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I love it when a tweet takes off.
It is very satisfying to see the numbers of likes and retweets climb in real time. Some ego in that, sure, I admit it, but also, reassurance. You put yourself out there as a public figure, even a D-list one like me (OK, Q-list) and it is nice people engage with your commentary. It is why I like writing here for this great Substack, and why I watch to see engagement, likes, reposts, comments, and emails. Feedback is great.
The other day I tweeted in response to President Trump’s Executive Order on meat processing, and it took off. 430,000 views, 30,000 likes, 4,300 retweets. On meat processing!
Yay, freedom!
Yay, Farmer Dan!
The concept is very simple, and something President Trump has recognized in response to soaring meat prices. Buy direct. Buy direct from me.
The local Giant grocery store has lamb chops at $24.99 per pound. Sprouts, the fancy organic store an hour away, has a rack of lamb for $23.99.
Also, in both stores, the cuts are imported from New Zealand. Booo…
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An alternative: buy an entire lamb from my farm, butchered and vacuum sealed, for $450. That’s about 50 lbs in total: legs roasts, shanks, ribs, loins, various chops, and 20 1lb bags of ground, all for about $9 per pound. You’ll need a 2 cubic feet chest freezer, but you’ll have lamb for a long while.
I’ll even throw in the organs, if you’d like. If you don’t eat lamb brain or heart or kidney, your dog definitely will.
Preventing me from selling, and you from purchasing, is of course, the government. I am not United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) certified and approved, and these agencies and their myriad of levels of compliance enforcement only exist to make Doctor Fauci a multimillionaire by forcing a vaccine on you and your family to keep you safe.
To become USDA / FDA certified to sell our lamb directly, it would be close to $1 million in costs: infrastructure, insurance, legal fees, inspections, etc. Now, the math does not math.
At $450 a lamb, I’d need to sell 2223 before I could break even. At our current rate of 90 lambs per year, that’s 25 years of leveraged debt.
The work around: I charge $1500 a lamb. Now that is only 667 lambs before break even and keeping our current birth rate of 90 lambs per year, that’s 7.5 years of leveraged debt. Certainly better… but who in their right mind would buy a lamb for $1500?
I would have to spend a small fortune on “influencers” who dance around my farm barefoot and tell their followers “OMG I just found the CUTEST farm, and guys, it’s like so, incredible, and their organic, grass-fed, all natural, hypo-allergenic, non-GMO, lamb (cut to a shot of eating with exaggerated eye roll) is AMAZING you guys, you HAVE to try it, use my promo code RIGHT NOW…”
If we had to have these insufferable idiots “curating content” in our paddocks, my better half would likely run them over with the tractor.
But that advertising would drive up costs. Next day shipping drives up costs. I could add volume, go from 90 lambs to 200, but I don’t have the grazing land so hay and grain purchases would drive up costs… see how this is going?
Right now… in the simplest form… 90 lambs, $450, easy peasy, you give me money, I give you two huge boxes of meat, but for the government.
Until now.
President Trump’s Executive Order allowing farmers to process, package, and sell their products, even across state lines, gets the government out of our free and fair exchange. Hence, my fairly viral tweet. You don’t want to buy lamb from a small farm like me? That’s fine. You’re an adult. Don’t.
And many people will not.
Many, many people are afraid, grossed out, or don’t trust “farmers markets” or small shops. The big stores, the packaged and certified and stamped and labeled foods give them reassurance. Absolutely fine.
But many are not. And many of us who know and trust our neighbors would gladly purchase meat, eggs, milk, butter, cheese, from them.
That is the choice I am pro.
That $1 million in costs to become certified does not make our lambs safer or better, but it does form a barrier to keep me out of the market. It does protect those giant processors and “big meat” who dominate this market. It does keep food prices artificially high, under the guise of “food safety” and prevent you from more affordable options.
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The greatest American economist, Milton Friedman, argued incessantly that a corporation “cannot get a dollar out of your pocket unless you voluntarily pay it over” making it clear that government was a far greater coercive power over your liberty than any big business, and he is right. So, to get around it, big business team up with big government, and now you are forced to spend your money, enriching companies against your will, and usually under the pretext of “health” or “safety” or “the greater good”.
No one lobbies harder for vaccine mandates than the pharmaceutical company who makes the shot. For the safety of the children…
No one lobbies harder to change the building codes that the companies that manufacture the products. For the protection of the children…
No one lobbies harder for your school district to upgrade to new laptops than the company who sells them. For the education of the children…
Your elected official should be protecting you from this sort of forced consumerism, and instead they are active participants in it. I did not cross reference the House and Senate Members of the Agriculture Committees who opposed President Trump’s order with campaign contributions from the major meat processors because I did not want to get depressed. But you know it. I know it. And the saddest part? They know it, too. They just don’t care.
We do not have to be victims of market prices, and regulations and government action should facilitate, not impede, the free exchange of goods and services, and in my case, meats and money. It is rare, almost unheard of, almost impossible, to imagine a politician in 2026 saying “let’s get the government out of the way and let people buy and sell according to their own free will”. Good Lord, it’s a 250th Anniversary Miracle. It’s like the stuff of Independence. It’s the stuff of freedom. It’s the ideas that make America great. Again.
My mind is blown. I did not think we would ever see a President embrace this level of freedom ever. Just think a few years ago Joe Biden tried to make the gas stove illegal.
We need to ride this wave while we can, because the next president, Republican maybe but democrat most certainly, will reverse this trend. You think Kamala Harris will let you buy meat directly from a local farmer? You think a President Gavin Newsom allows free exchange of goods and services without government intermediary? The man made the sale of the gas-powered car illegal in California starting in a few years.
So, ride this wave while you can. We can win. We can change things. We can claw back our freedom, one issue at a time. One lamb chop at a time.
Honor and courage.
Daniel Turner is the founder and executive director of Power The Future, a national nonprofit organization that advocates for American energy jobs. He also runs a sheep and cattle farm in rural Virginia. Contact him at daniel@powerthefuture.com and follow him on Twitter @DanielTurnerPTF
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Thank you, President Trump and thank you to the farmers of this country. Never never ever give up there’s always light that cuts through the darkness of the tunnel.
God bless you all.🙏🥰💕
That is the problem in a nutshell. You have to cut out the middleman or two! They jack up the price, or you could call it greed!