Ryan - Danby, VT

“I’m Ryan Yoder, Yoder Farm, down in Danby Vermont, and I guess the main thing I’d like to say about healthcare is maybe one the surface of it quite general, and I guess the focus that I would like to see throughout our society, our culture, definitely within our state government, businesses, communities, is a reorientation towards health as the organizing principle of what we currently call healthcare. And this is because I think that when I’ve listened to the voices of people who have studied this and can articulate it well, they point out that whether we have private healthcare, whether we have public healthcare, we won’t be able to afford either. And that’s because it’s expensive to be as unhealthy as we are as a society. And on top of that I think there is really well-documented information now from doctors and scientists that create a very comprehensive picture of what we need to do to become healthy. And, the base of that is food, and agricultural production. And this is the great promise of our time, I think, because the two biggest crises that we as a world are facing are an ecological crisis, and a health crisis. The solution to both of those, or at least the most sane and rational way to address them is through creating the best food ever, regenerative agriculture is the current term for that. And what that does is rebuild soil, rebuild biodiversity, rebuild biomes, it creates food that is not toxic to people, which has the optimal amount of nutrition possible, so that people can better address their ability to stay healthy in the first place. So I guess that would be my overriding concern with healthcare, is that we can’t afford what we have, and we can’t afford doing something different unless we re-orient ourselves to being healthier. Doing that will help us to address the ecological crises, be that loss of biodiversity and habitat, or climate change, and things like that (inaudible) et cetera. So that’s my message”.