Texas Slim warns EPA rules gut ranching

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• David Bennett hosts "Bitcoin and," exploring Bitcoin's intersection with gaming, permaculture, podcasting, and education to uncover "edge effects" where diverse systems overlap. Texas Slim is interviewed about the Rancher Storefront, Texas fires, EPA water regulations, and the global food shift.
• Texas Slim, with Justin Trammell, opened the Rancher Storefront in Canyon, Texas, as a retail outlet for locally sourced beef, hog, poultry, and lamb, expanding on their Panhandle Meat microprocessing center. This initiative fosters full vertical integration of the food supply, allowing ranchers to control processing and sales.
• The Rancher Storefront offers ground beef at prices competitive with supermarkets, challenging the perception that locally sourced meat is always more expensive. Texas Slim and David Bennett advocate for consumers to "divorce the supermarket" and investigate local options, including university meat shops, as a behavioral shift away from subsidized, devalued commodity products.
• Recent wildfires in the Texas Panhandle, fueled by dry forage and strong winds, devastated 1.2 million acres of grasslands and resulted in an unknown number of cattle mortalities. Texas Slim indicates that some ranchers lost over a quarter of their herds, with immediate impacts including injured animals, orphan calves, and overwhelming strain on local veterinarians.
• The Texas Slim Foundation established a Texas fire relief fund to help affected ranchers with inputs like seed, feed, and fertilizer, and to care for orphan calves. Texas Slim aims to raise $100,000 through this fund, emphasizing the long-term need for healing and regrowth in the devastated regions.
• The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is proposing new water filtration system requirements for microprocessing centers, estimated to cost $250,000 per facility. Texas Slim argues these regulations, framed as "regulatory capture," could force hundreds of small and independent microprocessing centers out of business, despite producers already managing water quality.
• David Bennett highlights how the Army Corps of Engineers and EPA use "navigable waterways" to expand regulatory control upstream, impacting even land far from major rivers. Ranchers face mandates like building expensive fences 200 yards from streams, which they often cannot afford, demonstrating how bureaucratic measures can weaponize land ownership.
• Texas Slim asserts that a "global industrial food shift" is underway, consolidating food industries and aiming for a one-world food group by 2030, partly driven by carbon credits. He contends this shift, tested during COVID, devalues nutritional food in the Western Hemisphere, promoting anti-beef narratives while other regions maintain animal protein consumption.
• Texas Slim states the US now has its lowest cattle inventory on record and imports more beef than it consumes domestically, a historical first. He warns that beef will become "caviar" in the US, predicting a "summer of pork" as an alternative, while advocating for consumers to create decentralized food systems to retain control over their nutrition.
• David Bennett warns that increasing EPA pressure on water runoff, combined with major events like the Texas fires, will further reduce domestic beef production, accelerating reliance on international imports. He suggests that even agricultural universities could face funding cuts (NIH, NSF, DOD, DOE grants) if they continue animal agriculture programs, as compliance with government agendas could supersede research funding.