosystem back that used to be there before we started tilling so aggressively and using synthetic fertilizer, which is basically salt, and then concentrating pesticides continually. That has destroyed

Literally completely destroyed all of the microbiome anything that was living in the soil So we're growing most all of our crops in a in a bare naked Almost beach sand kind of environment. There's some minerals there, but we supply everything and Was unbelievable restoring this ecosystem is Is what I've spent the last five years doing and it's all the evidence

of it. And really the result is this nutrient dense fruit. That's where it comes from, from the microbes in the soil. And it's completely developed a new passion in me and to try to communicate that and have a tiny, tiny impact on consumer choice, on what people are buying because I know now that it has an incredible impact on their health. That's some of the things I'd love to

talk about some of the discoveries I've made out here about different flavonoids, carotenoids, the things that can impact people.

Bill Jollie (10:24)
Yeah, this is incredible. And I know my wife Tracy is getting just so tired of me. This is kind of me lately. And I've become friends with quite a few urban farmers and legit regenerative ag farmers and ⁓ all my podcasts now. It takes you down this incredible hole and then you just get a taste of it and you're like, well, I got to go learn about this. I don't know anything about, you know, all these different.

organisms living in the ground and regenerative farming practices. I think to just to back up just a second. So eight out of 10 of the leading causes of death in America right now are due to poor nutrition. Chronic disease can be completely eliminated through our diets and, you know, exercise, sleeping community. But but diet is the key here. And so

America's really laser focused on reducing ultra processed foods and all the chemicals that come in that. But that's only one part of it. I wish we could go back 100 years, 120 years, maybe 150 years, I don't know, and analyze the fruits and vegetables that our ancestors were eating. it's gotta be.

I would think it would be so close to what you're growing in that orchard behind you today, Herb.

HERB YOUNG (11:43)
Yeah, it would be exact. Here's a great example, My favorite are flavonoids. When I sent it to the lab, they analyzed nine different flavonoids. Amazingly, citrus has 90 flavonoids. I mean, think this, we don't even have a concept, a framework to hang that on.

Every one of them is anti-inflammatory and an antioxidant. And each one is a completely unique structure and has a different health impact on us. So of the nine they analyzed in my fruit in the conventional grove almost half, four of them were completely missing. Zero. There wasn't any. So think about that. And then mine.

We're averaged this eight or 10 times higher concentration, meaning to get this conventionally grown, and it's grown on bare ground just with fertilizer and pesticides. It's almost no nutrition. They've even found Florida orange juice that doesn't have any vitamin C in it.

It's so sad we've demanded that farmers produce so much with so little and we've pushed these industrial farming practices and we got what we get. It's food with nothing in it. I call it hollow food. There's not much there. And my discovery was kind of proof to me. I changed how I eat.

Bill Jollie (13:13)
almost

HERB YOUNG (13:15)
as a result of what happened that day.

Bill Jollie (13:15)
yeah that's fantastic  it almost seems like if the soil is is barren because we've we've destroyed it the fruit we have today is missing so many nutrients a lot of it is it seems like it's different colored containers of sugar almost and so if

HERB YOUNG (13:35)
Good.

Bill Jollie (13:36)
If the ground,

HERB YOUNG (13:36)
Yeah.

Bill Jollie (13:37)
if the soil isn't alive with fungus and bacteria and microorganisms, then the only nutrient that's coming through in the fruits and vegetables is the chemicals that they're putting in the ground.

HERB YOUNG (13:52)
And the tree is putting together some nutrients, but what's happening is it's struggling. When we use these synthetic fertilizers, especially the nitrogen, it forces growth. So farmers loved nitrogen fertilizer when it came out after World War II. People don't even know.

The dynamite plants that were all over the world after World War II were all converted to nitrogen fertilizer plants. Well, the farmers put this stuff on and they said, wow, these plants grow so fast. The corn is taller, the vegetable, everything is greener. Never realizing that they're getting hollow structures in the plant, that the cells within the plant are growing extremely large.

with very little contents in them. So that's what the microbes were contributing. So the plant just doesn't have the capacity to produce nutrition. It's unbelievable. And it's not just, here's the sad thing, it's vegetables, it's fruit, but it's cereal grains. And then we, all of our plant breeders, breed the plants just to respond.

to synthetic fertilizer. So they select the plants that grow the quickest and the biggest and the prettiest without zero. None of them consider the nutritional value. Even grains, you know, all the wheat and cereal and oats, even corn, soybeans. Then these grains are fed to cattle and pork and chickens.

And you get this whole system that's now created on low nutrition based cereals. Now we're getting meat and milk and dairy that have lower and lower and lower nutritional values. Everything is completely out of whack. That's why your eggs, you your pasture raised, regeneratively grown, everything, meat, eggs.

milk. It's incredibly, everything is back and balanced. The omega-3s and the omega-6s, we inverted them in the wrong way. To be healthy, I think it's six over three, the ratio, and we've inverted it and just made it into something that causes inflammation. God created it in an incredible ecosystem.

I've done DNA analysis, excuse me, on my soil. had a neat grant when I first planted and I took samples before I ever planted. And then I did, I compared in my grove in a replicated research trial, conventionally grown with bare ground and fertilizer versus regenerative. immediately, originally there were 600 species of soil microbes.

Well, immediately when I added them and fed them, the regenerative jumped to 1,100 species. And then you could see changes. I checked the soil DNA every year for four years, and you could see the conventional literally kind of degrade with no positive changes and good organisms weren't there. And the regenerative developed this beautiful diversity.

It's just kind of its own ecosystem that was in balance, in flowing with all these different bacteria and fungi that interact with each other and bring all the nutrition to the

Bill Jollie (17:23)
That's incredible. do me a favor, tell me a story about the art or talk me through the video that you posted. I forget what the name of the tool is that measures how compacted the soil it is. Is it a densitometer or something like that? That was incredible. Yeah.

HERB YOUNG (17:38)
Yeah. Yeah,

it's a penetrometer. It's just a three foot long rod with a pressure gauge on top. And I bring it out here anywhere in the field and push it in the soil and I push it into 100 pounds of pressure. And it goes in three inches and I'm staying away from tractor tracks and stuff.

and go over to, and it's a hard push. And then I take it, it has two handles, and then I take it over into the, anywhere under the tree, because under every tree is a sprinkler. And my fertility, I can pump it through that sprinkler. So there's a six foot ring where I put inoculants, I feed the microbes with that.

My organic fertility goes out through that. When I come over here, anywhere under the tree, the ground is literally, it's soft, it's spongy. that rod, with almost no effort, it goes all the way to the handles, three inches, three feet deep. it's, there's tree roots, but that's not it. It's the microbes and everything they're doing. It's, I have cover crops.

But they're everywhere, they're in the middles too. The cover crops feed the microbes, that's a neat system.

Every plant exudes about 40 % of all of its sugars and its nutrients back into the soil. Again, God designed this incredible system and we've ignored it. So the whole system is in place to feed the microbes and that soil is just loose and friable. So the organic matter has almost doubled in my growth, which is great.

sequestering carbon and supporting the microbes. So there's an entire life system there under my trees, which doesn't exist in an open field zone.

Bill Jollie (19:36)
This is incredible. Let's see here. So talk to me about the idea of feeding microorganisms. So you're not, it's a change in thinking, right? We go from chemistry to biology and we're not just feeding plants anymore, but we're feeding microorganisms.

HERB YOUNG (19:54)
You, and I say I switch. I kind of fertilize or do something about every two weeks and I can give nutrients to the trees with a foliar spray. And then the next one I put through the irrigation and it goes to the microbes. So I go tree microbes, tree microbes and my microbes get a great diet.

To be honest, they love sugar. Some growers literally just put out a pound of sugar once a month per every acre. But I use it from like a form, a real complex form of sugar is molasses. So I use a product that's based on molasses. And then they get seaweed, kelp. They get something called fish hydrolysis, which they've taken.

the remains from processing fish and digest it down into its protein. I recently discovered soy protein, which is a form of nitrogen that the microbes and the trees both seem to love. So I'm feeding microbes at least once a month. And I also, I watch out and take care of them. I have probes all over the farm.

And I make sure that the temperature doesn't get above 85 degrees, which it gets really hot here. And I watch the temperature in the soil all the way down two, three feet deep. And I irrigate when it's getting up close to 85 and that brings the temperature back down. So I, there, there my concern. I'm, I'm, I guess, farming microbes in addition, in addition to citrus, cause they're what's

what's bringing all the nutrition to my fruit. Yeah, farmers call it that. was, a fruit drops off the tree, I'll grab it and I might eat it on the spot or take it home. But one day I ate a grapefruit, one of these pink or red grapefruit.

Bill Jollie (21:37)
your livestock.

HERB YOUNG (21:57)
Everybody knows grapefruit will kind of make your lips tingle. Well, mine do a lot more than that. Your lips literally go numb. And I thought, wow, that's a powerful something. And I noticed three hours and then four hours later, my lips were still numb. And I thought.

This is unbelievable. What in the world is causing that? I just looked it up. You chat GPT is amazing. What in grapefruit makes your lips go numb? And it came back. It's a flavonoid, naringin, which is unique to grapefruit. And it is an incredible anti-inflammatory, has an impact.

on arthritis, lowering arthritis. It's just one of those powerful things and to think, okay, I just ate this grapefruit and I've got this surge of this flavonoid in addition to 89 other flavonoids in my body, which the evidence of it is that my lips are still numb. And it's just an incredible thought to think that one...

I mean, that's the idea that food is medicine. Absolutely, my food is medicine. I'm not going to say all food is medicine, but my fruit is medicine.

Bill Jollie (23:14)
So, you mentioned flavonoids a few times. So, there's all these different compounds in various fruits, phytonutrients, plant nutrients. They're just different chemical structures, different molecules. And the point of this is when you take a supplement, there's almost no proof that vitamins and supplements work. If you don't have

already have a nutrient deficiency, like if you're low in something, then you want to take a supplement to raise that back up. But when you're taking one supplement at a time, like in just this short period, you were talking about 90 flavonoids. And that's just one category. So if you're just trying to get healthy on one single compound

HERB YOUNG (23:53)
Yeah.

Bill Jollie (24:03)
It's crazy to think all the money that we spent trying to get healthy when all we have to do is eat healthy produce.

HERB YOUNG (24:11)
Eat good produce. So one day I was doing the same thing. I was cutting some fruit. I have to cut and see when it's going to be ripe and ready. And I thought, you know, all of my grapefruit have these beautiful colors. This one's pink. The next three varieties are red. I mean, red, really bright red. And I thought, what is causing the red and the pink colors?

And so again, chat GPT, I just looked at it. was literally standing out here in the Grove and it came back. The red coloring in grapefruits, it named three things, grapefruits, watermelon, wasn't strawberry, something else, maybe cranberries is like Pete. And I said, you've got to be kidding. I had bought a lycopene supplement a month earlier.

and had been taking it for a month because I had elevated PSA numbers. So men with prostate know that I was waiting to get a biopsy back and it ended up being okay. But I thought, you know, I'm going to take a supplement and lycopene is what helps prostate, brings your PSA numbers down. And I thought, here I am. I'm sitting in a grove that's supercharged, full of lycopene.

Bill Jollie (25:28)
Full of lycopene.

HERB YOUNG (25:31)
And then I did some more research on lycopene. Well, guess what? not only does lowers PSA, it suppresses cancers. It's such a strong antioxidant anti-inflammatory, but one of its unique traits, it suppresses cancer. And I thought, gosh, what an incredible idea. I know mine is probably off the charts like everything else in my grove.

feed.

Bill Jollie (25:54)
You mentioned another word earlier, inoculant, when you were talking about feeding your ⁓ microorganism. What does that mean?

HERB YOUNG (26:00)
Yeah.

So this whole new concept of regenerative agriculture is, it's like new science. so companies have learned how to isolate the best bacteria from the soil and make them into, they literally all bacteria and fungi when dried, they turn into a spore form. And usually they...

survive for years if not decades. So you can now buy inoculants, something to inoculate your soil. Gosh, I use eight or 10 different inoculants. I've tried four different ones to bring back mycorrhizal fungi, which is the microscopic beneficial fungi that carry all the nutrients to the trees. The bacteria dissolve the minerals.

then they churn out their little factories. make all these enzymes, hormones, different activators. Then the fungi carry them to the tree. And the fungi literally are interspersed with the roots. They grow into the roots and it multiplies your root system 10, 20 fold. The bacteria out there working. So I add these

these spores and regularly and hoping that, and a lot of them do become resident and for, you know, maybe some are adapted to my climate, some are not, but I add them to the soil and we call it regenerative. We're trying to restore the soil, but it's, it's a little complicated. We don't know exactly what was the native soil here like 200 years ago.

before we started tilling it and cut down all the trees. It's an interesting concept. Think about the forest. Nobody goes out there and fertilizes, controls soil diseases. There is an ecosystem in the ground, particularly fungi in the forest, that is nurturing. They say it literally connects the trees.

This is an amazing concept. They've done this research now that in a drought situation, let's say a tree is an oak tree and there's a mother tree and its acorns have fallen and created these little daughter trees. in amongst it are all these other kinds of trees, pine trees or whatever. And if there's a drought or some nutrition is missing,

They found that that mother tree literally sends nutrition to her daughter plants, but not to the other trees. She's literally connected by this mycorrhizal, this fungal network underneath the ground. All of this is, I mean, it's almost, I'm calling it new science. It's old science, but we're discovering that the mycorrhizal

microscopic world is more amazing than we can imagine. I have a microscope in my little shed that when I mix up concoctions, we call it compost tea. We take some compost, which is full of microbes, and then put it in a tank with some molasses and some nutrition and bubble it with oxygen for 24 hours and it

The bacteria double every 20 minutes. So you start with a 24 hours later, you've got close to a trillion. And I've got a 10 gallon version and a 250 gallon version. And I bring it out here and I add it to the trees. It's just, I make my own microbes. That's my inoculant. I'm inoculating the trees and bringing them good microbes.

everybody knows Will Harris. He's gotten to be pretty famous. He's got a farm. It's about 80 miles from here, White Oaks Pasture. I went and spent two days and took a class with them and they make their own compost and it's everything from their slaughterhouse. They compost it for one year and it breaks down into this beautiful organic matter. I said, well, I'm curious, could I make?

compost tea from your compost. It's, you know, the ruminants from their slaughterhouse that are, you know, a cow has four stomachs because it's full of bacteria, able to break down grass into protein. And sure. So I got a five gallon bucket. Well, I make a compost tea from the compost made from the basically the ruminant of

White Oaks pasture, which is regenerative anyway, and it's incredible. Put it under the microscope and it's alive. There's little critters going everywhere and the bacteria just under a microscope. They just vibrate. They're just swimming. ⁓ So I know it's exciting to add those and be contributing and trying to get my soil back to a closer to a natural living system.

Bill Jollie (31:13)
It's an incredible, gosh, like environment universe. I don't know what the right adjective is. Thinking about learn the more I learn about soil like I'd been hearing. These are all new terms to me. I have to go look them up or listen to a podcast or YouTube or something. But like mycorrhizal look that up if you're listening and find some images. So so picture of a plant root systems growing. Well,

HERB YOUNG (31:38)
It's incredible.

It's microscopic. We can't even see it. And it's naturally forming a network under the soil and it's connecting everything. My dream was to have all of my trees interconnected just like that mother tree, daughter tree out in the forest that if one has a need, the one next to it supplying it or the bacteria out in the soil are

are pumping back to it what it needs. And it's giving me this incredible nutrition that comes across in the fruit.

Bill Jollie (32:12)
So think eventually it would be... I think eventually we'll get to the point. There'll be some way to differentiate for consumers when you go to the grocery store. There'll be some way...

to look at the nutrient density of various fruits. Like right now we just have organic and not basically. But we don't have a way to tell how much nutrient is in a fruit. So I gotta think with testing, it's getting cheaper and cheaper and better. So why don't you talk about testing for just a little bit, Herb?

HERB YOUNG (32:34)
Right. Right.

So there's actually a neat group that's called the Nutrient Density Alliance, I think. And they're working on a handheld meter that anybody could take into the grocery store. you can actually, from the infrared and the ultraviolet that's coming off of produce, you can measure.

a lot of its nutrient density. so it's, they're trying to do it open source so that it's free though, so that no company will patent it and, and steal it away. But, it's been a little slow to develop, but I think they've done about 10 different kinds of produce. They've done beef, cherry tomatoes, cucumber,

They've done quite a few kinds of produce and eventually will come out with a meter that you could look in the grocery store and go, here's the organic, here's the conventional and find out what the nutrition is. But to be honest, there's a better way to do it. It's find out where the source of your food's coming from. And like I said, I changed my mindset the day I got my...

my results back and found out. And so I started searching for, immediately began buying organic, but organic is the promise from the grower that I didn't use anything synthetic. No synthetic pesticides or fertilizer. But what you really want is regenerative. mean, organic's probably twice as good nutrition wise, but regenerative.

going to be five times as good or more. right now the way to do that is you go to a farmer's market and this is a huge wave that's happening in our country right now. These market gardeners, which are small farms, one, two, three acres that are selling their produce at farmer's markets and

They may not, they're not sending it off to get analyzed. They're not doing DNA, but all of them, most all of them are doing it regeneratively. They're making huge efforts. These are the people that I follow. I've gone visit their farms. They come and see mine. share ideas and somebody said, well, how do you know that it's regenerative? Well, these things just

When you go to a farmer's market, ask. Ask the guy how he produces and they love to talk about it. But there's an easy indicator. When you go to a farmer's market, half of the booths have plastic totes under the table. That means that they grew everything themselves. They harvested it all day Thursday and Friday, put it in totes, put it in a cooler and brought it Saturday morning.

The other half of the booths, have cardboard boxes under the table. Guess what? That means that they went and bought it off a truck. And maybe the truck was selling some organic produce, but probably not. They were just selling conventionally grown produce. So go to a farmer's market, find that guy with the plastic totes, talk to him, and that's your go-to. The little farmer's market that I try to go to, it's a ways.

down in Tallahassee, Florida. And the first time I went, I thought, I'm going to go real early and I'm going to make sure and get a chance to talk to Cory, the grower that I knew. I got there at 830. Weren't very many people there yet, but at his booth, unbelievable stacked nearly to the ceiling, double booth with all the things that he had just harvested. There was a line 15 people long already at 830 in the morning.

People know they buy his produce. The flavor's incredible. Flavor is nutrition. That's what a flavonoid is. It's what gives us all these flavors. And they may be coming back for the flavor, but what they're getting is the nutrition. People just instinctively knew it. They weren't buying the produce at the other booths, but he sells out every Saturday mornings.

absolutely as much as he can pick and it's incredibly regenerative.

Bill Jollie (37:00)
I challenge you, everybody listening, I challenge you to go to your local farmers market this weekend. Find out, you know, find out how they're growing it. And if you take, if you take a tomato that's grown from one of these market farms, that's grown regeneratively,

And then you have a tomato that you bought from the store. You take a bite of the tomato that you bought from the store. And this is like, you don't know what you don't know. It just, it's a tomato, right? Or a strawberry. But you take a bite of the tomato and then you take a bite of the regeneratively grown tomato or strawberry store bought strawberries grown regeneratively. it'll change your mind right then and there. It's, it's incredible.

HERB YOUNG (37:45)
It's

unbelievable. I'm so tired of buying produce with no flavor. Let me think about it. Strawberries. They're picked almost green in California. It takes seven days to get to the East Coast. The passion for our family is cantaloupe. We love cantaloupe and we've only had one good cantaloupe all this past summer.

Last summer we didn't find any good kale. We buy them constantly. There's no taste. I even bought, this broke my heart, I found muscadines. It's a southern grape, wild grape. thought, ⁓ muscadines and scuppard. I was so excited to find them in the grocery store and got them home. Almost no flavor. You've got to hold it on your tongue.

to get a sense of the flavor. I took, there's some people that specialize in flavor. One of them is Sherry Hess on Colorado. So she and I talk a lot. And last year I sent Herb some of my grapefruit and we did a little online video of, I took them out of my test, my grapefruit and conventional, from a conventional farm. And we did a,

We did a taste comparison and this was amazing. The first thing that happened is when I tasted mine, it's a flavor explosion. And I tried to describe it to her I said, Sherry, feels like it's, when I first take a bite, it feels like it's coming up through the top of my head. She laughed and she said, that's exactly right.

She said, your naval cavity goes all the way up into your head and it's filled with sensors that are, you know, they're aromatic, but that's basically taste. She said that taste is going up through you and it goes upward and it feels like it's going out the top of your head.

Speaker 2 (39:36)
So there was an interesting experience. The University of Florida had a marketing, ag marketing class and the professor, he pulled up my website, squeezecitrus.com and he said, okay, look at the branding that this guy's got. know, and we did, had to, knew it was unique what I was trying to do. So we did, I mean, we paid for branding, we hire social media.

we pay for advertising. So there's a lot of expenses involved to find the people that are interested in nutrient dense food. ⁓ And people said, well, his prices on his fruit are ridiculous. And he said, no, no, no, look, he sold out of everything. Everything I had last year, we sold out. And my prices are a lot higher.

Some of the expenses, the things that I talked about and described, I do this nutrition program, fertility, every two weeks, I do it 20, 22 times a year. I have a small grove, it's every day, it's probably 30 hours a week just for maintenance ⁓ because I've got cover crops. ⁓ All the pesticides make things easy. Of course, with pesticides, they spray, they've got bare ground. I've got cover crops.

I have to manage them and get them out from underneath the tree to be ready to pick. I'm constantly replanting cover crops, taking care of them. So there's a lot of expenses to get to the final result of a nutrient-dense fruit. And I know that the produce guys, ⁓ market gardeners, they have the same thing.

This guy that I told the story about who sells out every week, he wanted to come visit my Grove. He didn't have a spare three hour window all week long, except for late Sunday afternoon to come to visit my Grove. I expect he puts in 70 hours a week to grow his, ⁓ to take that huge volume of produce to market every week. So it's complicated.

learning the science behind it. It's just very different than conventional ag. A big grower, such a squirrel called me yesterday, day before, and said, you know, I understand you're getting a better price for ⁓ your fruit. I want to convert to organic. And I've thought about it overnight. There's no way.

He doesn't, in a 40 acre grove, he doesn't spend three hours a week out there. You know, he sprays and walks away and it's a great, you know, he's able to crank out huge volumes of fruit and there's much, if any nutrition to it. ⁓ he has no idea. It's taken me five years to understand all the concepts behind what this is. ⁓

being organic, being compliant, being regenerative. certified regenerative, we subscribe to a lot of different principles. pay living wage to everybody that works here, which is lot, it's almost double, it is double minimum wage. And we have all these policies in place, operating procedures, ⁓ grievance policy. It's a lot of things to comply. I can't run out and control insects.

like a conventional farmer does. I do a slow process, nutrition, neem oil, thyme oil, some very slow processes. My trees grow about half as fast. Actually, they only grow one third as fast as conventional trees. So I'm in my fifth year and instead of having a huge harvest like this other guy that my competitor has, I'm a fraction of what he's got on an acre basis.

way less than half. So some trees don't grow regeneratively. I've got one variety, 400 trees that will not grow regeneratively. find that they're incompatible with, they were bred to respond to synthetic fertilizer instead of organic. And so I can't use my system to grow them. So I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do and overcome that. So I'm doing a lot of test plots just like I did when I was back in industry.

Speaker 1 (44:25)
Yeah, I love that. So ⁓ how many trees do you have? How many acres?

Speaker 2 (44:29)
I planted 10 acres worth of trees, high density onto five acres. So I've got 1,350 trees. I'm in my fifth year and only about half of them are into production yet. I've got a variety I found out that may take, it may not come into production until eight or nine, 10 years. So it's been a huge investment and...

I've tried to calculate my break even and it'll either be in year seven or year eight. ⁓ I'm talking that's break even. So when will I become profitable? It'll be year eight or nine. That's a long road. Now vegetables, hopefully those guys are able to do it a lot quicker. But yeah, for me with trees, slow process. ⁓

Speaker 1 (45:25)
If, ⁓ if this has been such a learning curve and, I love, I've, I've, I've described you as a scientist farmer. Cause you, you're, really good at the one variable at a time and studying and testing and looking at metrics. And I love that. I think that's why you've been so successful, but if you've learned a tremendous amount, if you were to start over or there was another farmer that asked you for advice.

How do you scale this?

Speaker 2 (45:57)
That is the challenge. Some big farmers, citrus growers from Florida have talked to me and they do a few of the things. They're growing cover crops, but that's the word they use. say, I can't really scale what you're doing. Now I would do a few things quicker, different. I don't think I'd allow cover crops to grow right up to my tree. I would...

use one of these ground cloth systems. It's that heavy, heavy ground cloth right around the, and the tree is planted into it. That would, therefore the tree wouldn't have any competition for the first two or three years. That would, that would expedite things. ⁓

Speaker 1 (46:45)
How far away would you, how wide or radius from your tree would you put that?

Speaker 2 (46:50)
There's cloth or you can get them up to six feet wide. So it'd be three feet on each side of the tree. And then you need the cover crops out in the middle. Again, the cover crops are feeding the microbes. This big grower from Florida told me, he's got, yeah, can't give up my Roundup. So I still spray it under the tree and I'm him. And he told me, he said, when he digs up a tree, maybe a tree is lost or something. He said,

there's this big bare root that comes out from the tree, three feet, and he said when it gets out from under that round up ⁓ strip under the tree, he said the root just, it explodes as soon as it gets under the cover crop. I mean, that's proof that the cover crop's feeding the microbes, he's got all this interaction, mycorrhizal fungi, and the root system is responding. ⁓

There's things that I could change to expedite that I would do and maybe I'll try and go from five acres to 15, but I'm kind of a one man operation. would be, well, that'd be beyond my limits. I'd have to have a hard help to expand at all. I think a lot of help.

Speaker 1 (48:12)
I gotta think eventually commercial ag will be able to figure out how to incorporate regenerative practices. to, mean, they're going to have to, because I think eventually they'll face consumer pressure to increase this.

Speaker 2 (48:28)
Yeah,

I hope so. ⁓ You know, part of it is what they need to get away from. They need to get away from the big three that are destroying the soil. Synthetic fertilizer, pesticides, and excessive tillage. The tillage, every time they go through the field and turn it up, the cultivation cuts all the mycelium, the fungal mycelium up.

and kills it, and it turns the soil up and the ultraviolet sun ⁓ kills all the bacteria. So no till is a great thing. Organic fertilizer is a great thing. And then learning some organic pest control options. But my trees are so healthy. ⁓ They're just not, I don't have a need for ⁓

many, many pesticides. It's just, they are finally growing so vigorously. My big threat here is freeze, which these replanted trees were lost in a freeze. Grapefruit are real vulnerable, yeah, to freezes. That's my biggest enemy.

Speaker 1 (49:52)
okay. Gotcha. Yeah. And you're in South Georgia there. folks that are farther north of you. So I heard you talk about another story about the size of your leaves and how many leaves it takes to produce a fruit.

Speaker 2 (50:09)
Yeah. The university says it takes 25 leaves to fill every fruit. so here's one of the coolest things. I use an algae. There's a blue-green algae that has apparently it's filled with bacteria inside of it. And it has

Those have lots of hormones. So when I apply it, I get a leaf flush. Citrus can have five leaf flushes in a year, but most people only get two or three. ⁓ it's a brand new crop of leaves that comes out at the tip of every branch. mean, imagine we can do that five times a year. This little tree, everything that's bright green,

Speaker 1 (50:46)
I mean, leave flush, what's that?

Speaker 2 (51:03)
up here was one leaf flush. Well, if I can do that five times a year, ⁓ it's going to be, I'm going to have a chance at producing a lot more. I'm looking for one. I know or have learned that copper and zinc are what determine leaf size. And so that's one of the things that I fertilize with.

And so I'm going to try to show this. So this was a, this is an old leaf. And then this is a recent leaf flush that had good nutrition and copper and zinc. So it's, it's double. Sometimes those leaves will be, will be triple in size. mean, a leaf is a, a leaf is a solar panel. That's where my, where my sunlight hits. ⁓

and I'm looking and finding some leaves. This is ⁓ a comparison. Can you see that? Big leaf little leaf. This was nutrition a while back and this is the recent nutrition. When you get everything just right, the tree loves it and ⁓ almost explodes. It's exciting to...

to see it grow.

Speaker 1 (52:34)
If you're listening to this, he showed an example of a leaf that with his old nutrition system and then a new leaf. And I don't know what it was like five or six times the size.

Speaker 2 (52:45)
Yeah, yeah, four or five times ⁓ larger for sure. Yep. That's the goal. Yeah. Get the tree healthy. We are just learning all these things. I was in pest control my whole career. Now we know that if you can get the contents of the tree up, we measure it with this little scope, real easy. it's if you can get the level up, the insects...

only can feed on real simple sugars. And if your tree has complex sugars, they fly right past it. They don't even stop. So that's the goal. You get the tree so healthy and all your pest pressure goes down. Disease pressure? I don't have any. My competitors grow a mile from here and then there's others all around. They're spraying fungicides, bactericides.

Florida now has a terrible disease that's devastating their orange groves. They have to inject the trees with a bactericide. Can you imagine? On both sides of the trunk, every year they're having to inject a bactericide, ⁓ an antibiotic. I mean, it could even potentially interfere with human infection, but I don't have any of that. My trees are-

Speaker 1 (54:10)
⁓

Yeah, Inslee, my seven year old daughter and I visited ⁓ a regenerative ag farm. They've been practicing regenerative techniques for quite a few years now, south of San Antonio, Southwest farms. Give them a shout out. It was incredible. So they're practicing rotational grazing. So we're talking livestock here for a minute, but the concepts are the same. So first of all, he said that he has a...

used any vaccines on his cattle in seven years. And I tried telling another rancher that and they just didn't believe me. Like what? What are you talking about? Like we have to vaccinate every single year. if you grow healthy soil, healthy plants, healthy animals.

Speaker 2 (54:58)
then they're healthy. They don't need it. don't have, you and you rotational, you put them on fresh ground and then what comes in behind them are, I mean, the real big guys, they bring in pigs, then goats, then sheep, then geese, then chickens. That's the ultimate. And every cycle eliminates whatever might been a parasite for the first one.

And by the time your cattle get back to that ground in 60 days, it's completely rejuvenated. It's so healthy. Yeah, they don't need medicines.

Speaker 1 (55:36)
The other thing, and you can talk about this and you kind of touched on it very briefly earlier is like if you get a ⁓ thermal measure and you see how hot the ground is on barren ground during the summer compared to in between your rows and your orchards.

Speaker 2 (56:00)
Oh, it would be a 30 degree difference. The soil and the fields around me, there's a cotton field just adjacent to me. And it's bare ground, it's tilled except for three months a year. So that soil is being sterilized by UV light for at least eight months a year. And then in the summertime, it's still bare and

Oh, it gets to 110 degrees, I'm sure, or more. And like I said, I manage mine in the grove. I never let it get above 85 degrees. And that's level I know that the bacteria are fine up till 85 degrees. Beyond that, they suffer. So they're almost non-existent out in the cotton field that's next to me.

Speaker 1 (56:55)
So stick with me for a second. we talked about temperature difference. ⁓ Let's talk about moisture difference for a second, because the other thing about being at Southwest farms, which is fantastic, like you said, every 60 days. the cattle, so we'll talk about cattle and livestock for a second. So they have these paddocks. They change the placement of where these animals are with electrified wire. It's not super, super high voltage. You keep them in place.

And so they'll munch on this particular vegetation for two to three days, and then they'll move them to the next paddock. And so they never touched the same ground for another 60 days. So I'm talking to this guy and my seven-year-old picks up a, I don't know what type of grass it was, but it was a fairly thick stalk. And she brushed it up against my arm. And I noticed there was moisture on my arm. And so I asked her to hand it to me and I broke it in half.

And that the end, this is amazing. Like you don't understand this until you actually see it, but the inside of this stock was, was, was wet, not just kind of damp, but it was moist and it was green on the inside. And the cool thing about this, it had, we had had 95 to a hundred plus degree temperatures for two weeks in a row. There hadn't been a massive rain, but looking at the, the paddock,

that the cows were going to be moving to, this grass is as green, a dark green as you can possibly see. It's waist high and it's hundred degrees, no rain. It is amazing.

Speaker 2 (58:37)
It is, it's incredible. They say, here's a great number. 1 % organic manner increase holds 20,000 gallons of water per acre. So when it rains, instead of rain running off, it soaks into the soil and it's just held there. It's right. For me, it's in my cover crops, but it's going down to my trees.

I measure the moisture, I've got a moisture meter close to me that goes down 40 inches. So when I irrigate, I go home that night, I look at my meters all the time. I go home that night and I say, okay, I irrigated 45 minutes today. And I wanna see how deep it went. And I can look at my meters and say, okay, it penetrated 12 inches down. That's great. I'm good for three days. And so, you know, I just kinda, now,

In Florida, deep sand, they came out with a policy this year, irrigate three times a day, 20 minutes each time, boom, boom, to max, because they have this disease and they're trying to keep their trees alive. mean, three times a day, which they do it electronically and everything, but I irrigate as needed, you know, every few days for an hour and I keep everything kind of at ideal.

Speaker 1 (1:00:05)
So

you can measure, you're monitoring like 12 inches of penetration on a conventionally grown farm that irrigated. How deep do you think water's penetrating?

Speaker 2 (1:00:18)
⁓ It may, I don't think it gets that deep because it's being wicked off because the surface temperature is so much hotter because it's bare ground. So it's evaporating off nearly as fast as it's coming down. So ⁓ it may get six or eight inches deep and then it's wicked right back up to the surface and evaporated off. So, or the plant is

desperate for it. So the sucks it up and then transpires it off.

Speaker 1 (1:00:53)
I think you all can hear the, like some of the reasoning for the excitement in my voice when I talk to ⁓ farmers and talk about this topic because like, hopefully you can pick up. This isn't just about nutrients in our fruit and getting us healthy. It's not just about improved flavor, but this is about our entire planet. And the reason why I brought you on here is to help.

spread some knowledge and why nutrient density is so important and why regenerative practices are so important. So folks could be educated and start demanding it. And then, you know, some people are more politically active or motivated than others. And if there's a local, you know, ordinance or something or state, you know, maybe somebody will get a little more fired up. And instead of just saying like, somebody needs to do something about this or a new farm bill comes out.

Maybe they'll be a little bit more motivated to pull the trigger and just actually, you know, make their congressmen or local, you know, whatever.

Speaker 2 (1:02:01)
There's huge environmental impact retaining. They say these bigger farms that have gone regenerative, there's amazing stories now that they actually create their own microclimate that this farm, I mean, you know, pretty good size, several hundred, if not a thousand acres will actually have more rain than everything around it because...

their moisture's being kept and when it's transpired, it goes up and it cycles right back down. So the climate effect is there, healing the soil, we're talking carbon dioxide retention, sequestering carbon. So yeah, there's an environmental impact. Because I'm so small, I think, well, my chance to make a difference is the health impact. So, you know,

Bill, we're in a health crisis. Everybody has some preexisting condition. Children that are terrible diseases and conditions, these chronic things. And you talked about it and started out with it. Well, we didn't have those 50, 60 years ago. I just believe, I know we've over-processed our food, but we also...

have industrialized our food and it doesn't have the nutrition. So we'd love to hear the message that we just got to get our food back to being nutritious. And I think we could solve so many of our health problems.

Speaker 1 (1:03:38)
Yeah. don't know if it's your good health problems or climate. I'm sure the ambient temperature over your farm is, I bet it's, it's gotta be cooler. Yeah. Than some of your neighbors. And I bet there's actually higher humidity over your farm.

Speaker 2 (1:03:53)
Wow. Unfortunately, yeah, probably so. It's a big system. It's going to be hard to change. Here's a number. At the time of the Revolutionary War, 90 % of all people in America were involved in agriculture. By the time of the Civil War, it had dropped to 50%. And today, it's less than 2%. So those few of us in agriculture, us 2%,

are producing for the rest of the population and for a lot of the world. And so we've shifted to go to these huge farms, big equipments, chemicals. An average farmer now is way over a thousand acres. I've seen it just in my career in 40 years. Average farmer going from four to 500 acres to 1500 to 2000 acres. So he's got a...

Unfortunately, he's doing that in an industrial way, big equipment, chemicals, so that he doesn't have to do it by hand. ⁓ The labor is not there. know, just harvest labor is a challenge for those of us in produce. ⁓ I think the initial, yeah, those big guys can slowly convert and do some of the things, but health-wise, I think the first step is

develop a whole new subculture around this ⁓ market gardeners and that we get healthy food and those guys need to be incentivized. There is very little, almost no government support. The huge guys can get government support for their corn, their wheat and their soybeans. It's hard to get any encouragement for

for doing what we're doing organically. So we're hoping that there'll be some changes in that. We need to.

Speaker 1 (1:06:00)
Local food is, is, where we need to help and, and, and boost. So I, ⁓ I got an idea for you. want to plant a seed and see if you can figure it out somehow. And in the next, and then, and, and, and in the coming months, but you're, you're such a great visual storyteller. I want to see if you can expand it a little bit. So right now you've, you've posted pictures of your fruit cut in half compared to a conventionally grown one or your orange juice. And you can see the difference in color.

Is there a way for you to show the progression? Is there a picture that you can show of the soil, regeneratively grown, some of your soil and how alive it is compared to, you know, the bare soil conventional and then show your fruit and then show the next step would then compare the nutrient density. I think that would be amazing.

Speaker 2 (1:06:51)
Yeah,

it's, no, you're exactly right. It's a little difficult to show, but I do have these beautiful graphics that almost look like a microscope for the DNA of the soil. And you can see on mine, gosh, I almost grabbed one and brought it this morning. You can see on mine that in year three, the conventional that I had in the test collapsed. And instead of 300 species of fungi,

There was only one left and it was a puff ball, absolutely worthless. That's a neat visual, ⁓ kind of a graphic, but you're right. The color difference is probably was the most profound. That very first sample I took that I compared my page mandarin, which was beautiful fluorescent orange compared to a conventional one that was just pale yellow. ⁓ that's the numbers that came back from that fruit.

There was one of the nutrients, again, I love these flavonoids, hisperidine, which is responsible for blood flow and literally blood flow to the brain. So cognition and even memory, my fruit was 39 times higher. 39 times. I mean, that's like taking a ⁓ memory pill by eating a piece of grapefruit. You know, it's just, it's incredible.

But you're right. I'm trying to do it visually. It's hard to tell the story and convince people. I'm trying to put together ⁓ this kind of information ⁓ into a class and doing little video clips out here in the field. So I may have that available in the next ⁓ month or two. up on harvest season, starts November 15th. We just went live doing pre-orders.

Things are getting wild, pouring concrete, I'm building the greenhouse today. ⁓ Got a packing line that's on a truck coming, a little baby packing line. So we're gearing up for a big season. It's not very long, it only lasts about 90 days. So November 15th ⁓ into February.

Speaker 1 (1:09:09)
Where can folks buy some of this incredible fruit?

Speaker 2 (1:09:12)
They can buy it right now at squeezecitrus.com. So we're actually, this is fun. We decided people wanna supply because we sold out last year. Then people were upset. ⁓ I didn't get enough. So we're selling a subscription. We'll have a box that comes to them at Thanksgiving, one just before Christmas and then one into January. So that'll be our subscription program like these CSA farms do. And then they can just order.

as each variety comes available into ripeness, we'll have a pre-sale and then they can order it. But it is a matter of jumping on it and ordering it before it's out. We have Rangpur limes in the greenhouse, which are absolutely my favorite and ⁓ sold out of them already ⁓ from the greenhouse in the last two weeks. the chefs just love incredible flavor.

Speaker 1 (1:10:11)
You're obviously putting out a fantastic product that people want more of. Man, we've touched on a ton of topics today. I feel like I could talk to you all day long, is there anything else that you wanna share that we didn't touch on yet?

Speaker 2 (1:10:29)
You know, we've really covered the waterfront. I wanted to make sure that people understood that there's a group out there that's growing this regenerative ⁓ food for them. And it's these, it's the small market gardeners. have CSA boxes, Community Sorted Agriculture. You can get subscription and get a box of regenerative food every week or two. ⁓ The same thing with farms. These, ⁓

guys that you're talking about, you can order now. mean, internet and delivery has changed everything. You can get nutrient dense ⁓ meats and produce and my, you know, my fruit, I don't know how many other fruits literally are regenerative and documented, but go find those foods. And that's going to have a health impact. Everybody that's listening, and I know that's your audience is that.

is that group.

Speaker 1 (1:11:28)
What about if people want to dive into this, can you throw out some names or some organizations?

Speaker 2 (1:11:36)
Yeah. You know, the world's changed with podcasts. my goodness. I researched for a year before I planted my growth and I listened at least three hours a day to podcasts and videos. So my favorite podcast is Regenerative Agriculture. And it's John Kemp. He's absolutely brilliant. Elaine Ingham talks all about the science of it and the soil. ⁓

But there's, yeah, just go into podcast and search regenerative. ⁓ those are probably two of the best. ⁓

Speaker 1 (1:12:18)
Yeah, it's funny. listen to a regenerative ad with John Kemp all the time and I'm gradually catching up, my gosh, it's just, it's really neat to hear the level of excitement in his voice when he's talking and he's learning constantly, but it's, I mean, they go pretty deep, but like you can soak it up because they, they, they.

Speaker 2 (1:12:41)
His story is just like mine. was a kid, he grew up Amish. He was on the farm and they rented new land from a dairy into a line. One side died, his family farm side died from powdery mildew. The cantaloupes on the dairy side, completely healthy. That changed his life and launched him into this whole career of...

of regenerative. Mine is the same thing. When I got that nutrient-dense information back, was completely vindicating everything that I'm doing, and it's worth the effort to produce fruit that's like this, that can ⁓ literally impact people.

Speaker 1 (1:13:32)
It is funny. Just the other day I was talking to somebody and I had spent some time and went through the whole story, what we're trying to do and why I get so excited about this. then so ⁓ somebody else walked up and basically said like, what's new? And this friend I was talking to, like, you should ask Jolly about...

like about farming and regenerative agriculture and, just laughed. I'm like, it's.

Speaker 2 (1:14:04)
How many hours have you got? Yeah, that's right

Speaker 1 (1:14:06)
Yeah,

was, you can't, you can't unsee this. You can't unlearn it. It's once you understand it, it's, it's going to change your life for the better. really does.

Speaker 2 (1:14:16)
And it's, yeah, it's incredible. to try, yeah, it's not easy to explain and people look at you like, really? It's that much different? Well, I'm pleased that this accidental thing happened to me that I was able to document it from a lab that is eight times more nutritious. that's, mean, nobody can dispute that. What I've done is different and they can.

interpret it however they want, but nutrition is nutrition.

Speaker 1 (1:14:49)
Yeah. There's a reason why we have 18 million cancer survivors right now. Right? We didn't have that much cancer back in the day. didn't have diabetes and heart disease. You know, our food is missing the nutrients that we need, the anti-inflammatories, the anti-cancer fighters.

Speaker 2 (1:15:10)
And think about the childhood ⁓ things, autism and all these spectrum diseases. The world's desperately trying to figure it out, but they didn't exist 50 years ago. Even diabetes, some of these basic things, these were not the problems they dealt with. They dealt with different problems, but it's sad to say, but...

we have created so many of ⁓ these chronic illnesses ⁓ or nutrition.

Speaker 1 (1:15:47)
Well, Herb, you are doing fantastic work. love what you're putting out into the universe. you just, you got a heart of gold, sir.

Speaker 2 (1:15:57)
Thank you. Thanks. Appreciate it. Well, appreciate what you're doing. you know, communicating it now, that's our big job. I'm not just growing fruit. I influence a few hundred, maybe a couple thousand people with the fruit I grow, but maybe more by communicating and doing this. So I hope that's the difference that we can both make, making people aware.

Speaker 1 (1:16:21)
Go find a farmer. Yeah, go find your farmer, local farmer. That's it. Yeah. It's a good concept. I've heard this repeated so many times. Like most people do not know the person that grew their own farm, that grew their own food. Right? That should be a good mission for you. In the next several months, try to go find somebody that grew the food that you ate.

Speaker 2 (1:16:35)
Nobody does. Right.

And this is a little bit sarcastic, but I've used the expression, why not pay a farmer instead of paying a doctor? Pay for better nutrition and not have to be at the doctor all the time.

Speaker 1 (1:16:59)
Pay a farmer instead of a doctor. Wise words right there. I love it. That's a good place to end. beside, yeah, squeezecitrus.com, you're on LinkedIn, Herb Young, any other place that they can find you?

Speaker 2 (1:17:12)
Yeah, my whole story is on Instagram and it's, I think on Instagram it's squeeze.citrus. ⁓ Okay. On Instagram and we post constantly everything we do. Our whole family's involved in the operation and it's a lot of fun. That's how we communicate, get our story out, tell people when things are ready, when harvest starts. So that's a great way to keep up with us. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (1:17:38)
Well, this has been so much fun. really enjoy getting to know you. I look forward to coming out to your farm one of these days.

Speaker 2 (1:17:44)
That'd be

great. That'd be great. Enjoyed it. This was lot of fun. Thanks, Bill. All right.

Speaker 1 (1:17:49)
Well, thanks a lot, Herb. ⁓

Speaker 2 (1:17:50)
Bye now.