April 2, 2024 • 49 mins
The COVID pandemic led to two problems that strangely existed at the same time. Millions of Americans were going hungry and yet thousands of commercial farmers were literally dumping food when customers such as restaurants and schools shut down. This didn’t make any sense to Ben Collier, Owen Dubeck, and their ragtag group of college friends, so they decided to become the link between these two worlds. Today, The Farmlink Project has delivered over 200 million pounds of food to people who need it!
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
I mean, I showed up with my camera because I'm like,
I'll document this. Hey, maybe we'll end up on the
local news. We can use it to help raise a
bit more money or something. And I remember the guy
who works at the egg ranch comes over to me
and he whispers, He's like, you really shouldn't be filming this.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
You need a refrigerated truck. Like you can't put eggs
in a U haul.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Yeah, whoops.
Speaker 4 (00:23):
And I was like, hush, obviously that.
Speaker 5 (00:28):
Yeah, yeah, So I don't know.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
I kept I kept filming, and we put the we
put the eggs in there, and you know, it's pretty heavy.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
You're not supposed to fill you haul with that much weight.
Speaker 5 (00:37):
And we're driving up the four h five.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
We're in the left lane, like the fastest lane where
people drive one hundred miles an hour, and we're going
ten fifteen.
Speaker 5 (00:46):
Miles an hour. It's like, might not make it up
the hill.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
But yeah, we got it to the food bank, and
the people there were so wonderful and lovely and grateful
that we were able to bring.
Speaker 5 (00:57):
It to them.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
And we were like, if we did.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
This again, would you want more food than they were
like absolutely, And that gave us a lot of confirmation
that we should keep going.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
Welcome to an army of normal folks. I'm Bill Courtney.
I'm a normal guy. I'm a husband, a father, an entrepreneur,
and I've been a football coach in Inner City Memphis.
And the last part it unintentionally led to an oscar
for the film about our team. It's called Undefeated. Guys,
I believe our country's problems will never be solved by
(01:30):
a bunch of fancy people and nice suits talking big
words that nobody understands on CNN and Fox, but rather
an army of normal folks, US just you and me deciding, Hey,
you know what I can help. That's what Ben Collier
and Owen Dubeck, the voices we just heard, have done.
The COVID pandemic led to two problems that strangely existed
(01:53):
at the exact same time. Millions of Americans were going
hungry after losing their jobs, and yet thousands of commercial
farmers were literally dumping their food when customers such as
restaurants and schools shut down. This didn't make any sense
to Ben Andoan and their ragtag group of college frooms,
(02:14):
so they decided to become the link between those two worlds.
Apparently no adults are going to do it. And today
the farm Link Project has delivered get this, one hundred
and sixty five million pounds of food to people who
didn't have it. I cannot wait for you to meet
(02:35):
Ben and Oen right after these brief messages from our
general sponsors. Ben and Owen, welcome to Memphis.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Thanks for having us.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
That was the flight.
Speaker 4 (03:00):
Got emergency row.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
Yeah, that's not bad, especially for a guy with long
legs like you. Right.
Speaker 4 (03:06):
A woman checking me in said you're too tall to
somewhere else for free?
Speaker 3 (03:12):
Everybody. Ben Callier and Owen du Beck Am I saying that? Right?
All right? Owen du Bec are from LA and they
have a really interesting story that I first learned about
in Nashville. Is where we met.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
Yeah, Nashville a few months ago at the summit.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
Ironlight Labs Nashville Summit, which is basically a collection of
dadgum do goods.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Yep.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
And they're all telling their stories, right yeap, yeah, and
you told yours.
Speaker 5 (03:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
And I was sitting in the front row with Alex
wondering why I was dragged to this summit of do goods.
And once I started hearing the stories. I was so
inspired and when I specifically heard you, I turned to
Alex I said, I really want to do a podcast
on those guys. And so here we are. Ben and
(04:03):
Owen have flown in from LA late last night here
in Memphis with me, and after this, hopefully they're going
to go to the National Civil Rights Museum and see
a few things in Memphis before they they bow out
of here. And Ben and Owen started this thing called
the farm Link Project that we are going to get to.
But first, first, would you grow up?
Speaker 4 (04:26):
Who are these guys? I grew up in Connecticut, so
born and raised in the Northeast and then ended up
in LA after college.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
You're a Yankee.
Speaker 4 (04:35):
I am a Yankee. I'm a Mets fan Yankee.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
But yes, that's weird, isn't that weird? I mean I
thought everybody liked the Yankees and the Mets were the
other team.
Speaker 4 (04:42):
Yeah, it's easy to cheer for the good teams.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
Yeah, okay, so you're you just you just you just
dig your heels in on.
Speaker 4 (04:48):
Dig my heels in with the Mets, Jets and Knicks.
Which and you went to Brown I did go to Brown. Yes,
so you're dumb I'm dumb. Yeah, they're only dumb people
go to Brown, right. Well, I got in. I ended
up playing sports, But really I was a tennis player.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
No kidding, you say it was. You're still probably pretty good.
I'm pretty good. Had a pretty big surgery right before
the pandemic and farm like golf started, so not the same,
but I could still swing around full reconstructive leg and
ankle surgery. Absolutely, how'd that happen?
Speaker 4 (05:20):
I've had this neurological thing going on with my legs
since I was like fifteen, kept playing on it, and
it just gave out junior year.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
So that kind of sucks.
Speaker 4 (05:30):
There's nothing they could do but break it all and
put it back together.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
Really. Oh yeah, and so you were playing college tennis
and then they had to do all that to your leg.
Speaker 4 (05:39):
Yeah, they just offerred like three or four years before
this gave out. I just strapped it into a really
tight ankle brace and it was definitely on. You knew
that was the trajectory it was going.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
I'm a three to five. Could I even stay on
the court with you? No?
Speaker 2 (05:54):
You can't even see this guy, sir. Baseball my whole life.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
I'd rather get hit by a ninety mile per hour
fastball on the shoulder than return to this sky's serf.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
It's is it a.
Speaker 4 (06:09):
I could? All right, if we're talking about serves, I'm
here for this podcast now, I could. I could do all.
My serf was my best part of my game. When
you're this tall and this slow, you got to have
a good serve.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
I'll love it, all right. And so owen you are from.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
I'm from New York originally so New York. Grew up
in the suburbs for a little bit, had a somewhat
normal childhood with a front yard. Backyard situation in New
York is in state or a little outside of.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
The city, and then we moved into the city later on.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
So did you grow were able to grow up in
the city.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
Yeah, yeah, it's kind of cool. It was like, yeah,
middle school, high school in the city, which is interesting,
thirtieth floor of an apartment building like uptown.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
My mom. My mom day traded so she raised us
and just like traded stocks all day. She's a total,
total wizard. She's like, you know, she'll text me at
two in the morning and be like, sell everything, and
then there will be a text at seven am that
says don't sell it went back up. That's uh, that's
(07:14):
what my mom was up to and my dad. My
dad was involved in finance. He just kind of did
what what everyone was doing in Manhattan.
Speaker 5 (07:22):
But it worked all the time.
Speaker 3 (07:24):
It's as a high school to grow up in the city,
I guess.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
Yeah, it was cool. Like starting at thirteen, you have
full independence. You can kind of build your own world,
your own community. Like your parents don't really know where
you are. So it's like, you know, you're playing baseball
in the park one moment and you're hanging out downtown
with a bunch of people, and it was like, yeah,
it was like a little a little adventure.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
That's pretty awesome. Y Okay. So then you end up
at in school at Claremont McKenna.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
Claremont McKenna and that's east of l A.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
Yeah, so it's like, what are you doing going all
the way there from New York?
Speaker 5 (07:58):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (07:59):
So I had surfed growing up in New York.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Yeah, in New York.
Speaker 4 (08:04):
Yeah, he's the most California New Yorker you'll ever. I
did not like growing up.
Speaker 5 (08:09):
I hated growing up in New York.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
How do you in New York?
Speaker 1 (08:12):
So I took the a train two hours to South
Brooklyn and there's a place called Rockaway Beach where you
can surf, and there's a little community there, and they're
actually really good.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Waves a few days of the year, but in the.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
Winter, right, Yeah, But the trick is in the fall
and winter that's when the waves are actually good.
Speaker 3 (08:30):
So so what do you wet a mink?
Speaker 5 (08:33):
Yeah, you look like a seal.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
You have the taketeer, you have the hood, gloves, boots like.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
You don't we love surfing To do that, to take
a train two hours and dress like a seal to
surf off Brooklyn.
Speaker 5 (08:48):
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
And then in the in the summers it would be
warmer and we would go out to Long Island and
that was a little easier. But I always knew I
wanted to do that. So my entire college list was
a California. I was like, I'm not going anywhere else.
And Claremont McKenna was just this really beautiful community. It
was a three hundred person per class school where it
(09:10):
seemed like they give you a ton of agency to
pursue your passions and what you wanted to do.
Speaker 3 (09:15):
And this thing is I think you said outside Fontana
I mean.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's like sixty miles east of downtown.
Speaker 4 (09:23):
So what's that big pitch they say at all the
Claremont schools, they're like, you can ski and surf in
the same day.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
Yeah, you can see your because you could have gotten
a Big Bear and go snow skiing. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
Well, even closer than Big Bear, there was Mount Baldy,
a tiny local mountain twenty minutes away.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
You could be skiing.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
You just drive straight up like the steepest canyon road,
and then you could go surfing that same day an hour.
Speaker 5 (09:44):
So I was sold on that pitch.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
So Ben, what was your first year of college?
Speaker 4 (09:49):
My first year of college, Oh, twenty seventeen.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Twenty seventeen, and Owen mine was twenty sixteen, twenty sixteen.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
Okay, so from the at you guys listening, understand, these
are still young men and they're in college about to
do the college thing, playing tennis, surfing, assume considering going
to class fairly regularly, and yeah, trying to make your grades,
do the right thing, and you're going to learn and
(10:19):
study and go be you. Right, then, people in your
generation dealt with this thing called COVID. So what were
where were you guys in school COVID time where in like,
were you junior?
Speaker 1 (10:35):
What?
Speaker 2 (10:36):
How do what you want to go first? Because you're still.
Speaker 4 (10:38):
Yeah, so I was a junior. I just had the
surgery though, and so I was the first couple of
months of twenty twenty, I was taking twelve percosets a day,
still in ten out of ten pain, and so I
was already looking ahead at the next couple of years,
thinking my whole community is really getting shaken up. And
then the pandemic starts, and suddenly someone else is in
(11:00):
the exact same position. And so in a way, COVID
made it almost easier for me to be where I was,
because I couldn't already be anywhere else. But yeah, I
was back home by the end of March or early April,
or I think maybe even before then.
Speaker 3 (11:17):
And this is twenty nineteen, This is twenty twenty, twenty twenty, yeah,
all right.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
And Owen, Yeah, I had just graduated from college.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
So I'm a little bit older than Ben and most
of the people at Farmlink, and I was working as
a documentary filmmaker in LA doing like all the grunt
work for.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
The Creator projects, which means.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Starting to death, not making any money, just like still surfing,
filming weird commercials like whatever will come my way to
pay the bills, and all of a sudden, COVID hits.
All the work drives up, and a few of my
friends call me with the big idea. And you know,
I was itching to get outside. I was itching to
(11:58):
talk to people have community, the same kind of thing.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
But we're all we I mean, I remember it too. Everybody.
Everybody has their own COVID reality story. But I mean
I remember the board games. I remember creating things to
do at home, and I cannot imagine being a junior
in college or a recent graduate trying to start off
(12:25):
life in the world shut down on you. My son,
my third child, first son, Will was about to be
a senior at Ole miss And you know, I mean
this is people died and everything, so this is small,
but you know, his formal was robbed from him. Kids,
(12:46):
high school football games were robbed from him. It we
need to be reminded. It for a year and a half,
shut down the world, and for kids that hadn't finished
college or just getting out of college or in high school,
it really had a profound effect because at the most
(13:07):
social time in your lives. You were now told you
cannot be social. So that's kind of your reality and
your generation experienced that reality, right, And who was it
that was first watching TV hearing about hungry people.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
Yeah, so you know we were all, you know, I'll
relate this back to my mom. My mom had always
said it's in moment of crisis that there's the most
opportunity for growth, for learning her stocks, that she's investig in,
like all that stuff.
Speaker 5 (13:41):
It's like when everyone is.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
A day trader would understand right.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
When she was like, when everyone is fearful, that is
the time you want to look around and do your
own research and see like where there's opportunity. And it
felt like as a documentary filmmaker, this was a similar
a similar situation. You know, normalcy, there's there's not much
interesting nuance or people's personal stories in a normal day.
(14:09):
But when all the rules of the world change, that's fascinating.
How do people react, how do people shift their lives?
And so in the beginning of the pandemic, that's really
what we were looking towards. It was like, what can
we do to help other people? What's here that's missing?
Where's this major gap? And I started calling James and Aiden,
(14:30):
who you see in the film, and then they called
Ben and we were all spitballing ideas like what.
Speaker 5 (14:35):
Can we do here? Kind of ask question, Yeah, why why?
Speaker 3 (14:39):
Go ahead?
Speaker 1 (14:40):
I think because you know, for me, my why was
I was working on a documentary on an undocumented kid
my age was living in San Francisco, and I saw
everyone get a relief check except for him, and I
saw him lose's apartment and I was like, that's messed up.
And there are millions of people in this situation right now.
And I'm privileged enough that I'm gonna be okay. I
(15:02):
have a little money saved up from college. I can
go a little while without income.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
And let's less be candid. You have parents that could
support you if.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
Yeah, if it, if it, if it all goes to ship,
they can give me a couple thousand dollars to get
through that month's rent. And I have that safety net
and I'm so lucky for that, and I want to
use every ounce of that privilege to help other people
because we can. There's there's so much that we can do.
And even though we hadn't built anything that actually worked before,
(15:30):
there there's always been this feeling amongst our friends that like,
we can actually make a big impact here, and we
want to start something and we want to like think
of these bigger eye It's fun to think of these
big ideas and what if this worked, what if that worked?
And yeah, I threw around some ideas that were like
pretty bad in hindsight.
Speaker 4 (15:46):
We're never going to work.
Speaker 5 (15:49):
And then that's a luxury, isn't it?
Speaker 3 (15:51):
Being young, stupid and.
Speaker 5 (15:53):
Broke, right totally?
Speaker 3 (15:55):
So what if you mess up? Yeah, young stupid broke
at that point, right.
Speaker 5 (15:59):
Totally, Yeah, you and fall back on us.
Speaker 3 (16:01):
But you're saying you just felt a call to do something.
You felt an urge or a sense that there's we're
in a crisis. There's got to be a way we
can do something. There's this feeling of restlessness. I mean, no,
that's interesting.
Speaker 4 (16:19):
I think when you acknowledge once that privilege of safety
is there, we're home, we're locked up. In many ways,
things aren't going to change. I think you had hundreds
and thousands of students and young people who, for the
first time in their lives, had no outlet to direct
that whether their previous outlet was something social or productive
(16:40):
or academic or entrepreneurial or just drinking. There was almost
none of that, and so I think it was all
of these different experiences that were leading so many students
to the similar place of I will pour myself into
something if given the opportunity, just.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
Give me something today I mean restlessness. That is so
that's interesting to me.
Speaker 4 (17:01):
Well, at the start of the pandemic, you're like, this
is a vacation, and then you and then then after
a couple of weeks, this sucks.
Speaker 3 (17:07):
My mom.
Speaker 4 (17:08):
To tie it back to our moms, my mom saw
all this ppe shortage and she just started taking all
of our old, old T shirts and sewing them into
masks and so at the same time, do something, do anything.
And she would see all these articles because right at
the beginning of the pandemic they highlighted these food shortages
(17:29):
quite a lot, farmers facing huge surpluses as the commercial
food industry shut down, and then food banks facing these
long lines as school lunch programs and so many other
things became less accessible. My mom would cut these out
and just leave them outside of me and my brother's door.
We'd joke like some humanitarian serial killer just with these
ransom notes. But we'd wake up and we'd just read
(17:53):
we'd read these articles, and I think that it wasn't
one student. I mean everybody was seeing this. And so
when we started to come together and think, all right,
let's just learn more, let's just do a little more,
one step more, I think that was all that was
really needed for us to then get that ball roll.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
And now a few messages from our general sponsors. But first,
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(18:41):
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So I hope you'll think about it. We'll be right back.
(19:04):
I think a little background for our listeners on some
things I really didn't consider think about. But do you know,
I think you probably know the numbers, but how many
kids in the United States are fed lunch by a
school that, if they weren't in school, would not eat.
(19:26):
Do you know that number.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
I don't know the exact numbers, but I think, do
you know the exact number?
Speaker 4 (19:31):
I know? I know about one in five kids has
inadequate food access in this country. Say that again, about
one in five kids has inadequate food access.
Speaker 3 (19:40):
That's twenty percent of the United States. Twenty percent of
the kids in the United States have inadequate food access.
So I think the number I've read is seven million
kids in the country, if they did not have school
provided lunch, would go hungry that day. Oftentimes that is
the meal, and in some districts they get breakfast and
(20:01):
launch and without those meals they would not eat well.
COVID happens, and these kids aren't in school, so where
do they eat. That's one of the things that struck
me when I really thought about your guys story, is
we literally had kids starving. They weren't dying of COVID,
(20:22):
but they were hungry and restless and hungry.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
I think what struck us too was how slow. You know,
they're billion dollar organizations in this space, they're massive government programs,
they're supposed to be working on this, and they weren't
agile enough to anticipate that quickly.
Speaker 3 (20:42):
I've heard you say that before. I think it might
have been on the documentary. I'm not sure I agree
with that. I think maybe they weren't creative enough. It'd
be too I think maybe it took a twenty one,
twenty two twenty year old mind to say why not?
(21:03):
And can't we do it differently?
Speaker 4 (21:05):
That question is something we talk about a lot. We
just revisited our values. You know, what are the things
that really drive us? And that question of why or
why not is everything at the beginning. I think that
you talk about creativity so many times we asked questions
at at those beginning ones because we knew nothing, and
(21:26):
why was the leading question, and wherever someone said that's
the way it's always been, those were the areas where
we were able to do something the most innovative or creative.
Speaker 3 (21:36):
Do you know the final words of a dying organization?
Because that's the way we've all done it. You have
to constantly ask why, you have to constantly reinvent, and
you have to constantly find creativity in any organization. I
own a business that I started in two thousand and one,
and every couple of years I create a crisis. And
(21:58):
what I mean by that is, I don't actually go
into my own company and destroy anything. But we get
together as a leadership team and we say, what if
this happened, what would our response be? And if we
can't come up with an atticate response to that crisis,
we have work to do because we haven't asked the
(22:18):
wise and we haven't been creative, and I think nobody
asked the question in our country among these large organizations.
As you talk about what happens if a pandemic happens,
what will our response be? You're right, government has tons
of organizations, tons of money. There's all these large NGOs.
(22:40):
But as you guys learned and pointed out that you're
now going to share with our audience, we had millions
upon means of food being thrown away, while we had
means upon means of kids and families starving, and there
was no organization to figure out how to quote them,
(23:01):
which is what a bunch of college kids with some creativity,
some initiative, some restlessness, some time on their hands ultimately
figured out. So tell me about Pittsburgh and tell me
about how it happened.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
Yeah, So Pittsburgh was on the news. There was this visual.
It's a helicopter shot of a mile long line for
food banks, a bunch of cars honking at each other.
Speaker 3 (23:32):
And literally literally on the off ramp. It was backed
up that far.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
Oh my god, it's it's overflowing, and people were waiting
in line for twelve hours only to get to the
front and the food bank to tell them we just
ran out of food. I could not imagine having two
three kids in the car in the United States and
not being able to get that to get that food assistance.
So I think when we saw that became more personal,
(23:58):
you felt it in your stomach, and I remember James
said to me, let's just do one small thing to help.
Let's do one delivery. We're not going to solve this
whole crisis. There was no thought of an organization or
a documentary or anything like that. It was let's call
as many farms as we can, let's find one, and
let's drive it to our local food bank. Where we're
(24:20):
seeing similar things happen.
Speaker 3 (24:22):
Because also on the news, you're also seeing these pictures
of these farms that now that restaurants are shut down
and schools are shut down, they have nowhere to sell
their food, so they're literally throwing food away.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
Right, billions of pounds of bananas being thrown in the dump,
watermelons being smashed, there's milk being poured in drains like,
there's beautiful edible food being thrown away all over the country.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
Because there's no outlet for the farmers to go with
it again, because the schools are shut down so we
don't need school lunches, and all the restaurants are shut down.
And so you guys say, let's help our food bank
because all we got to do call these farmers are
throwing the food away and get it to them.
Speaker 4 (25:02):
That's what your thought is exactly, And it was just
there's one spot with so much food nowhere to go.
There's another spot that can't possibly get enough food through
its doores. Why and what is going to connect those two?
Speaker 3 (25:14):
So you started calling farmers.
Speaker 4 (25:16):
No problem, right, We've said let's find every farmer that
has been written about in local news, national news.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
Where are we right now? We're in April, where logistically,
where's the food bank are going to help?
Speaker 4 (25:29):
Well? I think we The intention was Los Angeles from
from James and Aiden and Owen being over there. We're
calling people everywhere and call.
Speaker 3 (25:40):
But that idea was we're going to help our one
food bank, and that one food bank was a food
bank in La Yeah, is that right?
Speaker 1 (25:46):
Yeah, And but very quickly it proved difficult. We weren't
getting the reception from farmers that we expected.
Speaker 3 (25:52):
Yeah, tell me.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
It was dozens of rounds of rejection. It was like,
this is a scam. I don't believe you. You're in college,
hang up, like, and.
Speaker 4 (26:00):
There's a pandemic going on. What do you expect? These
guys are getting called by people that admit at the jump,
we don't know anything about this. We're just trying to
help the like, well, we got bigger fish to fry
right now. So there was this rejection.
Speaker 3 (26:11):
So how many farmers do you think you called that
first week or whatever? I think it was like two hundred,
and all of them were just like, leave me alone. Well,
there's a lot of voicemails because we're not even going
to get through to begin with. And those we did
get through with we couldn't speak the language at the time,
and so yeah, it was it was a whole lot
of rejection.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
So and eventually we landed on we landed on two farms.
There was one farm in right outside of La. It
was like an egg.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
Ranch and the farms are having to euthanize their chickens.
Speaker 4 (26:43):
They literally couldn't possibly figure out where to get all
of this, these eggs that they were creating.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
They were euphanizing their chickens.
Speaker 4 (26:50):
I mean, this was happening all over the country.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
Yeah, we'll let you find an egg ranch.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
That's what they were called. It's Trafficana egg ranch is
what it's called north of La like in the valley,
not that far away distance. He answers our call. He says, sure,
you can pick up these eggs and transport them to
the foods. We talk about it. It was like forty
thousand eggs, eggs, eggs.
Speaker 4 (27:16):
We picked up eleven thousand of them. To put that
into perspective, it filled a U haul. That's how you rip.
Speaker 5 (27:22):
So we rented a U haul and I remember.
Speaker 3 (27:27):
Needs to get this picture. These college kids, restless asking why,
seeing stuff on the news, decide we're going to help
our food bank. And you call all over the place,
you get told no, and you finally find happy egg
farmer who gives you eleven thousand eggs, and you like,
how are we going to get them? There? Are you haul?
Speaker 4 (27:47):
How do you move your how do your college dorm.
Speaker 3 (27:49):
Went to you? So you go, you show up at
an egg ranch in a U haul and you leave
with eleven thousand eggs pounder.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
Yeah, so yeah, I remember. I mean I showed up
with my camera because I'm like, I'll document this. Hey,
maybe we'll end up on the local news. We can
use it to help raise a bit more money or something.
And I remember the guy who works at the egg
ranch comes over to me and he whispers, He's like,
you really shouldn't be filming this.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
You need a refrigerated truck. Like you can't put eggs
in a U haul?
Speaker 3 (28:20):
Yeah whoops. And I was like, uh, obviously that.
Speaker 5 (28:26):
Yeah, yeah, so I don't know.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
I kept I kept filming, and we put the we
put the eggs in there, and you know, it's pretty heavy.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
You're not supposed to fill you haul with that much weight.
Speaker 5 (28:35):
And we're driving up the four h five.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
We're in the left lane, like the fastest lane where
people drive like one hundred miles an hour, and we're
going ten fifteen.
Speaker 5 (28:45):
Miles an hour. It's like, might not make it up
the hill.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
And like I had met Aiden once before, like we
weren't close for I was close friends with James, so
Aidan and I are like meeting for the first time
and bonding over this shared experience of like trying not
to blow it with all these eggs in the back.
But yeah, we got it to the food bank and
the people there were so wonderful and lovely and grateful
(29:10):
that we were able to bring it to them. And
we were like, if we did this again, would you
want more food? And they were like absolutely, And that
gave us a lot of confirmation that we should keep going.
Oh and the other thing which needs to be said
is that James had the idea to paint a banner
that said Farmlink and strap it to the side of
the U haul like a bed sheet, like an eight
(29:32):
foot long bed sheet taped to the U haul.
Speaker 5 (29:34):
And Eden was like, this is a horrible idea.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
It's gonna fly off, it's gonna hit someone's windshield, they're
gonna crash. The whole thing's gonna be done. They're gonna
hurt someone, crash the name of the thing we're starting
just directly implicating us. But it turned out to be
the most important element because a bunch of kids standing
in front of that banner looked like the beginnings of
a movement, and that's what new local news and eventually
national news gravitated towards. I think that's what people all
(30:02):
over the country saw as a symbol of hope. And
I never thought that the bedsheet still the banner. It
was not this professionally printed out thing. It was this
painted like slanted thing that said farm link with a
bunch of kids standing in front of a rented U
haul filled with food.
Speaker 3 (30:19):
It felt like eleven thousand eggs.
Speaker 5 (30:21):
Filled eleven thousand eggs.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
It felt like the scrappiness that I don't know, in
some ways provided hope or the country felt like we
needed at that time.
Speaker 4 (30:31):
There's two disclaimers to share. The first is the eggs
arrived in good condition and they were well received, and
the second is that we don't have kids drive our
fruit around in you hauls anymore. So both of those things.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
There were some more U haulwork very well.
Speaker 4 (30:45):
The second these truckloads were happening at the same time,
but right when these guys were going to pick up
these eggs. We'd also spoken with this onion farmer. His
name was Shay, and he had a much larger onion
operation in Idaho, and he had just been written about
in the New York Times for having a pile of
millions of pounds of onions with nowhere to go. And
(31:06):
it was at the point where he was literally digging
a ditch in his farm and just burying millions of onions.
And there's this visual of more onions than I have
ever could could ever possibly imagine. And we get on
the phone with him and he says, well, if you
get a truck here, you can take whatever you can.
And so as these.
Speaker 3 (31:24):
Hell onions riden at u haul, well.
Speaker 4 (31:26):
Those went in a forty foot long truck that fit
forty thousand pounds of onions. And so just as these
eggs are being picked up, we have the world's biggest
omelet coming together.
Speaker 3 (31:38):
And that was are you taking these onions to that
light thing? Still?
Speaker 1 (31:43):
The one yeah we took I think they went to
We sent one truck to San Francisco and we sent
one truck to La I'm pretty sure how'd.
Speaker 3 (31:50):
You get some money for the truck?
Speaker 4 (31:51):
That was our first fundraise. I mean, to this day,
trucks are the main expense we have. But we just said,
all right, we need nine hundred dollars. Let's just reach
out to whoever we can, or some friends and family.
And that was the proof of concept. That was how
we got started. And I think that New York Times
article is particularly important because now we've moved eleven thousand eggs,
(32:11):
a full truckload of tens of thousands of pounds of onions,
we still don't really know what we're trying to do.
And one of our early teammates, Jeordie, reaches back out
to that New York Times writer who just written this article.
It says, hey, we're a bunch of college students. Here's
what we did with this, just so you know, they
want a follow up piece. And so three weeks into Farmlink,
we barely even have a website, and suddenly we're featured
(32:33):
in the New York Times, and that accelerated the trajectory
that we were on immediately.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
That's I'm believe we'll be right back. I got to
tell you a quick story. You might find it funny.
(33:02):
There's the supplements called juice plus. All right, your parents
may have taken them. I bet your parents know what
they are. But they're little pills. The one's a fruit
and one's a vegetable supplement, and they're good supplements. They've
got all the vitamins and stuff. It's what old people
like me to say, Is this an AD? Huh?
Speaker 4 (33:21):
Is this an AD?
Speaker 3 (33:23):
Is it an AD? No? It's funny though it should
be Jay Martin, the owner of Juice Plus, you need
to reach out to me because it's just free advertising
podcasts in U haul. Oddly, it was the reason I
know about. It was started here, but it's sold worldwide
and they're little green pharmaceutical looking containers that you've seen them,
(33:45):
like if you go to gen C or whatever supplements
vitamins right. Juice Plus, well, it was getting off the
ground here in Memphis, and the folks were trying to
figure out Juice Plus. You know, we need a spokesman,
we need to really get the nationwide and everything else,
and they thought Juice O. J. Simpson. So they brought
(34:08):
Oj to Memphis, went to La signed a deal with them.
We're about to pay him to be their spokesman. And
three days later he's driving down their state in the
white Bronco and we's rested. Go back to the picture.
He's pulled out of the Bronco and he's wearing juice
plus t shirt and Juice plus went nuts, and they
(34:30):
never had to pay him because now he's a convict.
So anyway, what I'm saying is when I hear your
story about the sheet on the side of the truck,
it's phenomenal. The right picture of the right thing at
the right time can do for you. And it's amazing
to me that in four weeks you guys, are you
have a janky website. You delivered some eggs and some onions,
(34:51):
but you're being put into the New York Times.
Speaker 4 (34:55):
I've never in four years of farm Link been compared
to oj Simpson.
Speaker 3 (34:58):
Well he the juice, it should be. There's a connection there.
It's more lenk, it's more leak.
Speaker 4 (35:04):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (35:05):
So when that thing happens, did y'all? I remember reading
somewhere there was a GoFundMe or something and you woke
up and you're like, hold it, we got one money.
Speaker 4 (35:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
So I was driving back from Idaho. I had gone
there to take photos of all the potato the five
million potatoes in the in the side.
Speaker 3 (35:28):
We hadn't heard about the potatoes. Maybe that was a
Doug has project.
Speaker 5 (35:31):
Oh yeah, so yeah, go ahead, no, go for it.
Speaker 4 (35:34):
Well, right after this onion and these eggs, we get
on a call and we think, all right, we need
to split into two groups some one group needs to
focus on the farms. One group needs to focus on
fundraising and storytelling, because if we're gonna keep doing this,
we need money.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
And so the way, I'm sorry to interrupt you, the
storytelling part of this is so integral because not only
were you doing work to do the work, you have
to do fundraising and do fundraising. People have to hear
about you and the fact that you guys had the foresight,
the creativity, or maybe just the restlessness with the right
(36:09):
amount of skill set from each individual person involved in this.
To have not only the work going wrong with the
storytelling in order to build I think is part of
the secret.
Speaker 4 (36:23):
So, I mean, James and Aden are great storytellers. Owen
is the the keystone of that though. And so to
have people from the start senior praise yeah, I mean,
it just it positioned us to be something that I
think is I mean, storytelling is such a necessary ingredient
for systemic change. We didn't even know that at the time.
We just knew this is a part of who we
(36:44):
are and how we think this needs to be operated.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
Yeah, And what I'll say about that is, so I
was working for two guys who make social impact documentaries
and they had raised ninety million dollars for Syrian refugees
and people living in poverty through the stories. And for
the last two and a half three years, I had
seen their work. I had seen every step of how
they put their stories together, how they run impact campaigns.
(37:09):
They fully took me under their wing and mentored me,
which I'm so grateful for. So by the time Farming started,
I was ready to hit the ground running. I was like,
I know how to do this. I'm young, i haven't
done this before, but I've seen it work, and that's
what we tried to replicate. I was like, this is
a time where everyone's at home. Every news story is
(37:31):
as negative as it's ever been. Let's give people hope.
Let's only storytell from the perspective of hope.
Speaker 3 (37:37):
And so you separated in two groups fundraising, storytelling and
actual production.
Speaker 4 (37:43):
And we're calling hundreds of farmers same deal. Now we
have a little bit of credibility. You know, we did
this with the Onions. Here's what we did in New
York Times. We still aren't having much success. But we
get through to this potato farmer and he's growing potatoes
that are seed potatoes, so they're not historically sold at stores.
They're used to grow more potatoes, completely nutritious. And he says,
I just have potatoes in a pile. And oh, and
(38:05):
you went and saw it. It's how many feet tall
was that mountain?
Speaker 2 (38:09):
Fifty foot tall pile of potatoes.
Speaker 4 (38:11):
Millions of potatos, and he's so huge, and they store them.
That's how they storre them. They can last for a
year like that.
Speaker 3 (38:17):
They like under a shed.
Speaker 5 (38:19):
Yeah, it's like it's like a shed like some.
Speaker 4 (38:23):
It's like a airplane hangar full of potatoes. And he says,
I don't have packaging, but if you guys figure that out,
you can have them. And so this was the first
time we really figured out all of the logistics of
making this work. We had a local Idaho packaging company
donate boxes that they brought to the farm. Then we
(38:43):
said food banks that we knew we could could receive
the potatoes. Then we had to coordinate the trucks to
go pick up the potatoes, the bins to be filled,
and then all of those to be moved. It was
our first time doing all of those logistics and it
was pretty clunky, but I mean it was a way
for us to learn, and those potatoes were I think
proof for me that this wasn't just a fluke. And
(39:06):
this guy was a fifth generation potato farmer. He said,
no one in my life has ever experienced something like
this pandemic. The closest thing I can think of is
what was it like.
Speaker 2 (39:15):
The Spanish This great grandfather during like the Spanish flu?
Speaker 4 (39:19):
And so he's like, we farmers, we know everything about
this industry. We don't know what's going on right now.
And he told us, he said, the saddest day in
a farmer's life is the day all of the food
you spend your entire livelihood growing is going to waste.
And we've tried to figure out how to make farm
link the most financially viable solution for farmers. But that
(39:39):
was when it also clicked that the real reason they
wanted to be a part of this at the jump
was this is what they're here for. They're here to
feed people, and especially in a moment where so many
people were hungry, that was what drove them to respond
to farm Link. More than anything else because we didn't
have a perfect solution or experience behind us. But I
think that hope piece really resonated with the farmers too.
Speaker 3 (40:01):
So how many trucks of potatoes did you like that.
Speaker 4 (40:03):
At that time? I think we were covered about one
hundred and fifty thousand pounds of potatoes, and so you're
looking at like four truckloads, which you know, now we're
doing deals where we're moving and we're talking, we're talking
about so much a truckload. When we say a truckload,
we're talking.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
Two foot truck. It fits twenty two pallettes in there.
Speaker 4 (40:20):
And forty thousand pounds is our unit of measurement for
a truckload. So forty thousand pounds is enough to fill
a large room with six feet tall oft produce es.
Speaker 1 (40:31):
To tie it back to what you're saying before, I
was driving back from that visit of the potatoes and
we got a call that ABC.
Speaker 2 (40:40):
World News wanted to feature us. They had seen like the.
Speaker 3 (40:43):
GBC World News tonight on ABC. We're like, say about
thirty Real News David, bigger than the New York Times.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
And they were like, yeah, they had seen the two
sentences we were featured in in the New York Times,
and they were like, can five of you send videos saying,
Hey David, I'm here on the potato farm. Hey David,
I'm here receiving the potatoes at the food bank. And
I plugged my laptop into the outside of a Dairy
Queen takeout window and started I started, yeah, there's a
(41:12):
photo of it, and it started sending them all the
videos like quickly because the news was going on in
like two and a half hours.
Speaker 3 (41:19):
It's like they didn't can you do this? We want
to go out with it in two hours.
Speaker 4 (41:22):
If they don't, that's all you get. If if if
this is going to happen, it's going to happen.
Speaker 3 (41:26):
Now.
Speaker 1 (41:26):
They were like, this is can you get it to me?
I have like nine emails from the producer. There's no
text in the in the body of the email, it's
all caps in the subject line and that's how they communicate.
And I was like, oh my god, I don't know,
have a panic attack.
Speaker 3 (41:38):
I got to start da Yeah. Unfortunately, again, yeah, this
doesn't happen. Had you not understood the power of storytelling
while you're doing this, because if you hadn't had those
files on you and already canned and ready to go.
You couldn't send them content. Your stories never.
Speaker 1 (41:55):
Told right, we had the first delivery and with the
banner and the U haul, and then we had this
is starting to happen on a much bigger scale, so
people could understand what was happening there, and I mean
I've never seen I mean, we raised like one hundred
and twenty thousand dollars and ten minutes.
Speaker 6 (42:14):
And after right when it as it aired, like as
it was still playing, it was like our PayPal account
got shut down for suspicious activity because we had so
many donations coming in.
Speaker 1 (42:26):
And it wasn't people donating one thousand dollars. It was hey,
I got ten dollars here, twenty dollars here, thirty dollars here,
and these long, long messages about what this meant to
them and how they want their kids to participate, And
it was people from all over the country.
Speaker 3 (42:40):
There was no and it's a pandemic.
Speaker 2 (42:43):
So during the pandemic home it was a symbol of hope.
Speaker 1 (42:45):
Everyone's at home and it's the only positive news story
of a nine hour negative news cycle.
Speaker 3 (42:53):
It was literally overnight, you went from raising a little
bit of money to you one hundred thousand.
Speaker 4 (42:59):
In our friend's bank count, and suddenly we're thinking this
needs to change.
Speaker 3 (43:03):
I hear that fate was just noping to check it out.
Speaker 4 (43:06):
Credit to one of our co founders, Max Goldman, who
did not run away that morning.
Speaker 3 (43:12):
All that the quarter million dollars. Did it really happened
like that quick overnight?
Speaker 1 (43:17):
Yeah, because after the news there is like an hour later,
it's all it's all gone. Like if you didn't donate
by then, you forgot about it. You watched the next thing.
So it all happened at once.
Speaker 3 (43:27):
That's unbelievable. So now you've delivered eleven thousand eggs, you've
delivered two truckloads of onions, four truckloads of potatoes, you've
got a short in the New York Times, you've got
your world news tonight. At this point, you're a few
months old, I assume.
Speaker 4 (43:41):
Less than we're less than a month.
Speaker 3 (43:42):
A month old, and you've got now how much money,
and who's was it?
Speaker 4 (43:48):
Call it one hundred and fifty thousand dollars and whose account?
Speaker 3 (43:51):
With maxes and Max's bas you realize how ridiculous it's crazy.
So in a month, you've delivered onions, potatoes, eggs, let omelet,
been on New York Times, been on World News tonight,
and Max wakes up to one hundred and fifty grand
(44:12):
and y'all got a U haul truck and a bedsheet.
Speaker 1 (44:15):
Yeah, so that's that's a catalog of all the assets
that does.
Speaker 3 (44:20):
Not happen without some college kids with some creativity and
some restlessness going why not?
Speaker 4 (44:26):
And we didn't know what we couldn't do. So there
was this optimism in this naivete that just led it all.
And I think when we woke up, when we when
that money was there, we thought, Okay, there is a
level of responsibility. And we were already so locked in
and motivated by this, but there was a level of
responsibility to push from there where we thought, okay, this
(44:46):
needs to become a step more intentional. What's going to
happen from here? And so that's when we just continue
to ramp it up hosting on our social media.
Speaker 3 (44:55):
The first thing you did was actually open a harm
Link bank account.
Speaker 4 (44:58):
We did. What we started is yeah, was pretty integral
for getting all that legitimacy lined up. I think he
was kind of scared, this is much money you're gonna
go to jail.
Speaker 3 (45:09):
But that's a late where was backs in school at
the time.
Speaker 4 (45:14):
He was one of my classmates at Browns. I got it,
and I actually didn't even really know Max. So many
these people were coming together in a way where it
was happening so quickly. It was happening so quickly, and
I think this is when we started to really learn
that next month about it and help.
Speaker 3 (45:28):
But laugh at you two guys. I'm seeing these two
college kids wanting to do something good getting involved in
doing all this. Picking up some paperwork left outside your
bedroom board by your mom and a dude who likes
to serve from New York and you put a sheet
on a U haul and only a month later. I
mean it had to have been surreal for you. Really,
(45:50):
I'm trying to get in your minds. But a month
into this it had been exciting, but you had to
be looking at each other going, what well we.
Speaker 4 (45:57):
Got dunked on so hard right after that, because we're thinking,
all right, we have this article coming out where the
talk of the town. Surely we must be moving into
a center position in this industry. And I'm gonna tell
this cucumber story real quick. I mean, we then speak
with a cucumber farmer in Florida. This is all happening
(46:18):
within the same couple of weeks. He has thirty truckloads
of cucumbers with nowhere to go, and he's a guy
who grows cucumbers to turn them into pickles. If your
audience doesn't know it, calls her cucumbers, Yes they are.
I actually think a lot of us didn't know that,
but that's ridiculous. Nobody was pickling anything in May of
twenty twenty and so we had one point two million
pounds of cucumbers and we think perfect, we can get
(46:40):
these to twenty different food banks. And a local food
bank calls and they say, this is our territory. You
need to back off. And this is something we didn't
know existed. And they said, this is our farmer. We're
going to take five of these truckloads of cucumbers, but
you're gonna you're in a mess, this whole thing up.
You can give us money or you can get out
(47:01):
of here. And we're like, what about the other twenty
five truckloads, the million pounds of cucumbers. We can find
homes for them. And they called the farmer with me
on the phone and said, these kids are scamming you
and hung up, and the farmer didn't work with us,
and a million pounds of cucumbers went to waste. And
so now we're sitting here not really sure what to
do at all. Because we know this food is there,
(47:25):
we're starting to talk to more and more people who
have it, but maybe this industry that we're trying to
support doesn't actually want us there to begin with, And
so that kicked off I think a lot of learning
and asking of questions for us, and that is not
a reflection of food banking as a whole. But what
we started to learn was there are hundreds of food
(47:46):
banks and each one is set up to support their
local community and they see those people showing up every
single day needing them, and so it's really easy to
just focus on preserving and supporting your slice of the pie.
And what we realized was they're all these food thanks,
hundreds of them around the country, that in a weird way,
are not incentivized to support each other. And so that
(48:07):
became a layer of this that we started to realize,
if we're going to make some progress at a large
scale here, we need to address that too. And so
I think that between the David Muir and all this
money showing up and then starting to have these conversations
with these folks in the industry, realizing this is so
much more nuanced than we maybe gave it credit credit
for when we started out.
Speaker 3 (48:33):
And that concludes part one of my conversation with Ben
Collier and Owen do Beck, and you do not want
to miss part two that's now available to listen to,
as their fight to link these two worlds is just
getting started together. Guys, we can change the country, but
it starts with you. I'll see in part two the
I mean, I showed up with my camera because I'm like,
I'll document this. Hey, maybe we'll end up on the
local news. We can use it to help raise a
bit more money or something. And I remember the guy
who works at the egg ranch comes over to me
and he whispers, He's like, you really shouldn't be filming this.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
You need a refrigerated truck. Like you can't put eggs
in a U haul.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Yeah, whoops.
Speaker 4 (00:23):
And I was like, hush, obviously that.
Speaker 5 (00:28):
Yeah, yeah, So I don't know.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
I kept I kept filming, and we put the we
put the eggs in there, and you know, it's pretty heavy.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
You're not supposed to fill you haul with that much weight.
Speaker 5 (00:37):
And we're driving up the four h five.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
We're in the left lane, like the fastest lane where
people drive one hundred miles an hour, and we're going
ten fifteen.
Speaker 5 (00:46):
Miles an hour. It's like, might not make it up
the hill.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
But yeah, we got it to the food bank, and
the people there were so wonderful and lovely and grateful
that we were able to bring.
Speaker 5 (00:57):
It to them.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
And we were like, if we did.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
This again, would you want more food than they were
like absolutely, And that gave us a lot of confirmation
that we should keep going.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
Welcome to an army of normal folks. I'm Bill Courtney.
I'm a normal guy. I'm a husband, a father, an entrepreneur,
and I've been a football coach in Inner City Memphis.
And the last part it unintentionally led to an oscar
for the film about our team. It's called Undefeated. Guys,
I believe our country's problems will never be solved by
(01:30):
a bunch of fancy people and nice suits talking big
words that nobody understands on CNN and Fox, but rather
an army of normal folks, US just you and me deciding, Hey,
you know what I can help. That's what Ben Collier
and Owen Dubeck, the voices we just heard, have done.
The COVID pandemic led to two problems that strangely existed
(01:53):
at the exact same time. Millions of Americans were going
hungry after losing their jobs, and yet thousands of commercial
farmers were literally dumping their food when customers such as
restaurants and schools shut down. This didn't make any sense
to Ben Andoan and their ragtag group of college frooms,
(02:14):
so they decided to become the link between those two worlds.
Apparently no adults are going to do it. And today
the farm Link Project has delivered get this, one hundred
and sixty five million pounds of food to people who
didn't have it. I cannot wait for you to meet
(02:35):
Ben and Oen right after these brief messages from our
general sponsors. Ben and Owen, welcome to Memphis.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Thanks for having us.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
That was the flight.
Speaker 4 (03:00):
Got emergency row.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
Yeah, that's not bad, especially for a guy with long
legs like you. Right.
Speaker 4 (03:06):
A woman checking me in said you're too tall to
somewhere else for free?
Speaker 3 (03:12):
Everybody. Ben Callier and Owen du Beck Am I saying that? Right?
All right? Owen du Bec are from LA and they
have a really interesting story that I first learned about
in Nashville. Is where we met.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
Yeah, Nashville a few months ago at the summit.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
Ironlight Labs Nashville Summit, which is basically a collection of
dadgum do goods.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Yep.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
And they're all telling their stories, right yeap, yeah, and
you told yours.
Speaker 5 (03:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
And I was sitting in the front row with Alex
wondering why I was dragged to this summit of do goods.
And once I started hearing the stories. I was so
inspired and when I specifically heard you, I turned to
Alex I said, I really want to do a podcast
on those guys. And so here we are. Ben and
(04:03):
Owen have flown in from LA late last night here
in Memphis with me, and after this, hopefully they're going
to go to the National Civil Rights Museum and see
a few things in Memphis before they they bow out
of here. And Ben and Owen started this thing called
the farm Link Project that we are going to get to.
But first, first, would you grow up?
Speaker 4 (04:26):
Who are these guys? I grew up in Connecticut, so
born and raised in the Northeast and then ended up
in LA after college.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
You're a Yankee.
Speaker 4 (04:35):
I am a Yankee. I'm a Mets fan Yankee.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
But yes, that's weird, isn't that weird? I mean I
thought everybody liked the Yankees and the Mets were the
other team.
Speaker 4 (04:42):
Yeah, it's easy to cheer for the good teams.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
Yeah, okay, so you're you just you just you just
dig your heels in on.
Speaker 4 (04:48):
Dig my heels in with the Mets, Jets and Knicks.
Which and you went to Brown I did go to Brown. Yes,
so you're dumb I'm dumb. Yeah, they're only dumb people
go to Brown, right. Well, I got in. I ended
up playing sports, But really I was a tennis player.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
No kidding, you say it was. You're still probably pretty good.
I'm pretty good. Had a pretty big surgery right before
the pandemic and farm like golf started, so not the same,
but I could still swing around full reconstructive leg and
ankle surgery. Absolutely, how'd that happen?
Speaker 4 (05:20):
I've had this neurological thing going on with my legs
since I was like fifteen, kept playing on it, and
it just gave out junior year.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
So that kind of sucks.
Speaker 4 (05:30):
There's nothing they could do but break it all and
put it back together.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
Really. Oh yeah, and so you were playing college tennis
and then they had to do all that to your leg.
Speaker 4 (05:39):
Yeah, they just offerred like three or four years before
this gave out. I just strapped it into a really
tight ankle brace and it was definitely on. You knew
that was the trajectory it was going.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
I'm a three to five. Could I even stay on
the court with you? No?
Speaker 2 (05:54):
You can't even see this guy, sir. Baseball my whole life.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
I'd rather get hit by a ninety mile per hour
fastball on the shoulder than return to this sky's serf.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
It's is it a.
Speaker 4 (06:09):
I could? All right, if we're talking about serves, I'm
here for this podcast now, I could. I could do all.
My serf was my best part of my game. When
you're this tall and this slow, you got to have
a good serve.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
I'll love it, all right. And so owen you are from.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
I'm from New York originally so New York. Grew up
in the suburbs for a little bit, had a somewhat
normal childhood with a front yard. Backyard situation in New
York is in state or a little outside of.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
The city, and then we moved into the city later on.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
So did you grow were able to grow up in
the city.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
Yeah, yeah, it's kind of cool. It was like, yeah,
middle school, high school in the city, which is interesting,
thirtieth floor of an apartment building like uptown.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
My mom. My mom day traded so she raised us
and just like traded stocks all day. She's a total,
total wizard. She's like, you know, she'll text me at
two in the morning and be like, sell everything, and
then there will be a text at seven am that
says don't sell it went back up. That's uh, that's
(07:14):
what my mom was up to and my dad. My
dad was involved in finance. He just kind of did
what what everyone was doing in Manhattan.
Speaker 5 (07:22):
But it worked all the time.
Speaker 3 (07:24):
It's as a high school to grow up in the city,
I guess.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
Yeah, it was cool. Like starting at thirteen, you have
full independence. You can kind of build your own world,
your own community. Like your parents don't really know where
you are. So it's like, you know, you're playing baseball
in the park one moment and you're hanging out downtown
with a bunch of people, and it was like, yeah,
it was like a little a little adventure.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
That's pretty awesome. Y Okay. So then you end up
at in school at Claremont McKenna.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
Claremont McKenna and that's east of l A.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
Yeah, so it's like, what are you doing going all
the way there from New York?
Speaker 5 (07:58):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (07:59):
So I had surfed growing up in New York.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Yeah, in New York.
Speaker 4 (08:04):
Yeah, he's the most California New Yorker you'll ever. I
did not like growing up.
Speaker 5 (08:09):
I hated growing up in New York.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
How do you in New York?
Speaker 1 (08:12):
So I took the a train two hours to South
Brooklyn and there's a place called Rockaway Beach where you
can surf, and there's a little community there, and they're
actually really good.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Waves a few days of the year, but in the.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
Winter, right, Yeah, But the trick is in the fall
and winter that's when the waves are actually good.
Speaker 3 (08:30):
So so what do you wet a mink?
Speaker 5 (08:33):
Yeah, you look like a seal.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
You have the taketeer, you have the hood, gloves, boots like.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
You don't we love surfing To do that, to take
a train two hours and dress like a seal to
surf off Brooklyn.
Speaker 5 (08:48):
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
And then in the in the summers it would be
warmer and we would go out to Long Island and
that was a little easier. But I always knew I
wanted to do that. So my entire college list was
a California. I was like, I'm not going anywhere else.
And Claremont McKenna was just this really beautiful community. It
was a three hundred person per class school where it
(09:10):
seemed like they give you a ton of agency to
pursue your passions and what you wanted to do.
Speaker 3 (09:15):
And this thing is I think you said outside Fontana
I mean.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's like sixty miles east of downtown.
Speaker 4 (09:23):
So what's that big pitch they say at all the
Claremont schools, they're like, you can ski and surf in
the same day.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
Yeah, you can see your because you could have gotten
a Big Bear and go snow skiing. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
Well, even closer than Big Bear, there was Mount Baldy,
a tiny local mountain twenty minutes away.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
You could be skiing.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
You just drive straight up like the steepest canyon road,
and then you could go surfing that same day an hour.
Speaker 5 (09:44):
So I was sold on that pitch.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
So Ben, what was your first year of college?
Speaker 4 (09:49):
My first year of college, Oh, twenty seventeen.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Twenty seventeen, and Owen mine was twenty sixteen, twenty sixteen.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
Okay, so from the at you guys listening, understand, these
are still young men and they're in college about to
do the college thing, playing tennis, surfing, assume considering going
to class fairly regularly, and yeah, trying to make your grades,
do the right thing, and you're going to learn and
(10:19):
study and go be you. Right, then, people in your
generation dealt with this thing called COVID. So what were
where were you guys in school COVID time where in like,
were you junior?
Speaker 1 (10:35):
What?
Speaker 2 (10:36):
How do what you want to go first? Because you're still.
Speaker 4 (10:38):
Yeah, so I was a junior. I just had the
surgery though, and so I was the first couple of
months of twenty twenty, I was taking twelve percosets a day,
still in ten out of ten pain, and so I
was already looking ahead at the next couple of years,
thinking my whole community is really getting shaken up. And
then the pandemic starts, and suddenly someone else is in
(11:00):
the exact same position. And so in a way, COVID
made it almost easier for me to be where I was,
because I couldn't already be anywhere else. But yeah, I
was back home by the end of March or early April,
or I think maybe even before then.
Speaker 3 (11:17):
And this is twenty nineteen, This is twenty twenty, twenty twenty, yeah,
all right.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
And Owen, Yeah, I had just graduated from college.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
So I'm a little bit older than Ben and most
of the people at Farmlink, and I was working as
a documentary filmmaker in LA doing like all the grunt
work for.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
The Creator projects, which means.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Starting to death, not making any money, just like still surfing,
filming weird commercials like whatever will come my way to
pay the bills, and all of a sudden, COVID hits.
All the work drives up, and a few of my
friends call me with the big idea. And you know,
I was itching to get outside. I was itching to
(11:58):
talk to people have community, the same kind of thing.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
But we're all we I mean, I remember it too. Everybody.
Everybody has their own COVID reality story. But I mean
I remember the board games. I remember creating things to
do at home, and I cannot imagine being a junior
in college or a recent graduate trying to start off
(12:25):
life in the world shut down on you. My son,
my third child, first son, Will was about to be
a senior at Ole miss And you know, I mean
this is people died and everything, so this is small,
but you know, his formal was robbed from him. Kids,
(12:46):
high school football games were robbed from him. It we
need to be reminded. It for a year and a half,
shut down the world, and for kids that hadn't finished
college or just getting out of college or in high school,
it really had a profound effect because at the most
(13:07):
social time in your lives. You were now told you
cannot be social. So that's kind of your reality and
your generation experienced that reality, right, And who was it
that was first watching TV hearing about hungry people.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
Yeah, so you know we were all, you know, I'll
relate this back to my mom. My mom had always
said it's in moment of crisis that there's the most
opportunity for growth, for learning her stocks, that she's investig in,
like all that stuff.
Speaker 5 (13:41):
It's like when everyone is.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
A day trader would understand right.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
When she was like, when everyone is fearful, that is
the time you want to look around and do your
own research and see like where there's opportunity. And it
felt like as a documentary filmmaker, this was a similar
a similar situation. You know, normalcy, there's there's not much
interesting nuance or people's personal stories in a normal day.
(14:09):
But when all the rules of the world change, that's fascinating.
How do people react, how do people shift their lives?
And so in the beginning of the pandemic, that's really
what we were looking towards. It was like, what can
we do to help other people? What's here that's missing?
Where's this major gap? And I started calling James and Aiden,
(14:30):
who you see in the film, and then they called
Ben and we were all spitballing ideas like what.
Speaker 5 (14:35):
Can we do here? Kind of ask question, Yeah, why why?
Speaker 3 (14:39):
Go ahead?
Speaker 1 (14:40):
I think because you know, for me, my why was
I was working on a documentary on an undocumented kid
my age was living in San Francisco, and I saw
everyone get a relief check except for him, and I
saw him lose's apartment and I was like, that's messed up.
And there are millions of people in this situation right now.
And I'm privileged enough that I'm gonna be okay. I
(15:02):
have a little money saved up from college. I can
go a little while without income.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
And let's less be candid. You have parents that could
support you if.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
Yeah, if it, if it, if it all goes to ship,
they can give me a couple thousand dollars to get
through that month's rent. And I have that safety net
and I'm so lucky for that, and I want to
use every ounce of that privilege to help other people
because we can. There's there's so much that we can do.
And even though we hadn't built anything that actually worked before,
(15:30):
there there's always been this feeling amongst our friends that like,
we can actually make a big impact here, and we
want to start something and we want to like think
of these bigger eye It's fun to think of these
big ideas and what if this worked, what if that worked?
And yeah, I threw around some ideas that were like
pretty bad in hindsight.
Speaker 4 (15:46):
We're never going to work.
Speaker 5 (15:49):
And then that's a luxury, isn't it?
Speaker 3 (15:51):
Being young, stupid and.
Speaker 5 (15:53):
Broke, right totally?
Speaker 3 (15:55):
So what if you mess up? Yeah, young stupid broke
at that point, right.
Speaker 5 (15:59):
Totally, Yeah, you and fall back on us.
Speaker 3 (16:01):
But you're saying you just felt a call to do something.
You felt an urge or a sense that there's we're
in a crisis. There's got to be a way we
can do something. There's this feeling of restlessness. I mean, no,
that's interesting.
Speaker 4 (16:19):
I think when you acknowledge once that privilege of safety
is there, we're home, we're locked up. In many ways,
things aren't going to change. I think you had hundreds
and thousands of students and young people who, for the
first time in their lives, had no outlet to direct
that whether their previous outlet was something social or productive
(16:40):
or academic or entrepreneurial or just drinking. There was almost
none of that, and so I think it was all
of these different experiences that were leading so many students
to the similar place of I will pour myself into
something if given the opportunity, just.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
Give me something today I mean restlessness. That is so
that's interesting to me.
Speaker 4 (17:01):
Well, at the start of the pandemic, you're like, this
is a vacation, and then you and then then after
a couple of weeks, this sucks.
Speaker 3 (17:07):
My mom.
Speaker 4 (17:08):
To tie it back to our moms, my mom saw
all this ppe shortage and she just started taking all
of our old, old T shirts and sewing them into
masks and so at the same time, do something, do anything.
And she would see all these articles because right at
the beginning of the pandemic they highlighted these food shortages
(17:29):
quite a lot, farmers facing huge surpluses as the commercial
food industry shut down, and then food banks facing these
long lines as school lunch programs and so many other
things became less accessible. My mom would cut these out
and just leave them outside of me and my brother's door.
We'd joke like some humanitarian serial killer just with these
ransom notes. But we'd wake up and we'd just read
(17:53):
we'd read these articles, and I think that it wasn't
one student. I mean everybody was seeing this. And so
when we started to come together and think, all right,
let's just learn more, let's just do a little more,
one step more, I think that was all that was
really needed for us to then get that ball roll.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
And now a few messages from our general sponsors. But first,
I hope you'll consider becoming a Premium member of the
Army at Normalfolks dot us. By becoming one for ten
bucks a month or one thousand dollars a year, you
can get access to cool benefits like bonus episodes, a
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(18:41):
grow this army that our country desperately needs right now.
So I hope you'll think about it. We'll be right back.
(19:04):
I think a little background for our listeners on some
things I really didn't consider think about. But do you know,
I think you probably know the numbers, but how many
kids in the United States are fed lunch by a
school that, if they weren't in school, would not eat.
(19:26):
Do you know that number.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
I don't know the exact numbers, but I think, do
you know the exact number?
Speaker 4 (19:31):
I know? I know about one in five kids has
inadequate food access in this country. Say that again, about
one in five kids has inadequate food access.
Speaker 3 (19:40):
That's twenty percent of the United States. Twenty percent of
the kids in the United States have inadequate food access.
So I think the number I've read is seven million
kids in the country, if they did not have school
provided lunch, would go hungry that day. Oftentimes that is
the meal, and in some districts they get breakfast and
(20:01):
launch and without those meals they would not eat well.
COVID happens, and these kids aren't in school, so where
do they eat. That's one of the things that struck
me when I really thought about your guys story, is
we literally had kids starving. They weren't dying of COVID,
(20:22):
but they were hungry and restless and hungry.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
I think what struck us too was how slow. You know,
they're billion dollar organizations in this space, they're massive government programs,
they're supposed to be working on this, and they weren't
agile enough to anticipate that quickly.
Speaker 3 (20:42):
I've heard you say that before. I think it might
have been on the documentary. I'm not sure I agree
with that. I think maybe they weren't creative enough. It'd
be too I think maybe it took a twenty one,
twenty two twenty year old mind to say why not?
(21:03):
And can't we do it differently?
Speaker 4 (21:05):
That question is something we talk about a lot. We
just revisited our values. You know, what are the things
that really drive us? And that question of why or
why not is everything at the beginning. I think that
you talk about creativity so many times we asked questions
at at those beginning ones because we knew nothing, and
(21:26):
why was the leading question, and wherever someone said that's
the way it's always been, those were the areas where
we were able to do something the most innovative or creative.
Speaker 3 (21:36):
Do you know the final words of a dying organization?
Because that's the way we've all done it. You have
to constantly ask why, you have to constantly reinvent, and
you have to constantly find creativity in any organization. I
own a business that I started in two thousand and one,
and every couple of years I create a crisis. And
(21:58):
what I mean by that is, I don't actually go
into my own company and destroy anything. But we get
together as a leadership team and we say, what if
this happened, what would our response be? And if we
can't come up with an atticate response to that crisis,
we have work to do because we haven't asked the
(22:18):
wise and we haven't been creative, and I think nobody
asked the question in our country among these large organizations.
As you talk about what happens if a pandemic happens,
what will our response be? You're right, government has tons
of organizations, tons of money. There's all these large NGOs.
(22:40):
But as you guys learned and pointed out that you're
now going to share with our audience, we had millions
upon means of food being thrown away, while we had
means upon means of kids and families starving, and there
was no organization to figure out how to quote them,
(23:01):
which is what a bunch of college kids with some creativity,
some initiative, some restlessness, some time on their hands ultimately
figured out. So tell me about Pittsburgh and tell me
about how it happened.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
Yeah, So Pittsburgh was on the news. There was this visual.
It's a helicopter shot of a mile long line for
food banks, a bunch of cars honking at each other.
Speaker 3 (23:32):
And literally literally on the off ramp. It was backed
up that far.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
Oh my god, it's it's overflowing, and people were waiting
in line for twelve hours only to get to the
front and the food bank to tell them we just
ran out of food. I could not imagine having two
three kids in the car in the United States and
not being able to get that to get that food assistance.
So I think when we saw that became more personal,
(23:58):
you felt it in your stomach, and I remember James
said to me, let's just do one small thing to help.
Let's do one delivery. We're not going to solve this
whole crisis. There was no thought of an organization or
a documentary or anything like that. It was let's call
as many farms as we can, let's find one, and
let's drive it to our local food bank. Where we're
(24:20):
seeing similar things happen.
Speaker 3 (24:22):
Because also on the news, you're also seeing these pictures
of these farms that now that restaurants are shut down
and schools are shut down, they have nowhere to sell
their food, so they're literally throwing food away.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
Right, billions of pounds of bananas being thrown in the dump,
watermelons being smashed, there's milk being poured in drains like,
there's beautiful edible food being thrown away all over the country.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
Because there's no outlet for the farmers to go with
it again, because the schools are shut down so we
don't need school lunches, and all the restaurants are shut down.
And so you guys say, let's help our food bank
because all we got to do call these farmers are
throwing the food away and get it to them.
Speaker 4 (25:02):
That's what your thought is exactly, And it was just
there's one spot with so much food nowhere to go.
There's another spot that can't possibly get enough food through
its doores. Why and what is going to connect those two?
Speaker 3 (25:14):
So you started calling farmers.
Speaker 4 (25:16):
No problem, right, We've said let's find every farmer that
has been written about in local news, national news.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
Where are we right now? We're in April, where logistically,
where's the food bank are going to help?
Speaker 4 (25:29):
Well? I think we The intention was Los Angeles from
from James and Aiden and Owen being over there. We're
calling people everywhere and call.
Speaker 3 (25:40):
But that idea was we're going to help our one
food bank, and that one food bank was a food
bank in La Yeah, is that right?
Speaker 1 (25:46):
Yeah, And but very quickly it proved difficult. We weren't
getting the reception from farmers that we expected.
Speaker 3 (25:52):
Yeah, tell me.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
It was dozens of rounds of rejection. It was like,
this is a scam. I don't believe you. You're in college,
hang up, like, and.
Speaker 4 (26:00):
There's a pandemic going on. What do you expect? These
guys are getting called by people that admit at the jump,
we don't know anything about this. We're just trying to
help the like, well, we got bigger fish to fry
right now. So there was this rejection.
Speaker 3 (26:11):
So how many farmers do you think you called that
first week or whatever? I think it was like two hundred,
and all of them were just like, leave me alone. Well,
there's a lot of voicemails because we're not even going
to get through to begin with. And those we did
get through with we couldn't speak the language at the time,
and so yeah, it was it was a whole lot
of rejection.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
So and eventually we landed on we landed on two farms.
There was one farm in right outside of La. It
was like an egg.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
Ranch and the farms are having to euthanize their chickens.
Speaker 4 (26:43):
They literally couldn't possibly figure out where to get all
of this, these eggs that they were creating.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
They were euphanizing their chickens.
Speaker 4 (26:50):
I mean, this was happening all over the country.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
Yeah, we'll let you find an egg ranch.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
That's what they were called. It's Trafficana egg ranch is
what it's called north of La like in the valley,
not that far away distance. He answers our call. He says, sure,
you can pick up these eggs and transport them to
the foods. We talk about it. It was like forty
thousand eggs, eggs, eggs.
Speaker 4 (27:16):
We picked up eleven thousand of them. To put that
into perspective, it filled a U haul. That's how you rip.
Speaker 5 (27:22):
So we rented a U haul and I remember.
Speaker 3 (27:27):
Needs to get this picture. These college kids, restless asking why,
seeing stuff on the news, decide we're going to help
our food bank. And you call all over the place,
you get told no, and you finally find happy egg
farmer who gives you eleven thousand eggs, and you like,
how are we going to get them? There? Are you haul?
Speaker 4 (27:47):
How do you move your how do your college dorm.
Speaker 3 (27:49):
Went to you? So you go, you show up at
an egg ranch in a U haul and you leave
with eleven thousand eggs pounder.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
Yeah, so yeah, I remember. I mean I showed up
with my camera because I'm like, I'll document this. Hey,
maybe we'll end up on the local news. We can
use it to help raise a bit more money or something.
And I remember the guy who works at the egg
ranch comes over to me and he whispers, He's like,
you really shouldn't be filming this.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
You need a refrigerated truck. Like you can't put eggs
in a U haul?
Speaker 3 (28:20):
Yeah whoops. And I was like, uh, obviously that.
Speaker 5 (28:26):
Yeah, yeah, so I don't know.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
I kept I kept filming, and we put the we
put the eggs in there, and you know, it's pretty heavy.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
You're not supposed to fill you haul with that much weight.
Speaker 5 (28:35):
And we're driving up the four h five.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
We're in the left lane, like the fastest lane where
people drive like one hundred miles an hour, and we're
going ten fifteen.
Speaker 5 (28:45):
Miles an hour. It's like, might not make it up
the hill.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
And like I had met Aiden once before, like we
weren't close for I was close friends with James, so
Aidan and I are like meeting for the first time
and bonding over this shared experience of like trying not
to blow it with all these eggs in the back.
But yeah, we got it to the food bank and
the people there were so wonderful and lovely and grateful
(29:10):
that we were able to bring it to them. And
we were like, if we did this again, would you
want more food? And they were like absolutely, And that
gave us a lot of confirmation that we should keep going.
Oh and the other thing which needs to be said
is that James had the idea to paint a banner
that said Farmlink and strap it to the side of
the U haul like a bed sheet, like an eight
(29:32):
foot long bed sheet taped to the U haul.
Speaker 5 (29:34):
And Eden was like, this is a horrible idea.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
It's gonna fly off, it's gonna hit someone's windshield, they're
gonna crash. The whole thing's gonna be done. They're gonna
hurt someone, crash the name of the thing we're starting
just directly implicating us. But it turned out to be
the most important element because a bunch of kids standing
in front of that banner looked like the beginnings of
a movement, and that's what new local news and eventually
national news gravitated towards. I think that's what people all
(30:02):
over the country saw as a symbol of hope. And
I never thought that the bedsheet still the banner. It
was not this professionally printed out thing. It was this
painted like slanted thing that said farm link with a
bunch of kids standing in front of a rented U
haul filled with food.
Speaker 3 (30:19):
It felt like eleven thousand eggs.
Speaker 5 (30:21):
Filled eleven thousand eggs.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
It felt like the scrappiness that I don't know, in
some ways provided hope or the country felt like we
needed at that time.
Speaker 4 (30:31):
There's two disclaimers to share. The first is the eggs
arrived in good condition and they were well received, and
the second is that we don't have kids drive our
fruit around in you hauls anymore. So both of those things.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
There were some more U haulwork very well.
Speaker 4 (30:45):
The second these truckloads were happening at the same time,
but right when these guys were going to pick up
these eggs. We'd also spoken with this onion farmer. His
name was Shay, and he had a much larger onion
operation in Idaho, and he had just been written about
in the New York Times for having a pile of
millions of pounds of onions with nowhere to go. And
(31:06):
it was at the point where he was literally digging
a ditch in his farm and just burying millions of onions.
And there's this visual of more onions than I have
ever could could ever possibly imagine. And we get on
the phone with him and he says, well, if you
get a truck here, you can take whatever you can.
And so as these.
Speaker 3 (31:24):
Hell onions riden at u haul, well.
Speaker 4 (31:26):
Those went in a forty foot long truck that fit
forty thousand pounds of onions. And so just as these
eggs are being picked up, we have the world's biggest
omelet coming together.
Speaker 3 (31:38):
And that was are you taking these onions to that
light thing? Still?
Speaker 1 (31:43):
The one yeah we took I think they went to
We sent one truck to San Francisco and we sent
one truck to La I'm pretty sure how'd.
Speaker 3 (31:50):
You get some money for the truck?
Speaker 4 (31:51):
That was our first fundraise. I mean, to this day,
trucks are the main expense we have. But we just said,
all right, we need nine hundred dollars. Let's just reach
out to whoever we can, or some friends and family.
And that was the proof of concept. That was how
we got started. And I think that New York Times
article is particularly important because now we've moved eleven thousand eggs,
(32:11):
a full truckload of tens of thousands of pounds of onions,
we still don't really know what we're trying to do.
And one of our early teammates, Jeordie, reaches back out
to that New York Times writer who just written this article.
It says, hey, we're a bunch of college students. Here's
what we did with this, just so you know, they
want a follow up piece. And so three weeks into Farmlink,
we barely even have a website, and suddenly we're featured
(32:33):
in the New York Times, and that accelerated the trajectory
that we were on immediately.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
That's I'm believe we'll be right back. I got to
tell you a quick story. You might find it funny.
(33:02):
There's the supplements called juice plus. All right, your parents
may have taken them. I bet your parents know what
they are. But they're little pills. The one's a fruit
and one's a vegetable supplement, and they're good supplements. They've
got all the vitamins and stuff. It's what old people
like me to say, Is this an AD? Huh?
Speaker 4 (33:21):
Is this an AD?
Speaker 3 (33:23):
Is it an AD? No? It's funny though it should
be Jay Martin, the owner of Juice Plus, you need
to reach out to me because it's just free advertising
podcasts in U haul. Oddly, it was the reason I
know about. It was started here, but it's sold worldwide
and they're little green pharmaceutical looking containers that you've seen them,
(33:45):
like if you go to gen C or whatever supplements
vitamins right. Juice Plus, well, it was getting off the
ground here in Memphis, and the folks were trying to
figure out Juice Plus. You know, we need a spokesman,
we need to really get the nationwide and everything else,
and they thought Juice O. J. Simpson. So they brought
(34:08):
Oj to Memphis, went to La signed a deal with them.
We're about to pay him to be their spokesman. And
three days later he's driving down their state in the
white Bronco and we's rested. Go back to the picture.
He's pulled out of the Bronco and he's wearing juice
plus t shirt and Juice plus went nuts, and they
(34:30):
never had to pay him because now he's a convict.
So anyway, what I'm saying is when I hear your
story about the sheet on the side of the truck,
it's phenomenal. The right picture of the right thing at
the right time can do for you. And it's amazing
to me that in four weeks you guys, are you
have a janky website. You delivered some eggs and some onions,
(34:51):
but you're being put into the New York Times.
Speaker 4 (34:55):
I've never in four years of farm Link been compared
to oj Simpson.
Speaker 3 (34:58):
Well he the juice, it should be. There's a connection there.
It's more lenk, it's more leak.
Speaker 4 (35:04):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (35:05):
So when that thing happens, did y'all? I remember reading
somewhere there was a GoFundMe or something and you woke
up and you're like, hold it, we got one money.
Speaker 4 (35:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
So I was driving back from Idaho. I had gone
there to take photos of all the potato the five
million potatoes in the in the side.
Speaker 3 (35:28):
We hadn't heard about the potatoes. Maybe that was a
Doug has project.
Speaker 5 (35:31):
Oh yeah, so yeah, go ahead, no, go for it.
Speaker 4 (35:34):
Well, right after this onion and these eggs, we get
on a call and we think, all right, we need
to split into two groups some one group needs to
focus on the farms. One group needs to focus on
fundraising and storytelling, because if we're gonna keep doing this,
we need money.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
And so the way, I'm sorry to interrupt you, the
storytelling part of this is so integral because not only
were you doing work to do the work, you have
to do fundraising and do fundraising. People have to hear
about you and the fact that you guys had the foresight,
the creativity, or maybe just the restlessness with the right
(36:09):
amount of skill set from each individual person involved in this.
To have not only the work going wrong with the
storytelling in order to build I think is part of
the secret.
Speaker 4 (36:23):
So, I mean, James and Aden are great storytellers. Owen
is the the keystone of that though. And so to
have people from the start senior praise yeah, I mean,
it just it positioned us to be something that I
think is I mean, storytelling is such a necessary ingredient
for systemic change. We didn't even know that at the time.
We just knew this is a part of who we
(36:44):
are and how we think this needs to be operated.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
Yeah, And what I'll say about that is, so I
was working for two guys who make social impact documentaries
and they had raised ninety million dollars for Syrian refugees
and people living in poverty through the stories. And for
the last two and a half three years, I had
seen their work. I had seen every step of how
they put their stories together, how they run impact campaigns.
(37:09):
They fully took me under their wing and mentored me,
which I'm so grateful for. So by the time Farming started,
I was ready to hit the ground running. I was like,
I know how to do this. I'm young, i haven't
done this before, but I've seen it work, and that's
what we tried to replicate. I was like, this is
a time where everyone's at home. Every news story is
(37:31):
as negative as it's ever been. Let's give people hope.
Let's only storytell from the perspective of hope.
Speaker 3 (37:37):
And so you separated in two groups fundraising, storytelling and
actual production.
Speaker 4 (37:43):
And we're calling hundreds of farmers same deal. Now we
have a little bit of credibility. You know, we did
this with the Onions. Here's what we did in New
York Times. We still aren't having much success. But we
get through to this potato farmer and he's growing potatoes
that are seed potatoes, so they're not historically sold at stores.
They're used to grow more potatoes, completely nutritious. And he says,
I just have potatoes in a pile. And oh, and
(38:05):
you went and saw it. It's how many feet tall
was that mountain?
Speaker 2 (38:09):
Fifty foot tall pile of potatoes.
Speaker 4 (38:11):
Millions of potatos, and he's so huge, and they store them.
That's how they storre them. They can last for a
year like that.
Speaker 3 (38:17):
They like under a shed.
Speaker 5 (38:19):
Yeah, it's like it's like a shed like some.
Speaker 4 (38:23):
It's like a airplane hangar full of potatoes. And he says,
I don't have packaging, but if you guys figure that out,
you can have them. And so this was the first
time we really figured out all of the logistics of
making this work. We had a local Idaho packaging company
donate boxes that they brought to the farm. Then we
(38:43):
said food banks that we knew we could could receive
the potatoes. Then we had to coordinate the trucks to
go pick up the potatoes, the bins to be filled,
and then all of those to be moved. It was
our first time doing all of those logistics and it
was pretty clunky, but I mean it was a way
for us to learn, and those potatoes were I think
proof for me that this wasn't just a fluke. And
(39:06):
this guy was a fifth generation potato farmer. He said,
no one in my life has ever experienced something like
this pandemic. The closest thing I can think of is
what was it like.
Speaker 2 (39:15):
The Spanish This great grandfather during like the Spanish flu?
Speaker 4 (39:19):
And so he's like, we farmers, we know everything about
this industry. We don't know what's going on right now.
And he told us, he said, the saddest day in
a farmer's life is the day all of the food
you spend your entire livelihood growing is going to waste.
And we've tried to figure out how to make farm
link the most financially viable solution for farmers. But that
(39:39):
was when it also clicked that the real reason they
wanted to be a part of this at the jump
was this is what they're here for. They're here to
feed people, and especially in a moment where so many
people were hungry, that was what drove them to respond
to farm Link. More than anything else because we didn't
have a perfect solution or experience behind us. But I
think that hope piece really resonated with the farmers too.
Speaker 3 (40:01):
So how many trucks of potatoes did you like that.
Speaker 4 (40:03):
At that time? I think we were covered about one
hundred and fifty thousand pounds of potatoes, and so you're
looking at like four truckloads, which you know, now we're
doing deals where we're moving and we're talking, we're talking
about so much a truckload. When we say a truckload,
we're talking.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
Two foot truck. It fits twenty two pallettes in there.
Speaker 4 (40:20):
And forty thousand pounds is our unit of measurement for
a truckload. So forty thousand pounds is enough to fill
a large room with six feet tall oft produce es.
Speaker 1 (40:31):
To tie it back to what you're saying before, I
was driving back from that visit of the potatoes and
we got a call that ABC.
Speaker 2 (40:40):
World News wanted to feature us. They had seen like the.
Speaker 3 (40:43):
GBC World News tonight on ABC. We're like, say about
thirty Real News David, bigger than the New York Times.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
And they were like, yeah, they had seen the two
sentences we were featured in in the New York Times,
and they were like, can five of you send videos saying,
Hey David, I'm here on the potato farm. Hey David,
I'm here receiving the potatoes at the food bank. And
I plugged my laptop into the outside of a Dairy
Queen takeout window and started I started, yeah, there's a
(41:12):
photo of it, and it started sending them all the
videos like quickly because the news was going on in
like two and a half hours.
Speaker 3 (41:19):
It's like they didn't can you do this? We want
to go out with it in two hours.
Speaker 4 (41:22):
If they don't, that's all you get. If if if
this is going to happen, it's going to happen.
Speaker 3 (41:26):
Now.
Speaker 1 (41:26):
They were like, this is can you get it to me?
I have like nine emails from the producer. There's no
text in the in the body of the email, it's
all caps in the subject line and that's how they communicate.
And I was like, oh my god, I don't know,
have a panic attack.
Speaker 3 (41:38):
I got to start da Yeah. Unfortunately, again, yeah, this
doesn't happen. Had you not understood the power of storytelling
while you're doing this, because if you hadn't had those
files on you and already canned and ready to go.
You couldn't send them content. Your stories never.
Speaker 1 (41:55):
Told right, we had the first delivery and with the
banner and the U haul, and then we had this
is starting to happen on a much bigger scale, so
people could understand what was happening there, and I mean
I've never seen I mean, we raised like one hundred
and twenty thousand dollars and ten minutes.
Speaker 6 (42:14):
And after right when it as it aired, like as
it was still playing, it was like our PayPal account
got shut down for suspicious activity because we had so
many donations coming in.
Speaker 1 (42:26):
And it wasn't people donating one thousand dollars. It was hey,
I got ten dollars here, twenty dollars here, thirty dollars here,
and these long, long messages about what this meant to
them and how they want their kids to participate, And
it was people from all over the country.
Speaker 3 (42:40):
There was no and it's a pandemic.
Speaker 2 (42:43):
So during the pandemic home it was a symbol of hope.
Speaker 1 (42:45):
Everyone's at home and it's the only positive news story
of a nine hour negative news cycle.
Speaker 3 (42:53):
It was literally overnight, you went from raising a little
bit of money to you one hundred thousand.
Speaker 4 (42:59):
In our friend's bank count, and suddenly we're thinking this
needs to change.
Speaker 3 (43:03):
I hear that fate was just noping to check it out.
Speaker 4 (43:06):
Credit to one of our co founders, Max Goldman, who
did not run away that morning.
Speaker 3 (43:12):
All that the quarter million dollars. Did it really happened
like that quick overnight?
Speaker 1 (43:17):
Yeah, because after the news there is like an hour later,
it's all it's all gone. Like if you didn't donate
by then, you forgot about it. You watched the next thing.
So it all happened at once.
Speaker 3 (43:27):
That's unbelievable. So now you've delivered eleven thousand eggs, you've
delivered two truckloads of onions, four truckloads of potatoes, you've
got a short in the New York Times, you've got
your world news tonight. At this point, you're a few
months old, I assume.
Speaker 4 (43:41):
Less than we're less than a month.
Speaker 3 (43:42):
A month old, and you've got now how much money,
and who's was it?
Speaker 4 (43:48):
Call it one hundred and fifty thousand dollars and whose account?
Speaker 3 (43:51):
With maxes and Max's bas you realize how ridiculous it's crazy.
So in a month, you've delivered onions, potatoes, eggs, let omelet,
been on New York Times, been on World News tonight,
and Max wakes up to one hundred and fifty grand
(44:12):
and y'all got a U haul truck and a bedsheet.
Speaker 1 (44:15):
Yeah, so that's that's a catalog of all the assets
that does.
Speaker 3 (44:20):
Not happen without some college kids with some creativity and
some restlessness going why not?
Speaker 4 (44:26):
And we didn't know what we couldn't do. So there
was this optimism in this naivete that just led it all.
And I think when we woke up, when we when
that money was there, we thought, Okay, there is a
level of responsibility. And we were already so locked in
and motivated by this, but there was a level of
responsibility to push from there where we thought, okay, this
(44:46):
needs to become a step more intentional. What's going to
happen from here? And so that's when we just continue
to ramp it up hosting on our social media.
Speaker 3 (44:55):
The first thing you did was actually open a harm
Link bank account.
Speaker 4 (44:58):
We did. What we started is yeah, was pretty integral
for getting all that legitimacy lined up. I think he
was kind of scared, this is much money you're gonna
go to jail.
Speaker 3 (45:09):
But that's a late where was backs in school at
the time.
Speaker 4 (45:14):
He was one of my classmates at Browns. I got it,
and I actually didn't even really know Max. So many
these people were coming together in a way where it
was happening so quickly. It was happening so quickly, and
I think this is when we started to really learn
that next month about it and help.
Speaker 3 (45:28):
But laugh at you two guys. I'm seeing these two
college kids wanting to do something good getting involved in
doing all this. Picking up some paperwork left outside your
bedroom board by your mom and a dude who likes
to serve from New York and you put a sheet
on a U haul and only a month later. I
mean it had to have been surreal for you. Really,
(45:50):
I'm trying to get in your minds. But a month
into this it had been exciting, but you had to
be looking at each other going, what well we.
Speaker 4 (45:57):
Got dunked on so hard right after that, because we're thinking,
all right, we have this article coming out where the
talk of the town. Surely we must be moving into
a center position in this industry. And I'm gonna tell
this cucumber story real quick. I mean, we then speak
with a cucumber farmer in Florida. This is all happening
(46:18):
within the same couple of weeks. He has thirty truckloads
of cucumbers with nowhere to go, and he's a guy
who grows cucumbers to turn them into pickles. If your
audience doesn't know it, calls her cucumbers, Yes they are.
I actually think a lot of us didn't know that,
but that's ridiculous. Nobody was pickling anything in May of
twenty twenty and so we had one point two million
pounds of cucumbers and we think perfect, we can get
(46:40):
these to twenty different food banks. And a local food
bank calls and they say, this is our territory. You
need to back off. And this is something we didn't
know existed. And they said, this is our farmer. We're
going to take five of these truckloads of cucumbers, but
you're gonna you're in a mess, this whole thing up.
You can give us money or you can get out
(47:01):
of here. And we're like, what about the other twenty
five truckloads, the million pounds of cucumbers. We can find
homes for them. And they called the farmer with me
on the phone and said, these kids are scamming you
and hung up, and the farmer didn't work with us,
and a million pounds of cucumbers went to waste. And
so now we're sitting here not really sure what to
do at all. Because we know this food is there,
(47:25):
we're starting to talk to more and more people who
have it, but maybe this industry that we're trying to
support doesn't actually want us there to begin with, And
so that kicked off I think a lot of learning
and asking of questions for us, and that is not
a reflection of food banking as a whole. But what
we started to learn was there are hundreds of food
(47:46):
banks and each one is set up to support their
local community and they see those people showing up every
single day needing them, and so it's really easy to
just focus on preserving and supporting your slice of the pie.
And what we realized was they're all these food thanks,
hundreds of them around the country, that in a weird way,
are not incentivized to support each other. And so that
(48:07):
became a layer of this that we started to realize,
if we're going to make some progress at a large
scale here, we need to address that too. And so
I think that between the David Muir and all this
money showing up and then starting to have these conversations
with these folks in the industry, realizing this is so
much more nuanced than we maybe gave it credit credit
for when we started out.
Speaker 3 (48:33):
And that concludes part one of my conversation with Ben
Collier and Owen do Beck, and you do not want
to miss part two that's now available to listen to,
as their fight to link these two worlds is just
getting started together. Guys, we can change the country, but
it starts with you. I'll see in part two the
Host
Bill Courtney
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