Hatten Health Podcast Episode 5 with guest Jeff Bragg

 In this episode we have a very informative conversation with Jeff Bragg. Jeff Bragg is a Superfood Consultant with his company Everything Potatoes Inc. alongside his wife Sandy Bragg. He is a Chief Nurturer at the forefront of sustainable agriculture who sat down with us to discuss his history, their business & many stories and insights about their field.  
This conversation breaks down inside information about Agronomy, horticulture and the potato farming industry plus much more that a lot of companies hide from us. Get the inside track on what you need to know about the food that we eat from the seeds, the ground, how it's harvested, transportation, selling and everything in between. Links below!
Thanx for listening!

Links:
JEFF BRAGG:
Website: https://www.superfoodconsulting.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jbraggui
 
Hatten Health:
Website:
https://www.hattenhealth.com
Hatten Health Recipe App: app.hattenhealth.com
Instagram & YouTube:  ⁨@HattenHealth⁩  
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hattenhealth
Email: hello@hattenhealth.com 

You can also catch f this episode on YouTube, Apple Podcasts & Amazon Prime.

We are Hatten Health
Family. Health. Growth. Empowerment.
Let's make it happen, together! 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:06

Welcome everybody to another episode of the Hatton Health Podcast. This is episode five. I am Cari.

SPEAKER_02 0:11

And I'm Abby.

SPEAKER_01 0:12

And we are Hatton Health. Well, we are here to focus on family, health, growth, and empowerment. So let's make it happen.

SPEAKER_02 0:21

Together.

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Together. Cheers and we all as always start with the cheers. Cheers to us and cheers to our viewer and cheers to our very special guest that we have on the podcast today. He is a superfood consultant. He is an amazing farmer, along with his wife, which we are going to introduce both names in a minute. They grow potatoes, they grow onions, and among other things that he would like to probably discuss. He is big in the agriculture field. He's big in the superfoods industry. He's here to talk a lot about everything that that entails, as far as the vegetables, crops, front of table, the food industry, his part in it, his role, his history, and then their experience in that. Talk about how we met and things that they have going on and information that may be valuable to you and you and anybody you love or anybody else you know in the food or agriculture industry and the person andor people that I am talking about. The reason I say that because I'm not sure if you have your lovely lovely wife here with you today, also. But who I am referring to is Mr. Jeff Bragg, along with his lovely wife, Sandy Bragg, ladies and gentlemen. Jeff and Sandy Bragg, everybody.

SPEAKER_04 1:40

And I want to say Sandy would be with us, but she has been getting ready because we have a road trip and it's about empowering uh food for kids uh down the next generations.

SPEAKER_02 1:50

Oh wow, that's excellent. Do you want to expand on that a little bit?

SPEAKER_04 1:55

Yeah, and I'll I'll kind of tell you a little bit about my history and what why this is so important. I'm gonna move my head just out of the way here a little bit. Okay, and then behind me, you will see a picture. I don't know if you can see that picture or not.

SPEAKER_02 2:08

We can.

SPEAKER_04 2:09

Okay, so you were asking about the history of things. This was about probably 12 or 15 years after I started. This is my one of my daughter's pictures of our family as potatoes back in Idaho in the early late 1980s and early 1990s.

SPEAKER_03 2:29

Wow.

SPEAKER_04 2:30

When we were farming big in Idaho.

SPEAKER_01 2:34

Well, if anybody um wants to know how we connected and how we're able to um get this man on our pod today. And the reason why I wanted to talk to him is because back when I was executive chef of a restaurant down in Durango, Colorado, I um met Jeff. He came in and he brought us some samples of some potatoes that he was growing that he wanted us to try to use for our french fries, to like a better quality potatoes for the french fries that we were serving. And at the time, I thought the ones we were serving were pretty good, was cut hand cutting them from scratch. But we were getting them from uh Shan Rogan, Cisco, uh wholesale distributors, uh food service distributors, and he had a better product, so he brought us cases of samples. And I was getting a lot of educational potatoes from him. He was telling me so much about them that I had no idea about. We tested some, they were better products. He told me about better ways to fry them, that was faster, more efficient, and had a longer shelf life as far as the way we were preparing them. And I learned about just how many different varieties of potatoes that there were out there that I didn't even know about. So um, you know, his wife was there with him, and they were just giving me so much information that I was like, okay, I gotta stay in contact with them because whether the restaurant that would buy them or not, I didn't have control over that at the time, but I wanted to know more and I wanted to stay in contact with them. So we connected through Facebook, and over the years since I've been there, we have stayed in contact. You've um shared and liked and followed some of our content as well as me, well, as me, excuse me, following some of your content, which I have been able to get some education on as well. So I started telling Abby about who actually I told her about you since then and been talking about you. Like, okay, so we got started spower into food on health and wellness. He's one of the people that I definitely want to speak to and get his information out there, get his knowledge of um this field out there to the people. And so that's just a general background from um my side of the story as to how we met. And yeah, just I wanted to get into your story and get into your industry. One of the things that I wanted to get into was first, I noticed that you had a degree in the science of agr on agronomy. Is my am I saying that right?

SPEAKER_04 4:47

I'm I'm a can I started in 1980 as an intern going to the school at the University of Idaho, and I became a consulting agronomist in 1981.

SPEAKER_01 4:57

Okay. And what exactly is um agronomy? Because I never heard of that before. I had when I found it, I was like, oh, this is interesting, and I wanted to see how that connected to your field.

SPEAKER_04 5:07

Well, it was interesting, and I'll just give you a quick way of how I ended up getting there and got getting into teaching. Uh met Sandy on June 15th of 1979. I was uh needed a PE credit to uh to go along with my fly fishing class so I could get my P credits for my degree, and it was in landscape horticulture, is what it was going to be in. So I met Sandy and fast fast forward to November, a few days before our wedding in no in Orfino, Idaho. My dad was on one side of me, her dad was on the other side of me. I was letting them be, I was a gentleman letting them sign my marriage license. Oh so I let go to dad, dad's short, I'm looking over to his left, and he looks over at me like this, and he goes, Well, son, he says, now that you're getting married, you're gonna need a job. And he's and he said he he said this. He says, and and I've got just the thing for you. He says, I just hired a soil scientist and another gentleman to help us with our potato crop. And so I ended up going down and working for a father and a son soils lab in Idaho in 1980, and uh ended up working for them. They actually sent me back to school, paid for two semesters, and then had me come back. Oh and so uh a consulting agronomist and an agronomist is somebody that goes out and looks at the soil and the water through tests and tissue tests and looking at the exam and plants. I was doing it three days a week on each field, and then prescribing the inputs necessary. And I'm doing this now because I've changed a lot in my chemical application world, and then I was involved in uh helping product development of chemicals to go onto fields.

SPEAKER_03 6:57

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 6:58

And so uh consulting agronomy at that time, it was really new, and this was 1980, 81. It was so new that I had I've had a cell phone since 1981.

SPEAKER_03 7:09

Wow.

SPEAKER_04 7:10

And the reason why is because my boss, the younger boss, told me, he says, uh, we're getting our insurance for this agronomy program through Lloyd's of London. There was so few of us that it was such a uh beginning field that anything we said could have been held liable against us, and so he taught me, he says, You cannot make a mistake, we can't do anything wrong. We're insured by Lloyds of London. You've got a phone because I want you to use it, I want you to use it to talk to your farmers whenever you need it. And so, yeah, my kids sat on a big box in the back of the pickup when they were babies.

SPEAKER_00 7:47

Yeah. So why haven't I heard that name Lloyds of Lords of London before? Did they insure more than just businesses?

SPEAKER_04 7:53

They insured they insured very high-level businesses of kind of scary enterprises at the time.

SPEAKER_01 8:01

I've heard that name on a few videos of different things before. I was wondering, like, this is a gigantic company. What are they about? I didn't know that they did they. I think you had one of those cell phones that were like a big block connected to the cord with a suitcase or something, right? It's like the case back in the day.

SPEAKER_04 8:13

Oh, that was this that was the second phone. Uh the first phone, the first phone was a regular big phone, like a pay phone, hooked to your dash.

unknown 8:22

Right.

SPEAKER_01 8:22

That's before my time. I was born in 81, so I seen that.

SPEAKER_04 8:25

Yeah, this was it. Yeah, in 80 81, uh, it was just perfect. You you ended up getting the box phone. And then the bag phone came along.

SPEAKER_02 8:34

I remember the back phone. And then it just kept going.

SPEAKER_04 8:37

And now it is uh, and I wasn't ever I I had mobile phones, but I to be honest with you, when I ended up uh working in as for a uh Pillsbury company at the end of uh my big executive career, I can tell you that uh I had to have a I they my people in in Alberta to make sure that I was make sure that they were doing the right thing and we were getting all the right things again. Along came our partners in Alberta, Canada that told me I needed a BlackBerry so I could type. And this is before the iPhones, and they said you need to type your reports and because if we lose you, we're gonna lose our program. That's what they that's how big agronomy was to them. And in my agronomy career, I will tell you this, it also propelled me uh back in the early 80s to become a person that helped introduce worker safety laws because of that agronomy career, the prescribing of chemicals to crops.

SPEAKER_02 9:38

Yeah, that's a huge, huge liability and safety issue, I'm sure.

SPEAKER_04 9:45

Oh, Abby, it was uh so I was working the and so the first year, the first soil samples in potatoes that I took, actually as the intern in 1980, I was poisoned unknowingly at that point. Uh the product was called uh forate or thymet, and it they put it on with the seed potatoes as they were being planted. It was a black uh like substance that was kind of like dusty uh coal that made into a flower. It was a black flower, and they put it into the potatoes down with the seed as it went in the ground as they planted. The half-life of it to be not poisonous was 55 days. Back then they didn't have the baby potato market because they would have been poisonous actually at that point because they would have been small. And uh, so I was poisoned, and that poison went up into the plant, into the leaves, and then it turned around and went back through the xylem and phloem of the plant into the tubers. So anything that ate above the ground on it would die, and anything below the ground on it would die.

SPEAKER_03 10:51

Oh my goodness.

SPEAKER_04 10:52

And so the thing about this treatment on seed is it's on field corn, it's on beans, it's on peas, it's on everything, and it's still being used today. And the reason they put it on, like onion seed and things like that, is because that way if a mouse won't eat it, it'll die before it goes on to the next one. But then you know what eats it is the coyote, and then what eats the coyote is the eagle, and so there's a lot of birds that have been taken out by this product. I was getting headaches really rampantly in 1980, 81. So I went to my first doctor's appointment on it and asked him what was happening, and I told him my field, and the first thing he asked me was um, he he goes, Well, I got it. He says you got organophosphate poisoning, and that's what thymet was. And I go, oh, okay. I but knowing you know the chemical, you've got to trust these people. You can't not trust Union Carbide and DuPont and these people. So anyway, I said, Well, okay, so when will it when will it be out of my system? He says, Well, when you die, it'll be gone. So I go, excuse me. He says, Well, it goes down in your fat cells and it lives there, and so it's had an important part of my life. I kept prescribing it for and there's a I don't know if you'd ever heard of the explosion in India called Bhopal, India.

SPEAKER_03 12:19

I haven't.

SPEAKER_04 12:21

Uh B H O P A U L. Uh, it is either it's been told as the worst environmental accident in the world, even worse than Chernobyl.

unknown 12:32

Wow, never much.

SPEAKER_04 12:34

It uh killed several million and a half or so people. It it they they don't they give you a lower number, but the real number is in the millions. It was in it was in Bhopal Union carbide, it had an explosion of the plant, and it uh they never paid for it, and it's uh uh widely what else happened in India though, to be along with it, is when American agriculture went in, these big companies to also take over and colonize places like India or China, even then. They go over there, the farmers then get pushed aside, the little farmers, and the farmers over there were being pushed aside, and they'd never seen big business like this. So they were using the thymet as a way to commit suicide because a sixteenth of a teaspoon would kill you. Wow. And so this was going on in 1984. I was prescribing this stuff, and and then I got all my doctor tells me all this. So I go out to the spring and look at the next year's potato crop, like in 1982 or 83 in eastern Idaho. And I'm watching the winds up, and my hired man goes up and goes into the into the box where they have the black charcoal stuff, and they re he reaches in it with his bare hands after taking a soil sample. He's got moisture on it. I go, get that off of you. You know, so he he shook it off and then he washed his hand off, and I go, that's poison. And then I looked over, and the the Hispanic workers were on the back of the planter, and they were wiping the dust off with jersey gloves, cotton gloves, which was absorbing it, and then they're sweating. And so I got a little upset. I left and I drove 200 miles to Boise, Idaho to the state. And I said, We got to do something, we got a problem here. So I helped introduce worker safety laws at that point.

SPEAKER_02 14:26

Wow, that's amazing. Yeah, it's amazing.

SPEAKER_04 14:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:29

So uh back to the poison. So is there anything that you've done to get it out of your system?

SPEAKER_04 14:37

Well, after I met Kari in in uh Durango in 2020 and whatnot, I was working, we had potatoes in an old in these potato storages and old storages uh in that were organic, quote unquote, hadn't had anything in them for four years that were conventional. Uh they had a moisture issue in the storage where it was evaporative coolings. That's why that's how you control the temperature and of in the coolers. So they had a uh they had a fresh air, they didn't they shut the fresh air off, which created a lack of moisture uh fresh air movement, and it caused a rainfall event. And so the the the storages are curved because of the temperature storage. All of the moisture from all that soil that fell off 25 years of potatoes went up on the ceiling and then came down back through the potatoes where we were working on them. I was working on them with my hands. I and then I had a rash on the inside of my leg. It went to a rash that covered 85% of my body. This was in 2020. Um so I couldn't. I was living with Sandy and I were living in a place called the Casablanca Inn in Farmington, New Mexico. It was a bed and breakfast. And one of the traveling nurses that was there because of COVID looked at, I showed him my arm. I he he was living next door, and I said, You don't know what this is. And he looked right at me and he says, That's organophosphate poisoning. Point blank. And so I went, really okay. And then that made made sense that I would have got up by touching it and the all of the stuff. I uh ended up getting a hold of Beyond Pesticides in Washington, DC, just to find a doctor in New Mexico that I could actually go and actually talk to because they do not turn in pesticide poisoning in rural communities to the poison centers.

SPEAKER_01 16:39

Uh growing and harvesting superfoods and what you guys superfood.

SPEAKER_04 16:45

Uh potatoes are a superfood. Okay. They are actually the only one of the they are actually only one food that you can probably survive on. And you kind of remember the show The Martian where they grew potatoes. That that method and everything is exactly why I would say that would be the most important thing you could do.

SPEAKER_02 17:05

Yeah, because potatoes tend to get a bad rap.

SPEAKER_04 17:08

They got it, they get a really bad rap, but that's because of the industry. They don't inform, like you talked earlier, Kari, about uh cooking fries. They don't teach the industry why why fries are hard to cook because they don't want people to know, they don't want chefs to know that they're cooking an inferior product by cooking it, you know, them the limp brown French fries that you see, that's glucose.

SPEAKER_03 17:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 17:34

And I think I don't know if I've uh shared this with you, Kari, when we met, but uh I will tell you that uh the potato industry don't say this. I started in 1980 when I met Sandy as an intern. I went that was when I took my first potato science class at Washington State University, was the fall of 1980. And uh so I was a French fry developer basically, but they don't tell you what happens with these russets in that when they get chilled. Now, when the grower and they harvest it, like in Farmington, we were harvesting in temperatures along 45 degrees, uh so where the potatoes were 45 degrees. The russet Burbank, famous potato of Idaho, when it falls below 45 degrees as a potato grower, they would not even pay you if it went below 45 degrees because the quality of the fries would have been worthless. They can go in and freeze them at 45 plus and frozen French fries, but they do not uh once they go under 40, the difference of temperature in a three-degree drop. What would you expect the glucose to change percentage-wise in a three-degree drop from 45 to 42 degrees?

SPEAKER_01 18:50

I would guess it wouldn't change that much, but I could be all based with that just assumption. I could really be all based with that. Because remember what you told me about how we were holding them at that restaurant, like because we were mass-producing them, it was cutting them by hand, but was holding holding them, it was pre-cutting them, holding them in cold water, submerged in cold water. We all seen when we cut potatoes, they start to oxidize and get brown really quickly. So it was holding them in cold water to keep them at temperature and to keep them from drying out because we were going through them so fast. But you were showing me how that those rusts that we were using, if we were using the ones that you were presenting to us, we wouldn't have to do that because we were using them so fast and it wouldn't turn brown so quick. We wouldn't have to hold them in the cold water. And you also showed me how the starch that was coming out of them into the water, how that wasn't always always necessarily a good thing. Like we need to keep some of that starch in there because that wasn't always a bad thing to have the starch in the potatoes the way they fried, but the way we used your and we sample them, they fried faster and they kept the healthy components in there with fresh oil, of course.

unknown 19:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:58

Yeah, what was the percentage though that it would drop?

SPEAKER_04 20:01

Uh they would drop um 200 to 400 percent an increase in the schedule.

SPEAKER_01 20:09

I guess for the end of the spectrum with my guess.

SPEAKER_04 20:11

So three, so three degrees, yes. And then they but basically what you have to do, they they trick they show you to trick the potato to make the fresh cut fries. You blanch them and then you put you put them in you the cold water actually, where the reason they do that is it converts the sugars to a different form of glucose.

SPEAKER_01 20:31

Right, that's what we're doing. We're blanching them for a couple minutes and then putting them back in the cold. And then we're not you keep them podium cold on the line. So when it's time to cook them per order, they'll only take like two or three minutes or five minutes to fry, which was fine. But then we did that with yours. They fried faster and the quality held better once they were cooked. So then you broke down as fast as that on while it's possible with yours. That was really amazing.

SPEAKER_04 20:58

Then the superfruit part of it is because I was we use a yellow flesh potato to do it because that's full of carotenoids, which is the word carrot where carrot comes from, and lutein. High health. And and so outside of the United States, yellow flesh potatoes are the norm.

SPEAKER_03 21:17

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 21:18

In the United States, white flesh is the only norm. In fact, they will not even research anything but white flesh.

SPEAKER_02 21:26

Why do you think that is?

SPEAKER_04 21:28

Uh, power and control of intellectual property rights.

unknown 21:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 21:33

And uh just so you know, I'm gonna just tell you right now that there's a the the big company that started frozen French fries in the first place, is now wanting everybody to switch over to a genetically modified potato.

SPEAKER_01 21:49

That the breeder does it save their money, or is it because they're able to acquire more land, or why is that?

SPEAKER_04 21:56

Well, they actually because they own all of the stock, the seed, just like what Bayer does with the corn seed for the people in the United States. That's why they didn't get rid of glyphosate, is because Bayer is a 85 or 86% of all the seed in the world.

SPEAKER_02 22:11

Right.

SPEAKER_04 22:12

And uh, but but this big uh company out of Idaho has actually uh put in a potato that the breeder called me at on in 2017 and told me it was uh harmful to consumers and harmful to people. He's told the administration they don't like it, and he said he'd been in the went into hiding, and he's been in hiding since 2017.

SPEAKER_01 22:37

Wow, that's serious.

SPEAKER_04 22:39

Yeah, he wrote a book called Pandora's Potato, and he was a Monsanto breeder before, and he said it's the worst thing that happened to mankind, and then he calls me and goes into hiding.

SPEAKER_02 22:54

Oh you're like, thanks.

SPEAKER_04 22:58

Yeah, and so they're they actually want a potato that won't brew, so they the advertising on it was a female uh professional boxer just kicking it. Oh wow, and then making French fries.

SPEAKER_02 23:12

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 23:13

So I saw so I was seeing some things on your website that I didn't seen before, and I was um without going into like long hours of research that I was late at night going and do, I wanted to ask you directly what is the difference between like biostimulants, micronutrients, and the soil conditioners and the root enhancers that you have when it's like look like they were um in powder form or the dirt form. Uh yeah, I don't know anything about those, so my brand is.

SPEAKER_04 23:41

Well, it what the way it came about, Kari, is because of there is a product, and you guys can look this one up too. It's called Metam Sodium.

SPEAKER_00 23:49

Metham Sodium.

SPEAKER_04 23:50

It's actually it's it's a pro in the trade name is called Vapam, V-A-P-A-M. Um, I was the person that as a product developer and a consulting agronomist, I helped put the product in through the center pivot irrigation systems. And it basically is a general biocide. So when it goes into the water system and goes into the soil, it kills everything in it the weeds, the bacteria, the fungi, everything, beneficial, non-bacter, everything. The growers in the United States, particularly in the West with irrigation, have been using that product to the point where it's been called the number one cancer-causing agent in the United States, in the western U.S. Uh, killed 100 miles of uh Sacramento River uh when it spilled a tanker load of it back in the 90s. Um that is on. So basically, when you're asking me about biostimulants in that, the reason there is biostimulants in that is because this these big companies have sterilized our soil to where we have no life. And so now we have to res get the biome back to life again, the soil biome. Sandy and I call our program soil to belly, because it's that soil biome at the six to eight inch level that has all the activity going on. It's the same as in your stomach. All of our health begins in our stomach, right?

SPEAKER_02 25:18

Microbiome. Yep. No, it's the same thing.

SPEAKER_01 25:20

It all of it.

SPEAKER_04 25:29

And so now you've got all you have the big boys now making money on the soils they kill because they've killed them all.

SPEAKER_02 25:36

Right.

SPEAKER_04 25:36

And so starting in 2015 when Sandy and I left uh we left Big Ag in 2013 and and went our into our organic projects. Uh, basically, they were everything was uh the soils have been killed. They started approaching us because they knew that we did product development in big ag before this, and say they wanted to make sure their product works. So I've had five or six companies come to us to show us their new products for biology. So that's that's why you're seeing all that in the shells. That's why you're seeing hearing about regenerative agriculture. It's that's all happening because of killing everything.

SPEAKER_02 26:19

Right. People are starting to become smart about it and realize all of that caused so much detriment to our to our country, to our nation. And so that's good that people like you and other people are starting to do regenerative farming and yeah, appreciate all your hard work and doing that and being willing to fight for that.

SPEAKER_04 26:42

Yeah, well, it's because of nice people like you. You uh the reason I I follow you guys is because you're the model family. So I love it. Thanks for a compliment, but you're pretty good. You guys are doing good. Danny and I raised three beautiful daughters, and we're proud of them to no end. So we're we just stay after it because we know there's our grandkids and your kids and everybody else's kids, and that need to be helped. Yeah, and the interesting that here's an interesting fact about that that stuff that was put on that I was telling you about earlier, it was like coal. That stuff, the people that use it, and when you've been poisoned by it, actually gives you uh you're prone to have diabetes.

SPEAKER_02 27:25

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 27:26

And so a lot of the workers and stuff, the workforce, that's a lot of the reason they're uh they're already not immune to the substances.

SPEAKER_02 27:35

Do you do you know the correlation why that specifically causes diabetes?

SPEAKER_04 27:41

I I don't, but I I do know that uh in all the nations, it's uh India, China, Mexico, you name it, the the populations are hot very high in diabetes. In fact, down here in New Mexico, there's been reports of 55 percent or so in some of the in some of the tribes.

SPEAKER_02 28:03

I wonder if it yeah, somehow it's triggering their insulin resistance or something.

SPEAKER_04 28:08

Right. And then they, you know, you think about the the long march and the and what they were what they were basically given to eat. I've been told by uh by the Danae that their sheep wasn't their thing. They just had to have them because that's how what they had in the military and gave them that so that's how they got along, and they really weren't into eating uh uh like white flour. In fact, the flour is probably and that's one of the things I teach in my in a superfood is never eat, never eat white flour, never eat anything but organic flour. Because our grain is absolutely worthless the way it is right now.

SPEAKER_02 28:52

Can you go into a little more detail about that?

SPEAKER_04 28:55

Well, it basically, yeah, and this is a good show for you guys. Have you watched the show Flower Power?

SPEAKER_01 29:02

I haven't. No, is that on a TV or streaming service?

SPEAKER_04 29:06

It's on uh it's on one of the streaming platforms. Okay. Flower Power, F-L-O-U-R. And you read it and it'll tell you about the fascination. It's the same fascination as having just the white potatoes. It's the same fascination as the bread makers out of Minnesota go into Europe to globalize white flour. But basically they're killing all of the the parts of the kernel that actually have all the health and nutrients in it.

SPEAKER_02 29:36

Right.

SPEAKER_01 29:37

Is it because it's bleached? Yep.

SPEAKER_02 29:39

And it's stripped from everything that has the actual nutrients apart.

SPEAKER_01 29:43

Yeah, and this is our scores. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:50

Fortified vitamins and minerals to begin with, but then it got stripped of it and then fortified.

SPEAKER_04 29:55

Well, that that movie will show you that these people did it to get power and control over the food chain. And it it shows how they developed co-ops to actually to actually take over things. And that's actually how the potato industry got taken over, is by co-operatives.

SPEAKER_01 30:14

Yeah, the information is out there, and a lot of people now, like you just mentioned, a lot of people are getting smartened up to everything, they're doing the dig and doing the research, whereas before it wasn't that or it wasn't as ready, readily as available as it is now with the internet and everything. And there's a lot of people out there that don't like that because they're making money off the ignorance of of all of us that don't do the research or aren't willing to do the research. And luckily we have people like y'all who are doing a lot of the research, doing a lot of the work, the groundwork, literally, to bring it all to people and to spread the message. So we appreciate the the work that you're doing.

SPEAKER_02 30:52

I think it's probably a year ago now, that one of my life goals is to have a green, grain meal, kitchen grain mill, so we can start ground grinding our own flour, purchasing wheat berries and fresh flour.

SPEAKER_04 31:05

We want to help you with that, Abby. We we actually uh we get so excited because there's people that know they want to teach. I want to help people get that. So I want to teach them how to grow just enough of the different kinds of grains, ancient type grains, that they can fill a like a five-gallon porcelain thing for a store, so then somebody can come in and get a get their own wheat that they want, the color, the type, and everything else. And there's a place in uh there I saw it in Paonia where they had hundreds of these or barrels full of organic seed. People went in and they could get their flour or what not the flour, but they get the raw the raw material.

SPEAKER_02 31:44

That's awesome.

unknown 31:45

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 31:46

Well, we um is there anything else that you want to ask or anything we want to cry about before we um move on to the rest of our days? Because yeah, there's a lot of things I can probably um ask you about or have you go on for hours about your industry, your field, and your research. Um, but yeah, wanna thank you for your time. We appreciate um everything your time for taking some time out to talk to us and everything that you've shared with us so far. Um, is there anything else that you want to leave with the people to know or you want to drop your information? I know you have a website for your company. I know you do um coaching, I mean consulting. If you want to talk about that, uh yes.

SPEAKER_04 32:26

I'm on I am a plat, I'm a platform, and I'm I'm on uh I'm on a platform and it's it's uh LinkedIn is my professional platform. It shows everything that I've done and I keep it on there just because I want facts to go out into the business into the world. Well, make sure everything potatoes is absolutely yes, it's Jeff Bragg. Okay, just Jeff Bragg on Facebook. We're everything potatoes, and we don't blog a lot. Well, but uh because we're out in the field a lot. But it's I will tell you that what my line of work has actually been fairly scary after I left Green Giant. They really did not like um the knowledge of the potato industry that I took out. They when I started, I started with uh two potatoes that they had started with as their specialty potatoes. And believe this or not, I actually saw them before I ever went to work for them in the middle of Siberia on a USAID trip for Lando Lakes Company out of Minnesota.

SPEAKER_03 33:32

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 33:34

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 33:35

And so the first year I went over in a summer trip, met this guy, and then the interpreter uh was from Siberia, but she schooled in Minnesota. After I left the first, after I left the second trip over there, four or five years later, a processing company from Minnesota went in and set up a potato industry in Russia. But yeah, I had seen the potatoes before that I was gonna work with a year before they called, and I interviewed in Siberia the following year when they were looking for the headhunter was looking for somebody in potatoes.

SPEAKER_03 34:10

Wow.

SPEAKER_04 34:11

Uh and it was a USAID trip the second time that they called, and uh I interviewed my first interview.

SPEAKER_02 34:20

Wow. You you've had quite the life, and we can spend hours talking to you about it. I want to talk to you more about it.

SPEAKER_01 34:27

Your previous people probably never know or experience.

SPEAKER_02 34:31

It's like this needs to be a multi-part.

SPEAKER_04 34:34

I'm gonna leave it at this with Kari so he knows this. Kari, you know that deal about the the oxidation of the potatoes, yeah. Sandy and I took uh about 10 different kinds of French fry types of all different colors into uh to her uh class reunion or 50th uh 45th class reunion here a few years ago. We cut all the fries and hand cut them and put them into trays, you know, like two two by four trays. I cut them all and then rinsed them to get all the excess starch out. They did not oxidize or change color from temperatures of 58 to 74 degrees for two days. Oh wow, two days, and I have the pictures. So, you, my friend, the chef, you would probably love to have this information. Yeah, it it blew me away.

SPEAKER_02 35:27

Wow, that's amazing. Jeff, one more question for you. What are one or two things that you would love young parents or families in the US to know about potatoes, flour, or anything like that? Like, what are two recommendations that you have for them?

SPEAKER_04 35:48

Know your farmer and know their seeds because it's the seed. Seed is everything. Without seed, we have nothing. Right. And so I'm teaching people, we are actually teaching people to actually own their own seed.

SPEAKER_01 36:07

I think that is an amazing point to end this one.

SPEAKER_04 36:12

It's wonderful, you folks. You are amazing what you're doing. Thank you for this opportunity. You too.

SPEAKER_02 36:17

And we'll we'll definitely be in touch and uh get to pick your brain some more.

SPEAKER_04 36:22

Absolutely. Love it. That you're the type of people that I want to give the information to.

SPEAKER_02 36:27

Oh, thank you.

SPEAKER_04 36:28

Appreciate that.

SPEAKER_01 36:29

We're all here for each other.

SPEAKER_02 36:30

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 36:31

With that, one thank you for your time. Thank you for joining us, and cheers to you.

SPEAKER_02 36:36

Cheers. Cheers.

SPEAKER_01 36:38

And like we always say at the end of all these every show, we're at Had in Health, where we are focused on family, empowerment, and growth. Just make this happen.

SPEAKER_02 36:49

Together. Love it. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 36:52

Thank you.