Using Food as Medicine: The FreshRx Program for Health and Local Farms

0:07 Got lots of people signed up today so I'm excited for this one and should have some good questions.

0:21 All right, welcome everyone to—gosh, what is this, the third or fourth webinar that we've had this summer? It seems like it's gone by so fast, probably one of the quickest summers I can ever remember. But I'm actually kind of ready for fall because I don't know about y'all down there in Oklahoma, but we have been hot. We probably had more 100 degree days than I can remember in a long time, so I'm excited for the cooler weather. But thank you to everyone that has joined us for the first couple of webinars that we've had.

0:50 But this one we're really excited for. This is going to be a little bit of a different topic than anything we've covered in the past, but something I think you guys are really going to enjoy and learn from. And they're also going to share some opportunities for how you can get involved in ways that I think what really stood out to me when I saw both Aaron and Jimmy here in Nebraska was just the scope of what you guys are doing. It's kind of inspiring, so I'm looking forward to hearing from that. For those that are joined, if this is your first time, you are muted, so we will let Aaron and Jimmy talk for about 45 minutes, but we will open it up to questions at the end. So if you do have questions, feel free to type those out in the chat or in the Q&A portion, and we'll get to those in the end, probably around 12:45.

1:41 So with that, I was joking with Aaron and Jimmy earlier—I have a lot of bio that I could read about both of these wonderful speakers, but we'll start off with Erin. She is a fierce and passionate gerontologist and advocate. She started working with older adults at the age of 15 and attended the University of Tulsa's Collins College of Business and completed her bachelor's in business management, but since then has gone on to get a master's in gerontology from the University of Southern California, which is the first and number one gerontology school in the world, founded by AARP. With that, during her master's program, she ran a team of advocates serving over 700 low-income older adults in the Southern California area, and in 2017 founded Conscious Aging Solutions, which was founded to empower and educate older adults in navigating the Western health and social systems while offering organic and conscious approaches to aging successfully and powerfully. Which is a lot—you've done a lot in your short time here on this earth. But I'm excited to hear what all that actually truly means because to me that's a lot of 'wow, what is...'—I think about gerontology in a much different light than what you guys presented us here in Nebraska, so I'm looking forward to that.

3:06 And in addition to Erin, we've got a long-time customer, long-time friend of Green Cover. We've got Jimmy Evans from Lady, Oklahoma. I should have mentioned Aaron, you're from Tulsa, so we got two okies with us here today. But Jimmy, for those who don't know, Jimmy and his wife Ginger, they farm around two thousand acres in Lady, Oklahoma, and if you're familiar with the—what's that film that was about you, Jimmy?

3:43 I'm pretty sure it's spacing my mind right now. You guys had a really good article and a good video to go along with that. Did I cut out on you, Noah? What'd you say? I was asking—I couldn't remember what the film was that you guys had on the fire on your farm.

3:52 'From the Ashes'—from the Ashes, that's right. If you have not seen 'From the Ashes,' yeah, I would highly recommend that. I'll go ahead and I'll put that in the chat bar so that people can learn more about you because I think that's one of the best ways to learn about your farm and the resiliency of what you guys are doing, but that's enough for me. I've done.

4:09 A lot of talking. I'm going to open the floor up to Aaron and Jimmy and let you guys talk today about food and how we can use that as medicine for the future.

4:19 Absolutely, thank you very much, Noah. Great to see so many people on the call today. And thanks, Jimmy, for being here with me. We have done some really incredible work together. We really represent this bridge that we're building from healthcare, long-term care, the health of individuals and communities to the farmers who are really have the responsibility and are not recognized for the incredible work that you all are doing. And agriculture is public health, and we are here to make that known and to make that very clear. And to also present a program and implementation of that program to represent that bridge so people can see how that actually is happening.

5:09 So we'll go over really the nuts and bolts to the program that we've put together, the work that Jimmy and I are doing together to advocate for the farmers involved in this program and to really create a sustainable, what I'd like to say a regenerative program that can really impact not only the agricultural space but the public health space, the long-term care space, our communities, our mental health. The ripple effect is infinite. And I'll just start with kind of helping people understand why I am here and how I'm talking to you all. And then I'll let Jimmy kind of talk a little bit from there. And then we'll get into more details. But as Noah said, I am a gerontologist. A gerontologist is really an older adult advocate. We're not doctors, but we are kind of the bridges in the space of healthcare and helping people kind of navigate the systems.

6:08 Then it was through working in all these different areas in long-term care that I saw the deep cracks in our healthcare system and how many people were horribly ill and on a lot of prescription medications. And it was through my studies and my understanding and my travels and my experiences and my personal experiences that I started to see food as the biggest impact on how we age. And everybody loves somebody. Everybody knows someone who's sick. Everybody's lost a parent or a grandparent or heaven forbid a child and sometimes to chronic conditions. And these are things to me that are somewhat preventable. That if we focus more intention on preventative medicine, that we would really see a big shift. And so that's why I've started really speaking and connecting a lot more with farmers and in this regenerative movement. And that's why I hooked up with Jimmy Evans.

7:18 Well, most of you know, or at least heard of me, probably in my work in the regenerative ag for the last twelve years. And I've met Aaron a couple of years, three years ago, probably now. Time flies when you're having fun. And it just really chimed in with me that I need to connect with Aaron and be part of what she was doing. And little did we know the first conversation or two that we had, how it was all going to tie together and link up and become this really one of the most best experiences I've ever had in my life, getting connected with Aaron and the work she's doing with people in the Tulsa area, but also how we can connect the soil to human health.

8:13 We, as soil stewards, have known for years that there was something to improving soil health, improving plant health. And we all thought that it would help human health in the end because it was just better tasting, better nutrients in it. You know, a lot of the word 'nutrient density' has come along. And we all believed that, but this is the first time that we've ever been able to really link it with Dr. Farish up there in the medical clinic and what we're actually working with producers.

8:51 That's prescribing food for medicine. So it's changed the whole outlook of how I look at things in the soil and how we talk about it. And I think it's just the next revolution that we've got to get to. And if you really think about our great grandparents and our grandparents, how healthy they were because they ate out of their garden. They literally ate everything that they raised, except maybe some salt and flour that they would buy. A lot of them even ground their own flour and made their own bread. But literally they raised everything they ate, and they were extremely healthy in an extremely manual labor workforce, not at all like what we do today. So there's a lot more coal taken on the body back then, so to speak, than nowadays. And yet they didn't have near the chronic diseases that we have. So you know, it should make sense to all of us, but sometimes we look right at the mirror and don't really see the beauty in what's in the mirror.

10:12 That's where I'm at. I'm going to let Aaron talk a little bit more now about how we got started in what the project really looks like, and then we'll have a bigger discussion about soil as we go through that with the producers.

10:28 Absolutely. Thanks, Jimmy. Us hooking up really connected the full picture and it really gave us access to a lot of the people already doing this incredible work for soil health. And what we found with working with farmers creating this prescription food as medicine is that this is something that's deeply fulfilling for the farmers to be involved in on multiple levels. They are able to connect their work on the farm to helping improve the healthcare and quality of life of individuals in their community. And that gives them this extra oomph and this inspiration to continue to do the work and to continue to regenerate their soil. They also have a brand new market that they can sell to wholesale, so they don't have to go necessarily to the farmer's market and spend that whole day there and then have leftovers and all the rigamarole that a lot of farmers go through when selling produce. Another good. So this is an opportunity and a new market that we're actually providing. And on top of that, we provide technical assistance and some other things that Jimmy and I will go into a little bit more later.

11:41 So everybody understands the program we're talking about, there are about 200 produce prescription programs in the United States. A lot of them use the name Fresh Rx, so it's kind of a franchise term as I like to describe it. There is a Florida Fresh Rx. There was a Fresh Food Pharmacy with all F. So pharmacy with an F. And I like to say that all of the farmers are pharmacists with an F, right? You're creating the medicine. And if you're growing more regeneratively, you're really creating medicine. So there's 200 programs kind of like this in the United States, but ours is a little bit different. I'll tell you why. But all of them, most of them, are focused on type 2 diabetes because it's a chronic condition that we know repeatedly can be reversed completely with food and exercise. We know that our diet, processed food, processed sugars, is contributing to this pandemic of type 2 diabetes. So we understand that food can be prescribed medicinally and exercise prescribed. And so they've created these Fresh Rx programs. They're usually a hybrid of providing fruits and vegetables to people and also providing classes to them. So we don't just throw free food at them and expect them to know what to do with it. We have forgotten over time how to chop things, how to bake them, how to prepare them. And so we offer class cooking demos and nutrition classes along with the food. So people get free food every two weeks at a distribution. And so we actually source all of this food locally and from people using regenerative practices. Other programs do not do this.

13:34 Programs for the most part are still sourcing USDA mass-produced food, Walmart food, Amazon food. And because I had gone through the Kiss the Ground program, the soil advocacy program just out of my master's program, I had understood the soil science and why we should be doing it this way. And how we just didn't know a lot of this information before, and how we're actually creating more nutrient-dense food than even our grandparents had. And it's been incredibly depleted over time. So I started understanding like why all my clients would have all these chronic conditions and need all these medications. And then the medications are also stripping you of all these things.

14:18 The program works like this: We contract with clinics. The clinics, the doctors actually prescribe this program. We enroll them. They go to their regular clinic visits every two weeks. They get fruits and vegetables. And then twice a month they get a cooking and a nutrition class. We started with 50 people last year in July. And we had them for 12 months, so it's a 12-month program. We raised enough money to do this. The other challenge and opportunity with this program is they're all locally funded. So we'll talk more about what we're doing on the policy side to get this to be a more regenerative program.

14:59 Out of those 50 people, we had an incredible retention rate. We had 40 out of 50 people graduate from that program, which was exceptional. This was in an area in North Tulsa where people are in a food desert. So they didn't have access to a grocery store. They certainly didn't have access to a lot of local food. Transportation is a barrier. There's a lot of other trauma that a lot of these people are facing all the time. Lots are raising their grandkids as their kids are maybe incarcerated or have other really big challenges in their lives. And so 40 out of 50 people graduating who have very challenging lives who don't live in great areas was an incredible feat in itself.

15:46 But we had some incredible results. So people measure their kind of where they are with their diabetes with a measure called A1C. We measure A1C, their weight, and their blood pressure. We had 30 out of those 40 have some reduction in their A1C. And we had a very large percentage of those go from something called uncontrolled diabetes, which means you have an A1C over eight, go from uncontrolled to go below an eight, which means you're now controlled. The goal of the program is to reduce someone's A1C by one to two percent. And the average reduction we saw was 2.2 percent. And a lot of those results were happening just within three to six months, so it doesn't take very long. Every meal counts. And so we really revolutionized some people's lives. We had people go from a 14 A1C to a 6.9, lose 57 pounds, and come off of their medications.

16:53 So this really revolutionized people's lives. And we had incredible testimonials of people getting up in front of a bunch of people and talking to people and telling them about their success, getting on the news, having articles written about them in the newspaper about these incredible things that were happening. Not only health-wise, but quality of life: being able to socialize with their friends and family more, feeling less depressed, less anxious, being able to start new relationships. It ripples across the board. And so we are really excited that we've doubled the size of the program. So we're enrolling for a hundred new people and have contracted with—we were originally contracted with two clinics, now we're up to about four or five. And we're really excited to expand the program.

17:44 So Jimmy, tell us a little bit more about how we've really helped the farmers on this side. So we've got the participants, but we've got the farmers. And so we've got a cohort of about 20 farmers, six to eight farmers at a time probably contribute to each distribution. So talk a little bit more about your involvement with them.

18:04 Part of my job as the soil guy is to meet with the producers, get them to understand how to grow regeneratively. You know, quit rototilling the land as much as they used to, try to do some no-till with heavy mulch, do soil testing, get a Haney test, PLFA test. And then now with the new testing that we can get them certified as a regenerative farmer and verified as well, and they put that stamp on their food products.

18:44 So that they really understand the true meaning of healthy soil can really change the outcome of the fruits and vegetables that they raise. Also, you know, a lot of these producers aren't large farms yet. We're talking and trying to get more people and producers involved to grow because as this grows out from northeast Tulsa into other areas of the state and other clientele and other doctors and clinics, and just as it grows, we're going to need more producers to grow food.

19:23 You know, most of us, including myself, have grown a lot of crops over the years but most of them have either been feed crops for animals or seed crops to grow more plants, but not necessarily just actually food for people, human consumption. And so we need more of that, and so that's part of my task and role: how do we get a commodity grain producer or cattlemen or some type of animals to start thinking regeneratively and to get involved and have a market for this?

20:04 Because a lot of the challenges is when you start growing food, where is my market? Can I sell that? And Aaron's touched on a little bit of that. You know, we can guarantee them a good market because we have the people in need of that, so that's a really good start to producers. But then there's challenges with that as well.

20:30 USDA has lots of good programs right now that helps producers with hoop houses or greenhouses. If we're going to supply year-round food in Oklahoma, then we're going to have to grow some of that indoors when the weather is too adverse in the wintertime. So a lot of that requires a greenhouse. Yet when you try to apply the normal USDA programs to someone that owns 80 acres or less, maybe it's ten acres, maybe it's five acres, then some of them USDA programs really have a tough time matching the criteria to get in the program.

21:14 So I've been able to help numerous producers in that, get qualified with hoop houses and greenhouses to further their production and become very profitable because this is a really good entity to be involved with and you can grow lots of different things simultaneously as the growing season goes through, to become very profitable. So that's a part of the soil guy's role, so to speak.

21:48 Part of this, and then it's also just the promotion of that outside the window and how do we get out to the next level of consumers and producers? So it's like I said, it's one of the best things that I've done. Aaron talked a little bit about the graduation. We were able to go up and participate and be in that to hear the producers get up and give a testimonial of the food that they're growing, that's making a life-changing, life-saving difference in someone's health and their bodies. It was just really emotional and then to hear the people that were in the program that have changed their A1Cs and reduced that by 50 or more.

22:40 Got off of the medication by 40, 50, 60, 80, 90 percent of what they were on as a chemical fix for diabetes was just very, very powerful. And then to hear Dr. Farish, one of the leading doctors that got this all started, talk about how originally he thought we just get the food from Amazon and had never gardened himself, never really saw that. When he saw the results coming in and the quality of the food and how these patients were very quickly turning themselves around, he knew that there was a huge difference in the food and where it came from. And so now he actually has a garden in his backyard and he really understands more. So this is a really big circle that just keeps getting tighter and tighter, and everyone becoming more in harmony and in sync with one another. And it is truly, truly humbling experience to be a part of it.

23:51 Thank you, Jimmy, and just to add to that, a lot of people ask me how do you have a rate that you pay for certain things and do you have a wholesale rate, how do you do that? And I like to make it really clear that we are allowing the farmers to dictate their prices. We have some that are larger scale, we have some that are just little market gardeners, and so obviously they're not going to be able to charge. And we really looking at this as revolutionizing the local food system, creating a new market. So our intention is to support people if they are backyard gardening or they're doing massive multi-acre vegetable farms. We are going to meet people where they are, and our intention is to allow smaller scale, even underserved farmers, which you could argue all farmers are underserved, but really supporting people and growing. And we look at this as an investment. That's why even for some of our local farms we have been paying for help with labor. We've also looked at creating future like buying future CSA shares in bulk ahead of time so that if you have upfront costs for labor or infrastructure that you need to really get going, that's something that we're looking at creating contracts for.

25:13 We have a kind of a trajectory to grow to meet 1,200 people in the next five years. And we've had a team do some research on our financial path towards that, and they've actually calculated that we could possibly with 1,200 people in the next five years would actually save the state of Oklahoma 25 million dollars in health care costs. And that money, the money that it's going to take for us to save that much money, that money has got to go to local farmers in Oklahoma and maybe adjacent states if we need, but my intention is that money does not go to Amazon, it does not go to Walmart, it does not go to big corporations. It goes to investing in local food systems and agriculture and to those farmers who are literally the ones saving our lives. And it was really powerful to hear the farmers get up, and for the participants who are receiving the food to match that with an individual and a family that's creating that food for them was a really powerful thing. And I thought we need to be doing more farm visits and connecting participants. And people are so disconnected from their food in general. They just think it comes from the grocery store. They don't even associate their food with a plant that grows in the ground. And so people don't understand where peanuts come from or how they grow off of a plant. Like, there's just so many things that we're so disconnected from. So this program's really kind of bringing all that together.

26:44 So if you're interested in really talking to us about growing for this program, we would love to. We will have a website available and obviously our contact information. But I'd like to get into some of the policy things that we're going towards. We have really been connecting with a senator. Jimmy and I, a named Senator Jessica Garvin, who has been a big—

27:12 Advocate she actually runs a skilled nursing facility down in Duncan, Oklahoma, and they actually grow a lot of their own food there so she got it like that. She really understood I was presenting to the Diabetes Caucus and talking about the sourcing of the food and she was just right across the hallway and we were able to connect with her. We kind of got a referral that she might be interested and she has been a huge advocate for us.

27:38 So what we've been doing is really starting a lot of conversations, which is where it starts, and we are really interested in SoonerCare, which is Oklahoma's state Medicaid program, to actually pay for this because it only costs us around three to five grand a person to educate them and provide them with food for a year. We have the potential of saving upwards of twenty four thousand dollars per person per year. So if you're a business person or a numbers person you know that the ROI is incredibly huge, and I would argue there's a lot more savings that could potentially be attached to that.

28:16 And that's where they got this figure. The group at the University of Oklahoma said we'd save the state of Oklahoma 25 million dollars. Well, senators and representatives like that, and they will use that figure, and so we're really hoping that this will become an insurance reimbursable program, which means insurances, both private and public insurance, could potentially just pay for this program permanently.

28:45 And then we've also worked a lot with the Oklahoma Conservation Commission because they provide a lot of help with these farmers and coaching them and doing the soil tests and seeing where they're at and kind of coaching them along the way and really helping us to find new farmers. So they have been an incredible support to this program. Jimmy's been a huge part of that, and so we've been kind of navigating the policy space so that we can not just depend on grant funding but really create a regenerative program where we won't be limited to only enrolling 50 to 100 people, that we can really expand this even into the Oklahoma City area into more rural areas, and we're really excited about that.

29:33 Yeah, and one of the great things about working with the legislature, we also were able to pass the Healthy Soils Act in Oklahoma this year that gives the Conservation Commission, which I work for part time right now, the ability to put more people on the ground to help these producers to understand. And another thing that Dr. Farris would talk about too is this is just not limited to a diabetic patient. I'm talking about healthy foods for healthy bodies. There's other things that are health benefits out of this program. We're just focused mainly on the diabetic side of that right now because there's a huge need of that, but as he gets more into the program he's seeing a lot more benefits to the health of the body other than just the reduction of the diabetes in them, so it's very exciting.

30:27 It's also building local communities again in agriculture. Since you know the last 50 years, we are probably more than that, 70 or 80 years, since the 30s, there was a huge exit off the family farm through the 30s, 40s, and 50s, and still continues to this day somewhat. And as that happens you also drop the local communities and businesses and that interaction there locally. So this is a way that we can rebuild the communities, the small network, the producers get more in sync with their food and their crops that they're growing and why with them the health care system, and so it just makes a lot of sense to a legislator that's worried about funding.

35:47 Insurances can provide prepared meals to people who are just out of the hospital who cannot cook, so they are just unable to cook and can't really go anywhere, so they get delivered meals. That's pretty similar to meals on wheels programs, but my real intention is to really help some of those entities and those reimbursable programs that are already kind of happening look at how they're sourcing the food. As we see a lot more influx and support with agriculture monies through the federal government, getting a lot of these other organizations that are serving meals on wheels, medically tailored meals all over the country to really start looking at how they're sourcing the food and how that can be a much more medical than they even realize, because a lot of these people who are serving meals on wheels or medically tailored meals, which is still an incredible service, they still don't know. Even the people running these programs don't understand where it's sourced from. These are mass-produced meals, these are meals that have obviously chemicals in them. There's not very much nutrients by the time someone gets it, even if it was grown better than some of the other food. By the time they get it, by the time it's been processed, frozen, and shipped, a lot of the nutrients will be lost as well.

37:15 I think that they'll eventually become more interested in how they can be more productive and increase their numbers and their outcomes with individuals. Then I think in the next five years, just food is medicine as a more preventative nature, not just people who are homebound and out of the hospital, but much more preventative through more primary care clinics. I do believe that that will become a federally reimbursed, and that means this is a huge market that will be opened up for farmers. It's our interest, state locally in Oklahoma, to put language in legislation that keeps people who are pharmacists, like a provider like Fresh RX. It will require them to source local food. That is our interest to make sure that language is implemented. I know at the federal level the doctors are speaking about regenerative local food systems, so it is in the conversation. I do believe that it will get implemented in the next five years, so this will be huge.

38:24 The first question's from Charlie. He says, are there other states you're involved with? You kind of alluded to a lot of that. I'd love to help bring this program to Maine. So more specifically, what can people do on a local level to try and get this in their own state?

38:42 That's a great question, and a lot of people have reached out from other states going how can we bring this to our area? Fresh RX Oklahoma absolutely will help with consultations. We do consultations. We even would help you create your own budget, look at logistics, how do you do all these things, what kind of things do you track, how do you connect with the clinics, all of these kinds of things we do. We have hourly basis or project-based pricing for things like that. We obviously will help if you just have a few questions or something. That's fine. You can email. But we have advised the state of Kansas. We've worked with a community food bank in North Carolina. We've talked a little bit with someone in Mississippi. You don't have to just use us. There's a lot of information out there. The big question is always who's gonna pay for it? So there would have to be some type of mechanism to do that. There are some states that might pay for it, and that would be a great thing to be looking into. Just knowing who your legislators are is a good step in just having conversations about what benefits are available and what could we use for this?

40:04 We would love to support. We can also backend a lot of work. We really would love to be traveling more and creating more of the local food systems and just creating these pathways to have a program. So it's something we'd be willing, if there was funding available, to travel to also just do trainings and different things like that. So it can kind of be hodgepodged. We can backend an entire program and use things we've already created so you're not recreating the wheel. So there's options if you're looking for that and we'd be happy to discuss more detail offline.

40:42 And I also think Aaron, just a good conversation with your primary care doctor, start opening them avenues up to the doctors to get them thinking. Have them look at Dr. Farris. Dr. Farris is wanting to reach out, and as he writes research papers on this program, I think we'll prove in the end that his patients are recovering quicker with the nutritious food that's grown locally. And so I really think that's an important part of it as well because you have to have the doctors on board as well to get things going. So it's just good to get that conversation started. I've had a conversation with my own medical doctor and she's very in tune to that, and I'm looking forward to linking her to Dr. Ferris very soon. So I think that's how we'll grow this out. It's much like we do in agriculture—it's one producer learns from another. The medical field has got the same challenges as a producer has. We've been taught and educated that this is the way to do it, and now we're proving that there's another way to do it. And so there's a big mind shift that's going to happen in the medical field as well as on the agriculture side.

42:11 Well, it kind of goes back to everything where we've put everything into different sectors, and what you guys are trying to do is make that connection between medicine and food. And there needs to be more of that communication and more of a holistic approach. You know, doctors and farmers, they need to have that communication, and that's probably the most important aspect of all of this.

42:34 David asks, he says, 'I remain curious if you have done the study to better understand how much of the health improvement is due to simply a better diet with what you would call Walmart food, and how much of that is due to regeneratively grown food.' That's a great question. I get that one all the time, and so I am prepared to answer that question. That's a lot of the criticism that I get. And there are improvements just increasing the consumption of fruits and vegetables, no matter what they are. So absolutely, there's health benefits. Due to several recent studies, we know that regenerative practices create more nutrient-dense food. When you get all of the nutrients that you need, your brain says, 'I'm satiated. I am satisfied.' What happens when you don't get as much nutrients as you could get? You keep eating. And even if you're eating just way more, even whole foods, you're still eating too many calories. So you're overeating, which impacts these numbers of A1C, blood pressure, and weight, and even other chronic conditions. And so A1C may not be the greatest measure to kind of look at that. But we do know that regenerative food is more nutrient dense, which means you're more satiated, which means you won't be overeating. And we know overeating contributes to many, many chronic conditions. And we know from recent studies that there is a wide variety of nutrients in one item. So blueberries can range drastically from how they're grown, where they're grown. And we also know if something is locally grown that it's maintaining its nutrients. So we harvest on a Monday, Tuesday, we distribute.

44:28 Wednesday morning and it's in the hands of those people on that day. We know within 72 hours that most vegetables are losing 30 to 50 percent of their nutrients. So even if they're grown regeneratively, they're losing nutrients. So if you start with something pretty nutrient deficient and then you ship it, you're really not getting much. And so even if it's a fruit or vegetable, it's still going to have good stuff in it, it just might not have enough. So it means like you're not having to eat as much of that thing but you're getting as much nutrients. And your body is a self-building house. If it gets the vitamins and the minerals that it needs, your body heals itself. It knows what to do. It's an incredible computer.

45:11 Yes, it doesn't have to be regeneratively grown to have a positive impact. Does it have a bigger impact if it's regeneratively grown? Absolutely. And we know that through multiple studies. And we can make an analysis based on those studies to say we know we'll be more satiated. We know it has more nutrients in it, which means we'll be more healthy. As we know that being healthy, we need these types of phytochemicals and different things in the soil that we know regeneratively grown produce is producing more of. And there's doctors like Dr. Daphne Miller in California, Dr. Zach Bush in Virginia, that have been studying this and have been proving the exact same things Aaron's talked about, that it is more about locally grown and also in that regenerative soil that makes it better. But once again, there are differences, but there's a bigger difference if you can get that locally. So there is something to it.

46:14 For the longest time I've heard about these nutrient density meters and new things that are coming out in technology. And you mentioned a lot of these studies, but what does the research side of this look like within the next few years?

46:28 Well, I think it's really going to grow, Noah. We've been working with the Bionutrient Association, Dan Kitricks, and their new meter, their new instrument that they've been working on for several years now that can measure that density in vegetables and meats and grains. And we've actually sent products from Oklahoma here to their labs to start that process. So I think it's really going to start narrowing in. I was thinking about this the other day. It's what we can do if we really focus the energy of the country in this, in a matter of 11 years. We started talking about going to the moon until we put the first footprint on the moon in 11 years. So if we could focus the energy of the nation into this, then we can quickly see this turnaround and we could change the way that we have these conversations totally. It's just a matter of getting the mass workforce behind this to really get and the dollars. You know, it takes dollars to build all this stuff. Investments in the technology. But that's how fast we could do this if we could get the mass to understand this and to get this up to scale.

48:04 Say you do that, we've got the funding, we've got all the research. I'm curious to hear your opinion on how the farmers are going to be able to scale up because we know that right now we're not actually growing a lot of food. We're growing a lot of inputs for food. What do you think that looks like for if all the everything's there for it? Can the farmers actually grow this much local produce? And how do we educate them to get to that point?

48:33 Yes, it can be done and we can grow mountains of food very quickly if we set our mind to it. You know, if you look at during World War II, came out and

48:48 Farmers and ranchers were asked to produce all they could to help feed the troops abroad. And in the matter of a year and a half, we flooded the market with grains and everything that we were requested to grow. And it took some mind shifts. This will take more mind shifts to go from where we're at in a commodity based into a food based now, but quickly we can grow a lot of vegetables and food if we want to change that model on the farm. That's going to be the obstacle is you know, as I say right now, from a conventional guy to a regenerative guy, it's that spot between two ears that's really got to change that shift.

49:37 So we're seeing new people getting in in the Tulsa area that have never farmed before start putting in gardens and hoop houses and are growing a tremendous amount in a very short time. So I know that an agriculture producer that's farming right now can do the same thing. It's just going to be an educational learning curve. And that's why I was talking about getting the masses of people to help with education to work with you on the farm. You know, John Kemp does a lot in the food production side and has consultants out there that helps. That's the kind of shift that we would have to have to help these producers. And that's part of my role, but there's only one of me. And so that's going to take more education and training to get people on the ground to help these producers. But you'd be surprised how fast we could get this up to scale if that market's there.

50:43 Well, Aaron and Jimmy, thank you so much for your time. Thanks for answering these questions today. Obviously, we've talked a lot about how other people can get involved. They can go to the website, but real quickly, is how else can people that are watching this now or those that watch later get involved? What's the best way to start?

51:01 Yeah, the best way to start would be to email me, Aaron at consciousagingsolutions.com, or to go to the FreshRx website, which is freshrxok.org. So my email again is Aaron at consciousagingsolutions.com, and the website is freshrxok.org. Also, all over social media, both on Facebook and Instagram, so you can find us there, FreshRx Okay or FreshRx Oklahoma. And also, you can search my name, Aaron Martin, and you should be able to find me. You can contact us. We have a phone number and an email opportunity on the website. So you can always talk directly to my team or to me, and we'd be happy to answer any questions that you have.

51:50 Also, Noah, we just finished a podcast with Farm Green, Rick Clark, where we had Dr. Farrish with us, the third wheel of the stool, so to speak. And he really ties in very well and talks about the medical side. So if producers or watchers out there today wanted to go to Farm Green site, that's going to be up. It was recorded very soon, and we're going to do more of them. Right now, we're working on another big podcast with Aaron's team as well to put out to be viewed in the near future, the next few months here, of all three of us—Dr. Ferris, Aaron, and I—on that.

52:37 Well, thank you guys so much again for your time. We'll get this recorded. I'll try and put all the resources that we have in the chat. I'll try to add those to YouTube as well. But in the meantime, you guys have a great rest of your day. For those that have joined us week over week, I'm not sure who we have next week, so that'll be announced here in the next few days. We will get next week's webinar up and going, but you guys have a great rest of your day and thanks again.

53:01 Thank you so much, Noah. Thank you, Green Cover, and thank you all for watching. Thank you. Along with the soil, our lives depend on it. Take care, Jimmy. You have a good day.