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If you google “farmer,” you will most likely get images of an overall-clad man looking a little dirty and broken down. This, however, is not an accurate picture of the modern-day farmer, and Tara Vander Dussen is on a mission to correct that.
Tara is a 5th generation dairy farmer and proud dairy advocate. She began sharing her story after realizing how little the general public understood about farmers and farming. Using her media channels, Tara educates people on what farm life is really like and shows people that farmers are experts in their field and should be trusted to feed the world.
On this episode, my co-host James Connolly interviews Tara and their discussion covers a wide range of topics like:
- Tara’s background and why she wanted to tell her story in an authentic way
- The challenge of debunking the media narrative
- The Urban vs. rural disconnect
- Farmers are experts in their fields
- Misinformation about the dairy industry
- The power of multinational companies
Resources:
University of Alberta Encyclopedia of Milk (Milk Composition Database)
Joe Rogan Podcast: James Wilks vs. Chris Kresser
Connect with Tara:
Website: Tara Vander Dussen
Instagram: @taravanderdussen | @elevateag
Facebook: New Mexico Milkmaid
Podcast: Elevate Ag
Episode Credits:
Thank you to all who’ve made this show possible. Our hosts are Diana Rodgers and James Connelly. Our producer is Emily Soape. And, of course, we are grateful for our sponsors, Patreon supporters, and listeners.
If you’re ready to take your support for a nutritious, sustainable, and equitable food system to the next level, join my Global Food Justice Alliance community on Patreon. You will have access to ad-free podcasts, exclusive videos, a discussion community, and much more. Go to sustainabledish.com/join to support my work.
Thanks to our episode sponsor, Annmarie Skin Care, a company committed to creating the best natural skin care possible and doing it sustainably. While I’ve always been picky about what goes on my skin, this product goes beyond that, feeding the skin with high-performance seed oils, antioxidant-rich botanicals, and synergistic plant stem cells that deliver skin-supporting nutrients. My skin feels fantastic, and these products smell so good.
For a limited time, you can receive 30% off your order at sustainabledish.com/skin with code DIANA30.
Quotes:
“You’re taking a really great nutritious product and making it not available. The wealthiest of our country are not going to suffer, it’s going to be our children. It’s going to be people that are food insecure. Those are the people that are going to suffer.” – Tara Vander Dussen
“I feel like what cows eat is the sustainability unsung hero.” – Tara Vander Dussen
“I hope you guys will leave this trusting your farmers a little more, that they’re making the best decisions for their cattle, their land, and the overall food system.” – Tara Vander Dussen
Transcript:
Diana Rodgers, RD
Welcome to the Sustainable Dish Podcast. I’m Diana Rodgers, a real food registered dietitian, author, and sustainability advocate. I co-host this podcast with James Connelly, who was a producer on my film Sacred Cow. I also founded the Global Food Justice Alliance, an initiative advocating for the inclusion of animal-source foods like meat, dairy, and eggs for a more nutritious, sustainable, and equitable worldwide food system. You can check it out and join me at global food justice.org. Thanks again for listening. And now, on to our show.
(Patreon Ad) Diana Rodgers, RD
Ready to take your support for a nutritious, sustainable, and equitable food system to the next level? Join my Global Food Justice Alliance community on Patreon and have access to ad-free podcasts, exclusive videos, and a discussion community, plus so much more. Go to sustainable dish.com/join to support my work, and thank you.
James Connolly
Welcome, this is James Connolly, co-host for Sustainable Dish’s podcast. I actually reached out to Tara Vander Dussen because I think a lot of her content online is the sort of perfect pushback against a lot of the stuff that’s happening in agriculture, and especially animal ag. The information that she’s putting out is up to date. It’s following a lot of things that are happening with current events, but then also within a larger narrative that’s happening with agriculture. And so I reached out kind of on a whim, and then I was like, well, this girl’s big. So thank you so much for coming on. This is actually really cool.
Tara Vander Dussen
Thank you for having me. Thanks for that introduction. I feel very excited about my social media presence.
James Connolly
Yeah, whenever I’m waiting in the green room for these things, I’m always like, nobody’s ever going to show up to my podcast, and we never talk about these things. Let me know a little bit about yourself. I was studying a little bit of biography of you and it sounds a little bit like Nicolette Niman like you’re sort of a prodigal daughter grew up, like fifth generation, dairy farmer, you know, multinational started out, you’re, what would we say? Great, great grandparents at this point?
Tara Vander Dussen
Yeah,
James Connolly
Were dairy farmers. So tell us a little bit about that. And then we can kind of dive into the work that you’re doing right now.
Tara Vander Dussen
Yeah. So as you mentioned, I’m a fifth-generation dairy farmer. I married a fifth-generation dairy farmer. So dairy farming is pretty much my life and has been. I grew up on a dairy farm in eastern New Mexico. And my dad’s actually a first generation in the United States. And we still have his first cousins, still dairy actually, a couple of his first cousins still dairy farm in the Netherlands. So we have… it’s kind of interesting, I always love kind of being able to see the comparisons between the US and the EU as far as dairy farming goes. I was classic, like small town kid who went away to college and said, I was never coming back, got my degree in environmental science and ended up coming back to the farm to work as an environmental consultant for like a third party consulting firm. And so I spent a lot of time spent the last 10 years doing environmental consulting, so permitting regulatory, water conservation, manure management, soil health on dairy farms throughout New Mexico and kind of throughout the southwest, actually. And that was kind of what led me to sharing online. I when I was a new mom, I was just seeing a ton of misinformation about dairy. And I was surprised to see that a lot of it was around sustainability and the environmental impact of dairy. And as a person who was kind of like boots on the ground, seeing what was actually going on, I wanted to kind of correct or share real information, what was actually happening on farms. And that kind of led me to starting my platform. And obviously, from there, it’s grown and expanded. You know, I have a podcast now called Elevate Ag that we share, you know, kind of current events and our take of what farmers are actually seeing and farmers how, you know, kind of what we feel about some of the current events going on in agriculture, and just trying to combat some misinformation out there.
James Connolly
Yeah, I had the opportunity to listen this morning to a podcast from one of your workshops. It was somebody who was a first generation outside of Bozeman.
Tara Vander Dussen
Yep.
James Connolly
And it was it’s sort of interesting because one of the takeaways that we tried to do with Sacred Cow, towards the end of the film was to interview… we reached out to a number of different farmers all over the globe, to just tell their story. You know how they got into it. A lot of them are young, a lot of them didn’t want to work in cubicles, they didn’t want to follow the sort of contemporary college to, you know, finance marketing. They wanted to work outdoors. And they wanted to be part of a system that felt like it was actually feeding people taking care of people. And so I think a lot of the work that you’ve been doing on your podcast is really talking to that generation of like, how do you tell your story and tell in a way that feels authentic? So you can bring people who are so removed from our food system, you know, into this idea, this sort of narrative that they are part of a larger community of people who are feeding people.
Tara Vander Dussen
Yeah, so our podcast is kind of like twofold. We have a Tuesday episode and a Thursday episode, and our Tuesday episode is definitely interviewing people and trying to give resources to producers, farmers, ranchers, to be able to share their story. Exactly like you said. We, my business partner and I, Natalie both feel and my co-host feel so strongly that like every farmer has a story to tell. And if we told it more, more people would be connected to agriculture, understood where their food comes from, and just have a farmer they could reach out to when they had questions. And then our Thursday episodes, as I mentioned, are kind of like our current events – our ag take on current events, our slogan is, ag and make it trendy. So trying to reach like the, you know, millennial urbans, like our counterparts that are in urban settings, and be able to share with them and relate to them, while kind of touching on agriculture and what we’re seeing. So there’s a little bit of something, I hope in our podcasts for everyone.
James Connolly
Yeah, and I do know that every once in a while you get some pretty mean pushback. But do you also get a lot of people who are in urban environments in cities who are like, wow, I never thought about it that way. Or I’ve never, you know, I’m not seeing a working ranch. All I see are these sort of staccato black and white imaging that’s sort of coming out of a lot of the vegan activist movement that makes it look like that animal ag is, you know, is this horrible experience.
Tara Vander Dussen
Yeah. So I would say overwhelming the response I actually get is positive. Like we all… I think we focus on the negatives because they are sometimes the loudest voice in the room, but they are not always the biggest as I have found. Overwhelming it is a lot of people and it always surprises me when I get DMs, like asking people, where did you find me because it’s amazing to see these, you know, people that are in urban settings, obviously, finding my page, finding it interesting. I’ve had so many conversations with people that are like you’ve really opened my eyes changed my mind made me see things differently. We do a lot of actual on farm tours on our dairy farm, we’re located near an Air Force base. And so one of the community outreach programs we have is inviting new transfers to our dairy to see it. And so it that’s always very eye opening, because obviously, those people are usually from very urban settings. And the thing that we always hear and it’s true, whether you’re in person or online is once someone actually sees a farm looks at it talks with a farmer, it changes our entire perspective of agriculture and how they feel about our food system.
James Connolly
Yeah, you did this really wonderful Instagram posts where you were talking about a New York Times short form documentary. I’m a documentary filmmaker, The New York Times had reached out to me years ago, they wanted us to do these sort of 20 minute docs. They wanted us to do it unpaid for exposure, and we were like, absolutely not. But there was this one, you look at it. And this is what I tried to do with a lot of the work that I’m doing is documentary filmmaking is so hard because one, the image that follows the narrative will sometimes you force people into this sort of concept where you think that the documentary filmmaker is not necessarily being honest. But that there’s some sort of governing body that looks at this and verifies whether or not it’s true. And so you have this one thing where you kind of go into it. You like… when you talk about global emissions in US animal agriculture, how they take one statistic for global emissions, and then extrapolate to US animal agriculture, specifically dairy, maybe meat, methane emissions, but then they also will show a finishing plant for cattle as if that is the sort of dairy industry or the meat industry or cattle industry. And so it’s like this plot-by-plot point where you’re kind of dismantling this documentary, which was probably seen by a lot of people who never would have questioned any part of that. And I think it’s really profound. You know, thank you for that.
Tara Vander Dussen
Thank you. Yeah, it’s one of the things that I struggle with whenever I am like debunking, as I call my doing the debunking videos, is you mentioned like a 20 minute New York Times like docuseries, or whatever it is, you have to like it’s very emotional driven. And then you have to go back and say, but these are the facts, but then still make it like, relevant, exciting, like, connect with the people. It’s just, it’s so easy to have one negative headline. And then for us to go back and actually explain the truth takes, you know, twice that amount of time and double the amount of data. And, you know, it’s still hard to get rid of like those emotional feelings that that documentary, like, instilled in people, that fear that it instilled in people. And so it’s hard and just trying to balance I think all those things when you’re trying to kind of, I guess, debunk those videos.
James Connolly
Yeah. And I think that because you have family in the Netherlands and family who are in the EU, and then you also are sort of living in the States, I think you have a very unique perspective on what’s happening with a lot of that stuff. Because I lived in the UK for close to a decade, you find the narrative there is very, very different. There’s a lot more sort of accepting of the media. There’s a lot more sort of accepting of, you know, the EU is one of the largest economies in the world. And so you see the structural changes that’s happening in agriculture over there, that then sort of being disseminated out to the rest of the world as sort of a marker for that. I don’t think people realize the EU is such an agricultural powerhouse. It produces enormous amounts of food, especially the Netherlands. And so what you what you’re starting to see is these dairy farmer protests that are happening. I don’t know why I keep on saying dairy. So you see these farming protests that are happening. And you know, Americans are like, What is going on? Right? Obviously, people in the farming community are understanding it from a different perspective. But it’s not covered a lot. If it’s covered. It’s taken from the perspective of we don’t understand what’s going on. So I wonder if you can give kind of a 30,000 foot overview of what’s happening, and specifically the Netherlands, but in the EU in general?
Tara Vander Dussen
Yeah. Oh, my gosh, this is such a complicated topic. We covered a little bit in our podcast, we’ve covered it twice. We covered it more in-depth once, and then actually, a podcast we just recorded, it’ll release tomorrow. I have an update on, you know, kind of sharing about what’s going on in the Netherlands. But yeah, they’re, you know, they’re hitting them hard. The farmers in the Netherlands or the EU overall, is obviously putting very strict regulations on nitrogen. And then, you know, farmers are protesting. And I think one of the things I feel like in the United States we see, and we’re like, yeah, what’s going on? And I see it as kind of like the writing on the wall. Like, I feel like the EU tends to be kind of ahead of us a little bit on some of these regulations, unfortunately, that, you know, misrepresented regulations. And, you know, the farmers have kind of like, had enough. The most recent that just came out yesterday, or this weekend, I think the report came out is, you know, discussions about seizing farmlands, like up to 600 Farms, that the government would, you know, that have deemed they’re too close to environmental protection zones, and relocate the farms. Like, I feel like that seems very extreme to some of us in the United States, when in reality, a lot of farmers in the EU and in the Netherlands, have experienced some pretty extreme regulations from their governments from, you know, quota systems to now the environmental side of things. While we can pretend like it’s like not happening across the ocean, I think it’s something we really need to keep an eye on and keep kind of like our finger on the pulse because I just… I see it as like, kind of foreshadowing what we can expect to possibly see here. And you know, what the UK – if you’ve been watching the news at all right now, you’ve probably been seeing the big protest in the UK of them dumping milk on the ground, and protests. So I do think while they may be, like, more ahead of us in the extremism, I don’t think it’s like that far off from what we’re dealing with in the United States.
James Connolly
Yeah, you know, I watched a lot of… a few of the interviews from Animal Rebellion, where they interview the young protesters who had gone in and asked them why, you know, sometimes it’s hard to judge, you know, some people don’t do well on camera. And so they looked really nervous. But they also didn’t really understand what they were doing. What they feel is this climate emergency, which is just absorbed from the entire environment, it is talked about incessantly in the UK, and in the EU. There are activist side of it, animal activist side of it. And then I think I’ve actually hijacked a lot of the conversation about it. But what you feel is a sort of impulse that something needs to change, and something needs to shift. And because a lot of the media and animal activism and these larger corporations that have invested heavily in plant based amalgams to meat and dairy, and all this other stuff, it really governs how that conversation is being held. And so you get something like, you know, the single best thing that you can do as an individual to lower your carbon footprint is to go plant-based, or flexitarian is a term that’s used over there. And you just look at it and you just like, wait a second, like, well, you can’t even put the brakes on this, right. I just want to like… I wonder your opinion on that. You’re raising children in this environment as well.
Tara Vander Dussen
So, my right… yeah, I have so many different directions to take this. You mentioning that they looked like the activist sometimes looked a little scared or unsure. I actually one time saw a letter of that went out to all the activists before a protest. And it said Don’t forget to not wear leather, like don’t wear leather. Make sure like you don’t show up like eating a cheeseburger. They had to remind the activist of what actually was animal ag and what they were protesting. And so I’m sure they were probably nervous because I bet some of these people when they got on camera, were not actually well versed in what they were actually protesting. Like they had this idea and didn’t actually have like hard evidence or really, like really understand the intricacies of our food system. And at the same time, like I think that it’s concerning because you have young children. I have young children. I think it’s just a very elitist way of thinking, especially in the UK and the EU. I think they get very focused on local sustainability and push off a lot of their sustainability globally to other countries, I think, you know, I think about, like GMOs and different things that they ban growing in their country, but yet, like import them from others, like, that’s just one example. And like a multitude of examples of where they are so hyper-focused on their sustainability, their metrics, and less concerned about where they’re pushing those emissions off to, and then you know, back to the elitist part of it, you’re taking a really great nutritious product like, and making it not available. The people that are not going to suffer are, you know, the wealthiest of our country are not going to suffer, it’s going to be our children. It’s going to be people that are food insecure. Those are the people that are going to suffer. You know, a big portion of our plant, our diet is already plant-based, where what I think it’s like over 60% of our diet is already plant-based. And most of that is not eating, you know, fresh fruits and vegetables. That’s not what we’re eating. And I think as if we get rid of animal protein, and you know, looking at these activists, we’re cutting out a huge portion of the great proteins and the nutrients we really need, we’re not going to be adding more fruits and vegetables, that’s not what’s going to happen. Those aren’t gonna be the plant-based… we’re going to be adding, you know, kind of the filler food unfortunately, and again, that’s going to hurt like the least of our country, our children and our underserved communities.
James Connolly
I remember, Kellogg got into a lot of trouble because they were… there was a lot of pushback in the EU on healthfulness of their cereals, and a lot of their products. And their big pushback on that was that actually, they were like, wait a second, you haven’t factored in the milk that you’re adding to this cereal. So people called *beep* on that? I mean, they were just like, you know, obviously, it’s not part of it. I mean, they converted a lot of that stuff to breakfast bars anyway, right. But the nutrition in that cereal is most of the milk or otherwise, it’s fortified. And so then you look at the rise of say oat milks, or non-dairy alternatives. And you look at it and you’re like, Well, really, what you’ve done is you liquified cereal, added some water, some emulsifiers to it, and now you’re putting cereal on top of cereal and calling it sustainable. And you do a lot of work kind of pushing back against the nutritional aspects of dairy. I remember the University of Alberta did an Encyclopedia of Dairy. And there’s a lot of nutritional dark matter that happens I think within these whole foods that we just don’t know… we don’t know what they do. The stuff that we can study, we do study and even the stuff that we do study just shows it’s so superior to any of these dairy alternatives.
Tara Vander Dussen
Yeah, a big one for me is that a lot of times we are not comparing apples to apples, like we are quite literally comparing like oats to milk to cow’s milk, and they’re not the same. Like we look at the protein and our labels are so behind the times that like the bioavailable protein in you know, cow’s milk or in before it you know, any animal protein source, compared to the protein in oat milk. It’s not comparable, and yet people see it as like this great substitute. And, you know, I think that’s some of it that concerns me is, you know, lack of understanding, obviously, about agriculture, but then beyond that a lack of understanding about our actual nutrition and what’s going on. And you know, just thinking that, like that you’re giving your children something that’s equivalent to cow’s milk when you’re actually not, is a huge concern for me.
James Connolly
Yeah, well, one of the stranger absurdities that I’ve seen with almond milk, is if you look at the ingredient list on most of the almond milk, the first ingredient is almond milk, which it should be almonds, but it’s actually not. It’s almond milk. And so what I think it is, and I’m just going to speculate here, what I think it is, it’s all the detritus and leftover from almond production, right? Because you can actually charge more for almonds. But what you can do is as you’re preparing it, you have a lot of what is the sort of like offal of almond production, which is then ground up. What you’re getting is this inferior product to begin with. And then most of it’s just water. I mean dairy is water as well, but I just think that they… there’s just so there’s so much nutrition in milk. And I think, you know, one of the things I find about societal living nowadays is because we live in… I grew up in New York City, I spent a number of years in sort of rural parts of England, which was a great education for me. And what I noticed was, as I moved back to the city, just from a very different perspective. I started, you know, I started this nonprofit. We were primarily going into inner city schools, and teaching about nutrition education. We were overhauling school food, and then just doing really basic nutritional education for pre-K to fifth grade, working with about 1500 kids a week. And so it was a really profound experience for us. I think we had the… what we noticed is the barrier for change for kids in improving nutrition was never the child, you know. You made it a positive experience in the classroom, you taught them where their food was coming from. And there was all of this positive, appropriate peer pressure would go in, and you would actually just really be able to fundamentally shift so that when they sat down at lunch, these are no longer barriers for change and barriers for them to kind of eat. And so you what you realize is the disconnect. There’s such a huge disconnect. One of my rants is Bloomberg when he was running for for mayor, sorry, for president, he had this talk where he was saying, you know, he was trying to talk about the brain drain in agriculture, all the smart people move to the cities. You know, do you have any idea? I mean, you study agriculture for like five years, you just realize, you know, nothing, you know, nothing about this. This is like, it’s an education of a lifetime, to be able to understand this stuff. And you just, it’s all of history. It’s all of written in recorded history. It’s also like, one of the great things about our world is that we actually, to our own detriment is that we don’t have to think about food all that much anymore. You know, so I’m wondering if you’d like when want to talk a little bit about the urban versus rural disconnect, how we can improve that. Right, and then kind of just talk about the absurdities of a lot of that stuff.
Tara Vander Dussen
Yeah, one of my big like, soapboxes, I guess is… is people like the… if you Google farmer, for me, one of the number one images that comes up, that’s in my keynotes, which I give, it’s like a farmer out in a field with like, overalls. They’re broken, they’re dirty, he looks kind of like dirty and dingy. There’s nothing wrong with that image. Like, that’s not the point I’m trying to make. It’s that the idea of the farmer is that we’re not educated, that we’re not clean. That we’re not like, just, I’m like, how did we get here? How did we get to this point where we don’t like respect the art of farming, like the expertise of farming. And so one of my big soapbox is, is making sure that people understand that farmers are actually like experts in their field, like they truly… it would be like going to a doctor and then not believing them when they told you something, you know, like we’ve studied. You know, my degree’s in environmental science, my husband’s degrees in agri, ag-business. You know, I know lots of dairy farmers that are actually veterinarians, the list goes on and on of the things that we’ve studied, even if you haven’t gone to college, like you said, it’s a lifetime of learning. You don’t just wake up one day and say, I want to be a farmer. And even if you do, then there’s a massive learning curve that you have. I know, I’ve talked to lots of first generation farmers that they can’t get their hands on enough research and information. And so for me, I really want to figure out a way to we connect that urban and rural divide of understanding each other. And I think it probably goes both ways. I think a lot of times rural people can be very like dismissive of urban people and can be very frustrated by their lack of, you know, information about agriculture and rural living in general. And so I do think that some of this is like opening up communication. I think social media, like me, sharing my story online, is a beautiful way to be able to, like open up your lives and be able to connect with people. You know, I remember one time I interviewed it was like, they wanted to do a TV show. And the TV show was where they transplanted like a farm person into a city. And they were talking to me and my husband interviewing us for it. And I could tell what they wanted. They wanted us to be like the country bumpkins that didn’t know anything about the city. And we actually, honey, we did our honeymoon in Tokyo. And we were like talking about our travels and using the subway. And they were like, Yeah, that’s just not the vibe we’re going for. And I was like, I’m not gonna like dumb myself down and act, play this part you want me to play when that’s not me. And I think that kind of like summed up where they wanted me to play the part of like, being a farmer that didn’t know anything. And it was extremely frustrating. And it’s frustrating as that narrative continues into our future, when in reality, I always tell young people, ag is a super exciting like technology-based like things moving forward industry to be in.
(Annmarie Skin Care Ad) Diana Rodgers, RD
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James Connolly
Yeah, and it’s interesting, the recent article, Oatly was mainly talking about the fact that there because I, you know, sit in cafes a lot. I read when I’m working – oat milk lattes, and all this other stuff. But there has been this movement sort of trends for people who were just like, No, I want dairy. Right? Like if you go to Paris and you ask for an oat milk latte, they’re like No.
Tara Vander Dussen
Like, it’s like contrasting views of being anti-animal and then other people that are like holding firm that are like, No, we will give meat and dairy its moment and like, No, we’re not gonna be like swayed. And I think it’s just interesting to see those like compounding viewpoints.
James Connolly
Yeah. And, you know, I think that and I do think a lot of the plant-based meat alternatives have understood that part of the reason why they tried to get GRAS status and so that they can start to put their food in schools was big Because they understood that this was a captive audience, right? And so you, they wouldn’t have a choice on what they eat. And you see a lot of that stuff. And in New York, Diana talks about this a lot. Nina Teicholz talks about this a lot is Meatless Mondays had all of these posters up that talked about water use for meat, talked about land use for meat, trying to, in essence, indoctrinate children with this idea that meat is the shameful part of that. And, you know, this is a large global movement. I remember there was somebody who had enormous amount of influence in the UN, whose name escapes me right now, she’s a sort of diplomat, but she said, you know, what she wanted was meat eating to be the same as cigarette smoking. You would have to leave the restaurant and stand outdoors to eat it. And that sort of like the level of shame that’s associated with that I just find is so important, especially when you’re talking to children.
Tara Vander Dussen
One of the things that frustrates me about this entire thing is the fact that they want to get rid of ag like I’m a firm believer in food choices if you go to you know, your local cafe and you want oat milk. And that’s your choice. As long as you make that decision without misinformation like you make it just because you like the taste of it. That’s your reasoning. Or because you like lower calorie, almond milk, whatever your reasoning, I’m fine with that. But I don’t understand the thought process behind actually removing it. There’s no other I feel like brand or company or product, like out there that’s like, Okay, I believe in backpacks, not purses. So I’m actually… we are not allowed to purchase, like you have to have a backpack. Like why is it that these companies are like, you must be plant-based, but not only you must be plant-based, we actually want to physically remove the possibility of having animal ag. It’s just, I mean, and even looking at our history of food choices in this country, like we not that long ago had the food pyramid and like, how did that work out for us? Like, let’s like, why are we being like kind of dictated this, I guess, these food choices, especially when we know our country doesn’t have a great history of like solid, you know, nationwide food choices.
James Connolly
Yeah, we’d love to dive a little bit into some of the misinformation that you have that because you and your husband actually do a really bang up job. Can we talk a little bit about antibiotics and milk? Can we talk a little bit about growth hormones in milk? Can we talk a little bit about the nutritional differences between raw and conventional dairy? Can we just go into some of those things? Because I think that there’s, you know, I just think it’s really important that we actually discuss this stuff and just repeat it over and over again, because we know the other side is really good at that.
Tara Vander Dussen
I repeat the same information but there’s no antibiotics in any milk on the shelf, period. Hard stop. That I like, that’s a hill I’m gonna die on one day, because I feel like I repeat it so many times. But no, yeah, every tanker – we are conventional dairy. So I’ll be upfront with you on that. So, we use antibiotics, we obviously use them sparingly. Like if… we don’t want to overuse antibiotics. We obviously pay for those, just from like a business side. If you don’t even want to consider like the animal welfare side, like the business side, it doesn’t make sense why we would overuse antibiotics. We obviously use them in conjunction with a veterinarian. We have a veterinarian that comes out on our farm once a week to do our herd check. And we test – so if a cow is on antibiotics, their milk is milked separately. They have a withdrawal time. So there’s a point of time where they have to be off antibiotics, and we still are milking them separate. And then after that withdrawal period, they can then enter safely back into the food supply system. We test our milk to the parts per trillion, which is the highest level of like standard we can currently do with current scientific like methods. For our milk, we test every single tanker of milk before it leaves our farm. Once it leaves our farm, it’s tested again at the plant for antibiotics and a number of other things. It’s not just antibiotics, its overall quality of the milk. And we’re actually paid based premiums on the quality of our milk. So having the highest quality milk is obviously important to us beyond animal welfare. Again, I always say like a healthy herd is obviously the best investment you can make, which means having high-quality diets all, you know, comfortable environment, comfortable habitat. So your milk is tested so many times before it ever even gets the grocery store. And then they do randomized sampling at the grocery store as well. And then as far as growth hormones, I feel like a lot of the growth hormone conversation stems from rBST, which is where it was used a lot more in the 80s and 90s. And it was a naturally occurring growth hormone that was given to cows. It was completely safe, deemed safe by the FDA. But the consumer response was obviously negative and so it’s no longer used in any cow’s milk on the shelf like it has been completely taken off of the market. And yet it still remains a concern. It’s one of those things that, like, it just will not go away. But even with all of our efforts, it’s still a part of the conversation. I mean, if you open a gallon of milk, chances are it says rBST free or from cows not treated with rBST, even though there is no milk on the shelf that currently is from cows treated with rBST. So some of these things are, it’s like once one little thing gets stuck, it stays for so long. It takes so much education to like reinforce people of like, what the actual standards are now,
James Connolly
Is your milk gluten-free?
Tara Vander Dussen
Yes. We jumped on that trend right away. Yeah, and that, you know, that’s one of the things it’s so hard. We were just talking on our podcast yesterday about this that like, does it bother you – I with my co-host asked me: does it bother you when something says it’s dairy-free, when it’s always dairy-free. And it’s like kind of like I understand, like, from the allergy standpoint. You want things to say gluten-free, dairy-free, soy-free. But at the same time, when something can’t even like… has never contained one of those ingredients, it’s very frustrating to see because you can tell it’s just a marketing ploy. You know, it’s kind of like just a label, you know, that they’re putting on things. And that can be extremely frustrating.
James Connolly
Can you talk a little bit about B12 supplementation?
Tara Vander Dussen
Yeah, um, I don’t know that I can speak to this great. I’m not a nutritionist. But, you know, I think that’s one of the things, the big misconceptions about like the vegan diet. I feel like in my mind, it’s like, the piece that’s like, you say that we can survive on a vegan diet, that we are meant to have a vegan diet, whatever people’s like, argument is for that, and it’s like, but what about B12? What about that piece of this? And so I think that is, I don’t know, it’s just an interesting conversation. When that is one of the points that I’ll get, I don’t know, into arguments, I guess with on vegans on my page. It’s kind of the B12 argument.
James Connolly
You know, some of it came about because, I mean, there’s a lot of sort of weirdness within the vegan community. One they’ll tell you that B12 used to be naturally occurring in the soil. Because of industrial agriculture, it’s no longer there. So we used to get our… because we used to be vegan, right? That’s the narrative. And now they’ll tell you that B12 supplementation is in a lot of animal feed, even in dairy and cattle. And so you sort of do get a… I did some of research into this. There is detail of supplementation in weaning for calves, just because their rumen isn’t fully developed yet. But it was one of the things that – I don’t know if you ever listened to the Joe Rogan podcast, the James Wilkes versus Chris Kresser. It was one of his sort of gotcha moments was the sort of B12 thing. And so you know, I do think that there is a lot of sort of misinformation that’s happening with that. What else can we talk about? Water use? Can we talk about water use a little bit? Yeah. I want to preface this though with like, you have a very small dairy farm. No, yeah. Yeah, right. So like, is this stuff at scale? I mean, your farm is absolutely huge.
Tara Vander Dussen
Yeah, we are huge. I was gonna say that when I said I’m a conventional dairy, I’m a large-scale dairy farm like by all animal activist standards. I would be a quote unquote factory farm. I am… we are fully family-owned. Seven direct family members work full time on the dairy like we could not be more… I live 100 steps from my dairy barn, from my backyard to our dairy barn. Like, even though we’re big, it is like the quintessential what you think of like family farm. And I grew up the exact same way on my father’s quote unquote, factory farm. So yeah, the water use conversation is extremely interesting. And I know that like Diana has some great stats on this – that one of the things that people love to do, whether it’s beef or dairy is claim a huge number of water use. When in actuality a lot of that is green water versus blue water. And that’s something that gets missed a ton. And even on our dairy obviously, a lot of ours is blue water. We use a lot of groundwater. We are in eastern New Mexico, so high plains does not get a lot of rain. So we are irrigating crops. But one of the things too with even within blue water, if my dairy, like our dairy did not exist, our piece of land that we’re on would be farmed for something else. And the water rights actually have to be put to beneficial use by the state of New Mexico or you like lose the value of those water rights. So if we were not farming, our water or our land and using our water, someone else would be. And I think there’s like a misconception that like if dairy vanished, then like that water wouldn’t get used. But obviously, we would need to feed people with a different crop. Someone else would be growing another food or fiber for clothing or food and would also be using water like inherently, in order to produce food. There has to be resources that are used and I feel like that conversation really is like a tough one to understand and just like go into and then from a water management state one point, we don’t have a ton of water here. It is constantly in the forefront of our minds like our water is our limiting resource. So on our dairy and this is not unique. This is most areas across the country, we recycle one gallon of water between four to five times on our farm and just really trying to get as much out of the water as we can before it ultimately gets collected in our lagoon with all of our rainwater and applied out to our crops to you know, feed the cows. So it’s that cycle back. And what’s collected in our lagoon we call we call it green water, it’s you know, kind of a mix of obviously water, cow manure, and we sample that water to see exactly what’s in it so that we can apply it out to our crops and make sure we’re applying it at like agronomic rates so that the crop is taking up the nutrients it needs, the soils getting what it needs. And we’re again recycling that water. So I think the water process on a dairy is actually quite fascinating.
James Connolly
And tell me about like, some of the aspects of the integration of how much of the area that you work with other farmers they say cotton seed or the integration of we say, plant-based agriculture and animal agriculture and how they’re actually, like completely dependent upon each other in you know, by most of what we would consider to be sustainability measurements.
Tara Vander Dussen
Yeah, you’re hitting like one of my favorite points. I feel like what cows eat is the sustainability unsung hero, like it just doesn’t get talked enough about that a lot of what especially in cow’s diet, especially at like, you know, CAFOs, which are confined animal feeding operation, a lot of what they get fed is byproducts. And I kind of hate the word byproducts because it makes it sound like it’s such like a wasteful product, when in reality, it’s a nutritious product. So one of the great examples is cotton seed. In order to produce cotton, you get left with this cotton seed. There’s not a ton you can do with it. We make some oils out of it for cooking, it can be in like salad dressings, but a lot of it gets actually fed to cows. It’s a big part of our cow’s diet. And it provides a great source of protein for our cows, and, you know, undigestible by us and what ultimately end up in a landfill and gets fed to cattle instead. And that is just like one thing like cattle have been local eaters, since the beginning of time. Whatever is local to you is what your cattle will eat. You know, in California like almond hulls, a piece of like almond milk or reducing almonds is almond hulls can be used for bedding. They can be use for cattle feed. You know what’s leftover from making ethanol, there’s tons of byproducts leftover from making ethanol, we can feed that to our cattle like the list literally goes on and on. I know, a dairy farmer here in New Mexico that’s located near Albuquerque, so a big city and he feeds grocery store waste. And so it’s just the fruits and vegetables that just didn’t… maybe they weren’t perfectly shaped or you know, different things. There was nothing wrong with them. And they ultimately go to feed cattle. And I’ve seen a lot of pushback actually like, Oh, so you’re just feeding your cattle like whatever, like waste. And it’s like, no, we actually have a nutritionist that plans all of our cows’ diets that incorporates all of these things and making sure they get like the perfect balance of protein, carbs, fats, minerals, vitamins. And so it’s a great way to kind of upcycle our food as you know, things that we’re already producing that we’d be wasting cattle can consume and produce nutritious beef and milk for us to enjoy.
James Connolly
Yeah, I don’t know if you remember there was a proposed bill in California that was pushing for… they wanted traceability in a lot of like say distillers grains or byproducts and all this other stuff. And I do – I’d like again speculating, raise my hand speculating. I think it was animal activists because they what they wanted to do was make it look at the end result of that traceability. And creating a market for that would have taken something that was a byproduct that would have just been thrown away, that will produce its own methane produce, its own nitrogen dioxide just thrown on the ground, as opposed to feeding it to animals. And so what they try to… what they’re trying to do, I think, in many different ways, is sort of break that matrix of all of the integrated elements of animal agriculture to make it untenable.
Tara Vander Dussen
I know Oatly is currently – they were just in the news about this, that they will no longer feed their oats to cattle. So only making oat milk would feed their leftover to cattle to be more sustainable and activist came after them about that, that then they’re not a vegan product because they ultimately like supply feed for cattle. It just like, makes you scratch your head a little bit that it’s like seriously, that’s I mean, that’s a sustainability thing. So they – Oatly has now had to come up with something else that they can do that is quote unquote sustainable. Feels a little like greenwashing to me but that’s my speculation for today. But yeah, they will no longer feed their leftover oats to dairy cattle in order to claim vegan status.
James Connolly
And they got in trouble for this because they were doing the same thing with pig farming in France. So they were selling all of the byproducts of oat production to their – they said that they were working on a… make a way of making it into renewable energy. But I think that’s been close to four years now. And I don’t think they made any progress at all. So that’s four years worth of waste. It’s just going nowhere.
Tara Vander Dussen
Oh, that’s so frustrating. That just makes me angry. You know, one of the things to going back to like the large farm thing, one of the things that kills me I think about this current narrative is, like you said, a lot of these plant-based companies are like, they’re not like local family farms. Like it’s not a local family, soybean making like a soybean patty. It’s, you know, multinational companies. And a lot of times what I get activists coming at me for and even consumers like, wow, you know, you have a big farm. They have concerns about that. And yet, it doesn’t seem that anybody’s concerned about the fact that multinational companies are now you know, really trying to dominate this conversation around food. And as you said, like, really infiltrate like our school systems. Or you know, there’s different institutions here in the United States and abroad. And that’s a massive concern. For me, it’s like, it’s kind of like very contradictory that we like, want small family farms, but then we’re okay with large companies on other scales of economy, like it just it’s kind of weird. And I’m kind of backwards.
James Connolly
There was a, there was a funny story that happened the UK, this was years ago, but they were trying to tax junk food. And one of the things that you’ll find it every bar, I know, if you’ve spent some time in England, you’ll find bags of crisps. So they’re very inexpensive, but they were just like, it’s empty calories. Why are people eating them? Obviously, they’re drinking, so they want something salty. And so they wanted to put a tax on that to possibly get people to leverage people to stop eating less. And then Pringles came out. And they said, Well, you can’t tax us because we’re not potato chips. And they were everybody was like, what are you?And they couldn’t figure it out. I mean, it’s like 20%, corn starch, and a little bit of potato starch, and, you know, a kind of emulsifiers and all this other stuff.
Tara Vander Dussen
Oh my gosh, I’m never gonna be able to eat it.
James Connolly
But this happens a lot. I think Bloomberg tried to regulate Big Gulps and large portions in New York. He wanted to tax them at a higher rate. And the big pushback was, in essence, from, you know, the five multinational large corporations that you know, can, you know, and you’ll see on Pepsi trucks, like they’re trying to take away your freedom, whenever it… people try to leverage to get people to eat less of these ultra processed foods. And for me, I think that’s where the rubber hits the ground. And a lot of this stuff is we have produced enormous amounts of calories for… most of it’s just not nutritious. It’s specifically designed to be hyper-palatable, to get you to consume as much as possible. And, you know, the end result of that sometimes is the illusion of choice. But really, it’s about 10 companies that govern the entire world, you know, the processed food, you know, enormous amount of leverage over legislation. And so I think in some ways they’re getting away with this. They’re like… we’ve created this false dichotomy, plant versus animal, and nobody’s paying attention to us anymore.
Tara Vander Dussen
I feel like, I’m not a very big conspiracy theorist, but I believe in one conspiracy theory. And it’s like, if we can pit animal ag against plant base, then nobody is looking at these massive companies doing who knows what else. And when you think like that as you said earlier, like that headline, like, the single biggest thing you can do for the environment is stop eating meat like that, that tagline I feel like was just like a beautifully crafted marketing scheme, to have us all looking in one direction, kind of and just, and the more you know, one of the sad things about plant based versus animal ag is like, we’re all farmers, everyone’s producing food. And it’s pitting ag against each other actually, just like, you know, dairy against almond milk, like, I don’t want almond farmers to go out of business. Like that’s not what I want. I just don’t want misinformation. And it’s definitely made this like internal war about our food system, about something that’s like, I feel like not relevant. Like we’re missing the bigger picture of what’s going on here. I think they’re in going back to your point of these, like, we’re great at producing food. We’re good at producing calories. There’s a study about like, the let’s not… I forget the exact title of it. But it’s basically like, let’s not make a food system that is quote unquote, more sustainable while being undernourished, like a malnourished country. And I think it’s like very well done study, obviously peer reviewed, and just getting into that, but like, What’s our goal here to produce more food and more calories or to produce higher quality food? And I mean, I would assume we’re all on that page. Obviously, we just are disagreeing about how we’re going to get there.
James Connolly
Yeah, and I think that’s the I mean, I think that’s the greater part of the story, right? I have found that a lot of the people who are kind of pushing back against the sort of plant-based narrative are coming from different structures outside of what you would normally consider the sort of diet wars elements of it, you know, so we have all of these systems in play. Is that in essence of vilifying needs, and, you know, like the individual carbon footprint was set up by, you know, an advertising and marketing agency, Edelman, and who hired them to, in essence blame the consumer for their carbon footprint? Well, it was British Petroleum. And so they were like, you know, so you know, a lot of that stuff is like, I just have such a visceral reaction to the idea that you’re going to shame the consumer for what I don’t believe is a really consumer driven environment. You know, vegans will make that claim a lot that your dollar actually matters. But when you walk into the supermarket, you are seeing upwards of 40,000 different products, but they’re really made by like, maybe five or six different companies, you know. And so, like, I wanted to kind of talk about, like, the distinction between that and cattle and dairy, which are, you know, is one of the few farming systems left that hasn’t been forced into this total monoculture? Like talk about family farms, like the percentages are so high?
Tara Vander Dussen
Yeah, I actually just read a study question. Maybe it was this morning that throughout the United States, they did a poll, and they people came back saying that they assumed only 47% of all fam of all farms were family owned and operated. It’s actually 98%. Like, farms are overwhelmingly family owned and operated. Even larger farms, like I said, like ours, one of the things with our farm, like if we had been back, like in my dad’s day, my husband is a one of six boys, we probably would have broken apart and been a smaller farm off on our own. And instead, all the brothers have chosen to stay together just because the economies of scale. They enjoy working together, they each being a larger farm, they each get to kind of pick what their area is that they like to work in – lots of different reasons why we made that… have made that choice. And I think that like so these farms, they are family owned and operated so many of them. And they’re really the backbone of our rural communities like that’s another piece of this that I don’t think gets talked about at all is what happens to our rural communities if we have a massive disruption in our food system as going fully plant-based. A lot of you know, like, it’s just I just think people want it to be simple, like, Oh, yay, here’s a little box. If you give up meat, we will save the planet. And we will figure it all the rest of the food system. And it’s like, it’s not that simple. The economy is that simple in that I don’t know how to do a better job, I think of explaining to people the complexities within a bar system, like we talked about the you know, the byproducts being fed to cows, all of these intricate things that work together to create our food system. That’s just not as black and white as people want it to be.
James Connolly
Okay, so we’re running almost to the point where I have to stop. And we’re gonna have to do a part two, I think.
Tara Vander Dussen
Right now I feel like we’ve been all over the place. I’m sorry for whoever’s still with us. Thank you for still being here.
James Connolly
I have so much information. It’s like 51 minutes of like, we could have dived into so many different things. Yeah. I really want to thank you for coming on. I think your work is absolutely invaluable. Your husband stated in one of your Instagram posts about the percentage of people still working in ag. And the miracle it is that they produce so much food. I don’t think we thank farmers enough. So I really like to thank you and your family for all of the work that you’re doing. And put for putting yourself out there. I mean, it is really a brave choice. You know, I want to just thank everybody involved with what you’re doing.
Tara Vander Dussen
Well, thank you for having me on. Thank you for all the work you guys do. You don’t know how much as farmers I rely on like information coming from you guys. That is useful for me to be able to tell my story. And I always I know I think there’s like a sentiment among farmers I don’t need to be thanked. I actually love what I do. But I would love to be trusted about what I do that I’m making informed decisions. And so that’s what I’ll say is I hope you guys will leave this trusting your farmers a little more that they’re making the best decisions for their cattle, their land and the overall food system.
James Connolly
Okay, so last thing, can you just how do people find you, reach out – websites, podcasts, all of it?
Tara Vander Dussen
Yeah, so you can find me on Instagram at Tara Vander Dussen and my website’s Tara Vander Dussen.com You can follow my husband. He has more on my Facebook page, actually. And it’s still New Mexico Milk Maid, which is my old name. I just I can’t deal with the beast that is changing my name on Facebook. And I hope you guys will listen to our podcast. I don’t want to take you away from this one. But I hope if you’re looking for more podcasts, you’ll check out Elevate the podcast and see what we have to share there.
James Connolly
Great.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Thanks so much for listening to the Sustainable Dish Podcast. If you liked the show, please leave a review on iTunes. And if you’d like to support the work I’m doing on Patreon, please visit sustainabledish.com/join. As a Patreon subscriber, you’ll get access to ad-free podcasts, plus exclusive video podcasts, never before seen interviews, and a discussion community. Go to sustainabledish.com/join, and thank you for your support.
