Food as Medicine: How Nutrient-Dense Crops Reverse Chronic Disease

0:00 Hey everybody, welcome to the Green Cover podcast where we have really interesting conversations with some of the top agricultural producers and experts in the regenerative movement. Join us as we learn together how we can regenerate God's creation for future generations. We're going to take just a little bit of a different tack today. Instead of just talking specifically about soil health, we're going to be talking a lot about human health and how the two tie together.

0:27 And if you've been watching the news or listening at all, you know that we've got a huge health crisis here in America. We spend more per capita than any other country in the world on health care. Over $12,000 per person. We spend over $4.3 trillion as a country on health care. And that is just a huge amount. 93% of Medicare claims relate back to chronic disease. And diabetes is 10 times more prevalent than it was back in the 1960s.

0:57 And today we have a guest who knows these statistics all too well and is doing some really cool things to come up with very creative, very regenerative solutions to some of these problems. So welcome Aaron Martin. Aaron is a friend of ours. Aaron, we've known you for quite a while now. You are the founder of Fresh RX Oklahoma, a clinical gerontologist and just really kind of a reach and a superstar. So, thank you for joining us.

1:29 Thanks, Keith. Yeah, it's been great to know you and know your work and to work together and with all the other rock stars, too. So, we need as many as we can get, right? For sure. So, it's been a lot of fun. So, a lot of people probably don't even know what a gerontologist is. So, give us just a little bit of background, give us a little bit of your education, your work background, and then we'll kind of dig into some of the really cool things that are going on.

1:55 Yeah. So, baby boomers, a lot of people know what baby boomers are. That was my parents' generation and it was the biggest generation. And that is aging in this country today. And so gerontology and gerontology schools were born kind of expecting this problem that 10,000 baby boomers are turning 65 every single day and they're actually on an average of 15 or more prescription drugs per year and they have multiple chronic conditions and it's costing our health care system like you just mentioned a lot of money and we're in trouble because of that.

2:39 And so gerontology is about the aging process and gerontologists go into all different kinds of fields. They go into policy, they go into advocacy. I went through a track where I was being trained to be a nursing home administrator or an assisted living type administrator. And during that time in my program, I was learning a lot about what natural processes of aging is and how that was actually different than what I was seeing in the United States.

3:15 And so I was director of social services over seven affordable housing sites for seniors. And I was learning all of us gerontologists learn the physiological changes of aging, like what is a natural, what are things that people experience psychologically what they experience as they age—lots of loneliness, lots of loss as you get older—and just experiencing life is challenging. And then we also learn about different cultures and how they respond to aging and it's really a social work-based field but there's also medical professionals like geriatricians who focus, who are MDs but focus on older adults.

3:57 They'll come over to the gerontology school and get some additional learnings. Like something that a lot of people wouldn't know is when a regular doctor takes your temperature. In a young person it's 98.6 but in older people it may be different and you have to know those types of things. So there are a lot of differences in the bodies as they age, but I was learning about like what does it take to have a healthy

4:25 Life and have longevity and I was putting those pieces together at that time. So, I actually started working in a retirement community when I was 15 years old. And by the time I was in my mid-20s, I had worked in all levels of long-term care, including hospice care. And so, I'd really seen the systems of aging and how challenging it was for adult children of older adults to navigate those things. And I was trained on Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security by lawyers and really understanding those systems and how to help and empower people to navigate those systems. But I was seeing them all these things as band-aids on a much bigger problem with chronic disease. And that's kind of where I went from there.

5:13 Yeah. Well, that's a great background. And just for the record, I am 41 days from being a baby boomer. I was so I'm Gen X but barely. Yeah. So yeah, that's those are those old people, not me. Right. But so I mean a fascinating background and great experiences, but how did you get from there to where you've been really immersed in the regenerative world and you know I want you to talk a little bit about your Fresh RX program in Tulsa there because you know that's just such a cool story and I think it's a great model for other people to follow and set up hopefully. So how did you kind of make that transition over to where you find yourself now?

5:58 It's amazing God's journey that he puts us on and when you look back you realize how intentional the path was and but you don't know it in the moment. One of the things I started really changing my own diet and my lifestyle as I was learning more about the aging process in school. I started, really cleaning up my diet and I saw changes in myself and I was actually able to come off some prescription drugs as well during that time. And I was learning about herbal medicine and different medicines all over the world that God created. And I started learning about something called the blue zones where people age the longest in the world. It's the largest concentrations in the world. There's about six of them. There's some other quasi blue zones that people will speak of, but mainly six that were identified by Dan Buettner in the Blue Zone book and now a series on Netflix and these areas where they have the most hundred year olds in the world and what those things had in common. They had a lot in common. One of the things although they were very different cultures, they had herbal medicine they used. They ate a lot of local food. They had very close-knit communities and they lived intergenerationally.

7:16 I think they had a sense of purpose which people could call spirituality or purpose, God's plan, however you want to describe that they had some sense of that which is this deep I think a deep hole in a lot of people who haven't figured out what that is for them. And so that that kind of aids in probably better mental health and emotional health as well. And they had a very plant-forward diet but more so like whole foods. They're not eating like at McDonald's every day and that kind of thing. And weren't they active in growing a lot of their own food as well? Yeah. Yeah. And active in general, so a lot more walking in their communities.

7:57 There were older people living with like five generations of their families. So lots of support and love and community as well. And yes, many of them would grow their own food or probably process a lot of their own food and probably are eating a lot of locally grown food right there in their community. So, it's going to be super fresh. It's not large-scale so it's probably going to be more nutrient-dense and we'll obviously we're going to get into some of that. So I was connecting food as medicine at that time, but I I never connected it, which is all ironic, to agriculture. And randomly, I had a mutual friend who

8:37 Was running who was the executive director of Kiss the Ground in Los Angeles at the time because that's where I was getting my masters at USC. And I was just kind of admired her work. She had started this community garden in Venice Beach and just doing some local food type stuff. And they had this new certificate program on soil advocacy and I was just kind of curious and I said, 'Hey, can I get in this little course?' And I was starting to read, there was a lot of reading, a lot of research, a lot of books and it was very foreign to me. But I started reading soil science. I never thought about agriculture. I grew up in cities. None of my family members were in farming. I never really gave it a lot of thought, which is probably a lot of people in metropolitan areas. They're not connected to it. We're super detached. Our food comes from a package in a grocery store, right? We're detached both from food and farming and our own health. And detached from each other, I think, in a lot of ways, too. And so there's a lot of detachment going on. And so I started reconnecting these dots in my brain and a lot of other people's brain that's been utterly destroyed. And so it's all ironic that I didn't think food was connected to soil health, but how could it not be if it's growing there, right? And I was shocked by how much our food has been depleted in particularly micronutrients, vitamins minerals phytonutrients over the last like 50 to 100 years. But so I was connecting like, oh well that must have to do with some of this chronic disease. If we're depleted of vitamins and minerals, your body is going to not be able to heal itself and so you're going to get chronic disease. So I kind of already understood this idea about health and aging. And so when I started learning that it connected all these dots for me and then I was like wow, aging or healthy aging might actually start in the soil.

10:53 And what gave me hope was like this is horrible. I'm seeing long-term care. We are destroying our bodies. Our bodies are being destroyed. Our health care systems collapsing. Like not a lot of hope here. Kind of discouraging. Yeah, very discouraging. And but this gave me hope for the first time. And when I learned about regenerative agriculture and the ripple effect of benefits on the climate, animal health, plant health, human health, that we could actually regenerate the nutrients that we've lost in the way we've farmed, but we could actually increase it. I'm just thinking, wow, this could be the answer for everything.

11:34 And that's when all those dots connected. And it was like a light bulb. It's not even one light bulb. It was like 40 light bulbs going off just crazy. And you know, God's been chipping away at me for this time, putting me through fires, forging me and getting me aligned to this idea. How long ago was this? It wasn't that long ago, right? This was in 2017. Okay, so yes, not all that long ago. Only about eight years ago. And Fresh RX wasn't even a star in my eye, you know, a twinkle in my eye. And I moved back to Tulsa. I had another God thing, Keith. So I had two really big moments where because I had grown up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Actually, a suburb of Tulsa. More of a sod farming kind of area, which was really foreign to me. But I wanted to get out. It was like a typical young person want to get out in the world and experience new things. So I moved out to Los Angeles and done all that and gone to school and working and doing this whole thing. And I got another lightning bolt moment of calling me back to work in Oklahoma. And I had sworn, you know, I am no way. Never coming back. Not coming back. No way.

13:09 My best friend at the time, still my best friend today, she said, 'Aaron, if all the good people move away from Oklahoma, what happens to Oklahoma?' I was like, 'Wow, that's a really good point.' And I had some other lightning bolt type moments. It took a couple to get me to consider it. And I begrudgingly moved back to Tulsa. And it's amazing to say now it was the best thing that ever happened in my life. It helped me launch a culmination of all of these teachings and learnings and to really create community through the fresh arts program.

13:53 I moved back in 2019 right before the pandemic. I had a couple of years starting in 2017, I started helping families navigate long-term care, but also with what I would say a holistic flair, and I was teaching them to eat better and do these types of things. I've seen clients have great success. The pandemic hit, I moved back to Tulsa, still serving clients, still speaking publicly about these things. But the pandemic hits and I can't really speak publicly, can't really go into long-term care and serve people. So I had a lot of free time and certainly the food system had many cracks in our society and COVID highlighted lots of those things.

14:39 One of those things was how fragile our food system is and that felt like a very immediate need for people. So I was out volunteering when there were farm to family food boxes being given out. I was working with local nonprofits just volunteering, seeing what's going on. And then I was meeting with young people on farms and people thinking about how we need to grow our own food, let's solve this problem. There was a lot of iterations of that, lots of different groups. And I started really honing in and God is moving me through here. I met a doctor in North Tulsa.

15:19 North Tulsa was a food desert, still very much a food desert. Didn't have a grocery store for 14 years. Very low income area. High rates of mortality from diabetes. There was a lot of attention on this area in Tulsa because it's very much so underserved and has been for a very long time. In fact, a 10 to 11 year longevity difference between North and South Tulsa, which clearly piques my interest as a gerontologist in the disparity there and why that is. And it was really just about access to healthy food and other types of resources.

16:00 This doctor said, 'Aaron, my patients are coming to the doctor, they're taking their medications, but they're diabetic and they're getting worse. Their A1C level, which is how you measure where people are in their diabetes, is skyrocketing. It's super high. They're at risk for having kidney failure, stroke, amputation, and we've got to do something about this.' I totally agreed. And he said, 'Help me raise money to do this.' I said, 'Okay, I have some free time during the pandemic.' We launched. I raised $185,000 over four months on Zoom with funders. We literally started in a parking lot. We bought food and education for people since we couldn't do in-person classes at the time.

16:54 There was kind of a community committee with the doctor and they were putting the pieces together of this program and they said, 'Okay, well, we'll order the food from Walmart or Amazon.' Well, in 2017, this would have been just three years prior when all those light bulbs came off and I had this in my back pocket. I said, 'No, farmers using good soil health practices, local economy, good farmers that really care, those are the people that we want to source this from.'

17:30 Food from because if we have any chance of getting people to eat fruits and vegetables, let's keep it the most nutrient-dense, beautiful food that these farmers deserve to be honored and to be a part of this process to be recognized as what I call farmers being the longevity heroes because so much of what they do is predicting the health of people. I mean there's a lot more steps involved with that. People have to choose to eat it. But it's the sweat and blood and tears of farmers that is very unrecognized and I wanted them to be a part of this program.

18:11 If people said that there was really it would be really unlikely, Erin, that you would be able to do that, right, with just our current system. It wouldn't be an easy feat. And I definitely am someone who likes a challenge. So I said, you know, I'm only going to source from local regenerative farmers.

18:30 Yeah. And that's also important because that nutrient density is so closely tied to taste and to smell. And nobody wants to eat vegetables that are just blah or bland. And so you've got a much better chance of getting these flavorful aromatic vegetables into people's diets. Not to mention that they're going to be far healthier for that as well.

18:54 So we can count this as one good thing that came out of COVID, I guess, because Fresh RX really was kind of birthed out of that. It was a lot of good things that came out, but we'll count this as one. So from those humble beginnings, how has it grown?

19:10 It's grown drastically. We've quadrupled in size. We went from that one clinic, we had mostly one clinic and then we had a couple from another clinic initially. So basically two clinics and we've grown to getting referrals from over 22 primary care clinics in Tulsa across six health systems. We've navigated lots of challenges, but there hasn't been it's been actually the path of least resistance in my life and it's very clear that God has opened every door possible that needed to be and shut doors that we didn't need to go in and really being a part of the regenerative world and who've appreciated and recognized this work has really launched us in so many ways.

20:00 And being able to speak across the country about soil health and human health and really use Fresh RX as this case study. We have had incredible health outcomes. I could tell you so many stories about people transforming their health. We've had people come in the program suicidal and not be suicidal anymore. We've had people come into the program legally blind and leave not legally blind anymore because diabetes really affects the eyes.

20:28 We have had people fully reverse their chronic diseases. We've had people go into remission of cancer in our program. We've had people come off all of their prescription drugs or considerably decrease their dependency on prescription drugs. And it's been an incredible thing to watch the doctors want to be a part of this, the farmers feeling reinvigorated, appreciated, having a diversified market to sell to, and to see the patients embody these things that I know I always knew was possible, but that they made the choices inevitably to do that.

21:04 And from the very beginning, I knew just doing this on grant dollars was not going to be sustainable and that this really deserved to be a recognized healthcare intervention, but I knew that that's a pretty controversial topic or it has been in the past. But I think there's been some changes that have been made that have kind of opened the doors in the last five years and even in the administration now there's this alignment that I don't think we've ever seen before that the topic about our food system has not really been a mainstream conversation and so now it's given some validity.

21:47 On May 1st we passed the Food Medicine Act of Oklahoma, which requires insurance companies that cover folks on state Medicaid, so low-income folks. A lot of people think that population doesn't want to change or get healthy, and I can tell you from experience that's very untrue. They just need the resources and to be taught, and then just like everybody else, they want to be healthy, they want to feel good. So we're working with the state to implement that. We have lots of support, but we're excited to see Oklahoma implement this.

22:27 We also included a requirement for local food or at least a prioritization of local food sourcing. We want to stimulate local economy on the back of food as medicine. I think that's something we can do nationally. There's lots of groups in the nation that do these types of programs that also source local food. There's also a really good friend of mine, Dr. Steven Chin in California who runs a program and he only sources regenerative food as well. So him and I very much echo each other. He's served 5,000 patients with regenerative, and I think these two movements coming together and being aware of each other makes us more powerful.

23:17 But I want to go back just a little bit because I want to make sure people don't miss this: Fresh RX and the food is medicine policy are being funded through insurance companies, and that's stunning to me. It's the way it should be because food is medicine. They're paying for medicine, and doctors are writing prescriptions, insurance companies are paying for it, and that's how we're driving this forward. A few years ago that would have been almost unthinkable.

23:54 The reason why they're really interested in doing this is because there's a need, but because it actually drives cost savings. We spend way too much money on the cost of poor nutrition—more than we do on our military. We have agriculture everywhere, but we have food deserts and people sick. That doesn't make sense. The cost savings are huge for this. We could save the country billions of dollars on health care cost. With diabetes we've seen almost a five times ROI, return on investment, and that is really what's ultimately driving insurers to want to pay for this because they get paid a capitation rate per person, and if they don't spend all that, they get to keep it.

24:57 Our argument is that food as medicine programs should share in those cost savings and that it should go back into the community, and ultimately I think the farmers should be paid dividends on these health outcomes, and that really creates this circular economy that goes back into incentivizing farmers to grow healthy nutrient-dense food. And then we know the ripple effect on the environment and everything else, our water and how that can happen. Insurance is doing this all over the country. There are programs in commercial, Medicare Advantage, and Medicaid. There are some 20 states that are doing this at a Medicaid level. Our hope is that this would be federalized, particularly within this administration, to make this like open sesame: every insurance is going to cover it if you've got a chronic disease, and maybe even you can use your HSA dollars to pay for food and regenerative food, which is actually starting to happen. We're really excited to see where this can go nationally.

26:04 Agriculture folks need to be at these tables discussing this. And we want more medical professionals to understand the difference between food in a grocery store, food at a food bank, and food grown at a local regenerative farm and maybe why they would want to prescribe that over something else, right?

26:26 Yeah. And again, I just can't be overstated how important that is that the insurance companies are getting on board, not because they're altruistic but because it's to their financial advantage as well, which just proves the point that this is working and it's a win for all the folks involved. I want to go back to the farmer side of this a little bit. So as you were starting Fresh RX, was it difficult to find farmers growing, you know, this because it's mostly fruits and vegetables, I'm assuming, right? Was it difficult to find them? And have you seen more people enter into this production space because of what you've done?

27:10 It's been a very interesting journey. I really turned over stones. But I don't know if God brought me back to Tulsa also because we had a lot of just these young people in Tulsa who had quit their nine-to-five jobs to become regenerative farmers. So I was super lucky at first. I had a smaller group of farmers and I would buy everything they had available. So I started at the farmers market. I found several farmers there that use regenerative practices. I had to ask certain questions because they may not even identify as that. And then I got word of mouth through other farmers. Farmers know other farmers that may not be selling at the farmers market, but maybe they have a CSA or they've got other stuff going on. So I built a good network, really a core group of about 15 farmers. We've served about 27 small-scale producers and more and more people also have entered into using more regenerative practices or just starting new farms. Lots of new and beginning folks, families that just wanted to grow healthy food for their own family because they realized that they needed to do that for their family, that maybe want to sell a little bit extra of their food.

28:32 And so we really started by aggregating a lot of similar products but from different farmers to get the amount for 50 or 100 people that we needed. We made the barriers super low. As we grow we're having to kind of do a little bit more as more and more farmers come online, making sure produce safety and those kinds of things. We're working through all that kind of stuff. We did so much to support them especially initially to scale because many of these farmers weren't cultivating their full land, just obviously a quarter acre of vegetables was a lot of vegetables which is great for us. But we worked very closely. Some of these key partners were the conservation districts and the conservation commission who really care about conservation, care about regenerative agriculture, and they really came in and stepped in and helped these farmers. We also worked in tandem with them with the NRCS and the USDA to help them access and get funded for things like high tunnels which we really needed to be able to extend seasonality. We do have cold and very hot here in Tulsa in Oklahoma and wind and all the different weather right now. We've had an insane amount of rain. So it's very challenging.

29:54 We have gone into Oklahoma City which actually has a lot of great regenerative growers and then not too far off in western Arkansas, there's some great food hubs that have great growers in those areas. So we really haven't gone outside of a 200 mile radius. And as we've grown, we've become more concentrated where we have to go outside of the Tulsa County area less and less. And as these farmers locally have grown and what's really exciting is we've started to really build a local food system with both conventional and regenerative agriculture.

34:44 It was a really wonderful event that you all hosted at the Culinary Vegetable Institute with Bob Jones, which by the way, what an incredible place that was. Amazing, mindblowing. It was such a beautiful place to do this convening and to be with like-minded, amazing, passionate people. And we got to talk with Cali Means who had called in also with Jimmy Emmens, our good friend, who's now the assistant chief of the NRCS. And we got to start talking to them about the benefits of food as medicine and also for regenerative agriculture.

35:30 I did get to go to Washington DC and go by the West Wing of the White House and meet with Cali. We had several conversations in between there about different ideas and what's happening in the food is medicine space. And we had lots of different conversations about why hospitals would care about this. Don't they want to make money off sick people? And actually hospitals are not making money off these particularly certain sick people. They're not actually built for chronic disease. They're built for more emergency medicine. And so they actually do want to do this. So we got to clear up and discuss some of these barriers.

36:06 The MA report will come out with a secondary report and help to advise kind of action steps that can be incorporated there. So had a great conversation with Cali, going to continue to work with him. We got to meet with the chairman of the MAHA caucus as well and they actually want us to come testify with a regenerative farmer, our doctor, a patient, and myself, hopefully sometime in September.

36:32 We're hoping most of these groups are talking about a fund that Barack Obama actually set up for Centers for Medicare and Medicaid innovation fund. And it's really to use that fund to demonstrate innovation in the Medicare and Medicaid space. And so Cali is helping to recommend that we do a national food as medicine demonstration so they can measure these impacts on a larger scale, and hoping that happens.

36:58 We also got to meet with HHS Health and Human Services and meeting with some special advisers to Robert Kennedy and mention the same thing. They're really excited about these new nutrition guidelines that are coming out. Our food pyramid is really the recipe for diabetes. And so really changing that and making sure there's not special interests involved and making sure people know at least the main guidelines, that it's not necessarily funding to do demonstrations, but at least set some precedent, and we're really excited to see some of the changes that will come.

37:35 Obviously, RFK has taken some bad chemicals out of bad foods, but we want to see some of those good foods funded, and I think that's coming. And we're really excited that he ended up while I was in DC, fortunately and unfortunately, he did make a visit to Oklahoma City. I didn't get to see him, but they did have a making Oklahoma healthy again event. And so that's pretty exciting that he visited.

37:59 We're really excited to implement the food as medicine bill, but hopefully something nationally can come because once Medicaid in certain states start doing stuff, the holy grail is really getting it integrated into Medicare, which is where a lot of people are insured through that are older adults and where these costly costs are coming from. And so they are particularly excited about food as medicine with this administration. It's very much aligned. And I have heard from other healthcare lobbyists and professionals in DC that they actually haven't seen an alignment like this ever in the last 30 years. They said kind of with there was some alignment with Obamacare and marketplace care and that kind of stuff.

38:40 But nothing close to this. And so pretty radical. Yeah, and something, you know, on our food is medicine bill in Oklahoma, we had five unanimous votes on that bill. So something we actually could all agree on, which we desperately need. And so I'm just trying to drive it home as much as I can with a lot of help.

39:15 Well, that's just super exciting to see. Like I say, all these stars are aligning and I think there's a lot of hope for the future for that. And I do want to talk just a little bit about the future. Do you see because this is a question I wanted to ask you in Ohio, but we never got the chance. Do you see these food as medicine, fresh RX type programs expanding to include regeneratively grown grains and grass-fed proteins? And, you know, do you see it expanding beyond just fruits and vegetables to include a lot more of the overall diet?

39:55 Absolutely. And there are kind of three different sections of food as medicine. There's produce prescription, which predominantly fruits and vegetables. There's something called medically tailored grocery that a lot of people really haven't tapped into yet, and we're hoping to actually expand into that space, and that would include dairy, protein, and things of that nature. And then there's something called medically tailored meals, which has a lot of room for improvement in regenerative agriculture. Those are really mass-produced, kind of like meals on wheels. And so there's a lot of room, I think, for growth there. And so a medically tailored meal is just a pre-made meal that would be associated with appropriate for different chronic diseases. There's a great group in Boston called Community Servings and they actually do a lot of local sourcing. I'm imagining some of those farmers probably use regenerative practices and they make incredible meals and they can do up to like 15 different arrangements of food based on different allergies and chronic diseases. It's really impressive.

41:00 But there's a lot of room for different types of growers or ranchers to get inside of these spaces. And I'm excited. There's a lot of groups doing more research on why local and regenerative may improve these outcomes. Not only just maybe the health outcomes, but maybe compliance because you mentioned earlier the taste of the food. You know, eating a vegetable from McDonald's is disgusting. No wonder no one likes vegetables, but those aren't vegetables.

41:37 Yeah, I think there's lots of space. A lot of regenerative protein growers have reached out, you know, really wanting to be a part of this. And so I'm trying to figure out ways to expand in those areas and include more growers because there's just so many ways they could participate.

41:57 Yeah, and hopefully, you know, as the general public sees the success of these programs that it will click in their heads that, oh, you know what, if this is good for sick people, this will probably be good to keep me from getting sick. So I should be looking for that food myself. Yes, and you know, utilize my own spending power to source this. I mean, that's the hope. That's the goal. And then we really see it start to grow and expand. Absolutely.

42:28 So one last kind of topic of questions that I'm curious about is do you see this type of movement encouraging and incentivizing more people to grow some of their own food? Do you see a kind of a resurgence in a home garden type thing, or do you see or find that being possible and what can we do to try to encourage that? Yeah, I do think that's possible. That's a topic that's brought up to us.

42:57 We do some different type of herb potting classes and if people have particular interests, we connect them to those resources. I don't think everyone wants to do that or it's not amenable to their lifestyle, but yes, I do see that is really to a lot of people the ultimate goal is really being self-sufficient, knowing where your food came from and being able to grow it.

43:22 With kids, I think it's really impactful. We partner on a childhood obesity program and they're teaching the kids how to grow, how to cook, and what nutrition is. And I think it's incredibly empowering. And they've actually said there's a really cool statistic. They say a grocery store doesn't necessarily fix a food desert or improve health necessarily, but one visit to a community garden as a child can actually change the trajectory of a kiddo.

43:49 And so even if someone doesn't grow into an adult who's growing all their food, that's fine. But exposure to that, I think, is critical. And the kids are more likely to eat it when they had some part in growing it. 100%, 100%.

44:07 So I do think that's a part of this movement. I think we're seeing a resurgence of those victory gardens that were really well known during World War II. Jacqueline Capriyotti is working on some of that movement nationally and kind of in the Magna Trail. And so I hope people do. I'm moved to do it. I'm moved to do it, too. Yeah, well, yes, so am I.

44:30 And you know, so my wife and I, we decided one of the ways we want to invest our money, we're building a greenhouse, one of the greenhouse in the snow type deals, so we can run it 365 days a year. Hopefully be able to have citrus trees in there. Right now, it's just a hole in the ground, so I got a lot of work to do. But that's what we want. That's where we want to spend our time and money growing food for our family, for our employees here at Green Cover, and just, hopefully encourage and incentivize other folks to do that.

45:01 And I was just at the Nebraska Soil and Water Conservation Society meeting and met a couple from Lincoln who in this block of Lincoln that I remember my wife used to live there and it was a rough neighborhood. They've got like 20 community gardens now or 20 different people growing gardens just in this one block, one single block because they've really pushed it.

45:28 And you know what they said? They said the biggest thing that we grow is community. They said before we started doing this because they've lived there like 40 some years, we only knew like three people. Now we know everybody. We know everybody because and they've just transformed the community. They've increased property values exponentially because they've cleaned up the neighborhood and they're growing food as a community. It's just such a great story. I mean, we need that on every block.

45:58 Yeah, food absolutely connects us all and that it's beautiful to me, that's how I see Fresh Rx, too, is that food is this entry point to deeper healing and connection. And so it's just my Trojan horse actually to community.

46:14 Yeah, it's just to connect us and it really does. Lincoln has some great initiatives. Nebraska's hot on the trail. I think Kansas might be next and Nebraska's following. So really excited to continue to support efforts there as well.

46:31 Yeah, well, you know, as a true red corn husker, it's a little hard for me to know we're trailing Oklahoma and Kansas in. Give us one thing. We just have one thing, you know.

46:42 But the greenhouse in the snow, you know, I got to go to Alliance and tour the original one and the newer one. And yeah, that is so cool that you all are doing that. I can't wait to hear more about your journey doing that. And I want to build one of those, too. That it's so cool.

47:02 And so, here's the other cool thing. Like in Carney, there's a church that put one up and it's they're using that.

47:07 To minister to their community. I'd love to do that at our own church eventually. I got to get mine built before I can try to push into that. But what better way to serve and reach out to your community than to help them grow food and help them understand how important that food is.

47:24 Yeah, very exciting. Any last closing comments, Aaron? If people want to get involved, how can they? I'm assuming you probably have a website for Fresh RX and maybe even the food is medicine. How could people learn more?

47:40 Yeah, absolutely. Freshrx.org is our website for Fresh RX. We also have a YouTube channel that has all of our cooking and nutrition classes and some stress management classes on there. That's available for anyone that wants to learn. We also just launched all of our recipes on our website as well. There's a tab on there for recipes. You can really learn a lot about us from the website and our YouTube channel.

48:11 If you're looking and interested in starting your own food as medicine program, I also have a food as medicine guide that I created on my website aaronwartin.com. A lot of people get inspired from these podcasts and want to get a 30 minute call. And if I took every 30 minute call, I wouldn't actually work. But I do have that guide on there and there's other options to interact with me to help you. I offer technical assistance. I do speaking. I can do workshops and trainings and happy to point you in the right direction or connect you with resources.

48:47 There's also lots of free resources out there. The Gretchen Swanson Center for Nutrition in Omaha has a ton of resources. They're also called the Nutrition Incentive Hub. They have a few names, so you can find them somehow. Incredible resources on how to start a program. And I just really encourage you to have a relationship with your local farmer. I know a lot of farmers are probably listening to this, but maybe you don't grow food, but find someone you can have a relationship with. I've been ordering from organic regenerative farms as well, just for personal use.

49:21 Alexander Family Farm, just super excited. I can actually eat their yogurt. As someone who's had to be dairy-free, best ever. They pointed me in the direction of Burrow's Family Farm that does regenerative olive oil and almond butter. So if you are fortunate to have money, vote with your dollars. Do it at the farmers market. Subscribe to a CSA and be an example of your own health. You can't really fix other people, but you can work on yourself.

49:54 Yeah, that's a great point. So thank you so much, Aaron. Thank you, not only for this conversation, but thank you for all that you're doing to advance this movement and thank you for being willing to sacrifice your time to go to DC and speak up for us. It's important and it is the time when things are changing and moving.

50:21 So folks, thank you for listening to this episode of the Green Cover podcast. We encourage you to take advantage of some of those resources that Aaron shared, learn more, and take control of your own health and that of your family. Thank you so much.

50:34 My brother and I started Green Cover in 2009 because we understand what it's like to be a farmer starting out on the journey to improve soil health. We saw the power of plant and biological diversity on our own farm here in Nebraska. But we found that it was difficult to get the right cover crop seed mix. We also learned that there was a big learning curve in successfully implementing cover crops.

50:58 That's why we built Green Cover so that farmers like you can access the highest quality cover crop seed put into the right diverse mixes along with the technical advice and the educational resources to help you successfully implement cover crops on your own operation. So contact us today and we'll help you with the right cover crop mix for your farm or ranch so you can regenerate your portion of God's creation for future generations.