USDA's Sam Berry on SNAP fraud, food security, farm succession, and data center siting on farmland

deck. I was clicking through it. Um, and I very uh respectfully said like go and like do this yourself because uh just because you've made something that that looks like a deck.

Yeah. But you didn't do the sort of like fundamental work to actually present this in a way uh if you looked at each slide individually.

Yeah. Your eyes kind of glaze over.

Yeah.

And and you just sort of like lose focus, stop paying attention.

Yeah. It's like it would have been more it would have been more compelling to actually just have a bulleted list of like problem.

I mean a lot of times you can just send me the prompt because I can instantiate in my head. I can imagine the rest of the paragraphs. I I have the context window preloaded. Yeah. uh for for myself. Yeah. Uh we should talk about the new Audi, the Nuvo Lari. Is this real? Motor one. This seems real. It's real.

Uh it's big deal. It's the It's the brand's first supercar since the R8. Twinturbocharged 4 liter V8 hybrid. 217 mph top speed. That is 10% faster than a Cayenne Turbo GT. What is the Cayenne Turbo GT market doing right now? Is it tanking? Depreciation must be just through the roof on this news because you have a car that's 10% faster and so why every everyone is gonna be rotating out.

I mean I think they did I I think the new Ari design. It's a really cool design.

Feels like somewhat cybert truck.

Cyber punky futuristic. I don't know. It just checks the box for like the next supercar for me. And uh in a way that the

Ben says it can't touch the R8.

Oh, can't touch the R8. Okay. Okay. Well, it goes 0 to 60 in 2.6 seconds. Uh well

almost 1,000 horsepower. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless realtime experiences and new value with Cisco. And our next guest Sam Barry is here from the USDA. Welcome to the show.

How are you doing?

Very good.

Good to meet you. Thank you so much for coming on down. Let's throw this on.

And just like that.

On the left side.

So

good.

Introduce yourself a little. Tell us about yourself.

All right. Yeah. My name is Sam Barry. I am uh proud to be working at the USDA. Would you do that right now? I'm the chief.

Nominative determinism. Do you know about nominative determinism?

No.

It's the idea that you you know a person's name could possibly influence or or uh the but but Barry and working at the Department of Agriculture is like pretty perfect. No, it's incredible. Actually, my uh the berries came over here from France in um

like 1640.

Wow.

So, we've been here for a long time.

That's crazy.

And uh it was all farmers.

Yeah.

Yeah. I was like all farmers until my grandpa then he became a materials engineer actually worked on jet engines.

Okay.

And so then his sons became engineers. My dad became an engineer. Then I was an engineer. So we're kind of

okay

trying to bring the two together.

Now you're going back to the USDA.

Yeah.

What what is the shape of the USDA? Like what what is the shape of the organization headquarters? Do you go to the office? Is this you know US? You think just America international footprint? Like do you travel for work? What's it like working there? Well, actually, it'd be kind of interesting to ask you what you think, like what are the things that you think USDA does?

Uh, they grade the milk in the states. That's what I think about it. So, I imagine that at some point farmers send the cows to you and you kind of inspect them and say, "This is a good cow." Is that what happens?

I don't know.

Um, there's like inspectors. There's a whole area that does that.

There's like a series of certifications, but but but is but what else is happening?

So, all kinds of stuff. Do you know that like food stamps?

Yeah,

SNAP is inside of USDA.

Oh, I didn't know that.

I didn't know that either. I thought I figured it was in like HHS or something, but uh yeah, it's in USDA.

So, that's hundred billion dollars a year. It's kind of a big deal.

Yeah.

Um so, we do we have SNAP that's in the food nutrition service.

Uh Forest Service is inside of USDA. Like crazy.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh, and then FPAC is like what you would really think that USDA it's like the farmer facing like okay

where farm programs are where they do acreage reporting like the stuff I talked about today.

Got it.

Um, then there's rural development.

Okay.

Which is like loans like a bank basically do loans for all kinds of things.

Okay.

Um, actually in some of the reviews I came in on Doge and uh

uh there's like beachfront hotels that are being funded out of RD. So there's like a lot of things that need to be cleaned up.

Okay.

Um,

yeah. And then there's like food inspection service. And then there's actually a huge scientific arm.

Yeah.

That's inside of

That makes sense. Testing things and

Yeah. Like labs,

advancing different pesticides.

So things that I mean actually become very passionate about it because I certainly didn't have an appreciation for I thought the same thing. It's like grading meat. Yeah. You know,

um

but like our we are so uniquely positioned as a country because of the fact that we can feed ourselves.

Yeah. Yeah.

And like that is not the case for a lot of a lot of countries.

Isn't America basically a net exporter of food too? You hear about this in the China debate all the time. Will they buy XYZ product from us as a retaliation? And uh yeah, you just don't think about it. But uh

yeah. So like China can like minimally feed itself like bare minimum it could like keep itself alive.

Um but you know they're getting like like we just did a big deal with them to move a bunch of beef over there.

Yeah.

And kind of got some negative press

on that. So, it's important to know it's uh I forget exactly what it's called, but it's like the parts of the cow that we don't eat here. So, it's a little misleading to say like the amount that we're sending over there.

Also, all these trade deals are like very complex and there's like six different moving parts. We get batteries or they get the chips and like these are always like, you know, seven part negotiations. It's hard to look at anyone in isolation.

But, I mean, I think it's a little surprising that aggro like food is actually part of that. I mean and then in warfare uh like agriculture the food supply is usually hit before anything like kinetic even happens you know and then before even the world knows that it's warfare

you know okay

uh because you can do that and you can do things to you know impact a nation's food supply in the future and so agriculture is like a really big deal

sure

um really important so all this to tie back to I wanted to talk about the labs because this is like a whole area inside of uh USDA but uh we do all of these these things like invest in figuring out. So like personally I try and avoid like GMOs and we eat, you know, like we drink raw milk and we get our meat from a local farm.

Um but GMOs are actually really important. Yeah.

Because if we were hit with some kind of adverse event or something and we needed to create corn that would could survive a drought better like we have

the science and the research to be able to do that. Got it.

And it's a huge edge that we have

like geopolitically.

Interesting. Yeah.

Yeah. talk about uh over the years I've read so many stories of you know this uh this insect has been detected in you know some region of the US and there's speculation on is it um you know kind of foreign interference things like that is that is that in USDA domain is trying to help monitor and track and make sure that

um pests yeah pests pests like pests are obviously naturally occurring right they flourish for their own reasons or there can be um some uh some sort of malicious intent as well. Is that your guys'

Yeah, cuz they're not ne necessarily naturally occurring, right?

And uh so one that we have going on right now, and I'm not saying this one's not naturally occurring, but the uh new world screw screw worm that's coming up through Mexico. So our secretary, which by the way, I couldn't say enough good things about Secretary Rollins. I mean, she's incredible. Just an actual like genuine good and like it's unbelievable what she's able to accomplish. Uh, but New World's screworm is something that's falling in USDA's uh, you know, responsibilities. And this is like a parasite basically that's coming up through Mexico and it's like a flesh eating parasite. So it's like really hardcore. Yeah.

So we're developing a lab

flesh. No sorts. No, but you know, I don't think you want to be around it. But no, it's for like cattle mostly is what it impacts. Um, and so we're developing a lab and like sterilizing flies, which again, like personally, I don't really like any of this stuff, but it's better to be doing this and be able to protect our nation than like if we let this just come and flourish in our country, I mean, it' be very detrimental.

Yeah.

So, I'll go back and and if and if it's a necessary, you know, technique that needs to be harnessed, it needs to be harnessed securely and it needs to be harnessed with uh, you know, the right teams in place to make sure that whatever's rolled out is rolled out effectively and safely, right?

Yeah. I mean, I think it's just so important. You know, there's uh like techn there's so much farther we can go with technology, but we have so much right now.

And uh so many people are just black pill, right? And I think it's important. I think you should be like black pill on certain things, but you should probably take a lot of pills. Like you should be red pill and black pill and white pill at the same time.

Uh because take

like we have a long way to go and when we're just like

sitting feeling sorry for ourselves, like it's not a good position to be in. This is the most incredible country on earth

and other countries are advancing though. You know, our edge is like our edge doesn't come for free.

No, we got to work at it.

We got to keep pushing at these things. But when we do this, like when there's a parasite that's, you know, coming into our country and we're able to just like use biology

to combat it. Like that's incredible that our country can do that.

Talk about uh these more SMB scale farmers and their approach to technology. Uh I think a lot of people would be surprised at how much uh how much these individuals at least from from what I've experienced are happy to lean into technology. I met uh a group in Texas that had developed this was years ago so pre-ai boom developed their own SAS product to help manage their operations like a a a tool that that they had built by discovering problems that they had uh on their property. And I just thought that was um that was really fascinating and and cool at the time because I think Silicon Valley would have maybe some expectation uh that uh that there might be an aversion to that until you get into the more like enterprisegrade uh scale.

Yeah, I think it's a really important topic because you're essentially talking about like democratizing access to technology, right? And certainly with uh with like AI becoming so much more widely available, uh that was a big step forward. But I mean, and this is a big point that's being hit on at this conference and what Palanteer is really focusing on is those LLMs become useless if they're not uh if you're not deploying them in the right way with the right like data boundaries, right? So, um you know, I think that's something that we're seeing even in our universities. We do a lot of university research and uh like all the you know kids or whatever the the university students like they're wanting to do experiments with LLMs and do like meat grading like better meat grading because that's something that can happen at the farms and uh if you can make that automated then you know our ability to produce beef uh you know is is greatly impacted. Um, but there's a major issue in secession planning right now for farms, right? Like this is a big thing that's happening. Like the farmer generation is getting very old and kids don't want to go and and run the farm.

A lot of them went to big cities and jobs and white color work and stuff.

So, uh, you know, this is a big thing that is a H2A. Yeah. You know, these H2A visas where like a lot of the farmers are actually still saying like we need the help from, you know, we need immigrants to come and help us

and, uh, you know, the best way that we can solve that is through automation. So, I think that

that's something I would love to see USDA do more of or, you know, uh

it's something that needs to be answered. I don't have an answer for you right now. Yeah. But in order for us to continue to, you know, remain self-sufficient and providing food.

Yeah. Whenever you have a dwindling workforce, increasing the leverage and productivity of the existing workforce allows you to maintain overall aggregate productivity. This is Yeah. general technological leverage. So, it makes a ton of sense.

Do you know anybody that's becoming a farmer?

Uh, well, we know some folks. We've had a number of uh entrepreneurs on the show who are getting into a tech building. Uh we've had the founder of the laser weeder that uh uses uh a lot of people don't like pesticides, but they don't mind if uh if a pest is zapped with a laser because that's just heat that's being transferred to the particular plant right there and the tomato plant continues flourishing. So it uses just cameras and lasers. Very cool sort of modern solution to something that people have had a lot of beer around about around different pesticides. fruit picking robotics company.

Yeah, Orchard as well. Uh but but mostly from tech side, usually with some family lineage uh sort of returning to the roots or or tapping into their networks uh to go back, but uh I mean truthfully, I don't know that many people that I grew up with. I mean, I grew up in LA, so not much farming activity. I know one family that had an avocado farm.

I mean, it actually it would be super based to be a large scale farmer. Like more people should do it. And um

we need a maybe you could be the Alex Hormosi of farming.

Yeah. No, for real. I mean, you can. So, USDA, one of the great things that USDA does is you can get financial assistance. Like, you get big time like big time loans from USDA. You have to go through the process and they're actually doing a loan modernization effort right now to try and make that better. But

like USDA, we'll fund it for you. You got to pay it back, but you can like get the interest rates low rate subsidized. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, one of our uh administrators at USDA, he like pulled up his phone one day and he's like, "Look, it's a planting day for me." And it was his John Deere app. It's like the most advanced, you know, like

uh he had all these tractors going and there's still people sitting in the tractors, but it's to the point where it basically could be fully automated.

So, I mean, you can get yourself a couple thousand acres and just start, you know, growing corn or wheat or cotton like cotton and then, you know, whatever.

Uh talk about data collection. I feel like data is the lifeblood of, uh, you know, any decision- making, any udaloop, anything related to Palunteer, USDA. And I'm wondering about like you mentioned that screw worm. You got to track that thing. it shows up on some cattle rancher's farm and they're detecting it or they're seeing symptoms, maybe they know roughly what percentage of the herd is affected, but how do they actually get that information to you? Are they going to usda.govreport incident or are you pulling things from their filings? Like h how how do you want that to evolve? I imagine that that with more AI and technology we're it's only as good as the data that we can actually put into the system. So just broadly data collection where is that going these days?

Well if you don't mind instead of screw I'd like to focus on SNAP for that question.

So SNAP is funded by the federal government but it's administered by the states.

Okay. So uh when it comes to so something that we're doing right now and it was one of the first things that our secretary did like on our first day was she did a data call to all the states that you know we want all of your snap data to understand how because it's our responsibility as the funer of this program

to understand the integ like to verify the integrity of the program.

So we put a request out there but it has to come from every single state.

Yeah.

And a lot of the state programs they're not technical or they've got contractors that you know it's just a difficult thing to get us the data. Uh but then there's also a bunch of states that are just not complying, you know, for whatever reason, which it shouldn't be a problem. I don't understand what the problem is.

Um

but the importance of so that program that's a hundred billion taxpayer dollars a year. Like that's pretty substantial. Um that's an area where we really want to have all angles of the data available so that we can deploy AI and become really smart in detecting fraud. Like we want to get it to the point where um if somebody's committing snap fraud, we should be able it's like your card, right? If you if if somebody stole your card and did a transaction that wasn't recognized, like your card's shut off. Yep. Right. Yep.

So, we want to get to the point where we're very intelligent and we're confident enough in the system that we can do that. When there's fraud detected, it's off immediately.

Uh because it's an important program. You know, we want to be able to support people that can't support themselves, but it's uh it's not arguable that there's a massive amount of fraud in there. I mean, even the uh the organization itself does like an audit every year and they're at like there's 12% improper payments. Um improper payments is kind of a bad word.

So 12 12 billion a year.

Yeah. Right. And that's just like kind of based on

that's money that that's that could actually be going towards the intent of the program, which is to provide

food to people that otherwise wouldn't be able to get it. And there's other, you know, you could like grock how SNAP has been used to fund uh like international crime organizations and like terrorist groups and everything. So it's it's being exploited at a at a huge level. And uh I mean it's something that our secretary has prioritized, but that's probably our biggest fpack. What I talked about today is like our most complex system of data, but the SNAP challenge is uh like the biggest or like this the snap environment is probably the biggest challenge on the data front. Mhm.

What's next for you? You making a career out of this or you going to go be a farmer?

Hopefully both. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, um

yeah, I've got some farmland. Um trying to convert it in It's like woods right now, but um

uh where's that?

Uh in Virginia, so actually when I lived in Michigan, we had like a little bit of a farm. We had some goats and sheep and a bunch of chickens and and ducks. Um you don't ever want to get you don't want to get ducks. You don't want to get goats. Um, ducks are like really savage actually. Yeah, like a chicken sleeps, you know? So, like it's got a normal cycle like at night time it goes into the coupe and it like sleeps.

Ducks don't sleep.

No, ducks do not sleep. No, they like in our house was kind of this like really unique house. So, the windows were like on the ground and the ducks would come and just stare at us in the window. No, they're savage. They just like they sleep for like 10 minutes at a time. So, they'll just like waddle around and then sleep for 10 minutes. You have to have the right balance of female and male ducks. Otherwise, it's like really ugly.

Yeah, chickens are a lot. I grew I grew up with chickens and uh most of the time they're they're cool. My dad would build

these sort of like complex contraptions to automate the opening enclosure. So, he would use like irrigation to

uh on a timer to fill a bucket which would lift there would lift it up. Yeah.

Okay. Interesting. Um but but then I still core memories as a kid was waking up my dad would yell like there's a fox in the coupe and then we'd be like running out. We'd be it would be like game on. Yeah. Yeah. Or you get like skunks in there and coyotes maybe.

Yeah. We would just everybody would get up and try to go

deal with be satisfying. That's way more satisfying than some software bug. there's so much uh fear and doom and and blackpilling uh around data centers. Uh I wanted to hear from you how you're I imagine your your role is to be an advocate for for farmers as well on on on water supplies, things like that. California went through, you know, probably

many many really rough years from a from a water supply um and a water scarcity standpoint. Thankfully, you know, had a lot of rains over the last few years, but how how are you working with farmers or or what is the situation around um the the the kind of like tension between a lot of farmland could also be great land for data centers, right? And there's been some um uh pretty high-profile stories where farmers either sold their land, but from your side, you're trying to make sure that we have, you know, can produce an abundance of food, you know, from a from a national security standpoint. or how are you guys thinking about that balance?

Yeah, I mean I think the best solution is putting the data centers in space, you know, like which is totally led by Elon and people are jumping on that train, but it's going to be a couple years it sounds like before they're to that point. We're actually uh USDA is pursuing a partnership with SpaceX.

Um and that that part isn't isn't ready yet. We don't really have a need for that, but it's there's a partnership on the technical side, but there's also just on the like conceptual side of the fact that like we're align because we do care about conservation. um you know there was a lot of green stuff that was like you know sure not stuff that we care about but we do care about conserving our land and uh putting data centers in space just makes a ton of sense but that being a couple years out so for today you know I'm actually pretty passionate about this because in my hometown of Selen Michigan it's like small town mostly farmland they're putting a data center in there

and it's like you know 30 miles from Detroit and Flint and like all these very industrialized areas and so it's very confusing to me why we wouldn't be putting these data center and they're like struggling areas. Detroit's doing all right, but like Flint struggling big time.

Uh like why not put a data center there where there's already the infrastructure there's like

it's already developed land, but instead it's like taking these small townships and and plopping them in the middle. Um and the people don't really like it. Now the boards seem to like it for some reason, the councils. So I don't know what's up with that. Um but it doesn't align. It creates it creates a massive amount of tax revenue that can be used to fund a bunch of other programs that

but it's got to actually flow back to the people who are in the town and I think that there's like a disconnect there sometimes. I actually this is kind of outside but something that I do think is uh probably going to happen is you know there was this big shift to go to the cloud right it's like everybody kind of had their own servers you know it's on prem and now we're in the cloud and it's like really you just took you like moved it across the street right

um and now that people are becoming more aware of like what that means and when it's like oh my data is in AWS or you know it's like and maybe this is a global company and how much can I really trust this company that there's going to be a shift back to caring actually actually caring about where your data is living. Interesting. So I think a good a b business opportunity would be I I think there's a world where there's a culture that comes up around data centers because like me personally like I want to build like my house is like uh like I'll have a kill switch for my Wi-Fi and then like we've got the data in the basement.

You got your raw milk supply.

Got raw milk. No, like we're ready to go. I mean we're I I was ready to go off the grid before I came and joined the government. This is a much better option. But um still like I care about my data. I don't really want to use YouTube music anymore for my music cuz now my recommendations are getting worse and you're like very beholden to that. It's like I could very easily just

have the music

buy my music and write a simple program to like make my recommendations and it would be way better because there's certain artists that are not getting recommended because they're not, you know, prioritized behind the scenes

or something.

So, but not everybody's going to want to manage their own servers, right?

Jensen just announced a data center that bolts onto the side of your house.

Oh, that's sweet.

And uh I mean and there's more stuff that's coming that way. I mean, people are doing with the Mac minis. Can't really do the Frontier AI on the Mac Mini just now, but in a few years, you know, the DJX uh desktops, like it's all coming and I think it will be more of an option.

So, just to like kind of wrap this up, so there's this um uh or this like topic, the uh one of the things that USDA does is we pay 600,000 federal employees. So, like we pay Secret Service, we pay DHS, we pay it's like it's like a thing inside of USDA.

Interesting.

And so the the payroll system that does that is a mainframe. Okay. And people literally explained it to me like this thing has a personality. Like you have to like you can't touch it the wrong way. You have to has to have like the right environment to work and it like all these things. I mean like a dozen people came to me and told me all these things. So then I went and visited it. I was like really excited to you know encounter this being mainframe

and uh it's like a

uh five-year-old brand new like IBM server you know it's just like it's not there's no tapes. There's not like a team of people underwhelmed. Yeah. It's like you know it's like this big. Okay.

Um, but I was expecting like a like a small micro data center or something. Exactly. Yeah. So totally modern and it like I like formed this connection with it and I was like we have had so many conversations about you

and I just thought that like this is potentially a future where it's like a data center a coffee shop you know like people might want their data to be hosted in a place that's like aligned with their views.

Sure. Sure. Yeah. You know, because it's like I can trust like I don't want this in my house, but I can like trust this like cool company, local company that my my data lives there because I don't need it distributed across the globe. It's like

I'm here.

No, that makes sense. That's interesting.

Country intelligence.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Intelligence. This is the future. I love it. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Great to meet you for Thanks for doing this work.

Have a great rest of your day. Talk to you soon.

We will wrap up the show. Yeah.

Thank you for tuning in with us today, folks. We will be back on Monday.

Yes.

And we look forward to it.

Some business to do tomorrow, but see you Monday. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify. Sign up for the newsletpn.com and have a wonderful weekend. We'll see you. Goodbye. Goodbye.