I speak again with Ashley Armstrong about farming, food freedom and rebuilding our food system.
We cover farm burnout, food labels, chicken feed and Michigan’s food freedom bill. Ashley shares how pasture and animal care shape food quality, and how Nourish Food Club connects farmers with families.
Thanks for listening.
What we cover:
Farm burnout and better systems
Food labels and online misinformation
Pasture-raised chickens and their feed
Michigan’s food freedom bill and raw milk
Pasture, food quality and animal care
Farmer cooperation and direct sales
Timestamps:
00:00 – Ashley returns
06:26 – Farm burnout and better systems
23:43 – Food labels and greenwashing
26:28 – Farming myths and chicken feed
41:16 – Michigan’s food freedom bill
55:51 – Reconnecting with food and farmers
01:00:04 – Pasture, phytonutrients and flavour
01:05:19 – Farmer cooperation and animal care
01:10:10 – Making farm-fresh food convenient
01:15:22 – Customer stories and food experiences
Links & resources mentioned:
Dr. Stephan van Vliet’s nutrient-density research
Episode transcript
Edited for readability: spelling, punctuation and false starts have been cleaned up while preserving the speakers’ meaning and views.
Ryan
And today, alongside me, I have a returning great guest, Ashley from Angel Acres. Thank you for joining.
Ashley
Hey Ryan, it’s always a pleasure to chat with people who really get the long-term vision and the goal of the regenerative agriculture movement. It’s refreshing and really amazing to listen to the conversations you have with farmers, because so many of us out here are fighting such a hard fight. Hearing more of the stories can wake people up to the realities of what’s happening.
The reality of the modern food system can seem daunting. But the more we talk about it, the more ideas we can spark and the more connections we can make, eventually snowballing in the right direction. The food system is not in a good place, as everyone can see. But what do we expect? Given the reality of the last 100 years, of course we’ve arrived where we are today. So the question is: How do we move forward? Embracing and supporting small farmers is, in my opinion, the only path forward. Otherwise, we literally won’t have American agriculture. I’m grateful you’re allowing people to have these conversations.
Ryan
Thank you. That means a lot, especially because this is my ‘baby’. This is what I truly love the most. It’s been probably two or three months since we last recorded. A great way to start this conversation is to ask: how have the last couple of months been for you? We are in some crazy times. Every day I log on to Twitter or Google, especially with agriculture, there’s something crazy and new happening. How have things been for you?
Ashley
There’s always a lesson to learn at the farm. My farm, Angel Acres, is the original small regenerative farm of Nourish Food Club. I run a farm cooperative where my farm and a group of other small farmers work together, with the same shared Nourish Food Club standards, to produce a wide variety of food. We’re trying to create an alternative food system: what I wish existed.
It’s a struggle and a lesson every day. The farm has had a rough few years. This year has been better, because weather always changes things. I finally have help at the farm, which is amazing. I don’t think people realise how much labour, manpower and time it takes. When you look at the profit-and-loss statements of small farms, they never pay themselves for their time. That’s a sad reality. I finally have some help on the farm and feel really solid about that. I’m making decisions for next year. It’s a lot of work—I work seven days a week.
But I feel fulfilled and feel this is the path I should be on. One highlight this year is seeing great pasture diversity. My farm was a row-crop field for corn and soy, with very low soil organic matter, little soil diversity and a lot of compaction. In my first year, basically only weeds came up.
Then we tried more of a Gabe Brown and Will Harris approach to regenerating the land: seeding and gentle tillage to work the seeds into the ground. Joel Salatin’s approach is more about letting animals do it. I think both work; it depends on your ground. This year we’ve seen a return on those efforts from the last few years. The pasture has been much better, which is exciting. Elsewhere on the farm, I’m experimenting with a different pasture-seed mix. There’s always something to learn and no rule book. I think that’s one reason small regenerative farmers are disappearing. People go to school expecting instructions: ‘Here’s exactly how you do it. Copy and paste.’
There’s no rule book for farming, and it’s very different from farm to farm. You have to learn and adapt to your environment and what Mother Nature teaches you each season. It’s a challenge for a type A perfectionist like me, but I think it’s been good for me. The struggle is always real. When you ask a farmer, ‘How’s it going?’ just know they’re always struggling a little bit. But we do it because it connects us to the earth.
It’s what fulfils us. I’m grateful and humbled to produce food for people. It’s still wild that the work on my farm literally nourishes families. That’s so cool. What I enjoy most is finally doing something that lets me interact with nature. For most of my life, I just observed or ignored nature. Now I interact with it, and there’s something so human about that. We have a garden, laying hens, pigs and cows. It’s time-consuming and long-term, rather than quick dopamine hits. You plant a seed and wait weeks for it to come up.
Long story short, it’s been a long summer. I’m not going to lie: I’m a little excited for some winter rest. But overall, there have been great things.
Ryan
Winter rest is what I was going to ask about, on the topic of burnout. You mentioned working seven days a week. Above all else, that’s another thing I try to get across to consumers who view agriculture through social media, Yellowstone, television and other things. Wanting land, wanting to manage it yourself and grow food is a great thing. That’s what I want people to want. But I also want them to have a realistic view of it all, because burnout can happen so easily. People talk about burnout in their jobs, working 40 hours a week rather than seven days a week. But in agriculture, it’s very easy to burn out. It’s also long-term. If you’re a farmer, you’re most likely expecting to do it for the rest of your life and eventually pass it down. How do you approach that? You finally have some help, but being on your own must be quite challenging.
Ashley
There have been moments when I’ve been about to throw in the towel. But the more I learn about business and entrepreneurship, the more I realise you’ll always work hard. The best way to stay in it long-term is to develop systems. That’s what I’m trying to fine-tune.
The systems aren’t written out for you. You have to develop and fine-tune what works for you. By systems, I mean standard operating procedures, checklists and making sure you have enough hired help. The biggest problem is that a lot of small farms can’t afford that help. I can barely afford it. But if it gives me back time, that matters, because I’m a creative at heart. I like to dream about products, food-system standards, what I want to write about on Substack and what content I want to create. To do that, you need space and peace. With farming, you’re always doing something. My goal for 2027 is to fine-tune systems across Nourish and Angel Acres Farm. That isn’t about changing the products or the outcome. It’s about asking: can we be smarter with how we go about the day-to-day work? Can we improve the systems so the output stays the same, but I don’t burn myself out? I don’t even want to know how many hours per week I work.
I can improve there, but first I had to learn what worked and what didn’t. Now I know what works and what’s possible with our collective food club, our farm partners and at the farm. It took three to four years to get there. Now the question is: how can we do it more systematically? I’m excited about that because I think it will help make it sustainable long-term.
Ryan
On the topic of peace, you mentioned how important peace of mind is for us as humans, and as farmers. What gives you peace? Being out on the land after a hard day’s work? Sunrise as the animals wake up? Something else?
Ashley
Sunrise and sunset are the moments when everything feels worth it. You can take it in and soak it up, and it doesn’t last long. That’s what makes it beautiful: you have to experience it in the moment. If you miss it, it comes back tomorrow. Those little moments of joy and peace let you be in nature and understand what nature is bringing to the farm, and what you’re bringing back to it. For me, it’s the sunrises and sunsets. I don’t catch them every day. Last night I was working late on the computer and missed the sunset. That happens; that’s the reality of those days. But cherishing the moments when you can soak it in really helps reset things. Say you’ve had a bad day: four days of rain, everything is muddy, the tractor’s stuck and you can’t move the pigs. Everything breaks. Those days happen when you work with nature. Thankfully, I have a team to help me through. Sunrise and sunset make it worth it.
Ryan
Or if you’re moving pigs and discover a wasp nest. Hornets—that’s what it was.
Ashley
Oh my gosh, hornets!
We have pasture-raised pigs and little huts. Pigs love to snuggle together rather than sleep alone. Even with 10 huts, they’ll pile into one. It’s the cutest thing.
When we move the pigs, we move the huts, which are light enough to flip over. The other weekend, I flipped a hut onto a ground hornet’s nest—yellow jackets, ground hornets, I’m not sure. They came after me before the hut touched the ground and chased me for about five minutes. I got somewhere around seven to nine stings. Ryan, I was almost paralysed for two days.
Ryan
Yeah, those aren’t good at all.
Ashley
The back pain—something in the venom seemed to affect my nerves. I couldn’t move normally for a few days. Then it was totally fine; it cleared out. But that corner of the farm became a little scary.
I wore a beekeeper suit to move everything and wasn’t stung. So far, so good. I still don’t understand the purpose of hornets. I think every insect and animal has a purpose. Remove one, and you’ll have a deficiency or issue somewhere else. I’m still trying to figure out the hornets.
Ryan
I read an interesting comment about that. I have to find it, because I think about the same thing with ticks, mosquitoes and no-see-ums. I live in the South now, and no-see-ums are worse than mosquitoes. They’re tiny dots and their bites itch much more.
Ashley
I think we call those gnats. You guys call them no-see-ums? Okay.
Ryan
I think these might be different from those.
But they actually might be the same—now that you’ve said that, I don’t know.
Ashley
Yeah, they all have a purpose. One of the biggest problems with conventional agriculture is that, over the last 100 years, we’ve disconnected from nature. We’ve had this superiority—excuse me for saying it—this white-man supremacist thought: ‘I know better than Mother Nature and can outsmart her with chemicals.’
We see something annoying and kill it. Now we’re seeing the consequences. Whatever path you take to decimate something, Mother Nature will adapt and grow back stronger. That’s the difference between degenerative and regenerative agriculture: with degenerative agriculture, you try to outsmart nature with chemicals.
I’m sorry, but biology always wins. We don’t know enough about nature to think we can outsmart it with chemicals. Today we have superweeds developing resistance to the pesticides we use. Of course, this is great news for Big Ag: now they can keep developing more and more products.
It’s a continuous product line: one stops working, then they make another, and another. They love it. But corn and soybean farmers are realising they can’t make money doing this. Plenty of farmers around me decided not to plant this year and took crop insurance instead, because it was more profitable than planting an acre of corn.
We’re at a pivotal point. People are waking up to the fact that what we’ve done for 100 years no longer works. Once you understand degenerative agriculture and the importance of soil health, you can’t keep going down that path.
I don’t know if support is going to come from the top down. People in government understand that there are a lot of issues, and there are really great people working there. But the reality is that a lot of people are bought out. Big Ag and big chemical companies spend millions, sometimes billions, in lobbying dollars.
They pay for decisions on bills so the status quo isn’t touched: ‘Let our company keep doing what it does and destroying the environment, because we’re making money.’ I’m not hopeful about top-down changes, meaning government passing transformative laws that change the food system. Given the last 100 years, I think it will be more bottom-up: consumer demand and where people spend their money will add up. If we keep supporting the conventional food system, we allow it to continue.
They have the money to keep going. If we spend less there, they have less money to continue. Buying directly from farmers or co-ops makes a difference. In conventional grocery sales, the farmer gets a small percentage, and Big Ag has a hand in it. Of course, government doesn’t want to make direct sales easy for small farms, because it doesn’t get a percentage.
Ryan
It takes away control, too. Everything is so heavily centralised, which makes it easier for them. This could be a good segue into your efforts to start a bill in Michigan and the massive red tape around that.
Ashley
Consumers don’t realise how much red tape farmers face. It isn’t just cost. Everyone knows about filing with government, getting permits and licences, and so on.
Government gets a little cash from each one. You sign things without necessarily understanding the fine print. That happens in everyday life and to farmers. Many of these licences and warehouse registrations didn’t exist 50 years ago.
They’ve been added in the name of food safety, but, as you said, I think it’s control. Farmers are already busy. Now they have paperwork to fill in, submissions to make and fees to pay. It’s time-consuming and costly, and it prevents things that would make it easier for them to sell directly to consumers. There is a lot of government red tape that makes it very hard to be a small farmer. That’s a reality, but it’s what the powers that be—the big guys, the Big Ag groups—want. If it’s harder for small farmers, more farmers will keep selling to the conventional market. They’ll adopt the mindset of ‘go big or go home’, or keep buying these chemicals. At the end of the day, farmers have to sell what they make. If they don’t sell it, they don’t make money. If they don’t make money, they have to close their doors. We’ve lost over 67% of farmers since around 1950. Those are insane numbers. As a listener, think about that: 67% of farmers since 1950. That’s ridiculous.
It’s largely because of the conventional food system shaped by Big Ag companies. It didn’t used to be this way. My biggest wake-up moment was asking why we have to operate in this model, when it clearly isn’t working. Americans’ average lifespan is declining, and chronic disease rates are rising.
Most people are overweight or obese, and diabetes keeps rising. There are so many issues with feeding the nation. But that allows Big Ag to maintain control and make money. Then there’s the Big Ag–Big Pharma connection: feed us bad food and make us reliant on pharmaceuticals.
It’s a sad reality. The refreshing part is that, as a country, we know how to produce food outside that model—we did it for hundreds of years. Let’s go back to a more regional, cooperative approach.
Ryan
And there are a lot of people today doing it. Yeah.
Ashley
A regional, cooperative style has farmers working together to produce a variety of food. Once I learned what an old-fashioned farm cooperative was, I thought, ‘I want to make one. Let’s do it. Let’s go back in time and make one.’ That’s what Nourish Food Club is. My farm isn’t producing everything. There wouldn’t be enough hours in the day; I wouldn’t sleep. I’d work myself to death. So we need to work collaboratively rather than rely on this big behemoth system.
Farmers are so disconnected from what consumers want because they’re bought into selling to the conventional system. That was a long tangent, but it’s refreshing and grounding to recognise that it doesn’t have to be this way. It wasn’t this way before. We can operate outside the big, ‘go big or go home’ conventional model. But consumers have to participate with us.
Ryan
As time has gone on with Nourish and Angel Acres, do you feel more consumers are walking with you?
Ashley
I think so. An important next step that some consumers are starting to see—but we need to talk about more—is that most labels at the grocery store are complete BS. There’s so much greenwashing and fancy label marketing. People see a nice-looking label saying ‘grass-fed’ or ‘pasture-raised’ at the grocery store, but it’s often not that different from the conventional model. There’s so much greenwashing, yet they charge more than the conventional product. That’s my concern: people think it’s a better product. But is it really? I don’t think so. The more steps you can remove between farmer and consumer, the more transparency, trust and higher-quality food someone will get. To get farmers back onto the land, we need to reverse the trend. We’ve lost 67%; we need that number of farmers to rise. We need less government red tape. I don’t think the government should try to fix it.
I think the government needs to get out of the way for some people. Food-safety regulation for the conventional system, where thousands of cows are in a single barn producing dairy—yes, regulate and monitor that. The conventional food system has a purpose for mass production, for people who want those foods, for airports and so on. Let that be. But the big thing is reducing red tape—a ‘get out of the way’ model. We need both more consumer support and less government red tape, so direct farmer-to-consumer relationships can happen.
Ryan
When you interact with consumers in person, by email or on social media, what are those conversations like? More people are waking up, but there’s also so much misinformation.
Do consumers ask questions or make assumptions about your practices because of what they see online? Seeing that stuff infuriates me.
Ashley
We’re in a dangerous place in alternative health. Influencers speak confidently about food quality, but as a farmer, it’s painfully obvious some have no farming experience. That misinformation hurts small farmers. If a health influencer is listening, please be careful what you say.
What if you’re hurting a small farmer by sharing information you don’t know enough about? I see it more with food-rating apps. Is it a good idea to have food rated by someone with no farming experience? I’ve gone through their ratings, and it’s obvious they’ve never stepped on a farm.
As a consumer, be careful who you listen to in both mainstream and alternative health. Listen to farmers with experience. I cringe at what I said five years ago, before farming. I was disconnected and thought I understood. But farming and going through a full food-production cycle showed me what goes into it from start to finish. I’m not talking just about raising a chick into a finished chicken. Where do you get the chick? Where is the chicken processed? How is it packaged? There are so many steps. As a consumer, be careful about where you get information. Are you just reading headlines? Does that person have farming experience? The specific post Ryan is talking about is from Seed Oil Scout. The guy who started Seed Oil Scout is a great guy; I’ve had him on my podcast, and I think he’s doing a lot of great things. But that post was misinformation. It showed that a conventional chicken ate feed, while a pasture-raised chicken ate only grass and worms. That’s false and inhumane. The chicken wouldn’t get enough calories or protein—there aren’t enough worms. Unless you’re raising it in a worm-farm container, you have to provide feed.
If you didn’t give it feed, it would take about a year to finish and be very stringy and tough. I don’t even know if it would survive. That misinformation hurts small farmers. At Nourish, we get emails asking, ‘Are your chickens 100% grass-fed?’ Then when people hear that we feed grain, they say, ‘I’m sorry, I’m not interested. I have to have grain-free chicken.’ I love you guys, but that doesn’t exist.
I love how passionate people are about regenerative agriculture and supporting small farms. But I ask health influencers to be careful with their wording. What if something untrue hurts farmers? I’m concerned about AI, too. Image and video generation are getting so good. I can still tell the difference.
I work with Amish people every day of the week. They don’t record themselves. If you’re following an Amish-person account, it’s an AI-generated video account. They aren’t recording themselves and posting it on the internet. I’m worried about how much this has progressed in the last year. Where will we be a year from now? I’m leaning towards more messy social media. I’m tempted to use whiteboards or hand-drawn graphics again. I’m interested in livestreams. I’m getting turned off by AI slop: I scroll Instagram and see the same story I just read above it.
It’s the same story and headline, with different AI-generated colours and text. I’m tired of it. The more we learn from real humans and farmers, the better we’ll be—not only about farming. Farmers are well-rounded people. I’m not saying I’m well-rounded; I still have plenty to learn.
A mutual friend of Ryan and me is Greg Gunthorp. He’s one of my favourite humans, and I’ve learned so much from him.
Ryan
He’s awesome.
Ashley
My phone calls with him are always fun and entertaining. As a farmer, you have to be skilled at everything and prepared for anything, every day. That’s the best way to describe a farmer. I hope people can support small regenerative farmers however possible. If you can’t afford to support them financially, share their social media content. Pin it, post it, send it to friends or put it on your story. It helps. Farmers are spending precious time they don’t have generating content to share their message. I’m leaning towards more real content: sloppy, live, messy. Hopefully I can do more in-person things at my farm next year. I want to host one event at the farm and start there. I hope more things like that pop up.
Ryan
One hundred percent. We’re in another Wild West of the internet. The early 2000s were the Wild West—YouTube was vastly different from now. But with AI where it is today, it’s like Wild West 2.0.
There are a lot of passionate people, but I think some are passionate about being the one who ‘saves agriculture’, while taking advantage of the movement financially. I don’t think they’re actually passionate about farmers or agriculture, or they wouldn’t do these things.
There are other names I want to mention. They’ve helped by talking about agriculture, but there are posts they’ve made that they would never have submitted if they really gave a damn about agriculture and farmers.
It can be disheartening. I’m trying to bridge the gap, but I see people taking advantage, hurting farmers and consumers—hurting everyone. They’re essentially like the big corporations.
They criticise Big Ag, but act like Big Ag, using the same models to take advantage of consumers and farmers while they rake in money, get clout and become more famous on social media.
Ashley
All in the name of virality. Virality, y’all.
I’m at a point where I ask, ‘Why am I on social media?’ That’s an important question to reflect on, because it impacts my nervous system. I have a system: I work with a team that uploads posts and helps with editing. They take care of the actual posting. I don’t think people realise how much work posting is when they’re scrolling. You have to post to Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, Facebook—all the channels. It’s time-consuming and stressful. I’ve recognised that it takes too much time, and affects my creative space. Having someone else post gives me separation from the craziness. I still go on social media, but with misinformation on all sides, I ask what the purpose is. What value am I adding? I keep coming back to sharing the journey and the truth. There isn’t a long-term plan. It’s sharing as we build, along with helpful recipe videos and tips. At the end of the day, I don’t know where social media is going because of AI. It may go away in a year. It may just be bots versus bots—what’s the purpose? It’s a difficult time to be a creator. You see misinformation, but social media is where consumers get information. If we’re absent, are we giving up and letting them hear it unchallenged? I think, Ryan, please make more reaction videos calling out the BS. We need people doing that.
Ryan
Loaded, loaded.
Ashley
I should start sending you posts: ‘Ryan, react to this one. Call out the misinformation.’ It’s needed.
Ryan
I probably should start doing that.
Ashley
Some of it really is hurting farmers. The biggest thing to take home from building the farm and food club is that there’s a reason the conventional food system developed: farming with nature is hard. I planted my garden, nourished it, cherished it and loved it. Then a hailstorm ruined the whole thing.
All my squash plants died. I had to replant everything. In my first year farming here, a 94-mile-per-hour wind gust took our chicken coop five acres away, completely damaged it and left 200 chickens homeless. Working in nature is challenging. Farming is hard. Every season and every year, something different happens. It’s never perfect.
There are good and great days, but also horrific, tragic and hard days. The conventional system separates animals from nature: concrete slabs, cages and buildings. That’s easier and more predictable. It’s a factory: inputs, outputs, push a button, output.
Farming is hard. That’s the biggest lesson. Conventional production makes sense in that it’s easier, but at what cost? Soil, small farms, the environment, more toxins and more veterinary drugs contributing to antibiotic resistance. Nobody’s talking about it. I’ll make content about drug use in animal agriculture. There are so many consequences we’re leaving for the next generation. You and I are part of a generation raising flags and saying this isn’t what we want. We don’t want pesticides in our food.
We don’t want bland, tasteless food or high amounts of omega-6 polyunsaturated fats—PUFAs—in all our food. We have work to do to reverse that, but I don’t think it will come from the top down. From trying to get bills passed and working with legislators, I think we need to put more time into removing red tape. I don’t know if there will be some massive federal, top-down nationwide change that suddenly makes it easier. It will have to be state by state: remove the red tape and get out of our way. Let us do what consumers and farmers want. The legislation is out of date and needs updating. Many of these bills were passed in the 1990s and early 2000s. It’s 2026—we need a refresh, because a lot has changed.
I look at these food laws and think, ‘None of this makes sense.’ It’s like Mr. Potato Head: there have been all these changes over the last 50 years. It makes sense for the big guys, but not the small guys. Unfortunately, legislators aren’t going to make the changes on their own. We have to work towards that. It’s painfully slow, time-consuming and disheartening. But what other option do we have?
Ryan
I completely agree. I realised I didn’t ask more about the new bill.
I remember videos of you in offices with people in Michigan, talking about raw milk. Before recording, you said the bill was about more than raw milk. Could you explain what trying to start a bill has been like?
Ashley
I’ve learned more about government in the last year and a half or two years working on this bill than I ever did in school.
I don’t remember what I learned about government at school. This has been eye-opening.
Ryan
Not much.
Ashley
There’s the House of Representatives and the Senate. A bill goes through the House and Senate, then to the governor’s desk. The governor signs it, and it becomes law.
It’s a painful process even to get it into the House. We worked with Representative Matt Maddock, a Michigan House representative, and presented a bill. I worked with my dad, who is a lawyer and can read the mumbo jumbo. It’s really hard to read. It says, ‘Refer to this section.’ You go there, and it says, ‘Refer to this section.’ Then you go there, and it refers you somewhere else.
It’s purposefully so hard to read.
We created a bill, but you can’t just show up on the House floor and ask them to vote. You have to get it accepted into a committee, which means getting to know legislators. I hosted a raw-milk-and-cookies event.
I visited offices and asked their thoughts on raw milk and food freedom: ‘Should government have its hand in everything between farmers and consumers?’ We needed co-sponsors—representatives who like the idea and sign on to support it when it reaches the House floor.
We needed enough co-sponsors for a committee to look at it and vote on whether it should go to the House floor. We got 32, which is awesome. Then you choose a committee. There are lots of committees, and it’s a political game: who heads it, and will they want the bill?
Will they block it? We were strategic about which committee to choose, then presented to it. Those are probably the videos you saw. Committees have Democrats and Republicans who can ask questions in real time. I’m not making a party-political statement. I don’t stand with Republicans or Democrats. I stand for food freedom and real food: get out of the way and let farmers produce it. We’ve had opposition from Democrats, and I’ll get to opposition from Republicans, too. We have to talk to everyone because this is bipartisan. For Democrats, we’re standing up for small farmers and producers against Big Ag and corporations. For Republicans, it’s food freedom and informed consent. We can access raw oysters, sushi, raw-egg cookie dough, vape pens, marijuana and alcohol, knowing the risks. We can do those things because we’re free to understand the risks and decide the benefits outweigh them. We don’t have that in the food system. It’s a bipartisan issue. Initially we faced opposition from Democrats. They kept bringing up CDC data from 2013, saying that 150 people got sick from raw milk in California. I responded that more people got sick from cucumbers that same year. Safety comes up every time. At committee meetings, they ask questions, we present counter-evidence and then they vote: yes, let the bill move forward, or no, shut it down. People can send letters supporting or opposing it. You can guess who opposed it: Farm Bureau, Michigan Milk Association, Dairy Producers of America, Milk Producers of America and Mom’s Milk Association.
All those came in, alongside about 350 consumer cards supporting it. We passed the first committee with flying colours.
Ryan
How long ago was that?
Ashley
That was early 2025. Rather than going to the House floor, some Big Ag lobbyist did some magic behind the scenes and said we had to go to another committee. So we had to do it all again.
It went to another committee and we did the same thing. At that point, my friend Chelsie from The Grazing Life joined us. You need to talk to her—you’d love that conversation. We recruited her into our food-freedom lobbying team, which gets paid zero dollars. She started helping us present at the next committee hearing. It was a new committee, but the same style of process.
There were Democrats and Republicans. By then, one of the Democrats was a huge supporter because he’s a farmer. We got his signature as a co-sponsor and became a bipartisan bill, which is huge.
Ryan
Hm. That is huge. Especially in today’s society.
Ashley
Once you have both sides, people take you more seriously. We passed that committee hearing early this year, in 2026.
Now it’s in limbo, waiting for a vote on the House floor. The committees said it was worth voting on. But a single Republican stands in the way of putting it on the floor. That Republican is paid by Farm Bureau, milk associations, Michigan Milk Association and other Big Ag companies. So it isn’t just one side causing problems.
It’s a bipartisan matter. It makes sense. We’re not doing something extreme like bringing crack cocaine across the Mexican border, but that’s what it feels like. It threatens big dairy producers, but we’re not getting rid of their system. We’re providing an alternative path.
It’s frustrating. We’ve had a long few months of nothing, because legislators go on summer break and don’t meet for a while. This is an election year. On Tuesday this week, my dad, Chelsie, Representative Maddock’s office and I had Zoom meetings with a few other legislators to get more co-sponsors. Three more people joined us.
They were completely supportive and said they’d vote for it. We now have over 40 bipartisan co-sponsors, but it still isn’t being released to the House floor. It’s been a year and a half without even reaching that vote. I think the House would pass it. Then it goes to the Senate, and we do it all again. My legislator friends say it won’t pass in the current Senate.
We may have to start over and tweak it. Is there an end in sight? I don’t know. I have amazing friends in Utah, Sara and Symbria Patterson. I’ll speak at their food-freedom conference, January 14–16, at Red Acre Farm. They’ve changed over 40 bills or laws in Utah, creating so much food freedom. They encourage and empower me, and tell me it will take a long time. If we get to a House vote, it’s time to meet senators from both parties and ask their objections. At first I was nervous, with a script to read and only 15 minutes with them. Now it’s: let’s get to the point. You have their attention for five minutes, so you have to ask right away, ‘What is your issue here?’ Let’s work through the misinformation. It goes back to health information on social media. There’s misinformation there, too. A lot of legislators are really good people.
But what if their decisions are based on misinformation from the CDC, FDA or whoever they get news from? More conversations and updated information can move things forward. I’m hopeful, especially with consumer support. If we have consumers call in and say, ‘This is what I want. As my representative, I want you to say yes to this,’ that helps. We’ll need more of that over time. Unfortunately, it depends on who’s in power. What if you get a bill to a certain point and a new governor vetoes it? They dealt with that in, I think, New Hampshire.
They did all this work to get an on-farm slaughter bill to the governor’s desk, and the governor didn’t sign it. That kills the bill right there. I’ve talked a lot, but it is a long process.
Nobody’s telling us exactly what to do. I don’t know what I’m doing, but we’re doing it. We’ll learn a lot by the end, and hopefully more people can do it regionally, state by state, and remove more red tape so farming becomes easier and more profitable.
Ryan
I’m glad you went into detail. When friends ask, ‘How’s The Regenaissance going?’ my answer is usually that I’ve peeled back another layer of the onion. Agriculture feels like an infinite list of onions to peel back.
Whenever I search Google for farming news or raw-milk news, I expect another crazy, insane thing to be going on. What you said about legislators is interesting, too: what information are they being fed?
With raw milk, critics always bring up infants dying in the 1800s. It’s technically true that infant mortality rose in cities in connection with raw milk. But I never see those critics provide context. They don’t explain the conditions the cows were kept in, what they were fed, or the lack of electricity, sanitation and refrigeration during transport. They say infants drank raw milk and died, so we shouldn’t drink raw milk now. Even after learning about it and working on a farm, I was nervous the first time I drank raw milk because of the ideas I’d grown up with. That mental model is hard to break. Conversations, especially in person, can help. Visiting a farm and trying the milk makes you question the claims and propaganda.
I think the root of our problems is disconnection from food, because when we look at this conversation, many of the problems involve farmers not being in the room. People aren’t listening to a farmer with experience. They’re listening to someone who cares about health but has never grown food, worked on a farm or spoken with farmers. The same problems keep happening in agriculture: farmers are left out, or their microphones are blatantly muted.
Ashley
Farmers need to be back at the table in every room. You’re right. Five hundred years ago, farming was part of everyone’s life; everyone had to participate in food production. Over time, it became more inconvenient.
Not having to farm is seen as progress. It’s amazing that people can use their time and creativity for other things and advance technology. But we have to accept that it also disconnected us from nature, food traditions and food culture, from farming and soil health. There are real consequences. I’m grateful I was heading down that path, came back to farming and now have experience of being nourished by food produced in a certain way.
It’s hard to explain unless you’ve been part of it. Comparing factory-farmed food with small regenerative farms is a joke. There are so many compounds, along with blood, sweat, tears, love, taste, flavour and character, in food from a small farm, which we’ve lost in factory-farmed and ultra-processed food. French chefs have a word for it: terroir, the taste of place. Other countries won’t eat American meat because they find it bland, fatty and bad-tasting. America has become a factory farm.
I wrote about this in the Nourish newsletter that came out today. I write a newsletter every Thursday for Nourish Food Club. The title was ‘The Food System Has Become Sysco’d.’ We heard a story the other month about most American restaurants buying through a massive distributor called Sysco. Sysco supplies something like sixty-something percent of restaurants with food.
It’s the same bland food. Restaurants coat it in oils and spices. It isn’t just restaurants; the whole food system has become inputs and outputs. Everything looks perfect and identical: the red pepper, the ribeye, the eggs’ shape and colour.
That’s industrially produced food. We’ve come to expect perfection and lost touch with nourishing food. People go to Italy or France and say the food is amazing, that they could eat bread again or taste the difference in tomatoes. That’s because it’s small-farm production with real soil. That doesn’t happen in America’s conventional system. It’s a bizarre way to produce food. As consumers taste the difference, they’ll realise these are different production models.
The taste comes from phytonutrients, which give plants their bright colours. Phytonutrients have anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer health benefits. Dr. Stephan van Vliet wrote a review showing animals on regenerative farms eating a wide range of phytonutrients on diverse pastures and passing them into meat, milk, cheese and eggs. That’s what provides health benefits and better taste. Mainstream health people say there’s no difference between grain-fed and grass-fed meat. Maybe if you look at outdated USDA data from 1995 comparing B vitamins, but what about phytonutrients? There’s a huge difference: none detectable in grain-fed meat, and significant quantities in grass-fed meat.
There are health implications. That’s why I’m such a fan of Dr. Stephan van Vliet’s lab work. I don’t remember whether he’s at Duke now or has moved to another university. His lab is trying to understand the benefits of more phytonutrients in the diet: metabolic benefits, blood-sugar benefits, anti-inflammatory effects. A lot of the data is showing yes.
We’ll see differences in fatty-acid composition, which Nourish has shown with our eggs, chicken and pork, and in phytonutrient content. Phytonutrients give unique character and flavour. It isn’t bland. One pasture-raised pork chop won’t look like another, because animals express their instincts and move different amounts.
We have to normalise what real food is.
Ryan
Even with grass-fed and grass-finished meat, taste varies enormously. Ranches may undernourish cows while trying to stay fully grass-fed, or other variables may make the meat taste terrible. The best beef I’ve had was grass-fed and finished. The worst beef I’ve had, which tasted like shoe leather, was also grass-fed and finished. I’d have been upset if I’d bought a whole cow. I worry about consumers buying half a grass-fed cow, finding it tastes terrible and losing faith in the whole idea.
This goes back to nuance and why we think in black and white.
We always compare America and Europe, but they’re different. America is gargantuan. I think the average distance food travels to your plate is about 1,500 miles. That affects taste, too. Sometimes the apples you buy in summer were picked the previous fall. Of course the taste is gone. Sometimes berries mould immediately or have no taste. I’ve stopped buying berries at grocery stores because of that. So often I’ve bought them and there’s no taste. I think, ‘What am I even eating?’
Ashley
A lot of that stuff I freeze immediately.
Ryan
Good call.
Ashley
This year was a big grass-fed-and-finished experiment with Nourish. I’m excited for next year because we learned so much. We tried diverse pasture species suited to southwest Michigan and northwest Indiana, where our farm partners are. We seeded a mix and moved cows two or three times daily. The beef was incredible. Watching them grow and seeing what they did to the soil was fun. We did a lot of soil testing. ‘Grass-fed’ isn’t always the same thing. We import enormous amounts of grass-fed beef from Uruguay and Argentina. You buy Aldi 100% grass-fed meat, but it’s coming from another country. Maybe those cows are eating on golf-course-style grass farms. If they stay in one open field, that’s different from a diverse, regenerative pasture. I’ve seen and tasted that difference in real life. It’s fun to be part of.
Farmers who are excited about those things need support. That will yield better flavour and more nutrients, and rebuild soil faster. It’s been fun to be part of.
Ryan
I’m curious: in Michigan, how often do you talk with other farmers and ranchers, especially younger people? You mentioned Greg Gunthorp. As you said, a hundred or five hundred years ago, farmers worked together.
Ashley
We have regular meetings with farmers, including a lot of Amish farmers. Most weren’t farmers before. Our support team is me, Nate, Robert, Martin and Richard. We have a big Nourish Food Club standard-operating-procedures booklet. Those rules guide new farmers who don’t know exactly what they’re doing yet. We have a support team that visits each week, and another team that asks what’s going well and what isn’t. I have experience now, but we’re still building this as we go. Farmers tell us where they want more support and where they haven’t felt supported.
It’s a community, one of my favourite things about Nourish. Yesterday I spent about six hours with farmers, discussing what worked and didn’t this year. We have a breakfast coming up with our laying-hen partners. Bringing farmers together has been rewarding, and it’s missing from agriculture, where everyone is isolated.
A farmer with 100 acres of corn grows it, takes it to the conventional mill, gets a cheque and is done until spring. They don’t need to talk to another farmer. It wasn’t always like that. Reconnecting people, learning from them and seeing improvements on their farms is fun.
I’m grateful and humbled to work alongside farmers doing this for the right reasons. It’s a management-first mindset. Conventional thinking asks what drug, supplement or feed to add to fix an animal. Management-first thinking asks: What are an animal’s fundamental needs? Enough calories, a dry place to rest, sunlight, contact with the earth and space to express natural instincts. Let’s take care of those needs. Is there enough drinking space? Do some chickens feel pressured because there isn’t enough room to drink? Is there enough space at the feeders?
If they get bullied, run away from the coop and don’t eat, they won’t lay. Their immune system suffers because they’re not getting enough calories, and they get sick. A management-first mindset means meeting the animals’ fundamental needs. That’s working with nature—the mindset we need to return to. Instead of asking what drug we can add to fix something, ask what need we aren’t meeting for the animals or plants.
What is this squash or tomato plant missing from nature, rather than from a synthetic input? Correcting those small management decisions, which add up over time, is how we raise food without drugs or pesticides. Dialling in that management-focused mindset has been our focus for the last few years. It’s the main thing with regenerative agriculture. Not everyone can have that mindset or should be a regenerative farmer, because working with nature takes a different way of thinking.
Ryan
Everything you just described is within Nourish Cooperative—or Nourish Food Club?
Ashley
Nourish Food Club, yeah.
Ryan
For listeners who farm and ranch themselves, what advice would you give? If they’re isolated, how could they rebuild communities where they are?
Ashley
This started by knocking on someone’s door and saying, ‘Here’s what I want to do. Do you want to participate, or do you know someone?’ He introduced me to Nate, who helped get it off the ground and connect farmers. If you want to do this, don’t be afraid to pursue what we want. Who cares if you don’t know the next step? Ask questions and talk to people. Reach out through email or social media: ‘I produce great beef. You produce great chicken. Do you want to come together and work on this?’ The problem Nourish is trying to solve is that a family can’t spend an entire weekend going to one farm for milk, another for eggs, two states over for sourdough, home for pork, across the state for raw cheese and then to a pesticide-free produce farm a state away. Nourish tries to solve that. I want farm-fresh food to be easy to access by bringing it together.
One checkout, one cart, all small regenerative farms, conveniently delivered to members’ doors. We lose to conventional food because of convenience. It’s convenient, and convenience wins.
Ryan
And sometimes cost—a rotisserie chicken, for example. When people see a pasture-raised chicken operation and visit its website, the comments often say, ‘You’re ripping me off. I can go to Costco and get a five-dollar rotisserie chicken.’
Ashley
Yeah. That’s another topic: loss leaders. The conventional food system can afford to sell products at a loss. Costco’s rotisserie chicken doesn’t cost only five dollars to produce. They lose money on those sales because they know you’ll come into Costco and buy high-margin processed foods. Cheap staples lure you in, and that hurts farmers. Stores may sell milk at a loss because families need it. You walk through aisles to the milk at the back and pick up high-margin items on the way. They don’t mind if they lose money on those staples. Small farmers can’t afford to do that.
Ryan
Costco has it in-house, too, with its own chicken houses. I wouldn’t even call those farms; they’re mass-industrialised torture chambers for chickens.
Ashley
Food freedom is full of incredible people who’ve done this much longer than me. They’ve dealt with government bullying, learned a lot and are willing to help. Earlier this year, I spoke at a conference at Abby Rockefeller’s farm. I know: ‘Oh my gosh, the Rockefellers.’
I think she’s an outcast from that family. Her incredible raw-milk farm in New York is Churchtown Dairy. Food-freedom speakers came from around the US. It’s encouraging that people chip away at this daily, even though there’s no instant change. It’s day by day, doing a little and chipping away. Meeting Max Kane in Wisconsin, and the people at Abby Rockefeller’s event, is encouraging. It fires you up again. If you stay in a silo doing everything alone, the days can be long and exhausting. Becoming part of a community where you can talk about these things is important. Who knows what will happen or what doors will open from that experience?
Ryan
My final question is about relationships with consumers since starting Nourish Food Club. Have you had any cool stories or feedback about how the food you’ve grown and produced has impacted their lives?
Ashley
I remember a point when I was vegan, egg-free, dairy-free, grain-free, gluten-free—free of everything. I don’t even know what I was eating.
Then I found old USDA booklets for farmers from the late 1800s and early 1900s, and looked at an average grocery list: dairy, eggs, potatoes and bread, things people say they can’t eat now. They were staples of our ancestors’ diets. But bread isn’t bread, eggs aren’t eggs, pork isn’t pork and chicken isn’t chicken. Sourdough isn’t conventional bread.
Different production methods yield different food that people digest differently. I didn’t realise there were different farming models; I just thought all those foods were bad.
That was a light-bulb moment. What happened? This used to be what people ate, and now people say they can’t eat or digest it.
One rewarding thing is hearing people say they can eat eggs again. We have reviews saying, ‘I haven’t digested eggs in 40 years, but I can eat yours.’ Soy proteins can pass into eggs, and someone with a soy sensitivity can be sensitive to eggs from soy-fed chickens. We’ve seen that. People have shared blood work, too.
They’ve shared blood work showing high inflammatory markers or poor fatty-acid results on their OmegaQuant tests. After six months or a year eating Nourish Food Club food on a low-omega-6-PUFA diet, their results looked completely different—much better. People say they can eat bread again because it’s real sourdough made with pesticide-free grains. I wonder whether we have a gluten problem or a problem with pesticides coating much of American bread. Are people not digesting gluten well, or not digesting pesticides? People tell us they can eat food again. That’s freeing: more culinary experimentation and more life. Food is meant to nourish us and to be enjoyed. We’re supposed to have fun cooking, create cuisine and learn from ancestral traditions.
Giving that back to people is a cool experience. I haven’t fully come to terms with it. Old-fashioned farming changes food’s makeup in a way people can digest better, because conventional inputs have changed so much that outputs are different.
Let’s go back to how it used to be, and the outputs will be different. We see that more every day. That keeps things going on the long days. It’s the ‘why’: bringing back small farms and creating food people can eat again. They don’t have to stick to just three foods they can digest. They can add more to their plates. Life is more fun, fulfilling and nourishing, because the wider the variety of food you include, the more micronutrients you can get in your diet.
Ryan
Love that. Disconnection from food is disconnection from our reality and what makes us human. My time working on a farm wasn’t long. I wasn’t there from the first planting or when they first got the cows and pigs. But being there on the final day, working farmers’ markets and talking to customers was memorable. That farm had some of the best ginger I’ve had, and really great tea. At one market near Pittsburgh, customers’ eyes lit up when they saw it. It was the same with shiitake mushrooms. Those interactions rebuild community, and you look forward to those conversations again. Even though I got up at 4 am, barely slept and sometimes forgot things—we even forgot the ginger for one market, which cost money—we still had great conversations and spoke with the other vendors. Looking back, that was one of my favourite experiences.
I’m not the best morning person, which isn’t ideal for farming, but it ruled. We did it Saturday and Sunday, then rested Monday. It was fulfilling to be there on that final day and share it with other people.
I remember hearing about ‘bring your tractor to school day’ in high school. I laughed and didn’t think much of it. Now I wish I could go back and experience it as a kid: driving a tractor with all your farming friends, who have their own tractors.
That’s one benefit of social media. Despite the bad parts, if you keep being authentic and showing what you do on a farm or ranch, the right people will find you. There are people looking for that; they just don’t know where to go.
Even with only 1,000 followers, 100 may live locally and become customers. You never know what doors will open. Find the good to keep going.
Ashley
For sure.
Ryan
Thank you again. This was a great conversation. I’ll include everything in the show notes.
Ashley
Thank you for caring—from all the farmers out there. Thank you for this space to speak and for truly caring about us. I think there’s something in those reaction videos. I’ll send you some.
Ryan
Yeah. I’m gonna start doing those.
That’s good, because I have the perfect spot to start making those.
Ashley
Great. Cool. Well thank you, Ryan.
