Fifth generation Texas cattle rancher Shad Sullivan tells Lara Logan about a lesson from his father that he has never forgotten: Americans may not understand what is being lost until they experience real hardship themselves.
Shad says generations who lived through the Depression understood something much of modern America has become disconnected from: where our food comes from, who produces it and why the land itself is fundamental to a free and independent nation.
Lara and Shad discuss the growing divide between urban America and the farmers and ranchers who feed the country, as well as the cultural and political movements they say have increasingly portrayed cattle, ranching and traditional agriculture as threats to the environment.
They also examine efforts to reduce meat consumption, proposals to tax meat, the push toward highly processed alternatives and the broader consequences of policies that make it increasingly difficult for independent farmers and ranchers to survive.
In Episode 97 of Going Rogue with Lara Logan, Shad argues that losing America’s ranchers means losing far more than a source of food. It means losing knowledge, independence and a connection to the land that generations before us understood was essential to keeping a nation free.
My dad on his deathbed, I'll never forget this day.
I said, Dad, what are we going to do about this nation?
We're losing our nation.
And he looked at me and he was full of cancer and it was weak.
And he said, son, we'll never change anything in America
until everybody sits in the dark, cold and hungry.
And you see, that's the place of suffering where he came from.
He was a child of the Depression.
Yeah, they you know, it was hard to grow their food.
They had no electricity, no running water.
They gathered cow chips
and buffalo chips off of the prairie to heat their home.
These are real stories.
And I'm connected.
Me and you are connected to those generations.
But once you lose that perspective,
you lose the knowledge that's important to keep a nation free.
And that is what you produce.
And the land, the land is the base of it all.
So I'm sorry I got down off into the.
No, don't be sorry.
You're exactly right.
And it's very important for for people to hear this
because, you know, you go into the grocery store,
you go into the restaurant
and your food is so far removed from where it originally came from.
And you can't blame, you know, kids who've grown up in the cities
who've never had the opportunity to go to the rural areas
or spend any time there, you know, or really or really connect
and understand with where these things come from.
Because at the same time as they're growing up in the big city,
all of their media, their social media, their their Hollywood stuff,
their entertainment, their games, all of it is demonizing ranchers.
It's demonizing farmers.
It's demonizing people from the rural areas.
So they're not only are there being they being, you know,
sort of led down this dance to believe where, you know,
people believe that buying a protein bar, something that's pure chemical,
purely chemicals made in a factory out of other chemicals,
that somehow this is better for you than eating a steak.
The very same movement that said, oh, we need to go organic, right?
We need to go organic, but don't eat meat.
But here eat this thing that is not only not organic,
but it's not even real food.
And and of course, when you look at that in the broader context, right?
You have the a few years ago,
Oxford University put out a study that literally said
that the world was going to end if we didn't get rid of meat
and we didn't get rid of cattle and we didn't get rid of cattle
ranching and organized agriculture and farming.
They said that that, you know, all these people will die.
It'll be the end of the planet because of global warming,
all of which has been completely, completely.
It is it is over time.
All the models have been false.
They've turned out none of those things that they predicted have happened.
Every single one of their scare tactics, tactics has been exposed.
And and it's it's a complete scam.
But what they who did they go after?
They went after the beef first.
They went after the cattle.
And they literally had this study at Oxford University.
They said that there should be a tax on eating meat.
In a sense, all the things that you're doing and talking about
that you're fighting against are taxes, you know, layers and layers of bureaucracy
are taxes on on on meat.
And this university study predicted that roughly a third of the people
in the world would die from starvation as a result of reducing
the meat supply and putting a tax on meat.
And they literally asked the question, the researchers,
what are you willing to give up to save the planet?
You know, these is this.
They suggested that this is what you would call an acceptable loss.
And when you when you see that and you look at it, wow, OK,
so you really are going after meat.
That's what net zero, all these, you know, no carbon emissions.
That's what all of it is about.
That's why you're blaming the cows for poisoning the environment,
which is nonsense, because CO2 is needed for life on Earth.
I mean, that's right.
Do they not teach photosynthesis in school anymore?
I mean, it's ridiculous.
So when you talk about the forest and the Amazon shrinking and all the rest,
it's because you're reducing CO2 by so much.
We're in a drought.
