meditation healing foods living in balance healthy relationships and harnessing the true power of where you are powerful you are welcome to this week's episode of the gates at oprah's show today we're going to talk about g m o foods are getting farming and the food you eat every day most people are not aware of what they're putting into their bodies if you look at a watermelon from the sixteen hundreds it looks completely different than it does today similarly you would even recognize a banana from two hundred years ago this is due to genetically modify the food you eat to prepare large proportions and more internal flesh this is not equate with good health sadly ninety nine percent of fruits and vegetables look as stylistically different today than they did and their original form you wouldn't recognize  i encourage you to google some of these variations for your own knowledge after the show today what the genetic we modified food meaning it simply means that certain foods have been introduced with an organism that is a pesticide or virus resistant so pests and certain viruses do not take over the crop this is good for farmers it is not good for you when you eat these foods you also eat this organism research has come as far as to label them vaccinated foods so if you're not a fan of getting vaccinations you are in fact getting your vaccinations when you eat g m o food we will cover the standard for us da organic food as well and what you should know in that regard finally today we will address how important it is to eat in season most people do not realize that eating salad in winter is out of balance for your spleen because salad is a cold food is meant for summer similarly squash and okra should be avoided in summer because they are grown in their natural form in winter you wouldn't drink a coffee while lot lousing at the poolside in july would you and that's equivalent to eating squash and summer and cold fruits in winter eat the foods of the season to avoid imbalance and support your natural rhythm the problem today is that anything is available any time you can have anything you want and this is not a blessing my guest today is a manager of retail sales at cherry grow farm in lawrenceville new jersey she's a local farmer she has over five years experience in this particular role and she's going to address all the above topics for your knowledge please join me in welcoming kathy simon to the show today welcome kathy glad to have you here today it's a pleasure to be here grades so tell me more about what inspired you to join this line of work well i lived in california for a long time and that started me off with the idea of farmers markets and buying fresh and local and then i lived in italy for a little while which really brought it home with the markets in italy would have the farm and the little town come back to something like that and when the opportunity came up to join cherry grow farm it just seemed like the natural fit for me to do the thing that had so interested me in these other places right here in my own backyard and you were the corporate world before that i w ok ok that's quite a drastic change right it is it's but it's a really nice when it's nice to feel like the place you work fulfills you like you believe in what they're doing and it just makes going to work everyday that much easier oh i can imagine so what's a typical day like at the farm at a typical day changes all the time so it's never typical we have animals because we raise for meat and we make cheese so depending on the weather depending on what's going on with the animals depending on the people could be anything we milk in the morning and then the cheese makers pull over the milk and start making cheese and we open our store on the farm and we invite guests in and we sell other local products as well as the things that we make and you just sort of unfold from there it depends on what goes on with the people in the animals and you doing planting and with the soil we don't do any planting really but the soil is the basis of everything we do in the soil is healthy then the grass that's growing on it is healthy and that means that the cows and the sheep in the pigs and the chickens and everybody are getting the nutrients they need to produce the best milk you know how do you know as well as healthy or not for us we know by what's growing in it because we know what we want to see we do some seeding in fields periodically if you get a field that's gotten a little bit compacted maybe we'll see some daikon radish and so it expands the soil and opens things up a little bit and you let the pigs on the field to dig up the radishes and do their thing if you don't see good forage good the the good types of grasses we're looking for if you see a lot of weeds then you know you have a soil compaction problem or you have  over grazing problem wow so let's get so we're getting food a little bit what's important stuff organic food well i think nowadays you see more and more people who are getting more connected to their food system and they want to know where their food is from and how it's grown and the thing about an organic certification is you can have some certainty that certain requirements were met in the way things were raised or grown  for us on the farm because organic certification is so all encompassing if we raise meat if we want to have the meat labeled as organic then we have to find organic butcher and an organic slaughterhouse and organic feed all the way along the line and that's very difficult especially in new jersey so we choose to certify our pasture since we believe the pasture is the basis of everything the grass yes the pasture a certified every year the state comes on  certification there's a state certification too and i believe we're state certified so what does that entail the u s d a if you're going to be certified they come out to your farm they look at what you're doing they go through your records they meet with your farmer and this is every year and then you fill out a quite quite a lengthy form with the information about what you're doing it and how you're doing ok and then you pay your money and next year they're going to come out again and go through the same thing with you to be sure that you're doing what you're supposed to be now does this mean no herbicides and no pesticides yeah for the most part from our standpoint we don't use anything but there's a certain i think there's a small amount it like a tolerable level especially for us we're surrounded by conventional farms so you might get some overspray ok we have a lot of lancer we have buffer zones in a lot of spots but there are two places where we butt up against  conventional farmers so there might be a little bit of overspray and they take that into consideration we don't raise it that way so they know ninety nine point nine percent of what we're doing is going to act ok so the conventional farms do use herbicides and spray ok yeah and they might put chemical fertilizers on their land but have we well the fertilizers chemical fertilizers would be to boost their plant production but the problem with chemical fertilizers is they do also deplete the soil yeah the way to boost and then it doesn't promote that healthy sustainable life in the soil wow you need the microorganisms and the little buzz so it's kills all the bacteria yeah it's not really good for that so it's kind of like in your adding yeah wow ok so in terms of eating in season how important is that so because i know you farm your food and obviously in winter you have different fruits and vegetables here in new jersey as you know for almost three or four months out of the year so what are you producing that and why is it important for the consumer to buy what's in season and actually eat that i would say the importance of eating in season is twofold one you are reducing your carbon footprint if you eat in season because you're not supporting the shipping of seasonal produce from far away and new jersey has a great program for local vegetables new jersey fresh program and you can find out where things are grown seasonally like asparagus the not a lot of people growing and selling speratus locally but there are a few places in new jersey that do it and when you get it fresh from the farmer there's more taste there are more nutrients because once you harvest something and you ship it it starts to lose lose it's new and doesn't absorb more pollution along the way as well and it brought some of that have to spray it with something like preservatives to preserve the longevity of it it depends on the produce some things yes they do have to treat in some way to retard it sometimes apples all apples so al even if there were again if they are not local are they have this gas surrounding them yeah and i can't remember what the gas is but it's not something that's necessarily bad for the fruit but it  question what do you do and how do you ship this and how do you take care of this and you're never going to have that relationship with a farmer that's in another state thousand miles away or in mexico because we don't know what's going on down there but you know again even just a transportation process even if we fully trust the california farmer it's that travel time exactly i know i sound and that's fossil fuels being used as just more really needs to be done so it damages the environment ecosystem mor i was a second part of that well the second part really is that it's taste better and taste better if you get it fresh oh yeah there's a lot more flavor in it now what about all we know what it does to our bodies like for example people eating all these cold fruits and winter and and you know and heating foods in summer so that's that's part of the imbalance we see as well right because you can get anything anytime now you can get manos in december as long as they come from some part of the world they can sell it for me there so there's something lost in terms of it not being special anymore because i remember as a kid asparagus season was right around easter time you looked forward to it that's it because that's when it was probably his alliance or you know dandelions are good spring cleaner for the liver  is great if you know what you're doing local foraging is we do a farting class on the farm which is fantastic because we can take people out and teach them a little bit about plant identification and the things to keep in mind about you know you don't want to forage by the side of a road because you've got all the pollutants coming off the road but if you know there's a source even in your own backyard if you don't spray the dandelion comes up there you go there's your food source in your own backyard so it's all about getting back to nature like leaving out the chemicals and taking what mother earth is trying to give us you know there are a lot of edible foods that are right in the fields all around your house that we're just weeding out that they don't want right because of the mass production factory farming on that note let's talk about g m o sis's one of the most controversy all subjects of today and people really want to know people are angry they want to know what's in their food they don't want to eat these genetically modified organisms  do you just explain to the viewers watching actually modified food is first that we can talk about its implications sure so the genetic modification of a seed can happen for a variety of reasons one it could be to boost production in that the other could be to make it resistant to something like roundup persistent foods and there are lots of roundup being used by monsanto right roundup is made by monsanto and yes it's an herbicide that  farmers often use to control weeds and field because there are some plants that their fields are going to be we joked unless you sing something and they don't have the facility either the machinery or the time to go out and hand weed when you're working at a huge scale like that so they make these these seeds for corn and soybeans that are roundup ready so that the farmer can then spray the field and it will kill the plant that is trying to grow  we believe on the farm that everything should be transparent that people should absolutely know what's in their food so they can make their own educated choice about what they're willing to go with so essentially you're eating these herbicides or these roundup chemicals when you buy the g m o foods they would say no because the produce is cleaned before it comes out but you want to see over the course of a few generations what really comes personally i'm more worried about making something resistant to poison and than i am about a lot of the other forms of g m o that one makes me very nervous because you're using poisons and then you're selling that food and i just want to know that there's no residual effect there well that's a vaccination so basically you're eating vaccinated foods right so if you don't believe in vaccinations when you eat g m o foods you're eating the vaccination because th food is now resistant to some sort of virus you know in the field its d n a has been changed and it has changed so that when you eat that food you're basically altering your organism or your micro micro your micro bio guts because you are now you are you can now be resistant of that poison as well so that's that's one of the concerns that people have i know and the studies that are out there can go both ways on it yeah that's why i think it's important that people know exactly what's going on so they can make that i think that's a fair yeah the fair compromise should be at least information should be available if we don't people who don't want g m o foods that's fine but they should at least know that's what we're eating and giving their families and if you're talking about processed foods  there's probably a g m o content in pretty much anything with process you know anything yeah yeah well on that note do you think food can be your medicine if eaten properly or if you the right foods yeah yeah because food is the fuel that runs the body so what you put in you want to get the most nutrition you want to get the most benefit out of what you're eating and if you can do that and stay away from the foods that detract from it but more sugars and you put more carbohydrates in things that the body doesn't process quite as easily that takes a toll on the body just being able to use the good stuff right away that's that's honestly the way we look at our cows in the forage if again to the nutrient level right and it sounds like these days more so than any time in history our livers have to work harder to flush out talks and not just because of the environment stress but i'm talking out of nutrients you know food level we have to flush out half of the stuff is process you know then i guess g m o or then some mopping organic and all these different contaminants in the food itself how much nutrients is actually left in it you know so it's right how much clean stuff that your body can use right away yeah yeah what about sustainable farming what's that so sustainable farming is it's a method of farming that asks to put in as few inputs as possible and so for example we're trying to run a farm and we're doing everything grass based we can use chemical fertilizers that we have to buy or we can use manure that comes naturally out of our animals and the way we farm by rotating our fields all the time by rotating the cows through the fields in the cows or spreading the manure for us around the property so that's less that we're having to do you basically try to get a holistic organism going together where we're all working together they are doing some of the work we're doing some of the word you need a lot of cows for this process or just for you know it's very important when you're raising animals that you know exactly how much land you have so that you can make sure you only have the amount of animals that are going to fit on that land it's really easy to get overexcited and and just keep adding more and that puts more stress on the land and that in turn doesn't feed the cows as as well so i think the rule is for a dairy cow you're supposed to have four acres of land ok so we have per cow so so for us we move our cows all the time our milking herds together and they get shifted through these large fields and we sort of carve the fields into smaller sections and make them graze intensively in a small area and then shift them over here and they graze intensively and while they're rotating through the fields this original field is resting and and the soil is is doing its thing in the grasses regenerating so that by the time we bring the cows back again this field is ready to sounds like a job it is but that's great so the cows eat grass and then they produce or manure so it's all grass  anti oxidants when we put our cows out on grass once the grass starts growing you see the difference in the milk right away it turns the beautiful golden color from the beta carotene in the grasses and that informs the cheese the better quality milk the better the cheese you're going to get out of it and you get the seasonal flavors you know i should move them through spring is different than summer is different than fall in terms of what's growing out there it might be all green but it is different  clover in the spring and you get onion grass in the spring so the cows take that in and it changes the flavors of the milk subtly and then you can see that in the cheese from batched batch ok so your cheese has different flavors just based on the seasons it's subtle but yeah definitely ok so does your farm ought to have not have chemical fertilizer just use the manure then absolutely we strive for a sustainable model so part of that too is we have these links back into the community we  we take day old bread and things from one of the local bakery so that we can feed our pigs we take the way from the cheese making process to feed the pigs so you're taking everything that's created on the farm and finding another use for  it we accept wood from several local arborist because they would have to pay money to dump it somewhere we take it on the farm and then that wood is used in our wood burning stove which heats the farm in the pasture ization tanks so you're basically trying to create a whole ecosystem where you're using all the resources within recycle and reuse as much as you possibly can so you're not buying extra stuff while so about how many employees do you have serious  probably if you think about the part time people in the interns we might have around twenty full time we have maybe eight full time people ok so you have an intern program for students for a cheesemakers  making internship in a farming internship ok so how long does it take to make a block of cheese depends on the cheese so we make a breed that is pretty much ready to sell at about sixty days and then we make an aged cheese that can go as long as two years a little over two years ok so you do all that on site all the age and it's all done right there or where what's known as a farmstead operation our cows our milk our facility we control the whole process ok so what type of products you offer for the public we raise beef and sheep and pigs and then we have this dairy program so that we can do or own cheese we also have honey we have hives on the farm and then in our local farm store we have other locally made products things that we that we really like good clean label tastes good we know the story of the maker and we like them and then we try to have these tight partnerships with the local chocolatier we work they're different people who make condiments and mustard some things like that so in terms of the future of american farming do you feel that small farms are going to be crowded out by monsanto for example by the larger industry who wants a just sort of genetically modified  food and take away seeds because now we have watermelons and grapes without seeds so they're taking away the seeds so they control the seeds basically so do you feel that smaller farms are going to be flushed out or crowded out of the marketplace in ten or twenty years from now it's a it's a tough environment there's more and more of a demand for local and for small farms but the big guys pretty much make the rules so it's harder for the small farms to keep an even footing i don't know maybe a coin toss i can't see a time when there aren't some people who just insist on small farming because it's what they do and it's what they love but it is hard agribusiness does make it very hard on the small farmer most of the rules the federal rules are guided by the big guys and they have the economy of scale to to deal with those costs whereas you mean they are lawmakers and lobbyist so they influence how things come out so in terms of seeds where where do you buy your seeds from and the only thing we see is the fields so we get them from i couldn't i couldn't tell you the name of the person but there is a seed group that we do buy from their non g m o seeds are there a lot of those suppliers left nadji a most seeds so yeah you can get organic seed you can get it's expensive and that's what's backbreaking for a small farm ok but they can't i just be reflected in your price yes but you absolutely will be reflected in the price but there is also what the market will bear and most people in the u s are used to seeing the real cost of food because big agribusiness is subsidized so you can get a gallon of milk for a couple of bucks in the store but that is not the cost of creating a gallon of milk in fact dairy farmers right now are going through just a horrible time because the market cost that the market value for milk is so low that they can't they they just can't keep farming it the government is subsidizing or so for for big farms there are a lot of ag subsidies that come in a lot of different ways and for smaller farms that's just not we don't have the economy of scale so i have people in store all the time who say why why are these things so and with and with organic especially i think most small are getting farmers there's a lot more labor involved because you have to do more hand work ok right because you are spraying ok so what's or take on these on monsanto for example or the larger farmer in corporate style farming do you think that they should stay in place they should grow how does a small farmer you know it's a it's a tough thing there are a lot of people to be fed and not everybody has access to farms and this sort of large scale farming developed because we had a lot of people to feed and we also had the stream of feeding the world that's how it's a lot of the g m o st uff started as a way to feed the world so there there was a good idea behind it there was a lot of heart behind it and saying but maybe if it was if it was not g m o feed in the world or if it was or again do you think that would be a better dream it would be a wonderful dream but i think i think that that's probably something where you get back to buying local and small farms if we all had a little more land around us and we still had some small farms and you could walk down the street and buy from you know your local corn farmer or your local vegetable people this were farmers markets come into yeah if you can access your small farmer in great buy a lot of people don't have that access especially up north yeah uneven i mean there are areas there are areas you know you go into trenton and access to food to good healthy food is tough so you take somebody who's low income and they only have so much money they can afford organic or they have to make some really frightening choices to be able to put their money into the food while that's very informative actually thank you i think the moral the story is definitely you know if you can shop locally local farming is is probably the best way the healthiest way to go and hopefully it's the future we all know it's going to happen but one can only hope right so thank you again for coming on the show today definitely glad to have you and hopefully viewers got some really good information today i know i sure did thank you