Family Talk

Dr. James Dobson: Hello everyone, you're listening to Family Talk, the radio broadcasting ministry of the James Dobson Family Institute. I'm Dr. James Dobson, and thank you for joining us for this program.

Roger Marsh: Well, welcome once again to Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk. I'm Roger Marsh with a question for you. Did you know that most of the bread on your grocery store shelf is controlled by just two companies, and one of them is not even U.S. owned? Well, after COVID exposed just how fragile America's supply chains really are, one man decided to do something about it. His name is Dave Owen, former Lieutenant Governor of the state of Kansas.

On today's edition of Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk, we're going to hear a continuation of a conversation Dave had with Gary Bauer, our Senior Vice President of Public Policy here at the Dr. James Dobson Policy and Culture Center. In addition to being Kansas Lieutenant Governor back in the 1970s, Dave Owen also served as Bob Dole's campaign chairman. He's a lifelong man of faith, and he shared his remarkable journey from a small-town baptism to the halls of government to taking a tech company public on NASDAQ. That was on our last edition of Family Talk.

On today's program, Dave will explain why he co-founded Golden Waves Grain, a mission-driven company working to return America's bread supply to America's hands. Plus, Dave will also make the case for why Christians simply cannot afford to stay on the sidelines in civic life. That's coming up on today's edition of Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk with our guest host, Gary Bauer.

Gary Bauer: Well, welcome back to Family Talk. Great to have Dave Owen with us again today. Dave, welcome back. I really appreciate you spending some more time with us.

Dave Owen: Well, thank you, Gary. It's a pleasure, and I'm delighted to be back with you today.

Gary Bauer: Let's get right into it. You continued to work on Senator Dole's Senate campaigns. Were you involved in his efforts in the presidential race too?

Dave Owen: Up until the very last one, I was very central to all of those races. Probably my most intense campaign with him was when he was picked to run with Gerald Ford in '76. I was the chairman of the Kansas Republican Party and a delegate to the convention, but I was very central. I was the assistant to Senator Bob Griffin on the floor. He was Ford's campaign chairman on the floor.

Senator Griffin came up and wanted Kansas. Kansas was on the front row because of Dole. Senator Griffin wanted to be up there, so we sat side-by-side through the whole thing. As the convention came to a close, Stu Spencer was up on the podium, and we could just look up at the podium. All of a sudden, I saw him motioning for me to come up.

I went through the door underneath the podium and went backstage. I didn't come on the stage, but Stu said, "You seem to be the guy closest to Senator Dole, so we need you to run the vice presidential part of this campaign and be the liaison with the campaign and President Ford." That's what I did through that Ford-Dole campaign.

Gary Bauer: Dave, one of the things Christians have been divided about—this used to drive Dr. Dobson crazy and when he would get upset about it, he would call me and we'd get upset about it together—but we would run into pastors and just fellow believers who had convinced themselves that as Christians, they should stay out of government and out of politics because that was dirty and it wasn't a godly thing to do.

Of course, if Christians all did that, then the people that were making all the decisions about governing us would not be the right people. Dr. Dobson for years, and the James Dobson Family Institute today, is committed to pushing the idea of Christian citizenship. From everything I know about you, all of your opportunities in public life, your faith was always right there, driving you and leading you in the decisions you made. What would you say to our listeners that might be absent without leave in this battle that we're in in our country about whether we're going to remain one nation under God or not?

Dave Owen: If we are going to remain one nation under God, Christians have got to get involved because we see it at every level. We see it here in our communities. Christians and hunters are the worst at getting involved in voting. Why, I do not know. It's resulted in our community of just real liberal people taking over our government at every level—school board, city politics. We've got to change that because if there's any hope for us going forward, Christians have got to get involved in the political arena.

Gary Bauer: I don't want to get you in trouble, Dave, but the church that you're a proud member of now, does your pastor understand this need for the congregation to be active citizens?

Dave Owen: Absolutely. He is very encouraging from the pulpit. He obviously tries to be even-handed about it, but he is a strong believer in involvement in politics for Christian people and encourages in every way possible.

Gary Bauer: That's great to hear. We need more pastors and priests and rabbis and faith leaders of all kinds to do that. I was Undersecretary of Education for a couple of years under Reagan, and we were seeing it in textbooks even then. The textbooks have been rewritten to take Christianity out of the founding of America. The Bible was the most widely read book in the colonies before the Revolution. It's a tragedy that it's gone this far where many children are being taught that America had nothing to do with Christianity. In fact, Christianity and religion are supposed to stay out of all of this. That is the exact opposite of what our founding fathers thought.

Dave Owen: I would agree. The opponents to that use that as their explanation for why people should stay out of politics. What's happened is the wrong people have then gotten involved in politics and taken over our government at many levels.

Gary Bauer: Dave, are you past your running for something part of your life? Because you're exactly the kind of guy with this experience. Do you want to make any kind of announcement today?

Dave Owen: I think I'm through with that, but you know this: once you get hooked on it, you can't let it go. I still stay very involved. Currently, Laura and I both are helping one of our friends run for Governor of Kansas, a businessman who's never been involved in politics before but has written a lot of checks to others and finally just decided, "Why not me? Somebody needs to do something here." We're really proud of Philip Sarnecki, who's running for governor in our state.

Gary Bauer: Fantastic. Dave, since this is the James Dobson Family Institute, do you recall when you first heard about Dr. Dobson and did his writings and speeches have any impact on your own family?

Dave Owen: The first time that I became aware was I had a really good friend, John Erickson. John was a great athlete himself. He was the general manager of the Milwaukee Bucks when they signed Lou Alcindor, who became Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Then he was hired to be the president of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. That's when we got connected, and he's the one who first directed me to Dr. Dobson. I began following his writings and so forth at that time. I spent 16 or 18 years on the board of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes here in Kansas City working with John, trying to do what we could to direct the youth in the right direction in our city.

Gary Bauer: Well, that's fantastic. We see today the influence that sports figures both at the college level and at professional sports can have by being honest and open about their Christian faith. It can have a tremendous influence on other young Americans who are searching for the meaning of life. Then this is not athletic, but it's an example of somebody in the public eye using it for our faith. One of the Artemis astronauts was very open earlier this year in sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Athletics involves leadership, so it does provide a wonderful opportunity for men and women that follow the Cross, doesn't it?

Dave Owen: It sure does. I'm really pleased to see that more and more athletes, at the college level in particular, make a point of giving credit to Jesus Christ in their success. The influence that that has on little kids is just really, really big.

Gary Bauer: People might be wondering why we're going to be talking about bread. I mentioned in the introduction that you've got this great new company—I don't know if it's real new or been around for a while—but what's motivating you at least in part is that we used to, as a nation, be able to buy the things to sustain us from people in our local community. We knew the people that grew the wheat that made the bread, and we knew the guy running the local store.

As time passed, those things became bigger entities and the little guy kind of got pushed out of the way. I think one of the things you have talked about is that there are two gigantic companies that control virtually most of the bread supply that we take for granted in America. Am I right that the purpose of this company is to try to connect again the whole process of making bread and having a connection between the people that make it and the people in the communities that are buying it?

Dave Owen: That's exactly right. You described it perfectly. Back in the day, a lot of it was just because it had to be that way because bread wouldn't last very long. You had to mill it and bake it in a community and then distribute it locally to people so that it would last long enough.

To go back just one second, the reason that something like this kind of struck a nerve with me was when I was Lieutenant Governor, one of my duties was as head of the Economic Development Commission for the state of Kansas with a mission to create new businesses in the state and create jobs. This is dead center for that. We'll be hiring 141 people out there in Northwest Kansas. That's a big deal.

To further describe what it was all about, four of us were just sitting around the table out at the golf course in Goodland, Kansas one day and got to talking about how you've got the greatest, the best wheat in the world as grown right here within this Northwest Kansas area and Colorado and Nebraska, the tri-state area. Yet there's no mill, there's no bakery out here. We got to thinking about the way bread is distributed now. What happens is a farmer ships the wheat to a storage facility. Somebody buys it, and then they may ship it two or three other places before it ever gets to a mill to be milled into flour. Then that gets shipped to a bakery, and the flour might go through two or three spots before it ends up in the bakery. Then the bakery bakes the bread, and then jobbers come by, pick up the bread and take it to the individual grocery stores. That's a lot of moving around of the raw product.

What we came up with was we'll build a commercial bakery supported by a wheat mill. We'll buy the wheat from the farmers. They'll deliver it to our facility. We'll mill it into flour, blow it over into the bakery, bake it into bread, put it on trucks and take it to a distribution warehouse in Kansas City, Associated Wholesale Grocers, and have it then delivered to the grocery stores right along with everything else that they deliver to their members. That takes almost 18 to 20% out of the cost of a loaf of bread when you eliminate all that middleman delivery system. In our case, from the time we bake it into bread, it should be on the grocery store shelf within three or four days. It's just turning the whole thing upside down because this whole system hasn't changed for 100 years, and we're disrupting the system.

Gary Bauer: Which is a good thing to do because as we're learning sadly in various emergencies, there's all kinds of problems in the things that we've taken for granted. We could spend a long time just talking about how the trade relationship that developed between the United States and Communist China really started in earnest in the year 2000. That ended up resulting in the closure of like 80,000 American factories in the decades that followed, all because we wanted to get stuff cheaper. But then we needed that stuff and we're relying on somebody that currently is not really a friend of the United States. Doing more and more home here at home, from our food to our medicine, seems to me to be a very wise thing to do.

Dave Owen: You mentioned something earlier about the owners of the bread companies that we use in our country. One of the companies is owned by an investment firm in New York. The other, and I think this is a national security issue, the other huge bread company is a Mexican company. There isn't any reason that we can't be baking our own bread in the United States of America.

Gary Bauer: So this model that you're starting out with in Kansas, do you envision this something that then could be duplicated in other parts, particularly of the Midwest, or what's your ultimate goal here?

Dave Owen: We've already been contacted as people have learned about this and asking us if we could duplicate this in other parts of the country. We definitely plan to do that. We can easily, once we get the first one operating, we can easily duplicate it just about anywhere.

Gary Bauer: Well, that's exciting. You already took one company public, right? That tech company?

Dave Owen: Yes, we did. We took a company that back when we first—again, it was kind of like this—we discovered that police cars were still using VHS tapes in the trunk of the car to record their video. We designed the first digital in-car video system for police cars and we were successful in taking that public on NASDAQ and sold our product all over the world.

Gary Bauer: Dave, I'm one of those people—I guess it's a sign of age—I yearn for the simpler time that used to be in America and the better sense of community. Almost every day you see another story about people, they don't even know their neighbor. They've lived next door to somebody for five years and never done any more than wave and that's it. I came across a story the other day, I think it was a recent one, an article or an essay that you wrote about an earlier time in America when a flour sack could become a dress. I found it to be a really moving story. Would you mind explaining what I'm referring to?

Dave Owen: My grandfather—I was born in a little town in South Arkansas—and my grandfather was quite the entrepreneur. He had a grocery store, he had a service station, he was the Justice of the Peace, he was the postmaster. Part of what happened, I'd work in the store when I was a little kid, and women would come in looking for the flour sacks when they were delivered because they would take those sacks and make them into dresses. The people in that little community, everybody was wearing cotton sack clothing because that was during World War II and things were tight and raw materials were tight. One company I remember in particular, Dixie Lily Flour, they just did a tremendous job of coming up with patterns that the women just loved.

Gary Bauer: So they actually decorated the flour sack because they knew that people on really tight budgets, this was a way to help what they were doing in order to pinch a penny.

Dave Owen: They had to buy the flour. That was a staple of their existence. To get a sack of flour that you could then use the sack for something else was just—and that's as you mentioned earlier, that's what I call connecting in your business, connecting with your constituents, your customers, and serving their needs in more than just selling them something. I commend the companies that recognized that at that time and did that. That was pretty tremendous.

Gary Bauer: One of the explanations for Dr. Dobson's success, the main explanation of course is that God blessed his ministry. But multiple people over the years told me, even when Dr. Dobson wasn't present, that when they listened to him over the radio, he sounded like their grandfather or their next-door neighbor or the guy they knew down the street. He had this ability to make every mother and father feel like he was talking directly to them. I think that's the same kind of thing we had in a simpler time in America, when you knew the businessman down the street. He wasn't going to sell you a junker of a car because you'd see him in church in a couple of weeks and he was going to hear from you. Everything we can do to restore those connections in America, I think, is going to be good for our future.

Dave Owen: I totally agree. Because I've lived a long time, I had the opportunity to be around when people still drove horse-drawn wagons to town to get their groceries. I picked cotton by hand, took it over to the gin and watched it being ginned into bales. People just don't realize what it was like.

Gary Bauer: We love the new technology and the conveniences, but we've got to be able to rediscover that even with all of our gadgets and staring at our phones. We need to look at the guy across the table or the lady across the table or the child sitting there that needs guidance at dinner time. That is of course what Jim devoted his ministry and life to—getting families to do that family time together. Let me close by asking you: are you an optimist? Obviously as a man of faith, you're an optimist about how it all ends up. But what about America? Are you an optimist or a pessimist about whether our best days could still be ahead of us?

Dave Owen: I'm totally an optimist and our best days are ahead of us because I see an awakening taking place amongst young people, and that's where it has to start. I think we're in for the best times of our lives going forward. I really do.

Gary Bauer: Well, that's a great note to end on. Dave Owen. Dave, you've been an everyday hero through your entire life—your public service, your work in business, your work in your community and in your church. We need a lot more men and women like you. I know if Dr. Dobson were here today, he would probably want to talk to you for another couple of hours. God bless you for all that you've done, and it's been a real pleasure to spend some time with you.

Dave Owen: Thank you so much, Gary.

Roger Marsh: Dave Owen is proof that a life built around faith and service never runs out of things to do. You're listening to Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk, and we featured Gary Bauer's conversation with Dave Owen, co-founder of Golden Waves Grain, a man who spent a lifetime putting his convictions into action.

If you missed any part of today's broadcast, you want to share it with a friend, or to learn more about Golden Waves Grain, visit JDFI.net. Also, keep in mind Gary Bauer, our Senior Vice President of Public Policy here at the Dobson Policy and Culture Center, writes a weekly blog for JDFI.net. He also hosts a twice-monthly podcast called Defending Faith, Family, and Freedom. To learn more about Gary's podcast and blog posts, go to JDFI.net as well.

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Well, I'm Roger Marsh. On behalf of all of us here at Family Talk and the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, thanks so much for spending time with us today. Be sure to join us again next time right here for another edition of Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk, the voice you trust for the family you love.