The Millennial Ag Podcast

Whew! It's been a tough few weeks as far as topics go. Thank you for sticking with us through not only mental health (which we thought was a tough subject but didn't even begin to touch on what June had in store for us!) This week, we take a bit of a breather. We reflect on those hard topics, share your feedback and comments, and look ahead to what's next in ensuring that no topic is off limits for us, for you, for American agriculture. Thank you for listening - please keep sending us your notes, thoughts, and comments. It makes what we do glow so much brighter. We wish you and your families a very safe and happy Fourth of July in our great country.

This week, we're joined by guest Sarah Mock, a freelance agriculture journalist with some serious opinions and thoughts about how agriculture in America operates. We start out discussing her recent article about exploitation in ag. If that doesn't grab your attention, the rest of the conversation surely will. Tune in for conversation that will definitely ruffle feathers, but needs to be voiced. Young people in agriculture are starting to get fed up with the status quo, and we're finally old enough to start doing something about it. Why does agriculture sell our products as commodities? Are more regulations something producers should be excited about? How does the collapse of Syria relate back to food security equating to national and global security? You'll hear all that and much more in this week's episode of the Millennial Ag Podcast.

Heard of Project Counterglow? You may not have yet….it was only published 3 weeks ago. We’re here to tell you everything you need to know about this dangerous scheme. Animal rights activists have taken their agenda one step further, and identified over 30,000 animal enterprise businesses (farms, poultry houses, dairies, feedlots, zoos, etc) in the United States and put those locations on a public – meaning accessible to ANYONE – map. This precursor to domestic terrorism hasn’t hit mainstream ag networks yet. To bring you the full picture, we sat down with Emily Smith, Senior Communications Coordinator at Protect the Harvest, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting animal enterprises, with its roots in animal agriculture. Emily gives us the details of Project Counterglow, how it came to be, what agricultural producers can do to protect themselves, and what Protect the Harvest is doing to help. We also talk about the implications of this publication, from violation of privacy and private property rights, to the potential for violence against producers, their families, and the animals they dedicate their lives to caring for. This episode is time sensitive. We can’t afford to wait to move on this issue. Tune in, and then speak up.

Welcome to Episode 40. What better way to celebrate this milestone than talking about one of the hardest topics out there? Unless you've been living under a rock, you know about the civil unrest taking place in our country right now. Racism has risen to the forefront of the national consciousness and can no longer be ignored. We're white. We're privileged. And we're only just now starting to understand how deep these wounds run, and how our silence has only added to the problem. We are joined by Shannon Archebeque-Engle, who serves Colorado State University as Assistant Vice President for Strategic Initiatives and Assessment in the Vice President's for Diversity Office. As a Chicana in agriculture, she's experienced racism in her own life, and has watched how it affects American agriculture. She answers many of our questions, but more importantly, lays out exactly how racism still affects our agricultural lives and how to start making a change for the best. Every second of this episode is critical. Please join us in our mission to educate ourselves, understand the personal, institutional, and systemic problems with racism in our most beloved industry, agriculture, and how we can start to heal and move forward together.

This week we’re joined by two millennial ag traders to discuss the wild swings in agricultural markets. Cole Lickley lends his expertise on the livestock and dairy markets, while Justin Chapman discusses grain and oilseed markets. We get into where the year started on a high, to the impacts COVID wrought throughout March, April, and May and what we think is looking like a potential recovery at least on the dairy and livestock side. Justin and Cole do an excellent job of breaking down what’s happening, what we are seeing right now, and some glimpses of hope, as always. Tune in for a refreshing look at the markets as they stand today.

This has been a big month for us, for you...we brought you our first series and we couldn't be more excited about how it turned out. We shared our own whys, we brought on a farmer who shared her own struggles, and we spoke with an incredible mental health professional who helped us bust down myths and stigmas and taught us that it's compassion and grace that matter the most. This week we say thank you for your courage in talking to us, sharing your own stories, and thinking about what is next in this conversation. We commit to you ongoing episodes talking about mental health, and the launch of our mental health resources page on www.millennialag.com. We cannot say thank you enough to you for listening, for reaching out with messages of love, joy, support, encouragement, and curiosity. You made us brave enough to start the conversation and you, our dear listeners, picked it up right from where we stopped. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

This week, we were honored to be joined by Dr. Nora Feldpausch, a board certified psychiatrist, mom, and dairywoman. Nora has many years of experience helping people through their mental health journeys. She lays out what mental illness really is and maybe more importantly, what it isn’t. She shares how we can help ourselves and each other (hint: grace), how compassion for self and others is the key to navigating mental health struggles, and brings love and joy to a topic that can be very hard to talk openly about. She talks about how important it is to build a team of professionals while you’re seeking help for mental health challenges, and breaks down what each of those professionals looks like. Dr. Feldpausch hits this episode out of the park, and we’re so excited to bring this third installment in our rural mental health series to you. Dr. Feldpausch shared the following resources for those seeking help with mental health: https://www.nami.org/About-NAMI National Alliance on Mental Illness - this is a great place to start if you want more info on support for yourself or a loved one who is suffering with a mental illness - lots of links to good information on diagnosis, treatment and support. https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/ 1-800-273-TALK National Suicide Prevention Lifeline - they also have a link to chat online on their website. www.SAMSHA.gov SAMHSA Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration - is a good place to start if you are looking for statistics/information on mental illness. https://www.samhsa.gov/data/report/2020-national-directory-mental-health-treatment-facilities This is a list of federal, state and local public and private facilities that provide mental health treatment. https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/cdhs/find-behavioral-health-help a link to state of Colorado behavioral health resources/services - something similar exists in all states - consider going to your state website and searching for "behavioral health".

This week, in the second episode of our series on mental health, we're joined by a Montana farmer who's walking the mental health path. Michelle Erickson Jones, a fourth generation farmer farming multiple crops and maintaining a cow/calf operation with her husband, has real world experience with anxiety and depression. She talks with Millennial Ag about her experience, how she realized she needed help, and the many struggles rural populations face in trying to find help with mental health care. She has some great policy proposals on how to address these access to care issues, and her refreshing honesty and openness break the mental health conversation wide open. Please listen in as we continue talking about one of the hardest topics out there. We're real, we're raw, we are Millennial Ag.

With all the upheaval happening in the beef industry right now, Millennial Ag is excited to bring you our first bonus episode. Cevin Jones and Jared Brackett, both cattlemen with decades of experience from Idaho, join us to discuss the so-called "shortages" in the beef supply chain, why the process has bottle-necked during the pandemic, and what this situation means for consumers. They also shed light on some of the policy proposals that are floating around that are taking advantage of the fear and uncertainty of the times, and why those proposals just won't work. Listen in for some great insight into the disruption of the beef industry, and why in the end, the supply chain is truly secure and Americans will continue to enjoy the world's best and safest beef.

In this first episode on our May Mental Health Month Series, Katharine and Valene get real and raw. Both having dealt with various mental health issues, and the stigmas that surround them, the ladies of Millennial Ag bring you this series not just because May is Mental Health Month, but because they truly believe this is one of the issues in agriculture that just gets glossed over. They share parts of their own mental health journeys, their own “whys” for doing this series, and lay out where the month will take us. We invite you into a very vulnerable episode to hear our take on mental health, and to hopefully join ranks with us in combating this silent disease that we can let break us, or make us.