SharkFarmerXM's podcast
Bradley Johnson PHD from Lubbock, TX 7-19-24
[Music] Welcome again to SharkFammer Radio, hey! I'm your host Rob Sharkey, we're in the studio just outside of Bradford, Illinois studio powered by Bex Hybrid. We are playing corn plots and I'm such an Illinois farmer. I'm putting it in with like our series tractors and we're using field equipment to put in deer plots and it's ridiculous. If it saves you time, then it's worth it, right? Well we're behind the 8-ball. Our plan was to put them in later this year, so that was going to be around July 10th, 15th area. Well shoot, we didn't really get a chance to. No, we got a lot of rain and it kept putting you off and so yeah, you're getting it done, which is good because we head out to South Dakota this week to go to Ag PhD Field Day again. I can't believe it's that time of year. Yeah, I know. It's always a one day show out there and it's fantastic and we always go early and we tape a whole season of the route of it the day before, so I have nine interviews for you to do that day. Nine in one day. Yeah, we're going to have to have a Red Bull or something. Last year, we shot a Red Bull with Zach Kefti. Oh my gosh, okay, we're not going to do that this year. I think your heart was thumping for like three hours afterward. I could see music. Oh my gosh. All right, today we're going to go out to a Lubbock, Texas. We're going to talk with Brad Johnson. He's a PhD professor at Texas Tech. How are you doing, Brad? I'm doing great, Rob. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, the only time I've been in Lubbock, it was 9,000 degrees. How is it today? Oh, it's I tell you what, we've had quite a summer. Probably the most rain we've had since May through last weekend. It's as green as I've seen Lubbock in the 16 years I've lived here and it's today's high is only going to be in the mid 80s and we're expecting more rain over the weekend. So it's it's been a unique summer. So man, soak it up. It can get hot here, but the nice thing is we are in a desert. So it usually cools off at night. Mm hmm. You're not from Texas originally, though. Is that correct? No, that's correct. I just keep moving south. I mentioned earlier in your broadcast, South Dakota. I'm a poor farm boy from South Dakota grew up in North East South Dakota. My hometown is Melbank and did my undergraduate at South Dakota State, grew up on a farm feedlot. I was still in the cattle business. I've been in the cattle business my whole life. I did my masters and PhD at the University of Minnesota. So truly a Northern Plains person. And my first faculty job was back at South Dakota State in Brookings for about three and a half years and then I moved south to Manhattan, Kansas. I was at Manhattan, Kansas at Kansas State University for about eight years. And the last 16 years, I've been in a chair position here in Lubbock at Texas Tech University. So both my wife and I are South Dakota natives, but I'm not too proud to say I don't think I could ever handle the winners up there. Yeah, but can you handle the summers? Man, that is a that's a geographical jump you did. Yeah, but as I said earlier, being a desert, it's a dry heat. So we actually don't have much humidity. So I can I can handle it. So So your your whole career, has that been in animal science and and meat research and all that? Correct. Yes. I since I going back to my days at South Dakota State as an undergraduate student, I did undergrad research. I got turned me on to to research and I was actually accepted to vet school at the University of Minnesota and had every intention of going to vet school, but I started a master's degree in Saint Paul prior to that. And I just fell in love with basic research. So my whole career, I've worked with steroid implants that have been used in the cattle industry. Ear implants, hormonal implants that have been used since 1956 in the US beef cattle industry. So I've all my basic research has been on growth promotion of mostly cattle, but I've done some work on on the pig side on the swine side as well. So you decided not to be a veterinarian and you were in more on the research side, but you know, you probably have have worked with so many veterinarians and the medications they use in all your research over the years with cattle. Yeah, absolutely. I I've going back to every university I've been at. I've interacted with with a veterinarian extension veterinarians or research veterinarians, both at South Dakota State and at K State and Texas Tech just recently got a vet school. That's an amorrelo. It's not a topic, but yeah, I've interacted with veterinarians by whole career, especially on this on the growth promotion side, because these are these are all approved compounds by the US Food and Drug Administration. And so there's usually some oversight involved by a veterinarian. You may know just a year ago, the US Food and Drug Administration put some new guidelines and restrictions on how we re implant cattle with these steroid implants and obviously the veterinary community was brought into those discussions as well. Yeah, when you're at a party, right? And people ask, Hey, what do you do? And then you talk about, you know, steroid implants. I mean, do people even understand what you're talking about, like the, the non agriculture public? Well, you know, I try, I travel a lot. I've done working on every continent with the exception of Antarctica. And so, you know, the whole 32nd elevator speed sheet we teach you. Yeah, sitting on an airplane, right? And sometimes it's an hour and a half, sometimes it's 17 hours. But the thing is, the general public, they equate hormones as being bad. And so you use, I'm sure you see it on the swine side, any red meat side or poultry. There's obviously, you know, consumer groups that want a hormone-free product. The truth of the matter is when we're dealing with steroid hormones, estradiol and testosterone or androgens and estrogens, every mammal, male and female, produce these. So there, there are, there is no thing is hormone-free. Okay, we've got a break on that. Yeah, we got the music kitten. So we're going to break today. We're talking with Brad Johnson from Lubbock, Texas. We'll be back after the break. This segment is brought to you by Common Ground. Are you looking for an easy way to buy, sell or lease your land? Well, check out Common Ground where they connect landowners and farmers and hunters too, by the way. Go to commonground.io. That's commonground.io. This weekend on RFD TV, 130 Central is an encore presentation of Shark Armor TV. That's a tulip one, right? It is. That's where it wouldn't shoe in Oregon. Fantastically beautiful place. Massive. Beautiful places I've ever been. Massive tulip farm. And you don't pick them. No, you don't pick them. You go up in a hot air balloon and you look down at them. It's literally, and these people are making bank, right? And they're doing fantastic. The farmers and it's social media. It's people taking pictures for their social media and they are charging. You walk onto their farm. You're paying them money to do it and more power to them. That's right. Pay by the carload. Go get your Instagram pictures. Yeah. Today, we're in Lubbock, Texas. We're talking with Brad Johnson. He's a PhD professor at Texas Tech. And Brad, when we went to the break, you were saying there's no such thing. There's no such thing as hormone free. Oh, what about all those little stickers on the grocery store and my cat litter? Yeah. So when it comes to, as we were talking right before break, we were talking about steroid hormones that are the active ingredients and the implants that are predominantly used in 90% of the cattle in the United States. And so for individuals and you go to farmers markets and you'll see people try to advertise these as hormone free, but in fact, now most people would say no added hormones, right? And so we don't even monitor estradiol 17 beta, which is the natural female hormone or testosterone, which is the natural man hormone in meat products globally because they are natural. And so I think consumers need to understand that and back to the 30 second elevator speech that they have to understand that all mammal products, meat products, milk, we're going to have natural hormones in those. And so we're just basically augmenting the use of these hormones in the case of steroid implants to improve growth rate and efficiency of beef cattle. Mm-hmm. In a recently, Brad, I was in a beef jerky eating contest and I won, but they took it away because I tested positive for something. And I blamed it. I blamed it on eating meat. Does that work? Absolutely. Well, that's the latest craze. So most people would find this hard to believe. But in the last eight years, I've been involved as an expert witness in about 20 pretty high profile athletic cases, human athletes. These are Olympic athletes. These are UFC fighters. These are major league baseball players. These are NFL football players that will blame an illegal drug that they're not supposed to have in their system. They'll blame the presence of that on eating meat. And in the most common one of those 20 cases I've been involved in the last eight years, tremble on acetate or tremble on 17 beta is the active ingredient. I was been talking all day about steroid implants used in beef cattle and 90% of our cattle in the U.S. at some point in their life are going to get an implant that is going to contain tremble on acetate, which is a synthetic androgen like testosterone. And so that's become very common. You talk about eating beef jerky. I've even been involved in cases of chess players that failed steroid drugs. No, seriously. Oh my gosh. They're trying to get a competitive advantage and in fact have failed steroid hormone test, illegal doping, even on the chest, chest plane circuit. So it's, it's everywhere. But obviously with the Olympics started in a week. We've had a couple recent cases of some pretty high profile athletes that that have failed a drug test and then blame meat contamination or meat consumption on that. So with your expertise, I'm assuming that the athletes are not hiring you as a witness. It's the other side. Yeah. No, I usually represent our anti-doping agency. So worldwide, there's three different organizations that usually oversee this in the United States at Colorado Springs where the U.S. Olympic Committee resides. We have what we call the U.S. anti-doping agency. We also have a world anti-doping agency and then kind of an offshoot of that, a group that does almost all the high profile track and field athletes is a group called AIU, which is athletics integrity unit. So any three of those who ever draws the urine sample or collects a urine sample at that time would have jurisdiction over basically pursuing any kind of sanctions on that particular athlete. I mean, you're talking potentially lifetime income if you win a gold medal. I mean, you're talking millions and millions of dollars potentially. So this is probably taken as serious as any law case. Yeah, so it's a little different. Obviously, there's no jury involved. This is usually a one to three person arbitration court. And so that can be somewhat biased. The last case I was involved in was a single person making a decision. But you're right. This goes back. The very first meat anti-doping case was in 2012, a very famous individual contradore won the Tour de France that year in 2012. And he was a Spaniard, but he was he was training in Mexico. And he failed a Clenbuterol test. Clenbuterol is a beta agonist like Paelin, which used to be fed a lot in the US. Oh, yeah. Rocked open me and you probably remember Paelin. Rectiphen hydrochloride, right? Yeah, exactly. Clenbuterol is very much stronger and expand. And this individual failed a Clenbuterol test was stripped of the Tour de France title, but then actually proved that because he was training in Mexico and about 30% of the cattle in Mexico are so illegally fed, Clenbuterol, he was exonerated. He got his prize back. So was that the right call? Oh, my goodness. So in your opinion, I was not involved in that one. I think there's a Clenbuterol is very unique molecule. It's got a longer half life. I think it's always a gray area. I would say it's probably not that case, but Clenbuterol is unique and I wasn't involved in that. Most of the tremble on cases that I have been involved in, and we haven't won them all, but most of those, the individual would have to eat 35 to 40 pounds of meat the day before their drug test. No problem to have enough. And I know you probably ate that much jerky, right, Rob? So that's probably why you failed. He just answered my question too. I was going to ask him how much you have to eat. Like if you eat a steak and you don't know that that's, you know, something the animal was fed. Like with the implants, like tremble on, we've never had a relative residue in the United States with tremble on as they test in the packing plants. USDA oversees that for FDA. Okay. Literally. We do got to go to break. Today, we're talking with Brad Johnson, PhD from Lubbock, Texas, Professor at Texas Tech. We'll come back. I've got more questions about this. Absolutely. We'll be back. Right up to the break. This segment is brought to you by Common Ground. Are you looking for an easy way to buy, sell, or lease your land? Well, check out Common Ground where they connect landowners and farmers and hunters too, by the way. Go to commonground.io. That's commonground.io. It's time for Lubbock, Texas's favorite radio segment, Texas's. Texas, Texas's? I don't know. Where in the world is wandering? Well, what do you have for us today? Today I'm in Lubbock, a city in the US state of Texas and the county seat of Lubbock County. Okay. The city is the 10th most populous city in Texas and the 84th most populous in the United States. Oh. So, it's on the top one, Hondo. I realize it was that big. Lubbock's nickname is Hub City, which derives from it being the economic, educational, and health care hub of the multi-county region, north of the Permian Basin and south of the Texas Panhandle, commonly called the South Plains. The area is the largest contiguous cotton-growing region in the world. I love that word "contiguous." It's a tree, you know. Cotton, did you know that? I did not know that. There you go. Lubbock is also home to Texas Tech University, the sixth largest college by enrollment in the state. During World War II, airmen cadets from the Royal Air Force, flying from their training base at Terrell, Texas, routinely flew to Lubbock on training flights. The town served as a stand-in for the British because Cork Ireland was the same distance from London as Lubbock is from Terrell. Yeah, okay. In August, 1951, a V-shaped formation of lights was seen over the city. The Lubbock Lights series of sightings received national publicity and is regarded as one of the first great UFO cases. Actually, very embarrassed that I knew that. The sightings were considered credible because they were witnessed by several respected science professors at Texas Technological College. Yeah, Brad's on. Yeah. They were photographed by a Texas Tech student. Photographs were reprinted nationwide in newspapers and in Life magazine. Project Blue Book, the U.S. Air Force's official investigation of the UFO mystery, concluded the photographs were not a hoax and showed genuine objects. But dismiss the UFOs as being either "night-flying moths" or a type of bird called a plover reflected in the nighttime glow of Lubbock's new streetlights. I don't think it was a plover. Plovers don't probe people. No, no. The National Cowboy Symposium and Celebration is an annual event celebrating the prototypical Old West Cowboy and it takes place in Lubbock. Radio silence on that one. Oh, right. Wow. So interesting. Lubbock is the birthplace of rock and roll legend Buddy Holly and features a cultural center named for him. The city renamed its annual Buddy Holly Music Festival, the Lubbock Music Festival after Holly's widow increased usage fees for his name. Yeah, you can only push so far. She got greedy. Right. The city renamed the Buddy Holly West Texas Walk of Fame to honor area musicians and the city agreed to pay Holly's widow $20,000 for the next 20 years to maintain the name. Hey, bad. Outsider musician and psychobilly pioneer the legendary Stardust cowboy was born in Lubbock. He began his musical career there playing free shows in various parking lots around town. Since striking it big, however, he has not performed in Lubbock due to how little support and encouragement the city showed him. Yeah, I always forget where you started. Right. John Denver got his start in Lubbock, though. As a freshman at Texas Tech in 66, he could be found playing in a student union for free. Planes and musicians from Lubbock don't go well. Right. Sounds like it. Okay. I also had my first prickly pair Margarita and Lubbock there, Brad. Have you ever had one of those? Oh, yeah. Where was that at? Literally some we went to Mike. Gosh, I can't remember his name. He's big on Twitter, but some I mean literally just hole in the wall, but it had the best food and drink over one of those places. So there's another famous alcoholic beverage. It's very regionalized, but it's become national. It's called a chilton. It's basically lemon lemon juice and vodka. It's a very good in the summer. It's very light. So Dr. Chilton was a physician in town and he invented it at the Lubbock Country Club several years ago, but next time you come to Lubbock, make sure you get a chilton. Okay. We'll definitely do that. I think you make those on the weekends at home. I wasn't going to say anything, but that's literally my Saturday night. Today we're talking with Brad Johnson. He's a PhD from Lubbock, Texas professor there at Texas Tech. Very, very knowledgeable, but Brad, you've done a ton of traveling. Went to all the continents you set except for Antarctica. Which one, which continent was the most surprising? Well, I've had two real interesting trips that I don't know if I would want to recreate them, but I've been to Indonesia a few times and tell you what. You go into Jakarta, Indonesia, and like 25 million people, it's pretty humbling. And I had an interesting trip into Cairo, Egypt, where I actually got pushed into an abandoned subway and was tried, you know, I had to fight my way out of it. So my skills as a farm boy from South Dakota came in handy. Oh my gosh. So are you being abducted? Well, they were trying to rob three of us, and interesting, I had just crossed the Nile on a bridge, and a person jumped behind me. I was brought daylight off of a light post, and in perfect English, asked if I was an American, which obviously was talking to a guy from Virginia next to me, and he claimed he was from Kalamazoo, Michigan. So, if Kalamazoo is where up John, a pharmaceutical company in animal health, starting Zoetis is up there now, and I'm like, well, this guy's from Kalamazoo, and, but it was all a hoax, and he was trying to rob us, and, but we pushed our way out of it. So, but the next day I got up to see the great pyramids, and that was amazing. So I wouldn't know who built those. A lot of Egyptians, I believe. That is on my bucket list. I want to take a ride around those. You need to do that and take, take Rob down into the tomb. You might have to push him out, Emily, but, but you got to go backwards down this old ladder into the ancient tombs of the great pyramid, but it's well worth it. Oh, my word. That is fantastic. I hope we don't get robbed like you were, though. That's the point that you wish that you didn't get your pocket knife taken away from you before you got on the plane. I literally was two blocks from the US embassy. So I felt somewhat safe, but I was in a abandoned subway tunnel. So that was a little scary. But I tell on your ads, and I think, you know, there's nothing that makes me feel better than when I come back from any country, and I, and I cleared US immigrations and they say welcome home. And I wish I just wish that everybody in the agricultural industry, especially our young people, would have that opportunity to experience something like that. And maybe they just would appreciate the United States just a little bit more. Exactly. Bob Well said, real quick, is there emails or websites or social media people can find you? Sure, I'm not somewhat embarrassed to say it. I'm not on social media. My email is is Bradley B-R-A-D-L-E-Y.Johnson@ttu.edu, so that's the best way to reach out to me. And I am on the department website, but email is probably the best route. Alright, Brad, it was fascinating talking to you. Thanks for all the hard work that you have done for agriculture. Believe me us out here farming and eating meat. Appreciate everything that we've done. Brad Johnson, Lubbock, Texas, Professor of Texas Tech. Don't go anywhere. Sean Haney's coming up next. ♪ Carrotty-fold, carrotty-fold, the next shade of ♪