Episode #289
Teri McCall: Jack’s Fight, Roundup, And The Supreme Court

Teri McCall tells the story of a quiet Central Coast farm life shattered by her husband Jack’s diagnosis with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma after years of using Roundup around their property. As she began researching the links between glyphosate and cancer, grief turned into resolve. What followed was not only a lawsuit against Monsanto, but a public fight for accountability that eventually brought her from her family farm to rallies in Fresno, Belgium, and in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. Her story is both deeply personal and part of a much larger struggle over chemical exposure, corporate deception, and who gets protected when public health collides with profit.

Our interview with Teri McCall has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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Dave Chapman interviewed Teri McCall in California the winter of 2026:

Dave Chapman 0:00
Welcome to the Real Organic Podcast. I’m talking today with Teri McCall. Teri, I first heard you speaking in front of the Supreme Court last month. There was a rally challenging the Supreme Court not to create a liability shield for Bayer products – for Bayer chemicals – particularly for glyphosate and Roundup.

Dave Chapman 0:30
I thought it was a very exciting day. I was not there, I didn’t know about it until two days before it happened, but I was watching. I thought it was exciting to see it was a truly bipartisan gathering from the whole political spectrum.

Teri McCall 0:47
Yes, it was.

Dave Chapman 0:50
Of course that would be a formula for success if we could pull that off.

Teri McCall 0:57
Yeah, we need a little unity in this country.

Dave Chapman 1:01
Yes. You were talking about the death of your husband, Jack McCall, back in 2015. Jack died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which is, as Mark Doudlah said at the rally, that’s what we just call the “Midwest cancer,” because so many people get it there, because there’s so much glyphosate used.

Teri McCall 1:26
Yeah, it’s terrible.

Dave Chapman 1:28
You believe that his death was the result of long-term use of Roundup.

Teri McCall 1:34
Yes.

Dave Chapman 1:35
We’ll talk about that. But could you take us back to your years on the farm with Jack? Who was he? Who were you? How did you come to farm together?

Teri McCall 1:46
We were just a couple of hippies, actually. We were living in Cayucos, just planning to get married, and his parents were living in Cambria in a house that he had built for them. They both had emphysema, so they were starting to think about moving out of the pines, because there’s a lot of pine pollen, mold, and mildew, and people with lung problems really suffer. They were thinking about moving to Arizona.

Teri McCall 2:18
Then we showed them this property out here on Santa Rosa Creek Road, and they fell in love with it. They bought it in 1975, and then we got married here that same year, and moved out to live out here in 1976. It was really just a big transition for me to live out in the country like this.

Teri McCall 2:45
I’m kind of a Southern California girl, and always lived by the beach, but I love it. It really got to where I can’t imagine living anywhere else. It’s just so quiet and peaceful out here, and lots of birds and wildlife. There’s a creek right across the street. There’s a lot of just nature to experience.

Teri McCall 3:18
Right off the bat, Jack and his dad started planting fruit trees and then vegetables. We had a huge vegetable garden right off the bat, and quickly found out that it’s actually better to just grow one or two things and then trade at the farmers market for everything you need, because otherwise you just have so much waste. We had children, we raised our children here, and it was a wonderful life.

Teri McCall 3:18
Jack was really healthy, and always wanted to eat really healthy. His favorite thing to eat was salad, and he surfed, and he really would have loved to have been organic, but we looked into it, and it was just overwhelming – the paperwork involved. We never did, but he didn’t use any other chemicals on the farm, except for Roundup.

Dave Chapman 4:24
Otherwise he was an organic farmer.

Teri McCall 4:27
Yeah, because he believed that was safe.

Dave Chapman 4:33
Why did he think that?

Teri McCall 4:35
Why did he think that?

Dave Chapman 4:36
Yeah. How did he decide that was safe?

Teri McCall 4:39
I don’t remember. All I know is that one day I was out and started to pull some weeds in my flower bed, and he goes, “Oh, you don’t need to do that, I just sprayed them with Roundup,” and I was like, “Oh,” and he goes, “Oh, no, don’t worry, it’s perfectly safe.” I don’t know where he got the idea that it was safe, but it definitely isn’t.

Dave Chapman 5:05
Their marketing was very good around that. He had served in Vietnam, is that right?

Teri McCall 5:14
Yes. He was a second lieutenant. He got drafted, and he didn’t want to go to Vietnam, so he tested high enough to go to Officer Candidate School, and he was hoping that by the time he got out, the war would be over. Unfortunately, it wasn’t, so he was sent over there as a forward observer. He never really talked about it, but I’m sure he saw quite a bit of action, and it must have been hell.

Dave Chapman 5:51
My father was in the army in World War Two, and he and my mother had this dream of coming back and being farmers. Neither one of them was a farmer, and they did. They became dairy farmers down in Pennsylvania. You can see after being in that war situation, you’re just craving a quiet life in the country and just raising food.

Teri McCall 6:18
He really needed that serenity. He did have PTSD, we discovered later. He had a friend who was president of Vietnam Veterans of America, and he convinced him to go get tested for PTSD, and he was like, “Nah, I don’t have it,” but he definitely did. He had a recurring nightmare that he had all his papers lined up and ready to come home, and then right before he got on the plane, his papers got lost, and he didn’t get to go home. I can’t imagine how traumatic it must have been.

Dave Chapman 7:06
You had a good life together there for a while. Forty years?

Teri McCall 7:10
Yeah. We celebrated our 40th anniversary in December 2015, just a couple weeks before he died.

Dave Chapman 7:22
He had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Teri McCall 7:24
Yes.

Dave Chapman 7:27
It kind of came out of nowhere, and it came very quickly.

Teri McCall 7:31
Actually, it came on over a course of about a… I don’t know if it was a decade, but he got this kind of itchy, scaly rash, and he went to the dermatologist, and he came home from the dermatologist, and he said, “He thinks I might have lymphoma.” I can still remember. I was standing right on the back porch steps when he said it, and I just thought, “That can’t be. Somebody as healthy as you?”

Teri McCall 9:09
He started going through treatments, using cortisone creams, and we ended up going up to Stanford. It was just years of tests and treatments that sometimes seem like they were working, and then one morning he said, “Teri, I’ve got lumps in my neck,” and that was really the worst. We didn’t realize.

Teri McCall 9:09
I was hoping maybe that it was something benign, but we went to an ear, nose, and throat doctor, and she took a biopsy. I just detested this woman after this. I said, “Could this be caused by this ultraviolet light treatment that he’s been getting,” and she looks at me, and she goes, “No, this is a malignancy. Adults do not get lumps in their neck.” I was just so horrified and devastated. I told Jack, “I never want to see that woman again.”

Teri McCall 9:09
The first biopsy came back negative, and we were rejoicing, like, “Oh, good. It’s not cancer,” but the lumps were still there. Then he had an open biopsy, and that never healed. We went up to Stanford again. They finally diagnosed him with this rare type of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and he had his first chemotherapy treatment.

Teri McCall 9:09
The doctor told me that if he gets a high fever, you need to take him to the emergency room immediately, because the chemotherapy has suppressed his immune system and he could get a really bad infection. What it was, was that the actual biopsy site itself had become extremely infected.

Teri McCall 9:09
We had to go to the emergency room, and they had to clean it out, and then he couldn’t get another chemotherapy. It was just like the biggest nightmare you could ever imagine. I really did not believe I was going to lose him. I believed that they were going to give him some kind of treatment that was going to heal him, but it just wasn’t to be.

Dave Chapman 9:50
Yeah. I know that your dog died some years before that also with lumps in the neck. As it turned out, it was also lymphoma, right?

Teri McCall 10:59
Yep.

Dave Chapman 11:01
You hadn’t connected those two events yet, though.

Teri McCall 11:13
No, not until after Jack died. I started really researching glyphosate and the damaging effects, and then all of a sudden one day I went, “Oh my god, our dog. He got lumps in his neck too.” He was with Jack all the time, putting his nose in everything that had probably just been sprayed with Roundup. It’s no wonder he got sick.

Dave Chapman 8:17
I think you told me that Jack wasn’t actually spraying Roundup on the crops, he was using it to try and keep the poison oak from taking over the place.

Teri McCall 11:55
And thistles, yeah. Mainly poison oak and thistles.

Dave Chapman 12:00
It was advertised as a very benign substance with no problems.

Teri McCall 12:08
Right, I know.

Dave Chapman 12:08
Did he wear any protective gear?

Teri McCall 12:10
Not that I can remember.

Dave Chapman 12:13
Yeah. I have a nephew that also got non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Again, no safety gear. He worked for a camp, and he was going around spraying stuff, and years later, he still worked with it. You tell me about after Jack died, of course, that’s devastating. You were trying to figure out why he died, what happened, why did he get sick. Were you using the internet?

Teri McCall 9:03
Yeah. Before he died, my son Paul, we were all hanging out in the bedroom because Jack was in bed, and he goes, “Mom, you really ought to go on the internet and look at all the links between Monsanto’s Roundup and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.” He goes, “You ought to call one of these lawyers on the internet,” and I just thought, “What?”

Teri McCall 9:03
Then, when I had a minute, I started looking, and I told Jack, I said, “There are a lot of studies out there that are showing that glyphosate causes non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I think I should sue them,” and he goes, “Oh, Teri, that would take decades. It’d be like suing Big Tobacco.” I said, “Well, I’m going to do it anyway,” and he said, “Go ahead.”

Teri McCall 9:52
I knew nothing about Monsanto. The only thing I knew about Monsanto was the people mover at Disneyland. The more I read, the more I realized what a terribly evil company they are. How they’ve hidden studies that show that this chemical is carcinogenic, and then some of the other things they’ve done, like when they came out with these Roundup Ready seeds. You’re familiar with those, right?

Dave Chapman 12:51
Yeah.

Teri McCall 12:52
Then that allowed these big corporate farms to spray hundreds of acres of crops with Roundup, because the seeds are immune to the chemical. I can’t remember what the statistic is, but it has increased the use of glyphosate by hundreds of percent, like 800% or something – the amount of Roundup that’s just being dumped on our country. Now we’re eating it, and it’s in our bodies, it’s in breast milk. How disturbing is that?

Dave Chapman 12:53
Yeah. I’ve been meaning to get tested. When I give talks, I want to say, “I have it in my blood, you have it in your blood.” PFAS too; we all have them, and we shouldn’t.

Teri McCall 13:00
No. It really makes you want to try to go organic as far as what you eat, as much as possible. For instance, oats. We all fed our kids Cheerios, and that’s probably one of the worst, because not only do they use Roundup on the crop, but then when they harvest it, they cut it down, and they spray it with Roundup again to help it dry faster, so it’s just absolutely loaded with this chemical. I don’t understand why our government is allowing this.

Dave Chapman 14:01
Well, you probably do understand why. It’s not right, but they’re working very closely with those companies.

Teri McCall 14:10
They are. They care more about those companies than they do about us.

Dave Chapman 14:28
You learned that there were many connections between glyphosate, Roundup, and cancer, especially non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which is what Jack had died from. What did you do next?

Teri McCall 16:40
I thought, “Well, I’m not going to just call some lawyer on the internet. I know who I’ll call. I’m going to call Jack’s cousin Billy’s wife, Robin, who worked for this big law firm in Los Angeles.” I called Robin up, and I said, “Hey, do you know anything that’s pending regarding Roundup and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma?” She said, “Well, it’s interesting that you asked me that, because something just came across my desk. Let me call you back.”

Teri McCall 17:09
About two weeks later, and by then Jack had passed away, and I can still remember exactly where I was when the phone call came, and she goes, “Teri, RFK Jr. wants to take on Monsanto, and he’s partnering with our law firm, and he wants to take your case,” and I was just like, “Oh my gosh.” I was just floored. It was quite an experience.

Dave Chapman 17:56
What did you do next?

Teri McCall 17:59
As soon as they filed the lawsuit, my phone started ringing. I was still grieving, so it really pushed me to the limits of my intellect. They asked me to go to Belgium to speak at a press conference that was to determine whether Monsanto should still be allowed to sell Roundup in Europe.

Dave Chapman 18:22
In Belgium you were speaking to the European Union?

Teri McCall 18:33
Yeah. At a press conference. Little old me.

Dave Chapman 18:48
Yeah, look at you.

Teri McCall 18:41
I’m not a public speaker, believe me. I felt the more I got involved in it, the more I felt like this was the right thing to do, because I lost my husband because of this chemical. He should have lived to be… He had longevity in his family. He had an uncle that lived to be almost 100 years old.

Teri McCall 19:07
He should have lived to be 90 years old, at least. I was robbed of so much. My kids were robbed of so much. I just felt so vindicated to be a part of this battle, and I still do. I still feel like it’s something that’s worth being involved in, fighting for.

Dave Chapman 19:36
Did you talk to Bobby Kennedy at the very beginning? Did you have a call where he said, “I think that we should do this”?

Teri McCall 19:47
Actually, I never really spoke to him. I mainly was dealing with Brent Wisner and his law firm.

Dave Chapman 19:47
Was that your cousin’s law firm?

Teri McCall 19:51
Yeah. She was involved in the media portion of the law firm. I did get to meet Bobby. I went to a press conference in front of the Fresno courthouse, where there was some legislation that was pending, trying to get some kind of warning label on the bottles of Roundup. I met him there, and he is my hero. He is such a champion for the environment, and he’s so knowledgeable. That was a great experience too. My daughter went with me, and it was wonderful.

Dave Chapman 20:46
Yeah. Did you speak at a lot of places? It’s interesting. I know you spoke in front of the Supreme Court, and you spoke in Belgium for the European Parliament, and you spoke in Fresno. Was this something that you were doing a lot of? Going out and…?

Teri McCall 21:03
No, that was about it. I got the message from Jen Sherry Perry. She’s the producer of “The Doctors” Show, and she was really involved in this People vs. Poison. She sent me a message on Facebook. She wanted to know if I’d be interested in speaking at this rally against Monsanto.

Teri McCall 21:28
When I first read the message, I just immediately got this pang of fear, like, “Oh, I don’t really want to do that.” I just brushed it off, and then didn’t think about it for the rest of the day, and then the next morning I thought, “I better go take a look at that and get back to her.” I went back and read the message again, and that’s when I saw that it was in Washington, DC, at the Supreme Court.

Teri McCall 21:55
I thought, “I can’t pass that up. I would really regret it if I chickened out and didn’t do it.” I did it. I did lose a bit of sleep over it, but the thing is, I know my story. I didn’t really need to worry that I was going to forget what to say. I feel strongly about this.

Dave Chapman 21:49
When you were pursuing this court case, it was really the very first, wasn’t it? Had other people sued Monsanto about glyphosate as a carcinogen?

Teri McCall 22:04
I don’t really know. It seemed like it was really at the very beginning. At first I thought mine was the first case. Mine might have been the first case they took, but there were others that came and went all the way to court. This guy, I think they’re making a movie. Brent Wisner said they’re making a movie about him. Johnson, I think his name is. He was with Big Grounds Keeper. You remember that story?

Dave Chapman 23:12
Yeah, absolutely. I think Lee Johnson, maybe?

Teri McCall 23:16
Yes, Lee Johnson.

Dave Chapman 23:18
Right. Now, that was the big one. Before we get to that, and that’s important. But I’m just curious, when your case started, was it just you or was it a class action at that point?

Teri McCall 23:31
I don’t really know. I think it might have been just me, and then maybe it turned into a class action. I’m not really sure

Dave Chapman 23:42
That’s the impression I got from reading about it. It sounded like there were procedural challenges, so it evolved into a class action with a bunch of people.

Teri McCall 23:53
Yeah. Then they started putting ads on TV, “Call this number if somebody you love has become sick from using Roundup.” I’m sure they were getting a lot of people calling.

Dave Chapman 24:10
Did you actually go to court? Did you sit in a court and listen to testimony?

Teri McCall 24:16
No, I never did.

Dave Chapman 24:18
Did you testify?

Teri McCall 24:20
What?

Dave Chapman 24:21
Did you testify yourself, or was it all just happening…?

Teri McCall 24:25
No. I had to do a deposition, but I never actually went to court. I thought I might, but I didn’t.

Dave Chapman 24:37
I sued the USDA once. I thought I’d get to go to court, but I didn’t. It was COVID, and everything was done very virtually.

Teri McCall 24:47
Yeah.

Dave Chapman 24:50
The case, was it resolved before Lee Johnson’s case?

Teri McCall 24:56
No, I think it was after Lee Johnson’s. Maybe after they decided they better settle, because it was looking like they were going to be paying out a lot of money.

Dave Chapman 25:08
A lot of money, yeah.

Teri McCall 25:08
I think they didn’t want me. They didn’t want to have to have me go to court and have a trial because I had every receipt that we ever… Every purchase that we ever made, I had all the receipts. My lawyer said that Monsanto’s attorney said, “God, it looks like she was planning to sue us.”

Dave Chapman 25:36
Yeah. I know that Chuck Benbrook was one of the expert witnesses that they were using for your case, and for Johnson’s case also.

Teri McCall 25:53
Who is he?

Dave Chapman 25:54
Dr. Charles (“Chuck”) Benbrook, he’s somebody, he’s a PhD who’s very expert in the impact of agricultural chemicals on our country and on humans. He’s very good, and he’s a very effective witness. He was one of the ones who kept pulling out the things that came out of the Monsanto papers, where they clearly stated that they knew that this was a carcinogen, but they were hiding it.

Dave Chapman 25:54
The Monsanto papers, was that a big deal? Did your lawyer say, “Hey, we’ve gotten these papers from discovery”?

Teri McCall 26:41
They sent me a packet of information that included that information from the Monsanto papers. It’s really terribly disturbing that they have gotten away with this for so long. Then even the ghostwriting. They had people writing stories favorable to Monsanto, and then having it appear that it was written by real scientists.

Dave Chapman 27:17
Yes, they just got called out. They finally got the famous year 2000 article that was ghostwritten, and all based on Monsanto research, not peer-reviewed research. The journal that it was published in just rejected it, 25 years later, and said, “We didn’t know. This was based on fraudulent work.”

Dave Chapman 27:36
That was a big deal. I think there have been, I don’t know, 600 or 800 citations of that article. It’s widely quoted, and Monsanto used it as peer-reviewed evidence that their product was safe, but of course it was fraudulent.

Teri McCall 28:06
Yeah, they’re evil.

Dave Chapman 28:11
You got to know Carey Gillam?

Dave Chapman 28:13
Yes, I love Carey.

Dave Chapman 28:15
Can you tell me about how she came into your life? Carey is a journalist, for people who don’t know her. She’s an excellent journalist, and she’s written extensively about Monsanto, and they don’t like her. I’m just curious, did she call you up, write you a letter?

Teri McCall 28:37
After the lawsuit was filed, she came up with Brent Wisner and took me to dinner, and the two of them were just so on fire for this whole thing. We were having dinner at Lynn’s, and after about an hour, I go, “Can I go home now?” I was just exhausted, and they were like, “Oh, we’re sorry. We’re just so excited about this.” They were so excited just to see this happening.

Teri McCall 29:25
I really, really liked her a lot. I got to see her when I was in Washington, D.C. That was cool. Her organization was, “U.S. Right to Know,” was that what it was?

Dave Chapman 29:37
I think that’s right. She’s done a lot. She’s written for different…

Teri McCall 29:41
She used to be with Reuters, I think.

Dave Chapman 29:44
Yeah. Ultimately she wrote a book, “Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science”.

Teri McCall 29:54
Right.

Dave Chapman 29:54
You were featured in that book. Important part of it.

Teri McCall 29:58
Yeah.

Dave Chapman 30:00
You read the book?

Teri McCall 30:01
I’ve read portions of it. I should get it out and read it again.

Dave Chapman 30:07
Yeah. I need to interview Carey, actually. She’s done so much work. I’d like to have her talk about it.

Teri McCall 30:16
She’s amazing.

Dave Chapman 30:19
Somehow in Discovery, Monsanto was forced to turn over an awful lot of information that was just them writing to themselves, notes back and forth about strategies. I think it included strategies for how to discredit Carey. They really were attacking her and trying to make it that she was just a political extremist, a wacko. It’s not a new strategy. Sometimes it’s effective, and sometimes it isn’t. They tried the same strategy with Rachel Carson.

Teri McCall 31:09
Who’s that?

Dave Chapman 31:10
Oh, she wrote “Silent Spring.”

Teri McCall 31:12
“Silent Spring.” Oh, okay.

Dave Chapman 31:14
A book that really freaked out people who didn’t think that chemicals were bad, and they really trusted the chemical companies and the government to make sure that things were safe, and they weren’t. She wrote a searing exposé back in the ’60s. It really started something. It started something that we’re all part of right now.

Dave Chapman 31:44
The first response of the chemical companies was to try and destroy her, and say she’s not really a scientist, and she’s a lesbian, and she never finished her PhD, and she’s got emotional problems, and it didn’t work. Actually, I think within a couple of years of the book coming out, she died of cancer. So it really didn’t work. There wasn’t even anybody to… It doesn’t look good to attack people who have died.

Dave Chapman 32:18
She was actually an extraordinary writer and a heroic, brave person. They’ve been a little more careful about attacking people, and they do it in very quiet ways. In the Monsanto papers, it became clear that they did have this campaign just as they did for another man named Tyrone Hayes, who did research about atrazine and Syngenta.

Dave Chapman 32:50
It’s another terrible herbicide, and Syngenta, the manufacturer, really tried to destroy him for 10 years: professionally, privately, and personally. Ultimately, he sued them, and once again there were other Monsanto papers – we could call them the Syngenta papers – where they wrote down all the terrible things that they were trying to do to him. They lost the case, and The New Yorker wrote a big story about it. Sometimes the truth does come out.

Teri McCall 33:26
Yeah. I think people are waking up. There’s a lot to be discouraged about, but I think there’s also a lot to be encouraged, because, I think 10 years ago, most people including myself didn’t know what the word glyphosate meant. Now I think a lot of people know what it is, and people are becoming more worried about what’s in their food. Thanks to RFK Jr., I think things are starting to change, but it’s going to take a while.

Teri McCall 34:02
I try to support the organic food movement as much as I can, but it’s hard. Everything is so expensive now. I really want to support them. Somebody once said to me, “Well, you either pay now or you pay later.” I’d rather pay now and be healthy as long as possible.

Dave Chapman 34:30
There are certainly things that could be done that would make it considerably less expensive to have organic food. I think conventional chemical food is inexpensive because there’s been massive government support of it, just in research, but also in crop supports and insurance, and all that kind of thing. There are countries are doing the opposite. Denmark is putting a lot of money into supporting organic, and it’s working.

Teri McCall 35:01
Yeah. Why is our government so falling down on the job when it comes to protecting us? We know why, but I think that their time is coming to an end where they can get away with that. I think people are scared of being lied to and poisoned.

Teri McCall 35:24
One of the stories that RFK Jr. told when we were at Fresno, he said that when Monsanto came out with aspartame, and they took it to the soft drink companies and said, “You’re going to want to put this in your soft drinks.” The soft drink company said, “There’s no way we’re going to put this chemical in our soft drinks. We’ll be sued.” Monsanto said, “You will make so much money that it won’t matter if you get sued.”

Dave Chapman 36:01
It’s like the water parks that know that every year somebody’s going to break their back on those slides, but they just make enough money, they just say, “Well, we’ll lose that lawsuit, but we’re still going to make money.”

Teri McCall 36:21
Yeah.

Dave Chapman 36:24
What was it like for you, Teri, at that rally in front of the Supreme Court? Senator Cory Booker spoke, and Congresswoman Chellie Pingree, and Congressman Thomas Massie. There were people from both sides of the aisle. There were some very conservative MAHA people up speaking, Del Bigtree, but there were some very liberal people speaking. Did that day give you hope? Did it just make you angry? What was that like for you?

Teri McCall 37:02
I felt really just so grateful to be there and be a part of something so important. I felt really encouraged, like, “This is moving us in the right direction. This event is so unifying. People can get on board from both sides of the aisle.” It’s just one small step, obviously, but it’s a step in the right direction. Absolutely.

Dave Chapman 37:43
Yeah. Many, many speakers addressed Donald Trump because of his support for Bayer and his support for a liability shield. I only heard one mention, kind of glancingly, about Kennedy. It was odd, because, of course, he has supported Trump’s position has he supported his executive order that glyphosate is essential to our national security and defense.

Teri McCall 38:22
Yeah, I read about that.

Dave Chapman 38:24
Yeah, I’m just curious, did you feel confused by that, upset by that, or do you go, “Oh, he just did what he had to do?”

Teri McCall 38:32
I read his reasoning on it that China is the one that provides all the materials to make glyphosate, and so if we ever get on the wrong track with them, they could cut it off, and it would destroy our food system. I don’t really know if that’s true or not. I think Trump should stay out of it and let RFK do his job.

Dave Chapman 39:05
Yeah. Well, of course. He wasn’t made Secretary of Agriculture. That would have been a pretty amazing thing had that happened.

Teri McCall 39:19
I think we need to find some other way to grow food without using Roundup. I saw this, I think it was some sort of a little film that RFK did, and he said that there are some promising technologies out there. One of them is laser. This is obviously for big corporate farms. The machine costs about a million dollars, but I’m sure glyphosate is expensive too. Coming into the future, there may be a way to get away from using that.

Dave Chapman 39:44
There are Real Organic farmers… I say Real Organic. There’s some organic that is, in my mind, still better than chemical, but it is not what I think of as organic. We started Real Organic Project to say, “We all knew what we meant when we started organic,” and it’s just we’re now having to fight with corporate invasion.

Dave Chapman 40:23
But there are Real Organic farmers in every kind of crop: corn, wheat, soy, every kind of orchard, every kind of vegetable, and they’re all doing it without glyphosate. It’s not a question of whether it’s possible. It’s very possible. Some of them are very good and get very high yields, and some struggle more. They struggle more with weeds. Weeds are a challenge, but they’re not impossible.

Teri McCall 40:50
Yeah.

Dave Chapman 40:51
I’m just reading a book by a wonderful farmer named Scott Park, who’s in California. He got about 1,500 acres, and I don’t know, 400 or 500 acres of that is canning tomatoes. He’s doing it on scale. It’s not my kind of farm. They have big equipment, but they do it all. They control the weeds. They build up the soil, it’s very healthy. They get high yields. It can work. We know that.

Teri McCall 41:27
It’s hard work.

Dave Chapman 41:28
It’s hard work always. All farming is hard work.

Teri McCall 41:31
Yes, it is. It’s hard work, but it’s a great lifestyle. We just have 20 acres here. I think that 50 years ago people were saying, “Oh, you can’t really make a living on such a small…” but I think that now people really appreciate, like the boutique farm with the… It’s easier to grow some really good stuff on a small scale. Then with the advent of farmers markets, that was what Jack did every week. He did two or three farmers’ markets every week.

Dave Chapman 42:15
That’s where you would sell the crop?

Teri McCall 42:17
Yeah.

Dave Chapman 42:19
That’s great. When you started farming, there were no farmers’ markets, I guess.

Teri McCall 42:25
No. Wasn’t the very first farmers’ market in San Luis Obispo?

Dave Chapman 42:31
I don’t know.

Teri McCall 42:32
Somebody told me that once, but I remember we had one here in Cambria, right behind the Bank of America. It was so exciting. People were so enthusiastic, and they still are. I hardly go anymore, because my new husband, we’ve been married two years, he mentioned doing farmers’ market, and I said, “The thing with farmers’ markets, you have to be there every week, rain or shine.”

Teri McCall 43:01
We opted to not do it. We have a little fruit stand that we’re going to open and sell our stuff. That’s what Jack did every week, and everybody loved him. Everybody loved him because he worked at the post office, so he knew a lot of people from working at the post office, and then he also coached little league, so he knew a lot of people through there, and then the farmers’ market. He was a great guy.

Dave Chapman 43:42
Of course, now Monsanto is owned by Bayer. Does that change anything?

Teri McCall 43:52
I have no idea. They’re a German company, right?

Dave Chapman 43:57
They’re based in Germany. They’re very international, but their corporate headquarters is in Germany. I’m actually reading a book about their history. Sometime in the 1930s Bayer existed, and they banded together with other chemical companies to create this giant conglomeration called IG Farben. IG Farben became the biggest financiers of the Nazi Party.

Teri McCall 44:32
I remember reading about that, yes.

Dave Chapman 44:35
In World War I they developed poison gas. In World War II they developed the poison gas used in the concentration camps, Zyklon B.

Teri McCall 44:44
I’m sure they’d like to have that history erased.

Dave Chapman 44:51
Yes, I know. Amazingly, after the war, a lot of their top executives were hauled into a war crimes trial in Nuremberg. They had one just for IG Farben.

Teri McCall 45:05
Really?

Dave Chapman 45:06
Yeah. Some were put in jail and others were not. Some prosecutors thought they should all be put in jail, but the company was broken up. They were broken back into smaller companies, so Bayer became Bayer again.

Teri McCall 45:21
Yeah. What I think is interesting is that they’re creating these poisons that we’re all getting sick from, and now they create the drugs that are supposed to heal us from the sickness. It’s kind of an interesting concept.

Dave Chapman 45:42
It’s what Mark Doudlah said about his father. He’d gotten cancer from the Roundup, and then he was taking chemo, also made by Bayer. Of course, it wasn’t healing him.

Teri McCall 45:56
Yeah, that’s distrubing.

Dave Chapman 45:57
That’s a growth model. Yeah, it’s very disturbing. Robert Kennedy said something once that if his life was a Superman comic, Monsanto would be his Lex Luthor. He’s been contending with that company for a very long time.

Teri McCall 46:25
Yes.

Dave Chapman 46:33
Okay. I had many pages of questions, but I knew I wouldn’t look at them until the end. How critical do you think that the partnership was between investigative journalism and the lawyers who were defending you? Between the work of Carey Gillam and the work of Brent Wisner and Bobby Kennedy was that an important…?

Dave Chapman 47:00
In other words, how important is it that you get up and speak in public? How important is it that people in America all suddenly are learning how to pronounce glyphosate? As we look forward, and for our kids and our grandkids, how do we move to create the world that we want to create for them, which certainly isn’t one in which they’re dying of pesticide use from companies that are lying about the risks.

Teri McCall 47:47
I think we all need to do our part. Speak out whenever you have the opportunity. We can’t be silent. We’ve been silent too long. We trusted these people, and they’ve obviously violated our trust. People that voted to keep the immunity clause in the Farm Bill, everybody should know who they are, and they should be voted out.

Teri McCall 48:22
Who would be for keeping these chemical companies in business, poisoning us, and keeping the American people from being able to get justice when they’re hurt by their products? I can’t imagine.

Dave Chapman 48:36
Teri, because not everybody tracks us as closely as you or I, could you just explain what the immunity clause was? That there was a vote about that in the Farm Bill a few weeks ago?

Teri McCall 48:48
Yeah, it was hidden way deep inside the Farm Bill that would have made it impossible for people to sue these chemical companies when they get sick. That’s not the American way. Can you imagine if that passed? They’d probably become even more reckless with our health with impunity.

Dave Chapman 49:17
Yes, I think they’ve been fined $11 billion so far for the glyphosate Roundup cases, which have been 100,000 people. They’ve not lost all the cases. They won some, and they lost some. But the ones that they lost, they’re supposed to pay out $11 billion, which is a staggering amount of money.

Teri McCall 49:40
Yeah, it is.

Dave Chapman 49:40
It might make them change their behavior. It might not. Just to say in the Farm Bill, which has just now passed the House of Representatives and is in the Senate to see if they’ll approve it, one of the proposals in it was to offer a liability shield for Bayer for these products.

Dave Chapman 50:07
A bipartisan coalition voted it out. More Democrats than Republicans, but they got 76 Republicans to join almost all of the Democrats. They got it thrown out, and now we have to try and make sure it gets thrown out by the Senate too.

Teri McCall 50:44
Yeah.

Dave Chapman 50:27
Just to say, because, again, people won’t necessarily know, the reason that you were rallying in front of the Supreme Court was? Why were you speaking in front of the Supreme Court?

Teri McCall 50:45
To try to let people know what was going on inside those courts, that this was something they were trying to push through. I think it was to build awareness to people, the general public, as well as our elected representatives, that there are a lot of people that are concerned about what’s going on with our food supply, and how dare they think about protecting these chemical companies from being held responsible.

Dave Chapman 51:24
Yes. The Supreme Court is still considering whether they will give that liability shield. It failed in the Farm Bill, but it hasn’t failed yet in the Supreme Court.

Teri McCall 51:34
I can’t believe that it’s even still up for consideration.

Dave Chapman 51:39
Yeah, I’m with you.

Teri McCall 51:42
Anyway, two steps forward, one step back.

Dave Chapman 51:46
Okay, good.

Teri McCall 51:49
Fight, fight, fight.

Dave Chapman 51:51
Fight, fight, fight. That’s right. All right. Teri, thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk about this stuff.

Teri McCall 52:03
It was a privilege. Thank you.